by C. M. Palov
Grabbing her by the upper arm, Caedmon drew her to his side. “Now is not the time for us to be out of step with one another,” he hissed in her ear. “We merely want to tickle the man.”
“Yeah, before we move in for the kill.”
CHAPTER 27
“Figuratively speaking,” Edie amended.
“I most certainly hope so.” Concerned his companion may have watched too police dramas on the telly, Caedmon tightened his grip on her arm. Like a harried parent with an unruly child.
Surreptitiously, he glanced to and fro. Rock-laden, treed, and hilly, the surrounding terrain could easily camouflage a hunter on the prowl. Attired in her red and purple plaid skirt, Edie made an easy target. Although warning bells did not yet toll, they did tinkle, the place having about it a sinister air.
As they approached the bareheaded man seated on the park bench, Caedmon closed the black brolly he’d been holding aloft, the wintry rain having dwindled to a mere spit. He hooked the curved handle on his bent arm.
“A most interesting place to meet, betwixt and between these two beautiful creatures of prey,” Eliot Hopkins remarked, slowly rising to his feet. He gestured first to the lone wolf that warily prowled the fenced hillside beside them. Then he pointed a gloved hand to the bald eagle perched aloft on the opposite hillock. “Did you know that the eagle has been a symbol of war since Babylonian times?”
With his thatch of wavy white hair, patrician features, and ruddy red cheeks, Caedmon thought Eliot Hopkins a grandfatherly-looking man. Dressed in English tweed, he could have passed for a country squire. A harmless dolt who, if prompted, could natter for hours on end about shifting weather patterns and the breeding of Leicester Longwool sheep.
“How about canning the bullshit,” Edie retorted, ignoring his earlier admonition. “Because of you, and your boundless greed, Jonathan Padgham is dead! And don’t give me any bunk about him going to London to take care of funeral arrangements. I know what happened yesterday at the museum.”
“Jonathan’s death is most unfortunate and, I am sad to say, entirely my fault,” the museum director readily confessed, a morose look in his rheumy gray eyes. “I had no idea that Jonathan was in danger. Although once the deed was done, I had no choice but to assist in the cover-up.”
“I’m curious as to how you became involved with such a bloodthirsty gang of men,” Caedmon remarked. “You don’t strike me as running in the same circle.”
Smiling ever so slightly, Hopkins nodded. “Shortly after I acquired the Stones of Fire I was approached by a private consortium interested in buying the breastplate at an exorbitant price. When I refused to sell the relic, the consortium resorted to blackmail, demanding that I relinquish custody of the breastplate or they would alert the SAFE organization.”
Edie nudged him in the arm. “Who or what is SAFE?”
“Saving Antiquities for Everyone is a nonprofit group that monitors the international trade in stolen or secretly excavated antiquities.”
“And that would have created quite the public scandal,” she correctly deduced. “So why didn’t you give the consortium the Stones of Fire? Why take the risk of being exposed?”
“I called their bluff, knowing full well that if SAFE became involved, the consortium would lose all chance of getting their hands on my precious relic. A tragic miscalculation, as it turned out.”
“Proving that one cannot trump the devil,” Caedmon muttered, infuriated that the deadly game had cost an innocent man his life.
“I can assure you that if I knew several weeks ago what I know now, I would have—”
“Oh, puh-leeze!” Edie interjected. “You sound like someone running for public office.” She folded her arms over her chest, a stern headmistress in black leather. “I just don’t get it. Why would this so-called consortium resort to cold-blooded murder to get the Stones of Fire? It’s just a bit of gold with twelve gemstones.”
A drawn-out pause ensued as the museum director evidently debated whether to answer. “In and of itself, you’re probably correct,” he finally replied. “But when used in concert with that other holy relic, the Stones of Fire become a conduit to God. Thus making them a prerequisite for the larger prize.”
. . . that other holy relic . . .
. . . a prerequisite for the larger prize.
Caedmon’s mouth slackened, the realization hitting him like a fist to the belly.
“I don’t believe it . . . they’re actually going after the Ark.”
“The Ark?” Edie’s gaze ricocheted between him and Eliot Hopkins. “As in the Ark of the Covenant?”
