Home > Work > The Charlemagne Pursuit (Cotton Malone, #4)
1 " It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it. "
― Steve Berry , The Charlemagne Pursuit (Cotton Malone, #4)
2 " People like him, who buried their past so determinedly, should not help it from the grave so easily. "
3 " It's true that the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. "
4 " We find what we search for. "
5 " THIRTY-THREE MUNICH, GERMANY1:00 PM WILKERSON HAD SLEPT WELL, SATISFIED BOTH WITH HOW HE’D handled himself at the lodge and with Dorothea afterward. Having access to money, few responsibilities, and a beautiful woman weren’t bad substitutes for not being an admiral. Provided, of course, that he could stay alive. In preparation for this assignment, he’d back-checked the Oberhauser family thoroughly. Assets in the billions, and not old money—ancient money that had lasted through centuries of political upheavals. Opportunists? Surely. Their family crest seemed to explain it all. A dog clutching a rat in its mouth, encased inside a crested cauldron. What myriad contradictions. Much like the family itself. But how else could they have survived? Time, though, had taken a toll. Dorothea and her sister were all the Oberhausers left. Both beautiful, high-strung creatures. Nearing fifty. Identical in appearance, though each tried hard to distinguish herself. Dorothea had pursued business degrees and actively worked with her mother in the family concerns. She’d married in her early twenties and birthed a son, but he was killed five years ago, a week after his twentieth birthday, in a car accident. All reports indicated that she changed after that. Hardened. Became enslaved to deep anxieties and unpredictable moods. To shoot a man with a shotgun, as she’d done last night, then make love afterward with such an unfettered intensity, proved that dichotomy. Business had never interested Christl, nor had marriage or children. He’d met her only once, at a social function Dorothea and "
6 " at the sight of the sinking, "