The Last Monument

by Michael C. Grumley

  Rickards took a cautionary step back and squinted through the front window of the truck. He watched as the reflective window was manually rolled down from the inside, revealing a large, dark figure behind the wheel.

  The figure was Mike Morton, and he was staring out at both of them. “Get in!”

  Rickards leaned forward. “What?”

  “I said get in. Now!”

  Rickards blinked twice before glancing up and down the street. Then pulled Angela forward.

  “W-what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rickards rushed down the last few steps and across the sidewalk while Mike pushed the passenger door open. In one motion, Rickards shoved Angela into the front seat, clambering in behind her.

  A stomp on the gas caused the small truck to lurch forward and simultaneously slam the passenger door shut.

  The small engine roared and the truck took off like a bat out of hell, streaking forward past the line of cars until Morton yanked hard on the wheel and careened around the first corner. He reaccelerated and turned again, this time left, causing several people on the street to stop and stare.

  Angela’s eyes bulged, and she searched for something to grab onto. “What is going on?!”

  “In a second,” Morton said. “We have to get some distance between us.”

  After a few more blocks and another turn, Morton slowed the vehicle and checked his rearview mirror. Satisfied, he calmly turned into a narrow alley behind a small building, trash cans and stacked boxes scattered every several feet.

  “Who are you?!” Angela screamed.

  Rickards laid a calming hand on her leg. “It’s okay. Angela, meet Mike Morton. A rocket scientist from Texas.”

  Morton grinned. “We go way back. And sorry about all that. I didn’t want them seeing you getting into my car.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Why?”

  “Because if they saw you with me,” he said, “they might put two and two together.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They’d know I was the one who called.”

  Rickards leaned forward, looking past Angela. “What are you talking about?”

  Crammed in behind the steering wheel, Morton glanced back and forth between them and the road. “I was the one who got you out.”

  “How the hell did you do that?”

  “Well, this part you might not like so much. So try to remember that it actually worked.”

  “What call?”

  Morton grinned sheepishly. “I phoned in and said I was calling from the U.S. State Department.”

  “What?”

  “I demanded to know why you were being detained. And that the State Department was launching a full investigation through Peru’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

  Rickards stared at him, speechless.

  Morton shrugged again and eased to a stop at a traffic light. “I had a hunch you were some kind of law enforcement. I didn’t know which agency, but I figured the guys holding you probably knew.”

  Rickards blinked, his mouth wide open, and then abruptly…laughed.

  Morton gave a wide smile. “I was afraid if they spotted you getting into my car, they’d know it was me who called.”

  Still laughing, Rickards leaned back and looked out the front window. “Yeah. I’m guessing they might.”

  Between them, Angela was utterly confused, looking back and forth between the two. “So then you two know each other.”

  “We go way back. At least an hour.”

  53

  Ottman was growing impatient, still waiting with two of his men and peering intently through the one-way glass into an empty room.

  Was dauert so lange?

  When the door finally opened behind them, he knew something was wrong the moment he saw Fernandez.

  The colonel looked directly into the old man’s eyes. “They are gone.”

  “What?!”

  “I warned you,” Fernandez said. “They would find out.”

  Ottman became incensed. “No!”

  “The Americans called!” Fernandez growled. “From their State Department. They found out he was here and threatened to go through our ministry. I told you we should not have taken them!”

  “What have you—” Ottman was livid. “Scheisse!” He immediately turned to Fischer and his second man, Becker. No words were necessary. The panic on Ottman’s face was evident and all it took for both men to bolt out of the room, headed for the front door of the building.

  “How could you be so stupid?!” Ottman screamed. “They are the only link—” He stopped and rushed to the door, bumping the colonel and sending him back several steps.

  Through the lobby and then out the front doors, Fischer and Becker came to a stop outside in the bright sun, searching from side to side, the entire entrance and street in front of the Puerto Maldonado Police Station.

  There was nothing.

  The Americans were gone.

  54

  Reaching the hotel, Rickards and Angela got new keys from the desk and rushed down the hall to their rooms, followed by a lumbering Mike Morton.

  When Angela reached her door, she inserted the card and pushed the door open, immediately stopping in her tracks.

  Rickards, only one step behind, nearly ran into her, barely stopping in time to stare over her shoulder.

  The room was a mess. Sheets pulled off the bed and were strewn across the floor, the only chair in the room overturned and ripped open from the bottom. All the drawers still partially open and her bags emptied all over the stripped bed.

  “My God,” she cried. “This is like a bad dream.”

  Rickards said nothing.

  “Whoa,” an out-of-breath Morton said when he arrived and saw the room. “What the hell have you two gotten yourselves into?”

  Angela walked forward and picked through pieces of her clothing. “It’s true,” she said. “He knows a lot more.”

  “Who knows more?”

  Angela looked at him and frowned. “The man in the room. The German.”

