Lost Empire (3 page)

For Sam and Remi, the engine that drove their lives was not money but rather the adventure and the satisfaction of seeing the Fargo Foundation flourish. The foundation, which split its gifting among underprivileged and abused children, animal protection, and nature conservancy, had grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade, the previous year donating almost twenty 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 question they now faced was whether this ship’s bell was something they could turn into philanthropic funds or simply a fascinating historical diversion. Not that it mattered, of course. The pursuit of hidden history held its own joys for them. Either way, they knew where they had to start.

“Time to call Selma,” Remi said.

“Time to call Selma,” Sam agreed.

 

 

AN HOUR LATER they were back at their rented plantation-style bungalow at Kendwa Beach, on Zanzibar’s northern tip. While Remi prepared a fresh fruit salad, slices of prosciutto and mozzarella, and iced tea, Sam dialed Selma. Above their heads, a sixty-inch ceiling fan churned the air while through the French doors a cool offshore breeze billowed the gauze curtains.

Despite it being four A.M. in San Diego, Selma Wondrash picked up on the first ring. Sam and Remi were not surprised, having come to believe Selma slept only four hours a night, save Sundays, when she slept five.

“The only time you call me when you’re on vacation is when you’re in trouble or about to get into trouble,” Selma said over the speakerphone without preamble.

“Not true,” Sam replied. “Last year from the Seychelles we called—”

“Because a troop of baboons had broken into your beach house, destroyed the furniture, and made off with all your worldly goods, and the police thought you were burglars.”

She’s right
, Remi mouthed from across the kitchen island. Using the tip of her knife, she tossed Sam a chunk of fresh pineapple. He caught it in his mouth, and she applauded silently.

“Okay, that’s true,” Sam told Selma.

A former Hungarian citizen who’d never quite lost her accent, Selma Wondrash was the stern but secretly softhearted head of Sam and Remi’s three-person research team behind the Fargo Foundation. Selma was widowed, having lost her husband, an air force test pilot, in a crash ten years earlier.

After finishing her degree at Georgetown, Selma had managed the Library of Congress’s Special Collections Division until Sam and Remi lured her away. More than a research chief, Selma had proven herself a superb travel agent and logistics guru, getting them to and from destinations with militaristic efficiency. Selma ate, drank, and lived research: the mystery that stubbornly refused solution, the legend that showed the barest spark of truth.

“So what is it this time?” Selma asked.

“A ship’s bell,” Remi called.

They could hear the fluttering of paper as Selma retrieved a fresh legal pad. “Tell me,” she said.

“West coast of Chumbe Island,” Sam said, then recited the coordinates he’d locked into his GPS unit before heading for the boat. “You’ll have to check—”

“Boundaries of the reserves and sanctuaries, yes,” Selma said, her pencil rasping on paper. “I’ll have Wendy look into Tanzanian maritime law. Anything else?”

“A coin. Diamond-shaped, about the size of a U.S. half-dollar. We found it about a hundred twenty yards north of the bell . . .” Sam looked to Remi for confirmation of this and got a nod in return. “We’re going to see if we can clean it up a bit, but the face is obscured right now.”

“Got it. Next?”

“There’s no next. That’s it. As soon as possible, Selma. The sooner we can put a hook on that bell, the better. That sandbank didn’t look all that stable.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Selma replied and hung up.

 

 

QUAUHTLI GARZA, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED MEXICAN States and the leader of the Mexica (pronounced in the traditional way, Meh-SHEE-kah) Tenochca Party, gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows and down into the Plaza de la Constitución, where the Great Temple had once stood. Now it was nothing more than beautified ruins, a tourist attraction for those who wanted to gawk at the sad remains of the magnificent Aztec city of Tenochtitlán and the great twelve-foot-diameter, twenty-ton Calendar Stone.

“A mockery,” Quauhtli Garza mumbled, watching the milling crowds.

