The Loch Ness Legacy

by Boyd Morrison

  The vessel reminded Zim of the one his father had owned when he and his brothers were young boys, the days when they’d gone out on long weekend excursions on Lake Michigan, the days before his father’s job at the auto parts factory was destroyed by the company owned by a Saudi sheik who bought the plant merely to shut it down. Those were the last happy times Zim could remember, and it was his first taste of how ruthless Arabs could be. The family had sold everything and moved to California looking for work, where his father was reduced to pounding out dents at an auto body shop until he drank himself to death.

  Despite how much he reveled in the motion of the boat on the waves, Zim knew he couldn’t return to that life on Lake Michigan. He was a wanted man now and always would be. Stepping onto the dock in Everett was probably the last time he’d set foot in the United States. Europe would become his new home. If he ended up dying on this operation, at least he’d be going out in the birthplace of the white race. And he’d do it while making the Arabs pay for what they’d done to his family.

  Pryor was down in the bunk napping while Marlo Dunham lounged next to him in a sweater and jeans that hugged her slim body. Pryor had been lusting after her ever since they’d picked her up on Mercer Island, but Zim felt no attraction to her. Brunettes didn’t do it for him. If he ever took a wife, she would have to fit the Aryan ideal of a tall blonde Viking goddess. Maybe he’d settle in Norway. Carl had said it was filled with his type of woman.

  ‘How long until we arrive?’ Dunham asked.

  ‘A couple of hours,’ Zim said. ‘We’ll be in plenty of time for the flight.’

  ‘I’m not concerned about that. You both need to alter your appearance to match the passports or we’ll be arrested the moment we go through security in Victoria.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ve got the disguises in the cabin. We’ll put them on before we dock. What about you? You’re as wanted as we are now.’

  ‘I’ve got a blonde wig, a different nose, and glasses.’

  ‘Blonde, huh?’

  Dunham sneered at him. ‘Don’t even think it. I’m not interested.’

  ‘What if I don’t care?’

  ‘What if I don’t show up at the airport and you have no plane tickets? Remember, I funded your jailbreak, and I control the purse strings on this mission. Without my money, your friend Pryor over there wouldn’t be able to build a flashlight.’

  Zim gritted his teeth. He didn’t relish being in thrall to this or any other woman. ‘Relax. It was a joke. Besides, I don’t want Carl’s sloppy seconds.’

  Dunham gave him the finger, leaned back, and put on her sunglasses.

  She had hooked up with his brother four years after Victor was sent to prison. Carl told him it was fate, but Zim always thought it was a little convenient that she latched onto him just before presenting her plan to attack the summit with this old Nazi weapon. He later learned that she had found out about the tragic Zim brothers and seen an opportunity. Carl was too much of a stooge to realize what was happening. Dunham pushed all of his buttons in precisely the right way.

  She had used their mutual tragedies to reel Carl in. Years before, Dunham had fallen in love with some kind of peacenik who joined an aid organization supporting the Palestinian cause. Just like a woman, she was so head over heels for the guy that she went to Gaza with him. When an Israeli airstrike hit the apartment complex they were living in, her boyfriend was killed, and Dunham was injured so badly that not only did she lose the baby she was carrying, she lost the ability to ever have children.

  Zim didn’t like Dunham, but he could identify with her sudden change of attitude. Tragedy could do that in an instant. Dunham returned to the US stewing in hatred and convinced that both the Israelis and Palestinians were scum. Laroche kept a close watch on Israeli news and, unaware of her pathological grudge, took pity on Dunham because his own mother had been killed in a Palestinian suicide attack. He offered her a job to take advantage of her education in archaeology, which she had planned to indulge when she moved to the Middle East. Laroche hoped her background would dovetail with his cryptozoology passion. With no other job prospects, she took the position and worked for him faithfully for the next three years, despite his allegiance to Israel.

