Ramsey's Gold (Drake Ramsey Book 1) Read online

  “Sign there, by the X, if you would,” Lynch instructed. Drake did so and pocketed his license.

  “Well. There we have it. All done. This, young man, is yours,” Lynch said, presenting him with the cashier’s check. “And this is also yours.” He handed him the package. “Oh, and I’m afraid there’s one tiny caveat. It’s nothing, really.”

  “A caveat?” Drake repeated, instantly suspicious.

  “Yes. You’re to open the package while seated in this room, and read the note inside. After that, if you choose to do nothing else, I will return with another check for your two thousand dollars of expense money, and you may leave the contents of the package with me. I’ve been instructed, if that’s your choice, to forward it on to the largest museum in New York, and you may leave, your part in the matter finished.”

  “Wait. All I have to do is read a note from some lady I never heard of?”

  “Your aunt. Recently departed.”

  “Sure. Okay, go get the check. This won’t take long.”

  “As you wish. I’d suggest you be careful with the wrapping. You don’t want to tear the note,” Lynch said with a frown, and then stood. “I’ll be back shortly.”

  Drake waited until the heavy door had closed and smiled to himself. Fine. He’d humor the old codger. Play along, pretend interest, and then take the money and run. Twenty-five big ones. No, counting the extra two, twenty-seven. Added to the five he’d just gotten for Cranford, that was enough to lounge around on the beaches of Baja for a good year, if not longer.

  He leaned forward and began tearing at the brown paper, which to his eye was an old sandwich bag hurriedly sliced up and used for wrapping, and then remembered Lynch’s warning about going easy. He folded back the flaps, the cheap tape yellowed from age, and found a single creased sheet of binder paper sitting atop a five-by-seven battered brown leather book held closed with a grimy piece of twine. Drake gave it a cursory glance and opened the note. A flowing, clearly feminine hand filled the ruled page in blue ballpoint ink.

  Dear Drake:

  If you’re reading this, I’m dead. How or why isn’t important. What is important is that you know some things about your past. Important things. About your father.

  My brother.

  After his death, I moved from Portland, leaving everything behind. I did so because the men who killed him would be looking for me. As they would for your mother, who was a saint. By the way, I’m sorry she passed away. She’ll be missed.

  Where do I start? Best at the beginning.

  I was at your baptism. At your first four birthdays. At countless outings, picnics, dinners. Then everything changed. Your father went away and never returned. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Do you know the story of your name? You’re named after one of the greatest adventurers of all time: Sir Francis Drake. Your father admired his courage no end, which was probably his undoing. And your real last name is Ramsey. Drake Ramsey. Your mother and I changed our names after your father died, and yours, too. Why you don’t use the Ramsey name is one of the topics of this letter.

  Your father loved you more than life itself. Words can’t describe his joy when you came into the world. It breaks my heart that you never really knew him.

  Your father, Ford Ramsey, was an adventurer. A treasure hunter. He was a good man, but with a wild streak that couldn’t be tamed. Your mother knew it when she married him, and she did so willingly.

  He was killed searching for a lost Inca city said to contain the greatest treasure ever known. The journal contains his notes and his reasoning, up until he left for South America. Word arrived later that he’d died in the jungles there. Murdered, although the details are muddled. I know this because his trusted friend, who also changed his last name and is now using the name Jack Brody, returned from that trip with the news of his death.

  I have left you whatever money I’ve managed to cobble together in my new life. And the most precious gift I can offer – the words of your father, in his own hand, chronicling his thinking, and ultimately, his journey to his fate. Read it and guard it well. Its value is substantial.

  Your loving aunt,

  Patricia Ramsey

  Chapter Five

  Drake reread the note three times, wondering if it was for real. He had no memory of his father – or at least, nothing concrete. A vague recollection of a man at the first birthday party he could remember. Drake was four years old, wearing a red cowboy hat, playing pin the tail on the donkey. A hazy figure, male, tall, was there with his mother, but beyond that, he couldn’t form anything more. That was it for his dad, whom his mother had claimed had died in an accident. Beyond an insistence that he’d loved Drake and been a good man, she’d been reluctant to talk about him. When she did, it was always generalizations: that he’d been a writer and photographer, very smart, engaging. And that Drake shared some important qualities with him – a photographic memory and an ability to organize seemingly random data into patterns that were obvious to him, but eluded everyone else.

  The few photos she’d shown him were of a handsome man in his early forties with a full head of Drake’s longish brown hair and a twinkle of merriment in his eye. Their resemblance was strong, but it was one that elicited nothing from Drake but an ache in his gut at the lost opportunity to know his dad.

  And now, here was a connection with the past, his father’s thoughts and observations set down on paper in his own hand.

  Ultimately, his curiosity got the better of him, and he unwound the string with a trembling hand before cracking the worn cover open to the first page.

  Lynch returned, and seeing Drake reading the journal, left him to commune with the ghosts of the past in peace. Drake didn’t notice, so engrossed was he in his father’s account, and barely registered the passage of an hour. When Lynch entered again, Drake looked up from the journal as though surprised.

