Lost Empire (22 page)

The upper floor held Sam and Remi’s master suite, and below this, one flight down, were four guest suites, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen/great room that jutted over the cliff. On the second floor was a gymnasium containing both aerobic and circuit training exercise equipment, a steam room, a HydroWorx endless lap pool, a climbing wall, and a thousand square feet of hardwood floor space for Remi to practice her fencing and Sam his judo.

The ground floor sported two thousand square feet of office space for Sam and Remi and an adjoining workspace for Selma, complete with three Mac Pro workstations coupled with thirty-inch cinema displays, and a pair of wall-mounted thirty-two-inch LCD televisions. On the east wall was Selma’s pride and joy, a fourteen-foot, five-hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium filled with a rainbow-hued assortment of fish whose scientific names she knew by heart.

Selma’s other love, tea, she approached with equal passion; an entire cabinet of the workroom was devoted to her stock, which included a rare Phoobsering-Osmanthus Darjeeling hybrid that Sam and Remi suspected was the source of her seemingly boundless energy.

In appearance, Selma Wondrash was eclectic in the extreme: She wore a modified 1960s bob, horn-rimmed glasses, complete with a neck chain, and a default uniform of khaki pants, sneakers, and a tie-dyed T-shirt.

As far as Sam and Remi were concerned, Selma could be as strange as she wished. There was no one better at logistics, research, and resource scrounging.

Sam and Remi walked into the workspace to find Selma leaning over the tank, writing something on a clipboard. She turned, saw them, held up a finger, then finished writing and set aside the clipboard. “My
Centropyge loricula
is looking sickly,” she said, then translated: “flame angelfish.”

“That’s one of my favorites,” Remi said.

Selma nodded solemnly. “So, welcome home, Mr. and Mrs. Fargo.”

Sam and Remi had long ago given up trying to convince Selma to call them by their first names.

“Good to be home,” Sam replied.

Selma walked to the long, maple-topped workbench that ran down the center of the room and sat down. Sam and Remi took the stools opposite her. Blaylock’s massive walking staff was lying lengthwise on the table.

“You look well,” Selma said.

“Pete and Wendy disagreed.”

“I was comparing your current condition to how I imagined you over the past few days. Everything is relative.”

“True enough,” Remi said. “Selma, are you stalling?”

Selma pursed her lips. “I’m not fond of handing you incomplete information.”

Sam replied, “What you call incomplete we call mysterious, and we love a good mystery.”

“Then you’re going to love what I have for you. First a little background. With Pete and Wendy’s help, I dissected, indexed, and foot-noted Morton’s biography of Blaylock. It’s on our server in PDF format, if you want to read it later, but here’s the condensed version. Selma opened a manila folder and began reading.

“Blaylock arrived in Bagamoyo in March 1872 with nothing but the clothes on his back, a few pieces of silver, a .44 caliber Henry rifle, a bowie knife big enough to ‘chop down a baobab tree’ stuck in his boot, and a short sword strapped to his hip.”

“Clearly, Morton had a creative streak,” Remi said. She looked to Sam. “Do you remember the story we read about the murdered British tourist?”

“Sylvie Radford,” Sam finished.

“Remember what she found while diving?”

Sam smiled. “A sword. It’s a long long shot, but maybe what she found had once belonged to Blaylock. Selma. Can you . . .”

Their chief researcher was already jotting a note. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“A short sword and a bowie knife could easily be confused. Maybe Morton got it wrong. Sorry, Selma, keep going.”

“Evidently, Blaylock terrified the locals. Not only was he a foot taller and wider than almost everyone, he wasn’t prone to smiling. On his first night in Bagamoyo, half a dozen thugs got together and decided to separate Blaylock and his money. Two of them died, and the rest required medical attention.”

“He shot them,” Sam said.

“No. He never picked up his Henry, the bowie, or the sword. He fought with his bare hands. After that, no one bothered him.”