  Laroche’s fortuitous purchase of the Nazi chemical weapon reignited Dunham’s need for revenge, but her plan required muscle to make it a reality. When she met Alexa Locke, she briefly considered Tyler for the job but quickly found out what a do-gooder he was. He would never agree to it. She needed someone who would understand her desire for vengeance, and when she heard about Tyler’s involvement with Victor and Carl Zim, Dunham sought Carl out and convinced him to join forces with her. Carl’s only condition was that they would free his brother once the job was done.

  Carl was totally dazzled by Dunham and wrote about her in glowing letters to Victor that his attorney was able to bring in uncensored during regular visits. Victor suspected there was some fabrication and embellishment of the story on Dunham’s part, but it didn’t matter. Their goals were aligned perfectly: now Dunham would get the destruction of Israel and Zim would make Islam a dirty word in the western nations while taking out all of their leaders at once.

  Zim put the boat on a heading that would take them around Orcas Island. ‘How are you going to keep the money flowing now that they’ve found Laroche?’

  ‘Embezzling from that old fool was easy,’ Dunham said. ‘I’ve got enough cash stashed away for whatever we need.’

  ‘Are you sure they won’t find it? You thought they wouldn’t find that vault for weeks and look how that went.’

  ‘And they wouldn’t have if your men hadn’t screwed up and let both Alexa Locke and Brielle Cohen get away.’

  Zim shifted in his seat. ‘I’m down four men because they had help. Tyler Locke and Grant Westfield rescued them.’

  ‘I realized that when they showed up at Laroche’s estate.’

  ‘Which wouldn’t have been a problem if you had killed Laroche when I told you to.’

  Dunham had Laroche locked in a room at the mansion, delaying the inevitable need to kill him because of some misguided sense of pity. She learned her lesson when he broke out of his room long enough to send the email to Alexa and lock himself in the vault.

  Zim looked at Dunham with undisguised disdain. ‘Why didn’t you kill them all at the mansion?’

  ‘There was no point in giving myself away if they didn’t get into the vault.’

  ‘You should have had the gun with you.’

  ‘How was I supposed to know they’d open the vault so easily? I’ve been trying to figure out the code for days. The only reason they could do it was because of the clues Laroche sent to Alexa.’

  Zim grunted but said nothing. It sounded like a bunch of flimsy excuses to him. If he had been there, all their adversaries would be dead, and he would have destroyed the notebook, making the rest of this mission unnecessary.

  ‘We should split up in London,’ Dunham said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if they get to Versailles before you do, we’ll have to stop them in England. You’ll take Pryor with you to France and meet up with the men there. I’ll take the other half of them and stake out the library at Cambridge.’

  Zim scowled at her. She was getting too used to ordering him around. ‘Are you sure you can handle it?’

  ‘You’re so sweet,’ she said with a mock baby voice. ‘You’re worried about me getting hurt? Please. Carl trained me on weapons. I’m ready.’

  ‘I’m worried about you getting captured and losing our money,’ Zim said.

  ‘I’m not going to sit back in a hotel while the Locke siblings and their friends screw up a year of planning. If they find the Loch Ness monster in time to make the antidote, then your brother died for nothing.’

  ‘And if we find the monster first?’

  ‘Then not only do we have to kill it,’ she said with a shrug, ‘we have to make sure its corpse will never be found.’
r />   VERSAILLES

  WORLD NEWS

  Rocket Attacks Depleting Iron Dome Missile Shield

  By RIMONA BENESCH

  June 20, TEL AVIV – The Israeli defense system known as Iron Dome has been so active over the past week that a shortage of missiles could render it ineffective in a matter of days, according to sources in the military. If that happens, Israel’s major population areas would be at the mercy of a massive rocket and artillery bombardment.

  Some officers in the Israeli Defense Force are concerned that depletion of the missiles is the goal of the repeated attacks. Iron Dome is also an effective anti-aircraft system. If it is not available to defend against incoming airstrikes, they fear that Egyptian and Syrian forces – supplied with advanced Chinese and Russian weapons by sympathetic countries in the Muslim world – will be emboldened to launch an all-out invasion.