  “What German?”

  She gave Rickards a puzzled look. “Didn’t he talk to you?”

  “No one talked to me.”

  Behind him, Mike Morton made a face. “Oh, thanks a lot, man.”

  “No one outside of that cell,” he said, rolling his eyes at Mike and then squinting at Angela. “What…German?”

  “An old man. The one who questioned me.”

  “Did he give you a name?”

  “No.”

  “But he said he was German?”

  “No. I picked up on it. And it made him very uncomfortable.”

  “What did he ask you?”

  “He wanted to know everything I knew about the letter. My uncle. My grandfather.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  She stared at Rickards. Then took a breath and pursed her lips. The anxiety was returning.

  “I told him the truth,” she blurted. “Whatever he wanted to know. Okay?! I was scared! I didn’t know what they had done with you, and he said we could go home if I just told him everything!”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Yes!” she cried. “Yes, I believed him. What possible threat are we to him if we tell him what he wants? We don’t know anything!”

  Rickards remained quiet.

  “We don’t!” she insisted.

  “We know enough,” he said. “Enough to be kidnapped.”

  “He doesn’t know either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was fishing. And I don’t think he knows what for.”

  Rickards finally turned and glanced back again at Morton. “You probably don’t want to be part of this.”

  Mike shrugged. “I don’t know. Sounds kind of interesting.”

  Rickards shook his head and returned to Angela. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think we should do?”

  “I think we
should get on a plane and get out of here. We’re dealing with something bad. And if it hadn’t been for this guy,” he motioned his head toward Mike Morton, “we’d still be at the station. And I don’t know if you noticed, but the guys who took us were military, not small-town police.”

  She looked at him, still trembling. “I think they did something to Lillian. That German guy knew who she was.”

  Rickards sighed. “All the more reason to leave.”

  She nodded and looked into his eyes. “But what if we do and they still don’t find what they’re after? Would they come back?”

  Again, Rickards didn’t answer.

  She looked at her shaking hands. “Look at me. I’m scared to death. All I can think of is what happened before.” She glanced uncomfortably at Morton against the wall, then looked back at Rickards. “I didn’t tell you what happened before.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t!” She sniffed. Her whole body was shaking. “I told you some of the other women were raped in that attack. But not me.” She paused. “But…I lied. I was one of them.”

  Standing in front of her, Rickards suddenly deflated.

  “I was raped,” she said through tear-filled eyes. “By men like that. Monsters that take whatever they want. When they want it. Men who make up their own rules with no one to stop them.” She stared at them. “What kind of world do we live in, when we’re too afraid of the monsters to do anything? Even when there’s more of us. We still cower. For what? So we can live a terrible life?”

  “It’s not your fault,” Rickards said.

  “I know it’s not my fault. You don’t have to tell me that. I’ve known for a long time. What you need to tell me is how I run back home now and spend the rest of my life cowering. With the fear of them coming back. Tell me why I have to suffer my whole life…because of them!”

  She glanced briefly at Morton, who remained frozen.

  “When I’m old and on my deathbed, will I still remember? The cowering?”

  Rickards looked at her through pained but honest eyes and nodded. “You will.”

  55

  The voice on the phone confirmed it. The same voice that had assisted Fischer in Colorado. Sharp and precise.

  “They bought tickets. Leaving Puerto Maldonado in thirty minutes. To Lima, then back to Los Angeles.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Seven minutes.”

  Fischer checked his watch and stared at Ottman, who was glaring back from the middle of Angela’s ransacked hotel room. They had barely missed them. “Get Fischer a ticket on that flight.”

  The voice paused. “It’s full.”

  A fuming Ottman tried to think. Even Fischer and Becker could not reach them in time. They could get past security but would have to find a way to get two others bumped from the flight. Which would take time. And even then, Fischer could not do anything until Colorado. Not until they were far from the airports and out of the city.

  Ottman couldn’t believe it. He literally could not believe it.

  Fernandez was a dead man.

  ***

  “So let me get this straight,” Morton said, shifting the truck into third gear and accelerating. Trees and houses now speeding by on both sides. “Your great-uncle shows up here after the war, sends his brother, your grandfather, a letter that somehow gets lost for sixty years, which is tied to some British explorer back in the twenties?”

  “More or less.”

  “And what do you think it was that this guy found?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “But you have an idea.”

  Next to Morton, scrunched into the middle seat, Angela frowned. “It’s more like a theory.”

  “Well, lay it on me.”

  Angela hesitated, glancing first at Rickards. “Maybe…Paititi?”

  Morton’s eyes widened, and he looked at her before turning back to the road and letting out a long whistle.

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  He nodded. “Everyone down here has heard of it. But no one believes it. Because it’s never been found. And believe me, it ain’t for lack of trying.”

