Tuscan Hoax: An Archaeological Thriller (A Darwin Lacroix Adventure Book 4), page 1
TUSCAN HOAX
A DARWIN LACROIX ADVENTURE
DAVE BARTELL
Copyright © 2021 by Dave Bartell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
To my brothers Dan and Eric, two of my closest fans and fiercest critics.
CONTENTS
Preface
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Epilogue
Author's Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
“The antiquities underworld is far more determined and far more organized than anyone has ever imagined.”
Peter Watson & Cecilia Todeschini, authors of The Medici Conspiracy
“The easiest way to convince a collector to buy a forgery is to appeal to his self-conceit of being someone uniquely qualified to tell genuine from false.”
Erin L. Thompson, author of Possession
PROLOGUE
Thierry Panchon exited the truck into the quiet desert morning and breathed in the cool air. He studied the thin indigo horizon that foretold the coming dawn, still an hour away. We have time, he thought.
A bright flash tore the night sky and then faded to an orange semicircle. He counted one thousand, two thousand, three thou—whump! The pressure wave pummeled him, forcing him to step backward. “It’s less than a kilometer away!” he shouted. “Open the door. Move the truck closer.” They had to get the priceless artifacts out of harm’s way.
A fighter jet shrieked overhead, driving them to the ground. He lifted the arm covering his face to see twin yellow streaks peel from beneath the craft. The missiles struck near the earlier explosion, blazing the sky in a deadly inferno.
He raced to the locked shed and fumbled with his keys. Finally opening the padlock, he stood back and waved the workers through. “Allez, allez!” Thierry, a French native, had been excavating here in Sidon, Lebanon, as director of La Mission Archéologique, and the storage bunker held the treasures from the Temple of Eshmun, which dated back to 360 BCE.
As he turned to go in, his voice was drowned out by a roar that would have made Thor jealous. He looked up at three UH-1 Iroquois helicopters, better known as Hueys, whose rotors whopped the air like maniacal gods. Soldiers leaned out the doors with their weapons ready as red tracer fire from the Huey’s forward guns arced into the flames, now close by.
“Mon Dieu! The Israelis. Get moving!” He pulled his scarf tight against the acrid air and blinked to flush foul smoke from his eyes. The desert silence had been a ruse. God only knows what’s burning. Or whom. He shuddered and entered the makeshift warehouse storing the artifacts pending completion of the exhibit in the national museum.
Tensions had been rising since 1975, but the Lebanese civil war, now in full stride, was bringing its destruction and death to Beirut’s doorstep, a mere forty kilometers north. He needed to get the contents to a safer location, and he hoped it was not too late.
One by one, the men hauled the crates into the waiting truck. As they wrestled with a statue, he slipped past and moved to a refrigerator-sized safe. Once alone, he spun the dial, carefully ran through the combination, and then pulled open the massive door. Inside lay a pine box nearly half a meter on each side. Its lid was screwed shut, and “C-17” was stenciled on its sides.
He left the safe door ajar as he emerged with the box, figuring the incoming attackers would not blow up an empty safe. For all he knew, they might return to use it again. Then he placed the heavy crate on the truck’s rear deck and climbed in after it.
The men piled into the truck, and one of them pounded on the cab. Moments later, the driver pulled away. The French archaeologist watched the site recede as smoke from the encroaching battlefield bellowed in the morning light. He had dedicated thirteen years of his life to the Temple of Eshmun. Will I ever see you again? He shuddered at what might happen to it in the advancing war.
Just over ninety minutes later, the truck arrived at the Byblos Citadel, a twelfth-century fortress built by European Crusaders. Now, far from the war, they unloaded the truck and placed the crates in the citadel's basement. Thierry insisted on carrying C-17 himself, despite the strain of hauling it down steep steps.
Sweat poured from his brow as he set the crate atop another. After wiping his face, he placed his hands on the wooden box until his breathing settled. His fingers grasped the wood tighter as he heard the metal groan behind him.
