Tomb of the First Priest: A Lost Origins Novel

by A D Davies

  “There are people who keep the peace in the smaller villages around here. In America, we’d call them ‘militia.’ Armed citizens influencing the law, enforcing the law. That’s on top of the regular police.”

  “Ah.” Sanjeev stood and crossed to the window, cup in hand. “You wish me to ask them to... ease off on something?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that.” Valerio stood too. “I want to hire them for something.”

  Valerio and Sanjeev strolled the gardens between palms and statues, the huge bright flowers and tiled benches, while Horse kept watch ten paces behind, having rejoined them at a distance.

  “There are other interested parties,” Valerio explained after detailing the excursion he had planned. “I need people willing to fight back should these pirates attempt to stop us. And sherpas to help with equipment. Thirty should be sufficient.”

  Sanjeev’s pose was that of a statesman, hands clasped behind him, back straight. “You could hire professional sherpas and private security for this. For less than it will cost through me.”

  “I am paying for speed. A nearly immediate response. And for privacy. Better, don’t you think, to keep this local? So locals benefit more than a large corporate security firm.”

  Sanjeev gave a brief laugh. “And because you need to pass through Ladoh militia territory?”

  Valerio held up his hands. “Partly. We don’t have to pass through, but we are close, and the main reason I want your people—”

  “Not my people. They and I simply share a common goal.”

  “Then your associates. And if the people seeking to steal from me show up, be they... official law enforcement or not... I need a guarantee I will be protected.”

  Sanjeev paused as if pondering all Valerio had said. Like a bad negotiator. “I have conditions.”

  “Name them.”

  “I will ask. They will give you a price. You will pay this. Nonnegotiable. That’s if they agree. I cannot guarantee this. I am not their leader, you understand.”

  “I do.” Valerio struggled to contain his excitement. He wanted to whoop and punch the air, dance on the spot, leap to a tree branch to hang upside down, and sing. “You said ‘conditions,’ plural.”

  “Thanks to a financial portfolio I started with the free shares you gave to all townsfolk, I am really quite wealthy, a cofounder, in fact, of a business that has considerable input into a new marina in Mumbai. Coincidentally, the grand opening is tomorrow night. My final condition is that the great Valerio Conchin attends.”

  Valerio’s heart all but stopped. “You—”

  “Yes, I know. Mr. Conchin may be a renowned recluse with hardly any photographs of his face in existence, but I have my sources. Brandon Robinson just doesn’t have quite the prestige. He certainly does not possess a yacht like the Lady Mel.”

  There were ways and means Valerio could get around this. But waiting another twenty-four hours would allow that limy curator guy to put together a plan or those others to bite at his butt again. And, with the local militia being so supportive of Sanjeev Kaur, it would require far more time and effort to circumvent the man’s requests.

  Besides...

  Money, prestige, a spot of face time with Mumbai’s rich and shameless. More important, publicity.

  Perhaps making a public appearance could be turned to his advantage. He could roll with the punches, take a man exploiting him, and turn it into an opportunity. The only downside was a loss of control over how many people saw him.

  Would the press be there? Probably.

  But Valerio’s keeping his face off the internet and away from the news was no longer a concern. He needed to put himself out in the open. To draw a cog back toward him.

  Besides, Valerio would have paid much more if the man had asked. However he looked at it, this was a good deal.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  British Government Airplane, Indian Airspace

  The bangle was closer than ever, and all Jules had had to do was betray a bunch of people who welcomed him into their world and wanted him to partake in their mission.

  In the past week, he’d traveled on more private jets than in the previous five years combined. This was his third. The British government’s Lear was far nicer than LORI’s, and since it wasn’t decked out in garish gold trim with the Royal Standard flag draped over every surface, as Jules had half-expected, it proved more subdued than Valerio’s Gulfstream. There was no bedroom for starters. However, the bathrooms were of the standard you’d find in a fine hotel suite, and the chairs formed beds while the cherry on top was a glass table which rose out of the floor on command, variably adjustable from the height of a coffee table to a standing desk.

  That wasn’t to say it was without unnecessary luxury, though. Colin’s habit of trying on different watches that he kept in a safe might have been an OCD thing or vanity. Whatever, it demonstrated a whole different world from LORI’s.

  Colin’s desk on the plane was more than a slab of glass on stilts. It housed a touch screen akin to a giant iPad with which Jules could pair his phone—once they were en-route to India. Since retrieving the phone from his underwear—and cleaning it with alcohol wipes—he had charged and then encrypted it every way he knew how, with two passwords and a fingerprint, then he password protected each photograph of Thomas’s manuscript too. The jet’s equipment read the screen itself rather than saving the photos, so Jules watched out for any attempt to save a screenshot, conscious that the images were his only advantage.

  There were four others present: two gruff military types with firearms, scruffy beards, and Tasers; Sally, the middle-aged woman with the pantsuit whom Jules met in the museum, her hair now secured in a bun; and a man called Henry who wore tweed and was introduced only as an expert in antiquities.

  The woman, Sally, examined the snapshots of Saint Thomas’s journal for two hours before reporting in, with the table at a height that allowed four seats to swivel and view the progress.

