by Chuck Dixon
“I do know better, Lee.” Dwayne’s voice was level and low. “I was a Ranger too.”
Caroline leaned over her salad to hiss to each of them. “Look, we were there. We got the stuff. No one saw us. Can we stop the pissing contest and get on with it?”
Lee took a sip from his beer. “I need hot sauce.” He got up and walked to the bar.
“Sorry about him,” Dwayne said.
“You’re just as bad. Did you guys fight Al Qaeda or each other in Iraq?” Caroline said.
“Little of both.”
“Is it because there’s a girl here?”
Dwayne grinned at her, and she grinned back. They broke it off when Lee slid back in his seat with a bottle of habanero sauce. He sprinkled it on his burger. Without a word, he offered it to Dwayne, who did the same.
“You can’t sell this stuff legally. But I know some folks,” Lee said around a bite of burger.
“You mean criminals?” Caroline said.
“I prefer to think of them as patriots,” Lee said. Caroline rolled her eyes. Lee laughed.
“You can own gold. You can sell gold. But in any kind of quantity, you have to report to state and federal agencies. They’re going to have questions, and you have no answers,” Lee said.
“That’s why we’re turning to you and your patriotic friends,” Caroline said.
“What kind of quantity are we talking about?”
“We were only able to bathroom scale weigh it, but we think it’s around a ton and a half or two tons, give or take,” Dwayne said.
Lee choked on a bite of burger. He drained his beer in two gulps and drew in a breath.
“Well, none of my friends are that patriotic. For that kind of weight, we’re going to have to go to actual criminals,” he said at last.
“They won’t pay the going rate, will they?” Caroline said.
“No, they won’t. The gold is off the books, which makes it hot. We’ll need to come up with some kind of story for them. Any buyers will be outside the law, but they’ll still need to know where it came from. Or at least believe they know. Purity will be an issue, too. This stuff wasn’t refined under any kind of modern conditions.”
“I think we can assume it’s as raw as it gets,” Caroline said.
“Do we move it all at once or in increments?” Dwayne said.
“Every sale is exposure. The more sales, the more times we’re exposed,” Lee said. “That’s more chances the law might become involved. And more importantly, we don’t want to be going back to the same buyer over and over. Too many opportunities for fuckery that way. I say we find one buyer and make one big sale, even if we have to sell at a deep discount.”
“I suppose that makes the most sense,” Caroline said.
“Do you have a sample I can get tested?” Lee said. Caroline took a small padded envelope from a case and slid it over the table. Lee pocketed it.
“So, do I get a piece of this? I got screwed on our last deal,” Lee said. “I’m down nine million from what I was supposed to get to go to the Wayback and find the lady here.”
“Nine million, then, if you get us fifty cents on the dollar.” Caroline pushed her plate away, untouched. “And half of any more than fifty percent you can get.”
Dwayne started to object, but Caroline held up a hand.
“This is going to be a big chunk of untaxed cash,” Lee said. “What are you planning on spending it on?”
“Science,” Caroline said. Dwayne grinned.
Dwayne and Caroline had driven to the Hilton together. They stayed behind to pay the check and let Lee Hammond leave. Caroline suggested they have another round of beers.
“That’s one hell of a commission you’re letting him get away with,” Dwayne said. He sprinkled salt on his beer and the head foamed up.
“Let me try that,” Caroline said, taking the shaker from his hand.
“So, why so generous with Hammond?”
“We’ll need his connections going forward.”
“Going forward?”
“Next time we have him fence for us, it will be straight commission,” Caroline said and hoisted her beer. “Hey, I like it with the salt. All my time in London and I never tried that.”
“Hold on. Next time?” Dwayne said.
12
The Book
“A treasure map?” Dwayne said.
“It’s a codex from a Greek named Praxus. The original was written two hundred years before Christ,” Caroline said.
They were in Dwayne’s truck. He was driving them on 215 back to the Residence Inn in Cottonwood.
