King Solomon's Tomb Read online

  King Solomon’s Tomb

  Olivia Newton - Book 4

  Preston William Child

  Copyright © 2020 by Preston William Child

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication might be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher's Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Books by Preston William Child

  Special Offer

  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

  Epilogue

  Books of this series in order

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  About the Author

  Prologue

  They called him Roddy when he was drunk.

  His real name was Arsenio Rodriguez. Neighbors back in Peru called him Rodriguez, and most don't have any idea he had a first name. Sometimes he got drunk; when that happened, he became Roddy, the old drunk. This is especially so ever since the time he came down from the mountains of Machu Picchu and suddenly came into his own.

  Arsenio shaved his shaggy beard, trimmed his hair, shaped his sideburns, and straightened his back some. He adjusted his wardrobe too. Arsenio went from brown khaki shirts and pants to flowered shirts and beach shorts, expensive flip-flops—attire fit for the eternal summer of the mountainside of Apachia.

  Arsenio took one last look at his dismal antique shop, packed a small hold-all, and hopped a flight to Brazil.

  Arsenio Rodriguez was taking a stroll on the Copacabana beach. He was digging his toes in the crisp moisture of the sand. He was soaking the sun through the pores of his Inca skin when he noticed the shadow following him since the previous day was back on his trail.

  He looked back once. But there were people everywhere, bare-skinned women in stringy bikinis, hair blowing in the wind, men drinking beer from coolers, umbrellas of different colors. And the mighty ocean spread out on his left into the sky.

  The shadow had disappeared again, but he knew, he was sure it was there somewhere, lurking, waiting.

  He'd thought if he left Peru, he'd be safe. He knew you didn't do what he'd done with the Americans and not have retribution come for you.

  Retribution was here.

  Rodriguez quickened his pace. He walked across the beach to the road. He stopped a taxi and jumped in it without turning around.

  "Take me to the Windsor Martinique."

  The driver glanced at him through the rear-view mirror. Windsor was an expensive hotel; Rodriguez didn't look quite refined for it. Well, maybe a little.

  "Okay," the driver chimed. He plunked a cassette into his stereo, and loud Brazilian folk music blared.

  Rodriguez's phone started ringing. He tapped the driver's seat and asked him to turn down the radio volume.

  "Hello, Rodriguez," said a calm voice.

  "Yes."

  "Will you do it?"

  "I don't know…I don't think I want to…"

  "Roddy, come on. You prom—"

  "Don't call me Roddy!" he snapped.

  "Alright. You promised. This is big, just do it, and we'll reward you beyond your imagination."

  "I'm an old man. I don't need for that—"

  "Rodriguez, you don't know what I'm capable of. You don't wanna piss me off, do you? Now do this and I'll—"

  Rodriguez had disconnected the call and put the phone in his pocket. He was shaking all over. He looked at his hands. Oh, how they shook. He peered at the driver's face in the rear-view mirror. The man was having a good time driving, humming to that strange, foreign song on the radio.

  Why can't he have such beautiful freedom as well? He just wanted to be free.

  Neither Rodriguez nor the driver of the taxi saw the red van with the OPPO sticker that followed behind the car. Rodriguez had never been abducted, had never had to be, until now.

  The taxi parked in front of the hotel, behind a jeep loaded with luggage. A group of American tourists was arguing with the concierge who yapped at them in rapid-fire Portuguese.

  Two men in black jumpsuits stepped out of the van. One wore a red baseball cap; he went around the side of the car. The other, with blond hair, blocked Rodriguez's advance up the steps.

  The blond-haired guy poked Rodriguez's side with a gun. "Don't make a sound," he whispered.

  They pushed him into the van and put a black cloak over his head and drove away.

  —

  1

  Miami, Florida

  Paul Simon was on the radio that morning, moaning about an old lover he met on the road. He said he was still crazy about her after all these years. Olivia Newton was on her computer in her study. The radio was in her kitchen. Paul Simon's voice drifted across the apartment, traversing it in a melancholy that only the legend can manage.

  She loved the sound of slow country music in the morning. She worked her new article for her unique column in the Miami Daily she called “Speaking Frankly.” Rob Cohen had given her that stint out of nowhere. Olivia had taken the offer, surprising herself too.

  She had just finished the article, putting the last dot to the editing, and John Denver had come on with Shanghai Breeze when an email from Lawrence Diggs popped on the screen. It said simply: we need to talk.

  Olivia pushed her chair back slowly. She picked up her phone and dialed Diggs’s number on it. She held the phone down on her shoulder with the side of her face and said, "Hello, Diggs?"

  She picked up a big denim shirt with its sleeves folded halfway.

