Dirk Pitt - 16 - Valhalla Rising by Clive Cussler

Author:Clive Cussler
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Thriller
Published: 2010-06-09T23:00:00+00:00

Dirk Pitt 18 - Valhalla Rising

Part Three

THOUSAND-YEAR TRAIL

JULY 31, 2003 TOHONO LAKE, NEW JERSEY

Tohono Lake was off the beaten track as far as lakes went in New Jersey. There were no lakeside homes. It was on private land owned by the Cerberus Corporation for the use of its top management. Employees were provided with another resort lake thirty miles away for their pleasure. Because the lake was isolated, there were no fences around it. The only security was a locked gate five miles away on a road that wound through the low hills and heavily forested land before reaching a comfortable three-story lodge built of logs; the lodge faced the lake and came with a dock with a boat-house protecting canoes and rowboats. No motorized boats were allowed on the lake.

Fred Ames was not a director of Cerberus. He wasn't even a lower-level employee, but one of several local people who paid no attention to the No Trespassing signs and hiked into the lake to fish. He set up a small camp behind the trees surrounding the lakefront. The lake was stocked with largemouth bass and rarely fished, so it didn't take an old pro long to catch several five-to-ten-pound bass before noon. He was about to step into the water wearing his waders and begin casting when he noticed a large black limousine pull up and stop at the boat ramp. Two men got out with their fishing gear, while the chauffeur pulled one of the several boats sitting beside the ramp down to the water.

For big-time corporate executives, Ames thought it unusual for them not to use an outboard motor. Instead, one of them rowed the boat out to the middle of the lake, where he let it drift while both men tied on their bass plugs and began casting. Ames melted back into the forest and decided to warm a pot of coffee on his Coleman stove and read a paperback book until the corporate fishermen left.

The man who sat in the center of the boat and rowed was slightly under six feet and reasonably trim for a man of sixty. He had reddish-brown hair with no gray, topping a tanned face. Everything about him seemed exactingly sculptured in marble by an ancient Greek. His head, jaw, nose, ears, arms, legs, feet and hands seemed in perfect scale. The eyes were almost as blue-white as those on a husky, but not piercing. Their soft look was often misread as warm and friendly, when they were actually dissecting everyone in range. His movements-rowing, tying his bass plug and then casting-were precisely measured without wasted motion.

Curtis Merlin Zale was a perfectionist. There was nothing left of the boy who used to hike across cornfields to complete his chores. After his father died, he'd dropped out of school at twelve to run the family farm, and had educated himself. By the time he was twenty, he had accumulated the largest farm in the county and hired a manager to run it for his mother and three sisters.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.