by J. F. Penn
Jake took the photo.
“Kidnapping Morgan’s family seems like a desperate attempt to speed up the process, but why does he want the stones?” Jake asked.
Marietti handed him another photo.
“We think this is his motivation. It’s his brother Michael, a mentally and physically ill twin held in a local psychiatric hospital. Joseph visits almost every day and after the power demonstrated at Varanasi, we think he believes the stones will help heal his brother.”
“Do you think he’s working with Thanatos?” Jake asked, studying the photos.
“No, Everett seems to be entirely focused on his brother but Thanatos want the stones for a larger purpose and we’re only seeing a small part of their plans. I think they will take his stones too before this ends.”
Marietti looked away, his dark eyes black in the dim light, bushy eyebrows overshadowing a craggy face that had seen so much. He was silent for a moment. Jake knew this man had paid a high price for the position he now held and shared little but he didn’t want to know the secrets that Marietti kept hidden. The Director stood and walked around his desk. Jake pushed back his chair, realizing the interview was over.
“Your focus must be on retrieving those stones, Jake. They haven’t been in the same place since Pentecost over two millennia ago. Alone the stones are powerful: together with the comet they could be catastrophic.”
Marietti put his hand on Jake’s shoulder and Jake felt the weight of responsibility and trust this man had in him.
“I need them back here, but I’m too old for this now. It’s time for you to step up, Jake, a new generation of ARKANE. We’re coming into an age where the spiritual and supernatural are embraced again. These are dangerous times to have any artifact revealed to the world that gives credence to a particular faith. So you must bring them back here … at any price. No individual is worth more than this. Remember that.”
Jake left the office and walked out onto The Strand, one of the busiest hubs of London traffic and tourism. He merged into the crowd and was carried along back towards Embankment tube station. As he walked, he considered how he was going to work with Morgan Sierra. He felt a strong attraction to her, both physical and through a sense of kinship for their disjointed lives, but his loyalties ultimately lay with ARKANE.
He remembered when he had been recruited by Marietti while in Africa, overseeing aid in Sudan. His British special military team had been ordered to stand by and hold as the National Islamic Front had slaughtered Catholics, including children. It was a political decision, and there was nothing they could do but wait it out. Marietti had been sent from the Vatican as a representative of the Holy See during the hideous war that raged senselessly for years. Late one night they had both been awake and stood on a verandah together in the dark listening to screams in the distance. Jake had cursed God that night, feeling their blood on his hands, and Marietti had explained to him how it was not God but man who twisted faith into something evil. Religion had torn humanity apart for millennia and it would never stop but there was a way to be part of the solution.
That night Marietti had told Jake of ARKANE, a covert group solving spiritual mysteries and supernatural enigmas, attempting to understand a world beyond the physical but not tied to one religion. ARKANE sought to understand the myths behind religious artifacts in order to harness their power and keep them safe from the extremist fringes. After Jake had completed his tour of duty in Africa, Marietti had contacted him again and recruited him but it seemed a long time ago now. He had seen so much since that day.
Just as he arrived at the entrance of the underground train station, his cell phone rang. He answered it on the first ring.
“Jake, it’s Morgan. They’re still after me. I was attacked at Blackfriars. I think it was Thanatos again, but with some serious firepower this time.”
“Are you OK?” he asked, amazed that they would attempt something so serious in broad daylight.
“I’m fine now, but clearly they’re not going to stop until they have my stone. We need to get out of here and start the search, and I know where we need to start looking.”
Tucson, Arizona, USA.
May 19 4.35pm
Joseph Everett sat back in the armchair his father had loved. The leather still creaked with the same tone it had when the old man got up to reach for another book. He and Michael had listened to it over and over when, as children, they had sat with ears pressed to the ever closed study door. Joseph had recreated the study here at his own house, sure that the secret to his father’s quest lay within the pages of one of these books and he was determined to find it.
The large desk he sat behind was teak, inlaid with rosy marble round the edges. There was an accountant’s lamp, green hooded with a pull down switch that sat on the corner of the desk next to the old professor’s fountain pens. His father had collected them, spent hours cleaning the tiny parts and loved to write with them. Joseph idly fingered the red Montegrappa that he had been beaten for touching as a child. That pen had pride of place on his father’s desk, whereas he and Michael had been discarded and ignored. Joseph examined the pen closely, the texture of the barrel, the intricate nib carving. It was beautiful.
But today was different. Today he was one step closer to his goal, one step closer to beating his father to the stones he had sought in his lifetime. He bent down, placed the ruby pen on the floor, and firmly crushed it underfoot. He ground the pieces into the carpet, purple ink staining the cream color, spreading out like a bloodstain. Joseph smiled and thought back to when this search had begun.
Five years before, when his father had learnt he was dying of lung cancer, he had called Joseph to his bedside. The bedspread was stained where his father clutched it while coughing up blood and bile. The air smelt of vomit and death crept around the walls, waiting for the inevitable end. His father was weak and could hardly talk, but Joseph hated the man and didn’t care if he died. His father had taken the stone from around his scrawny neck and given it to Joseph. He had whispered, his speech halting.