“None other,” Hopkins confirmed.
Still in a state of shock, Caedmon pressed harder. “How do you know that the consortium is searching for the Ark?”
“I know because I was searching for the lost Ark. Two days before the theft at the museum, my Georgetown home was burglarized. Imagine my surprise when the only thing stolen was my research notes. For some thirty years I’ve hunted down clues, sent excavation teams into remote areas of the Middle East, continuing the work my grandfather began but could not finish.”
“Good God! Do you mean to say that you’re Oliver Hopkins’s grandson?” Considered by scholars to be daft as a brush, Oliver Hopkins spent a fortune searching for the Ark of the Covenant during the early part of the twentieth century—to no avail; the wealthy adventurer barely escaped the Holy Land with his head intact.
“I came considerably closer to finding the elusive jewel in the biblical crown than my grandfather did. And in so doing, I knew that if I was to avoid the curse of Bethshemesh, I had to first find the Stones of Fire.”
Edie derisively snickered. “The curse of Bethshemesh? Who are you, a character in an Indiana Jones movie?”
“Hardly,” Caedmon replied, the conversation about to darken several shades. “The punishment for accidentally touching the Ark of the Covenant was a very painful and instantaneous death, Yahweh having a beastly temper. That said, in the book of Samuel, a cautionary tale is recounted about the city of Bethshemesh, where Yahweh indiscriminately slaughtered fifty thousand of the residents as punishment for the handful of men who, seized with curiosity, dared to peer inside the Ark.”
“Jesus,” she softly swore. “God did that?”
“Elsewhere the Bible speaks of the Ark leveling whole mountains, parting rivers, annihilating enemy armies, and destroying fortified cities. Those who doubted the Ark’s power often found themselves covered in cancerous tumors or painful burns,” he informed her, knowing that most people preferred their God sanitized, the ugliness of the Old Testament swept under a heavenly carpet.
“It sounds more like a weapon than a religious artifact.”
“The Ark of the Covenant was, to use the modern parlance, a weapon of mass destruction, enabling the ragtag Israelites to conquer the Holy Land. Shielded with the Stones of Fire, the high priest could channel and control all of that explosive energy.”
“Thus making the Stones of Fire a ‘prerequisite’ to finding the Ark of the Covenant.”
Having stood silent, Eliot Hopkins rejoined the conversation. “Now do you see why I’m convinced that my mysterious consortium is intent on hunting bigger game? Think of the power contained within that precious gold chest. The Ark radiated divine power and might. And if one had a mind to communicate with the celestial spheres, the Ark could summon forth angels and even manifest the Almighty himself.”
The enraptured expression on Eliot Hopkins’s withered visage belonged to that of a man obsessed. Caedmon knew the look well, having once been an obsessed man himself, his fascination with the Knights Templar having bordered on the fanatic—which was why, long years ago, he’d been ousted from Oxford.
“A lot of people would say that the supposed power of the Ark was nothing but a fanciful myth used to entertain the Hebrews who gathered around the evening campfire,” Edie argued.
“And there are those who claim that God is dead. I, however, am not one of them.”
“So, what happened to the Ark? Was it plundered? Was it lost? Or was it destroyed?” Edie asked in rapid-fire succession.
Eliot Hopkins lifted his wool-clad shoulders in an eloquent shrug. “The pages of the Old Testament don’t give so much as a hint. We know only that Moses constructed the Ark in the fifteenth century B.C.; five centuries later, King Solomon built a lavish temple to house the Ark; and sometime prior to the construction of the Second Temple in 516 B.C., the Ark vanished, seemingly into the dust of history.”
“Surely, there’s a theory or two to explain its disappearance,” Edie persisted.
“Most biblical historians concur that there are five probable scenarios to explain the Ark’s disappearance,” Caedmon replied, beating the older man to the starting gate. “The first of these concerns Menelik, King Solomon’s son with the Queen of Sheba. Those who adhere to that particular theory have postulated that Menelik stole the Ark from the Temple around 950 B.C. and took it to Ethiopia, where it resides to this day.”
