The Feathers certainly weren’t expecting Emma Ford to show up — let alone with Dan McCarthy and Timo Fiore in tow — and the true reason for her group’s visit would surely come as an even greater surprise.

  Emma drove, with Clark beside her in the front passenger seat. He would normally have offered this seat to Tara, hoping she’d say no given that his frame would so obviously benefit from the extra space, but on this occasion his aches and pains from the incident at Stevenson Farm came before his deeply entrenched sense of chivalry.

  Clark’s nose looked noticeably better than it had the previous night, as everyone pointed out, and he explained that he had tried to “fix it” like he’d seen countless guys do after boxing matches during his military days. Although it was no longer so obviously bent out of shape, Dan pointed out that it was more than a small stretch to call it fixed. Nevertheless, Clark insisted that only his ribs and lower back were still giving him any real problems, as they had borne the brunt of his impact with the wall of Richard Walker’s hallway when the Messengers’ forcefield unceremoniously threw him backwards into it.

  “I’m reading about the Feathers,” Timo said, mainly to Dan. “Did you know that their father’s middle name was Zebulon?”

  “Is that an alien planet or something?” Clark butted in.

  “Not quite,” Timo said. “I am only familiar with two Zebulons, and something tells me this man was named after the explorer, rather than the biblical son of Jacob.”

  Clark turned to face Timo, no longer feeling any stiffness in his neck or shoulder. “What explorer?”

  “Zebulon Pike,” Dan answered. “You know, Pikes Peak? How can you live here your whole life and not know that?”

  “Who’s the Broncos’ all-time leading receiver?” Clark replied with a question of his own.

  Dan shrugged. “Who cares?”

  “How can you live here your whole life and not know that?” Clark quipped. “And that’s recent. Your mountain man was what, like 500 years ago?”

  “Riiiight,” Dan said, trying to keep a straight face. “Because modern American explorers were all over Colorado in the early 1500s.”

  “Are you sure you guys are definitely brothers?” Tara asked, laughing in the seat next to Dan. “And you definitely went to the same school?”

  The journey continued in a similar vein.

  As they neared their destination, Tara casually and knowingly whispered a question to Dan, asking if he had gone home during the night after offering to let Timo sleep in the basement. “Because I got up for a drink and it was the weirdest thing,” she said. “See, the couch was empty.”

  “Grow up,” Emma said, her tone somewhere between indifference and the mildest of annoyance. This comment revealed that she had either heard Tara’s whispers or — more likely — that she could deduce their content from the impish look on her younger sister’s face.

  “What’s happening?” Clark asked. “Who’s growing up?”

  No one answered for a few seconds, but Dan’s silence and Tara’s face combined with Emma’s words to tell him all he needed to know. A slow gasp automatically followed the eureka moment. “Seriously?” he said. “You two… last night?”

  “Perhaps this is one of those discussions best kept for after we have the plaque in our hands,” Timo interjected.

  “I guess it’s hardly the shock of the century,” Clark said, turning around to face forward once more. “Even if Dan is reaching about fifteen levels above his natural—”

  “Do you want to walk the rest of the way?” Emma interrupted, now tending more towards the annoyance end of the spectrum.

  There was no real anger or tension for the short remainder of the drive, with everyone very much understanding that Timo was right when he said that the plaque was the only thing they should be focusing on.

  The plan was simple: visit the Feather brothers in their antique store and convince them to allow the group to search through the outbuildings at their nearby family home.

  Stage one commenced when Emma parked outside the store and Tara, the least recognisable of the group, entered first to check that there were no other customers milling around.

  There weren’t, as everyone had fully expected, and Tara gave a quick hand signal to call the others forward.

  The whole group were soon inside the small store, familiar to them from the TV show, and the Feather brothers looked on in stunned shock as they caught sight of just who was paying them a visit.

  The brothers shared a relative resemblance to Dan and Clark in one sense, with one being far more substantially and athletically built than the other. But both were more than a few inches shorter than the tall McCarthys; and in the Feathers’ case, the more wiry of the brothers — identified by his name-badge as Andrew — was the elder.

  Andrew’s thin-framed glasses were very much in keeping with his own thin frame, while a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled up — also seen on the TV show — seemed to be his standard uniform of casual dress.

  Michael, the younger and stockier of the two, meanwhile sported dark blue jeans and a brown T-shirt emblazoned with the familiar logo of a locally brewed and internationally known brand of beer.

  Although first impressions weren’t always accurate and appearances could be deceptive, in this instance no one was surprised when Michael stepped forward and immediately positioned himself as the talker and decision-maker. There was equally little surprise in the brashness of his first question:

  “What the hell is this?”

  Dan opened his mouth, getting out only the word “we” before Emma drowned him out. This wasn’t an interruption as such since Dan hadn’t been speaking first; it was more a case of Emma being her firm and forceful self, effortlessly being heard over his deeper but quieter voice.

  “I have a contract for you to sign,” she said, addressing her words primarily to Michael, who she had already identified as being the key to gaining entry. “It’s extremely lucrative, and I need you to hear me out before you do or say anything. Okay?”

