Norris Sworski Codex

Eclipse Over Cusco
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4835-4319-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 350 Seiten

James Covax is a young accountant from a small town in Missouri. While life seems at first normal for Jim and his soon-to-be wife Mary, a mysterious string of events begin to affect their lives after they receive a strange wedding gift in the mail. Then after the pair win the national lottery and miraculously save the life of the UN Secretary-General, a senior New York-based FBI agent Oliver Jefferson becomes suspicious about the young couple and begins to investigate. One night Jim awakes to find Mary has been kidnapped. After he receives a massive ransom demand and then experiences a horrifying plane crash in the Amazonian jungle, Jim fights for his survival. He eventually enlists the help of an Australian archaeologist based in Cusco. While Jim never gives up hope of being re-united with his young wife, he and Johnston discover they have both become trapped in a wicked cat-and-mouse game. It seems unlikely to Jim by this stage that he will ever see his wife alive again. Likewise Oliver Jefferson unwittingly stumbles onto the path of a psychopathic Eastern-European billionaire grain trader, who aims to stop at nothing to implement his miss-guided plan to manage and control the world's staple food supplies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Norris, Paul

Leseproben

2 THE VISITOR Heading back home after his stressful flight, Jim thought how much he loved the small town life and all his buddies in Hermaine. He and Mary had agreed they had no intention of moving away. Hermaine’s population was around fifteen thousand and this figure had dropped by around ten per cent over the last five years. This was due to the fact that many young people were moving away to work and study in larger capital cities or move overseas. But growing up in a small town just fifty miles west of St Louis was just fine for James Covax. His father, Edward Covax, after years of struggling had established the largest firm of accountants in the district. So it was from an early age young Jim was being taught how to balance the books and also how to finance and manage an accounting business. His mum and dad agreed to Jim’s own request to study accountancy in St Louis once he finished school and that’s exactly what he did. Now aged twenty-three, and as he had just completed his accounting degree Jim was qualified to help run the family firm. He also felt financially secure enough to ask his childhood sweetheart to marry him. Jim was also a real sports nut. But being a little podgy and not ever really super fit he wasn’t ever a great player. However he was a keen fan of baseball and college football. He also loved watching sport and movies on TV. Mary Klempt, his finance, worked as an assistant librarian in the Hermaine District Library. She was a quiet girl with short brunette hair and wore spectacles. Studious and smart, she was an efficient librarian, and played basketball in the local team on Saturdays and church tennis on Sundays. Mary’s parents had bought a farm ten miles out on the western outskirts of town about thirty years ago. Her father, Hans Klempt, whose parents emigrated from Germany after the Second World War, had run cattle for the first ten years. In between Hans and his American wife Judy had raised three daughters. As years went by Hans tried his hand at growing vegetables and even some special varieties of grain for the baking of German bread. It was his purchase of some property in the east backing on to his existing property, however, which was his winning investment. The area had been set up for growing grapes but the owner had been forced to sell off in a hurry. Thanks to advice from the Covax’s accounting firm he was able to get a loan organised from the bank. Klempt’s Fine Red Wines were a huge success at first around the country and after that won awards and achieved large export sales internationally. People were coming to his vineyard from all over the world to sample his wines. This was also great for other businesses in the town. Hans certainly proved he was a good organiser and manager. It was his hard work through the ebbs and flows of prosperity over the years had seem him come out on top financially. Mary and her sisters had a happy childhood growing up on the farm. Mary had once thought of travelling to Paris to study French and maybe after that go to college in New York. But because she didn’t want to leave Jim behind she stayed in Hermaine. This tactic paid off just after Thanksgiving. One Sunday night after church tennis Jim proposed to her. The wedding was planned over the winter and set for late April, just after Jim’s graduation. As both their jobs seemed to be stable in Hermaine, the two of them felt very happy to live in the town they’d both grown up in. Most of their school friends had found it too quiet in Hermaine, however, and moved to St Louis. Then having moved to St Louis they soon grew restless there, too. After that they moved anywhere they could, even if it was an ill-conceived move, just so they could say they moved out of St Louis. After all just about everyone else they knew had done the same. Jim’s father had always told him his version of the old adage: ‘Travel broadens the mind - but