A Covenant of Thieves

by Christian Velguth

  She was speaking very fast and very loudly. Something seemed to be stuck in her chest, slowly becoming unhitched with every gasping breath. Estelle wasn’t sure if she was going to start shouting or crying, but she knew something was going to happen very soon.

  “I should have known, I should have been paying attention, something was clearly wrong, he said that, but I i-ignored it, I was too caught up in my own s-stupid life, and n-now he’s -- he’s --”

  Cry it is, then. From a detached perspective, Estelle watched herself break down in the middle of the narthex. A gout of anguish boiled out of her -- grief, and anger. Fury; at her father, yes, for keeping this one crucial secret, but also at herself, mostly at herself, for not paying attention, for slipping up the one time it really, truly mattered, and letting her father die. It was stupid -- how could she have known? -- and yet some part of her insisted, all the same, that she should have.

  Uncle Francis was comforting her. Slowly, miserably, Estelle pulled herself back together, wiping her face and her nose with the tissues provided by Yves. She felt thoroughly wrung out, and more than a little embarrassed. She could feel people watching her from the pews and refused to meet their eyes.

  “Sorry,” she said in a watery whimper.

  “Don’t,” Uncle Francis said, shaking his head. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for.” He paused, and then, face darkening, said, “It’s your father who does.”

  “We do not know why Martin kept this secret,” Yves said quickly, sounding a bit defensive. “It is possible he did not know about his illness, and that this was all simply a series of unfortunate events.”

  Estelle disagreed, but she didn’t feel like explaining how rare it was for a medical tag to spontaneously deregister itself, so she nodded. “He still lied about Africa, though.”

  “He…did,” Yves said hesitantly. “I could quote several passages that talk about a father’s love, his duty to his family, et cetera. But something tells me that wouldn’t help. The truth is, Estelle, that I am certain your father did keep secrets.”

  She looked up at him, surprised.

  “But I also know he loved you very much,” the priest went on quickly. “And that he never did anything without good reason. The nature of his secrets, I cannot guess. And it is not my place to speculate. But I knew your father, the sort of man he was. And if he kept anything from you, then in his mind it was only out of love. To protect you.”

  “But I don’t need protecting.” It sounded childish and petulant, but she needed to say it. What she thought, but didn’t say was: That was my job. “What could he even have been protecting me from?”

  “Hard to say,” Uncle Francis mused, “what a man thinks he needs to do.”

  Estelle leaned heavily against the wall. “I’m starting to feel like I barely knew him.”

  “I understand your frustration,” Yves said. “Loss, no matter how prepared we may believe ourselves to be, is always unexpected. We will always feel there are things left undone, promises left unfulfilled. The path to reconciliation can be long, and may involve a transformation of understanding. Yet this, too, is inevitable.” He paused. “History was your father’s passion, Estelle. If you wish to truly understand him, then perhaps that is where you should start. But first, let us honor his memory.”

  Uncle Francis took her arm. Estelle drew a deep breath, gathering herself, and allowed him to usher her into the nave.

  * * *

  She didn’t linger after the service but left as quickly as she could without looking like she was running away. Her father’s urn was tucked under one arm. She hadn’t chosen it; like the time and setting of the service, it too had been specified in her father’s will. It was bright copper, set with a band of silver moon-like discs. It felt heavier than its size warranted.

  On the steps outside, Uncle Francis caught up with her. “You’ll be alright?”

  Estelle nodded, tucking a curl of hair behind her ear. “Yes. I’ll be fine.” Eventually.

  “Yeah, I think you will.” He nodded, more to himself than her. “Well, look, I don’t have a fancy collar like Yves, but I’m around too, if you need to talk. Well, not around around -- gotta head out tomorrow morning -- but you can always give me a call.”

  She smiled, grateful, but also a little tired of people treating her like she was a piece of fine China. “Thanks.”

  He nodded again, and they made to part ways. She was at the bottom of the steps when he called after her. “Estelle?”

  She turned to look up at him. He was frowning, and seemed to be dealing with an internal struggle. “What is it?”