  Michael’s eyes widened. “Go on…”

  And go on Emma did; not with a slow-burning, frog-boiling description of the reason for her visit, but rather with an explicit statement: “Well, Dan thinks the fourth plaque is in one of your outbuildings and we came here to find it.”

  Dan watched uneasily as Michael’s eyes narrowed. He had hoped for excitement, but suspicion was a better word for what Michael seemed to be feeling.

  Michael turned to his older but smaller brother.

  “Let’s hear them out,” Andrew said, stepping forward to Michael’s side. “So Dan… what makes you think it’s here?”

  “And what makes you think you can have it?” Michael interjected.

  Andrew nudged him in the side. “Ignore him,” he told Dan.

  Emma in turn nudged Dan, more gently, encouraging him to field the question with his well-practiced answer. Dan proceeded to deliver his white lie with word-for-word accuracy, telling the Feather brothers that he had read a diary entry written by Karl Heilig which mentioned an encounter with a collector from Colorado who apparently visited Austria on several occasions and who claimed to have found a plaque similar to Heilig’s own.

  None of this was true and Dan didn’t like having to lie, but the ‘having to’ part of the equation helped him through it.

  “We watched you guys on American Treasure and we know there are buildings you’ve never even searched inside since your dad passed away,” Tara said, interjecting exactly as they had rehearsed.

  As Andrew Feather began to reply, Michael cut him off. “Andrew, close up the store,” he said. “I’m going home to find it. The rest of you… thanks for the tip.”

  Michael walked towards the door.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Timo Fiore said, speaking for the first time.

  Michael stopped halfway to the door and squared up to Timo. “Oh yeah, rich boy?”

  Clark gently moved Timo aside and gazed down at Michael, whose eyes barely reached his chin. “And you really don’t want to do that,” he said. “What you want to do is step back, calm down, and take us to your old man’s hoard.”

  “Give me one good reason,” the cantankerous man replied.

  Clark looked over Michael’s head at his older and wiser brother, Andrew. “Is this guy for real?” he asked.

  Andrew stayed out of it.

  “You want one good reason,” Timo said, remaining calm at Clark’s side. “Well, Michael, how about one million good reasons?”

  At this, Andrew stepped forward to pull his brother away from Clark. “Is that a serious offer?” he asked Timo. “A million dollars, just to look for it?”

  Emma took over. “If you keep quiet about this and let us look for as long as we want, a million dollars is yours,” she said. “And if we find the plaque, Timo will add another two million.”

  “On the condition of strict confidentiality,” Dan stressed.

  Momentarily, the air was thick with tension. Silence circled as a lot of eyes took turns to look at each other.

  “But you offered a billion,” Michael eventually said, his tone firm. “That’s a lot more than three million.”

  “That was if someone else found the plaque and put it in my hand,” Timo said. “And that was without the offer of one million dollars guaranteed, whether the plaque is found or not; that was without a million dollars for nothing.”

  “For nothing?” Michael snapped. “You mean for letting you into our house, for letting you search through our dad’s stuff, and for giving up the right to a billion if it’s there?”

  “The billion is off the table,” Timo replied. “The hard work is done, so if—”

  Sensing that things were moving in the wrong direction, Emma stepped in to cut Timo off. At the same time, Andrew likewise stepped in to try to reason with Michael.

  Emma then relayed the offer, very calmly, and encouraged the Feathers to think and talk it over. She also encouraged them to step back, which they duly did.

  “One million dollars, guaranteed,” Andrew stressed. “Even if they don’t find it!”

  “They wouldn’t be here and they definitely wouldn’t be offering that kind of money if they weren’t confident of finding it,” Michael replied. “If we shake their hands, we could be screwing ourselves out of an absolute fortune.”

  Andrew shook his head and sighed in frustration. “Michael, you heard him: the original bounty is off the table. Besides, where we are right now, three million might as well be a billion; it would change everything.” He then lowered his voice significantly, but not quite significantly enough for Dan and his group to not hear the words: “And let’s be real here for a second… it’s Timo Fiore. You really think he’s not going to get what he wants? We need to do a deal with him that makes sense for everyone, not turn him into our enemy.”

  Dan didn’t like watching this and he didn’t like hearing it. From what little he had seen of the Feathers’ home during the American Treasure episode, it looked to him like they had about as much money as his family did a few years ago, before Clark started bringing in the danger pay for his private security work in Iraq.

  The Feather brothers’ refusal to sell their father’s pride-and-joy “Pikes Peak Or Bust” sign from the Gold Rush era despite their financial position also reminded him of his own reluctance to cash the $85 cheque that had adorned his wall for so long after he received it as payment for the first ever article he sold.

  The figures being discussed, substantial as they were, didn’t even amount to a rounding error for Timo. ‘Mere’ millions meant little to a man considered the world’s wealthiest by some measures, but they could clearly be beyond life-changing to these everyday hard-workers.

  Dan would never offer one man’s money to another, but he turned to Timo and insistently whispered a request for him to up the guarantee to five million.