“This is a Pentecost stone ... powerful ... protect it from those who ... it belongs to you now.” The dying man had broken off in a coughing fit, then spoke again, his words even fainter. “There are more stones ... increase in power together ... complete the circle ... Death increases their power, Joseph, remember that.”
He had slipped into a coma soon after, and Joseph had held the stone, feeling the warmth from his father’s body leave it. He didn’t know what the words meant then. It was just a piece of rock, but it was the only thing his father had ever given him. The next day he rifled through his father’s study and began to read his diaries and papers. One of the journals had revealed the hypothesis that the stones held a power of God that could be harnessed and made stronger by the twelve being together. Joseph had copied the passage from the book of Acts about the healing miracles, speaking in tongues, and the power to convert people. All he could think about was Michael. Two were stronger together. Could these stones restore his brother?
Joseph opened another of his father’s diaries, as he did every morning before his business day. Each was dated in the front and contained only a month or two of notes. There were hundreds of journals stacked into the large bookcases that covered the walls in his study, all brought from the old house, filed in chronological order as his father had been a meticulous man. Joseph searched every day for information on how to energize the stones when they were together in one place.
It was in these pages that Joseph had found vital knowledge about the estimated dating of the comet elliptical and how it would come again on Pentecost this year. It had given him a timeframe to work to, but he hadn’t thought it would take so long to achieve his goal and now time was short. As he read, he also delved into the other research and the life his father had led. It seemed he had hardly noticed his children, or his wife as they were never mentioned. The books were concerned with discovery and research about the religious relics he had sought
throughout the world. They were filled with scraps of cuttings and articles he was proud of, most of which were in obscure and fringe publications. These were not diaries in the confessional vein, but more the chronology of a mind over years of immersion in the subjects of arcana.
This morning, Joseph was re-reading a notebook that mused on the power of the twelve and whether it was enhanced when the stones were together. There was mention of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and whether the stones could even change matter itself. There were lists of people in history who might have owned the stones, based on documentation of their spiritual and physical gifts including great artists as well as scientists and political figures throughout history. Joseph noted the mutterings of a driven, raving man amongst the occasional clarity of the scholar but he learned more about his father from these books than he had ever done when the man was alive.
His father had written that the stones had been cut from the rock of Christ’s tomb after the resurrection, plain at first, but over time each had been shaped and carved with words of power. The twelve had wanted to remember that unique time and to bind themselves together in faith, so the stones had been hung on strips of leather, silver chain or metal rings to be carried on missions to the ends of the known world.
There were clues to the locations in the notebooks his father had made over the years but nothing concrete, so he had given Morgan Sierra the notebooks with the best information as he knew she would find what he sought given the imminent threat to her sister and the child. Even if he couldn’t get all the stones in one place to recreate the power of Pentecost, maybe he could somehow increase the power of the stones he did have with a sacrifice. The diary he was reading contained some of the experiments his father had carried out after noting that the power of the stones could be increased by the energy transfer of death. This section was dog-eared and smudged from multiple readings.
He searched for those pages again today, for a reassurance that his plan would work. He read of a recovered scrap of a Gnostic gospel containing tales of healing that occurred with a stone after the martyr’s death of an Apostle. There was a note about life force and what might possibly empower the stones further. Originally it seemed the resurrection of Jesus had given the stones their power, a residual force of life overcoming death. The stones were intimately connected with the balance between life and death, a latent power to be used for good or evil. Certainly the nun’s death at Varanasi had resulted in miracles.
Joseph pulled out one of the loose leaves from the book he was reading. It was a page from a diary in Latin script with a translation beside it. From the Middle Ages, it described a brother in the church murdering another for one of the stones. At the moment of death, the stone was charged and miracles occurred, like those in the book of Acts - healing, speaking in tongues and mass conversions to the cause. It was as if the life force of one could be the energy that moved into others with the stone as a conduit. Joseph had seized upon this idea and he thought back to when he had decided to test the theory.
After his father’s death, his mother had sat in the kitchen, dressed in funeral black, the author of their misery squatting like a toad over their lives. The hem of her skirt was too high and the bulging blue veins in her thick legs revolted him. She slurped from a cup of tea and he flinched. He hated the sound of her drinking, the sound of her living.
“Now you’re the man of the house, Joseph, I expect you to earn money to support me and your brother. You owe me that,” she had said.
That night he had slipped the cord of the stone around his neck, gone to her room and held a pillow over her face. When she started awake, unable to breathe, he held her down, resting his body weight on top of her until the struggling stopped. Then he held the pillow there for another hour to make sure it was done. He had wept then, for the end of whatever it was people called family. Now it was just him and Michael against the world, but then perhaps it had always been this way.
