Simple Genius skamm-3

by David Baldacci

  “Which goes to show an appreciation of history can be very helpful in day-to-day living.”

  “I’ve always thought so. Okay, let’s do it.”

  Chapter 80

  The Boeing 767 had the strengthened engines and other enhanced capabilities required for long hauls over the ocean. The wide-body jet banked left and reached the continental United States, passing over Norfolk, Virginia, and continuing the descent to its final destination. The 767 didn’t belong to any domestic or foreign commercial airline. It was not owned by any business or individual, nor was it operated by the United States military. Normally a jet without one of those ties, when passing into U.S. airspace above one of the most important military installations America possessed, would have prompted the scrambling of fighter jets from Norfolk and an uncomfortable intercept in the air. However, no sirens sounded and no Navy pilots raced for their planes because the jet had clearance from the highest command levels to fly to any point in the United States it wished. The 767 continued on, just as it had every Saturday at this time for at least the last two years. In less than thirty minutes the pilots would engage the landing gears after setting the wing flaps for the final descent onto a runway fully paid for by the American taxpayer, a long strip of concrete virtually no U.S. citizen would ever be allowed to set foot on.

  Sean and Michelle reached the end of the tunnel and listened for any sound on the other side of the wall they were looking at barely six inches above their heads. They had just passed under some of the most intricate security defenses America had to offer. If they’d been above ground, the security detail would have already killed or captured them.

  Placing their hands against the ceiling, they applied steady pressure, their bodies tensed to run if any noise signaled the presence of others. The silence remained, the ceiling was shifted aside and they clambered up into a room, and shone their lights around. The walls here were brick, the air damp and foul-smelling.

  “It’s like we stepped back in time,” Michelle said in a hushed voice as she gazed around at ancient brick, rotting timbers and a partially dirt floor.

  “Welcome to Porto Bello,” Sean said. “The Navy must’ve used this place to hold Fuchs and the other POWs. And the Germans managed to dig a tunnel out right under the Navy’s nose.”

  In one corner some of the brick had come off the foundation wall and lay in a pile.

  “Not very reassuring,” Michelle said, staring at the fallen brick. “This whole place might tumble down on our heads any second.”

  Sean picked up one of the bricks. “It’s been standing for over two hundred years. It should be good for another hour.”

  Sean shone his light on the floor. The dirt had been disturbed. “Monk Turing, at least I hope so,” he said.

  “So where’s the gold?” Michelle asked.

  “We haven’t searched the place yet,” Sean reminded her.

  “I’m more interested in finding Viggie than a treasure.”

  He checked his watch. “We have to hurry. The plane will be landing soon.”

  After poking around the cellar they made their way upstairs. The main floor was vacant of even a stick of furniture. And yet here and there they saw touches of faded elegance in the woodwork, the fireplace surround, ornately carved mantel and the crest of the British crown crafted into the wall over the front door. The centuries had diminished the impact of it all. Yet it still made them look around in a certain wonder as their feet trod boards that had been in place when Washington, Jefferson and Adams were fighting for American independence.

  Clearly the dilapidated place was not being used by the CIA. As soon as they peered out one of the front cracked leaded windows they saw why. There wasn’t much here. The only thing nearby was a small tributary.

  Sean pointed to it. “The inlet from the York,” he said. Heinrich Fuchs and his fellow prisoners had obviously followed the inlet’s contours when digging their tunnel, figuring, rightly as it turned out, that it would lead the way to the York and freedom.

  For Sean and Michelle’s plan the inlet was also critical because it ran close to the end of the runway.

  They searched the house to make sure Viggie wasn’t there. They didn’t find any treasure either. After that they slipped out of the old lodge and headed toward the water. Michelle looked back at the dark house. It sat on a smooth patch of land with two massive trees out front. It had a flat roof with shingles covering the top third of the structure where a row of peaked windows was situated. A single chimney stack rose from near the center of the lodge. The house was all brick save for a small wooden front porch that was leaning at a precarious angle.

