“That really was spectacular,” she said, and now he noticed, she was breathing hard.

He said nothing. He didn’t think she was referring to the waterfall.

“That name you hollered.” She paused then to gulp in air. “It has special significance for Skull and Bones, you know.”

“What name?”

“Geronimo.” Although they could still hear the rush of the falls off to their left, the noise was muffled, and they didn’t have to shout to hear each other anymore. She spoke in spurts, gulping air between her words. “The real one, the Indian, he plays a part in the whole mythology about Skull and Bones. I did a lot of research about Bones when I found out what Michael had written on his hand. Most folks claim there is more fiction than fact in the Geronimo myth, but according to the story, Prescott Bush, father to one president and grandfather to another, had a bunch of his fellow Bonesmen visit him when he was stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Their weird idea of a prank was to dig up Geronimo’s grave, steal his skull, and take it back to New Haven as some sort of trophy.”

“Fun bunch of guys.”

 “Yeah.” Riley stopped on the trail, bent at the waist and rested her hands on her knees. Then she straightened up and took a deep breath. “They’re supposed to have quite a collection of them in the Tomb. Skulls, I mean.”

“The Tomb?”

“That’s the name of their headquarters on campus. Silly, isn’t it? That’s why I can’t really see this bunch of boisterous, grave-robbing frat boys as the engineers of some New World Order.”

Cole knew it would take time to make her understand what they were up against. There was nothing funny about these guys. “According to my old man, there was another not so silly side to Prescott Bush. He was a director of a bank that was seized during the war because it was owned by Nazis.”

“Really? I’d never heard that.”

“Good old capitalism. Make money where you can. Morals be damned. In the journals, my father never points fingers. He kept everything either very vague or enciphered. Otherwise, I never would have gotten my hands on the journals. And, he wasn’t sure.  See, according to him, these guys aren’t spies for the other side. They’re not enemy sympathizers. They believe in the strength of the U.S. In fact, they build the weapons and equipment that make us strong. But the last thing they want to see is the world at peace because then there is nowhere near the consumption of goods and services like there is during a war.”

When they reached the top of the trail, Theo was waiting for them at the edge of the stream. The water flowed deep and fast just before plunging off the cliff. He held up the GPS and shouted. “Hey, it’s less than a quarter of a mile ahead now. Come on.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Indian River, Dominica

March 27, 2008

1:15 p.m.

When Cole first saw the tree, he knew it had to be the one. He felt like he was starting to think like the old man — and he knew he would have picked that tree. Above the falls, they had found more rapids, and while there were stretches where they were able to hike up on the dirt banks, too often the shrubbery and low hanging trees forced them onto the slippery, algae-covered rocks at the edge of the stream. Theo had been calling out numbers, telling them they were getting closer, and then Cole saw the biggest tree trunk he had seen yet. The old man would have chosen an attention grabber like that. It was his style. The massive roots covered an area at least twelve feet in diameter. He didn’t know what kind of tree it was, but the proportions were so fantastic, he half expected to find a small door between the roots with Bilbo Baggins’ name on it.

He felt Riley looking at him as he stared at the enormous tree. “Wow. That’s an impressive tree,” she said.

Theo picked his way through the underbrush and stood next to the giant trunk. “According to the GPS, we are now on the latitude fifteen degrees, thirty-four minutes, and fifteen seconds.” He began to hike around the trunk, and he was out of sight when he yelled, “It would be nice if we could find a big red X on the ground right about now. This looks like a rather large area.”

“Cole,” Riley said, “now that we’re here, it seems a bit stupid to ask, but —” She made a little half turn like Vanna White.  “Why here? If your father was trying to hide instructions on how to find a submarine, why hide it half way up a mountain in the middle of a jungle?”

“I don’t know what to tell you that won’t make you think I’m even crazier. But my father saw the world differently than anyone I have ever known. Three years ago when he was here in the islands, he was already paranoid. But then again,” he tried to smile at her, “is it paranoia if someone really is out to kill you? He believed that his research had attracted the attention of these people. James Thatcher lived in a place he called the ‘tween. It was a world of shadows. I guess he knew I’d figure it out and find my way here, but he was pretty sure they wouldn’t.”

“You make me wonder what the hell I’m doing here when you talk like that.”

“Hey, Cole. Over here. Look!” Theo was perched on one of the huge razorback roots, and he had been unloading gear out of his backpack. Now his nose was an inch from the bark, and he was tilting his glasses up to see something.

Cole and Riley pushed their way through the underbrush to join him. The writing was crude. Cole figured his father had done it with a small knife. Carved in the bark of the tree was the word Liberte.

He held up the coin to show her in case Riley didn’t remember. Then he picked up the folding shovel from Theo’s pack and struck the ground between the roots. His arms felt the impact when the shovel clanged against hard wood. There were more roots under the surface that he couldn’t see. He tried again in another spot. It seemed the whole area — even ten feet away from the trunk — was a part of the massive root system. He was still searching for dig-able dirt when Riley called out.

“There’s another one over here.”

Cole handed Theo the shovel and then made his way through the underbrush to the smaller tree where Riley stood. She pointed. There, carved in the same crude letters was the word Egalite. 

“Good find,” he said. “That’s two, but there are three words on the coin.”

Riley swung her head around and surveyed the surrounding trees. “And with three, you could get a precise triangulated position.”

“You stay here,” Cole said. “I’ll go look. Theo,” he called. “Stay by that tree.”

It only took him a couple of minutes to find the word Fraternite carved into the bark of a large gumbo limbo.

“Okay, now let’s all walk the shortest distance to the center.”

Theo still had the shovel, and there was very little underbrush at the point where they met. “Looks like the ground has been cleared here,” he said as he thrust the spade into the ground. “Ground’s soft, too.” He tapped the overturned spade and a handful of dirt fell to the ground alongside the small hole.

Cole grabbed the shovel. The dirt was soon flying. The muscles in his back were feeling the strain of bending into the deepening hole. He knew his father would have been more than thirty years older than Cole when the old man was here. That is if he was here. Cole had hit more dry holes than he wanted to think about since coming to these islands.

He had dug down over two feet, and he was beginning to doubt that they had found the correct location, when he heard a clink as his shovel struck metal. He saw something shiny through the dirt.

He dropped to his knees, and then, almost standing on his head, he shoved his hands into the black soil at the bottom of the hole. Riley handed him a pocketknife, and he used the blade to clear away the dirt from the edges of what looked like a rusty, round Danish cookie tin with a shiny bright slash where the shovel had scraped through the dirt and corrosion.