  “I see you elected to read what Patricia left for you,” the attorney said.

  “I…it’s really remarkable. What do you know about it?”

  “Absolutely nothing beyond what I’ve told you. I was to arrange for you to come here, give you the check and the package, and give you Patricia’s final instructions. Which brings me to the next point. Have you decided whether you wish to keep it, or leave it with me for donation to the museum?”

  Drake shook his head, pushed back from the table, and rose. “I’m taking it.”

  “Then I have a further instruction that was based on your choice. Patricia had an insurance policy. Not a fortune, but substantial. I’ve been authorized to release the funds to you when they’re paid by the company.”

  Drake hesitated. “Substantial? How substantial?”

  “I believe the amount is seventy thousand dollars.”

  Drake sat down again. He’d been broke yesterday, chasing scumbags through sketchy neighborhoods, and now he’d come into almost a hundred grand…and the most fascinating account he’d ever read, even though he was only halfway through it.

  “Really? When will the policy pay out?” he asked.

  “I’m waiting for the death certificate. Once I have that, it shouldn’t be more than five to ten days.”

  Drake nodded mutely. He leaned forward, his hands folded in front of him on the table, the journal next to him. “How well did you know…Patricia?”

  Lynch looked like he’d been expecting the question. “She was referred to me by another client. I handled some small legal matters for her. Contract review. That sort of thing. And of course, her will and estate planning, such as it was.”

  “You say she died. How?”

  “A car accident. The coroner said she died instantly on impact, so she didn’t suffer.”

  “Where did she live?”

  “In Idaho.” Lynch didn’t elaborate, and Drake sensed that he wouldn’t be forthcoming with any more information. But he had to try.

  “Do you have any idea why she’d have changed her name?”

  Lynch shook his head an
d cleared his throat. “You now have all the information I do. Perhaps you could leave me your banking details, and I’ll arrange for a wire transfer when we receive the insurance payout?”

  Drake closed his eyes and recited his bank details from memory, which Lynch dutifully recorded on the ledger’s signature page. When he was done, Lynch rose and cleared his throat.

  “That’s it, then. I’ll contact you before we send the funds so you know they’re on their way. Thank you for coming in. Oh, and here’s the check for the two thousand, along with three hundred dollars for your hotel.”

  Drake took the check. The firm had paid for his airline ticket, so that concluded their business, other than the insurance. Lynch shook hands with Drake and then showed him out to the waiting area. Drake asked the receptionist to call him a taxi and took the elevator to the ground level, his father’s journal in one pocket and a small fortune in the other.

  He had the driver take him to the nearest branch of the bank that had issued the checks, and waited patiently in line before cashing them, ignoring the suspicious look of the porcine teller at his request for the entire amount in hundred-dollar bills.

  The cab was still in the lot when he came out of the bank, wads of hundreds in the pockets of his cargo pants. He gave the driver his hotel name and settled into the seat. His mind raced at how his day had gone thus far: He now had a stack of Benjamins two inches thick, no urgent plans, and his father’s legacy to pore over.

  Drake ate a late lunch, treating himself to a beer with his hamburger as he read at a quiet table at the back of the hotel restaurant. When the waiter arrived to take his empty plate, Drake was surprised – half an hour had flown by like seconds as he’d been sucked into the little book. He paid the bill, returned to his room, and spent the rest of the day reading. By evening he’d finished, and the hotel courtesy pad was filled with scribbled notes.

  According to Ford Ramsey, in the 1600s, persecuted by the invading Spanish, the Incas had spirited away the empire’s collected wealth to a new capital in the jungle where it would be safe: Paititi, the Inca city of gold. For a century, the city prospered, and then something changed – as near as Ramsey had been able to put together, the water that fed the metropolis became tainted and the population lost the ability to reproduce. Ultimately the last inhabitants passed away, leaving a ghost city in the jungle. Since then, for hundreds of years, adventurers had gone in search of it, returning empty-handed…when they returned at all. Ramsey had collected every bit of data from even the most obscure sources and cobbled together a rough idea of the city’s location, somewhere in the eastern jungles of Peru, or the westernmost edges of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. He’d isolated a spot where a meteor had struck at some point in the 1700s, possibly contaminating the water table, and had narrowed his search to that region.

  The journal described in detail the logic his father had used to arrive at his deductions, which included his conviction that a set of outposts had been set up by the Incas along the route to Paititi to guide travelers to the city. Find the remaining outposts, and Paititi was within reach. Drake’s father believed he’d figured out where the final outposts in the chain were, after his penultimate trip to Peru.

  When Drake got to the final chapter, the story took a more ominous turn. In dispassionate language, his father described being approached by an unnamed American intelligence service and been made an offer he couldn’t refuse, a secret conscription he’d been forbidden to share with anyone.

  That entry was the last in the journal.

  Drake sat back and eyed the little book. His investigative reporter instinct was aroused, and by the final pages he better understood why his father had felt compelled to go in search of the lost city. Not only because Paititi would have been a once-in-a-lifetime find, but because he’d apparently been forced to cooperate in the interests of national security – although why an Inca city was of interest to the U.S. government was perhaps an even greater mystery than Paititi itself.

