Ancient Echoes

CHAPTER 16



Washington D.C.

JIANJUN SAT WITH his back resting against multiple plush pillows on a king-size bed in a luxurious room at the St. Regis Hotel north of Lafayette Square and two blocks from the White House. He couldn’t believe the time. He had slept sixteen hours straight. Although past noon, he ordered eggs Benedict from room service, ate breakfast in bed, and now settled in to work in bed. After roughing it in a ger in Mongolia, and then traveling non-stop half-way around the world to get here, he owed it to himself. Ah, the good life, he thought as he patted the comfortable, lump-free, luxurious Egyptian sheet-covered mattress.

His gaze turned to the thumb drive holding files from Lionel Rempart’s computer. Maybe “the good life” wasn’t exactly the right term for this. He poured some tea from room service into the cup on the nightstand, set the laptop on his thighs and plugged in the drive.

The night before, he thought he was in big trouble when he heard a key in the door of Rempart’s town house. It turned out to be a management service Rempart had hired to keep an eye on the place. He showed the guy his student body card and a copy of the e-mail from Rempart’s server giving him authority to find some documents Rempart needed in Idaho. The property manager bought it, to Jianjun’s surprise. Taking his thumb drive, and telling the manager that someone had failed to lock the deadbolt or to arm the alarm system, Jianjun quickly escaped.

After a buying a burrito and chalupas from Taco Bell, which he’d learned to love while living in Seattle, he’d returned to his hotel room and crashed.

Now, he began to go through Rempart’s files. He learned that Rempart’s interest in Idaho and The Book of Abraham the Jew began over a year ago. Rempart apparently had met someone he called “JV” and liked what he heard. Two weeks after that meeting, he began writing down notes of their conversations. He didn’t annotate the initial meeting, only referred to it in later entries.

Rempart’s interest peaked when JV told him about a group of explorers who had secretly followed the Lewis and Clark expedition westward. Two young foreign students, Chou An-ming from China and Niels Jorgansen from Denmark, discovered their story many years ago as they worked together on a term paper for an anthropology class taught by Professor Thurmon Teasdale.

Rempart was fascinated by the explorers and the Indian band they found living in what was hitherto believed to be an uninhabited area in Central Idaho. Finding new anthropological groups was Rempart’s bread-and-butter.

As JV continued to feed Rempart new information, however, a change came over Michael’s brother. The Book of Abraham the Jew, which he had initially ignored, became more and more fascinating to him. JV talked about a man named Calvin Phaylor as having been the source of much of her information about all this. It sounded as if Phaylor was deceased, however. The Book of Abraham the Jew had caused Rempart to ask Michael to track down Chou An-ming in China while he flew off to France and Israel to learn more.

Jianjun paused to think about all this. He clearly remembered meeting Dr. Chou’s daughter, who insisted Chou knew nothing about alchemy, nor would he have wanted to.

The way Rempart’s notes expressed few thoughts and no explanation of why he suddenly started running around the world frustrated Jianjun.

Finally, the kicker: the mysterious “JV” offered Rempart the sum of one million dollars if he would spend a year of his life searching in Central Idaho for The Book of Abraham the Jew. Here, Lionel did explain some of his thinking, wondering what harm it would do to take the money. If he found anything, he’d be praised by his peers; if he didn’t, he’d still be a million dollars ahead. To be sure he didn’t lose in any way, he arranged for a visiting professorship to Boise State University so he could use the school’s money and students to fund his little field trip, along with paying his salary.

Cheap bastard, Jianjun thought.

Rempart’s notes about all this ended in the middle of him getting ready to move to Idaho for the school year.

Jianjun ran some searches to find out more about the mysterious people behind Rempart’s activities. Calvin Phaylor, he learned, wasn’t deceased at all, merely retired. He founded Phaylor-Laine Pharmaceuticals forty years earlier. When the company grew into one of the major pharmaceutical businesses in the world, Phaylor had it go public, and the hand-selected board kept him on as Chief Executive Officer until thirteen years ago, when they gave him a vote of “no confidence.” Three years later, the position went to Jennifer Vandenburg.

Ah ha! The mysterious JV.

Jianjun did more investigating, and soon sent Michael a long text message filled with information about the discoveries on Lionel’s hard drive, from the secret expedition to Lionel’s payment for searching for The Book of Abraham the Jew. He also let Michael know that, so far, he didn’t have a chance to do a deep investigation on Charlotte Reed or Simon Quade.

Hacking into the federal government’s personnel files, he found nothing about Charlotte Reed except that she had worked for ICE for over twelve years, and was now a GS-13. He could not find anything whatsoever on Simon Quade as yet. Also, there were no news accounts of a group of men going missing in Idaho in the past twenty years. Whatever happened was kept under wraps or wasn’t newsworthy.

Jianjun had lots more Lionel Rempart files to go through, but simply skimming the file names made him doubt he would find anything of interest.