“I don’t know for sure. But apparently January had been meeting with Thorne, trying to enlist his aid. This fits in with what Georgia was just telling us. I think we have to assume they have the best of the bunch, whatever January thought was important.”
“By important, you mean whatever proves his theories?” Georgia said.
“Yes.” Hayek looked around the table. “Those artifacts, and in particular the Clairvaux Codex, could destabilize the entire Middle East. It’s not important that you know what secrets the artifacts reveal. What’s important is that we need to get them back.” He ground his cigarette into an ashtray. “Unfortunately, Spencer and Thorne are spooked, so they will not be easy to find.” He exhaled. “This mushroomed on us quickly. It is now a top priority. As I said, this stuff could further destabilize the Middle East—not that anyone over there needs another excuse.”
“Wait,” Georgia said. “So you think January is right? These artifacts validate the Book of Mormon?” If so, it would be an astounding revelation. But how would that destabilize the Middle East? Hayek hadn’t given them any details.
Hayek chewed his lip. “I wish that was all we were talking about. The Book of Mormon is the least of our problems.”
Astarte tried not to cry. Adults didn’t like cry-babies. But she felt very sad. Uncle Jefferson was dead, and Mr. Thorne didn’t want to keep her. The police would bring her back to Aunt Eliza. But she didn’t want to live at the compound without Uncle Jefferson, especially because Aunt Eliza wasn’t a very nice person once you got to know her.
Mr. Thorne was talking on the speaker phone to a man named Salazar as they drove on the highway. “This doesn’t make any sense. That shot hit right next to Amanda; I was about ten feet away. But why try to kill her? I’m the one January gave the artifacts to. I’m the one he brought to the cave. I’m the one he wants to solve the mystery. If someone wanted that kept quiet, they would have shot at me instead.”
“Any chance January ordered Amanda, or you, killed?” Mr. Salazar asked.
Mr. Thorne shook his head. “He had plenty of chances to kill either of us. And he gave me the artifacts because he wanted my help. He had to know that killing Amanda would be the worst way to get it.”
“If not January, then who?”
“It had to be Judith,” Miss Amanda said after a few seconds of silence. “She’s the guard. She’s the only one who had access to the garage. And it seemed to me like she had some kind of military training.”
Astarte had once watched Judith lure a spider from the bathtub onto a stick and put it outside on a bush. She didn’t seem like a mean person. But maybe she liked spiders better than people.
“Makes sense,” Mr. Salazar said. “I bet this Judith was a plant, taking orders from the outside. Cam, did she even know about you?”
“I don’t think so. There was a male guard at the front gate when I came in. The first time I saw this Judith woman was after January shot himself.”
“So that’s it. That’s why they targeted Amanda and not you. My guess is Amanda learned something while she was at the compound. Something someone didn’t want exposed. Judith was reporting back to some central authority, who then sent orders back how to handle it.” Mr. Salazar paused. “Did the girl tell Amanda any secrets? Or show her anything that was supposed to be kept secret?”
Astarte felt her face get hot. Was that why they tried to shoot Miss Amanda?
Miss Amanda nodded kindly. “Go ahead, Astarte, tell Mr. Salazar what you showed me.”
Astarte turned away so Mr. Thorne wouldn’t see her crying. But she couldn’t keep from sobbing as she answered. “I showed her … where my uncle kept … the devil’s rocks.” Venus leaned over and licked the tears off her face. She buried her face in the dog’s fur and closed her eyes. She never should have brought Miss Amanda to the bunker. Uncle Jefferson had told her bad things would happen if she showed the devil’s rocks to anyone.
“The devil’s rocks?” Mr. Thorne repeated.
Astarte took a deep breath and dried her eyes. Using her most grown-up voice, she explained how the rocks told the story of white people coming to America a long time ago just like the Book of Mormon said, and how the devil made some other rocks to confuse people and make people wonder if the Book of Mormon had the story right, and how Uncle Jefferson put the devil’s rocks in a separate room, and how she brought Miss Amanda to see them. She lifted her chin. Maybe it wasn’t totally her fault after all. “Did the devil try to kill Miss Amanda because she looked at his rocks?”
