By the time Aliana climbed through the opening in the ship, and reached the sandy area where the dozen or more footprints indicated others had been entering, she found James’s hand, reaching down to help her up.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Not a problem.”
“Any luck?”
“Yeah, I found it!” James said, showing her a number of Rodriguez’s gold coins. “This is going to really piss him off.”
“What about Sam?”
“No idea. How about you have a quick look, and I’ll load up the Mole.”
“You’re unbelievable James!” she said, deciding to look around the ship herself.
“Thanks,” James said, as he put his dive mask back on his face and dropped back into the water with a bag full of gold coins.
Aliana then looked through the first few rooms, quickly making certain that Sam wasn’t there, lying injured or worse — dead — before moving on to the next ones. It didn’t take her long to clear every room in the ship capable of being easily accessed.
At the back of the ship, she saw that a large amount of sand had intentionally been removed. Shining her flashlight on it, she immediately saw how Sam finally determined the Mahogany Ship had been a fake.
The massive wall of concrete had been buried with no more than a few feet of sand, to give the image of the back half of the ship being filled with sand.
It was time to go. Nothing more could be achieved by walking around the fake shipwreck.
“We’re out of here,” she said to James, who was hurriedly shoving the last of the gold coins in another big bag.
“Okay, can you give me a hand with the second bag? I think I might have overloaded it, and I’d hate to leave Rodriguez with one of his coins.”
Not bothering to get into another fight with the man, she picked the smaller of the two bags, and returned to the mole.
After the water was expelled from the diving hatch, Tom helped her out of her dive gear, and then said, “I’m afraid, this is where the rescue mission ends.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“See the power gauge? We’re down to 65 percent.”
“So, can’t we wait until it gets to 50 percent?”
“No, it’s going to draw a lot more power to get back up those rapids,” Tom said. “Don’t worry. We’ll come back for him.”
Four hours later, the three were back on the surface, and Tom drove the mole back to the helicopter, ready to be unloaded. Aliana listened as James started whistling a happy tune to himself, while loading the several bags of gold Spanish coins into a safe aboard the helicopter.
“Damn it, James, you’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
He stopped whistling and replied, “And why shouldn’t I be? Traversing a grade six black water run, in a cross between a tank and a submarine, while stealing gold from a rich asshole — and you know that gold is always one of the most favorite things to rich people, and I should know.”
“You forgot the part about not being able to rescue your son, or have you forgotten?”
James looked amused, and said, “No, of course not, how could I? You kept reminding me of it every few hours.” He then opened a prepacked lunchbox containing more than twenty sandwiches, and said, “Lunch anyone? I’m starving.”
“Shouldn’t we be back down there trying to find your son?”
“And why should we do that?”
“Jesus, James, don’t you care for your son’s wellbeing, even just a little?”
“Of course I do… but I’m sure he’s quite capable of coming out on his own. Honestly, sometimes I think you don’t really know my son at all, do you?”
“How can you be so uncaring, and yet so certain that he will make it out on his own?”
James smiled at her, only the slightest guilt visible. “Because he’s already done so.”
“Sam’s already out of the subterranean waterway?” Aliana asked, too stunned by the news, to be angry.
“Yes, got out a couple days ago.”
“What do you mean, ‘he got out a couple days ago?’ We’ve been searching for him the past two days, and I was worried sick that he was dead. You knew he was out, but still we went in to get the gold!”
“Yeah, something like that. If it makes you feel better, Sam told me to.”
“He told you to. Really?”
“Well, he did say to make sure to keep you safe and hidden, while he was away. So I thought, why not make Rodriguez pay in the process?”
“I thought he was dead, you fucking asshole!” Aliana, for the third time in as many days, since meeting up with James, was ready to kill him. “Hang on. You said while he’s away… where the hell has he gone?”
“Longjiang, China, of course.”
“Oh, of course,” she agreed facetiously. “What the hell’s he doing there?”
“Elise sent him.”
“Why did she send him there?” Aliana paused, as she heard the words in her own ears. “And who’s Elise?”
James smiled, speaking slowly as he would to a small child, while explaining something complex. “He’s gone to meet a man name Jie Qiang, who might just know exactly where the Mahogany Ship was left.”
“And what about the other one… the woman you mentioned?”
James stared at her, amusement on his face at her concern at the mention of another woman. “And Elise is a computer whiz that my son hired years ago. She used to consult for the NSA and the FBI until a disagreement on the term ‘freedom of information’ made her resign — but not without leaving a backdoor into their computer systems, granting her unhindered, and untraceable, access to an immeasurable amount of information.”
“Okay… so why does Elise think Jie Qiang knows where the Mahogany Ship was left?”
“Because one of his ancestors built it, while the other executed the last man to return from its fatal voyage.”
Chapter Seventeen
Sam took a commercial flight to China, using a local carrier, and under an alias passport that Elise had prepared for him. He read the email again on the long flight, and recalled the conversation he’d had with the man. Sam had almost deleted the message the first time he saw it, concerned that it might be a ruse orchestrated by Michael Rodriguez or one of his men.
The email had been titled “In the unlikely event you haven’t been murdered yet.”
He then had Elise look into the email account and run a check on where the message had originated. Determining that it had come from Longjiang, in the northern province of Heilongjiang of the People's Republic of China, she then discovered that the original sender came from a small fishing village, with no known ties to Michael Rodriguez. The only notable history that she could find on the man, was that his entire family had been murdered two years ago.
Elise had suggested he read the letter, and then contact the man through an intermediary.
Sam had read the letter carefully.
Then read it again.
He remembered thinking that, if it was a ruse, it certainly was a very clever one.
By the time he’d finished the conversation, Sam had decided that he must fly directly to meet the man in Longjiang.
Arriving at Qiqihar Sanjiazi Airport, Sam quickly cleared customs, and then took a taxi to a park in Longjiang, overlooking the water of the Long River.
He paid the taxi driver and then, taking out three times the requested fee, asked the driver to wait for him. The driver, staring at the money, assured him he would wait.
Sam walked through the park until he reached two sets of tourist chairs. Sitting down, he examined the large river ahead. Within minutes, another man came and sat next to him.