GOLDEN ONE, page 1
GOLDEN ONE
An Omega Files Adventure
Rick Chesler
GOLDEN ONE
© 2022 Rick Chesler
© 2023 by ICARUS Publishing, an Imprint of Luzifer Verlag Cyprus Ltd.
www.icarus-publishing.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover: Michael Schubert
ISBN: 978-3-95835-971-0
All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
GOLDEN ONE
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
Epilogue
About the Author
Prologue
October 29, 1618
London, England
The end had finally come for Sir Walter Raleigh. At the age of sixty-five, after a rich and full career served in the military, politics and exploration, it had all come down to this.
He knelt on the unforgiving wooden planks of a raised platform in the Old Palace Yard at the Palace of Westminster, the site of many executions before his, and of many after. In front of him, a stout wooden block was fixed to the platform. Next to that towered above him a man wielding a formidable axe – robust metal blade, long wooden handle. All around the platform stood a gathering of onlookers, some supportive of Raleigh despite the state’s accusations against him, others less so.
Hands bound behind his back, Raleigh looked up at his executioner and said, "Let us dispatch. At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear."
Wordlessly, the executioner held out a black piece of cloth so that Raleigh could see it, before pulling it taut with both hands and leaning in towards his face.
“No blindfold,” the explorer said. “This ax, it is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries.” Raleigh’s eyes grew distant as he reminisced on exotic oceans and faraway lands, on sailors perishing in the dingy holds of ships due to scurvy, loyal men bleeding out from wounds of war while conquering and vanquishing new lands.
The crowd huddled closer around the platform, sensing the event was at hand. The executioner pocketed the blindfold and straightened. Raising his voice, he commanded, “Your last words, Sir Raleigh!”
Raleigh felt a swelling of pride at the use of his formal title, bestowed upon him by the former Queen of the government that was now putting him to death. He spoke his prepared and rehearsed statement before his emotions could get the better of him. “For a long time my course was a course of vanity. I have been a seafaring man, a soldier, and a courtier, and in the temptation of the least of these there is enough to overthrow a good mind and a good man. So I take my leave of you all, making my peace with God. I have a long journey to make and must bid the company farewell.”
The executioner’s stern gaze never left Raleigh’s kneeling form as he waited a moment to see if he had anything to add. In a low voice, much lower than the words he had just spoken, Raleigh said to the man whose job it was to kill him, “Make it quick, one solid blow. I will even give you a gift if you promise to do it swiftly and clean.”
Raleigh had not only heard, but actually seen with his own eyes the nightmarish spectacle of beheadings gone wrong – some said deliberately so, whether for reasons of revenge or for sheer entertainment value – where blunt instruments were used on purpose, where blows were intentionally weak or perhaps deliberately misplaced so as to result in agonizing gore rather than instant death. These were simply chalked up to an accident, a physical miscalculation on the part of the executioner who would be sure to try harder the next time. Wanting to suffer no such indignities or anguish, Raleigh made pleading eye contact with the man who would shortly take his life. Around them the crowd still gathered, and a few cried out for the axman to get on with it.
Raleigh looked out on the people in the crowd while he waited for the executioner to respond. He scanned the faces of the few women in attendance. One of them reminded him of the late Queen Elizabeth I, and he flashed on his knighting ceremony, presided over by Her Majesty more than a quarter-century earlier for his service in the battles against Ireland. How far he had fallen, he reflected while kneeling in front of the chopping block. Where had it all gone so wrong? He knew the answer lay in the New World, somewhere between the island of Trinidad and what would centuries later become a country called Colombia.
In his travels he had found it necessary to leave one of his ships behind, entrusting its captain to carry out Raleigh’s orders. One of these orders, issued to him directly from the English Crown, was not to engage in conflict with the Spanish, who were also exploring and seeking to colonize the New World. Raleigh’s charge did not obey these orders, instead attacking a Spanish expedition competing for resources and treasures, a move that resulted in casualties on both sides and the real threat of war with England. Raleigh was found guilty of treason, and without Queen Elizabeth to protect him, he had ended up here, quite literally on the chopping block.
