A Treasure Deep (34 page)

“Will do,” Brent said as he approached. “You
know that when all this is over, the pizza is on you. Tell me where
to put the business end of this shovel.”

The three men walked to the excavator, and
Perry told Jack what they were planning. “Once we’ve discovered the
lid to this thing, we’ll try to find its edges. When we do, you can
rip all the ground on two sides of the perimeter.”

“Did you bring me a shovel?” Jack asked.
“It’s getting a little cramped in here.”

“You can use Brent’s. He’s young and won’t
mind trotting back up to get another.”

Digging continued, but muscles provided the
power this time. Perry stood on the uneven ground over the chamber
and dipped his blade in the dirt. He did it again and again, until,
thirty inches down, the dense ground turned hard and the shovel hit
something unforgiving. The others joined him in clearing a
three-foot square hole revealing a hard, dark stone.

“Bingo,” Jack said. “I don’t think I’ve ever
been so glad to see rock.”

“Let’s expand the hole and make sure that we
haven’t found just a rock.”

“It’s pretty flat, Perry,” Gleason said. “I’d
be surprised if it isn’t what that GPR showed.”

Perry agreed, but he continued to dig.
Fifteen minutes later the four men had doubled the size of the
hole, and the rock remained consistent. “This has to be it,” Perry
concluded. “Back to your office, Jack, and see if you can’t get rid
of the last meter of dirt. I’ll guide you from out here. Let’s give
him some room.”

Gleason and Brent moved up the access incline
that Perry had created with the dozer and watched. Jack moved the
excavator’s bucket smoothly, following Perry’s hand signals with
unwavering attention. Perry’s goal was to have Jack scrape another
two feet off the chamber without damaging the stone lid beneath his
feet. Formerly he would have been concerned about maintaining the
integrity and appearance of the stone, but now his greatest fear
was causing the ancient construction to fall in on itself and
damage the treasure inside. If things had been different, if lives
weren’t hinged on his success, he would’ve been more cautious. But
patience now was too expensive a luxury.

Jack was a maestro at the controls, making
the beast of a machine behave and do what it was not designed to
do, dig by the inch instead of the yard. Perry directed Jack to
scrape from the hand-dug test hole to where he knew the front of
the chamber must be. Once done, Perry picked up his shovel and
started digging away the last foot of rocky soil. He had barely
finished his second strike with the shovel when the others joined
him.

With a gently sloping, nearly fifty-foot wall
of dirt just a few steps away, the men worked in concentrated
intensity. Sweat oozed from every pore, breathing became labored,
hands blistered, but no one complained.

They pushed on toward the edge until they
found it, then began digging at right angles. The edge
remained.

“That’s it,” Perry said. “Jack, dig in front
of this edge, and let’s see if there’s a welcome mat and front
door.”

“I figure I can scoop out another eight feet
of depth,” Jack said. “I can make the trench four or five feet
wide.”

“That’d be perfect,” Perry said.

“I’m worried about the stability of the
trench,” Jack admitted. “We’ll have to finish the digging by hand,
and the trench could collapse on us.”

Gleason spoke up. “Brent and I could bring up
some plywood and two-by-fours. We could make a down-and-dirty
shoring system.”

Perry agreed. “Good idea, but let’s do it
quickly.”

As the men scrambled off, Perry felt a strong
sense of thankfulness that God had given him friends of such
courage and sacrifice. He prayed that he wouldn’t make a mistake
that would cost them their lives. As dangerous as standing four
stories below ground was, he knew a greater danger lay ahead.

RUTHERFORD’S BODY WAS in bed, but his mind was
elsewhere. He paid little attention to the predawn morning and even
less attention to the nurse who washed his emaciated form with a
damp sponge. It was a daily routine he’d successfully blocked from
the forward part of his brain. Displacement. That’s what he called
it, the ability to project his mind to another place, a place where
he didn’t have to endure the indignity of having someone else do
for him what nearly everyone in the world could do for
themselves.

