And Willum had found one tantalizing clue. He glanced down at the photograph of the engraved stone he had found a year ago while exploring these hills. The stone sat in front of one of the caves pock-marking the cliff face of the range’s highest peak.
MUSTANG MOUNTAIN RUNE STONE
The inscription was written in an alphabet called runic. Willum had had it translated by an expert who opined this style of runes dated to medieval times and was of Anglo-Saxon, rather than Scandinavian, origin:
The body of rough Hurech lays here.
He enjoyed merriment.
The secret is near rough Hurech’s body.
Fame and glory await.
The body turns to dust and goes to Eden’s temple.
Willum had reached the obvious conclusion that the carving served as a grave marker, a eulogy for a man named Hurech, an apparently rough fellow who enjoyed merriment, was entrusted with an important secret and was buried inside the cave
Willum had returned the next day with a shovel to dig up Hurech, rough fellow or not. A bit uncomfortable with his task, and trying to add some levity to the exhumation, Willum called out as he dug, “Alas, poor Hurech!”—a clumsy nod to the speech Hamlet gave after Yorick’s bones had themselves been exhumed.
Six inches below the surface, near the mouth of the cave, Willum had found bones in a shallow grave. But the skeleton had been disturbed—perhaps by animals—and the skull and other bones were missing. He removed a rib, dropped a wad of tobacco in the grave as payment to the spirit of rough Hurech, and re-covered the grave. He also looked around the cave for some kind of hidden secret but found nothing. He sent the rib to a lab in Cleveland owned by an old college classmate. A week later the friend phoned to report the bone likely belonged to a northern European male eight or nine hundred years old. This result was consistent with the runic analysis.
When Willum found English land records showing a man named Hurech in Staffordshire around the year 1200, the story seemed to hold together. Unless there were a bunch of runic-speaking Indians running around the hills of Arizona carrying 800-year-old European bones, there was only one rational explanation: At least two Europeans (rough Hurech plus the fellow who carved the eulogy and buried him) had been exploring Arizona well before Christopher Columbus. And if they were here, they were here for a reason—probably the secret rough Hurech was guarding. Which brought Willum full circle back to old Boone’s dying words about some kind of treasure chest.
Willum decided to make one more pass with the copter. Other than illegal aliens navigating their way inland from the Mexican border twenty miles to the south, not many people climbed these mountains anymore. But in the late 1800s they had been teeming with silver miners. Men like Boone’s great-grandfather. Willum was pretty sure none of the other prospectors had found the chest—it was not the type of thing that would have gone unnoticed in a frontier mining town. Which was why he was staying away from the old mining sites and focusing instead on areas that had been left undisturbed.
The sound of his chopper caught the attention of a team of border patrol agents patrolling on horseback. Willum slapped his thigh. Time to call it a day. He angled the copter away from the illegal Mexicans, hoping to draw the agents away.
It was just bad luck that southern Arizona had so many military installations—Willum would have much preferred to be hundreds of miles away from anyone working for the federal government. At least so far, the feds hadn’t seemed to take any interest in the desert compound Willum recently bought and fortified.
Of course, that’s probably what the good folks in Waco and Ruby Ridge thought not long before the government assassinated them.
Astarte swung as they walked along a path bisecting the college academic quad, one hand grasping Cam’s and the other Amanda’s. “Don’t let me step on the cracks,” the girl said. “It will break my mother’s back.” She glanced up at Amanda. “I guess that would be you, Amanda, since you’re my mother now.”
Amanda stopped and cocked her head, green eyes wide and glistening. Going through the foster-parenting process with a nine-year-old had been harder than they thought—Cam knew that Astarte referring to Amanda as her mother was a big step. “I’m happy to be your mum, Astarte, but what’s this about broken backs?”
“It’s a game kids play,” Cam said, chuckling. “You didn’t have that superstition in England?”
Amanda laughed. “No. But you Americans don’t think twice about passing someone on the stairs, and you think a black cat is unlucky, so what do you know?”
Astarte looked up. “Wait, so a black cat is lucky?”
“Very much so.” Amanda smiled. “Unless, apparently, it steps on a sidewalk crack.” She resumed walking. “Is there something special about the cracks in Arizona, or is it everywhere?”
“It’s everywhere,” Astarte said. “But at home there’s too much snow on the ground, so it doesn’t matter.” They had flown out of Boston during a February snowstorm.
“I see. Well, I’d not fancy a broken back, so up we go.” Amanda hoisted the girl skyward as Astarte giggled and kicked her feet, her dark braids swinging around her almond-colored face. The girl’s dark coloring contrasted with Amanda’s flaxen hair and fair complexion—creamy skin highlighted by emerald eyes and wine-red lips, like a lightly-decorated Christmas sugar cookie.
Cam smiled. Astarte was a decent-sized kid, yet Amanda lifted her effortlessly. Cam stayed in good shape for a guy pushing forty, but Amanda regularly beat him in tennis; only with the greatest effort—and perhaps her silent understanding of the fragility of the male ego—did he keep up with her on their mountain-biking expeditions. Yet she managed to look willowy.
