Lost City nf-5 Read online

  Sensing her change in mood, Austin put his arm around her shoulders.

  "Are you all right?"

  "It was so peaceful underwater. Then we surfaced and I saw the glacier." She shuddered. "It reminded me that I almost died under that thing."

  Austin studied the troubled expression in Skye's lovely eyes, which were fixed in the hundred-yard stare that shell-shocked troops sometimes get. "I'm not a shrink, but I've always found it helpful to confront my demons," he said. "Let's go for a boat ride."

  The unexpected suggestion seemed to bring her back to reality. "Are you serious?"

  "Grab a couple of bagels and a thermos of coffee from the mess and I'll meet you at the skiff. I like my bagels with raisins, by the way."

  Skye was skeptical, but she had come to have a great deal of confidence in Austin, and would probably have followed him to the moon on a pogo stick if he asked. Austin got the power skiff ready while she rounded up coffee and bagels from the galley and they set off for shore. They dodged floating chunks of ice and pulled the boat up at a dark gravel beach a few hundred yards from where the glacier narrowed and broke up in pieces as it encountered the lake.

  A short hike along the shore brought them to the glacier's sidewall. The icy bulwark rose several stories above the plain; its surface was pockmarked with caves and craters and twisted free-form sculptures created by freezing, melting and unimaginable pressures. The ice

  was covered with dirt and a deep, unearthly blue light emanated from the wrinkles and grottos.

  "There's your demon," Austin said. "Now, go up and touch it." Skye smiled wanly, approached the glacier as if it were alive and reached out and touched an icy knob with a fingertip. Then she placed both palms on the glacier and leaned her weight against the ice, eyes closed, as if she were hoping to push it away. "It's cold," she said with a smile.

  "That's because your demon is nothing but a big ice cube. It's the same way I think about the sea. It's not out to get you. It doesn't even know you exist. You touched it. You're still breathing." He lifted the pack he'd been carrying. "Consultation has ended. Time for brunch."

  Near the edge of the lake they found a couple of flat rocks to use as chairs and sat facing the water. Skye doled out the bagels and said,

  "Thanks for the exorcism. You were right about facing your fears."

  "I've had good experience in that area."

  She arched a brow. "Somehow I don't see you being afraid of anything."

  "That's not true. I was very afraid that I would find you dead." "I appreciate that, and I owe you my life. But I meant it in a different way. You seem fearless when it comes to your own well-being." He leaned close to her ear and whispered, "Would you like to know my secret?" She nodded.

  "I put on one hell of a good act. How's your bagel?" "Fine, but my head is awhirl. What do you make of this craziness?" Austin stared off at the anchored NUMA boat, thinking of Coleridge's description of a painted ship on a painted sea, and tried to put events in order.

  "Let's deal with what we know for starters." He sipped his coffee. "The scientists working the glacier find a man's body frozen in the

  ice, and it has been there for some time. An old helmet and a strongbox are found near the body. A man posing as a reporter takes the box at gunpoint and floods the tunnel. Apparently, he knows nothing about the helmet."

  "That's where my logical mind bogs down. Why did he try to kill us? We were in no position to do him any harm. By the time we got out of the tunnel, he would have been long gone."

  "I think he flooded the tunnel to cover up the Ice Man. You and the others happened to be in the way. Like the glacier. Nothing personal."

  She nibbled thoughtfully on her bagel. "That makes morbid sense, I suppose."

  Skye paused, her eyes going past Austin's shoulder. A cloud of dust was approaching at a high rate of speed. As the cloud neared, they could see that a Citroen was kicking up the dust. Fifi. The car skidded to a stop, and LeBlanc, Thurston and Rawlins got out and came over.

  "I'm so glad we caught you," LeBlanc said, his broad face wreathed in a smile. "I called the ship from the power plant and they said you had gone ashore."

  "We wanted to say good-bye," Thurston said.

  "You're leaving?" Skye said.