  “He’s right, guv.” Sally spoke with a London accent, tempered artificially to a more neutral inflection. “It’s India, but these pages aren’t enough.”

  “Valerio has more,” Jules said. “You just gotta trace him and jump him when he does something illegal.”

  “Yes, thank you, Mr. Sibeko.” Colin touched the screen and pinched to zoom out. “I have been doing this a long time. I know how to recover stolen property.”

  Jules watched for a few seconds as Colin tapped another page, one with a diagram of one bangle, and whispered to Sally. She shook her head, and Colin sighed in frustration.

  “So what’s your deal?” Jules asked. “Thought you were just a curator. Don’t they like look after museums and the stuff in ’em?”

  Another sigh. He looked up from the screen. “I am not some stuffy professor keeping vases and old suits of armor free of dust. I, and Toby before me, have extensive experience in the field, but we do not achieve the post of royal curator without a lot of skills in... other areas as well.”

  As soon as Colin returned to the task on the screen, Jules said, “Old-school spies, huh?”

  Without looking up, Colin replied, “If I were once a spy, I’d hardly tell you, now, would I?”

  “Fair enough.” Jules slumped back, folded his arms.

  He wondered sometimes whether he suffered from what the quacks call “arrested development,” a condition where one’s emotional state is frozen at the point of a great trauma. So when Jules saw his parents die, his fourteen-year-old persona would be his defining characteristic in his future life. He’d grown, of course, and his life experiences had shaped him further, but there was always a niggle, that need to push a boundary or two, that left his fourteen-year-old self pounding on the door.

  It’s probably why he said, “Pretty lucky, huh? Born with a silver spoon where the sun can’t shine, then picked up by a great man like Toby Smith—who mentored you, way I hear it. Then you gotta spend years trying to get out from under his rep.”

  Coli
n placed his hands flat on the table edges so he didn’t affect the touchscreen and met Jules’s gaze without lifting his head. “I spent years studying my field. I worked hard. My silver spoon would not aid that. When an opportunity presented itself to join Toby Smith’s team, I thought it a wise move. I could not have known what a waste of a man Mr. Smith would turn out to be.”

  “Waste?”

  “So intent on ‘putting right,’ as he saw it, the sins of the empire. His support for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece was the final nail in his career coffin.” The man’s expression did not falter, a stone mask of focus. Then his eyes lit up as if a fire had sparked to life. “But Britain was once a shining light across the world. Civilizing savage lands, showing them how to live better lives—”

  “Religious suppression, land grabs, genocide—”

  “A benevolent occupation of uncivilized lands. Mr. Sibeko, if those people had not rejected British rule, if people like Mr. Toby Smith had not crumbled at every request for independence, we would have controlled this world as a force for good. The world certainly would not be in the state it currently is.”

  “And you think picking up a stolen book is gonna change that?”

  “I think retrieving property of the crown is not simply my job. It is an obligation. The Queen is appointed by God, and she appointed me.”

  “So it’s a holy mission.”

  Colin’s mouth turned up, but it wasn’t really a smile. “If I may...” He gestured to the screen, wanting to get back to work.

  “One last thing,” Jules said, warning that immature side of himself to ease up. “Why wouldn’t you make your own copy of a journal that details what you can do with a fifty-thousand-year-old bracelet?”

  Colin stood sharply. Sally shuffled to one side. Colin’s hands waved along with the pen he was holding, which he pointed at Jules. “First of all, these items are not fifty or even thirty thousand years old. They are maybe four or five thousand, and they were manufactured by the Sumerians and passed down for several generations.”

  No mention of the glowing, information he hadn’t shared with Colin. Did he know nothing about that side of the artifacts?

  “And, Mr. Sibeko, we have proven time and again that these silly theories about ancient advanced civilizations are nothing more than fantasies thrown up by people who snag onto a question mark from years ago. Gaps in the historical record do not indicate conspiracies, and you need to get that out of your head.”

  The denial sounded almost like he needed to be persuaded himself.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Jules said, enjoying the moment. “You honestly don’t know what Valerio believes, what Toby believes?”

  “I do not care what either man believes. They are both criminals. The difference is, we have far more evidence of Toby’s activities than of Valerio’s. You, on the other hand, are just a useful turncoat who is along on this ride for one reason and one reason only: himself.”

  Jules thought of Bridget, the disappointment on her face as she rose up out of the museum in Ulaanbaatar. He swallowed, and Colin caught it.

  “Yes, you see, don’t you? It stings when you understand your own nature, especially when you dislike what you find there. But take comfort. A real man will do anything to achieve his dreams, to fulfill his obligations. So sit there, say nothing, and maybe you won’t exactly come out smelling of roses, but you should be able to wash the stink off yourself. Eventually.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Singapore

  Morgan Winter Holdings was an old company linked to the Carson Corporation, a real estate branch that served as a tax write-off for Bridget’s parents when times were good, and the sprawling thirtieth-floor apartment in Singapore was a tool for that purpose. Morgan Winter Holdings owned it during those periods when no such write-offs were needed, then, if the Carson Corporation needed a touch of leeway with the IRS, the corporation bought up Morgan Winter’s properties at an inflated price before selling them all back at whatever value best served their accounts. On the day after the Carsons’ darling daughter escaped Mongolia, the apartment was owned by Morgan Winter, making it difficult for both foreign governments and insane billionaires to trace.