“That’s the building,” Cam said. He pointed at a sprawling, windowless, two-story white stucco structure with ‘Arizona Historical Society’ inscribed across the front. They had passed beyond the academic quad, emerging onto a side street rimming the University of Arizona’s Tucson campus.
“Are we all going in?” Astarte asked.
“Not to start with,” Amanda said. “We’ll let Cameron get set up and begin to examine the artifacts. You and I will get some breakfast and join him later.”
“How old did you say the artifacts were, Cameron?” Her cobalt eyes, large and expressive, stared up at him.
Good question. “Well, some people think they are over a thousand years old. And some people think they are only about a hundred. I’m here to see if we can solve the mystery.”
“Well, I’m not very good at remembering all the dates, but I bet whoever it was came here after the Phoenicians,” Astarte said. “The Phoenicians had bigger boats than Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims. They came to America to get copper.” Astarte had previously been home-schooled by her uncle, and obviously had learned a different version of American history than was taught in the public schools. Her uncle had been a researcher of early American exploration who shared his research with Cam before he died. A Mormon, he had spent a lifetime trying to prove that the history recounted in the Book of Mormon—that of white explorers traveling to America beginning approximately 2500 years ago—was correct. Cam was intrigued by his research, though both he and Amanda rejected the patriarchal teachings of the Mormon faith. Astarte continued to cling—understandably—to the religion that had played such a prominent part in her upbringing, and Cam and Amanda weren’t sure what to do about it. They didn’t want her growing up believing that she couldn’t go to heaven unless she was married, and that her primary job in life was to have babies, and that her husband was also her master—not that all Mormons believed these things, but Amanda had a friend from New Hampshire who had been raised with these precepts as a child.
“Yes, Astarte,” Amanda said. “We are learning that many people came across, over many centuries. People need to start thinking of the Atlantic Ocean as a highway, not a hurdle.”
The girl nodded. “Mormon people already think that way. We learned about it from the Book of Mormon.”
As he turned one last time to watch them go, Cam noticed a gangly man sipping a cup of coffee while leaning against a bike rack across the street. He wouldn’t have given it a second thought had it not been for the old Montreal Expos insignia on the baseball cap the man wore—Cam had rooted for the Expos as a kid, though of course the Red Sox were his favorite. And he had seen that hat in the hotel lobby this morning. Could there really be two Expos hats within a few blocks of each other in Tucson, Arizona?
Trying to appear casual, he yelled to Amanda and began jogging toward her. “Hey, you forgot your key.” And as he got closer. “Play along. I think that guy is following us.” A cab turned the corner and headed toward them. “I’d feel better if you got into this cab and got out of here.” He waved at the taxi.
Amanda glanced over. “Bloody hell. You’re right. I think I saw him in the hotel elevator last night. The hat makes his ears flare out.”
Cam smiled, trying not to alarm Astarte. “Well, I’ll say this for him. He’s not very good at his job if we both recognize him.” He kissed them again as they got into the taxi. “Don’t come back until I call you, okay?”
Amanda nodded. “What are you going to do?”
“For now, nothing. But if he’s still here when I come back out…”
Astarte interrupted, tugging on the sleeve of his coat through the open window. “I just took his picture. He didn’t see me through the window.”
“Good job.” In some ways Astarte was nine going on nineteen. “Can you text it to us?”
Cam jogged back to the stucco building, one eye on the Expos hat. Why would someone be following them? He knew it was a stupid question even as it formed in his brain. A few months earlier he and Amanda had uncovered religious artifacts that called into question some of Christianity’s basic teachings. In doing so they had foiled the plans of a group of religious fanatics hoping to usher in a new messiah; the group had been aided by a team of rogue federal agents. So their list of enemies included the Catholic Church, some federal intelligence operatives and a violent religious sect. Other than that, most people liked them.
Cam pushed through the door, taking a second to use the darkened glass as a mirror to see behind him. The man was watching him but had not moved. Cam shrugged and allowed the door to close behind him.
It was just before nine; he was scheduled to meet a geology professor from the nearby University of Arizona campus in the front lobby and together they would find the archivist. They would be examining lead artifacts that had been found buried in the desert outside Tucson in the 1920s. The artifacts, numbering about thirty, were inscribed in both Hebrew and Latin and purported to tell the tale of a colony of Christianized Jews from France exploring the area in the ninth century AD. The items caused quite a stir when first found—the New York Times ran a series of front-page stories chronicling the discovery. But within a few years the sheer outlandishness of the story swung public opinion—more specifically, the academics who studied the artifacts—into concluding the artifacts must be fake. So the lead pieces had been boxed, archived and largely forgotten for almost ninety years.
Cam thought it might be time to take a fresh look.
A fifty-something man wearing wire-rim glasses and long grayish hair pulled back in a ponytail stood up from a bench as Cam entered the building. “You Cameron Thorne?” He spoke softly, almost in a whisper.
Cam smiled and stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming, Professor Schneider.”
“You can call me Max.” The geology professor wore a wrinkled gray blazer over a blue button-down and a pair of jeans. He carried a silver, suitcase-like container.
