David Golemon - Primeval

"How silly of me, I should have thought to ask myself."

Serta looked up and knew beyond any doubt that these men must be searching for the other missing Twin. Singly, the diamonds were worth a billion dollars on the open market, but placed together as a set, the Twins of Peter the Great would be priceless. He knew he would answer their question, as it would be the only triumph he would have in the few remaining minutes of his life.

"The other Twin was lost with many men, many good men according to my father, somewhere in the Canadian wilderness almost a hundred years ago." Serta said his piece and then closed his eyes.

"Ah, no more knowledge than we had before. But, there was no harm in asking. Now, there is a rumor of a diary with the description of where the diamond was lost. Do you have information on this missing journal?"

"I have never heard of such a thing. If there was a journal, it would have disappeared with the officer it belonged to."

"Ah, you see, you think you have lied well enough to deter us from the truth, but in reality you have told us everything. Whoever said it was an officer who wrote in a journal? I see your father was very observant those many years ago. He knew the officer commanding their small expedition wrote in a journal. Now, did your father happen to take that item when he betrayed his officer and stole the diamond?"

"I know of no journal."

"Ah, I see," the small ponytailed man said, and then nodded at the large one.

He turned and made his way to the bathroom. He looked around and then shook his head. It was the first time that he had ever heard of anyone building a safe in a shower stall. He stepped up to the rounded, clear-glass enclosure, pulled open the door by the gold-plated handle, and looked at the Tuscan tile. He could see no flaws or anything that would indicate a door. He knelt down and felt around the tile edges, still not discerning any area that might reveal a secret hiding place.

The Russian was just getting ready to stand when he saw what he was looking for. Most would have missed it, but the big man had the instincts of a cat. He reached out and allowed his fingers to play over the drain cover. On the outside it looked like a normal trap, but he had noticed there was no caulking around its edges. His fingers played over the stainless-steel surface, and then he pushed down, and then tried to turn it to the left. The cover didn't move. Then he tried to the right, still applying downward pressure, and smiled when the drain cover popped free of the tile.

"Now, this is ingenious," he said under his breath in Russian. The drain cover was actually the dial for the combination safe that was still buried in the tiled shower stall. He turned the facing of the cover and entered the correct numbers that had been covered up by the drain rim. The lights automatically dimmed in the bathroom and the Russian stood. His eyes widened when three floodlights embedded in the ceiling of the bathroom illuminated as the flooring, not in the shower itself, but in the center of the bathroom, behind him, started rising. The floodlights caught the first glimmer of the egg-shaped stone. Then, as the small enclosure rose, the lights struck Peter the Great's most prized possession — one of the Twins. The diamond had been cut in five thousand different places around the circumference of the egg. The effect was such that when the stone was illuminated, blue, pink, and green shafts of light speckled the white walls of the ornate bathroom.

The large Russian was stunned. With all the treasure they had gathered over the years, this was the most amazing sight he had ever beheld. Not standing on ceremony, he reached out and touched the large diamond egg. It was cold to the touch, and he smiled, wondering how something with such fire inside could be so cool. He grasped the egg and removed it from its glass cradle. He went back to the shower, turned the combination lock, and then depressed the drain cover. The cradle for the Twin slowly started its return to obscurity. The lighting from above dimmed and the regular bathroom light came back on.

"Well, are we that much richer, my friend?" the small man asked, his eyes never leaving the old man beside him.

The large man stepped out of the bathroom, and held up the one half of the Twins to show his partner. "Yes, we are, and always will be, two of the richest men in the world."

The old man buried his face in his hands and sobbed. The diamond had been in his family since it was taken by his father in a forest long ago. Now it was in the hands of men who would either sell it on the black market or cut it to pieces.

"Come now, you could never have thought to hold such a magnificent treasure as this without unscrupulous men coming after it, did you? Besides, old man, what we are really after makes this small diamond very insignificant. We are after much more than riches; we are after the future."

The old man looked up, not understanding. Then he realized he wasn't meant to as the small man stood and pulled the trigger.

As the two men started downstairs, the rain outside had started to dwindle to a heavy mist.

"Now that we have the one Twin, the other will be more of a challenge to find without the pages of the journal."

"If the cursed thing even exists; remember the KGB from the old days were expert liars, just as we were," the smaller man said as he buttoned his overcoat. "Our newest ally says he'll take care of that end of things. All we needed to do was seal this end of the trail so no one can figure out where this diamond was originally taken from. Now it's up to our new partner."

"I have to admit, he seems very resourceful."

"By the way," the small one asked as they closed the door and entered the private hallway, "did our man at the airport forward the video disc of our arrival to our friend?"

"Yes, I have done as he has instructed, but why would he want video of us coming into the U.S.?"

"I did not ask; he will inform us when we get in the air. I'm sure he has an excellent reason for it."

Again, the two Russians smiled. Their day had turned out to be full of sunshine, despite the storm that had passed through Seattle that morning.

The head of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, Senator Lyle P. Casals, knew the feeling of claustrophobia was all in his head. Although it was a fact that he found himself three thousand, two hundred feet underneath the sands of Nellis Air Force Base, he tried desperately to get that little fact to stop entering his mind as he walked alongside the Director of an agency of the federal government he had known nothing about twelve hours ago.

The director of Department 5656, known to the president of the United States and a few others as the Event Group, smiled as the senator from South Dakota wiped his brow with a handkerchief. Niles Compton could not figure out if the man was frightened about the treasures and archaeological finds he had just been shown, or fear that the entire cave system was about to fall on his head. Compton suspected the latter since the bespectacled man kept glancing up at the steel netting that held some of the rock strata in place.

The senator swallowed and then looked up at Director Compton. Niles removed his own glasses and smiled at the Ways and Means representative.

"Astounding is all I can say, Mr. Director. To think that all of this" — the small man gestured around the massive and curving hallways that held no less than one hundred of the largest steel vaults in the complex—"has been kept secret for over a hundred years is completely amazing to me."

Niles nodded his head and looked around and smiled when his eyes locked on Virginia Pollock, his deputy director. The short and balding Compton felt even smaller standing next to Virginia, who was well over six feet tall. Her hair was loose today, and her green eyes expressive as they always were when she was dealing with politicos. Niles was ashamed he used his assistant's looks to assist in swaying support from either the numbers cruncher that now stood before them or even the president. Virginia knew this fact, but to her credit, she never said a thing or complained one bit.