  "What's going on?" she asked in a slightly trembling voice.

  "Roddy's gone."

  "Gone how, what'd you mean?"

  "Meet me at Bayfront Park," Diggs said and went off.

  She picked up the .38 under the pillow and her car keys.

  Olivia rushed down her apartment building on Biscayne Boulevard, where she now lived since Peru. She pulled the tarp off her Corvette and jumped inside. It was thick with yellow dust, but there was no time for the carwash now.

  —

  The Bayfront Park Amphitheatre filled the sky as she got off I-30 and joined the traffic of tourist buses on their way to sightsee the bowl. Olivia turned her head to see if she was being followed. She didn't trust the rear-view mirror, anything compared to the raw perception of the human eye. There were no cars back there that weren’t supposed to be.

  She parked beside a truck that was laden with a boat. Two men came out of it and went to the back to unload fishing equipment. A woman in a white loose-fitting t-shirt with a shark's picture carried a brown box and asked one of the men if they wanted to go out with the shrimps. Olivia lip-read her from behi
nd the steering wheel where she watched the party. They turned out to be ordinary town folks who came to fish and wanted to relax on the lawn or sit in one of the rows of benches in the amphitheater.

  Olivia checked the space behind her again in the rear-view. She saw the party from the truck with the boats on it lug their cooler and disappeared behind the corner. There was sidewalk there that led away into the main bowl. She expected that Diggs was watching her now.

  She dialed his number.

  "You're clear," he said.

  Olivia hid her gun under her oversized shirt and put on dark shades for the bright day.

  Diggs was standing on a high ledge at the back of the amphitheater. Beside the ledge, there was a spiral staircase that wound up; Olivia took it.

  Diggs started walking. His broad back looked like a billboard. Olivia joined him. This was the drill since Peru. Every member of the team had a tracking implant on their neck that Diggs monitored.

  They were getting noticed by the underworld. It was a good precaution to make sure everyone was always accounted for.

  "He left Peru two days ago," Lawrence Diggs said. "He took PanAm Airways to Brazil. He spent some time on the beach. Last I saw him he was in front of his hotel, then he just vanished."

  "Shit."

  "What do you think, did he talk to you?"

  "Nope. You talked to the others?"

  He shook his head. Diggs said he should have called Rodriguez to ask him why he was leaving Peru. Olivia smiled cheerlessly. Old Roddy must have desired some good time, a vacation maybe, which is why he had chosen the beaches of Brazil. He couldn't have been meeting someone. Or could he?

  "You think he may have been in some trouble?"

  "I'm sure of it," Diggs said, his cold blue eyes surveyed the grass and arcing benches of the amphitheater below. "I'm on to the others now. I've called everyone. They're cool."

  Yet Diggs seemed restless, troubled by something. He looked at Olivia and appeared on the verge of speaking but returned to his default mode— reticence.

  "Be careful," he said finally.

  "You too."

  Diggs brought out his device and checked it. He toggled from one page to the other and stopped at a map of downtown. There were two dots close to each other: he and Olivia.

  "I have to go. I needed to know if anything is wrong. But no one followed you here. Don't go back the way you came. I'll send a check-in time to your mail, alright?"

  "Yeah," she whispered.

  Diggs walked away; his rubber-soled shoes barely made a sound on the concrete. Olivia counted for ten seconds; she checked her time. It was ten in the morning.

  She went down the steps faster than she intended.

  A pair of binoculars up in the roof of the amphitheater followed her progress into her car, out the parking lot, and as she joined I-30 again.

  —

  Cusco, Peru

  CIA agent Reno Scalia kept in the shadows. He was surrounded by darkness and the aroma of rachi; he chewed some in his mouth. He sucked the juicy oil of the meat off his thumb; his piercing dark eyes riveted on the black Audi across the road. The occupants had been sitting there for two hours. The man in the passenger seat had stepped out and crossed to this side of the street. On that side, the smoke of the grill carried about in the air, ghostlike.

  He bought some rachi, some fruits, and a pack of milk from the grocery store further down the road before walking back to the car.

  He and his friend in the driver's seat had then devoured the snacks slowly. Meanwhile, both men took turns to lean forward to look at the balcony of an apartment building nearby.

  Reno had come out here that evening right after he got a call from Lawrence Diggs about a possible danger. Tami Capaldi lived in that building. Tami had gone out to dinner—Reno supposed—with the police detective José Hanna again. Both have been going steady for some time now. The detective has even slept over at the woman's place twice.

  Reno had followed both of them to their favorite restaurant. He had seen this black Audi follow the duo. The Audi had stopped a block away, waited for some minutes before driving back here. He had followed them.

  Now they were both waiting for Tami to come back from her evening with the detective.

