Ark of Fire ca-1

by C. M. Palov

  Properly enticed, MacFarlane walked over to the thug in possession of his anorak. Removing two sheets of folded paper from the front pocket, he first examined the translated quartets, then the sketched drawing of The Presentation of Christ.

  “Before I get to the drawing, I should tell you what we’ve learned to date. We now know that the quatrains were not written by Galen of Godmersham.” MacFarlane’s head jerked, the man clearly thunderstruck. “Rather they were written by Galen’s third wife, Philippa of Canterbury.”

  “You’re certain of this?”

  “There is no doubt in my mind.”

  MacFarlane chewed on the morsel for several seconds. “And what about St. Lawrence the Martyr?”

  “Another red herring,” Caedmon replied, suspecting the other scholar’s fate had been sealed with that particular mistranslation. “The ‘blessed martyr’ in question is Thomas à Becket. Which led us to Canterbury Cathedral, where we discovered a stained glass window.”

  MacFarlane stared at the sketched drawing, like an addict staring at a full needle.

  “As to the specifics of the window, one must bear in mind that it was created by an artisan with a very different set of cultural references. From a semiotic standpoint, deciphering the window is akin to peering through a dark lens. Complex theological tenets, historical fact, and archaic language structures are all jumbled together in that one seemingly innocuous drawing. Admittedly, it will take time to sort out the various strands.” Seeing the displeased expression on MacFarlane’s face, he hastily added, “However, we have reason to believe that the two geese in the basket are significant.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because one of the geese represents Philippa herself, in the medieval guise of the good housewife. Unfortunately, we have yet to decipher the meaning of the second goose.”

  “When will you have it deciphered?”

  “When I am sufficiently rested.” Caedmon stood his ground, knowing that if he didn’t, there would be precious few roots to cling to. Then, gesturing to Edie, he said, “We both require bed and board.”

  The added caveat was more for Edie’s sake than his own. He could see it in her strained expression; she was utterly exhausted. If an opportunity arose to escape, she would need to be sufficiently rested to turn opportunity to advantage.

  MacFarlane impatiently tapped his watch crystal. “If the Ark of the Covenant is not in my hands in sixteen hours’ time, I’ll kill the woman.”

  Although the proceedings had thus far proved civil, Caedmon recalled the old proverb advising the unsuspecting diner to use a long spoon when supping with the devil.

  “I will do all in my power to find the Ark,” he assured his adversary.

  MacFarlane locked gazes with him, a barely contained malevolence lurking beneath the controlled expression. “Behave like a guest and you’ll continue to be treated as such. Am I making myself clear?”

  “As a bell.”

  CHAPTER 62

  “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough chips for one day,” Caedmon grumbled.

  “And guys with big guns and things that go bump in the night.” Edie squinted, there being only a small glimmer of light shining through the locked door. MacFarlane’s twisted idea of “bed and board” was a small storage closet and a couple of bags of soggy fries.

  “But on a bright note, we shall be lulled to sleep by the babbling brook that runs beneath the mill.”

  Edie made no reply; a damp chill oozed up from the floorboards on account of that same babbling brook. Already she could feel the ache in her joints.

  “By the by, I’ve got your metal nail file hidden under the insole of my shoe.”

  “I can top that . . . I’ve got a thousand dollars stuffed inside my boot. After the attack in Oxford, I was worried someone might steal the Virgin Air bag.” Her thoughts running every which way, she abruptly changed gears. “There’s something I need to tell you . . . I have intimate knowledge of Stanford MacFarlane.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Not that I have biblical knowledge of the man,” Edie quickly amended. “But I do know the heart of Stanford MacFarlane.”

  “And how is that?” There was no mistaking the interest in his voice.

  “My maternal grandfather was something of a religious zealot. If not cut from the same bolt of cloth as MacFarlane, Pops was certainly cut from a similar one.” She caustically laughed, the memory an unpleasant one. “My grandfather believed that freedom of religion extended only to other fundamental Christians.”

  “Being a young girl, I’m surprised that you weren’t, er—”

  “Indoctrinated? Having been raised by a mother who repeatedly told me that she would clean up her act, and who repeatedly failed to make good on the promise, made me a hard sell. Deep-seated trust issues, I suppose.” She readjusted her legs, the dark space a tight fit for the two of them. “Having sat through all those Sunday sermons, I know that men like my pops and Stanford MacFarlane lie awake at night, consumed with visions of a global theocracy.”

