Spartan Gold Read Online Free PDF

cares.”
    He smiled. “The submarine. I’m pretty sure. We’ll have to get down there, of course, but I can’t imagine it’s anything else.”
    “But what’s it doing here? All the way upriver.”
    “That’s the mystery we’ll have to solve, won’t we?”
    “And what about Patty Cannon?”
    “She can wait a couple days. We’ll ID the sub, put Selma and the others onto unraveling the mystery, then get back to our sociopathic murderous slave runner.”
    Remi gave it a few moments’ thought, then shrugged. “Why not. Life is short.”
    Selma Wondrash was the drill sergeant-like head of Sam and Remi’s three-person research team back in San Diego. Selma was widowed, having lost her husband, an air force test pilot, in a crash ten years earlier. They’d met in Budapest in the early nineties, she a university student, he a fighter jock on leave. Despite having lived in the United States for fifteen years, Selma had never entirely lost her accent.
    After finishing her degree at Georgetown and becoming a citizen, she went to work for the Library of Congress’s Special Collections Directorate until Sam and Remi lured her away. More than a research chief, Selma had proved herself a superb travel agent and logistics guru, getting them to and from destinations with military efficiency.
    While Sam and Remi loved the research aspect of their field, Selma and her team were rabid about it, living for that buried fact, that elusive lead, that unsolvable riddle that always seemed to crop up in the course of a job. More times than they could count, Selma and her team had kept an investigation from going far astray.
    Of course, “job” wasn’t quite the right word for what Sam and Remi did. For them it wasn’t about a paycheck but rather the adventure, and the satisfaction of seeing the Fargo Foundation flourish. The foundation, which split its gifting between animal protection, nature conservancy, and underprivileged and abused children, had grown in leaps and bounds over the last decade, the previous year donating almost five million dollars to a variety of organizations. A hefty part of that money had come from Sam and Remi personally and the rest of it from private donations. For better or worse their exploits attracted a fair amount of media attention, which in turn attracted wealthy, high-profile donors.
    The fact that Sam and Remi got to do what they loved was a boon neither of them took for granted, having both worked hard to reach this place in their life.
    Remi’s father, now retired, had been a private contractor who’d built custom summer homes along the New England coast; her mother, a pediatrician with a series of bestselling child-rearing books. Following in her father’s footsteps, Remi had attended his alma mater, Boston College, emerging with a master’s in anthropology and history, with a focus on ancient trade routes.
    Sam’s father, who’d died a few years earlier, had been one of the lead engineers on NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs and rare-book collector, a love affair he’d passed on to Sam at an early age. Sam’s mother, Eunice, lived in Key West, where, despite being almost seventy, she ran a charter boat specializing in snorkel ing and deep-sea fishing.
    Like Remi, Sam had followed in his father’s footsteps, if not in his choice of education, then in his vocation, earning a summa cum laude engineering degree from Caltech, along with a handful of trophies for lacrosse and soccer.
    While in his final months of study at Caltech Sam was approached by a man he would later find out was from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where the government developed and tested the latest and greatest toys for both the military and intelligence communities. The offered salary had been far below what he could have earned in the civilian world, but the lure of pure creative engineering combined with serving his country made Sam’s choice an easy one.
    After seven years at