  “Look…Let’s say there were things Marty didn’t want you to know. I wouldn’t go against his wishes by spilling the beans, even if I could. But I always thought you were made of tougher stuff than he or Yves ever gave you credit for. So I wouldn’t discourage you from doing some digging, either.”

  Estelle stared up at him, mouth slightly open. He knows something. “What’re you talking about?” She climbed a step towards him. “Do you know what he was doing in Africa?”

  “No. But it seems clear to me there was something there, even if Yves doesn’t want to see it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Dig, Estelle. Find your own way.”

  And he set off down the sidewalk, not looking back.

  * * *

  She went straight to her father’s apartment. Estelle brought the urn with her, setting it carefully on the large mahogany desk. She studied it for a moment, struck by its appearance. Now that she had time to examine it up close, she saw that the silver discs actually were moons, each a different face of the moon as it advanced from waxing to full to waning again, an endless cycle of rebirth. The implication was hopeful, but it also seemed to be a bit at odds with her father’s life-long Catholicism.

  Just another reminder of how little you knew him.

  The study was just as she had left it, her father’s workspace cluttered with papers and books. Estelle cleared them away, sorting through them one by one. Bills and advertisements, mostly. There was a flyer requesting donations to heatwave shelters for the homeless and a mailer from the Louvre, which Martin Kingston had been getting ever since he did some consulting work for them years back, but nothing else of great import. She placed them in a careful stack on the corner of the desk.

  History was your father’s passion. She knew that, had grown up knowing it, and she doubted there was much more understanding she could gain about her father – as a person – from his subject of study. But that wasn’t what she was here to find.

  Africa. It all started there, with that mysterious trip, that single lie; Uncle Francis had confirmed as much, in his frustratingly enigmatic way. If she wanted to understand what secrets her father had been keeping – and why – then she needed to know why he’d gone to Africa.

  Dig, Estelle.

  But where to start?

  She reached up and pulled a book from the shelf above her father’s desk. The title almost got a laugh out of her – Magical Dung: Religion and Spirituality of Ancient Egypt. The dust jacket remained in pristine condition, but the spine and dog-eared pages spoke to years of loving use. She flipped through it, not sure what she was hoping to find. Nearly every page was highlighted, and the dog-ears took her to seemingly random topics: mummification rites, the scholar-god Thoth, lunar calendars.

  It told her nothing; and, she realized, it was the wrong place to look. Ethiopia, not Egypt. That was where her father had gone. She put the book back and searched the titles surrounding it. Nothing leapt out at her.

  “Sophia,” Estelle said, “recall any previous queries about Ethiopia.”

  “Sorry,” the smart assistant replied. “I don’t have any old queries in my log related to Ethiopia.”

  Damn it. What was the point of having an AI assistant if it couldn’t remember anything?

  She booted up the desktop computer instead. Running a system-wide search for Africa and Ethiopia would
hopefully prove more productive. Her father may have had a nostalgic fondness for paper books, but he was still careful enough to backup all his notes and research on the cloud.

  The monitor came to life at once, but it was a moment before Estelle understood what she was seeing. Rather than the usual image of the stone city of Petra that graced her father’s login screen, she was instead looking at a soft blue background with a twirling progress circle and a single line of text:

  Just a moment while we get the OS ready for you…

  She stared, dumb with disbelief. The operating system was reinstalling. Which meant it had been completely reformatted. Which, unless her luck was about to turn, meant that any and all files stored on her father’s hard drive had been erased.

  Estelle chewed her lip, her reflection a ghost in the screen. Why would her father have reformatted his computer? Maybe he’d gotten himself into some critical trouble that necessitated a hard reset. It didn’t seem likely; he’d been too savvy for that. That left only one logical reason – Martin Kingston had wanted to wipe his hard drive clean. To erase data that he didn’t want anyone accessing after –

  After he was gone. The thought acted like a speed-bump, derailing her stream of consciousness. Another hint that her father had known he was sick, known the end was coming, and never mind what Yves Poirier might say to the contrary. Why hadn’t he told her? Had he perhaps known there would be nothing the doctors could do for him, that his immune system was too compromised already? Had he wanted to enjoy his finals days with his daughter, free of the specter of his impending death?

