Powdered Gold: Templars and the American Ark of the Covenant (Templars in America Series Book 3)

by David S. Brody

  Cam sighed. “Let me guess. Willum Smoot.”

  “Exactly. We know he came to your lecture. Like I said, we’ve been watching him.”

  “What do you mean by ornery?”

  “They’re heavily armed, and they’ve begun to cause trouble with the local authorities.”

  “How so?”

  “Nothing overtly aggressive. Yet. But that’s how these things start.”

  Amanda chimed in. “I’m sorry, but get to the point, Georgia. You didn’t come up here to ask Cam to put on a sheriff’s badge and play John Wayne.”

  The older woman sighed. “Sorry, you’re right. The other thing Smoot’s been doing is traipsing around the mountains south of Tucson. He’s convinced something is hidden up there. And I’m convinced he would welcome your help in finding it.”

  “Let me guess again,” Cam said. “A golden treasure chest.”

  Amanda broke the silence. “Look, we met this Willum Smoot chap. He’s loony. You don’t really think the Templars buried their treasure in some cave in Arizona?”

  “I don’t.” Georgia shrugged. “But who really knows where it is? Nobody’s seen it in seven hundred years.” One of the main reasons the King of France outlawed the Templars in 1307 was to procure their treasure. But when his soldiers stormed the Templar headquarters in Paris, the storerooms had been emptied. Apparently the Templars had been forewarned and the treasure secreted to some safe haven.

  “Come on, Georgia,” Cam said.

  “I didn’t say he found it. I just said Smoot believes he will find it.”

  “He also believes the end of the world is near,” Amanda said. “Like I said, those people are loony.” Amanda loved Cam, and was fond of Georgia, and she had made many other friends in the States, but there was a current of paranoia and distrust that seemed to run through the American psyche—why couldn’t they just sit back and enjoy life rather than always being terrified that Armageddon was just around the corner?

  “Yes, they’re loony,” Georgia said. “But they believe what they believe. And we all know beliefs—rational or not—dictate behavior. And Willum Smoot believes he’s hot on the trail of the Templar treasure.”

  “Sounds to me like he’s watched too many Indiana Jones movies,” Amanda said.

  “Even so, Smoot concerns us. He’s brilliant—a retired chemical engineer who made a ton of money inventing some kind of fuel cell technology. Then he spent three years in jail for tax evasion. Ever since he got out he’s been building up and arming this Survivalist group. They’re not just Survivalists, they’re also a private militia—they have assault rifles, rocket launchers, maybe even chemical weapons. And they no longer recognize the authority of the local, state or federal government—Smoot won’t pay taxes, won’t let authorities in to inspect for safety. There are kids in there, and we don’t know if they are being abused or neglected.” She paused. “The biggest issue is that our experts feel the group might turn cultish, with Smoot some kind of god-like personality. Sort of like David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. But Smoot is much smarter than Koresh.” She lowered her voice. “Look, seventy-six people died in the Waco siege. And twenty-three of them were children. Innocent children, like Astarte.”

  Cam took Amanda’s hand. “So, again, what does this have to do with me?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a bunch of trigger-happy yahoos who think we need to storm Smoot’s compound before he fortifies it even more. I can persuade them to wait, but only if we can use the time to get some useful intelligence. But Smoot’s group is very secretive and very insular. We’ve been trying to infiltrate them for a year now, but we can’t break through. What we need is someone they will recruit, rather than someone looking to join. And he’s already reached out to you.” She looked from Cam to Amanda and back to Cam. “I’m afraid you’re the only one we know who can get in there.”

  Georgia knew better than to push Cam for an answer right away. She hugged Astarte again and said her goodbyes. “I’ll leave you to your day on the lake. But Cam, please call me tomorrow. We may have waited too long on this as it is.”

  An hour later Cam had the ice skates and sled out and the three of them, along with Venus, squinted as the midday sun reflected off the snow-covered lake. Shoveled paths wound their way across the lake’s surface; occasionally these paths terminated in larger clearings swept clean for pond hockey.

  The temperature was in the mid-thirties with little breeze. Astarte, normally fearless, gazed tentatively across the frozen expanse. She knew that mid-thirties was above the freezing point. “Cameron, how can you be sure the ice is safe?”