“Time to go. You need to pay the men,” his assistant, Sabah, said while holding the iron gate.
I can’t. Thierry’s feet were rooted to the floor, and his stomach sagged as he stalled for time. The C-17 box contained the treasure of a lifetime, a solid-gold bull mask, exquisitely cast and flawless. He had never seen its equal, and no one else knew of it except for Sabah. On the day of its discovery, Thierry and Sabah had conspired to send everyone home.
“We’ll come back later,” said Sabah. “No one knows what’s in it. Let’s go.”
A minute later, he stood, leaving sweaty handprints on the pine, and left the jail cell where they had secured the artifacts. Sabah wrapped a stout chain around the bars and fixed a large padlock to its links. Then she turned and took his hand. “Come, I’ll make you breakfast,” she said. When they reached the top of the steps, she released his hand to keep their relationship as secret as the box below.
Later that afternoon, as the two drank coffee in a quayside cafe, everyone around them talked of the spreading civil war. For now, Byblos remained far from the fighting near Beirut, but a palpable tension hung in the air. With Israel's border to the south and Syria everywhere else, the Mediterranean offered the safest option, as some families had already packed cars and left on ferries.
I must get it out of here. The golden bull mask had become the Frenchman's obsession since he had unearthed it seven months ago. He had lain awake at night, working out ways to keep it from going to the national museum. He loved archaeology, but it was a low-paying occupation, and he enjoyed fine living. A wealthy collector had approached him last year, offering cash for exceptional pieces. He had shown the man a photo of the bull mask and been offered a sum that equaled decades' worth of salary.
This war’s the perfect opportunity. He turned to Sabah. “We need to catch the ferry to Cyprus and then to Nice or Marseilles.”
“I need a visa,” she said.
“No time. We’ll work it out in France. You’re fleeing a civil war. We can get you refugee status.”
“What about the mask?”
“I’ll sell it to the collector.”
As Sabah stared out at the harbor, her black hair gleamed in the slanting sun, and her large, dark glasses shaded her eyes.
“Why sell only one? Why not three or four?” she asked.
“What the hell are you talking about? We only have one. Where would we…” His voice trailed off when he saw her mischievous smile.
“I know a man. An expert restorer. Used to work with me at the national museum. Until they caught him working on the side. They still say five or six pieces in the museum are no longer original.”
“A forger?” he asked. She nodded, and he continued. “How do you know him?”
She let the sandal slip from her foot and ran her bare toes under his trouser leg. “I have my ways.”
The next morning, Thierry left Sabah as she slept and went out to rent a car and buy ferry tickets. The more he thought about the forgery idea, the better he liked it. Over dinner the previous night, she had explained how the museum sent pieces out for restoration, adding that some had been copied and carefully aged to the right millennium. The originals went underground, sold by unscrupulous dealers to the highest bidders. Of course, the pieces could never be seen again in public, but buyers who acquired stolen antiquities were driven by possession, their desire for a private, personal collection.
After coffee, he had listened to her converse on the telephone with a man she called “the Albanian” and arrange a meeting the next day. “Where?” he had asked, but she had then led him to the bedroom, and he had become absorbed by thoughts of wealth during their lovemaking.
Now, walking back to the flat, he mentally inventoried getting access to hundreds of rare artifacts. No one’s harmed. National museums keep their treasures. The greedy get to admire their precious acquisitions in private. I’m paid handsomely to broker transactions.
“I’m back,” he said, dropping the keys on an entry table. At that moment, footsteps pounded down the outside hall behind him, and he turned to see a slender man with close-cropped hair, dressed in the uniform of a citadel guard.
“We’ve been robbed!”
“What?”
“Al-Katā’ib,” said the man.
Thierry froze at hearing the name of the Phalangist Party’s paramilitary force. Then he ran to get Sabah in the bedroom. Empty! He rushed back into the front room, his eyes wild, feeling gut-punched.
“They kidnapped her, sir.”