Joseph had brought Michael to the funeral, sedated in a wheelchair because he became anxious when they took him out of the facility. He had gently hung the stone round his brother’s neck then but nothing happened, nothing changed. He was angry then and confused. Perhaps God had not seen his sacrifice or he had his back turned in heaven as his earthly father had on earth. Or perhaps in Varanasi it was the death of the Keeper which had caused the miracles that night, he mused. Maybe that was the missing link.
Joseph sat back in the chair and stared out of the window to the roseate Catalina Mountains. Michael was the half of him that had almost died to protect him in his childhood. Joseph owed him life and soon he would summon it.
May 20
Brize Norton Airfield, England.
May 20, 7.08am
“So why Spain?” Jake asked, once they were seated in the 737, waiting for take-off. The plane was set up as a mobile ARKANE base, with a meeting room and galley up front and a central workspace with computers in the mid-section. Weapons, equipment and bunks were to the rear. A couple of crew were readying the plane and Jake had mentioned a team available on standby if they needed backup. Morgan could see that ARKANE was taking this search seriously and she appreciated the extensive support. In a show of good faith, she decided to share the information she had learned even though she still had suspicions about their involvement.
“Before the attack at Blackfriars, Ben and I discussed the more ancient legends about where the Apostles went after Pentecost. It seems logical to think that the stones would be near the bodies themselves, either with a Keeper or preserved with the relics of the saints.”
“That makes sense,” Jake said, “and it ties with our research as well.”
“We should go after the more obvious Apostles first, so I narrowed them down. We know that I have the stone of John, so Patmos, Greece is off the list and we think that Faye has James Alphaeus’ stone.”
Jake nodded.
“ARKANE was given Matthew Levi’s and our researchers think it was Nathaniel’s taken in Varanasi and the stone of Matthias that was stolen in Jerusalem.”
“So that makes five,” Morgan added, “and I’m pretty sure that Everett already has the stone of Thomas. His father’s diaries describe the Maltese and Goan myths around where the Doubting apostle ended up.”
“OK, so we know six are accounted for. What about the other six?”
“Given our time frames, Spain seems the best place to start. It’s a short flight and we can get started quickly. The bones of St James are supposedly stored at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, in the north west. There are so many myths about what happened to the Apostles after they left Jerusalem, but James’ story is pretty stable across the many extant documents, so we should try there first. Perhaps Everett will trade if we can show some early success.”
Morgan’s voice trailed off as Jake’s eyes slid away from hers and he busied himself in readiness for take-off. He clearly didn’t share her hopes for a quick resolution. In the last 24 hours, she had been smothering her fear in the intellectual rigor of research but now a gaping wound opened, and she felt a jolt of terror for Faye and Gemma. Grabbing her smartphone, she scrolled to the pictures of her family. One of her with Gemma’s little arms tight around her neck pricked her eyes with tears. She pretending to wipe something from her eye, not wanting Jake to see her vulnerability. Elian and her father had been ripped from her life too soon, and she would not lose her sister and niece this way.
Once they were airborne, Jake pulled out various maps from his bag as well as the Moleskine diaries.
“I thought about doing the Camino de Santiago myself a few years ago,” he said, as he opened them up on the table between them. Morgan glanced up at him, surprised by his words.
“To pay for what sins? What could an ARKANE agent possibly have on his conscience?”
The Camino was a thousand year old pilgrimage route through southern France and northern Spain. Morgan knew that the 780 kilometers were traditionally walked on foot as a spiritual
journey, culminating at the cathedral of St James in Santiago de Compostela where the pilgrim received forgiveness for their sins. It was the very church they were heading for.
“I haven’t always been so squeaky clean,” Jake smiled broadly. Morgan noticed the scar above his eyebrow crinkling. He opened the map of Santiago de Compostela, and located the main square. His fingers were long, like a piano player’s, less calloused than she had expected but there were also old scars on his knuckles, evidence of a harder side.
“It’s only an hour or so until we arrive and we won’t have long at the Cathedral.” Jake said. “We need to know what we’re looking for. We have to think like the people who’ve protected the stones for all these years.”
“There might not even be physical Keepers for all the stones,” Morgan said. “It’s much easier to track down people than as it is to find a stone that has been buried for millennia, so it’s possible that some were just hidden.”
Morgan was trying to be upbeat about their prospects. One moment she found herself excited about the research and the next bowled over by the enormity of their task, but she wouldn’t contemplate failure. It was easier to comprehend her own pain and death than those she loved.
She opened one of the journals from the package. It was a finely drawn, handcrafted book, with spidery labels and ancient names marked alongside modern cities. The world had changed since those days but the steps of holy men could still be traced, although some had multiple journeys marked and an unclear place of death.
“These diaries are amazingly detailed. Everett’s father was aware of some of the other Keepers and started to track where their stones might be. He had so much information. It’s odd that he didn’t manage to find the stones after all that research.”
“Maybe he just didn’t have the right team,” Jake flashed a grin. She couldn’t help but smile back. They had a long journey ahead of them and she appreciated his attempt at friendliness. They studied the street maps looking for the best route in and out of the Cathedral square.
