Lost City (NUMA Files 5)

"Brandy?" he offered.

Skye laughed at the sight and shook her head. "Well, what do you think?"

"Extraordinaire." He put the helmet back on the table and poured himself a brandy. "Where did you get this lovely objet dart?" "It was frozen into Le Dormeur glacier." "A glacier? Even more extraordinary."

"That's not half the story. It was found near a body that was embedded in the ice. The body may have been in the glacier less than a hundred years. The man probably parachuted from a plane whose wreckage was found in the nearby lake."

Darnay poked his forefinger through the hole in the helmet. "And this?"

"I think it's a bullet hole."

The antiquities dealer didn't seem surprised. "Then this Ice Man could have been wearing the helmet?" "Possibly."

"It's not a failed proof mark

"I don't think so. Look at the hardness of that steel. Musket balls would have bounced off the metal like peas. The hole was made by a more modern firearm."

"So we have a man flying over a glacier wearing an old helmet, shot with modern weapons." She shrugged. "It seems so." Darnay sipped his brandy. "Fascinating, but it all makes little sense.

"Nothing about this whole affair makes sense."

She settled into a chair and told Darnay about Renaud's summons to the cave and her harrowing rescue. Darnay listened with furrowed brow.

"Thank God you're safe! This Kurt Austin is an homme formidable Handsome, too, I suppose."

"Very much so." She felt herself blushing.

"I owe him my gratitude. I have always thought of you as a daughter, Skye. I would have been devastated if anything had happened to you."

"Well, nothing did, thanks to Mr. Austin and his colleague Joe Zavala." She gestured at the helmet. "Well?"

"I believe it's older than it looks. As you say, the steel is extraordinary. The metal used in its manufacture may very well have been forged in the stars. The fact that this is the only one of its kind that I have ever seen, and that you found no reference to it in your library, leads me to think it might have been a prototype"

"If the features were so innovative, why weren't these ideas picked up sooner?"

"You know the nature of arms and men. Good sense does not always prevail over intransigence. The Polish insisted on using horse cavalry against armored panzer divisions. Billy Mitchell had an uphill fight convincing the army hierarchy of the value of aerial bombardment. Maybe someone looked at this and said the old equipment was preferable to the untested."

"Any thoughts on the eagle motif I saw here and on the plane?"

"Yes, but none of them are scientific."

"I'd be interested to hear them anyhow. And perhaps I'll take that offer of brandy."

Darnay poured another snifter and they tapped glasses. "I'd say the eagle represents the joining together, an alliance of some sort, of three

different groups into one. Epluribus unum. "Out of many, one." It was not an easy arrangement. The eagle seems to be pulling itself apart, yet it must hang together or die. The weapons it is clutching in its claws would lead me to believe that this alliance has something to do with war."

"Not bad for an unscientific guess."

He smiled. "If we only knew who your Ice Man was." He glanced at his watch. "Excuse me, Skye, but I have a conference call with a dealer in London and a buyer in the United States. Would you mind if I kept this piece here for a few hours so I could study it further?"

"Not at all. Just call when you want me to pick it up. I'll either be at my office or my apartment."

A cloud passed over his brow. "My dear girl, there is more here than meets the eye. Someone was willing to kill for this artifact. It must have great value. We must be very careful. Does anyone know you have it?"

"Kurt Austin, the NUMA man I told you about. He's trustworthy. Some of those who were in the cave would know of it. And Renaud."

"Ah, Renaud," he said, drawing out the name. "That's not good. He'll want it back."