  Maybe. But Estelle had never known her father to just give up like that. Then again, it seemed she had never really known him at all.

  Find your own way.

  Alright, then. Martin Kingston, Uncle Francis, and Yves Poirier could all keep their secrets. She’d find her own way to the truth.

  Estelle shut down the computer, then pushed the chair back and crouched beneath the desk. After a few minute’s labor she had acquitted the tower of all its various connections and removed the rear panel. The hard drive slid smoothly from its rack and fit neatly into her pocket.

  The nice thing about computers was that nothing ever really disappeared. You just had to know where – and how – to look.

  Eleven

  40,000 Feet

  Somewhere Above the Mediterranean

  You never appreciate the little things, Rick reflected, until they’re gone.

  For example: The comforts of flying economy. Since its inception, flight had always been and always would be a pain in the ass, thanks to the rigors of security and customs and the less-than-altruistic tendencies of airlines. It had only gotten worse over the previous decades. The rise of super-resistant strains of bacteria meant that just about every international flight required a full medical screening, and automation did little to smooth out the experience. Most developed countries levied carbon taxes against airlines, ratcheting the price of tickets up an extra few hundred bucks. And, thanks to a global increase in severe and erratic weather, flights were just as likely to be delayed as they were to be canceled outright.

  Still, there were a few niceties one could rely upon. Having a seat designed for normal human proportions, even if it was a little cramped. Tiny bags of peanuts, even if they were overly salted. Complimentary cups of soda or water, even if its contents were seventy-percent stale ice.

  And yet even these, the bread-and-butter of the travel industry, were absent this particular trip.

  The N-7 Peregrine VTOL rattled and bounced, as it had been doing for the past three hours, cutting through air that seemed as thick and chunky as curdled milk. Despite the headset he was wearing, Rick was deafened by the droning of the rotors and the roar of turbulence. He was strapped into one of six “seats” – he thought of it that way because seat seemed far too generous a term – mounted to either side of the cabin, and the ample legroom did little to make up for the havoc it was wreaking on his lumbar region.

  And at forty thousand feet, it was fucking freezing. It was a shock, going from the muggy climate of a European summer to this in only a few hours.

  In general, the last twenty-four hours had been hectic and relentless. Ibis hadn’t been kidding; they really were on a tight schedule. Their flight from Mitchell International Airport had been scheduled to depart a mere twelve hours after the lakeside meeting. That had given Rick and Kai almost no time at all to gather their gear, decide on which aliases they’d be travelling under, and contact Amy’s sitter. They only managed to get her to agree to an indefinite contract with the promise of a substantial bonus for every day past a week her services were required.

  And then they were off on a flight to Spain, following the itinerary Ibis had provided for them and under the guises of their own aliases. They were flying as a pair of freelance investigative journalists, which would hopefully be enough to get them through international airspace without too many questions. The falsified press badges had worked well enough in the past.

  In Barcelona they waited out a two-hour layover before catching their second flight to Tunisia. It was here, finally, that the additional documents Ibis had promised Rick were delivered. Among these were a handful of photographs from the Ethiopian highlands, depicting towering stone stelae and ancient Christian churches. There were also some photos of a Gothic cathedral in France, which seemed out of place. Rick had hoped the notes would clarify things, but these only turned out to be a few disjointed paragraphs.

  “Great,” Kai grumbled, stretching his legs as they waited out their second layover at the Tunis-Carthage International Airport. “I’m glad we waited until Tunisia to look at this stuff. I’d hate to have committed to a job without knowing if it was legitimate or not. I swear, this is turning into another Grail hunt.”

  Rick hadn’t had a response to that. The sparse nature of these documents was definitely concerning, as was Ibis’s lack of explanation for their fragmented state. Yet every time he felt a flicker of doubt, his mind flashed to the first photo that Ibis had shown them, and has hand went to the pocket where he kept it.

