Return (Matt Turner Series Book 3) Read online

  Also by Michael Siemsen

  Matt Turner series

  The Dig (Book One)*

  The Opal (Book Two)*

  Matty (short)

  A Demon’s Story series

  A Warm Place to Call Home (Book One)*

  The Many Lives of Samuel Beauchamp (Book Two)

  A Demon’s Story Omnibus (Books 1-2)*

  Exigency*

  The Smiths (short)

  *Audiobook Edition available on Audible.com and iTunes

  FANTOME

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locations are used factitiously. Other names, characters, incidents, and places are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Michael Siemsen and Fantome Publishing

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof.

  FANTOME and logo are trademarks of Fantome Publishing, LLC.

  Editing services provided by Red Road Editing/Kristina Circelli

  ISBN 978-1-940757-17-9 (Trade Paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-940757-16-2 (epub)

  ISBN 978-1-940757-15-5 (Kindle)

  Connect with the author:

  facebook.com/mcsiemsen * michaelsiemsen.com

  twitter: @michaelsiemsen * [email protected]

  SUBSCRIBE for Michael Siemsen book email updates

  This book is dedicated to

  Erik V Siemsen

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Michael Siemsen

  Table of Contents

  Ancient Alexandria Map

  Beginning

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  I have found power in the mysteries of thought,

  exaltation in the changing of the Muses;

  I have been versed in the reasonings of men;

  but Fate is stronger than anything I have known.

  -Euripides, Alcestis, 438 BCE

  ONE

  Abu Qir Bay, Egypt – Six weeks ago

  Mushroom-colored sand gathered and disappeared into the vacuum tube, reappearing in the water forty feet away as a ghostly cloud. Soon, the sand would settle back to the sea floor, but it wouldn’t help the ever-poor visibility at the bottom of Abu Qir Bay, the recently discovered underwater home of the ancient Egyptian port city, Heracleion. Leonardo Dunch shifted the mouth of the tube closer to the massive statue of the Nile god, Hapi, as a bright flash reflected off the chiseled red granite. Leonardo glanced to his right and saw the site’s photographer give him a thumbs up.

  Leonardo thought, Why exactly are we taking pictures in three-foot visibility? But then observed the murky water had cleared up quite a bit. Clarity like this was rare here, so he expected the better part of the afternoon would entail posing for photos next to finds. More likely, though, he’d be frequently asked to move out of the way.

  Beyond the photographer’s column of tiny rising bubbles, Leonardo spotted Étienne Laprise, lead archaeologist (and Leonardo’s boss), in his blue-striped wetsuit thirty feet away, floating in front of the jutting sculpture of Cleopatra VII, and apparently tweezing its dark stone shoulder.

  Étienne’s working on Cleo again?

  The Cleopatra statue had been coral clean for weeks and was just touched up the day before. And hadn’t Étienne said he’d be on the palace ruins today?

  Leonardo continued sucking sand away from his Hapi statue, reaching its naval after ten minutes. Scans had shown the stone went deep—possibly more than fifty percent intact—but he’d begun wondering if this thing might just be in one piece. Either way, he’d now reached a point where structural suspension would need to be affixed.

  After a slew of cable-free photos, no doubt.

  Étienne’s vision of the site for the rest of the world was a turquoise-hued landscape with ghostly, carved stalagmites rising from an otherwise pristine sea floor. The fluorescent orange mapping grid and segment tags would have to be removed once again.

  An extended beeeep and vibration from his dive computer reminded Leonardo it was time to surface for a decompression break. The forearm-mounted device was flashing a two-minute countdown to begin his ascent. Maybe a good time for lunch, too. The new cook—Josh something—had made those insane grilled cheeses the other day. It was nice to finally have another twentyish-year-old American on a boat mostly full of Frenchies, but nicer still that the dude would be making their food for the foreseeable future.