  “Let’s not hang around longer than necessary,” Bridget told the others after allocating rooms for a couple of hours’ sleep.

  “This place is just... here?” Harpal gazed about the apartment with its spacious living room, wide-open kitchen and dining room, and a view over the dark city broken up by a million or more lights. “It’s yours?”

  “It sits empty unless it’s needed. And we need it.”

  “Eight hours downtime,” Toby said. “Then we’ll begin again.”

  Bridget didn’t know how much sleep the others got, but it took her two hours and half a sleeping pill to drop off. After waking, she felt sluggish as she joined the team in the kitchen, perking up only when she realized she’d been out for ten full hours rather than the remaining six.

  “We all needed it,” Dan said.

  It turned out he’d woken himself early and snuck around deactivating everyone’s alarm clocks and phones, then set to work on Bridget’s notes concerning the whereabouts of Saint Thomas’s tomb and figuring out how to get into India undetected. The answer to the latter question was a combination of bribery and Harpal’s old contacts, but Dan said he could do no more with Bridget’s work.

  The four sat around the dining table, munching on bacon sandwiches and slurping coffee or tea. Bridget’s printouts were scattered out of order.

  “Once I put them back together,” she said, “I’ll try to get a closer location. Right now, I think it’s in the north of India.”

  Dan shuffled a few sheets, attempting to reorder them. “Sorry, I just wanted to look at it from another point of view.”

  “There are no riddles here?” Harpal asked. “We’re good at riddles.”

  “They’re not riddles.” Toby sounded exasperated. “They are accounts from the day in which they were written. Occasionally, people got smart and hid their directions in other forms, but that was to conceal their true meaning from the people who would steal such objects. In most cases, though, we are simply working out the language, the diction, and putting it back together in a way we understand today. Thomas wanted his tomb found. His journal was intended for the other apostles. We just need to work out what he meant.”

  Harpal presented a phone to Bridget, an email on-screen. “Can we get these?”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Shopping list from Charlie. She’s on her way.”

  “Here?” Toby said. “But I thought—”

  “Yeah,” Dan interrupted. “Something about not trusting us to stay alive without her. She boarded a plane six hours ago. But now we got some time to breathe, there’s a number of things we have to discuss.”

  “Such as?”

  “Let’s go shopping first. We’ll talk on the way.”

  The twenty-four-hour electronics store was a wonderland of tech, laid out just right, with each department allocated a set floor space and not an inch more. Except where one item complemented another, but that was only for display purposes. So where a 4K camera phone could be hooked up to a TV, it was. Bridget noted the name of the store and emailed it straight to Charlie; she would hack it and check whether their images could be found on security footage or anything internet connected. They had no idea who might be following them.

  Ambling between the aisles, Dan appeared grim, tense. “Assuming we aren’t giving up, we have to face the fact this isn’t just a treasure hunt anymore. Agreed?”

  “Agreed, but it’s unclear exactly what it has become,” Toby said. “Something’s off with Valerio. He’s hurt people before, killed to cover his tracks, but never randomly murdered. Not like... sport. It’s as if he’s terrified of losing.”

  “Desperate,” Harpal agreed.

  “He clearly believes there’s more of a prize than he’s claimed in the past. More
than prestige, more than an ego trip.”

  “More dangerous than we figured him for,” Dan added.

  “And with Colin Waterston involved,” Bridget said, “he’ll be more eager than ever to throw Toby in a jail someplace. Anywhere. He still hates you.”

  “Yes, yes.” Toby waved off her concern. “But we don’t factor in my relationship with him. Only his threat to the outcome of this task. Clear?”

  All agreed.

  Dan remained tense as they halted beside a row of thin metal laptops. His attention fell on Bridget. “One other problem we have.”

  Bridget guessed what was coming but wanted him to vocalize it.

  He said, “Jules.”

  “What about him?” Harpal asked, reading Charlie’s list as he checked the specs on each machine.

  “He’ll keep on going,” Dan answered. “Won’t stop. He can’t stop.”

  “Which puts him in direct danger from Valerio,” Bridget said.

  Dan scoffed, a glance at the ceiling, then back to Bridget. “He isn’t our problem, and he isn’t our ally. He’s in this for his own gain, and anything else is an act. I suggest we write him off now as an aggressive competitor.”

  Harpal tapped a new HP model, one with a sturdy metal case and a solid-state drive. He signaled the sleepy sales assistant and held up two fingers to indicate what he needed. The assistant brightened immediately and scuttled away to retrieve what would surely be a healthy commission.

  “Aggressive?” Bridget said. “Please. He’s hardly—”

  Toby stopped her with a raised palm. “He means Jules is actively working against our interest. And I agree. He has a singular goal. One solitary item to ease whatever mental pain he still feels over his mother’s passing. What I witnessed back in Mongolia was a lightning-quick mind calculating that he had a better chance of success with Colin. Whereas we need to solve this for more worldly reasons.”