  Something was about to go down.

  Reno Scalia sent off a quick message to Lawrence Diggs.

  "New alert," it said. "No cover."

  —

  Reno was caught in between letting Tami come right back to her apartment so he could see what Audi's stake was all about and calling to warn her.

  He debated his options while wiping his oily hands on the seat of his black denim. His eyes were glued to the occupants of the black car. His mind was made up when he saw the semi-automatic weapon. In the passenger seat, the guy said something to his buddy, laughed grimly, and cocked the gun.

  "Shit."

  Reno quickly dialed Tami on his phone. It started ringing, and it rang on.

  He tried again. Same waste of effort. It rang, but Tami probably didn't go out with it. Just to be sure, he tried a third time. He put his phone away and cursed in the name of some Inca god.

  He checked his weapon and put it away, too.

  He started crossing the street just as the man with the automatic weapon got out of the car. The guy in the driver’s seat glanced at Reno and looked away from the bearded face.

  Detective José broke into the road from a side street as Reno disappeared into the alley near the building.

  He saw the two men from the Audi quickly go into the building. They want to a clean kill, he mused.

  Well, that was fine with him too. He loved neat, noiseless kills, too.

  —

  Detective José Hanna kissed Tami lightly on her rosy cheek. He said something into her ear and laughed. Tami waved at him and waited for José to get in his car. She watched him disappear back the way they had come and then sauntered through the street door, like a teenage girl that had just had her first dance with her crush.

  Her smile disappeared as she stepped on the landing. Two men were waiting there. They were two large men in black blazers, white shirts, and black ties. One of them, the one closest to her door, looked like he'd done so much killing in his time. There was a conspicuous bulge in his blazer. His left hand hung under the hems. The butt of his gun held there.

  "Who are you people? What'd you want?" she asked, backing down the step again.

  The one closest was fast. He pulled out the biggest gun Tami had ever seen and pointed it at her. Tami twisted around on her heels, her left leg caught in the right one, and she fell forward. Hands flailed trying to grab at the wall, but she plucked air instead.

  She heard a choking spit behind her as she fell forward and shut her eyes. She rolled over the short staircase and landed on her back to the wall. Her vision darkened for a second, lights flashed in her head, a sharp pain stung the back of her head and left hand.

  She looked up to see the man with the gun fall forward. He rolled down the steps, and his thick head bumped her outstretched feet. A trickle of blood ran down the side of the man's mouth. His eyes were turned into his skull, and there was a small hole in his forehead. He was dead.

  She heard scuffling at the head of the steps.

  Someone was grappling with the other man. She heard several puffing sounds, and the body of the other big man jerked. Then he was a large lump on the floor there.

  The dark figure of a shorter man stood over the body, contemplating it.

  Tami tried to rise, but her left foot weighed a ton, bled from the shin, and seemed altogether unlikely to function anymore.

  "Oh…" she groaned.

  The man up there under the bright yellow electric light in the ceiling looked at her sharply.

  "Wait—" he said.

  He went down and searched through the dead man. He came up with what looked like a wallet. Or maybe a movie ticket stub. Tami wasn't sure because her vision kept fogging and clearing. And that searing pain in her
left ankle was racing up the back of her thigh.

  She managed to sit up. She searched her pocket for her phone. But it was broken when she found it. She had sat heavily on it when she fell.

  "Shit…" She called at the strange man up there, "Hey, could you call an ambulance or the police?"

  "This is the police," the man said urgently.

  He came down to the other body and searched. He found a wallet and pieces of paper in the pockets. Olivia looked closer and saw who it was.

  "Reno?"

  "Yes, Tami. These men were police. They were going to kill you—"

  "What, why? What did I do?"

  "I don't know. But I'm glad I came just in time."

  Reno helped her up the steps and into her room, where he quickly rubbed a foul-smelling ointment on the mild swelling. He tied Tami's leg with a piece of clothing he tore from an old shirt of hers. Then she made an icepack for the knot on her forehead.

  "I have to get rid of the bodies?"

  Tami's eyes teared when she remembered what had just happened and that she ought to be dead if it wasn't for this young man.

  "You think José is in trouble too?"

  Reno shook his head. "Don't think so. He can handle himself. I'll be back in twenty minutes; I'll lock you in. Do you have a gun?"

  "No."

  Reno pulled out his magnum, unscrewed the silencer, and put it on the couch beside her. Tami looked at it the way a kid might do his medicine.

  "Aim and pull the trigger. It’s very simple."

  Tami nodded and closed her eyes.

  "Not again," she breathed.

  —

  "But then again, it can't possibly be true. Pietro is gone, and he is the only guy I think could want to do you guys any harm."