  As rumors of Muslim leaders dying from a poison supposedly administered by Mossad agents continue to spread, the threat of just such an invasion is not being taken lightly. Speculation continues unabated into the cause of the illness, but doctors are still at a loss for how to treat the deadly affliction. If no cure is found, sources say that the affected countries will feel obligated to strike back against the perceived aggressor.

  Israeli Prime Minister Elijah Alfandari has issued a statement that any incursion will be met with massive force and did not rule out retaliating against countries supporting the invasion, raising the risk that such a conflict could expand to a war engulfing the entire Middle East.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When the RER C train pulled into the Chateau de Versailles station, it was already five in the afternoon. Rather than struggle through the clogged Paris traffic, Tyler decided that they’d reach the palace faster using rapid transit. Brielle had purchased a book on Versailles at the airport and buried her nose in it for the entire train ride.

  Normally, Miles would have been happy for them to use a company jet for their air travel, but one was in Afghanistan and the other was undergoing maintenance. Instead, they took a late-night nonstop flight to Charles de Gaulle airport, while Alexa and Grant flew to London Heathrow. Upon landing, Tyler had gotten the message that the two of them were on their own train to Cambridge. He and Brielle stopped only to leave their bags at a hotel, where the concierge gave them complimentary tickets to Versailles.

  The plan was simple. Tyler and Brielle would find the statue of Apollo and get the exact dimensions of his foot by taking a photograph of it next to a ruler. Tyler would then email the photo to Grant, who would print out the photo at the appropriate size and overlay it on the copy of Laroche’s note to get the next clue. Alexa would figure out what they were looking for in the library, and hopefully that would describe how to find the Loch Ness monster. He also had Miles divert two Gordian GhostMantas intended for a North Sea oil rig to Loch Ness.

  Simple, but as Tyler went through the plan in his mind, it sounded ridiculous. When he’d presented Special Agent Harris with the idea, she felt the same way. She acknowledged that the Nazi notebook was valuable and might provide some insights for the toxicology teams working on an antidote in Washington, London, and Frankfurt, but there was no way she was going to ask the French or British authorities to help in the search for a mythological creature. She said she had neither the time nor the resources to go on a wild goose chase.

  Harris even thought Laroche might have gone to these lengths to divert attention away from his own involvement. If he was in on the plot with Dunham, she might have double-crossed him, leading him to concoct his wild story. However, they wouldn’t be able to get answers from him any time soon. Doctors said he had neglected to take his blood pressure medication with him into the vault, and because of the ensuing stroke and brain swelling, they had no idea when or if he’d ever wake up.

  Under most any other circumstances, Tyler would have agreed with Harris and not even considered pursuing this path. He’d seen some unbelievable things in his life, but his innate nature as a skeptic made the whole thing hard to swallow.

  This was one time, however, that his logical side was kicked to the curb. Other than Alexa’s three-second video, there was nothing concrete to suggest that something unknown to science was alive in Loch Ness, no matter how hard Zim and Dunham were trying to stop them. If that’s all he had, Tyler wouldn’t be in France now.

  Instead, Tyler was here because he was clinging to hope. His best friend was dying. If having a shot at saving Grant meant believing in an outrageous story, he’d need to have a little faith. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate.

  Tyler took a deep breath and focused himself on their work.

  ‘Do you know where we’re going?’ Tyler asked Brielle.

  She looked up from her book. ‘Yes. The statue of the Baths of Apollo was originally in the Cave of Thetis, an indoor bathhouse. Now it’s in one of the twelve bosquets, or groves. They’re rectangular stands of trees with paths cut through them to clearings, statuary, and fountains. The statues will be roped off, so we’ll have to cross illicitly to get close enough for the photo.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait a while until the grove is clear of tourists.’

  ‘It may not be much of a problem. At this time of day, more people will be exiting than entering.’

  The train lurched to a stop, and they had to jostle their way through the passengers waiting to get on. Brielle was right about people leaving; the station was jammed with tourists spent from their day at the palace.