“Codex?”
“Like a Reader’s Digest version of the original text. Praxus’ handwritten manuscript was lost when the library at Alexandria burned in 391 AD. Imagine if we used the tube to go back and visit the library before...”
“Stay on topic, Caroline.”
“Sorry. Beer makes me chatty. Anyway, Praxus was a slave aboard a ship, a Phoenician ship, that turned pirate. They raided shipping in the Aegean Sea. Praxus was sold to a Syrian merchant then eventually freed. He wrote the story of his time as a captive of the pirates.”
“We’re talking buried treasure?” Dwayne said.
“Well, hidden, anyway. People have tried to find it for years. The codex identifies the island as Nisos Anaxos in the Cyclades chain. According to Praxus, the Phoenicians hid a fortune in coins, gold plate and jewels somewhere on the island. They were heading into Rhodes pretending to be legitimate traders and didn’t want the Greeks finding their hold full of stolen goodies.”
“This treasure is famous?”
“Oh yeah. The locals still talk about it. Treasure hunters show up all the time. The Greek government had to ban digging on their beaches. You can only use a metal detector these days.”
“And no one’s turned anything up in all these years?”
“Nope.” Caroline shook her head.
“How many miles of beach are we talking?” Dwayne liked the way her blonde hair belled out when she shook her head.
“Twenty? Maybe more?”
“So, why would we have any more luck?”
Caroline turned and smiled at him. The galaxy of freckles across her nose wrinkled.
“Because we can go watch the Phoenicians hide it.”
Back at the Inn, Caroline laid out maps on a table and had the text of the codex of Praxus’ odyssey pulled up on a laptop. She was talking a mile a minute. Morris made a pot of strong coffee in the kitchenette. Dwayne popped a fresh beer. He had a feeling he’d need it.
“It’s an Oxford translation, but I’ve compared it to the original Greek and uncovered some useful details I think they missed in their interpretation,” she said as she smoothed the topographic map of the Cyclades on the tabletop.
“You read ancient Greek?” Dwayne asked.
“Caroline is that species worse than a scholar. She’s a hobbyist,” Morris said.
“So, you can you speak it?” Dwayne said.
“It’s not a phonetic language, silly. But I can probably manage with some practice.” Caroline laughed at that, but Dwayne couldn’t see the joke.
“Okay, I get that this guy was there when they buried the treasure. I get that, theoretically only, we could go back and watch these pirates bury it in The Then and then go dig it up in The Now. But it’s a question of when, right?” Dwayne took a pull on his Coors.
“But we know when.” Caroline accepted a steaming mug of black coffee from her brother. “Or we know damned close when.”
“Was this Prixus’ day planner you found?”
“Praxus, you, big dope. No, they weren’t really into dates back then. Even if he wrote one down, it would be useless to us now. They were centuries away from the Julian calendar. But something Praxus writes about gives us the year and month to a certitude.” That last word came out “sertytood” and she giggled again. Two beers were her limit.
“Halley’s Comet,” Morris inserted, and earned a swat, on the back of th
e head from his sister.
“Spoiler!” she snarled, then recovered herself. “Praxus writes about what he calls a ‘wild star’ crossing the heavens. His description of its appearance and path confirm that it was Halley’s. It kind of freaked him out, but he says that the sailors with him knew about it from their elders. Phoenicians were amazing astronomers, they had to be. They were practically the only ancient people who dared to sail from the sight of land. They knew their stars.”
“How close could we get?” Dwayne said.
“May, 240 BC. That’s as close as I can pinpoint it. But that’s damned good, right?”
“So, a thirty-day watch at the outside,” Dwayne said.
“A month at the beach!” Caroline said and shrugged grandly.
“Can we stop the blue-skying and consider some harder questions? For example, why do we want to do this?” Morris said.
“Buried treasure, big bro!”