Hours later, the police left the basement storage room in the citadel, and Thierry tried to piece together what had happened. The guards had described being disarmed by hooded militia and knocked unconscious. They remembered little except a blindfolded figure with hands tied and wearing a floral dress—Sabah.
When the guards awoke, they had found the chain cut and a half-dozen boxes gone. Now that the adrenaline had drained away and the pounding in his ears had subsided, a rising sense of wanting to hurt someone flooded his thoughts. They took my bull. His fists balled, and his fingernails bit into the skin. The pain helped him focus.
How did this happen? He considered the hired men. No, not them. No one knew the crate's contents. But that was not true. His lover had called a man—the Albanian—yesterday.
Putain! His blood boiled, pounding in his ears as he stared at the empty spot where C-17’s crate had lain. “I will get you back. No matter how long it takes.”
1
Darwin Lacroix sat on the two-thousand-meter ridgetop, his watch showing a heart rate of 191. At this elevation, the reduced oxygen, combined with hard climbing, had him belly-breathing to maximize air intake. He pressed against the rocks to shield against another sleet spray from an early spring cloudburst.
Darwin and his best friend, Zac Johnson, a former US Army Ranger, were in the notoriously difficult section of the GR20 route over the Corsican spine where teeth-like sections of granite peaks took the trail to its highest points. The last two hundred meters had required hand-over-hand hauling up a chain anchored in the near-vertical chimney between two peaks. And despite training throughout the autumn and winter, the trail had pushed him to his max.
His face stung from the lashing it had taken a few minutes ago as ice sprayed off the lower rocks. Biting one glove, he yanked out a hand and put it to his tender skin, momentarily soothing the windburn. The raw feeling reminded him of a skinned knee, and when he pulled his hand away, he half-expected to see blood.
“Let’s go,” said Zac as he climbed the last section of the chain. “You’re wasting time.”
Merde! Darwin shoved his now-icy fingers back into the glove, got to his feet, and crossed the few meters over the summit before dropping onto a narrow trail that hugged the ridge’s backside. His right foot shot sideways on the scree, and he quick-stepped to regain his balance as rocks careened off the mountainside toward the river a hundred meters below—a fall from this height would be fatal. He focused on the waist-width trail as a blinding light forced him to squint.
The setting sun had burst beneath the cloud layer, raking the alpine landscape in glaring light. Unfortunately, its rays offered no warmth against the frigid wind rocketing up the canyon. A sudden gust pitched him backward. He compensated and then drove against both it and the time. What felt like a doable task this morning rapidly receded as the trail stretched to infinity—an optical illusion of altitude and the horizon.
The wall of peaks marched on several kilometers, leaving the two men exposed to the elements. What would have been a breathtaking summer hike was now a race for survival. He pushed away thoughts of spending a night on this ledge in sub-zero temperatures.
His shadow on the rock wall to his left leaned downslope as if willing him to go faster. On flat ground, it would have stretched several times his height, but on the seventy-degree face, it was just shoulder level. Darwin increased his pace, thinking of Eyrún being held in the rock hut seven kilometers ahead. We need to get her before nightfall, he thought, glancing at his watch again. Shit! I’m behind.
While Eyrún, in truth, was comfortable in their warm mountain house, Zac had created this scenario to make the exercise seem more real. Darwin had wanted an experience akin to Zac’s special-forces training. While Darwin’s life as an archaeologist had involved more danger than typical academic digs, he wanted to toughen his survival skills. Since arriving back in Corsica, his Lacroix family’s ancestral home, he had been drawn to its independent nature. His forebears had built a shipping empire that had spanned the Mediterranean Sea, based in Ajaccio, three hundred kilometers to the south.
C’mon, you wanted this. He pushed on but slipped on his next step. He stayed upright, but more rocks spilled off the edge. Easy.
“Careful, bro!” yelled Zac.
“What?” Darwin hollered back as a wave of rocks cut between them.
Darwin turned to see Zac jump back. A boulder tumbled less than a meter away, pulling a wake of granite that plunged into the river. “Shit, that was close,” Zac said, his voice barely audible over the wind.