A mockery he’d so far been able to correct with only marginal success. True, the Mexican people had since his election gained a better understanding of their lineage—had come to understand the true history of their country that had been all but obliterated by Spanish imperialism. Even the name, the Aztec Party, which so many news reporters used to describe Mexica Tenochca, was an insult, a nod to falsity. Hernán Cortés and his bloodthirsty Spanish conquistadors had named the Mexica peoples Aztecs, bastardized from the name of the legendary home of the Mexica—Aztlán. It was a necessary artifice, however. For now, Aztec was a term the Mexican people both understood and could take to their collective hearts. In time, Garza would educate them.

It was, in fact, a ground surge of pre-conquest nationalism that had swept Garza and the Mexica Tenochca into power, but Garza’s hopes for Mexico’s widespread and immediate embracement of its history were starting to fade. He’d come to realize they’d won the election partly because of the previous administration’s incompetence and corruption and partly because of Mexica Tenochca’s “Aztecan showmanship,” as one political pundit had termed it.

Showmanship indeed! It was absurd.

Hadn’t Garza years ago renounced his Spanish Christian name, Fernando, for a Nahuatl one? Hadn’t his entire cabinet done the same? Hadn’t Garza renamed his own children in the Nahuatl tongue? And more: Literature and images of Spain’s conquest of Mexico were slowly being weeded from school curricula; street and plaza names had been changed in favor of Nahuatl words; schools now taught courses in Nahuatl and the true history of the Mexica people; religious holidays and traditional Mexica festivals were celebrated several times a year. But still, all the polling showed that the Mexican people saw all of it as novelties—excuses to miss work or drink or misbehave in the streets. Even so, that same polling suggested real change could be instituted if they had enough time. Garza and the Mexica Tenochca needed another term, and to get that Garza needed to have the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation more firmly under his thumb. As it stood, the presidency was restricted to a single term of six years. Not long enough to accomplish what Garza had planned, not long enough to accomplish what Mexico needed: a fully realized history of its own, free of the lies of conquest and slaughter.

Garza stepped away from the window, strode to his desk, and pressed a button on the remote. Shades descended from the ceiling, muting the noonday sun; in the ceiling, recessed lighting glowed to life, illuminating the burgundy carpet and heavy wooden furniture. Like the rest of Garza’s life, his office reflected his Mexica heritage. Tapestries and paintings depicting Aztec history lined the walls. Here, a twelve-foot-long, hand-painted codex detailing the founding of Tenochtitlán on a marshy island in Lake Texcoco; over there, a painting of the Aztec goddess of the moon, Coyolxauhqui; across the room above the fireplace, a floor-to-ceiling tapestry showing Huitzilopochtli, the “Hummingbird Wizard,” and Tezcatlipoca, the “Smoking Mirror,” in union, watching over their people. On the wall above his desk was an oil painting of Chicomoztoc—“the Place of Seven Caves”—the legendary source of all Nahuatl-speaking peoples.

None of these, however, kept him awake at night. That honor belonged to the artifact standing in the corner of the room. Perched atop a crystal pedestal in a cube of half-inch-thick glass was Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of the Aztecs. Of course, depictions of Quetzalcoatl were commonplace—on pottery and tapestries and in a multitude of codices—but this representation was unique. A statuette. The only one of its kind. At four inches tall and seven inches long, it was a masterwork carved by unknown hands a millennium ago from a chunk of nearly translucent jade.

Garza walked around his desk and sat in the chair before the pedestal. Quetzalcoatl’s surface, lit from above by an inset halogen bulb, seemed to swirl, forming mesmerizing shapes and pools of color that were at once there and not there. Garza’s eyes drifted back along Quetzalcoatl’s plumes and scales until coming to rest on the tail—or where the tail should have been, he corrected himself. Instead of tapering to a traditional serpent’s tail, the statuette widened for a few inches before ending abruptly in a jagged vertical line, as though it had been cleaved from a larger artifact. This was, in fact, the theory Garza’s scientists had put forth. And a theory he had worked hard to suppress.

This Quetzalcoatl statuette, this symbol of the Mexica Tenochca, was incomplete. Garza knew what was missing—or, more accurately, he knew the missing piece would not resemble anything in the Aztec pantheon. It was this thought that kept him awake at night. As the symbol of the Mexica Tenochca movement since the day Garza had founded it, this statuette had become a rallying cry for the wave of nationalism that had swept him into office. Should its credibility be called into doubt . . . It was a question Garza didn’t dare entertain. The thought that a lost nineteenth-century warship could destroy everything that he’d built was unacceptable. All of it gone because of a trinket or artifact found by a random snorkeler, who in turn shows it to someone with a passing interest in history, who then asks an expert. A falling domino that destroys a nation’s restored pride.