  "Yes," the glaciologist said, waving in the direction of the glacier. "There's no point in staying here with our observatory underwater. We're heading back to Paris. A helicopter will run us to the nearest airport."

  "Paris?" Skye said. "Do you have room for me?" "Yes, of course," LeBlanc said. He extended his hand. "Thank you again for saving our lives, Monsieur Austin. I would not like Fifi to be an orphan. She will stay at the power plant with Monsieur Lessard. We're going to talk to the power company about draining the observatory. Perhaps we can return next season."

  "I'm so sorry to be running off like this," Skye said to Austin. "But there's nothing more to be done here and I want to compile all my data for analysis."

  "I understand. The Mummichugs project is coming to an end. I'll stay on board to write up my report while the ship's heading back up the river. Then I'll catch a ride to the nearest railroad station and take the high-speed train to Paris for our dinner date." "Bien. Under one condition. I'm buying."

  "How could anyone in his right mind refuse an enticing offer like that? You can show me the town."

  "I'd like that," she said. "I'd like that very much." Austin brought Skye back to the ship to collect her belongings and gave her a ride to the beach where the helicopter awaited. She kissed him on both cheeks and on the lips, made him promise to call when he got to Paris, and climbed into the helicopter. Austin was on his way across the lake when the chopper passed overhead and he saw Skye waving at him from a window.

  Back on board, Austin unloaded the videocassette and digital disk from the submersible's cameras. He took them into the ship's dry lab and fed the digital images into a computer. He ran off prints showing the design on the plane's fuselage and examined them. Next, he zeroed in on the photos he had taken of the plane's engine until he found the one he was looking for. It showed markings on the engine block.

  He selected the engraved area with his cursor, zoomed in, refining the image as he enlarged it, until he could see the name of the manufacturer and a serial number. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the image for a moment, and then he reached for a phone that could connect him anywhere in the world and punched out a number.

  "Orville and Wilbur's flying bike shop," said a reedy voice. Austin smiled as he pictured the hawk nose and narrow face of the man at the other end of the line. "You can't fool me, Ian. I happen to know that the Wright Brothers closed their bicycle shop a long time ago."

  "Hell, Kurt, can't blame me for trying. I've been up to my earlobes trying to raise private funds for the Udvar-Hazy Center out at Dulles airport and I don't want to waste my time with small talk."

  Ian MacDougal was a former marine fighter pilot in charge of the archives division at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. He was the airborne equivalent of St. Julien Perlmutter, whose extensive library of nautical books was the envy of many academic institutions, and whose grasp of sea history was known the world round. The tall and lean MacDougal was the physical antithesis of the rotund Perlmutter, and he was far less flamboyant, but his encyclopedic knowledge of aircraft and their history matched St. Julien's grasp of the sea. "You can rely on me for a hefty contribution, Ian, and I'll try to spare the small talk," Austin said. "I'm in France and I need to identify a plane I found at the bottom of a glacial lake in the Alps."

  "I can always depend on you for a challenge." MacDougal sounded delighted to be distracted from fund raising. "Tell me about it." "Crank up your computer and I'll send you some digital photos." "Consider it cranked." ^

  Austin had already programmed the photos for transmission, and the pictures taken at the lake bottom whisked on cyber wings across the Atlantic in a millisecond. MacDougal had stayed on the line and Austin could hear him m
uttering to himself. "Well?" Austin said after a few moments.

  "I'm taking a guess, but from the distinctive cone-shaped engine housing, I'd say we're looking at a Morane-Saulnier. She was a World War One mono-wing fighter plane based on a racing plane. The little buzzard could out fly and outmaneuver almost any other fighter aircraft of the day. The gun and propeller synchronization setup was truly revolutionary. One of the Allied planes crashed, unfortunately,

  and Fokker copied the system and improved upon it. There's a moral there somewhere."

  "I'll let you deal with the moral complexities. Given what you know, do you have any idea how this plane got to the bottom of the lake?"

  "Fell out of the sky, obviously, which is what planes sometimes do. I can guess on the rest, but I'd probably be wrong. I do know someone who might be able to help you. He's only a couple of hours from

  Paris."

