Ancient Shadows

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Idaho

“Berosus is dead.”

“Damn!” Hank Bennett’s hand tightened on the satellite phone at the private eye’s news. Bennett, founder and onetime owner of the most advanced internet security program in existence, had spent years searching for Berosus. Just that morning he found a photo of the old priest in an Italian newspaper online. He immediately contacted a private investigator he knew in Italy, Lorenzo Fermi, and told him to find Berosus and the pearl. “What about the pearl?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It wasn’t in his room at the hospital, and we can’t find where he was living. Frankly, we suspect he slept on the streets or homeless shelters.”

“Not good enough!” Bennett fumed. He stood in his cabin high on a mountain side in an unprotected area in central Idaho. It was called “unprotected” mainly because the feds, who controlled most of the forest and wilderness lands, never bothered to formally decide if it belonged to the eastern Bitterroot forest, or the western Nez Perce forest. As a result, no one watched the hundreds of thousands of acres of no-man's-land, with no phone lines or cell towers, and no electricity beyond what could be supplied by a generator.

“Signore, the priest didn’t have what you want.” Fermi kept his tone calm. “The man had nothing.”

“Do I have to come there myself to investigate?” Bennett raged. “I’ve paid you good money, more than good. And now he’s dead. Where could he have hidden it? Have you done anything at all to earn the money I sent you?”

“Sì, sì! I heard that someone, an American, went to the hospital asking about him. I’m trying to track him down, but if he’s asking, most likely he doesn’t have it either.”

“An American? That’s bad, extremely bad. Find out everything you can about him,” Bennett insisted. “In the meantime, the priest was Chaldean. There can’t be that many of them in Florence. Someone’s got to know him. Find whoever knows him, and find where he was living, where his possessions are. Do I have to do your thinking for you?” Bennett yelled. “And do whatever it takes, do you hear me? If you want to see the bonus I promised, you’ll get some answers for me—useful answers.”

“Yes, Mr. Bennett. I will not disappoint you.”

“You had better not.”

Bennett ended the call and walked to the window, planning his next step. He was in his mid-sixties, but would have looked much younger if he trimmed his light brown hair and bushy beard so that the few frizzy strands of gray wouldn’t stand out, giving him the appearance of an aging hippy. A thin man, his face seemed concave from his cheekbones to his jawline, and his eyes were two small, gray-blue circles surrounded by pale lashes.

He looked out on a western branch of the Rockies, broad, rugged mountains, sliced by glaciers into jagged monoliths, many of which had ever known a human footstep. People who opined from their small, crowded urban residences that creatures like Bigfoot couldn’t possibly exist or some authoritative person would have sighted and photographed them, had never seen an expanse of mountains like this. Some considered it the most rugged land in the continental U.S.—roadless, impregnable, and threatening.

As much as he cherished the solitude of the area, the land had a sameness to it despite its beauty, and a loneliness that could drive a man mad.

People who knew Bennett would swear he’d gone crazy long before moving there, however. Madness was the only explanation they could give for Bennett leaving the world of information technology ten years earlier. Some of his colleagues swore that if he hadn’t sold his company, his fortune one day might have neared a billion dollars.

But Bennett had walked away from all he knew and sold all he owned. He owed no explanation and gave none. Why should he? Those authoritative know-it-alls thought the item he had spent his adult life tracking did not exist.

They were wrong.

His gray tabby leaped onto the window sill and then let out a loud squawk followed by a strange chattering noise at a squirrel on the opposite side of the window, the kind of clicking sound that told him every sinew in the feline’s body wanted nothing so much as to sink its teeth into the furry little critter’s neck.

He understood the feeling perfectly.