  With the taste of assorted cheeses in his mouth, Leonardo turned his back to the statue, shut down the suction, unclipped the extra weight belt, attaching it to the large vacuum unit, and then bled air from his BC vest until his buoyancy stabilized.

  Just as he prepared to ascend, something caught his eye at the far end of the vacuum’s discharge tube. Revealed beyond the dissipating sand cloud, a figure was coming toward him. A black wetsuit with blue stripes down the arms. Étienne waved to Leonardo and gave him the “OK” sign before cutting left toward the palace.

  Étienne? How—?

  Leonardo spun around to face the Cleopatra statue again, baffled at how the lead diver could’ve moved past him so quickly. But still there, squarely focused on the shoulder, floated the person in the matching wetsuit.

  Well, then who the hell is that?

  Leonardo kicked his fins behind him, passing in front of the photographer as he snapped more shots of Hapi, and swam toward the mystery diver. A moment later, Leonardo reached the curious figure and steered around beside him.

  The man had found something—some sort of hidden stone prism, like a thick, triangular carrot stick—and was carefully sliding it from an orifice in Cleopatra VII’s shoulder. Leonardo shifted his weight to bring his legs back under him, then tapped the man’s arm. The stranger’s head snapped toward him. Through the facemask, surprised eyes and a pale-skinned, unfamiliar face greeted Leonardo. This man was not from the team. Leonardo glared, pulled the man’s wrist away from the statue, and stabbed a finger upward, ordering the thief to surface.

  Without warning, the man grabbed Leonardo’s mask and yanked it off his face, sending stinging saltwater into his eyes. Leonardo raised his feet before him and blindly kicked outward. His fins struck what was presumably the thief’s chest, propelling Leonardo away while grasping at the water in search of his mask. Inhaling air from his regulator, a small amount of sea water slipped up his nose and burnt down his throat. He snorted out and pinched his nose shut, opening his eyes a crack to find the mask. Nothing but a blurry green glare.

  Surfacing too quickly would be dangerous—likely nearing twenty-five minutes at this depth. The computer would alert him to do his safety stops. But where was the thief? Was he coming after him, or making a getaway?

  Slow down … Slow breaths.

  It’d been a few years since diving school, where he’d drilled for this precise scenario, and he could only recall there was an acronym cre
ated to remember the steps. Was it C.A.L.M.? R.E.L.A.X.?

  Where were Étienne and the photographer? Had they seen what happened? Was the thief getting away? And if so, with or without what he’d found hidden in the statue?

  Leonardo staved off panic and paid attention to his bubbles to reorient himself. He tilted his head slightly downward, pressed the side of a cupped hand against his brow as if shielding sunlight, and waited for his trapped exhaled air to fill the space. A couple breaths later, his eyes sat in their new virtual facemask, and he was able to see again. He was floating about fifteen feet from the Cleo statue, ten feet above the sea floor, and slowly drifting south with the current. No sign of the thief. No sign of his mask.

  His dive computer began its more urgent beep, accompanied by pulsing vibrations.

  Outrage aside, his life was more important than an artifact. Ideally, with a few safety stops he’d reach the surface in ten-to-fifteen minutes, but he hoped that, in the meantime, Étienne and/or the photographer would see what had transpired, and stop the thief.

  After three brief safety pauses, and the extended stop fifteen feet below the surface, his head was finally above water, Leonardo scanned about with stinging eyes, spotting the bobbing research vessel, Pharos, about two hundred feet away. He spat out his regulator and blew his diver’s whistle, waving his arms in the air. Alarmed crewmembers spotted him and scrambled into action, jumping into an inflatable dinghy, and zipping to him in less than two minutes. The driver swung around him, curling the dragged tow rope around him.

  “What’s happened?” the ship’s medic called out to him as the dinghy slowed beside him, and Leonardo grabbed hold of the rope. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Leonardo called back. “Diver in the site down there! Taking a piece off the Cleo statue! A thief!”