The nurse—a likeable brunette whose name he
should’ve known but that he had refused to learn—ran the wet sponge
along a withered arm. He thought of the day. It was, at long last,
here. By sundown, the items would be securely in place, manipulated
by the skillful hands of Dr. Benton Carmack and under the vigilant
eye of Rutherford himself. The work ahead would take weeks, maybe
even months, but it would progress. All he had to do was live to
see it, to benefit from it. And live he would, if mental strength
and determination had anything to do with it.

It was a thin hope, true, but slim hope was
better than none. A drowning man would clutch at a thread if a rope
were not available. This was his thread, his flimsy, last-ditch
effort to beat the gods of disease that had afflicted him with this
cruel disorder.

It had to work. He would make it work. There
were no other options.

The nurse rolled him on his side and applied
the soap and sponge to his back.

ANNE FITZGERALD AWOKE fresh and with a sense of
vitality she had long missed. For the first time in years, her
drive to get up was found in something other than work.

Although it was still early, she slipped from
bed, trod across the hardwood floor, and looked out the window. The
black of the night sky was dissolving into a pale blue. Just
outside her windowpane, several sparrows bickered over a few seeds
from the surrounding plants. It amazed her that she took notice of
the little creatures. She wasn’t one to pay attention to such
things, at least not recently.

Although she had yet to shower, she felt
cleaner than usual and she knew why. A half-decade of bitterness
had been washed away with unexpected efficiency. Today would be
different. She had no idea how long the cathartic euphoria would
last, but she planned to enjoy each moment of it. For now, she
planned a quick wash and a brief breakfast at the Table and Grille.
That would be nice: a casual breakfast, a cup of coffee, and the
newspaper. Then she’d slip into her real estate office early and
catch up on all the work that she had let slip over the last two
days.

Yes, she thought, this is going to be a great
day.

JOSEPH HAD NOT slept, and other than occasionally
nodding off in the chair, Claire had remained awake as well. Joseph
now sat motionless at the work counter, staring at the paper the
dark-haired woman had brought him the previous evening. The moment
she’d set it on the counter, Joseph had leaned over it until his
nose hovered an inch from the paper. He rocked gently, then
stopped. He moved his head side to side as he studied the paper,
then up and down. After the woman had left, Claire had stepped to
her son’s side and peered over his shoulder. The image on the paper
puzzled her. All she could see were bands of black and gray laid
out in neat columns.

“What is this?” she asked Joseph, knowing no
reply would come. Joseph continued to study the paper. She was sure
he’d never seen anything like it. He had been known to stare at
pictures of animals for hours until he had memorized every detail
of their appearance, but he had never seen anything so
abstract.

She was also puzzled as to why they would
bring such a picture to Joseph. What could they hope to achieve by
that? Most likely he’d reject the document or, at best, copy it
with the crayons they’d provided, just as he had with Henri’s
precious fragments.

Nothing made sense. Not their abduction, not
their imprisonment, not this picture. She had nothing to offer. The
document they wanted had been stolen months before, and she was
certainly no expert in ancient languages.

Claire returned to the chair and watched
Joseph. He had been still, too still. His rhythmic rocking was
absent. Instead, he stared and stared, and it frightened her. What
did he see that she couldn’t?

Joseph sat suddenly erect and tilted his
head. A second later he picked up a black crayon, pushed the
strange paper to the side, and began drawing.

ANNE FOUND HER usual booth occupied by four burly
men. One was telling a story, and the others listened with
pre-laughter smiles pasted to their faces, anticipating the punch
line.

She surveyed the Tejon Table and Grille and
found it unusually full. She took a seat at the counter. There were
eight stools, and men occupied four of them. Each took notice of
her and nodded. She returned the gesture then spied Sara coming out
of the kitchen with three plates of food balanced on one arm and
another in her free hand. The waitress looked frazzled.

“Hi, Mayor. Be with you in a sec.”

“Okay,” Anne said, uncertain how to
respond.

Moments later Sara slipped behind the
counter, poured a cup of coffee, and brought it to Anne. “You’re
here early.”

“I wanted to get a jump on the day,” Anne
said, then leaned over and spoke softly. “Sara, what’s going
on?”

