“For me?” Olsen appeared confused, but Felix wondered if he detected a slight amount of fear too.
“Yes, it’s about what you found today.”
Olsen stopped pouring the warm water into a mug.
“What I found today?”
Felix carefully studied the man’s eyes. They failed to meet his own, and answered his question immediately.
Yes, Albert Olsen is trying to hide something.
“It’s quite all right, Albert. I don’t want to take it from you, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s just that I have a collection of local artifacts that have been discovered over the years, and I’m interested in one in particular. I have seen a number of drawings of it, and was hoping you may have stumbled upon it.”
Albert kept quiet, but nor did he deny his discovery.
Felix pulled out a rolled piece of paper with a drawing and opened it in front of him. “Did it look something like this?”
Albert stared at it for a moment and said, “Yes, it’s identical. Where did you get the drawing?”
“I was given it a long time ago, by someone who’d found it during an earlier expedition.”
“Is it valuable?”
“Yes, of course. Not in the sense that it is made out of gold or anything like that. But historically, it is worth a fortune. I once heard it described as the key to their greatest city.”
“What city? The place was a marsh before we came.”
“That’s not important.” Felix quickly changed the topic. He’d already said too much about THEM. “Did you show it to anyone?”
“No, of course not. Something like that looked as though it could be worth more than my entire life savings! I didn’t want anyone to steal it.”
“Of course… You’ve done the right thing,” he reassured Albert.
In one quick motion Felix slid the tip of the knife through the gap between Albert’s ribs and into his heart. It was as quick a death as could be contrived. A lifetime of training, and he’d never had the need to do so before.
Albert barely made a sound.
Felix wasn’t a born killer. And he took no pleasure in it. He stared at the boy’s face. Aghast, he noticed there was no hatred in Albert’s eyes and no pain, simply absent disbelief. Felix wanted more than anything to relieve the child from his anguish.
“I’m so sorry Albert, really I am,” Felix said. “But some things, I’m afraid, were supposed to remain buried — forever.”
Hank Worthington watched as the fifth marker pole was driven deep into the ground below the shallow water, forty feet out from the bank of the river. Today was the first day of the process of reclaiming the land from the sea, so that the man paying his wages could have his mansion built on prime real estate.
It wasn’t an entirely new idea for the Dutch, but on the outlying Trading Post, where land was plentiful, the return compared to labor required to achieve the task made it seem fanciful. Hank looked up, having heard the familiar sound of hammer on steel as the wooden marker pole was driven into the soft soil below until it struck bedrock. Tomorrow his team would begin the laborious task of backfilling the water below with rock and then soil.
He shook his head at its absurdity.
Built like a dike, and doubling as a fortress to guard the entrance to the main canal, which Mr. Brandt too had commissioned, the expansion onto the river seemed outlandish, even to him. And Hank was a 3rd generation master water engineer, whose family had been employed on a number of water projects in Amsterdam. But this was different.
“Felix Brandt is a fool,” he said out loud.
“Yes, but a very rich one,” his apprentice agreed.
“They’re the worst kind.” Hank pulled out the engineering plans to show his young apprentice. “Ordinarily, we would have supported this point here, where the natural bank of the river formed and then built his fortress above it, where it could still protect the entrance to the canal.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because Felix Brandt was specific. This spot, right here. He even took me out in a rowboat and showed me precisely where he wanted the new land to reach.”
His apprentice looked at the map depicting the landfill areas. “He wants a lot of new land? There’s nearly a square mile of it! I wonder why he doesn’t simply build further back. It’s not like land around here is scarce or valuable?”
“Indeed. Why not?” Hank waited for the boy to come up with an answer on his own. When none came, he said, “Felix gave some stupid excuse that he would then one day own the greatest amount of deep waterfrontage on the island, and therefore could command its trade.” Hank gave a supercilious smile and then continued, “But I think he did so simply to prove that what he wants, he can have.”
Out on the water, the familiar chime of hammer on steel continued as the sixth pole commenced being driven into the deeper water below.
Hank’s ears piqued to the sudden change in resonance.
That pole driver struck something other than sand, rock or wood. But what?
From the shore he watched as the men withdrew the wooden pole and attempted to reset it. By the third attempt, one of his men dived down to see what they had struck. The big man who’d entered the water climbed back onto the barge after holding his breath for nearly a minute.
Hank looked at the man’s face. Even from forty feet away, he could see that something was wrong. “Come with me. Let’s go see what the problem is.”
“I’ll get the rowboat.”
The two climbed into the small boat and his apprentice took the oars. Within a couple minutes they were tying up alongside the barge.
“What have we got?” Hank asked, taking the outstretched leathery hand of Jeroen, who was driving the piers. The two had worked together for nearly twenty years.
“We hit something hard. There’s no way we’re going to be able to drive anything through it.”
“That’s fine. We’ll build over it anyway.” Hank looked at Jeroen’s clothes, still dripping wet. “You’ve had a look. What have we struck?”
Jeroen looked nervous as he handed him a small ingot of orange metal. It could have been brass or even a copper alloy.
“You found it down there?”
“Yes. But I have no idea where it’s come from. There’s a lot of it down there. I think its best if you have a look for yourself.”
Hank looked at the water. It wasn’t quite spring and the ice had only recently thawed. He was going to say something but Jeoren stopped him.
“Trust me, you’re gonna want to see this.”
Not wanting to spend the rest of his day arguing over whatever the hell his men had found, he took his shirt off and dived into the water. The icy temperature stung him, but he forced his eyes open as he swam toward the bottom. It wasn’t deep. Maybe twenty or thirty feet at most. His head barely dipped the surface before he saw it.
It looked like the center of an old city. But nothing like any city he’d ever seen, or even heard of. And it was covered in the same orange colored, bright, metal that young Albert Olsen had discovered while digging in the canal. The entire place had the surreal appearance of a lost Egyptian city. Not that he’d ever seen one of those either. A friend of his had shown him sketches after visiting there when they were both students.
Hank returned to the surface and climbed the rope ladder onto the barge.
He could see Jeroen’s face — waiting to say ‘I told you so.’
“Well Hank, what do you make of that?”
“I’d better go to the owner with this one…” Hank said, without hiding the disgruntlement from his voice. “And that will mean delays.”
An hour later, Hank returned to the worksite. On the beach, a tent had been set up with a desk at its center — an office for himself and the architect. To the north it was protected from the wind by large piles of rock and soil in preparation for the build. Sitting opposite his desk, Jeroen and his apprentice waited for him. A glance at their faces told him they had both been waiting in expectation.