“Which was probably the point,” Sam replied. “Doing that to six men while unarmed tends to create an impression.”

“Indeed. Within a week, he was serving as a bodyguard for a rich Irishman on safari; within a month, he’d started his own guide business. As good as he was with his hands, he was even better with the Henry. Where other European guides and hunters were using big-bore hunting rifles, Blaylock could take down a charging Cape buffalo—a mbogo—with one shot from his Henry.

“About two months after Blaylock arrived, he contracted malaria and spent six weeks on his back near death while his two mistresses—Maasai women who worked in Bagamoyo—nursed him back to health. While Morton never came out and said as much, Blaylock’s brush with death seemed to have left him slightly . . . touched in the head.

“After the malaria Blaylock would disappear for months on end on what he called ‘vision quest expeditions.’ He lived with the Maasai, took concubines, studied with witch doctors, lived alone in the bush, hunted for King Solomon’s mines and Timbuktu, dug fossils in Olduvai Gorge, followed the trail of Mansa Musa, hoping to find his staff of gold . . . There’s even an anecdote that claims Blaylock was the one who found David Livingstone first. According to Morton’s account, Blaylock sent a runner to Bagamoyo to alert Henry Morton Stanley; shortly after that the pair had their famous ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume’ moment near Lake Tanganyika.”

“So if we’re to believe Morton,” Remi said, “Winston Lloyd Blaylock was the Indiana Jones of the nineteenth century.”

Sam smiled. “Hunter, explorer, hero, mystic, Casanova, and indestructible savior all rolled into one. But this is all from Morton’s biography, right?”

“Right.”

“By the way, we’re assuming Morton was named after
the
Morton—as in Henry Morton Stanley?”

“Right again. In fact, according to the family tree in the back of the book, all of Blaylock’s direct descendants were named after Africa in some fashion—the places, the history, the larger-than-life characters . . .”

“If you got all this from the biography, what about the journal you mentioned?” asked Sam.

“I used the word ‘journal’ for lack of a better term. In fact, it’s a potpourri: diary, field sketchbook . . .”

“Can we see it?”

“If you’d like. It’s in the vault.” Off the workspace, Selma had a temperature- and humidity-controlled archive area. “It’s in bad shape—insect-eaten, soiled, water-damaged pages stuck together. Pete and Wendy are working on the restoration. We’re photographing and digitizing what pages we can before we start work on the damaged portions. There’s one more thing: It appears the journal also served as Blaylock’s captain’s log.”

“Pardon me?” Remi said.

“While he never mentions the
Shenandoah
or the
El Majidi
, many of his entries clearly indicate he was at sea, on and off, for long periods. Blaylock does, however, mention Ophelia quite often.”

“In what context?”

“She was his wife.”

 

 

“THAT WOULD EXPLAIN his obsession, I suppose,” Sam said. “Not only did he mentally rename the
Shenandoah
, he also carved Ophelia’s name into the bell.”

“Ophelia is a distinctly un-African name,” Remi said. “It had to be the name of his wife back in the U.S.”

Selma nodded. “There’s no mention of her in the biography. And he never speaks in detail about her in the journal—just little snippets everywhere. Whether he was simply yearning for her or it’s something more, I don’t know, but she was never far from his mind.”

“Are there dates in the journal?” asked Sam. “Anything we can cross-reference with Morton’s biography?”

“In both books, only months and years are used; in the journal, those are far and few between. We’re trying to do some matching, but it’s turning up discrepancies. For example, we found a time where in the biography he’s trekking in the Congo, while according to the journal he’s at sea. It’s slow going so far.”

“Something doesn’t add up,” said Sam.

“Just one thing?” Remi replied. “My list is longer than that.”

“Mine too. But on the captain’s log angle: If we’re thinking Blaylock might have been at sea aboard the
Shenandoah
—
El Majidi
, I mean—then we’ve got a contradiction. By all accounts, after the Sultan of Zanzibar bought the
Shenandoah
in 1866 he all but abandoned her at anchor until she was destroyed either in 1872 or 1879. I think someone would have noticed her missing.”