Miss Amanda bit her lip. “It wasn’t the devil that did this, Astarte.”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Salazar. “But whoever it was isn’t going to be happy that you guys escaped with January’s artifacts and that Clairvaux Codex. It was smart for you to get out of there. But this isn’t over. Not by a long shot.”
Amanda tried not to let Cam see she was cross with him. They had more important things to do than bicker. But soon she would need to make it clear to him she had no intention of abandoning Astarte.
She and Cam were still unnerved from the gunshot, but Salazar had come up with a plan. They met him at a highway rest area and jumped into his minivan, abandoning the rental car. That would at least buy them some time.
“Hello, Amanda,” Salazar said, turning as she jumped into the back seat with Astarte. “I never had a chance to thank you for being so kind to my daughter.” His eyes, smoky brown and a bit sad, locked onto hers.
The last time she had seen him he had put a bullet in Cam’s shoulder. But she had managed to outfox him so she and Cam could escape. Yet she had never forgotten his parting words: I have a little girl, almost seven years old. I hope she turns out like you. A strangely intimate thing to say to someone you had almost killed. But how normal a conversation could one have with a man who had been hired to assassinate you?
Amanda offered a polite smile. “This is Astarte. She’s the same age as your daughter.” It seemed premature to be discussing play dates.
Salazar extended a stuffed pink bunny toward the back seat with one arm while he steered the van back onto the highway with the other. “My daughter keeps this bunny in the car so she’ll always have company in the back seat. I don’t think she’d mind if you played with her.”
“Thank you,” Astarte said. “What’s her name?”
“Rosalita.”
Astarte cocked her head. “No, I meant the bunny.”
Salazar chuckled softly. “Well, Rosalita got her for Easter.” His eyes found Amanda in the rearview mirror. “So we named her Ishtar.”
Ishtar was the pagan fertility goddess after whom the Easter holiday was named. Originally the Easter holiday was a spring fertility celebration, which is why eggs and grass and rabbits were its symbols. In the early centuries of Christianity the Church piggy-backed onto the festival and transformed it into a celebration of Jesus’ resurrection. Salazar had learned all this from Cam and Amanda a year ago. “How very appropriate,” Amanda said. “Even more so because Ishtar and Astarte are simply different ways of pronouncing the same name.”
Cam cut the conversation short. “We need to figure out where we’re going. And what to do with Astarte.”
Salazar nodded. “I’m pretty sure nobody saw you getting into my van. But at some point the police are going to come looking for Astarte. And whoever fired that shot is going to come looking for you.”
The police had finally left, which meant Eliza could wipe the painted smile and dreamy look off her face, stand up straight and get to work. Jefferson had insisted that he had taken care of everything, that upon his death there would be no loose ends. Well, he always did overestimate his ability to control things. Now she would have to try to clean up his mess. Actually, messes.
Mess number one was the disappearance of Astarte. Eliza made a quick phone call. “The princess is missing. She’s with Cameron Thorne and the Spencer woman.” She described the car and stated the obvious. “We need her back.”
Mess two was the failure of the CIA operative to carry out her assassination order. Had Judith simply botched the job? Or gotten cold feet? Or was it possible she had figured out that the assassination order was bogus, that Trey had intercepted Judith’s communication with Hayek in Virginia and issued the otherwise-authentic kill code and confirmation? If so, Trey—and their entire operation—might be at risk. Whatever the reason for the failed assassination, the result was potentially catastrophic—the Spencer woman had seen the devil’s rocks and lived to tell about them.
The third mess was the devil’s rocks themselves. Jefferson should have destroyed them years ago—preserving them was an unnecessary risk. But her brother was a collector at heart, a sentimentalist who could not bring himself to destroy the pieces of history he had so laboriously collected and deciphered. The Vatican at least had the good sense to burn the documents that did not comply with the orthodox teachings of Catholicism. Jefferson had locked them away, but he had not destroyed them. And now the Spencer woman had seen them.