  She said, “I saw this place from the air when I was with Champ.”

  Sean nodded. “I’m sure that’s why Monk flew with Champ. He wanted to see if Porto Bello was occupied and what else was around it.”

  A minute later they had slipped into the inlet and were heading east, neatly reversing the path they’d taken in the tunnel. So far they hadn’t seen any sign of another human being. Yet each knew this could change instantly, and the next human they did see would very likely carry a gun along with a strong desire to kill them.

  Chapter 81

  The jet, lights out, swooped past the tree line on the outskirts of Babbage Town, passed over the York, cleared the security fence and kissed the reinforced surface of the ten-thousand-foot-long runway. It came to a complete stop well short of that length as its reverse thrusters and wheel brakes did their job.

  The plane taxied to the end of the runway and the pilots turned the plane around in the wide stretch of concrete. A bus, Hummer and cargo truck were already waiting there. The engines were killed and the plane’s aft door opened, portable stairs were brought up and people started walking off. The cargo door at the rear of the plane was opened and the truck backed up to it.

  Sean and Michelle crawled forward on their bellies right up to a chain link fence surrounding the runway area. Their NV goggles easily picked up all the activity. Sean was also recording it using a special surveillance video camera that would deliver startling crisp footage regardless of the absence of light. Michelle flinched when the first man dressed in a business suit and wearing a traditional Arab kaffiya on his head emerged from the plane. He was followed by a dozen more, all wearing similar garb.

  Michelle pointed toward the back of the plane. Sean started as he saw the cargo being taken off. Along with luggage were piles of black plastic bales.

  He looked at Michelle in alarm and whispered, “Oh shit. Is that what I think it is?”

  As they continued to watch, a Range Rover pulled up next to the small passenger bus and a person got out.

  As soon as Sean saw who it was, he froze.

  Valerie Messaline was dressed in a beige pantsuit. She walked up to the Arabs and started speaking to them. Sean could make out around her neck what looked to be a white security badge. She was CIA. And a world-class actress; she’d made him believe every word of her sad story.

  Michelle saw how stunned he was and said softly, “Valerie?”

  He nodded dumbly.

  Valerie continued to speak with the same Arab for a few minutes while the other men were led onto the bus with their luggage. Occasionally Valerie and the Arab would glance at the cargo being unloaded from the rear of the plane. Once Valerie strolled over with the Arab to one of the bales, touched it and laughed at something the man said.

  A minute later Valerie climbed back in the Range Rover with the Arab and they followed the passenger bus out, probably toward the nearby complex shown on the satellite map.

  With the cargo unloaded all the men except two climbed in the Hummer and drove off. The remaining men jumped in the cargo truck and it pulled away. While the Hummer followed the path taken by the passenger bus with the Arabs, the truck drove off in the opposite direction and directly toward where Sean and Michelle were lying in hiding near the chain link gate.

  “Get back,” he whispered urgently.

  The
y fell back, pressing themselves flat against the ground.

  The truck stopped at the gate and one of the men got out, unlocked it and the truck pulled through with the man following. He locked the gate and started to climb back in the truck.

  Michelle slipped off her backpack and turned to Sean. “Get back to Babbage Town, get ahold of Merkle Hayes and show him the videotape. Then wait to hear from me.”

  He stared at her. “Wait to hear from you? Where are you going?”

  “The video’s not enough,” she said. “We need to make sure what that cargo is.”

  Before he could say anything or even reach out to grab her arm she exploded forward, approaching the truck from behind, threw herself under it, clamped her arms and legs around the metal of the truck’s underbelly and held on as it rolled off.

  Sean was so stunned he couldn’t even move. He couldn’t believe what she had just done.

  As his partner disappeared into the night underneath a truck, Sean lay all alone smack in the middle of the CIA’s most top secret facility and seriously wondered if he was having a heart attack. He finally seized an element of calm, from where he didn’t know. He put Michelle’s backpack in his, and started to slide on his belly back toward the ancient Porto Bello. By water it was less than five hundred yards away. It might as well have been five hundred miles.

