Ramsey's Gold

Chapter Forty

Spencer stood watch as Drake slept fitfully through the night, the half syringe of morphine having dulled the worst of the pain. The rain had started a few hours after dark and continued until morning. When Drake awoke and crawled stiffly out of the tent, Spencer was sitting with his plastic parka on, his back against a tree, water running off his hat as his eyes roved over the jungle.

“You wanna get some sleep while I keep watch for a few hours?” Drake asked. He took a long pull on his canteen, his throat parched, and looked over at Allie’s tent, which was set up next to his.

“I can sleep when I’m dead. How’s the leg?”

“I’ll manage. Thanks for doing that. And Allie?”

“All part of the platinum-level service I provide. You might want to take a day or two to let it heal.” Spencer stared without speaking for a moment at Allie’s tent. “She’ll make it. She got very lucky on the path the bullet took — it was messy, but ultimately didn’t do a ton of damage.”

“And a helicopter?”

“We need to talk about that. Right now, she’s sleeping, and there’s no point in waking her up. But once she comes to, I want to see how she’s doing. That will determine our next step.”

“In what way?”

“The second we contact the authorities for a helicopter, Paititi’s blown. Assuming they’re even willing to come this far into the jungle, which isn’t a given. And there are going to be a lot of questions about gunshot wounds — questions we might not want to answer.”

“So…what? The answer is to risk her life so we can try to find the treasure?”

“Her life’s not at risk anymore is my point. But that brings up the big question: you got any ideas where it could be?” Spencer asked.

“Some.”

Spencer tossed Drake an energy bar. The rain eased as they sat together munching on yet another dry breakfast, silent. Drake’s head was splitting and his leg felt like someone had taken a hot poker to it, but he was alive. They heard a stirring from Allie’s tent, and both rose and approached it.

Allie looked pale and weak, but her eyes were open, though foggy from the morphine. Spencer had fashioned a bandage from one of his clean shirts and the gauze from the first aid kit, and as she tried to sit up, she reached for it, wincing.

“God, this hurts,” she said as Drake climbed into the tent and handed her a full canteen. She drank from it greedily and then lay back. “What happened?”

“We got all the bad guys. And Spencer did a little emergency surgery on both of us,” Drake said. “How do you feel?”

“Like a truck ran over me.”

Spencer ducked his head into the tent. “Any fever? Shakes?”

“No, just really weak.”

“That’s because of the blood loss. You’ll feel stronger as the day goes on. But you need to eat something, and drink plenty.” Spencer tossed Drake two breakfast bars, and Allie reluctantly ate them as he summarized their situation and options.

“So there’s no danger from the wound?” Allie asked, finishing the second bar.

Spencer shook his head. “Nothing immediate. You’re on a high-dose antibiotic that’ll control infection, which is the biggest danger.”

“Then I vote we find the treasure before calling for help,” she said, her voice stronger.

“That’s not such a hot idea,” Drake said.

“We didn’t come all this way just to hand the location to the Peruvians. We need to locate the treasure, or this will have all been in vain,” she countered.

Drake shook his head. “Allie, some things might be worth risking your life for. But this isn’t one of them. We found the city. That’s already a huge win.”

“You heard Spencer. I’ll make it. You just need to get busy and locate the treasure.” She closed her eyes again and smiled. “Slackers.”

After a few more minutes of back and forth, Allie terminated the debate, threatening to crawl off into the jungle if they called for help before they’d located the Inca gold. Spencer went into the brush and emerged with a branch for Drake to use as a staff. After a short discussion about the dangers involved in leaving the tents pitched with Allie waiting by herself, they agreed that she’d keep one of the pistols, for the unlikely event a native appeared to challenge her.

“Anything shows up, shoot it,” Spencer said, handing her the gun.

“I kind of got that. Thanks.”

“You sure you’re going to be okay?” Drake asked, eyeing her skeptically.

“Go on. Get out of here. Make us all rich. I’ll be fine,” she said, her blue eyes flashing at him.

Drake backed out of the tent and looked around the clearing and, after hoisting his backpack, set off with Spencer to hunt for the treasure.

“What are we looking for?” Spencer asked.

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

Spencer gave him a sidelong glance. “You’re kind of grumpy after getting shot and brained, you know that?”

“It’ll do that to you.”

Drake limped, supporting himself on the branch, and he realized as they walked through the ruins of the sprawling city that Spencer must have carried Allie and him after tending to their wounds and setting up the tents.

Although it pained Drake to admit it, it occurred to him that he’d misjudged Spencer. Those weren’t the actions of a traitor.

They took their time walking what had at one time been wide boulevards. The temples on either side of them were now eroded lumps of vegetation, most of the structures having been built out of timber that had long ago rotted away. Drake’s leg ached, but when Spencer had shown him how to change the dressing, there had been no sign of infection, and he’d gulped down several more antibiotic pills and injected a quarter of the morphine in the syringe before getting underway.

The day stretched on and they found nothing, and by afternoon they were both exhausted and hot. They returned to the clearing to wait out the worst of it, and found Allie dozing but safe. After a brief report on their lack of progress, Spencer went to the river to get water. Drake gave Allie another half dose of morphine for the pain, and she drifted off in a narcotic sleep after drinking more water and eating another bar. When Spencer returned, he sat down on a log and shook his head.

“This is a big place. There must have been thousands living here at one time.”

“The last holdout of the Inca Empire. I wonder how many years it lasted, and what brought it down?” Drake said.

“We’ll probably know in time. Once you register the find and teams of archeologists descend on the place, they’ll figure it out. They always do.”

“Let’s hope I don’t have a problem registering it. When big money’s involved with a third world nation that’s got plenty of corruption, anything could happen.”