“And let’s not forget the theory put forth in Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Edie said, smirking. “You know, that the Ark is in Egypt.”
“A valid theory, as it turns out. Its adherents believe that a few years after Solomon’s death, the Ark was raided by the Egyptian pharaoh Shishak and taken to his newly constructed capital of Tanis. Then there are the three remaining theories, which involve the Ark being plundered by the Babylonians, the Greeks, or the Romans, take your pick.”
“And I did, painstakingly considering each of those theories in turn,” Eliot Hopkins informed them. “As you may or may not know, there are nearly two hundred references to the Ark in the pages of the Old Testament. Most of those references concern the time period between the Hebrew exodus from Egypt and the construction of Solomon’s Temple. All of which led me to surmise that the Ark of the Covenant disappeared shortly after Solomon built his famous temple.”
Proving herself a sure-footed student, Edie said, “Then the Ark was either stolen by Menelik or plundered by Shishak.”
“I know for a fact that the Ark does not reside in Ethiopia,” the older man quietly asserted.
Hearing that, Caedmon deduced that Eliot Hopkins had very deep pockets. The political situation in Ethiopia was dicey, to say the least; Obtaining permission to mount a thorough search would have been bloody expensive.
“So that means Shishak stole the Ark and it’s buried in the pharaoh’s tomb.”
“Not necessarily,” the older man said in reply to Edie’s deduction. “Some years back, during a trip to the Middle East, a group of Bedouin traders told me a most fascinating tale of an English crusader who, en route between Palestine and Egypt, discovered a gold chest buried in the Plain of Esdraelon amid the ruins of what had once been an Egyptian temple.”
“I’ve heard this story,” Caedmon murmured, hit squarely with the ghostly specter of his Oxford days.
“Careful, Mr. Aisquith. In this game, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.” Eliot Hopkins smiled, a kindly man offering a sage word of advice. “If you are familiar with the tale, then you undoubtedly have guessed at the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant.”
Refusing to take the bait, Caedmon went on the offensive. “Why are you being so forthcoming with us? For years you’ve gone to great lengths to keep your pursuit of the Ark a secret, and I’m at a loss to understand your sudden burst of loquaciousness.”
Grimacing, the museum director slid his gloved hand inside his wool topcoat. “Because it is inconsequential whether you know or don’t know.”
“And why is that?”
Eliot Hopkins removed his hand from his coat, a German-made Walther pistol clenched in his fist. “Because I have been ordered to kill you.”
CHAPTER 28
With only a wolf and an eagle to bear witness to their deaths, Caedmon affected a calm he didn’t feel. “I say, old boy. That’s not very cricket of you.”
“You’re a fool to think you can get away with murdering us,” Edie hissed, tacking her vessel in an entirely different direction.
One side of Eliot Hopkins’s mouth lifted in a rueful half smile. “Killing you and your charming companion will be the least of my crimes.”
“You’re actually going to kill us in cold blood all because of some religious artifact? Gold stuff! That’s all it is.”
“None of the biblical artifacts mentioned in the Bible can compare with the Ark of the Covenant,” Hopkins whispered, the gun unsteadily wavering in his gloved hand. “The Ark contains the majesty and glory of Yahweh. It alone could inspire or destroy a nation.”
“Or a man,” Caedmon murmured, the Ark about to claim its next two victims.
Raising the gun a few inches higher, Hopkins pointed it at Edie’s chest. “I do hope you will forgive my actions, but if I don’t comply with their orders, they’ll kill my daughter.”
“‘They’ being your mysterious consortium, aka the Warriors of God.”
Despite her brave façade, Caedmon felt the tremble in Edie’s shoulder. Although he was tempted to put a comforting arm around her shoulder, he refrained. Instead, he said, “I can see to it that no harm comes to your daughter.”
“Olivia presently attends boarding school in Switzerland.” As he spoke, tears welled in Eliot Hopkins’s eyes. “My hands are tied. I have but one child. She alone is my hope for the future. My legacy.”
“I can contact Interpol,” Caedmon pressed, using the only gambit he had to play. “Within the half hour your daughter will be placed in protective custody.”