  “Two,” Timo whispered in reply.

  Dan held firm. “Five.”

  “How about this,” Timo said loudly, drawing the Feathers’ attention as intended. “Three million if you let us in, eight if we find it.”

  “Five and ten,” Michael replied.

  Timo shook his head. “Three and eight.”

  Michael stepped forward again, less aggressively than before but still showing that he was in no mood to back down. “You say your bounty is off the table, fine. But don’t forget that you weren’t the only person putting up money for the plaque. Don’t forget that the only reason your bounty got so high was because you wanted to outbid the Arabs and Silicon Valley guys who were putting up almost as much. You ain’t the only show in town, Timo.”

  “Five and ten,” Timo agreed, keeping his words straight to the point and delivering them without expressing any annoyance.

  “Paid in regular instalments,” Emma added, “for as long as you keep this quiet.”

  “At least at first,” Dan interjected. “A lot depends on what the plaque says. You might not have to keep totally quiet about everything, but the point is that you can’t say anything about anything until we say so. If you don’t understand that, there’s no deal.”

  Dan didn’t feel at all conflicted — much less at all guilty — about stating this so firmly; after all, his intervention had just led to the Feathers’ guarantee rising to five million dollars and their final bounty to ten.

  Michael held out his hand and decisively shook Timo’s. “You got yourself a deal, rich boy,” he said, smiling as he spoke in a far warmer tone than he had earlier, with even the ‘rich boy’ term of address tinged with something close to friendliness.

  “A wise decision,” Timo replied.

  Michael then walked to Dan to shake his hand, too. “And you really think it’s here?” he asked.

  Dan nodded. He came close to spilling more than he intended to — the words “they wouldn’t have sent me here if it wasn’t” almost escaped his lips — but he managed to hold back and instead gave a reply which, while still true, was less revealing: “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

  “I know guys who have been up and down these mountains looking for that thing,” Michael said with a slightly rueful grin, “and goddamnit if it ain’t been right here all along! Ten million dollars… long way off a billion, but it sure as hell beats throwing Dad’s scrap metal out for nothing without even knowing what was hiding in beside it.”

  Andrew, the thinner and quieter of the Feathers, offered a word of caution similar to Emma’s from the previous night: “Let’s not count any chickens just yet.” A huge smile then crossed his face, as though the full nature of the deal had just sunk in. “But even if those chickens don’t hatch and the plaque is somewhere else, five million is a pretty nice consolation!”

  Michael returned to the area behind the cash register and crouched down to get something from a low compartment. He rose to his feet holding several pairs of thick gloves. “There’s a shitload of rust in some of those outbuildings,” he explained. “And maybe some, uh, wildlife, too.”

  “Rats?” Tara shrieked.

  “Maybe,” Michael said, tossing her a pair of the gloves.

  Tara looked at them for several seconds, as though deciding whether or not to throw them back and say that she wasn’t searching through any buildings where rats might be crawling around. “I’ve come this far…” she eventually decided, holding on to them.

  Michael also threw gloves to Timo, Clark and Emma. He handed a pair to his brother Andrew and carried Dan’s pair to deliver them by hand, too.

  As all of the others walked out towards the car, Dan was smart enough to know that Michael wanted to tell him something. He waited for the gloves, wondering more with each passing second exactly what Michael was going to say.

  “I know you told Fiore to raise the offer,” Michael said. He gently patted Dan on the back and handed him the gloves, smiling all the while. “Now let’s find your plaque and double my money.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Dan replied, sporting a relieved grin of his own as he stepped outside. “Sounds like a plan to me.”

  C minus 8

  Myers Residence

  Lipton, Colorado

  “One second,” Trey Myers called, hurrying to reach the back door of his house where, for one reason or another, someone had just banged several times on the glass.

  Had it been dark or had his wife and young son been around, Trey would have been more concerned than he was over the question of who was there. As it went, he was primarily confused.

  The answer, more mundane than he’d expected, came when Trey opened the door to find a young courier grasping a shoebox-sized package.

  “Delivery,” the courier said, handing over the box.

  Trey took it. “Why didn’t you go to the front?”

  The young man pointed around the side of the house. “I did. You mustn’t have heard. I was gonna leave this out here, somewhere safe, but I thought I should try the back door. You know, since there’s a car in the driveway. And hey, listen, I know this is weird… but could I maybe use your bathroom real quick? Number one.”

  “Left at the top of the stairs,” Trey said as he scanned for a brand name on the box or label in an effort to remember what he’d ordered. The courier politely took off his shoes and hurried upstairs.

  “Wait a second…” Trey called. “This is for a ‘T Miles’ at 1142. I’m Trey Myers and this is 1242. Wrong house, dude!”

  The courier stopped near the top of the stairs. “Seriously? Goddammit, the assholes at the sorting office are making more of these mistakes every single day!”

  Trey placed the box on the doorstep and waited at the bottom of the stairs until the courier returned a minute later.

  “Sorry about this bullshit,” the young man said. “And thanks for the hospitality.”

 

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