  Sean wasn’t the only one wondering why Michelle had impulsively done what she had. The woman herself was having second thoughts and more than once she came close to letting go, dropping to the ground, watching the truck pass over her and sprinting back to Sean. Yet something made her hold on.

  Noises other than the truck’s rumblings reached her. They must be getting close to the main gate, she thought, as the truck slowed and then stopped completely. She panicked for a moment. Would they search the truck before it left Camp Peary? Then she realized no one was going to even lay as much as an eyeball on this vehicle. She was right; the squeak of motorized security gates reached her ears and the truck started up again as they left the Camp Peary grounds.

  They turned out onto a street and the truck sped up. Michelle’s arms and legs were growing tired, yet she had no choice but to hang on. Letting go now at this speed probably meant at the very least a cracked skull. A minute later she could see the wheels of other cars passing them.

  After traveling for a while the truck pulled off the road and turned onto a gravel drive. The gravel soon gave way to asphalt and five minutes later the truck stopped. The doors opened and Michelle saw two sets of legs climb down from the truck’s cab and walk off. When she no longer heard footsteps, she let go, dropped silently to the ground and rolled out on the opposite side from where the men had departed.

  She glanced around. The area seemed familiar for some reason, though it was very dark and most of what she was seeing was indistinct.

  Michelle heard them coming back and, using the truck as cover, ran behind a small building she’d just spotted. She turned the corner, stopped, and then risked taking a look. As she peered around the edge of the building, the breath caught in her throat. Now, Michelle knew exactly where she was.

  Chapter 82

  Sean reached the grounds in front of Porto Bello without being seen. He crept up the rotted front steps and had no time to react as the board broke under him. Sean felt himself plummeting down; his leg hit something sharp and he involuntarily yelled in pain. He froze as his scream seemed to float up into the air and then, like a summer downpour, cascade down all over the damn place.

  Was that a siren? Were those running feet? Had he heard the sharp bark of a scent hound? No, they were the products of his terror. He struggled to free himself from the wreckage of the front porch, silently cursing the royal governor for choosing unreliable wood over sturdy brick. He reached down and felt the blood flowing from a deep gash in his calf.

  He limped into the house, and hurried down to the cellar. There he tripped over some debris and crashed against the wall, actually knocking a brick loose in the collision. Cursing, he rose up on his knees and rubbed at his scraped-up hands. Eye-level with the foundation wall he stared at the small gap the fallen brick had left. He flicked his light in the gap and something caught his eye. The foundation wall, he could see, was very thick with something behind it…

  “Damn!”

  Sean grabbed a broken piece of wood and jammed it in the opening, levering it around harder and harder until the mortar broke loose. He reached in and worked the object free, scraping up his hands as he did so.

  A solid gold coin. He dug some more and what came out was a small, hard stone. He brushed the dirt off and shone his light on it. The stone was revealed as a gleaming emerald. Digging some more he saw what looked very much like a solid gold bar and then some more gold coins. It was Lord Dunmore’s treasure and it was more than just gold. He’d found it, and by the looks of the disturbed site, so had Monk Turing.

  This is what Heinrich Fuchs had told Monk about in return for the American’s help in getting Fuchs back to Germany. Sean realized that it might be more than a king’s ransom hidden here. South Freeman had been wrong. Dunmore had been smart enough to keep the treasure undiscovered all these years by using a false foundation wall. Until an enterprising German POW trying to dig his way to freedom came along.

  As Sean looked at his hands, another mystery was cleared up. And it also had to do with Monk Turing. He smiled in triumph, a feeling that was cut short by a sound.

  Feet running. Feet running toward the house. Not his imagination this time; it was the real thing.

  He grabbed a couple of bricks and jammed them in the gap in the wall to cover the treasure, slipped the gold coin and emerald inside his bag, raced to the part of the floor over the tunnel and removed it. He piled some of the bricks on top of the wooden cover, slid it partially over the hole, dropped through, reached back up and pulled the heavy cover closed over the tunnel entrance.