  “Well, once people have been skating on it for a few hours and nobody has fallen in, I figure it must be okay.”

  “Cameron!” Amanda chided.

  “Sorry.” Apparently an attempt at morbid humor was not the correct way to respond to a frightened nine-year-old. It was tough enough to take a child into your home virtually unknown; they should at least provide some kind of owner’s manual. “Usually after a week of really cold temperatures, it starts to get thick enough. Then the ice fishermen go out in the shallow areas and drill a hole. Once the ice is five inches thick, it’s safe. We don’t have any currents on this lake, so the thickness is pretty much the same all the way across. And even if it gets up to 35 or even 40 degrees for a day or two, it’s still safe as long as it stays cold overnight.”

  They skated along one of the paths paralleling the shoreline of the lake. Cam and Astarte held hands; Amanda held Venus’ leash, sometimes urging the dog to run and allowing herself to be pulled behind like a water-skier. “You want to try this, Astarte?” Amanda asked.

  “No thanks. I’m not ready to go that fast.” The girl, like Amanda, had just learned to skate. She smiled up at Cam. “And Cameron is too big. Venus wouldn’t be able to pull him.”

  Nothing like a nine year-old to be brutally honest. Cam had, indeed, gained a few pounds this winter. Now that his knee was almost back to normal after surgery he’d begin to jog again. It felt pretty good today, though he wore a thick brace to help keep the ligaments stable. And the bright sun wasn’t giving him a headache, which meant his concussion symptoms had faded.

  At the far end of the lake a few guys had cleared a rink and were playing pond hockey. Amanda noticed Cam eyeing them. “You want to go play?”

  He smiled. “How could you tell?”

  “You had the same look that Venus has when I’m grilling steaks.” She smacked his butt. “Go. Just be careful. And be home by dinner.”

  He circled back to grab a hockey stick he kept in a shed by the lake and, lengthening his strides, sprinted the few hundred yards to the end of the lake. As he approached he watched the game—four young teenagers, plus a red-haired guy about his age. Good, an odd number.

  The man smiled a welcome. “Thank God. Somebody my own age. These kids never get tired.” He stuck out his hand. “My name’s Ellis.” Not a big guy—a few inches under six feet, like Cam.

  “I’m Cam. You live around here?”

  “No. I’m visiting my sister—she lives a few blocks over. But I was driving by and I saw the game. These are my brother-in-law’s skates; they’re two sizes too big.” He smiled again. “But, hey, can’t beat pond hockey.”

  Cam introduced himself to the boys, a couple of whom he recognized from the neighborhood. The oldest youth divided the teams three versus three and threw a puck down. Cam played tentatively at first, not trusting his knee, but after ten minutes his adrenaline kicked in and his instincts took over. The kids were decent players, as was Ellis, and the puck moved crisply from stick to stick as the teams traded goals.

  Each player took a turn as goalie. Since the rules were that the puck had to remain on the ice to count as a goal, playing goalie really meant blocking what you could with your stick and skates and then chasing pucks that you missed. At one point Ellis broke in and fired a puck high and far wide of the net. Cam raised an eyebrow. “Sorry,” Ellis said. “I didn’t mean to lif
t that. The puck bounced just as I was shooting. You want me to get it?”

  Cam shrugged. “No problem, I got it.” He skated to the edge of the rink and trudged through the crusted snow, perhaps six inches deep, toward where the puck lay buried fifty feet from the rink. A few feet from the puck the snow turned fluffy, almost as if it had been disturbed. Odd.