Eliza retrieved the dynamite-filled suitcase from the kitchen, lifted the bulkhead door and descended the stairway to the underground bunker. She punched in the security code, turned on a light and strode into the main display hall, locking the entry door behind her. She examined the display cases—other than the artifacts Jefferson had packed up to show Thorne, everything seemed in order.
Now to the back room. She entered the security code a second time, opened a second door and flicked a second light switch. Tucked into the back corner of the room sat an old cast-iron bank safe about the size of a child’s playpen. Wearing a pair of gardening gloves, she gathered the devil’s rocks from the display cases and tossed them into the center of the safe. She counted them as she did so, mostly as a way to keep her mind focused and her thoughts organized. Twenty-one artifacts.
From the suitcase she pulled out a single stick of dynamite. For generations her family had worked in the mining industry so she had some familiarity with explosives—she rested the stick on top of the artifacts, struck a match, lit the fuse, slammed the safe closed and scrambled to the far side of the room, hopeful that there was enough oxygen in the safe to keep the fuse lit. Ten seconds later she had her answer as the room concussed. The iron safe bounced a few inches off the ground, belching smoke and dust before skidding to a stop, its door hanging on a single hinge.
Job done, she gathered the description cards from the display cases, planning to burn them in the fireplace. Out of habit she counted them as well. Twenty-two cards. She froze. She recounted the cards; twenty-two again. Had she miscounted the artifacts? Or was an artifact missing? She eyed the smoking safe. It was too late to find out.
She strode back across the room and peered into the safe. What was left of the artifacts lay in a clump of dust and rubble. Even the devil would have found them useless. And even the devil would have no way of telling if the rubble comprised twenty-two stones, or only twenty-one.
CHAPTER 10
Cam drove north on Interstate 95 in the early afternoon traffic. Astarte, traumatized by her uncle’s death, had cried herself to sleep on Amanda’s shoulder; Amanda tried to doze with her, though Cam doubted she would be able to sleep much after the gun shot. Cam tried to control his breathing, his body still trembling from the combination of adrenaline and trauma.
Amanda still didn’t know she had been one sip of tea away from immortality. Nor did she know Cam had murdered January. Or at least killed him. Or maybe just caused him to die. Whatever the correct term, Cam couldn’t help but replay the scene, wondering what he might have done differently. How was he even sure there was dynamite in the suitcase? Maybe the whole thing had been a bluff. And had he reacted more quickly, when he had the full 43 seconds, he might have had time to wrestle the gun from January and still disable the detonator. But he had been too slow to figure out January’s plan. And no way was he going to put Amanda in danger, or even the threat of danger, to save a dying megalomaniac. Even if it meant he had blood on his hands.
They had dropped Salazar off at his home in Rhode Island, along with Venus, but not before stopping at Salazar’s cousin’s house and trading Salazar’s van for the cousin’s Ford Explorer. “Whoever is after you will find your rental car and figure out you didn’t walk away from that rest area,” Salazar explained. “At some point they’re going to check your cell records and see you called me. If they have half a brain, they’ll figure out I picked you up and lent you my van. Using the SUV should buy you an extra day or so.”
He had lent Cam a wad of cash and instructed them not to use their bank or credit cards. “You don’t know who’s following you. They might have access to financial data bases.” He then dropped their cell phones into a bucket of water. “My phone is untraceable but you need to get some disposable cell phones. You guys need to be totally under the radar. Get one for the girl also in case you get separated.” He would rejoin them if necessary but for now they were heading to Boston—Salazar knew of a furnished apartment available on short notice where the owner would ask no questions.
Cam felt a pang of remorse at leaving the dog but was glad to be rid of the mercenary. It wasn’t so much that Salazar outwardly flirted with Amanda; rather, he seemed to idealize her. It was unnerving. Cam had the sense Salazar thought him unworthy of Amanda.