  He gripped both sides of the wheel and shook his bald head. “The old lost city of gold, huh? Now that’s one thing a bunch of Nazis do not need to find.”

  “We don’t know exactly what they’re looking for,” Angela reiterated.

  “I have to think that anything made out of gold would have either been found by now or shown up on someone’s lidar like a giant Christmas tree.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Records say the conquistadors who went from city to city murdering Incas for their gold supposedly drove them into hiding. To a secret Incan location so deep and remote that the Spaniards were never able to find it.”

  “Taking the rest of their gold with them.”

  “Correct. So, the last thing the Incas would want was someplace that lights up under a bright sun.”

  “So, you don’t believe the city made of gold thing.”

  “I think it makes more sense that it would be a city of gold, rather than a city made of gold.”

  Morton looked at her. “You mean as in the gold being hidden inside. Or buried.”

  “Somewhere below ground and out of sight. That’s what I would do. In fact, maybe it’s not in a city at all.”

  “Then in what?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Tunnels maybe? Caves? A lot of ancient civilizations created vast tunneling systems all over the world. We’re finding new ones all the time. Would it be all that strange for the Incas to do the same thing?”

  Morton raised his eyebrows at the thought and looked across to Rickards. “Oh, I like her.”

  Rickards nodded and shifted in his seat. “Look, Mike, this is all conjecture. The truth is we have no idea what we’re looking for.”

  “Yeah. I know,” he said, checking a side mirror before passing a slow motorized scooter carrying three passengers. “You’re here to find out what spooked her grandfather. And his brother.”

  “More or less.”

  Morton nodded. “I get it.”

  Angela turned when Mike reached into his shirt pocket and retrieved a small bottle. He removed the lid and popped a tiny pill into his mouth.

  “Nitroglycerin,” he said. “For my heart.”

  She nodded and looked forward, out at the jungle view before them and the narrow winding road, which had left the city miles behind. They were now surrounded on both sides by walls of thick green vegetation and dark trees, many growing up and out over the road, with branches hanging down almost low enough to scrape the roof of the truck as they sped beneath them.

  “So, where exactly are we headed?”

  “Bolivia,” Morton replied. “You said those goons gave you back your wallets and passports, right?”

  “Yes. And phones.”

  “Yeah? Do you have a signal way out here?”

  They both checked.

  “No.”

  “Let me see them.”

  Angela took Joe’s and showed them to Morton, who promptly grabbed them in his thick paw and threw both phones out through his open window. He looked at them and grinned.

  “Just in case.”

  56

  They turned off onto a small, much rougher road littered with potholes, causing the truck to shake and bounce wildly from side to side. Unnerving for Angela and Rickards but did not seem to bother Mike Morton in the slightest. Instead, he merely rolled the steering wheel back and forth like an Indy driver.

  Just much, much slower.

  The wild vegetation almost completely enveloped them now, with long thin strands of wild grass stretching nearly as tall as the trees making it impossible to see in any direction except forward and backward. Though even backward was difficult, obscured by a thick trailing cloud of dust.

  And now, all of it, even the dust, glowed brilliantly beneath the gleam of late after
noon sun, blazing down between clouds upon a darkening azure sky. All the while, behind them, a rumbling in the bed of the truck told them their bags were still there.

  Angela’s trembling had stopped, witnessed by her hands now calmly resting atop raised knees, squeezed to one side of the truck’s gear shift.

  It was a welcome feeling over the last two hours. One that left her wondering why. Perhaps it was the revelation and emotional release to Joe and Mike in her hotel room when she’d been struggling so hard to maintain her composure. It was a secret she had never fully revealed to anyone except her grandmother.

  Angela had tried to sleep, but due to her seated position, as well as the constant rocking of the vehicle, she couldn’t, until finally, late in the day, exhaustion finally won out, taking her slowly as she lowered her wavering chin and leaned softly against Rickards’ shoulder.

  ***

  Angela awoke to the sound of screeching birds, promptly followed by the rolling and abrupt stop of the truck, then a short screech of metal as Morton pulled up and engaged the parking brake.

  “We’re here.”

  Rickards was the first to straighten, blinking and looking around through a dirtier windshield than when they’d dropped off to sleep. “Where is here?”

  “I think you’re going to like this,” Morton said and threw open his door.

  Angela followed Rickards out and rose, stretching her arms over her head and yawning. A gratifying feeling after being cooped up for so long. Next to her, Rickards blinked several times, clearly having fallen asleep himself. Together, they watched Morton flip the driver’s seat forward to retrieve an odd-looking pole from behind it. Several feet long and bound with wires repeatedly circling over several pieces of electronics.

  “What’s that?”

  “The reason I get arrested.”

  She looked at Rickards, who shrugged, before both followed the larger Morton as he ambled forward to what appeared to be the end of the dirt road where a wall of tall grass and vegetation blocked most of their way, save for one smaller opening to one side.