Marauder (Oregon Files 15)

“No,” Julia gasped. “Does it give the name of the nut?”

“It’s called nux viridi lucus. It means ‘green-eyed nut.’”

“Eric, can you find any nut with that name?”

“I’m looking but don’t see anything.”

“It’s probably called something else now,” Julia said. “Without a picture of it, the nut may be impossible to find.”

“We don’t even know what island they were on,” Murph said. “It could be any one of thousands in the Indian Ocean. It’s not looking good. Maybe I should get used to this chair.”

Sylvia sniffled, and Eric put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t give up yet,” Juan said. “We’ll try out every single nut in existence if we have to. I know we’ll find the antidote.”

Julia didn’t look as confident about his reassurances because of the time pressure, but she didn’t say anything to Sylvia. They would never be able to replicate the antidote in a week if they didn’t know the key ingredient.

“Let’s get back to the ship and see what we can come up with,” Juan said.

“Before we go, I want to get photos of the dental work on these skeletons,” Julia said. “It will help their families get closure if we can identify the bodies for the authorities.”

She knelt beside the bones and gently lifted each skull one by one to take the pictures.

On the fourth person, something fell to the ground when she picked up the skull.

“What’s that?”

Juan bent over and focused his light on a blue plastic object the shape of a piece of gum.

It was a USB thumb drive.

“How did that get there?” he wondered as he picked it up. The case was still intact and unharmed.

“This man must have had it in his mouth when he died,” Julia said. “There must be something on it that he didn’t want the killers to find.”

FORTY-ONE

Eric plugged the USB drive into his tablet.

“There are a lot of files on here,” he said. “Here’s one that’s a translation of all this text on the wall.”

Murph cut in. “That would have saved us some time.”

“Do a search for ‘nux viridi lucus’ and ‘green-eyed nut,’” Julia said.

“Searching. It looks there are several mentions of them.”

“Any pictures?”

“No images that I see. Just text files. Here’s one called Daily Log. It looks like this thumb drive was the property of the expedition leader, a guy named Victor Ormond.”

“He knew that his team was in danger and hid the files,” Juan said. “Too bad it didn’t help him, but it might help us. What do the references to the nut say?”

“Here’s a file where he talks about researching the nut’s origin, but there are no conclusions.”

“What about the daily log?” Julia asked.

“It says they found amphorae sealed with beeswax. Three of them were marked ‘N V L,’ etched in the wax. It looks like they brought one of them back to their headquarters here, but the log ends before it mentions what they found inside.”