“Is that your microscope?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “I’m not much use without it.” They followed signs to the archivist’s office. As they walked, the aroma of pipe smoke wafted from the professor’s blazer. “So you’ve never seen these artifacts before?” Cam asked.
“Never even heard of them until we got your call. But I spoke to a couple of the old-timers in the department. They think you’re wasting your time.” He shrugged. “The artifacts are fake.”
“Have they examined them?”
Max smiled and shrugged again. “I don’t think so.”
Cam came across this often. “It’s amazing how so many people, even those in academia, jump to conclusions.”
“Well, I’m here with an open mind.”
Ten minutes later the archivist ushered Cam and the professor into a small conference room. “Nobody has looked at these things in almost fifty years,” she said, smiling. The lead artifacts were displayed on three multi-shelved metal display carts. She handed the men each a pair of white cotton gloves. “Please wear these when you handle them. There are thirty-two objects in total. Take all the time you need.”
Yanking the gloves on as he crossed the room, Cam made a beeline for the most elaborate objects. He had seen pictures of most of the artifacts before, but two crosses that contained both Hebrew and Latin writing were the ones that most intrigued him. Each was about eighteen inches long and intricately decorated. One of the crosses had a snake entwining the four arms of the cross, and the top of the cross had been shaped into a sharp arrowhead. The other cross had been shaped so that the lower end of the cross resembled the hilt of a battle sword.
TUCSON LEAD ARTIFACTS
Using two hands, Cam lifted the snake cross. Despite the arrowed point, it was much too heavy to be used as any kind of weapon. These were obviously ceremonial objects. Peering closer, he noticed that parts of the artifact were engraved in Latin and parts in Hebrew.
TUCSON LEAD ARTIFACTS
“If you want to bring one of those over, I’ll take a look at it,” the professor said. Cam was so enthralled with the artifacts that he had almost forgotten about Max setting up his microscope.
Cam handed him the snake cross. He knew a little about forensic geology, but obviously not as much as a trained geologist. “It seems to me, there are only two possibilities for these artifacts. Either they’re authentic, or they were planted there as a hoax or a scheme by the guy who found them—maybe as a way to make money or garner publicity.”
“Sounds fair. As I understand it, these were found on the outskirts of the city, out in the desert. I can’t imagine how else they would have gotten there.”
“So is there anything you can tell microscopically about how long they may have been buried? Mineral growth or weathering or something like that? The guy who found them had only lived in Tucson for three years. So if they were in the ground longer than three years that would help rebut the hoax possibility.”
The professor took the object and placed it under the scope. He moved it around, finally settling on the area where the Hebrew letters had been carved. “Interesting,” he said after a few minutes.
“What?”
“Here. Take a look.”
Cam peered into the scope. “I assume that grooved area is one of the Hebrew letters?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s the white stuff inside?” It looked like some kind of buildup, almost like cholesterol forming on the inside of artery walls.
“That’s calcite. It often accumulates in lead pipes.”
“How long does it take?”
“Well, in pipes it can build up in a couple of years.”
Cam felt his shoulders slump. He had hoped to be able to prove the artifacts were authentic. “So that’s not going to help us. Our guy could have planted the artifacts and waited a couple of years to discover them.”
“Not necessarily.” The professor turned to face him. “It only takes a couple of years for calcite to form in pipes because pipes have a constant supply of water. But you said this cross was buried in the desert, right? Was it near the surface?”
“No. S
ix feet down.”
“So only rarely would it have been covered in water. I can’t see how the calcite would have built up in less than, say, many decades. Probably much longer.”
“Really?”
The professor shrugged. “The science doesn’t lie.”
Cam tried to stay focused. If the geologist was correct, then the artifacts were almost certainly authentic. He wanted to call Amanda right away and share the news, but he also wanted to maintain an air of professionalism in front of the professor. “Do you see anything else?”
“Not on this artifact.” He pointed to a thick lead cross on one of the display carts. “But what about that one? It has some green growth I’d like to take a look at.”
TUCSON LEAD ARTIFACTS
Cam retrieved the cross, which was unadorned but freckled with blotches of green. Using two hands, he carried it over and gently rested it on the microscope. This time he stood by while the professor examined the object.
“Well, I think my estimate of many decades is actually incorrect.”
Cam’s stomach tightened. “Why?” He tried to be objective when studying these artifacts, but his passion for the subject always made him hope they were authentic.
The professor moved aside again. “Take a look. See that green build-up? It’s called malachite. And there’s a blue deposit called azurite also. Both of these are formed from the copper ore that is present within the lead. Essentially what happens is, over many centuries, the malachite and azurite seep to the surface.”
“Did you say over many centuries?”
The professor pulled a pipe from the inside of his jacket pocket, sat back and chewed on the end. “Yes, Mr. Thorne, I did. It seems you have at least two very old artifacts here. I’ll leave it up to you to explain how they found their way to Arizona.”
Powdered Gold: Templars and the American Ark of the Covenant (Templars in America Series Book 3) Page 2