  Drake stared at the notes and gathered his conflicted thoughts. He’d just gotten a glimpse of how his father’s brain worked – the familiar gathering of seemingly disparate information and recognition of a symmetry nobody else had seen – and in spite of his better judgment, he felt himself getting sucked into his father’s world. After studying the scrawled names and circling several, he activated his iPad, did a search for Paititi and found numerous sites. He read about the legend of the lost treasure, and even as he did so he realized that he, too, felt the tug of the city of gold.

  Not that he was planning on actually searching for any Inca treasure. That was idiocy. But he couldn’t see any harm in trying to locate his father’s closest friend to learn what he knew about Ford Ramsey’s last days. Drake certainly had the spare time to do it, now that he’d lost his job and had money in his pocket.

  The first step would be to use his skip-tracing skills to track the man down. Drake loaded a website he used to locate fugitives and typed. The interface flashed at him twice. He sat back as it churned, the letters blinking hypnotically onscreen. A window popped up and he studied the readout and then entered more information. Another menu illuminated, and it quickly became obvious that it wouldn’t be as straightforward as he’d hoped. There were hundreds of hits, and Drake had little else to go on other than the man’s new name, which was as vanilla as they came.

  Jack Brody.

  That’s all he had.

  But with perseverance, it would be enough.

  Chapter Six

  The sun was setting by the time Drake landed at the San Jose airport, the afternoon flight from Seattle having been delayed for two hours. He exited into the parking lot and made his way to his car, anxious to spend some serious computer time running down the right Jack Brody, which he’d failed to do on his tablet, adding to the frustration of being stranded at the airport.

  Pink and orange ribbons of high clouds marbled the twilight sky as he pulled out of the lot. When he rolled down his window to pay the attendant, the air felt heavy and moist with the approach of a springtime storm. The ride home was typically slow as the tail end of rush hour clogged the freeways, and he was seized by an unexpected bout of melancholy as he inched past endless anonymous strip malls and car dealerships, altars of commercialism in a land that worshipped consumption.

  Two days of newspapers had collected on the stoop of his apartment when he eventually made it home. He kicked them aside and pushed the door open before stepping inside and glancing around. Drake paid too much rent every month for his one-bedroom unit in Menlo Park, where the local economy was driven by Silicon Valley economics that had spread like a metastasizing tumor, making the entire southern peninsula impossibly expensive for those not involved in software or the development of specialized electronics. He flipped on the light and moved into the laughably small section of the apartment allocated to dining.

  Drake retrieved the three bundles of hundred-dollar bills from his pockets and set them on the table, pausing to consider how little space almost thirty thousand dollars occupied. Eyeing the princely sum, he was struck by how inconsequential the pile of currency appeared. It seemed like a cheat. It would have taken him six to eight months of skip-tracing and apprehending felons to make that much – the better part of a year risking his life, and that’s all it looked like.

  He left the money and walked into the kitchen. After a quick scan of his bare cupboards, he pulled the refrigerator open and studied the contents with dismay: a loaf of moldy wheat bread, four high-caffeine sodas, a bag of leftovers from an Italian meal from four days ago, and seven bottles of Rolling Rock beer. He retrieved the white polystyrene container and eyed the half lasagna inside skeptically. After a few cautious sniffs he slid it into the microwave with a shrug and opened one of the beers.

  The damned journal had put him in a morose mood he couldn’t seem to shake. Compared to his father’s life, his was as mundane as a fry cook’s. While Dad had been planning a journey into the Amazon jungle
every night after work, what did Drake have to show for his efforts? A dead-end job chasing derelicts, a car on life support, and a nonexistent love life. A fine state of affairs for a promising student who’d graduated near the top of his class, ‘a gifted writer with a keen analytical mind,’ as one of his professors had enthused. All that had done him zero good in the real world. He couldn’t even get a job writing copy for one of the ad agencies in the Valley, and his freakish ability to spot patterns hadn’t translated into any career advantage, even if it had enabled him to coast through his math and science classes.

  The ping of the microwave pulled him from his reverie, and the odor of questionable Sicilian surprise wafted through the space. He unceremoniously pushed the money on the dining room table aside and sat down with his feast, which he consumed with plastic utensils provided by the Lebanese couple who’d bafflingly chosen Italian cuisine as their specialty.

  He chewed the tough layers of suspect pasta with mechanical determination, his mind elsewhere. As he swallowed the last bite, he checked his watch and considered his options for the evening. The choices were hitting one of the local watering holes and throwing some of his newfound wealth around in the hopes of attracting female company, or settling in for a long evening of plodding research as he attempted to triangulate his father’s friend. An image of himself standing in a darkened bar, hundred-dollar bills plastered all over his naked body, sprang to the forefront of his imagination. Perhaps he could construct an elaborate fan of hundreds, like a strutting peacock’s tail, announcing his mating availability to the willing hens…

  The visual convinced him to opt for research, although he rewarded his diligence with another beer, the green bottle his companion for another tedious night of solitude in front of a flickering screen.