thins the wallet’. And for an accountant that was a fitting mindset. Having a ‘gap-year’ or and overseas trip seemed a waste of money to Jim who, deep down inside, felt he was not cut out for the wild single life. He preferred to settle down in his hometown and start a family instead. For their honeymoon Jim and Mary had planned to drive around Canada on a six-week camping trip. They were looking forward to going away after spending the last few months renovating their new apartment. Also exciting for them was this trip was the first time either of them had been anywhere outside the state of Missouri. While they referred to their house as an apartment, it wasn’t an apartment in the normal sense. It was really just a big house around the corner from the main street of Hermaine, which had been divided in two. Jim’s father had bought the property a few years ago and renovated it, then rented out each section. Occupying one of the half-house allotments seemed like the perfect solution for Jim and Mary after they announced they intended to marry. Some of their wedding gifts had arrived early via courier and were delivered to the apartment. Mary’s parents had given the pair a very generous gift voucher from the local electrical store for four thousand dollars two days before their wedding. They had excitedly gone out straight away to buy a microwave oven and a blender. But Jim was particularly excited about buying a combined DVD player and digital video recorder unit, along with surround-sound amplifier system and a wide-screen television. The latter he couldn’t wait to get installed so he could view all his favourite sports shows on the new big screen. Jim’s brother Tom had also sent them a wedding present of a battery-operated digital calendar with a big illuminated display. They’d not ever seen one of these before. Upstairs in the lounge room Jim fiddled with the buttons on the side of it to set the correct date. Once he had set it to the current day he put it on a side table opposite the TV and went back downstairs. On the floor in the kitchen were several open cardboard boxes as the couple jumped to the task of sorting out where their new appliances should go. ‘There’s only one place for the microwave oven and that’s here in the kitchen next to the lava lamp,’ he declared. ‘Okay’ said Mary. ‘But if you put it there near the window you’ll have to swing the door and it’ll knock the flour canister off the bench’. Jim agreed. As a matter of fact he thought Mary was always right about stuff around the home. Come to think of it she was right about just about everything else as well. He loved that. Sometimes it also got on his nerves as Mary was, as his sister had once told him, a ‘typical Virgo’. Apparently in the lives of Virgos everything has to be in its correct place. They are by nature perfectionists. Still, he thought, a woman like that is great to be with. As a Gemini he was a bit less tidy and organised than her. Jim’s mother, however, was always sceptical whether his star sign ever had anything to do with his untidiness. ‘Okay, and the blender?’ asked Jim. Mary threw her gaze across the kitchen. ‘Yeah, the blender can go under this little foldaway door. I calculate we’ll be using the blender on Sundays after tennis so we can keep it out of view but not so tucked away we can’t find it once a week. A priority of need ranked on a seasonal usage I’ve calculated it to be a four-and-half out of ten.’ When Jim heard this he thought maybe Mary was a little too fastidious sometimes. ‘And the digital video recorder, surround-sound and wide screen TV?’ ‘Well...’ At that moment the doorbell rang. It was one of those novelty doorbells that played the first few bars of When the Saints Go Marching In. Jim looked up, and for around a second the slit of his mouth was as straight as a pencil. ‘Hmm, we gotta figure out how to change that tune,’ he muttered quietly to himself. When Jim opened the front door an Ex-Press-It courier was standing there in front of him holding a small package. ‘Mr & Mrs J. Covax?’ asked the man, who was dressed neatly in a grey jacket with the company logo on the breast pocket. ‘Well, not officially until Saturday,’ Jim responded, ‘But yes, that’s us.’ ‘Aah, getting hitched on the weekend are we? Best of wishes to you both, then.’ ‘Aah? Don’t I need to sign something?’ Jim quizzed the man. ‘No. It’s just a small package. I’ve checked it off my list. We try to avoid unnecessary paperwork. Well, that’s it! Thank you and have a great wedding,’ said the man, who then left. ‘What is it?’ asked Mary. ‘Oh, a package from...’ Jim looked at the package and turned it upside down. ‘L.F. Smith. I don’t know them.’ Jim shook the package and shrugged his shoulders and then put it on the kitchen bench. Mary picked up the package and looked at the postmark. ‘Funny, I can’t make out the postmark, but written on the side here it says the sender is Walter’s Antiques and Curios in Salt Lake City’. ‘Maybe it’s a wedding present from one of my long lost relatives?’ Jim postulated. Mary attempted to open the tightly wrapped package but broke one of her fingernails trying to lift the packing tape. ‘Ouch! Darn! Shoot! I broke off my nail!’ cursed Mary in a polite way as she waved her hand in the air. As she went off to grab her nail file, Jim took over. ‘Never mind, I’ll open it,’ said Jim, now taking command. ...