  A split-second too late Cam realized there was indeed something odd. And also nothing beneath his right skate. Forward he tumbled. A moment of panic, just enough time to gasp for some air. And then heart-stopping, numbing, almost deadening cold engulfed him. He forced his eyes open and kicked, fighting to stay directly beneath the break in the ice—the only way out of a frozen lake was the way you came in. Every second or so the beat of his heart concussed in his ears. Look for light. Find the hole. His left skate touched the soft bottom of the lake and he steadied himself. Using his hockey stick, he probed the ceiling of his icy tomb, his movements slow and awkward as his saturated clothes bound his limbs and his muscles spasmed. Why was there no light, no opening? He thrashed his head around, searching for an escape. The movement forced cold water up his nose, the ice-water like a sledge hammer to the inside of his skull. His eyes closed in an involuntary reaction to the pain. A heavy weight settled in his chest and Cam felt thick, numb, almost peaceful. No. He ripped his eyes open again, the view of his icy dungeon a reminder he was still alive. He thrust his stick upward once more, wildly probing the surface, the stick moving in underwater slow motion. On the fifth thrust the stick impacted something flexible and soft. Cam shoved upwards—a tarp-like sheet billowed away to expose the opening. Even in his desperation to survive, Cam understood what had happened: Someone had cut a hole in the ice, covered it with a tarp, and piled snow on top to hide the break. A trap.

  As if on cue, something grabbed the end of his stick and pulled upward. Cam braced himself—was he being pulled up just to be clubbed unconscious and shoved back down? He released his right hand from the stick, ready to block a blow or throw a punch. He thought about letting go of the stick altogether, but no matter what awaited him at the surface it was preferable to an icy drowning.

  As he broke through the surface, missile-like, Ellis leered down at him. Cam swung his arm out, trying to upend his adversary-turned-rescuer. Ellis danced away from the sluggish thrust, grabbed Cam by the back of his soaking jacket and yanked him out of the hole. Cam flopped on the snow, gasping and shivering. Ellis leaned in and whispered, his warm, acrid breath actually welcome on Cam’s face. “You were never going to die, Mr. Thorne. I would have jumped in to get you if it came to that—it’s what I’m trained to do. But when your government asks you to do a favor, you shouldn’t need to think about it.” He showed a row of straight white teeth in what was supposed to pass for a smile. “This country is at war, Mr. Thorne. You have a unique set of skills we need. And the way we look at it is if you’re not with us, you’re against us. I’m just saying.”

  The first thing Willum did when he awoke late Sunday morning was check his pillow. A few strands of hair, but nothing like the past two days. And his nausea had abated.

  Many residents left the compound on Sundays to visit relatives or do errands. Willum was planning to take his son Gregory to a spring training game this evening in Scottsdale. He would use the block of time beforehand to research the mysterious white powder of gold.

  He turned on his computer and sipped his coffee. A couple of days ago while on the internet he had stumbled upon a report of an archeological expedition to Egypt back in the early 1900s—it was one of many pages he had bookmarked with plans to revisit.

  According to the report, a British Egyptologist named Petrie led an expedition in 1904 to Egypt’s Sinai desert, to a mountain called Serabit el Khadim. At the top of the mountain they discovered a ruined temple of ancient Egyptian origin whose design and structure seemed more to resemble a massive workshop. In stone containers they found large quantities of a fine white powder whose nature they could not identify. The existence of an unknown white powder in the desert of Egypt is, of course, what intrigued Willum.

  He clicked on links and followed threads. Eventually he stumbled upon a modern-day author by the name of Laurence Gardner who theorized that this white powder was in reality the ancient substance known as mfkzt, a mystical substance that ancient priests molded into conical-shaped bread-cakes and fed to both the Pharaohs and the Egyptian gods. Willum quickly found a number of engravings from Karnak and other ancient religious sites showing the priests offering these cakes to the Pharaohs and the Pharaohs in turn offering them to Egyptian deities.

  PHARAOH OFFERING CONICAL LOAF OF MFKZT TO ANUBIS, FROM THE TEMPLE OF ABYDOS

  Willum continued to read. The mfkzt, which most people pronounced ‘mufkizit,’ apparently expanded the consciousness of the Pharaohs and heightened their senses. Gardner believed that the priests of Serabit el Khadim were the caretakers of an ancient technology, as manifested by the workshop, which allowed them to transform gold into a powdered monatomic state which was the essential ingredient in the mfkzt bread-cakes fed to Egyptian royalty. As proof of this, Gardner pointed out that the Egyptian afterlife was a place called the Field of Mfkzt.