  If there’s even a chance…

  He continued to pore over the documents right up until their next flight arrived. Commercial flights were being strictly regulated in light of Ethiopia’s ongoing conflict. Government excursions were the only sure way in or out. Somehow, Ibis had arranged for them to hitch a ride with the UN rather than gamble on a passenger jet. Rick didn’t like to consider the connections required to pull that off. After Tunisia, they were on their way to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

  Rick opened his eyes as the VTOL jolted violently. There was just enough light to make out his own misting breath and Kai’s massive form in the seat to his left, squeezed into his own UN-emblazoned parka. Rick couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not. Normally the snores would have given it away, but even those would have been impossible to hear right now.

  Secured beneath his seat was a bulky backpack full of equipment they’d need for the days ahead: a laptop with solar charger, five changes of clothes (including antimicrobial underwear), an elements-proof field notebook, enough low-quality/high-durability rations for up to two weeks if needed, a canteen with built-in filtration, seventy meters of carbon-nylon rope, crampons and pitons and carabiners, a mini-drone, and a Beretta handgun in a shoulder holster. He hoped not to need that last one – a clean job, just once, would be appreciated.

  Strapped into the cargo towards the tail of the VTOL were three crates of heavy-duty black plastic, filled with fully-functioning but utterly useless gear for audiovisual production. Most days they were kept in a storage locker in Milwaukee, only pulled out when they used the journalist personas. Rick didn’t really relish the idea of lugging around seventy-something pounds of camera, boom mic, and battery packs once they were on the ground, but it added to their credibility. People were usually more willing to help you out if you looked like you’d spent a lot of money to be there.

 
Tired of being cold and bored, Rick pulled his laptop out of his bag and unfurled it. He opened the folder that Ibis had given them and selected the first text document.

  The Ark of the Covenant has long straddled the line between history and myth; yet its prominence throughout Biblical text and its importance in Judeo-Christian culture cannot be denied. The mark it has left on the collective psyche of an entire people and at least three belief systems suggests that, like many similar objects, it has some basis in reality. (This only heightens the bizarre nature of its sudden disappearance from any and all Hebrew texts ca. 500 BCE.) The factual nature of the Temple of Solomon, which was built expressly to contain the Ark, all but solidifies its historicity. Given this, and the numerous consistent accounts of its nature, we are convinced that the Ark did exist and have assigned it probationary R-LGD status. Moreover, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the Ark was not lost to Babylonian or Egyptian invaders, but was removed from Jerusalem before the city fell to foreign armies. Through extensive research, including primary and secondary sources, as well as in-field evidence, we present what we believe to be a strong case for the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, and recommend retrieval.

  It was the fifth time he’d read through it, and again the strangeness of the paragraph struck him. It wasn’t just its fragmentary nature, or the odd familiarity of it, as if he’d read the words before, in another time. The language it used -- “probationary R-LGD status” -- was like nothing he’d come across in a job. He’d done exploratory write-ups for clients before, laying out the feasibility of a job and what they’d need to get it done. This didn’t feel like that. It was more…corporate.

  He moved on to a different entry. This one was attached to a photograph of the porch of a Gothic cathedral, a trio of doors set within intricately-carved arches.

  … Chartres Cathedral, in its earliest known iteration, was constructed sometime during the middle of the first millennium CE. But it wasn’t until the 12th century, following several fires, that the cathedral as we know it came to exist. Design and construction was presided over by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. This is significant: not only was Bernard the main proponent of Gothic architecture in Europe, but he was also the nephew of André de Montbard, co-founder of the Order of the Knights Templar (See Exhibit 10). The two had a close relationship, which is perhaps why it was Bernard who presided over the Synod of Troyes, during which the Templars ratified their codes of conduct and were officially recognized by the Holy Roman Church following their return from Jerusalem. The famous North Porch of Chartres Cathedral was constructed to Bernard’s exact specifications, including the statuary of King Solomon, Queen Makeda, and the transported Ark with inscription (See Exhibit 12). Given what we know about the Templar activities beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (See Exhibit 11), their sudden rise to power, and the abrupt appearance of sacred geometry in Europe through the Gothic style (promoted by St. Bernard – See Exhibit 9) upon their return, this cannot be mere coincidence. That it predates the dissemination of the Kebra Nagast to Europe suggests foreknowledge of the Menelik story from another source, perhaps found in Jerusalem. It is at this same time that Wolfram’s Parzival…