  They made their way through the station and turned right when they got outside. According to Brielle, it was a short walk to the chateau. No clouds were present to blot out the warm afternoon sun. A T-shirt and jeans were all Tyler needed, while Brielle wore cargo shorts and a loose-fitting top. They fit right in with the tourists.

  Seeing so many couples and families returning from a day of sightseeing, holding hands and laughing, Tyler felt the urge to put his arm around Brielle’s shoulder. But considering the task at hand, it didn’t seem right.

  ‘I haven’t been to Versailles in twenty years,’ Brielle said. ‘Came here with my parents when I was in high school. It’s a magical place. Elegant. Inspiring. I always thought I’d return someday on a romantic holiday.’

  Tyler smiled. ‘This doesn’t qualify?’

  ‘I don’t know if that statement makes you a hopeless romantic or just hopeless. Have you been here before?’

  ‘No. Karen always wanted to come here, but she died before it happened.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thanks. I guess we both thought we’d be here under different circumstances.’

  Silence descended. Ever since Tyler plucked Brielle out of Lake Shannon, they’d been all business. Even the flight to Paris had consisted of little more than planning and sleep. After the Eiffel Tower incident, Tyler never thought he’d see Brielle again, let alone three days later. They’d said their final goodbyes and gone their separate ways at the hotel, expecting that would be the end of it. It was like sleeping with someone during a spring break fling and then returning to college to find out your one-night stand lived in the same dorm.

  ‘I went out with a gentile once,’ Brielle said. ‘Dated, I mean. So I’ve been down that road before. It doesn’t end well.’

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘For either of us. No sense in trying again, although it does seem like someone is determined to put us together.’ She turned to him. ‘Do you believe in fate?’

  Tyler shook his head. ‘I like having a little more control over my life than that.’

  ‘What do you believe in?’

  ‘Living in the moment. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, you never know when your time is up.’

  ‘You mean, dying is just bad luck?’

  ‘If you want to call it that. But I like to think of luck as where preparation meets opportunity.’

  Brielle chuckled at that. ‘And what an opportunity we have before us now. I’m back at Versailles becaus
e of a quest to find Nessie so that some boffin in a lab can extract an antitoxin to a Nazi superweapon.’

  ‘Well, when you say it like that, it sounds absurd. Are you buying into Laroche’s letter?’

  ‘Dunham thinks the Loch Ness monster is important, so there must be something to it. Whether that means we find Nessie or something else, I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out together.’

  They rounded the corner and there ahead of them loomed one of the largest residences ever built, the chateau of Versailles. At over 700,000 square feet, it is fourteen times the size of Bill Gates’ enormous mansion in Seattle. The gardens are even larger, encompassing two thousand acres.

  As they approached, passing a statue of Louis XIV astride a horse, Tyler couldn’t take his eyes from the ornate stone and brick palace that encircled a gigantic cobbled courtyard. The façade was lavishly appointed with sculptures and adorned with gold filigree along the eaves of the slate roofs. Even the gate and fencing were gilt. Clearly Laroche had borrowed many of Versailles’s themes when designing his own estate.

  Even at this late hour, a pack of visitors waited in line to get into the palace.

  ‘We don’t have to get in line because we’re not going inside,’ Brielle said, and then nodded to the left. ‘The entrance to the gardens is over here.’

  They went through an alcove and presented their tickets. On weekdays the gardens were accessible for free, but on weekends there was a fee because tourists were treated to the Grandes Eaux, the only days the fountains were in operation.

  They emerged into the rear courtyard, which was perhaps even more spectacular than the front. Opulent gardens and forests stretched as far as Tyler could see. The terrace’s gravel and sand hardpan, split by two huge pools, gave way to steps that led down to a jetting fountain. Past the fountain was a promenade that extended along a manicured lawn to another fountain and then the Grand Canal. Nearly a mile long and bisected by an equally long basin, the wide pool was dotted with rowboats for hire.