Spartan Gold

CHAPTER 3

SNOW HILL, MARYLAND

Sam Fargo stood at the bottom of the stairs, leaning against the banister, legs crossed at the ankles and arms folded across his chest. Remi was running late as usual, having decided at the last minute her black Donna Karan dress was going to be a bit much for the restaurant and returned to their room to change clothes. Sam checked his watch again; he wasn’t so much worried about their reservation as he was about his empty belly, which had been grumbling loudly ever since they’d gotten back to the B&B.

The lobby of the hostel was quaint almost to a fault, done in Americana shabby chic and decorated with landscape watercolors done by local artists. A fire crackled in the fireplace and over hidden loudspeakers came the faint strains of Celtic folk music.

Sam heard the stairs creak once and looked up in time to see Remi coming down the stairs in a pair of cream Ralph Lauren trousers, a cashmere mock turtleneck, and a russet-colored shawl draped over her shoulders. Her auburn hair was up in a loose ponytail, a few strands touching her delicate neck.

“I’m sorry, have I made us late?” she asked, taking his offered arm as she reached the bottom of the stairs.

Sam stared at her for a few seconds without replying, then cleared his throat. “Looking at you, I fear time has come to a standstill.”

“Oh, shut up.”

The squeeze on Sam’s biceps belied her words and told him that, corny line or not, his compliment had been appreciated.

“Are we walking or driving?” she asked.

“We’ll walk. It’s a beautiful night.”

“Plus you run less risk of another ticket.”

On the way into town Sam had let their rented BMW have a bit too much head, much to the annoyance of the local sheriff, who’d been trying to eat his bologna sandwich lunch behind a roadside billboard.

“That, too,” Sam agreed.

There was a slight spring chill in the air, but not enough to be uncomfortable, and from the bushes along the sidewalk came the croaking of frogs. The restaurant, a locally owned Italian affair complete with a green-and-white-checkered awning, was only two blocks away, and it took only five minutes. Once they were seated they took a few minutes to peruse the wine list, settling on a Bordeaux from the French region of Barsac.

“So,” Remi said, “how sure are you about this?”

“You mean about the you-know-what?” Sam whispered conspir atorially.

“I think you can say the word, Sam. I doubt anyone cares.”

He smiled. “The submarine. I’m pretty sure. We’ll have to get down there, of course, but I can’t imagine it’s anything else.”

“But what’s it doing here? All the way upriver.”

“That’s the mystery we’ll have to solve, won’t we?”

“And what about Patty Cannon?”

“She can wait a couple days. We’ll ID the sub, put Selma and the others onto unraveling the mystery, then get back to our sociopathic murderous slave runner.”

Remi gave it a few moments’ thought, then shrugged. “Why not. Life is short.”

Selma Wondrash was the drill sergeant-like head of Sam and Remi’s three-person research team back in San Diego. Selma was widowed, having lost her husband, an air force test pilot, in a crash ten years earlier. They’d met in Budapest in the early nineties, she a university student, he a fighter jock on leave. Despite having lived in the United States for fifteen years, Selma had never entirely lost her accent.

After finishing her degree at Georgetown and becoming a citizen, she went to work for the Library of Congress’s Special Collections Directorate until Sam and Remi lured her away. More than a research chief, Selma had proved herself a superb travel agent and logistics guru, getting them to and from destinations with military efficiency.

While Sam and Remi loved the research aspect of their field, Selma and her team were rabid about it, living for that buried fact, that elusive lead, that unsolvable riddle that always seemed to crop up in the course of a job. More times than they could count, Selma and her team had kept an investigation from going far astray.

Of course, “job” wasn’t quite the right word for what Sam and Remi did. For them it wasn’t about a paycheck but rather the adventure, and the satisfaction of seeing the Fargo Foundation flourish. The foundation, which split its gifting between animal protection, nature conservancy, and underprivileged and abused children, had grown in leaps and bounds over the last decade, the previous year donating almost five million dollars to a variety of organizations. A hefty part of that money had come from Sam and Remi personally and the rest of it from private donations. For better or worse their exploits attracted a fair amount of media attention, which in turn attracted wealthy, high-profile donors.

The fact that Sam and Remi got to do what they loved was a boon neither of them took for granted, having both worked hard to reach this place in their life.