Of course, they had bigger problems. When they arrived in Boston they would need to figure out what to do about Astarte and the artifacts. The obvious way out of all this was to just give the artifacts and/or the Clairvaux Codex back to whomever it was who wanted them so badly. But how were they supposed to do that? Who was it that wanted January’s research to die with him? Cam doubted it would be enough to just offer the items up on eBay and hope January’s enemies—who now were also apparently his and Amanda’s enemies—popped up with a winning bid and a mailing address.
And even so, could Cam just let this go? In some kind of macabre, dying wish sacrament January had traded his very life for Cam’s assistance. Sure it was a slimy, coercive trick, but the reality was that Cam was responsible for the death. The gun would not have fired but for Cam flicking the light switch. He clenched the steering wheel. What he had done was not murder. He owed the loony January nothing.
Amanda stirred, reached forward and caressed his cheek with the back of her hand. “Sorry I nodded off.”
“Feel better?” He sighed and kissed her palm.
“Actually not. I had horrid dreams.” No doubt he would be haunted by nightmares of his own.
He had already summarized his trip to the cave and his meetings with January for Amanda and Salazar. But she had not yet provided any details of the artifacts in the bunker. “What was it about the artifacts you saw that would make someone take a shot at you?”
“You know, I didn’t really get much of a look at the devil’s rocks. Other than the fact they were in black display cases rather than white ones, they mostly looked like the same as the others.” She smiled coyly. “But I did pilfer one.”
“You what?”
“I lifted one of the devil’s rocks. It’s in the trunk with the ones January gave you.”
“Really?” He shook his head. “That was pretty ballsy. And pretty smart. What kind of artifacts were they?”
“Mostly carved stone. I was only in the room for a few minutes. I spent most of my time studying a stone which had a carving of Jesus on his knees, sort of praying to another man standing up. The figure standing was barefoot and had scruffy hair and a beard and was carrying a shepherd’s staff. The description card said it was John the Baptist.”
“Why is Jesus praying to John the Baptist? Are you sure it wasn’t a baptism scene?”
“That’s what I originally thought, but there was no water or even a bowl of any kind. And John was looking rather imperious.”
“I wonder why January hid it away. What else did you see?”
“Next to the John the Baptist stone there was another carving of Jesus, on the cross. It had Latin w
riting on it.”
“Then it may not have been a Burrows Cave piece.” Though many of the Burrows Cave pieces did portray Jesus, based on what January had shown Cam none of them had Latin writing. “Maybe January found it up in the Catskills. Do you remember the Latin?”
“I made a point to memorize it. ‘Ereptor Crucis.’”
Cam had taken four years of Latin in high school. “I’m pretty sure ‘Ereptor’ means thief. And ‘Crucis’ means cross.”
“Odd. Did Jesus steal a cross or something? Or did someone steal his body off the cross?”
Cam shrugged. “Another mystery.”
“I’ll add one more. One of the description cards mentioned Prince Madoc. But I didn’t get a good look at the artifact.” Amanda summarized the legend of the Welsh prince—tired of fighting with his brothers over control of his father’s kingdom, he sailed west to North America to colonize a new world.
“What year was that supposed to be?”
“I think 1170. My mum was Welsh so I remember hearing about it when I was a girl. That’s why the card caught my eye.”
Cam switched lanes. “That’s about the same time as the journey in this Clairvaux Codex.”
“You know most historians think the Madoc visit never occurred.”
“Yeah, well I’m beginning to think most historians should find a new line of work.”
Trey Buckner had a lot of work to do to clean up the mess caused by January’s suicide and the loss of the artifacts, but he couldn’t just walk out of the ODNI meeting like a fourth-grader going to the nurse’s office. Instead he stewed: How had the agent missed that shot?
Finally the meeting wound down. Jabil Hayek issued his orders. Trey was to work with Georgia Johnston, whom he knew from the Presidential campaign and didn’t particularly care for—she had an anti-Mormon bias that no amount of political mumbo-jumbo could mask. They were to find Thorne and Spencer, and also the artifacts and medieval document. Hayek had looked directly at Trey, his meaning clear: “This needs to be contained.”
Thief on the Cross: Templar Secrets in America (Templars in America Series Book 2) Page 13