  Then he started to run, bad leg and all.

  When Sean reached the other end of the tunnel he realized he was totally screwed. He stared up at the exit to the tunnel that was three feet above his head. Even if he could jump that high on his bad wheel, there was nothing for him to grab on to. Michelle had had to stand on his shoulders to replace the cover. Their exit plan had consisted of Michelle being hoisted up on his shoulders and setting in place a knotted rope for him to use to climb out.

  Wait a minute. If he was right, and Heinrich Fuchs had escaped alone, how had he done it? He dropped to his knees next to one of the fallen timbers they had passed on the way in. He managed to push the timber out of the way and frantically scraped away dirt until a rough-hewn ladder was revealed. It must have lain there undisturbed since Fuchs had made his escape all those years ago, until a fallen support timber had covered it along with decades of dirt.

  He hoisted the ladder up and set it against the top of the tunnel entrance. Like Monk Turing, Heinrich Fuchs had also been a very precise man. It fit perfectly into a ledge of wood just below the tunnel’s cover. He slung his bag over his back, gripped the ladder and clambered up as fast as he could. He pushed aside the cover, climbed up and then pulled the ladder up with him. Then he stopped. If Michelle hadn’t gotten out of Camp Peary by truck she might need the ladder to escape through the tunnel. The next moment this thought was dashed from Sean’s mind as the sounds reached him. There were other people in the tunnel now. Michelle wouldn’t be getting out this way. He threw the ladder into the woods.

  Sean put the tunnel cover back in place, turned and started counting off paces back to the clearing as a light rain started falling. Very troubling noises were coming at him now from all directions. Searchlights slit the black sky like a knife racing across a throat. Oh shit! He dropped to the ground, his hand fumbling in his bag.

  A few seconds later the man almost stepped on him. Sean saw the MP5, the black-painted face, the eyes starting to swivel in his direction. He fired and the man stiffened and then dropped to the ground. Sean put the stun gun back in
his bag, took the man’s gun belt and checked it. A pistol, cuffs, baton and something that Sean could actually use: two grenades. He put the gun belt in his bag but, keeping one of the grenades out, crouched in the woods.

  He would be heading to the right to get back to his gear. Unfortunately, the sounds he was hearing were coming from that direction. Sean hefted one of the grenades, pulled the pin and threw it as far as he could to the left. He hit the ground, covered his ears. Five seconds later all of Camp Peary came alive as the explosion rocked the night.

  Sean could hear yells and feet running. And still he waited. Ten seconds, twenty seconds. A minute. Then he jumped up and ran flat-out.

  Two minutes later he was through the fence and had located the propulsion units. He left Michelle’s just in case she made it back this far.

  Sean could hear a boat, its engines racing, coming from the south. He didn’t wait to see what it was. He inserted the nozzle from the oxygen tank in his mouth and dove under the water. He went down far enough to avoid the boat’s prop, engaged his propulsion unit and made a beeline straight across the York, emerging on the other side about two hundred yards down from the boathouse. It had been an exhausting trip back but he had no time to rest. He plunged into the woods, grabbed a bag they had earlier hidden there, stripped off his wet suit and changed into street clothes. He stashed most of his things in the bag and hid it back under a bush. His video camera had a copy function and he took a few moments to copy the video he’d taken onto another digital stick. Then Sean raced through the woods to Babbage Town. Somehow, he didn’t know how, he had to find Michelle before it was too late.

  Chapter 83

  The small plane was loaded with the cargo from the truck. There was plenty of room with the seats removed. Champ Pollion climbed in the cockpit and readied the Cessna for takeoff. Even with the rain starting to fall more heavily and the winds picking up he figured he’d have no problem meeting his schedule. The men finished loading the cargo on the plane, but, out of Champ’s sight, kept several large plastic bales on the truck. They drove off and quickly disappeared into the darkness.