All of his exploring hadn’t been for nothing, however. Although he had heard the rumors, the whispered tales, and even seen the supposed maps, Raleigh early in his career had thought the legend of El Dorado – the famed city of gold, where the buildings, and even the roads, were constructed entirely out of gold – to be either wishful thinking on the part of explorers, or else a deliberately invented fable meant to keep rivals away from the real treasures. Indeed, the known gold and silver mines of the southern New World were the reason for the state-sponsored expeditions. These treasures were real and palpable, metal ores mined from the Earth by the forced labor of godless Indians with no greater purpose in life. And yet, throughout his travels in the New World, particularly in the densest of jungles rife with the greenest of Hells, he could not deny the clues and intimations that trickled into his intellect like a steady drip of the purest water falling from the roof of a subterranean cave.
And now Raleigh’s only card left to play was to offer up the location of what he knew to be the greatest treasure in the world – New World or Old – in return for a quick and merciful death.
“And what sort of gift might you have for me?” The executioner leaned into Raleigh, speaking softly while holding eye contact.
It took the explorer a moment to realize he had taken the bait before he was able to tear himself from his remembrances. “In my cell, you will find my tobacco pouch under a loose brick in the leftmost corner when facing the window.”
The executioner guffawed. “Tobacco? If that is the best you can do…”
“Beneath the tobacco in the pouch, you will find something of great value, incalculable worth,” Raleigh persisted. “I speak only truth.” Raleigh made sure that his gaze was as earnest as he could make it.
The executioner backed away from the condemned man and straightened. “Very well. I had every intention of killing you swiftly anyhow, and I will now do my utmost to ensure the deed is carried out.”
Raleigh braced himself for his final moment as the executioner straightened, backed up a couple of steps, and hefted the tool of his trade. He heard the man’s voice behind him, deliberately loud enough to be heard by those in attendance, who had hushed upon seeing the axe raised.
“The last words of the condemned have been spoken. The sentence of death will now be carried out.”
Raleigh placed his head on the chopping block and closed his eyes for the last time as he spoke his actual last words.
“Strike, man, strike!”
The executioner gave his axe a test swing, knowing Raleigh couldn’t see it, but the crowd roared just the same, causing Raleigh to press his head on the block even harder. Then the axman adjusted his stance slightly and made brief eye contact with Raleigh’s wife, whose pleading eyes begged him to make it quick, make it clean. He disliked this part of the job the most – loved ones of the soon-to-be-deceased who must witness their family members’ demise, but it was all in a day’s work. He swung for real, a perfect motion, the metal blade connecting smoothly with the flesh and bone of the explorer’s neck.
The sound of what for most people would be a sickening thud – that of the head of the deceased striking the wooden platform as it tumbled from the chopping block – elicited no such reaction from the executioner. To him, it represented only the successful conclusion of yet another sworn duty. To those in the audien ce, along with the ghastly sight of the decapitated head rolling briefly before coming to a stop, it triggered a brief frenzy of raucous applause, jeering and celebratory commotion.
Raleigh’s wife rushed forward and scooped her dead husband’s head into a velvet bag, denying onlookers their grisly thrill.
The executioner stepped down from the platform, carrying his trusty axe, walking briskly toward the jail. As usual, he very briefly acknowledged those who congratulated him on a job well done with a curt nod, but did not linger. He reached the old brick façade and entered through an arched doorway with an iron gate that was swung open for him by a guard, then immediately shut behind him.
He strode purposely toward where he knew the late Sir Raleigh’s cell to be. Normally he would have to inquire as to a prisoner’s precise holding quarters, but in this case Raleigh was somewhat of a nobleman, a statesman gone bad, a celebrity with notoriety, and thus his cell location was familiar enough. The executioner nodded to another guard and turned down a dim hallway. Prisoners called out to him as he passed their cells, some heckling him nonsensically, others asking for help or information. He ignored them all equally and continued down the hall to the last cell on the left.
The door was open since the space was currently unoccupied. The executioner paused in the doorway, glancing around the cell to make certain no sort of booby-trap awaited him. Seeing or sensing nothing but the utilitarian, Draconian space it was designed to be, he entered the cell.
Recalling Raleigh’s private words, he moved to the leftmost corner while facing the window. Eyeing the corner near the floor, none of the bricks there looked loose to him, but he also knew that prisoners with lots of time on their hands were masters of deception. The executioner knelt with a heavy exhalation, convinced he was wasting his time on the word of a desperate man. Nevertheless, he had upheld his end of the bargain, and he had to admit that his curiosity was piqued, given Raleigh’s exalted reputation as an explorer and treasure hunter.