  Austin jotted down the information. "Thanks," he said. "I'll get my museum contribution to you as soon as I get back to Washington. In the meantime, give my regards to Wilbur and Orville."

  "I'll be glad to oblige."

  Austin hung up, and a moment later he was calling the number Ian had given him.

  SKYE SLAMMED the cover down on the thick reference book she had been reading and shoved it across her desk to join a tall stack of similar well-worn volumes. She hunched her shoulders and stretched her arms to work the kinks out of her muscles, and then leaned back in her chair, lips pursed, and stared at the helmet in front of her. She had always considered ancient weapons and armor simply as tools, nothing more than inanimate objects used in the bloody business of war, but this thing made her shiver. The oxidized black surface seemed to exude a malevolence she had never before encountered.

  After she had returned to Paris, Skye had taken the helmet to her office at the Sorbonne expecting that identification would be easy with the reference tools at her command. She had photographed the helmet, fed the images into her computer and searched through an extensive database compiled from hundreds of sources. She had started with her French archives, and then moved on to Italy and Germany, the countries that were once the primary armor centers.

  Finding no match, she'd expanded the country search to take in

  all of Europe, and when that search had bottomed out she moved to Asia and the rest of the world. She combed records going back as far as the Bronze Age. After the computer search fell flat, she turned to the printed page and exhumed every musty reference book in her library. She pored over old prints, manuscripts and ivory and metal carvings. In desperation, she researched the Bayeux Tapestry, but the conical headgear its warriors wore in battle bore no resemblance to the helmet sitting in front of her.

  The helmet was a contradiction. The workmanship was extraordinary and more characteristic of an ornamental than a war helmet, although the nicks and gouges marring the surface suggested that it could have been worn in battle. The apparent bullet hole was a puzzle all to itself.

  The design suggested an early origin. The weight was borne by the head as in the earlier helmets. Later models had an armet, the flared bottom that allowed the weight to be transferred to the shoulders via a collar called a gorget. The helmet was topped with a fan-shaped crest, another later innovation that added protection from a mace or sword.

  Helmet style evolved from the conical shape in the eleventh century to rounded helms in the twelfth century. The nose guards had expanded to protect the face, developing eye slits known as "sights," and ventilation openings called "breaths" came into being. German helmets tended to be heavy and spiky; the Italian models were rounder, reflecting the Renaissance influence.

  The most extraordinary thing about this helmet was the metal. Steel manufacture had started as early as 800 B.C." but it took hundreds of years to develop metal of such high quality. Whoever had forged this metal was a master. The strength built into this helmet's steel was evident in the dent in the crown known as a "proof mark." Someone had tested the metal with a pistol, or arquebus, and it had proved itself impenetrable. But as the bullet hole showed, each rise

  in the efficiency of defense produced a corresponding response in the effectiveness of attack. Armor finally became obsolete in the 1522 Battle of Bicocca. The enemy was gravity, rather than projectiles; armor simply became too heavy to wear.

  The face embossed on the visor was typical of sixteenth-century Italian armor. Artisans avoided embossing in combat helmets. Surface features had to be smooth and round, or shaped with planes to offer a glancing blow. Embossing could destroy the effectiveness of a glancing surface. She picked up her letter opener, actually an Italian dagger, and tried to catch the edge and point in the helmet. Despite the embossing and etching that covered the helmet, the metal had been cleverly fashioned to shed the blows.

  She came back to the steel again. No detail distinguished one armorer from another more than his ability to temper metal. She rapped her knuckles on the helmet, which gave forth a clear, bell-like sound, and then with her forefinger she traced a five-point star with "legs." She turned the helmet around. Seen from another angle the etching depicted a shooting star. She recalled seeing a sword from an English collection that had been made with iron from a meteorite. The steel was capable of being sharpened to a razor's edge. Why not a helmet? She made a note to have a metallurgist check it oufT

  Skye rubbed her tired eyes, and with a resigned sigh she reached for the phone and punched out a number. A man's voice came on the line. It was deep, and pleasantly cultivated. "Oui. Darnay Antiquites." "Charles. It's Skye Labelle."

