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Remi added, “And the thirty or so gigabytes of intelligence we collected.”
Rube sighed. “You know what I did last night? I painted our master bathroom. You two . . . Okay, send me your data.”
“Selma’s already got it. Contact her, and she’ll give you a link to a secure online storage site.”
“Got it. I know my bosses at Langley will be interested in the Chinese angle, and I’m sure we can find someone at the FBI interested in King’s black market fossil operation. I can’t promise any of it will pan out, but I’ll run with it.”
“That’s all we ask,” Sam said.
“There’s a better-than-average chance that King’s already ordered the site shut down. By now, it could be just an abandoned pit in the middle of the forest.”
“We know.”
“What about your friend Alton?”
“We’re half hoping, half guessing we’ve found what King wants,” Remi replied. “Or at least enough to get his attention. We’re calling him after we hang up with you.”
“King Charlie is scum,” Rube warned. “People have been trying to take him down all his life. They’re all dead or ruined, and he’s still standing.”
Remi replied, “Something tells us what we’ve got is very personal for him.”
“The Theurock—”
“Theurang,” Remi corrected. “The Golden Man.”
“Right. It’s a gamble,” Rube replied. “If you’re wrong and King doesn’t give a damn about the thing, all you’ve got are allegations of black market fossil trade—and, like I said, there’s no guarantee anything will stick to him.”
“We know,” Sam replied.
“And you’re going to roll the dice anyway.”
“Yes,” said Remi.
“Big surprise. By the way, before I forget, I’ve learned a little more about Lewis King. I assume you’ve both heard of Heinrich Himmler?”
“Hitler’s best friend and Nazi psychopath?” Sam asked. “We’ve heard the name.”
“Himmler and most of the upper echelon of the Nazi Party were obsessed with the occult, especially as it pertained to Aryan purity and the Thousand Year Reich. Himmler was arguably the most intrigued by it. Back in the thirties and throughout World War Two, he sponsored a number of scientific expeditions to the world’s darkest corners in hopes of finding evidence to support the Nazis’ claims. One of them, organized in 1938, a year before the war started, was dispatched to the Himalayas in search of evidence of Aryan ancestry. Care to guess the name of one of the lead scientists?”
“Lewis King,” Remi replied.
“Or, as he was known then, Professor Lewes Konig.”
Sam said, “Charlie King’s father was a Nazi?”
“Yes and no. My sources tell me he probably joined the party out of necessity, not zealousness. Back then, if you wanted government funding, you needed to be a party member. There are plenty of accounts of scientists joining and doing perfunctory researc
h into Nazi theories so they could conduct pure scientific research on the side. Lewis King was a perfect example of this. By all accounts, he was a dedicated archaeologist. He didn’t give a damn about Aryan bloodlines or ancestry.”
“So why did he go on the expedition?”
“I don’t know, but what you found in the cave—this Golden Man business—is a strong possibility. Unless King was lying, it sounds like soon after Lewis King immigrated to the U.S. he started his globe-trotting.”
“Maybe he found something on Himmler’s expedition that piqued his interest,” Sam speculated.
“Something he didn’t want to end up in the hands of the Nazis,” Remi added. “He kept it to himself, bided his time through the war, then picked up his work again years later.”
“The question is,” Rube said, “why is Charlie King picking up where his father left off? From what we know about him, he never showed the slightest interest in his father’s work.”