Insects: Braga's Gold
Page 1
Insects: Braga’s Gold
The Insects Series (Book 4)
John Koloen
Copyright © 2019 John Koloen. All rights reserved.
Published by Watchfire Press.
This book is a work of fiction. Similarities to actual events, places, persons or other entities are coincidental.
Insects: Braga’s Gold/John Koloen. – 1st ed.
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
About the Author
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1
“I’m really tired of this,” Howard Duncan said as he absently watched a distant bicyclist weaving around strollers on Chicago’s Lakefront Trail. It was a sparkling autumn afternoon, crisp and bright, the sapphire blue lake extending to the horizon where it met the cloudless baby blue sky.
Without taking her eyes off the New Yorker article she was reading, Maggie Cross sighed. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard Duncan say such things. He’d been doing it now for three years, on and off, mostly, though it seemed like a drum beat to her.
“What is it now?”
Duncan turned away from the magnificent fifteenth floor view as if it were nothing more than wallpaper.
“It’s the same old, same old,” he groused. “Why can’t they just move on? Why can’t they let me move on?”
“You know why,” she said softly as she set aside the magazine.
“What? You mean the internet?”
“Of course. You know as well as I that if it weren’t for the internet this wouldn’t be happening.”
“It’s not just that. What they’re doing in Brazil is crazy. I mean, it’s been what, nearly five years and they still haven’t wrapped up their investigation, if it is an investigation.”
“What else could it be?”
“I don’t know, but it’s like they’re bleeding it for all its worth. I mean, we were kidnapped by a bunch of thugs and because we escaped and they didn’t, it’s like it’s my fault.”
“You were an American in a foreign country. What do you expect?”
She eyed him for a moment, a forlorn look on his stubbled face. Smiling affectionately, she joined him in the center of the spacious living room, wrapping her arms around his trim frame, nestling her face against his neck.
“You know, we were doing so well for a while,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“You weren’t upset. The trolls found someone else to bug.”
“Bug’s not the word. What they do is more than bugging. It oughta be a crime.”
“I wish it were, but what are you gonna do?”
“You are so, I don’t know, what’s the word?” he said, holding her by the shoulders while pushing her back gently.
“Aggravating?”
“No, that’s not it. It’s more like you’re a neutral observer.”
“I am not a neutral observer,” she said, her voice gaining a half octave.
“Maybe that’s not the word.”
“Phrase.”
“Phrase what?”
You said ‘neutral observer’ was a word,” Maggie said. “It’s not. It’s a phrase.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”
Standing two feet apart, facing each other, they broke into laughter. Duncan pulled her toward him, hugging her tightly.
“You know, the best thing that happened to me in Brazil was you. I know I’ve told you that a hundred times, but I can’t say it enough. If it weren’t for you I don’t know what I’d be doing.”
“Oh, you’d probably be shacking up with some bimbo somewhere. I know how men are.”
“You really think I’m like that?”
Maggie eyed him affectionately. No, she thought. He wasn’t like that. He was all the things that first attracted him to her. Decent looks, intelligent, educated, loyal, and in her eyes a hero who saved her life during a desperate fight for survival in the Brazilian rainforest.
“No, you’re not like that. That’s among the many reasons I love you. What I hate is watching you torture yourself.”
Duncan nodded in agreement as they settled onto a black leather loveseat.
“Maybe I shouldn’t’ve have written the book,” he said, leaning toward her, smo
thering her with a kiss.
2
Three years after leaving Biodynamism Inc., Duncan was a scientist without portfolio. No university would consider hiring the once esteemed entomologist following the debacles in Brazil and the controversy that had dogged him since. His former university had paid millions to several survivors of the first expedition who, it seemed to him, blamed him for everything bad that had ever happened to them. The worst was the family of Carlos Johnson. The grad student had died horribly.
The company had hushed the fiasco that ended his tenure at Biodynamism by paying off injured employees in exchange for nondisclosure agreements. They’d done the same with survivors of his two expeditions. It was either accept the agreement and payment or file a lawsuit against a vindictive and deep-pocketed corporation. However, it did not prevent the Johnson family from suing Duncan, who received a generous severance and positive employment recommendation from the company, though the recommendation turned out to be worthless since he couldn’t get a job interview in his field. With time on his hands, he traveled, sometimes with Maggie, and took up some of her interests, including visits to a shooting range where he became proficient with handguns. However, he had lost his professional credibility despite being the world’s leading authority on Reptilus blaberus.
Just as his world had changed dramatically, Reptilus had virtually disappeared from its previous haunts in the Brazilian rainforest. Some conspiracy theorists suggested that he’d exaggerated the size of the colonies he’d found, though few doubted the insects existed given the condition of animal and human corpses that were found. A year later, though, despite intense efforts by Brazilian authorities, no sign of them could be found and no credible reports had been made since.
Duncan speculated that drought conditions afflicting the rainforest since his first expedition may have been responsible for the absence of the insect, or that the fungus that had kept their numbers low had returned. It wasn’t that the bugs had disappeared, but that they may have returned to their previous low population state. Or it may have been that he had been looking for them when conditions for their proliferation were optimal and that he had somehow selected the right time and place to look for them. Despite not having a job in the field, Duncan frequently thought about Reptilus.