Remi’s father, now retired, had been a private contractor who’d built custom summer homes along the New England coast; her mother, a pediatrician with a series of bestselling child-rearing books. Following in her father’s footsteps, Remi had attended his alma mater, Boston College, emerging with a master’s in anthropology and history, with a focus on ancient trade routes.

Sam’s father, who’d died a few years earlier, had been one of the lead engineers on NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs and rare-book collector, a love affair he’d passed on to Sam at an early age. Sam’s mother, Eunice, lived in Key West, where, despite being almost seventy, she ran a charter boat specializing in snorkel ing and deep-sea fishing.

Like Remi, Sam had followed in his father’s footsteps, if not in his choice of education, then in his vocation, earning a summa cum laude engineering degree from Caltech, along with a handful of trophies for lacrosse and soccer.

While in his final months of study at Caltech Sam was approached by a man he would later find out was from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where the government developed and tested the latest and greatest toys for both the military and intelligence communities. The offered salary had been far below what he could have earned in the civilian world, but the lure of pure creative engineering combined with serving his country made Sam’s choice an easy one.

After seven years at DARPA Sam retired with the vague notion of bringing some of his own wild ideas to reality, and moved back to California. It was there, two weeks later, that Sam and Remi met at the Lighthouse, a jazz club on Hermosa Beach. Sam had wandered into the club for a cold beer and Remi was there celebrating a successful research trip looking into rumors of a sunken Spanish ship off Abalone Cove.

Though neither of them had ever called their first meeting a case of “love at first sight,” they’d both agreed it had certainly been a case of “pretty damned sure at first hour.” Six months later they were married where they’d first met, in a small ceremony at the Lighthouse.

At Remi’s encouragement Sam dove headfirst into his own business and they struck pay dirt within a year with an argon laser scanner that could detect and identify at a distance mixed metals and alloys, from gold and silver to platinum and palladium. Treasure hunters, universities, corporations, and mining outfits scrambled to license Sam’s invention and within two years the Fargo Group was seeing an annual net profit of three million dollars, and within four years the deep-pocketed corporations came calling. Sam and Remi took the highest bid, sold the company for enough money to see themselves comfortably through the rest of their lives, and never looked back.

“I did a little research while you were in the shower,” Sam said. “From what I can gather, I think we may have a real find on our hands.”

The waiter came, deposited a basket of warm ciabatta and a saucer of Pasolivo olive oil, and then took their orders. To start they ordered calamari with red sauce and porcini mushrooms. For entrées, Sam selected a seafood pasta with pesto-sautéed bay scallops and lobster, while Remi chose a stuffed shrimp-and-crab ravioli in basil white cream sauce.

“What do you mean?” Remi asked. “Isn’t a submarine a submarine?”

“Good Lord, woman, bite your tongue,” Sam said, feigning shock.

Where Remi’s forte was anthropology and ancient history, Sam loved World War II history, another passion he’d inherited from his father, who’d been a marine during the United States’ island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. The fact that Remi had little interest in who exactly sank the Bismarck or why the Battle of the Bulge was so important was something that never ceased to amaze Sam.

Remi was an anthropologist and historian without peer, but she tended to take an analytical approach to things, while for Sam history had always been stories about real people doing real things. Remi dissected; Sam dreamed.

“Apologies for the gaffe,” Remi said.

“Forgiven. Here’s the thing: Given the size of the inlet, there’s no way it can be a full-sized submarine. Plus, that periscope looked way too small.”

“A mini sub, then.”

“Right. But there was a lot of growth on the periscope. A few decades’ worth, at least. And one more thing: As far as I know, commercial subs—for surveys or mapping or whatever—don’t have periscopes.”

“So it’s military,” Remi said.

“Has to be.”

“So, a military mini submarine, twenty-some miles up the Pocomoke R iver . . . ” Remi murmured. “Okay, I admit it. You got me. I’m officially intrigued.”

Sam smiled back at her. “That’s my girl. So, what do you say? After dinner, we drive over to Princess Anne and see what Ted has to say. He’s forgotten more legends about this area than most people will ever know. If anyone might have some hunches about what this thing is, it’s going to be him.”

“I don’t know. . . . It’s getting late and you know how Ted hates visitors.”

Ted Frobisher, for all his genius and well-hidden softheartedness, wasn’t exactly people-oriented. His shop thrived not on his interpersonal skills, but on his breadth of knowledge and business acumen.

Sam said, smiling, “A little surprise will do him good.”