The executioner’s fingers explored the corner bricks, seeking purchase around their edges. Shortly he felt a brick wobble ever so slightly as he pressed on it. He shifted his weight and then tried moving it again, and this time he was able to jar it free. He pulled the squarish brick away and set it aside, eyeing the cavity in the floor. A small leather pouch lay at its bottom. He picked it up, noting it was drawn to a close at its top with a cord of leather. He shook the pouch, hoping to hear the jingle of gold coins or some sort of metal, but whatever was inside made no noise. Probably is just tobacco, he thought, as his fingers loosened the drawstring.
Peering into the pouch, he saw a bunch of tobacco leaves. Shaking his head, he removed them, noting they were of high quality but dropping them on the floor nonetheless. At the bottom of the pouch he could see a piece of folded paper. He plucked it from the bag and carefully unfolded it, noting the yellowed wear and creases.
The executioner’s brow furrowed as he took in the numerous lines and drawings on what was obviously some kind of map. The sound of footsteps approaching from down the hall toward Raleigh’s cell interrupted his examination of the map, but not before he read two words at its center: El Dorado.
Hurriedly, the executioner folded up the map and put it back into the pouch, which he pocketed before exiting the cell.
Chapter 1
Present day, New York City
Carter Hunt was not surprised to see the auction house at half capacity as the auctioneer banged his gavel to signify another item sold. A treasure trove of pre-Columbian artifacts was up for sale this afternoon, and though their cultural and archaeological value was for all intents and purposes priceless, the draw was simply not there compared to say, certain pop-culture items. Carter knew that a pair of shoes worn by a famous actress in a movie would easily fetch as much if not more than the jade figurine that had just been sold to the highest bidder, an anonymous buyer participating remotely from Singapore.
But Hunt was here because he did know the true worth of these items. For him they represented nothing less than humanity itself, and the fact that he felt they belonged to all of humanity rather than some rich collector was his reason for being here today. He scanned the crowd from his position near the back of the auction hall. Like most of the other attendees, he was seated in one of the chairs arranged in rows, a smartphone in his hand, wearing an expensive designer suit. He looked like he was one of those rich collectors, but in fact he was anything but.
Now two years out of the military, where he had served as a Naval officer for ten years after earning a degree in History, Hunt ran his own business specializing in the recovery and preservation of cultural and archaeological treasures. He had named his company OMEGA, an unofficial acronym he had coined after thinking about the disillusionment he had experienced while serving in the war-torn middle east. He had witnessed the looting, destruction, and theft of hundreds of irreplaceable artifacts from Iraqi museums and cultural centers, and it angered him to no end that ultimately it was the Iraqi people who suffered the most. He had thought about it until the letters of the word OMEGA swirled in his mind’s eye into words, and in time, the words into a phrase: Objects Meant to Endure for Generations to Admire. With the acronym of his new venture succinctly encapsulating his views on the subject of recovered artifacts and treasures, and with the very word Omega meaning a unit of resistance, Hunt had enlisted the help of his former Naval buddy and long-time friend, Jayden Takada. Although not with him today, his OMEGA associate was aware of Hunt’s trip to New York and on standby should Hunt be able to acquire the object he sought.
Now, as the auctioneer returned to the podium and banged his gavel, Hunt was about to find out if he would be able to.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the auctioneer, a lanky bald man wearing a tuxedo and rimmed spectacles began, “presenting our next item up for bidding…” He extended an arm to the left, where an employee lifted a black sheet from a cart. A spotlight in the ceiling illuminated the object on the cart, which immediately elicited gasps from the audience.
“Presenting an authentic gold piece recovered from Colombia, dated by experts to have been made somewhere between 600 – 1600 C.E., or A.D. if you prefer. Constructed from an alloy analyzed to be gold-silver and copper, this piece, while authentic in its own right, has been described by archaeologists as being an exact replica – probably an independently created piece – of a known artwork from the same period and locale known as the Muisca Raft, named after the Muisca tribe, which was one of the big four early civilizations in Central and South America: Aztec, Maya, Inca, and Muisca. The artifact is currently under the esteemed auspices of the Gold Museum in Bogota. This one, however, could be yours. I reiterate that the materials, chemical composition and construction are identical to the museum piece, and that this piece was recovered from a cave in Colombia, the same country where the other piece was also found.”
The auctioneer paused to let this sink in while gazing lovingly at the golden statuette, which continued to gleam in the bright artificial light. The exquisite work of art, replete with detail and style, depicted a man wearing an elaborate headdress and tribal garb standing on a raft. Around him stood a number of smaller tribal figures, facing the same direction. The entire structure was roughly oval shaped, and about ten by five inches.