  The crewmembers peered around as they took Leonardo’s heavy double-tank rig, heaving it into the small craft, and then pulled him up from the water.

  “I see a fisherman over there,” the driver said. “Looks like he’s by himself.”

  Leonardo peeled off his neoprene hood, and wiped his eyes on the medic’s shirt sleeve. “Get us back to the boat, fast. Any others besides the fisherman?”

  “Not that I can see,” the driver said as he restarted the small engine, and steered them back toward Pharos.

  Ten minutes later, Leonardo and three others plunged back into the water as their liaison from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities spoke on the satellite phone with his contacts. Security forces had already been dispatched to the beaches and harbors.

  Below the surface, they found Étienne posing for photos. Leonardo’s expression was all Étienne needed to see. Confusion morphed to dread, and he joined the group as they rushed back toward the statue of Cleopatra VII.

  The divers gathered around Leonardo as he pointed at the triangular hole in the statue’s creamy black shoulder. Étienne nudged his underlings aside and shone his flashlight into the cavity, peering in. He grasped at the bundle of tools strapped to his vest and found a thin ruler, dipping it into the opening until it stopped. Just under 12cm deep.

  Leonardo shifted his focus to the opposite shoulder, and the identical triangle carving in the relative position. He used a hardened rubber pick to probe the outline while studying it through a magnifying glass. As far as he could tell, the groove had been etched in, as with all the other decorative lines. But the piece he’d seen the diver extracting had been of a different material than the statue’s dark stone—perhaps red granite, like the vast majority of Ptolemaic sculptures from the area. Two months ago, he’d cleaned that very shoulder. He couldn’t believe he’d overlook such a disparity in color and texture.

  Leonardo turned back to the others as they continued studying the cavity. His eyes shifted to their feet and the sand beneath them. He tapped Étienne and gestured for them to back away before he shifted his weight and allowed his body to sink to the sea floor. And then he saw what he suspected, surrounded by tiny fragments of mortar: a black, triangular wafer. He plucked it from the sand and brought it up for the rest of the group to see.

  Étienne’s eyes widened, and Leonardo imagined the lead archaeologist was thinking the same thing as him: How would anyone in modern times know about a hidden artifact inside the shoulder of a submerged, just-discovered, two thousand-year-old statue?

  Étienne took the piece from him, pinching two points between thumb and forefinger, and placed it over the hole in Cleo’s shoulder. The surrounding stone’s grain lined up with the triangle—a cap that had concealed the secret compartment beneath it. Unless someone had decided to x-ray the statue, they’d have never found the now-missing piece hidden within.

  * * *

  Étienne jabbed a finger toward the small black triangle on the table as his eyes moved from person to person inside the ship’s cabin. The slim, habitually calm Frenchman was incensed. “Somebody say to me how this man knows to look for this? And someone tell me, why now?”

  Their Ministry liaison hung up his phone and joined the group. “None of the security personnel at the ports have seen anyone come in with a small boat.”

  “Tell them not only small boat!” Étienne yelled, and the crew flinched. They had never heard him shout in anger. “It could be anybody! Merde. He could swim up to any shore from here to Alexandria.”

  “Étienne-” The ship’s medic put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Don’t try to calm me, okay? I don’t need to be calm right now. Whatever that thing was, I want to know! With all our work …” Étienne’s voice faded to a whisper. “Why … why now?”

  “I have an idea,” one of the interns interjected. Heads turned to face the usually silent young man. “Maybe it was this.”

  He dropped a magazine onto the table beside the black triangle. Leonardo leaned in with the rest of the group. It was January’s issue of National Geographic, with its enticing, bold-font headline:

  DISCOVER THE REAL ATLANTIS…

  The crew knew the issue well, each having pored over it, front to back, in search of photos or references to themselves and their finds. All eyes locked on the cover image of the submerged Cleopatra VII, her left shoulder in perfect focus, the triangular groove now seeming to pulse and glow on the page. As Leonardo had suspected, the milky black triangle had blended perfectly with the rest of the statue’s thin decorative lines, carved shapes, and hieroglyphs. He scratched his beard nervously, glancing at Étienne, and their eyes met.