“You mean all the people,” Sara replied.
“They’re with that construction group working up in the hills.”

“Sachs Engineering?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. You want some
eggs?”

“Um, sure. The usual,” Anne said. “What are
they all doing here?”

“Eating, of course. How should I know any
more than that? You want rye toast?”

Anne was getting frustrated. “Rye is fine.
Why are they all here right now?”

A shrug was all the response the waitress
offered. “Okay. I’ll have your food up in a moment. I have to run
to the kitchen. Poor Tony is overwhelmed back there.” Sara turned
and slipped away.

“Day off,” a voice said to her right. She
turned to see a man in his twenties taking a long draw from his
coffee cup.

“Excuse me?” Anne said.

The young man swiveled his stool to better
face Anne. He offered a smile of teeth as straight and white as
piano keys. His skin was deeply tanned but still held the
smoothness of youth. “We’ve been given the day off,” he said.

“Then why are you here so early?” Anne
inquired.

“It’s one of the drawbacks of working
construction. We’re used to getting up early.”

“Why would you have the day off? I mean,
isn’t that strange?”

The man shrugged one shoulder. “Sachs knows
what he’s doing. I’ve worked with him on several projects. He’s no
dummy. If he wants us off-site, then he’s got a reason for it. None
of us are going to complain about a day off with pay. So, is there
anything fun to do in this town?”

“Is Perry . . . Mr. Sachs here?” She looked
around the room but didn’t see him.

“Don’t waste your time, ma’am. I doubt he
came down from the hills. He’s probably still up there.”

“He stayed all night?”

“I guess. A couple of us knocked on his motel
room door and didn’t get a response. We thought he might like to
have breakfast with us, but since he didn’t come to the door and a
couple of the SUVs are missing, we assumed he stayed on-site.
That’s the kind of guy he is. He’d give a bulldog a bad name.”

Something wasn’t right. It was a feeling,
illogical, nearly groundless, but Anne was certain that something
was out of place. Rising from the stool, she turned toward the
door.

Sara called after her, “Hey, Mayor.” Anne
didn’t turn around. “You don’t want your coffee? What about your
breakfast?”

Anne left the restaurant without looking
back.

THERE WASN’T AN inch of Perry’s body that didn’t
ache. His side hurt from the beating he’d taken; his back hurt from
the hours spent in the backhoe and with a shovel; his hands felt
bruised to the bone from constant use of the shovel and hammer. The
last tool was used to help Gleason and Brent build makeshift
shoring out of plywood and two-by-fours, as Jack had continued to
put the excavator through its paces. He worked with remarkable
speed and accuracy. Together the weary team had uncovered the roof
and the chamber and dug a ditch along one side—the side they
assumed would be best to open.

The top of the chamber had been fifteen
meters below grade—forty-five feet. The trench in which they stood
was another seven feet below that. Perry looked up past the
fifty-plus feet of sharply sloped walls. Only the six-foot-wide
trench was shored. The rest of the hole was bare ground, an OSHA
inspector’s nightmare. Perry wasn’t feeling very good about it
either. This was the second time

in less than twenty-four hours he found
himself at the bottom of

a hole.

A framed wall made of wood studs covered with
plywood stood behind him. Double two-by-four braces that ran from
the top of the wall to similar braces on the ground held the wall
in place. The connections formed a triangle, nature’s strongest
geometric shape.

In front of Perry rose the stone wall of the
chamber. He studied it intensely, as did Jack, Gleason, Brent, and
Dr. Curtis. No one wanted to miss the next few moments, despite the
great risks.

When Perry was a teenager, his father had
tried to tame his son with the aphorism “The difference between a
fool and a brave man is motivation. The man who loses his life and
leaves a grieving family because he was seeking a thrill gets what
he deserves, but a man who dies while attempting something great is
a hero.” Perry got the message. He knew his dad would understand,
even if this expedition left him without a son.

“Piled stone construction,” Curtis said.
“Just one stone on top of another. It’s a wonder it remained
standing.”