David Golemon - Legend

Then he saw it. The creature was standing right at the water's edge, watching the people inside their small enclosures. The beast grunted three, four, five times. It was enormous. The long arms, muscled and sinewed, hung leisurely at its side, then the waters of the grotto erupted with sound and splashing water as the small amphibious monkeys broke the surface of the large underground lake. Robby watched as they struggled to the rock shoreline and saw that each had its own burden to carry ashore; each had one, two, or three struggling fish in its clawed hands. One by one the monkeys tossed a flopping handful toward the humans who cowered inside, watching. Then the amphibians splashed back into the strange grotto and vanished. The giant beast looked around and then slowly stepped back until it was covered in water and disappeared.

"If I make it out of here alive, I've got the making of one hell of a thesis," Kelly said with a grin. Then she saw the confused look on her fiance's face.

"Don't you understand? It's lunchtime for the slaves. And our guard and his trained staff just brought the food."

He couldn't say anything as his mind raced. These prehistoric creatures had been trained to watch and keep human slaves? But why?

"I can see the questions racing around that Stanford-type brain of yours, so let someone from Cal-Berkeley and real higher education explain it to you. It didn't take that long to figure out. Why would the ancient slave masters of the Sincaro go through the difficulty of training the wildlife here to act as prison guards when they could have just as easily watched over their slaves themselves? The answer is simple. They didn't want to die as their slaves did by the thousands. I'll bet my eventual master's degree that not only were the Sincaro driven to near extinction, but five or six other large tribes throughout El Dorado's history were murdered till not a one survived in this place."

"For what? Gold?" Robby asked incredulously.

Kelly lowered her head, then took Robby by the hand and pulled him out into the enormous cave. Then she turned and called for the gathered survivors to douse their torches. As they did, little by little the cave went dark.

"I don't get—"

"Watch," Kelly said as she turned toward the walls.

As Robby's eyes adjusted to the blackness around him, he saw first the many statues of the creatures start to give off a dim glow. Next, the very walls around them became alive with a green luminescence that grew in intensity. Then, as his jaw fell open in amazement, he discerned long streaks of ore coursing through the rock strata. They glowed as if they had an inner fire.

"No, Robby, they didn't die mining gold, they died digging that out of the earth. And why should the slave owners risk their own lives guarding what could be done by the highly evolved amphibians of this lagoon?"

The giant cave was now awash in the soft glow emanating from the carved stone and the streaks of strange ore that shot through the stone like rivers of green fire. Then Robby suddenly understood. Everything fell into place and he realized what he was looking at. With a shudder, he knew what their fate would be at the same time Kelly voiced it.

"If we don't escape the hospitality of our guards soon, I would say we'll all die a very long and agonizing death."

The twenty-eight department heads had been notified that an Event had been called, and so the Group went into action. At Department 5656, when an official Event is called, it means that something bordering on an important history-altering situation has occurred, one that could affect the lives of people in the present, an event that may have to be passed on to the president, or something that was beyond mere investigation by a group field team.

Pete Golding, in Computer Sciences, was in charge of doing the investigative work in several areas, including the timeline of the Events. Both the Padilla episode and the incursion in 1942 now fell into that category. He had the assistance of Assistant Director Virginia Pollock. The computer section would be running three shifts in an effort to uncover all the facts they could on the legend of the Padilla expedition, and most important, on the cryptic lead Helen had given in her letter regarding the papal medalists and the lost map. Niles had decided to take a silent part in Pete's investigation, working on his own.

Communications would also be diverted to the computer center because they would be using the Group's KH-11 satellite, code-named Boris and Natasha, to sweep the Amazon Basin from Brazil to the Peruvian Andes. They immediately started with the elimination of anything west of the mountains, for obvious reasons. The technicians, the best recruited specialists from the most advanced corporations in the United States, would be taking high-resolution images of the rain forest and jungles in the basin, and maybe with a little luck they would uncover something that would shorten the search for the tributary that led to the lost valley as described in the legend. But for now, the only descriptions were fictionalized accounts by very obscure and long-dead Italian authors who had claimed to have seen the journal or map — scenarios very unlikely, as the accounts varied wildly in their reporting and descriptions.

The three departments covering religion would be hard at work trying to uncover all they could from the Vatican Archives. The Cray computer system, Europa, would be set loose on the Vatican's formidable cataloging and supposedly secure IBM Red Ice system. The Europa was a system that Cray had built for only four federal agencies, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and covertly, as a favor to former director of Event Group Garrison Lee, Department 5656. The Cray was able to break in, or go through, the backdoor security of any system in the world, including the supposedly impenetrable Red Ice mainframe. Pete Golding called what Europa did "sweet talking." The three religion-based departments would try to sweet talk their way into the Vatican system and find out all they could on the diary, the map, and the reputed gold samples that had always been a rumored part of the story. It was a task that would be more than just a little daunting, being as the Holy Roman Church was the most experienced body in the world for burying secrets.

Heidi Rodriguez and her Zoology Department was joined by the Paleolithic Studies, Archaeology, and Oceanography divisions, to find out all they could on the species of animals that may have existed in the past that were no longer viable, or extinct. Heidi had already committed heresy in her three departments by requesting the assistance of a department no one spoke about in the sciences divisions. The strange group was located on the deepest level of the department, level thirty-one. Some said they were buried so deep by Director Compton just so they couldn't contaminate the labs of the real sciences. But Niles knew, more than anyone, the importance of this department and insisted it had value.

Niles had started the Cryptozoology Department three years ago as a fallback contingent to the extinct animal sciences group and nobody, absolutely nobody other than the director and Heidi, took them seriously. Their desire to find out about the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, and werewolves, among other laughable studies, was a running joke in the science levels above them. The department was chaired by a crazy old zoology professor named Charles Hindershot Ellenshaw the III.

The three departments had met for exactly fifteen minutes before an argument broke out between members of the Crypto Department and Paleontology. Will Mendenhall had the complex security duty for the day and tried, along with Heidi Rodriguez, to bring the team back together. But Mendenhall found himself staring at the head of the Crypto Department, entranced by the long, wild, white hair of the man. Finally he was nudged by Heidi.