“You need to talk to our friend Keon,” Kaity said. “He was the real wizard in those days and the one who really put it all together and figured out the missing pieces between the ones from the notes and the ones we found in various ruins.”
Twenty-Five
Keon stepped off a bus near Merrion Square not far from the National Museum. As he strolled to a corner, stopping near the square’s black iron fence and a cluster of trees, he slipped the burner mobi from his satchel and dialed the memorized number, keeping his eyes wide, scanning his surroundings. He should see anyone threatening coming at several paces.
At the moment the area was clear, so he listened to the dial tone again and again until finally came the click of someone answering.
“Go ahead.”
“It’s your African friend,” Keon said.
“You think I only know one African?”
“I think you know which you’re talking to.”
Shawn Drury had always been paranoid and cautious.
“The friend from the old days,” he said. “The one you tracked down.”
“Where the Irish coffee was always strong and the MiWadi was always necessary the next day.”
They’d often joked about MiWadi, an Irish fruit drink used for hangovers, which they agreed almost sounded African.
“What did you want?”
“We need to talk.”
“Are you in the clear?’
Keon gave a look around. Anyone nearby seemed mundane.
“I think I am. I’m near a spot once as dear to us as O’Broder’s. I’ll be strolling there in a while looking at the stuffed hares.”
“Forty-five minutes,” Drury said.
And forty-minutes later, Keon stood in front of a stuffed moose that towered over the first floor of the natural history museum while deer and goats’ heads looked on from a second-floor gallery. It was easy to see why some called it the Dead Zoo. The showroom was so packed with preserved animals, it almost felt claustrophobic. With a little imagination, it felt like walking among a diverse herd of creatures from many continents.
When a man with long, graying hair stepped to his side and flipped up the brim on a floppy black hat for just a second, it was as if he had emerged from the African bush.
The glimpse of his face confirmed he was Drury.
“You’re watching what’s going on?” Keon asked, focusing his attention on the moose as if he had a deep fascination with its coat.
“I’ve seen activity,” Drury said.
“Do you have a feel for what’s happening?”
“Some remnant of Madam Quiñones’ followers seem to be going for the pieces of your puzzle that the original disciples never found. I’ve been following news and chatter. From what I can tell they have the stone that was at Castle Cluin.”
“The old man died up in County Fingal,” Keon said. “The authorities haven’t connected it, I believe, but I think it’s safe to say they have the markings from there.”
“Then there’s the elephant in the room,” Drury said, smirking only slightly since they’d strolled past a display of rhinos.
“They’re killing anyone in their path,” Keon said. “Or almost anyone connected who can’t or won’t do them any good.”
“Professor Burke didn’t know where the pieces were buried.”
“He was just an advisor.”
“Word has it players are getting messages using the new symbols.”
“What else do you hear?” Keon asked.
“Soon after the symbols they seem to die.”
“I think I can confirm that. If they refuse to help, or can’t, they seem to die anyway.”
“Have you picked up how they’re dying?”
“Poisoned.”
“I’m hearing it’s venom the authorities can’t identify.”
“Sounds like we’re getting into that territory,” Keon said. “You were the one who actually believed it might be real.”
“If the offshoot reptile race exists, it would be one more chip on the scale for the theories you thought were fabrications. If the reptiles are really there, then what you thought was just a story…”
“If the reptile race is real, then why would they need the characters?”
“Lost knowledge, needed to tap into whatever energy’s under our feet or in the air.”
Keon felt an eerie ripple along his spine. Hidden Knowledge.
His message.
The message he’d helped shape, thinking it was just legend.
“If any of this is true…” he whispered.
“They’d just need to find the last piece,” Drury said. “Your control piece. Is it impossible to find?”
“Not impossible. Clues were planted. I always kept the algorithm on a computer that wasn’t networked, so that should be safe.”
“Maybe you should go dig it up.”
“That might lead them to it. Maybe it’s safest in the ground.”
“If they find you, they’ll torture you until you talk and then they’ll have it anyway. Won’t matter to you, but the rest of the world will find out if Rudolph Rottman was talking out of his ass or if he really had secret meetings with snake men in nineteen twenty-seven and sprinkled bits of what they told him into his stories.”
“It has to be just a story.”
“I decided long ago, what might be true was enough to sever ties with the disciples I’d met.”
“Can you help me? I need to get off the grid until I can figure something out.”
“I can lend you a pad, but I won’t be coming there. I don’t need them torturing me.”
“Give me a key and the coordinates,” Keon said. “I’ll take it from there. Now, do you happen to have access to a car?”
Twenty-Six
“It really started when we worked on a real archaeological dig one summer. We were supervised by some of our professors, but we found markings on a wall and on a bit of stone. We got kind of enraptured by what we were doing and decided to keep it to ourselves for different purposes. We started doing a little more research, and things got out of hand from there.”
“I should be impressed by the enthusiasm,” Bullfinch said. “I find it hard to engage contemporary students.”