Cody Boyd, his former student and assistant, like his mentor, signed a nondisclosure agreement with the company to get severance. Unlike most of his colleagues, Boyd kept in touch with Duncan. It was Duncan who encouraged his former protégé to take up an offer to become an assistant producer of reality videos.
“After working with that crew and seeing what they produced, I thought, that’s what I want to do,” he’d told Duncan during one of their recent telephone conversations. “But it ain’t working out.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“You know what another name is for an assistant producer?”
“No.”
“Gofer. And when I’m not gofering, I’m scouting locations or interviewing potential subjects who may or may not be interested in cooperating. Mostly, I’m working on pilots that never turn into anything. But I’ve learned a lot about production techniques and how boring all this is when you do it day after day.”
“Life’s like that,” Duncan said, sitting in the living room of his apartment.
“What about you? Anything new?”
“Just that the Brazilians want me to testify about what happened when we were kidnapped.”
“Really? What the hell are they doing that for? I mean, what’s to investigate?”
Duncan wondered as well. He’d provided testimony more than once and was mystified about what more they wanted. Maggie didn’t have a clue. Her live-in housemate, George Hamel, speculated that it was a subterfuge to lure him into the country.
“I hear it’s never a bad thing to charge an American with a crime,” he said.
Duncan added Hamel’s speculation to the list of reasons the Brazilians may have wanted to talk to him.
“All I know is that they’ve got some loose ends. Can’t imagine what they are. Anybody contact you?”
“From Brazil?”
“Yeah.”
“Nope. But you won’t believe this. I got a call from Biodynamism on my voicemail. They called a couple days ago. Haven’t called them back,” Boyd said.
“What’d they want?”
“Just that they’d like me to call them. Have they called you?”
“Are you kidding? I’d be the last person they’d call. You know, if they offer you a job—”
“What kind of job would they offer me?” Boyd asked skeptically.
“I guess you’ll have to call them back. But you’re good at anything you try.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“I’m not your boss.”
“I know, sorry,” Boyd had said.
3
Although Duncan and Maggie Cross were a couple, they lived separately, she in a high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan, he on the second floor of a two-story brick apartment complex near Old Town. It was his idea. Maggie was wealthy, and he was not. She was spendy, and he was frugal. He didn’t like the idea of being a kept man, though she was not the type. Besides, she already had a kept man in her housemate, George Hamel, who was something of her personal secretary, scheduler and shopper. He was mostly out of sight when Cross and Duncan were together, but never far away, like a covert chaperone. It took a while for Duncan to get accustomed to spending the night with Maggie when there was another man around, but Hamel was discreet and his relationship with Cross was platonic.
Because she was addicted to travel, the couple was frequently apart for weeks at a time. Early on he accompanied her on flights to Europe and Asia where she liked to travel by train and stay in pricey accommodations, rubbing shoulders with other one percenters. He was amazed at how many people she knew, how many times she introduced him to people whose names he immediately forgot. The main advantage for him, he decided, was that being with Maggie allowed him to forget about the background noise emanating from the legal issues and occasional troll. Though she enjoyed Duncan’s company on her trips, she didn’t quibble when he told her that he’d had enough jet-setting to last a lifetime. She had a fallback companion in Hamel and was happy to oblige him.
Spending much of their time together when she was in town, he worked fitfully on a second book when she wasn’t, in which he felt it necessary to clarify some of the most controversial parts of Reptilus Blaberus: Death on Six Legs, which some readers criticized as self-serving and disrespectful of those who had died. Since leaving Biodynamism, he had changed his phone number several times, and generally accepted calls only from those on his contact list. Using a spoofed account he periodically visited the Facebook accounts maintained by Carlos Johnson’s family in the hope that they had moderated their contempt. Wishful thinking, as it turned out.
He was surprised at how easy it was to find a publisher for his book, which briefly appeared on national best seller lists. Given his aggrieved mental state at the time, he wrote the book without editorial help or even a decent proofreader, proving the value of graduate assistants who performed such tasks on his academic work. Almost everyone who had been on the expedition had been quoted somewhere after the book came out. Most of their comments were evasive. No matter what actually happened, they had survived. And while Duncan was the one who got them into trouble in the first place, they would never have gotten out of it without him. Besides, the grad students who had received settlements from the university were well aware of their nondisclosure agreements.
Duncan had written the book in eight weeks soon after coming to live in Chicago. Years after the first expedition he remained unsettled. Few came to his defense when the criticism and publicity were crescendoing. And the book would be his defense, his shield against the trolls. As it turned out, it wasn’t a shield so much as a lightning rod, giving renewed life to his critics, some of whom claimed it was a work of fiction.
Howev
er, his publisher was happy with the sales and managed to get copies into airport bookstores where they sold well for several months before joining the remaindered bin.
Although the idea for a second book had been in the back of his mind not long after finishing the first book, Maggie’s attorney cautioned him against it.
“From what I understand,” he told him over the phone, “that could open up a whole new can of worms.”