“Entrust my daughter to strangers more than four thousand miles away?” The museum director wearily shook his head. “You ask the impossible.”
Refusing to surrender, Caedmon pressed a bit harder. “Yesterday afternoon, in your museum, Jonathan Padgham was senselessly slain. Let us stop this madness before anyone else is killed.”
“I can’t stop the madness,” the older man croaked, barely audible. “I am truly sorry. I have no choice but to—”
Quite unexpectedly, a lion roared in the distance, a deep-throated bawl that rumbled through the leafless trees and echoed off the ice-laden boulders. The stentorian bellow momentarily distracted the elderly angel of death as Eliot Hopkins nervously glanced about.
Caedmon had no way of knowing whether it was divine intervention or a bit of serendipity. He only knew it was the moment to act. Before the window slammed shut.
Carpe diem, he silently invoked, his thighs, buttocks, and biceps all tightening as he yanked the closed umbrella from where it hung on his forearm, hurling it like a spear. That done, he shoved Edie out of the line of fire, pushing her behind a massive cement trash receptacle. He watched as the umbrella hit its mark, the stainless steel tip hitting Eliot Hopkins square in the chest.
Stunned by the force of the unexpected blow, Hopkins dropped the handgun to the pavement, where it skittered along the icy surface.
About to retrieve the gun, Caedmon stopped in his tracks as a bullet whizzed past in the wrong direction, slamming into Eliot Hopkins’s heart and killing him on impact.
There was a sniper on the hillside!
It had been a setup. None of them was to have left the zoo alive.
Knowing that in combat, he who hesitates is lost, Caedmon lurched behind the trash receptacle, using his body to shield Edie’s quivering backside.
“I’m beginning to think that ‘the land of the free’ means free to shoot and kill,” he muttered against her ear.
“He’s on the hill, above the bald eagle, isn’t he?”
Caedmon nodded, knowing they’d been followed by a professional assassin, the man’s movements so smooth, so subtle that he’d tracked them into the zoo, then faded into the landscape. If they showed themselves, he would expertly fire two kill shots. Men trained to kill at a distance did so without remorse or regret, the action no different than breathing.
Edie peered at him from over her shoulder, a stricken expression on her face.
“Please tell me that you’ve got a plan.”
“I don’t,” he truthfully replied. Although he had better come up with a plan bloody quick. They had only a few seconds before the sniper readjusted his gun sights.
Briefly he considered lunging forward and retrieving the Walther pistol. Just as quickly, he rejected the idea, certain he’d take a lead bullet to the head for his troubles.
“May I take a peek inside your tote?” he asked, tugging on the canvas bag she had clutched to her midsection.
Edie wordlessly complied, opening the tote for his inspection. With no time for niceties, he riffled through the bag’s contents, removing her khaki-colored waistcoat.
“Perfect.” Reaching beside him, he grabbed a fistful of snow.
“What are you doing?”
“Weighting the garment so I can toss it through the air. If we’re lucky, the sniper will see the sudden motion, take aim, and fire. The ruse won’t gain us more than a few precious seconds, but that’s all the time we’ll need to get our arses behind those rocks.” With a lift of the chin, he indicated the jumble of boulders some twenty meters from their current position.
If she had misgivings, and no doubt she did, she kept them to herself.
A brave woman, indeed.
Hoping the venture didn’t prove deadly, Caedmon quickly tied the ends of the waistcoat into a knot, securing the icy ball of snow. Silently mouthing the words On three, he counted to two before tossing the waistcoat through the air. A perfectly bowled cricket delivery.
There being no time to observe the arc and descent of the makeshift decoy, Caedmon snatched Edie by the hand. Bending at the waist, making himself as small a target as possible, he charged toward the clustered rocks. Behind him, he heard a bullet ping off the metal handrail that fronted the Mexican wolf exhibit.
The ruse had worked.
With Edie in tow, he dodged behind a waist-high boulder. Assuming a crouched position, they pressed themselves against the oversized stone.
Quickly, he glanced from side to side. In the hilly terrain above the bald eagles, he thought he detected a blurred figure in a black anorak. A deadly specter on the prowl.