  Étienne scrunched his nose, closed his eyes, and shook his head subtly. Leonardo got his message: I don’t blame you for missing it.

  “I am so pissed off, mes amis,” Étienne said to the group. “Whatever that damned thing was, I want it back.”

  TWO

  Philadelphia, PA, USA – Present day

  UPenn’s main auditorium could seat 1,259 people, according to the event coordinator, and though Cameron Langley’s seminar hadn’t quite sold out, it sure as hell looked like it had. Standing behind a cherry-wood lectern on the right side of the stage, wearing his second favorite suit, Cameron felt goddamned distinguished. And the audience? Goddamned rapt, if he said so himself.

  “… or as Hardy referred to it, ‘object-aided telepathy.’ This rubber band on my wrist—you folks in the back can’t see this, but trust me, there’s a rubber band.” Cameron snapped the band against his skin a few times, close to the lapel mic. “Ouch.” Sporadic chuckles from the audience. “All right, so a few minutes from now, or a week from now, or even a century or more, a skilled psychometrist holding this rubber band could see all of you through my eyes—like a head-mounted camera—but more …” He tapped his temple with an index finger. “In my head, I was thinking about my notes, and the slide after this one, and the next items I plan to share with you; I felt a churn in my stomach, wondered what’s good around here for lunch; felt the rubber band between my fingertips, and, of course, the sting of it snapping against my wrist.” Cameron paused for effect. “Psychometry.” br />
  He waited for the applause he’d received in Tucson at that point in the presentation, but the audience simply nodded, wide-eyed.

  Oh well. Moving on.

  He clicked the remote to switch to the next slide, glancing back at the expansive screen where the illustrated profile of Dr. Buchanan now shone from the projector. A bit pixelated at such a size, but it was the only picture Cameron could find with Google.

  He went on, “Now, as I earlier illustrated, such powers have been reported and observed all throughout human history, but the term ‘psychometry’ was not actually coined until the nineteenth century by this man, Dr. Joseph Rodes Buchanan.”

  Another click. A sepia-toned photo of Mrs. Buchanan painted the screen. “Dr. Buchanan’s wife, seen here in this photograph, is who I’d consider the modern era’s very first documented psychometrist, and was the subject of decades of research performed with her husband, and outlined in his 1885 treatise, The Manual of Psychometry: The Dawn of a New Civilization.”

  Cameron once again gauged the audience’s interest level. Still riveted, but they were surely waiting for him to move on to the ‘star’ subject of the show.

  Not just yet.

  Glaring sunlight burst from the back of the auditorium—a late arrival entering from the lobby, and the goddamned ushers didn’t hold him until the break. Squinting, Cameron folded his arms across his chest, his gaze chastising the back of the room. The door swung shut, revealing a bearded man in shorts, waving his blundering apologies before slipping into the back row.

  Cameron forced a forgiving smile and returned his focus to his notes.

  Right. Buchanan.

  He glanced back at the towering visage of Mrs. Buchanan, then regarded the room.

  A hand beside his mouth signified a confidential admission. “Dr. Buchanan was a bit of a grumpy old fart.” The audience chuckled on cue. “In most of his speeches—delivered to fascinated, rapt audiences, not unlike you wonderful people—he’d digress into ranting diatribes against the ‘ignorant medical establishment,’ skeptical editorialists, and pretty much anyone that questioned his research. Given a modern publicist and a skilled team of handlers, Dr. Buchanan might have, in his time, made ‘psychometry’ the household word it is today. Said handlers would’ve most certainly had Buchanan bring his wife and other test subjects onto the stage with him.” Cameron pointed to the screen. “Why? Because thirty years into his research, Buchanan and his assistants had confirmed over one hundred psychometrists of varying skill levels.”