  She paused a moment, recalling the earlier one-on-one conversation. “Although I get the feeling that, unlike Pops, MacFarlane thinks of himself as some sort of Old Testament patriarch.”

  “One of those unsavory bastards who prays before the bloodletting, hmm?”

  Edie shuddered. “He’s probably praying as we speak.”

  Putting an arm around her shoulder, Caedmon pulled her close. “As long as there’s a chance of finding the Ark, you will be safe. MacFarlane knows that if he harms you in any way, I’ll refuse to comply with his wishes.”

  “You don’t actually trust him to keep his word, do you?”

  It being too dark in the closet for her to discern Caedmon’s features, she sensed rather than saw his sardonic smile.

  “In my experience, trusting one’s enemy is a fine art.”

  In the same way that she sensed the smile, Edie suddenly sensed its disappearance.

  “It’s my fault that you got dragged into this mess. I should never have agreed to—”

  Edie put a hand over his mouth, sshhing him. “Since meeting you at the National Gallery of Art, everything that I’ve done—and I mean everything—from coming to England to making love to riding in the back of that refrigerated truck, I’ve done of my own free will. We’re in this together, Caedmon. And don’t for one second think that we’re not. There was no way that either of us could have known they’d place a tracking device on me.”

  “Are you saying that the punch-up at the Covered Market was merely a feint? Bloody hell. I should have seen that one coming. From the onset, MacFarlane has remained one step ahead of me.”

  Hearing the self-recrimination in his voice, she thought a change of subject in order. “We now have less than sixteen hours to figure out the meaning of those two geese in the basket. All we know is that one of the geese represents Philippa.” She sighed, well aware that it was a very brief allotment of time. “I wish we knew more about Philippa. Other than the fact that she married Galen and she joined a nunnery, we’ve got precious few clues.”

  “The nunnery . . . that’s it. You, Edie Miller, are bloody beautiful!”

  Without warning, Caedmon began to loudly bang on the closet door with his balled fist.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on in there?” came a deep-throated voice on the other side of the locked door.

  “Tell MacFarlane that I know where the Ark is hidden.”

  CHAPTER 63

  Onward, Christian soldiers, Caedmon silently mused, realizing that each of the four armed men gathered around the table wore a Jerusalem cross ring on his right hand.

  “And you’re absolutely certain that the two geese depicted in the stained glass window will lead us to the Ark of the Covenant?” MacFarlane gestured to the Canterbury drawing that lay on the tabletop.

  Seated in front of a laptop computer, Caedmon stopped typing, taking a moment to glance at his adversary. He knew that he served but o
ne purpose. Once he fulfilled that purpose, he would no longer be in a position to safeguard Edie.

  Surreptitiously, he glanced at the locked closet door on the far side of the room.

  Somehow he had to devise a suitable enticement, a bargaining chip, that he could use to garner Edie’s freedom. Until then, he would merely reveal enough to whet MacFarlane’s voracious appetite. But not so much that he lessened his overall worth. Stanford MacFarlane had to believe that without him, he would never find the Ark.

  “As I mentioned earlier, one of the geese symbolizes Philippa in her role as the good housewife to her husband, Galen of Godmersham. After Galen’s death, Philippa joined a nunnery, where she lived out her remaining days. With that in mind, I believe that the second goose also represents Philippa; nuns are often referred to as the bride of Christ. Or the good housewife of Christ, as it were.”

  MacFarlane took a moment to digest the crumb just tossed to him. “What does Galen’s widow being a nun have to do with anything?” he asked, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. He’d already been led down a false path by one man. Clearly, he was not about to venture forth without a proper road map.

  “It’s possible that Philippa took the Ark with her to the nunnery.” He jutted his chin at the Oxford University search engine that he’d pulled up on the Internet. “Hopefully, I’ll be able to find out which order Philippa joined. Although it may take some time, as there were scores of now-defunct religious orders active in the fourteenth century.”

  “Time is the one thing I’ve got in short supply.”

  As he waited for the search results, Caedmon couldn’t help but wonder at MacFarlane’s impatience to find the Ark. It made him think that the self-styled Warriors of God were operating under some sort of deadline.

  But a deadline for what?

  Though he was tantalized by the ancient mystery that had beguiled such luminaries as Newton and Freud, he was keenly aware that lives had been ruthlessly taken; MacFarlane’s obsession with the Ark knew no bounds.

  “Ah! We have a hit,” he announced, pointing to the computer screen. “According to a fourteenth-century document called the Regestrum Archiepiscopi—”

  “Can the Latin,” MacFarlane snarled.