“That’s always a danger. But I may have a way around it. One of my drinking buddies is the curator at the Museum of Natural History in Lima. He went to school in New York and has deep connections with the Smithsonian. If we actually find the treasure, I can reach out and see if he can assemble a team that’s bigger than some bureaucratic larceny. If the Smithsonian announces the find, with your name on it, and flies a bunch of pencil necks out here to catalog the treasure, that’ll go a long way toward eliminating the chance that big chunks of it disappear, or that you get cut out of a reasonable finder’s fee.”

Drake appraised him. “You’d do that?”

Spencer waved nonchalantly. “It’s purely driven by self-interest. I can’t collect my cut if you get screwed, now can I?”

Drake nodded, not entirely convinced by Spencer’s gruff demeanor. “I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Good thinking.”

“Yeah. Now, why don’t you tell me everything you know about the mad Russian? Seeing as we’re sharing openly and honestly? Because I’m getting a bad feeling about this the longer I’m out here, you know?”

Drake sat back and took a deep drink of water before beginning. When he was finished, Spencer whistled.

“Boy, you don’t do things in half measures, do you?”

“Look, I have no idea whether Palenko has a nuke or something, but whatever it is, the CIA is interested enough to send a team to keep it out of unfriendly hands. So they believe it’s worth pursuing. Whether or not it is, who knows? Did he seem like he’d be able to design a working toilet, much less something that could provide energy for the planet or destroy it?”

“Hey, Howard Hughes had a similar look, and he managed some amazing feats. I wouldn’t let that fool you. Besides, who knows what made him flip out and start the Inca god thing? For all we know he was schizophrenic. Heard voices. Maybe he went off his meds. Or maybe the voices got so loud once he was in the Amazon, he had to obey. You can’t try to figure out crazy. Because you’re not nuts, so you have no idea what was going on in his brain.”

Drake nodded. Spencer was right. About a lot of things, apparently. Spencer was more than his appearance would suggest, and there was considerable thought behind the stone-faced façade.

“You know, something just occurred to me. If we find the treasure, we might also run across the mystery ore. If we do, what would you like to do with it? Drop it in the river so it’s lost for all time? Or turn it over to the CIA?” Spencer asked.

“Beats me. I hadn’t thought about it much.”

“As I see it, you have two choices. Either you hand it over and you’re off the hook; or you don’t, in which case you’re always going to be a marked man. Did I miss some nuance you left out?”

“But I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Yeah. I get it. Unfortunately, being innocent hasn’t ever meant going unharmed when you’re dancing with elephants. If they step on you, you’re squished just as badly as the guilty.”

“Why are you harping on this?” Drake asked, annoyed at Spencer’s tone.

“Because I might be able to help with that, too.”

“In what way?”

“I know a few people at the CIA.”

Drake fought to control his outrage. “Damn. I knew it. You’re a plant,” he said as he struggled to stand.

“Whoa, there, Nellie. Why is it always so black and white with you? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you don’t trust me.”

“You just said…”

“I said I know some people. You don’t spend a decade doing what I do for a living without making connections, you know? Someone needs to get across a border, or an agency needs some intel on the latest movements of a drug-trafficking gang, or some friendly rebels need a few cases of grenades without any accountability…it’s an imperfect world, is all I’m saying. So yeah, I have contacts. If you decide you want to hand it over, I could negotiate a deal for you. Sounds like you could name a pretty high price.”

“It’s not about the money.”

“It’s always about the money. Are you kidding? If you’re sitting on something they’ve been looking for that long, you’re in the driver’s seat.”

The fight had gone out of Drake. He sat back down.

“What would you do?”

“Personally? Let’s think it through. If you ditch it somewhere else, once they know the Inca city’s here, they’ll spare no expense on divers, sonar, whatever it takes. And you’ll never be safe, no matter how much money you get from the treasure. Someone, either them or the Russians or someone else, will always think you know more than you’re saying. So it’s just a matter of time till they come for you. You’d be fighting the whole world. I don’t like those odds.”

Drake frowned. “That sounds about right.”

“What’s the downside to handing it over? Uncle Sam gets the ore and builds a death star with it? Guess what. They’ve already got enough nukes to kill everything on the planet a thousand times over. So I highly doubt that’s the end game. Maybe it might have been when Russia was the evil empire, but now? Not so much. So it’s more likely it’s used to develop a power source, assuming Palenko was onto something. Or it could be he was completely off-base, in which case nothing ever gets built. I’m just saying that behind door number two, you have inevitable death, probably painful, and behind door number one, a way out with a potentially big payday.”

“When you put it like that…”

Spencer squinted at him. “You have something against the U.S.?”

“No more than any other government, I suppose.”

“Then what’s the beef?”

Drake thought about it for a while. “I don’t like being told what to do.”

“Right. Join the club. But unless you left something out, they didn’t order you to do anything.”

“That’s right. But it felt like I had no choice.”

“Hey, do what you want, but I kind of like breathing, and I’m sure Allie does too. And the problem I see is that if we’re associated with you, and you decide to bury it in your backyard, the bad guys will be coming for us, too. I didn’t sign up for that. If you’d have come clean before, I would have made turning it over a condition of my help.”

Drake shrugged. “You did miss that we haven’t found anything.”

“Yet. You found the frigging city. Everyone else has been hunting for it for hundreds of years. I’d say that should inspire some confidence. My money’s obviously on you. Besides, if I didn’t…” Spencer’s voice trailed off. Drake had gotten to his feet and wasn’t listening anymore.

Spencer rose too, rifle in hand. “What?” he whispered.

“I think I know where the treasure is,” Drake said, and limped off into the jungle without another word.

Spencer glowered at his back as he disappeared into the brush, and with a groan and a glance at Allie’s tent, followed him, wondering what had just clicked in Drake’s head.