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“It’s funny,” Fleming said. “I grew up here and heard plenty of stories about monsters in the caves. I never suspected that the monsters were walking among us every day.” He paused, thinking. “We’re going to be getting help from Australia. They’re sending a team to work the pit with us and try to make sense out of the skeletons. But it sounds like that will be a long process, trying to match bones to POWs or islanders killed during the war.”
They moved to the second cave where the medical experiments had been conducted and paused at the entry. Down the hill, a diesel generator rumbled, providing power to the spotlights strung through the caverns. Sam saw Remi shiver as they drew near the opening and he took her hand.
“Do you need any more for the police reports?” Sam asked. They’d given their statements the prior day, explaining the obvious self-defense in the rebel killings.
“No. Nobody doubts what happened here. I just wanted to hear from your own lips how it all went down as we walk the site.”
“I’ll just as soon stay out here, if you don’t mind,” Lazlo said, fidgeting with his cell phone as he peered into the cave.
“No problem,” Fleming said. “How about you?” he asked Leonid.
The Russian shrugged. “All the same to me.”
The caves looked smaller in the wash of light from the work lights. The corpses of the gunmen were gone, replaced by chalk outlines and crime scene tape. They moved through the area slowly, noting the number of beds and the age of the equipment, before entering the cell where they’d been imprisoned only a day earlier, rust-colored smudges on one of the walls evidence of Sam’s head wound.
When they had finished with the nightmare scene an hour later, Lazlo was pacing excitedly outside, his face flushed as much from agitation as the sun. The Fargos could see that he was waiting for them to detach themselves from the police so he could talk to them in private and they wrapped up their time with Fleming before joining Lazlo on the trail leading to the logging road.
“I’m a fool. A blind fool,” he blurted as they made their way through the brush.
“What are you talking about?”
“The diary
. Something’s been eating at me and I couldn’t put my finger on it. But now I have.”
Remi eyed him. “And?”
“The translation of the encoded message. I botched one of the words. As it turns out, a critical word.”
“Botched?” Sam said, eyebrows raised.
“Yes. Botched. The key to the whole riddle.”
“Out with it, Lazlo,” Remi said.
“It wasn’t ‘beyond’ at all. ‘Beyond the fall,’ remember?”
“Yes, Lazlo. Very well,” Sam said impatiently. “What was the word?”
Lazlo paused and slowed to a stop. “It was an easy mistake to make. I was going too fast. Too sure of myself.”
“Spit it out, Lazlo,” Sam urged.
“‘Behind.’”
“‘Behind’?” Remi repeated, puzzled.
“Behind the fall,” Lazlo said solemnly. “Behind it, not beyond it.”
CHAPTER 52
Sydney, Australia
Jeffrey Grimes leaned back in his executive chair, a distracted expression in place, as his subordinates gave their reports of ever-worsening financial results. The mood in the conference room was panicked as the assembled executives described a financial empire slowly running off the rails.
“With commodity prices slipping and our tankers sitting unused twenty-seven percent of the time, we’re literally bleeding money on our shipping company, as well as the commodity trading entity,” a stern man in his forties said from beside the overhead projector, where a graph that was mostly red glowed accusingly on the screen. “The gold bet was disastrous, and with another nine billion in notional value of related options contracts maturing this month, it looks like at least twenty-eight million dollars net loss.”
That got Grimes’s attention. “Get us out of those contracts early. The trend’s not our friend now. Someone’s selling large amounts of gold into the market every day when trading’s thinnest, driving prices down. That has to be a central bank, probably the Americans trying to prop up their dollar, given the volumes—there aren’t a lot of players who can sell twenty-five tons of bullion every day and I don’t want to wait until they’re finished with their play—it could ruin us.”