“Good point,” Selma said, jotting down a note. “Another point of curiosity: Sultan Majid died in October 1870 and was succeeded by his brother and bitter rival, Sayyid Barghash bin Said. By default, he became the owner of
El Majidi
. Some historians find it curious that Sayyid didn’t change the ship’s name, let alone keep it around.”

Sam added, “Can we put together a time line of the
Shenandoah/ El Majidi
? Be easier to visualize the events.”

Selma picked up the phone and dialed the archive room. “Wendy, can you throw together a rough time line of the
Shenandoah
/
El Majidi
? Thanks.”

“We also need to find out more about Blaylock’s life before Africa,” Remi said.

“I’m working on that as well,” said Selma. “I reached out to an old friend who might be able to help.”

Wendy stepped out of the archive room, smiled at them, held up a
Just one second
finger, then sat down at one of the workstations. She tapped away at the keys for five minutes and said, “On your screen.”

Selma used the remote control to find the new graphic:

Sam said, “We’ve got two seemingly reliable accounts of her sinking that contradict each other, and over six years where the
El Majidi
is unaccounted for.

“Selma, what’s the earliest date in Blaylock’s journal?”

“As best we can tell, August 1872, about five months after he arrived in Africa. On our time line, that’s a month after the
El Majidi
’s first reported sinking and at the beginning of her lost years.”

“Six years,” Remi echoed. “Where was she all that time?”

 

 

FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES to the south, Itzli Rivera sat in President Garza’s anteroom waiting to be summoned, as he had been for the past hour.

Garza’s executive assistant, a doe-eyed girl in her early twenties with glossy black hair and an hourglass figure, sat at her desk typing, her index fingers wandering over the keyboard and occasionally punching a key. Her expression was one of puzzlement.
As though she’s trying to finish a master-level Sudoku puzzle
, Rivera thought. Clearly, the woman’s administrative skills had not been a priority during the hiring process.

Hoping to kill some time, Rivera wondered if Garza had ordered the woman to take a Mexica name. If so, what would it be? As if on cue, President Garza’s voice came over the intercom on the woman’s desk, answering Rivera’s question.

“Chalchiuitl, you may send Mr. Rivera in.”

“Yes, sir.”

She smiled at Rivera and gestured toward the door with one of her ridiculously long fingernails. “You may—”

“I heard him, thank you.”

Rivera walked across the carpet, pushed through the double doors, and closed them behind him. He strode to Garza’s desk and stopped at semiattention.

“Sit down,” Garza ordered.

Rivera did.

“I was reading your report,” Garza said. “Do you have anything to add?”

“No, sir.”

“Let me summarize, if you don’t mind . . .”

“Go ahead, sir.”

“That was rhetorical, Itzli. You and your men, after being outwitted for days by these treasure hunters . . . these Fargos . . . You finally manage to take possession of the bell and transport it to Okafor’s island, only to have it stolen out from under your noses.”

Rivera nodded.

“Not only did they steal back the bell, but they also stole Okafor’s four-million-dollar helicopter.”

“And I lost a man. Nochtli fell from the helicopter and broke his neck.”

President Garza waved his hand dismissively. “You were vague about how the Fargos managed to get aboard the helicopter at all. Can you elaborate? Where were you when all this was happening?”

Rivera cleared his mouth and shifted nervously in his seat. “I was . . . unconscious.”

“Pardon me?”

“The man, Sam Fargo, attacked me aboard Okafor’s yacht. He surprised me. He clearly has some martial arts training.”

“Clearly.” Garza rotated his chair and gazed out the window. He drummed his fingers on his desk blotter for a minute, then said, “We have to assume they’re not going to give up. That could work in our favor. If they’re as clever as they seem, we know they’ll be visiting at least one of the areas we’ve already searched.”