 

 

THE BUZZ OF THE INTERCOM on Garza’s desk shook him from his reverie. He turned off the case’s halogen light and returned to his desk.

“Yes?” he said.

“He is here, Mr. President.”

“Send him in,” Garza said, then turned and sat down behind his desk.

The double doors opened a moment later and in strode Itzli Rivera. At six feet tall and one hundred fifty pounds, Itzli Rivera appeared unsubstantial from a distance—gaunt in the extreme, his narrow face of angles and planes dominated by a hawk nose—but as he came closer Garza reminded himself how deceptive Rivera’s appearance was. It showed in the hard set of his eyes and mouth, in his steady, purposeful gait, and in the taut muscles and the tendons of his bare forearms. Even without knowing the man, an astute observer could easily see Itzli Rivera was no stranger to hardship. Of course, Garza knew this to be true. His chief operative had indeed visited hardship upon many poor souls, so far most of them political opponents who didn’t share Garza’s vision for Mexico. Luckily, it was easier to find a virgin in a brothel than it was to find an incorrupt member of the Senate or the Chamber of Deputies, and Rivera had a knack for finding a man’s weakness, then shoving the dagger home. Rivera was himself a true believer, having rejected his Spanish name, Hector, in favor of Itzli, which in Nahuatl meant “obsidian.” A fitting name, Garza thought.

A former major in the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, or Special Forces Airmobile Group, GAFE, and former Secretariat of National Defence’s S-2 Intelligence Second Section, Rivera had left the army to become Garza’s personal bodyguard, but Garza had quickly seen Rivera’s wider potential and had put him to work as his own private intelligence and operations director.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Rivera said stiffly.

“And to you. Sit down, sit down. Can I get you something?” Rivera shook his head, and Garza asked, “To what do I owe this visit?”

“We’ve come across something you may want to see—a video. I asked your secretary to cue it up.”

Rivera picked up the remote from his desk, aimed it at the fifty-inch LCD television on the wall, and hit Power. Garza sat down. After a few seconds of silence, a man and woman in their mid-thirties appeared, sitting together before an ocean backdrop. Off camera, a reporter was asking questions. Though Garza’s English was fluent, Rivera’s technical people had added Spanish subtitles.

The interview was short, no longer than three minutes. When it was done, Garza looked to Rivera. “And the significance is?”

“Those are the Fargos—Sam and Remi Fargo.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“Do you remember last year, the story about Napoleon’s Lost Cellar . . . the lost Spartans?”

Garza was nodding his head. “Yes, yes . . .”

“The Fargos were behind that. They’re very good at what they do.”

This got Garza’s attention. He leaned forward in his chair. “Where was this interview taped?”

“Zanzibar. By a BBC correspondent. Of course, the timing could be a coincidence.”

Garza waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t believe in coincidences. And neither do you, my friend, or else you wouldn’t have brought this to me.”

For the first time since entering the office, Rivera showed a trace of emotion—a thin shark’s smile that never reached his eyes. “True.”

“How did you come across this?”

“After the . . . revelation . . . I had my technical team create a special program. It monitors the Internet for certain key words. In this case, ‘Zanzibar,’ ‘Tanzania,’ ‘Chumbe,’ ‘Shipwrecks,’ and ‘Treasure.’ The last two, of course, are the Fargos’ specialties. In the interview they were adamant that the trip was simply a diving vacation, but . . .”

“This close to the last incident . . . the British woman . . .”

“Sylvie Radford.”

Radford, Garza thought. Luckily, the idiot woman had had no inkling of the significance of what she’d found, treating it as nothing more than a trinket, showing it off around Zanzibar and Bagamoyo, asking locals what it might be. The necessity of her death had been unfortunate, but Rivera had handled it with his usual care—a street robbery turned murder, the police had concluded.