“When did you figure out this wall had a new set of characters?” O’Donnell asked.
She was pulling past one of Dublin’s bendy buses, a two-sectioned bus with an accordion-like connection at the center for cornering. Bullfinch held his breath as they whisked past its rear bumper.
“Keon recorded the marking, became kind of the keeper of what we had, started looking it over, started checking a book then online sources. He realized he had something, so he showed it to us at the pub the next night. We started joking about what it’d be like to plant it in some farmer’s field.”
“Then we started realizing that if there was one unknown there must be more, and we started sniffing around.”
“You found what a number of full-fledged archaeologists didn’t?”
“Well, we suddenly knew to look, and we started tapping into what others might know. We even found this call that was passed on to the institute we were working with. It hadn’t been checked out yet, but this kooky old man claimed he’d found forgotten chambers in a ruin on his property.”
O’Donnell shot back into the lane in front of the bus just in time to make a hard turn at a corner, crossing an oncoming lane only a few seconds ahead of another bus. Bullfinch looked through O’Donnell’s window and saw the driver’s panicked eyes as they zipped on past his front bumper. He thought about giving a reassuring wave, but then they were past.
“And we started to extrapolate,” Kaity said from the back seat.
“Extrapolate.”
“Keon started to assemble the secret Ogham alphabet, and, he was a mathematical genius. We started to figure out what had been found where, and he started to run probabilities and make educated guesses about the markings we had. He did pattern recognition, you mi
ght say.”
“Part of the second alphabet is made up?”
“No. No. Nothing that simple. He worked really hard to fill in characteristics of missing symbols, and in some of the perusals of old information, we started to realize things were floating around that aligned. We started tracing them back and…”
“Rottman’s grimoire,” Bullfinch said. “The random markings from the grimoire stories? I feel like I should be slapping my forehead.”
“You want to go easy on yourself and just fill me in?” O’Donnell asked.
Horns echoed in what seemed to be stereo. Bullfinch just closed his eyes. Better not to see anything coming.
“Rottman built a world and a mythology for his stories as we’ve mentioned. It included snippets of artwork. In correspondence, he claimed he’d been given some of it by shadowy figures he encountered in secret meetings and one-on-one encounters.”
“Things in his stories resembled the characters we’d found, but it wasn’t quite right. Keon noticed that the pieces that matched had characteristics that had been altered. Rottman changed them in his stories, but Keon tweaked everything, figured it all out.”
“It’s said Rottman incorporated his secret knowledge into his stories,” Bullfinch said. “But in letters that have surfaced he revealed he wondered if it was real, so he changed things to make it safe and withheld some information.”
“Except you had enough to use his alphabet to fill in the blanks and fix the changes?” O’Donnell asked, looking at Kaity.
“Keon had computer lab time. He worked with a program he wrote and kept under wraps that would model the characters and speculate on the pattern of the changes Rottman made. Keon was able to make decisions about the way he modified.”
“This is kind of like what you were telling me about the Dead Sea Scrolls, sort of, isn’t it?” O’Donnell asked.
Bullfinch opened his eyes just a fraction. They seemed to be in their proper lane and proceeding fast but in a reasonable trajectory.
“That’s about right.”
“So you took Rottman’s ideas, the forgotten alphabet, filled in the blanks on yours and fixed it.”
“That’s about the size of it as the Americans would say,” Kaity said. “Whether it was created by a secret order of Druids or whatever, we felt it was fairly accurate.”
“Then you decided to play the game,” Bullfinch said.
“We started to think it could be more interesting to do an experiment than to just turn in a few more rocks to sit in museums or have old scholars speculate on their contribution to the story of early man.”
An array of symbols on various types of paper were spread across the table. Malphas sat at the end, looking more ancient in the harsh fluorescent light of the hotel meeting room as Freya and Jaager strolled in.
The symbols she’d contributed were in the mix. A large piece of drawing paper had been placed at the end of the table for her to look at the almost complete array of characters. One wide space was left open between strings of slashes and whorls.
She looked across the room. Seated beside a slumped and weary William Groom in his wheelchair, Edward and a young female assistant seemed to wait patiently
William Groom looked almost like he’d aged more since he was last seen.
Edward remained as crisp as ever. Malphas peeled back the hood. He was more ancient than either of them, the skin on his cheeks a wrinkled parchment. His eyes were watery yet intense and wild.
“I understand the black man has eluded you.”
“For the moment. Vacated his house a while back, took anything that mattered it seems, but we’re working on it.”
He rose and walked to the paper that featured the compiled list of characters. He tapped a spot left empty between other sets of hash marks.
“We need the final character.”
He pulled over another piece of paper, a topological map with networks of lines and red dots arranged along the lines. He tapped one of the dots.
“An incomplete configuration won’t serve us, and the celestial alignments are available for a limited time.”