  Willum sat back in his chair. Could it be possible that the monatomic white powder derived from the desert sand also was some kind of hallucinogen or mind-expander? He shook his head. What didn’t the desert sand do? It burst into flames for no reason; it levitated; it yielded precious metals; and now it seemed to be the key ingredient used to feed and drug the ancient Pharaohs. Did it also cure cancer?

  Willum still had a couple of hours before he needed to leave to pick up Gregory. So he continued to surf the internet. Surprisingly, a few individuals claimed to have figured out how to produce white powder of gold. They claimed the substance heightened their senses, gave them boundless energy and made them telepathic—well, that would explain why the Pharaohs ate it. And, yes, these people claimed the powder even cured cancer.

  Willum laughed and clicked off the computer. It was time to grab a bite and then go watch some baseball with his boy.

  Cam had refused medical care, instead opting for a long hot shower. He downplayed the incident to Astarte, telling her he had fallen through a hole made by an ice fisherman. “There was a flag right there marking the spot, but I was looking for the puck and didn’t see it.”

  Amanda sensed there was more to the story, and now that Astarte was in bed Cam related the incident. They sat in an oversized chair by the fireplace, Cam wrapped in a thick blanket, sharing a mug of hot apple cider mixed with cinnamon and rum. A bonfire across the lake danced in the distance, a miniature partner to the flames popping beyond their outstretched toes. “That guy Ellis—assuming that’s really his name—set the whole thing up, guessing we would come out to skate.”

  Amanda’s eyes grew large. “Wait. Someone did this on purpose? Someone working with Georgia?”

  Cam nodded. “He said he was trained in cold water rescue, ex-Navy SEAL or something, so I wasn’t really in danger. Asshole.”

  “Beyond asshole, Cam. Criminal asshole. Dangerous asshole.”

  “Federal agent asshole.”

  “So he just gets away with it? Bullshit.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and scrolled through her list of contacts.

  “Who you calling?” Cam asked.

  Amanda glared as her call connected. “Georgia!” she spat into the phone. “What the hell is wrong with you people?”

  “I made sure Thorne went for a little swim,” Ellis said. He sat sideways, taking up two seats on a Green Line train in Boston. He had time to kill—waiting for the call he knew would come from Georgia—and loved to people-watch on the nation’s subways. “Just to let him know we were serious.”

  “Just to let him know we were serious?” Georgia spat into the phone. Ellis pictured her leaning forward in her seat, teeth grinding, as her plane taxied to the terminal at Reagan National. He imagined her thoughts, wondering if she had been saddled with
some kind of whack job. Maybe even something harsher, along the lines of, This Ellis guy is supposed to be some kind of expert in psychology; it sounds like he needs to be on a couch himself. “If that doesn’t work, should we water-board him?” she asked, interrupting the conversation he was imagining in his head.

  “He’s fine. Maybe a bit wet and cold. But I wouldn’t have let him drown.” A goth, college-aged girl opposite him checked her watch, checked the subway map on the wall of the train, then checked her breath by breathing into her hands. Next stop, first date. She wasn’t bad-looking despite the nose ring; maybe Ellis would circle back later and try to find her again. Just in case she needed some cheering up.

  “Weren’t there kids out there also? What if one of them had fallen in?”

  “Hey, I had it under control. I was trained in cold water rescues. And I made sure the kids stayed away after I marked the hole with a flag.” What, did she think he was incompetent? It was like when he was a SEAL. He wasn’t as strong and big as the other elite soldiers, and his specialty kept him at base more than out in the field, so the other men had given him the nickname ‘Snapper,’ which was a play both on his red coloring and the fact that he was smaller than his SEAL brethren. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they actually treated him with some respect. Well, that would change when he stepped on their heads climbing the promotional ladder in the intelligence community.

  Georgia interrupted his musings. “And you think almost drowning him is going to persuade Cameron to want to help us?”

  Even though Georgia was the senior member assigned to the mission, she didn’t know what he knew, didn’t know what was at stake here. As far as she knew they were trying to prevent another Ruby Ridge. Ellis had been assigned to the team from the DIA. That’s how ODNI worked: Agents from various governmental departments were assigned to work a case together so that the various branches of government knew what the others were doing. No one agent was in charge, which made for some interesting group dynamics and turf battles. Anyway, Georgia knew nothing about the fuel cell.