  "Ah, Skye!" Darnay was clearly glad to hear her voice. "How are you, my dear? How is your work going? Is it true that you were in the Alps?"

  "Yes. That's why I'm calling. I came across an old helmet during my expedition. It's quite extraordinary and I'd like you to look at it. It has me stumped."

  "What about your wonderful computer?" Darnay teased. Darnay and Skye had had friendly arguments over the technological tools she used. He felt empirical experience gained through constant handling of artifacts was more valuable than browsing any database. She countered that the computer saved her valuable time. "Nothing is wrong with my computer," she said with mock indignation. "I've looked through every book in my library as well. I can't find an exact match."

  "I'm very surprised." Darnay was acquainted with Skye's reference library and knew it was one of the best he had ever seen. "Well, I'd love to look at it. Come over now if you'd like." "Bien. I'll be right along."

  She wrapped the helmet in a pillowcase, then put it in a shopping bag from Au Printemps and headed out for the nearest Metro station. Darnay's shop was on the Right Bank, down a narrow street next to a boulangerie that sent out mouthwatering aromas of baking bread. Printed in small gilt letters on the shop's door was the word ANTI-QUITES. In the window was an odd, dust-covered assortment of powder horns, flintlock pistols and a few rusty swords. It was not a display that would entice anyone into the shop, which was Darnay's intention. The door bell tinkled as she entered the shop. The dingy interior was dark and narrow, and empty except for a rusty suit of armor and some flyspecked cabinets holding a few poor replicas of antique daggers. A velvet curtain at the rear of the shop parted, and a wiry man dressed in black emerged from the widening ribbon of light. He cast a furtive glance at Skye, brushed by as silently as a shadow and left the shop, quietly shutting the door behind him.

  Another man stepped out of the back room. He was short, and in his seventies, and resembled the old film actor Claude Rains. He was impeccably attired in a dark blue suit and stylish red silk tie, but would have projected an air of elegance if he had been in a workman's smock. His dark eyes sparkled with intelligence. His hair and thin mustache were silver-gray and he was smoking a Gauloises in a cigarette holder, which he removed from his lips so he could kiss Skye on both cheeks.

  "That was fast," he said with a smile. "This helmet of yours must be a very important find."

  She returned the kisses. "That
's for you to tell me. Who's that man who just left?"

  "He is one of my, er, suppliers."

  "He looks like a sneak thief."

  An alarmed expression crossed Darnay's face. Then he laughed. "Of course. That's what he is."

  Darnay flipped the sign on his door to CLOSED, and then led her past the curtain to his office. In stark contrast to the worn-at-the-heels seediness of his showroom, the office-workshop was well lit by track lights and the desk and work space were of contemporary design. The walls were hung with weapons, but most of them were inferior items that he sold to less knowledgeable collectors. His top-grade inventory he kept safe in a warehouse.

  Although he teased Skye about her reliance on technology, he did business mostly through the Internet, and a glossy catalog, mailed to an exclusive list of buyers, that was hungrily awaited by dealers and collectors worldwide.

  Skye had first sought Darnay out for advice in spotting forgeries. She soon learned that his knowledge of old arms and armor surpassed that of some academics, including herself. They had become good friends, although it became apparent that he dealt in the shadowy world of illegal antiquities. In short, he was a crook, but a classy one. "Let's see what you have, my dear." He pointed to a brightly lit table that was used to photograph objects for the catalog.

  Skye removed the helmet from the bag and set it on the table, then pulled off the pillowcase with a flourish.

  Darnay gazed with reverence at the object. Then he walked

  around the table, puffing on his cigarette, bending low, with his face inches from the metal. After going through the dip-and-stand routine, he picked the helmet up, hefted the weight, held it high and then put it on his head. Wearing the helmet, he walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Grand Marnier.