“In addition to helping with your needs, our friends here have generously provided us with assistance in the search,” Freya said. “We have eyes on him. We’ll let him lead us to the final piece.”
“This is not a leisurely process. We’re putting pieces in place as we speak. My associate is out now exploring options, but we don’t want to miss opportunities. Is that clear? You were chosen for your tenacity. Trusted with this task. Are you up to it?”
“Yes. You don’t need to worry.”
“The Grooms are making resources available even though it might make them vulnerable. Go find the African and make him lead us to that last mark.”
“I will, sir,” Freya said, summoning all her confidence.
She’d make it work.
Bullfinch found that his heart rate actually slowed a bit once he was outside O’Donnell’s vehicle, even after a climb up the stairs at Keon’s small two-story house. Since the dwelling proved to be empty, he wondered if they’d needed O’Donnell’s derring-do pace. Then he wondered for just a second if the term derring-do was archaic and that it made him old. Perhaps he was a bit old to be running around, chasing this kind of strangeness.
But the world kept needing to be saved.
The state of the house confirmed cause for concern for the man he sought. The place had been tossed. Cabinets had been emptied. Clothes had been yanked from the closet, and the mattress had been tumbled off the bed frame then ripped open so that stuffing spilled out.
“No stone unturned,” O’Donnell said.
She stood at the center of the bedroom, scanning, but it just looked like any spot in the suburbs that had been upended.
“Is there a landline?” Bullfinch asked.
“Couldn’t tell you,” Kaity said. Her distraction was evident. Her gaze was trained on the devastation, eyes wide at the thoroughness.
A search failed to yield a phone, but Bullfinch’s hopes hadn’t been that high about a redial telling them anything. He followed O’Donnell crunching over strewn breakfast cereal through the kitchen to look out through a small window into Keon’s narrow and fenced back yard. A tiny garden shed, pre-fab but made of cedar, stood under a squat little tree near his fence. The door flagged open in a gentle breeze.
They stepped out a back door and headed toward the structure for a look. Bullfinch noticed a twisted padlock in the grass on the way. Inside the small chamber, potting soil, shovels and gardening tools had all been disturbed, even the wooden floor of the shed pried up.
“He’s not here and neither is anything useful,” Bullfinch said.
O’Donnell turned to their charge. “Ms. White, any thoughts on where he’d go?”
She had approached quietly from behind them. She stood, seeming nervous and a bit vague as she looked around.
“Keon was always the brilliant one. He compiled the information, kept it all. He was always careful.”
“Could they have taken him?”
“If he was here when they were, looks like he didn’t give them anything.”
Bullfinch let out a slow sigh.
“We need to find him. Why don’t we take her back to your headquarters?” he said to O’Donnell in a low whisper. “We’re going to need Garda analysts again and their facial recognition to try and figure out where Mr. Bello has gone. If he does hold the key to the kingdom and he took it, we’re going to need him alive and so are they.”
“What if the disciples took him?” O’Donnell said.
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough and learn if it was a game or if Rudolph Rottman was onto something.”
Twenty-Seven
Freya approached Mike quietly, stepping near his left shoulder, not getting too close before she spoke. She’d learned that before he was the head of their security team, he’d served in the American military police, then been a cop before going private, so he had surveillance experi
ence on his resume.
With his background and training, she didn’t want to trigger any reflex responses she’d regret. If her nerves were tense, and her reflexes coiled, she could imagine his were even more likely to flare.
“I hear you,” he said.
He’d picked up some subtle trace of her approach and sensed her caution. He turned with a quick, grim upward tick of one corner of his mouth to relieve her. Then it was gone and calm stoicism returned.
“Our man’s in a coffee shop over there. Liking the free WiFi, I suspect.”
Now that she was aware of it, she could almost feel his military confidence and read the underlying power in posture. Not terribly tall but solid.
“He looked nervous when he went in,” Mike said. “Looking over his shoulder. Didn’t see me.”
“Alone?”
One quick tick of the head affirmed.
“My recommendation’s follow for a while.” He kept his gaze trained on the front of the shop. “We need a professional approach.”
Freya felt her jaw lower in quiet shock, but she held back words and avoided turning his way. No need to give him a reaction or a personal defense. Nor to remind him of the assault at the hotel and that failure. She could tell he’d just grunt his response and disapproval or remind her that the hotel attackers had been freelancers. Help wasn’t always all it cracked up to be.
“I agree,” she said. “Do you have the manpower in town to handle this?”
“Got a guy on the back door. Another at the corner. We’ll find whatever rock this is the bosses are so sold on.”
“You’re gonna be surprised,” Freya said. She let her accent go full force. She hoped that carried a subtext of contempt, though she mouthed a focáil leat only in her head. Why did it have to be an American?
She pushed back her annoyance as the African emerged from the shop door. He checked both directions, but didn’t look their way. After a second of looking like he would head up the sidewalk, he stepped to the curb and lifted a hand.
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