“We have a treasure, Carrie.” Morris only called her that when he was annoyed with her.
“You can’t have enough treasure,” she said, peeved.
“I have to side with her,” Dwayne said. “She’s talking bullshit right now but sometimes bullshit covers the truth.”
“Is that some kind of redneck wisdom?” Morris said.
“Well, it’s something my dad used to say a lot, so I guess it is. The truth is, we’re sitting on a crapload of gold and soon a crapload of tax-free cash. If it was all free and clear, we’d be cool. But we have this Sir Neal character on our ass, and I don’t think he’s going to forget about us. Being on the run from the law eats up money. On the run from a guy with enough juice to ignore the law. That gets real expensive real fast.”
“Besides, Mo,” Caroline put in. “I put the idea in your head. I gave you a problem to solve. You’ll never get a good night’s sleep until you’ve nailed that down.”
“I’m going to bed, and I’m going to sleep like a baby,” Morris said.
Caroline made a motorboat sound with her lips.
Morris exited his room the next morning with red-rimmed eyes. Caroline sat at the table with a black coffee and a bottle of aspirin. He sat down across from her and took a long sip from her mug.
“I have a few ideas,” he said.
13
Big Don
Some days you can’t give gold away.
Lee Hammond sat in the paneled office turning the pages of a golf magazine and pretending to read it. Who’d waste a good day playing a game that 99.999% of the players sucked at? And who’d want to read a magazine about it?
The receptionist spoke to him through a speaker from behind the glass of her little cubby.
“I’ll buzz you in,” she drawled. A harsh buzzer sounded, and Lee trotted to the door set next to the secretarium and yanked it open. The buzzing stopped abruptly, and Lee entered the frigid air of a large office room packed with ranks of empty desks. Big Don Brinkley maneuvered through the desks with a big grin on his face and eyes invisible behind tinted glasses.
“What can I do you for, Lee?” Big Don thought that brand of white-shoes-salesman shit was charming.
“This needs to be between you and me,” Lee said.
“Oh. Hush-hush. Always-Secretive Lee. Follow me to my bear-cave, okay?” Don led Lee toward the back wall through the maze of desks.
“Everyone at lunch?”
“Huh?” Big Don said. “Oh, the fucking economy. Had to let some people go. You know how it is.”
Lee did not know how it was. Big Don was into Florida real estate, car dealerships, highway contracting, and cruise ships, and all those businesses covered Don’s real enterprise, money laundering. The economy may have sent his office people home on unemployment, but Don always had plenty of green around somewhere.
They settled into Big Don’s office. It was a modest little room with one wall lined with padlocked filing cabinets, a big old steel desk, and a minifridge. The only attempt at decoration was a signed poster of Warren Sapp framed on one wall. Lee knew from previous association that there was a minimum of six loaded handguns within Big Don’s reach from the seat behind that desk.
Without asking, Big Don pulled a cold Bud from the fridge and tossed it to Lee, who caught it with the practiced ease of a man who fully expected the gesture.
They settled in and shot the shit for a while about “back in the day” which was six years ago when Lee worked security for Big Don on one of the cruise-ships he had an interest in. The line was being sued by a passenger claiming she was raped by one of the waiters. The DNA from the rape kit taken in Barbados was a match for a staff member, and that was enough proof for Big Don. He paid Lee a wad of under-the-table to make the little greaseball the latest mysterious victim of the Bermuda Triangle. Big Don settled out of court with the woman, and the whole thing just went away.
“So, what is it you can’t talk on the phone about?” Big Don said and tossed a second Bud his way.
Lee took the padded envelope from his jacket pocket and slid it to Big Don, who dumped a dull metal lump from it to the desktop. He weighed it in his hand.
“Heavy.”
“Gold usually is.”
“It’s more yellow than gold.”
“It’s raw, Don.”
“My less-than-educated guess is that this is like ten karats goods.”
