AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Pardon.” The man stepped around Sam and stopped at the bumper of their rental car. He looked at a piece of paper, then the license plate, then turned back to them. “Mr. and Mrs. Fargo?”
“Yes.”
“I have a message for you. A Selma is trying to reach you. She said it is urgent you call her. You may use the phone inside, if you wish.”
They followed him inside and found a house phone in the lobby. Sam punched in his credit card number and dialed Selma. She picked up on the first ring. “Trouble,” she said.
“We haven’t had a cell signal since Saint Rhémy. What is it?”
“Yesterday when I was talking to you on the phone one of Rube’s bodyguards—Ben—was walking around the workroom. I didn’t think much of it at first, but it started nagging me. I did a scan on all the Mac Pros. Someone had installed a hardware keylogger, then removed it.”
“In English, Selma.”
“It’s essentially a USB drive loaded with software that records keystrokes. You plug it in and leave it. However long it was installed it downloaded everything I typed. Every e-mail, every document. Do you think Bondaruk got to him?”
“Via Kholkov. Doesn’t matter right now. Is he there now?”
“No, and he’s late for his shift.”
“If he shows up, don’t let him in. Call the sheriff if you have to. When we hang up, call Rube and tell him what you told me. He’ll handle it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Assume we’ve got company coming.”
They walked outside, grabbed their packs from the car, then circled to the back of the hotel and started up the slope. The grass was starting to green around the rock outcrops, and here and there they saw purple and yellow wildflowers poking up. When they reached the top of the hill, Sam pulled out his GPS unit and took a reading.
“You think they’re already here?” Remi said, scanning the parking area with her camera’s zoom lens.
“Maybe, but we can’t second-guess ourselves. There are hundreds of people here. Unless we want to leave and come back later, I vote we push on.”
Remi nodded.
Eyes fixed on the GPS screen, Sam walked south a hundred feet, then east for thirty, then stopped.
“We’re standing on top of it.”
Remi looked around. There was nothing. “You’re sure?”
“There,” Sam said, pointing beneath his feet. They knelt down. Faintly visible in the rock was a chiseled straight line, roughly eighteen inches long. Soon they could make out other ruts, some intersecting, others moving off in different directions.
“Must be what’s left of the foundation stones,” Remi said.
They walked to what they guessed would have been the center of the temple, then faced east. Sam took a bearing with the GPS, picked out a landmark on the other side of the lake, and they headed back down the hill. At the bottom they crossed the road they’d driven in on and followed a path along the shore, past a stone block bistro fronted by a wooden walkway, then onto a rock shelf that ran along the water to a sheer ledge. Here they dropped down and followed a trail around a small cove to another flat area littered with boulders and patchy grass. Above them the cliff shot up at a fifty-degree angle. In the shade of the peaks, the temperature had dropped ten degrees.
&n
bsp; “End of the line,” Sam said. “Unless we’re supposed to climb.”
“Maybe we missed something back the way we came.”
“More likely two hundred years of erosion turned whatever ‘bowl’ was here into a saucer.”
“Or we’re overthinking it and they were talking about the lake itself.”
A gust of wind whipped Remi’s hair across her eyes and she brushed it away. To Sam’s right he heard a hollow whistling sound. He snapped his head around, eyes scanning.
“What’s wrong?” Remi asked.
