Charlie aimed his Maglite into the tunnel, revealing an opening fifty or sixty feet down, maybe the entry to another cavern. Shifting the beam to the right, he saw a wall coated in silt and dirt. Unlike the ceiling and floor, the wall was flat, undoubtedly man-made.
“That’s the gold,” Drummond said with no more enthusiasm than if he were showing Charlie the contents of his sock drawer.
“What’s the gold?”
“That wall.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The other wall too.”
Charlie swung his beam across the tunnel. Amidst the grime, streaks of yellow metal flashed. “Walls made of gold. How would that even be possible?”
“Fielding and I used to putter around this area, using sonar to find places like this that couldn’t be picked up by eyes in the sky. The idea was, if you’re a prospective client and you’re taken to a subterranean weapons cache on a tiny deserted island fifty miles from anywhere, you more readily believe that you’re seeing an actual nuclear device.”
“I’ll buy that. What about the fifty-foot-long slabs of gold?”
Drummond ambled into the tunnel. “Oh, that, right. Long story.”
Charlie followed him. “So you didn’t just order them from Sears and Roebuck?”
“In 1797, the Venezuelans organized a conspiracy against the Spanish regime. The Spanish colonial governor in San Isidro worried that the rebels would seize the gold that the Spanish colonists had previously seized from the natives, chiefly the golden roof of the church, which was worth two million dollars.”
“In 1797,” Charlie repeated, brushing a stripe of the metal and pondering its current value.
“So the Spaniards found a sea captain whom they thought they could trust to take the roof panels to Spain. But they were wrong about him: He and his crew turned pirate. The loot’s infamy made it impossible to traffic, though. So the pirates secured it here, intending to return when things cooled down. But they died in a cannon fight with a Spanish man-o’-war before they had the chance. And although there have been hundreds of attempts, no one found the treasure.”
At the tunnel’s end, half thinking he’d imagined the gold, Charlie turned, taking it in again. “Until you did?”
“Right.”
“So why was Fielding hunting for it for the last couple of years?”
“He had his dive teams search in the wrong places, which allowed him to go about his real work. Eventually, he would have ‘happened on’ this cavern, I suppose.”
Charlie bounced his beam off the floor to better see his father’s face. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t you sell the gold off yourselves? You’d still have your secret cavern.”
“For one thing, we would have had the same problem the pirates did.”
“You and Fielding? Come on. You guys trafficked nuclear weapons.”
Drummond shrugged. “I suppose we could have sold the treasure, if we had wanted to.”
Charlie, whose upbringing had been modest bordering on Spartan, couldn’t fathom his father’s indifference. “You ever even consider it?”
“We were occupied with the job that brought us here in the first place.”
“That gold is easily worth a hundred million-”
“We thwarted an actual nuclear incident in 2005,” Drummond said with finality.
“You would at least have bolstered your Marvin Lesser cover. We could have lived in a villa on the Baie de Fort-de-France, driven Lotuses …”
“Living the Lesser cover would have been too time-consuming. I needed to be either in the field or at the office.”
Drummond’s base of operations was Perriman’s musty, overheated, low-rent office in Manhattan.
“If memory serves, the washing machine is in here,” he said, rounding a corner into another, darker cave, not much larger than a van.
And, other than dirt and a spiderweb the size of a volleyball net, empty.
If memory serves resounded harshly in Charlie’s mind.
“Latex,” Drummond said, batting aside the spiderweb. “Otherwise we’d get bugs.”
He leaned into the damp, rocky wall and a door opened inward, revealing a small room. Charlie shot his Maglite beam inside, illuminating a white, top-loading Perriman Pristina, bound to a wooden pallet that rested on a dolly. The washer’s housing had dings, spots of rust, and a light coating of muck. A good deal of the spongy orange insulation around the power cord appeared to have been chewed away, as if rats had mistaken it for cheese.
“Probably in all of history, this is the happiest a man has been at seeing a washing machine,” Charlie said. “Unless it is just a washing machine.”
Wrestling with the plastic strips binding the machine to the pallet, Drummond pried open the lid and peered in. He grunted his confirmation that the Pristina indeed contained a nuclear device.
Charlie felt a jubilation well up in him, like bubbles in champagne.
“Better check that the serial number’s still there,” Drummond called, interrupting Charlie’s reverie of life with Alice enhanced by the proceeds from the treasure of San Isidro.
Charlie shone his light, revealing a metal band glued to the top of the control panel. He recognized the sequence of fifteen one- and two-digit numbers as the detonation code made to look like the manufacturer’s serial number.
He waited for the reality of their accomplishment to sink in. Then he would leap up or shout or-
“Well, are you going to lend a hand?” asked Drummond, setting about getting the washer out.
“Okay.” Charlie helped push the dolly into the tunnel. He guessed his father was averse to celebration prior to the completion of a mission.
“I was a big fan of our Pristina line even before we increased the cubic footage of the wash basket,” Drummond said, batting aside a tree root. “No one’s going to argue that we have the vibration control or that we’re designed as well as some of the highfalutin brands, but you won’t find as many wash cycle options at twice the money.”
The spy had reverted to the old appliance salesman suffering from Alzheimer’s. Charlie felt shortchanged; the transformation had robbed them of the shared exultation their discovery warranted. At least the timing wasn’t terrible for once, he thought, until, displacing a vine, he saw a tall policeman standing near the beached runabout.
Drummond came to a halt.
Charlie had DeSoto’s Beretta wedged into the back of his waistband. The policeman’s gun was holstered on his right hip. His right hand was occupied with a flashlight.
Spinning toward them, the cop called out, “They’re here!”
Five other officers came galloping from the parts of the tiny island that they had evidently been searching.
Returning his attention to Drummond and Charlie, the cop said, “Luckily the owner of the Riva installed LoJack.”