Don held it between his fingers and squinted at it like he knew what he was looking at.
“I know better than to ask where it came from. Can I keep this a while? I need to have it looked at.”
“It’s yours to keep. Test it. Grade it. Tell me what it’s worth, troy ounce.”
“This is near a pound of gold, son. How much of this shit do you have?”
“Around sixteen hundred kilograms.”
Big Don set the lumpy little stone on the desktop and tapped his fingers on it.
“That’s like a ton and a half.”
“Closer to a ton-seven. And that’s what brings me here,” Lee said.
Big Don’s bullshit salesman bonhomie melted away to be replaced by the hard lines of pure avarice. Without a word, he pulled open a drawer and retrieved a calculator that he planted on the desk and began tapping on it furiously with one hand. Lee sipped his ice-cold Bud and waited.
The tapping came to an end, and Big Don sat back and rubbed his fingers over his lips.
“So, how many millions, we talking about?” Lee said.
“More zeroes, son. Add about three more zeroes.”
Big Don walked Lee out to his rental parked in the Florida heat. They talked as they crossed the broad lot lined with ranks of shiny recent model cars under colorful pennants hanging still in the motionless air. Seminole Motors. Big Don was no more a Seminole Indian than Lee was Chinese.
“I can’t manage this alone. Not all at once,” Big Don said.
“And I don’t like the idea of bringing in any more players,” Lee said.
“I understand that. I do. I can act as a cut-out. A middleman. I take a percentage for setting the deal up, and no one hears your name.”
“Do I want to know who you’d go to, Don?”
“I’d be providing them the same service.”
“For a cut off their end.”
“There’s enough to go around, son.”
They reached Lee’s rental, a squatty Toyota in only-in-rental blue.
“So, what’s the plan?” Lee said and leaned back on the hood.
“Stay in the area for a few days. Don’t even tell me where. I have your cell. I assume it’s a throwaway. I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you the test results. Just a number. That’ll be karats. Give me another day, and I’ll call you with a figure. The cash. Your total. Again, just a number.”
“Then?”
“We arrange delivery.”
“Good to see you again, Don.”
“You too, son.”
Lee checked the rearview on the way off the lot. Don stood in the wavery haze and watched until the little blue car was out
of sight.
Lee was napping in a hot tub at the Flamingo Inn when the first call came on his burner.
Big Don’s voice. One word, then disconnect. “Eight.”
Eight karats. The prehistoric gold was raw shit indeed.
The following day the burner buzzed while Lee was on a pre-dawn ten-mile run.
“Ninety-eight.”
That was millions. Like Don said, there was a lot to go around.
The exchange was slickly made a week later. The gold was divided into four loads and concealed inside four new Chevy Avalanche pick-ups at a dealership in Chandler, Arizona. The dealership was owned by Big Don through a holding company that was a division of a shell corporation. The trucks were loaded onto a Nu-Car carrier and driven to Gainesville, Florida.
The cars were off-loaded there, given new paperwork, and shipped back to Arizona on the same carrier. Before the return trip, the gold was removed from the trucks, and plastic-wrapped pallets of bundles of non-sequential hundreds and fifties loaded into the beds and tied down. Two hundred million in cash. Almost two tons of money.
No one can trust anyone in a deal like that. Lee insisted to Don that each individual truck have Lo-jack installed and that he be given sole access to the codes. Lee and Jimbo rode shotgun at a discreet distance. They shared driving and made the marathon round trip across the country well behind the semi loaded with the multi-million-dollar trucks. They were all gunned up and prepared to intervene if there was a double-cross or ambush.
It all went down slicker than snot. Four men came into Sunshine Chevy Cadillac on the day the trucks arrived back in Chandler and bought four new pickups fresh from a Gainesville dealership. The deals were cash and all open and legal and registered, and that was that.
A week later, Big Don was unlocking the office at Seminole Motors but found someone had unlocked it before him.