  “Right.” Properly chastened, he decided to dumb down all relayed material. “What you are looking at is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s registry of nunneries compiled in the year 1350. That being two years after the plague, I suspect the archbishop was very keen to take a head count. Since most folk in the Middle Ages rarely traveled more than thirty miles from the place of their birth, I’ll first search for Philippa in the Kent listings.”

  As he scrolled the register, Caedmon knew that he was operating on nothing more than a strong hunch. A hunch that if proved wrong could have tragic results.

  “There she is,” he murmured. “Philippa, widowed wife of Galen of Godmersham, is listed as a member of the Priory of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to the entry, she entered the nunnery with a dowry worth approximately—”

  “Just tell me where the priory is located,” MacFarlane i nterrupted.

  “It is located in the hamlet of Swanley, southeast of London.”

  MacFarlane turned to the behemoth with the sutured head. “Pull it up on the GPS.”

  Using a small stylus that looked ridiculous in his oversized hand, the brute began pecking away on a handheld device.

  “I’ve got it. It’s at the intersection of highways M20 and M25,” he announced, passing the handheld computer to his superior.

  MacFarlane studied the computer-generated map. “You were right. Swanley is exactly thirty miles from Canterbury. Which means we can be there within the hour.”

  Caedmon vetoed the idea with a shake of the head. Knowing that MacFarlane was a man willing to punch above his own weight, he calmly pointed out the obvious. “If we traipse around a medieval priory in the middle of the night, we might very well be confronted by the local constabulary. Particularly if the nunnery is listed on the Heritage Trust. Given the delicate task at hand, we will be better aided by the light of day than the gloom of night.”

  MacFarlane stared at him, long and hard.

  “We hit the road at first light,” he said at last. Then, his gaze narrowing. “But if you’re thinking about sidestepping me like that li’l Harvard pencil dick, you think again, boy.”

  Although he took exception to being called “boy” Caedmon kept his ire in check. “Bear in mind that Swanley may simply be where we find the next clue.”

  “What are you saying, that this is going to turn into some sort of scavenger hunt?”

  “If you wish to hide a tree, you must hide it in a forest. We won’t know if the Priory of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the forest we seek until we can properly examine the site.”

  “Well, you better hope to God that it is the right forest.”

  At hearing that, Caedmon intuited what would happen should they not find the Ark. It was an intuition that involved slit throats and bodies buried at the low-water mark.

  CHAPTER 64

  Dawn arrived, damp and gray, the passenger windows on the Range Rover still ice-rimmed. The cold went right through Edie, causing her teeth to loudly clatter—though she suspected that fear had as much to do with her teeth clacking as the outside temperature.

  Rudely awakened only a short time earlier, she and Caedmon had been ushered into the backseat of the waiting vehicle. Seated in front of them was the driver, Sanchez, a sullen man given to muttering in Spanish, and his copilot, Harliss, a southerner with an accent so thick he might as well have been speaking in Spanish. Both men were armed. And both had made it very clear that they would not hesitate to use their weapons.

  Leading the pack in a second Range Rover were Stanford MacFarlane and his right-hand man, Boyd Braxton. To Edie’s relief, she’d had little to no contact with the hulking brute since the attempted rape. Knowing that Caedmon had enough on his plate, she’d made no mention of the near miss.

  “Didn’t you say something about swans and geese being interchangeable in the medieval lexicon?”

  “Hmm?” Clearly lost in thought, Caedmon tore his gaze away from the window. “Er, yes, I did say that.”

  “Making it all the more likely that this place Swanley is where we’ll find the Ark.”

  “Actually, I have no idea if the Ark is hidden at the nunnery. The Priory of the Blessed Virgin Mary may simply be where we find the next clue.”

  Jealously she watched as MacFarlane’s henchmen passed a thermos filled with hot coffee back and forth between them.

  “My feet feel like two blocks of ice,” she complained in a lowered voice, pointedly glancing at the pair of green wellies she’d earlier been issued.

  Caedmon, decked out in an identical pair of boots, commiserated with a nod. “The English Wellington was designed to keep the foot dry, not warm. Although we’ll be glad of them should we have to traipse through a damp field.”

  Edie didn’t bother to point out the obvious—that a full-speed sprint through that same damp field would be next to impossible in the clunky rubber boots.

  They’d driven through the postdawn gloom for approximately twenty minutes when Edie sighted the first road sign for Swanley. As they approached the town limits, she was surprised that Swanley looked a whole lot like any American residential suburb, the outskirts littered with strip malls and fast-food eateries.

  How were they going to find the Ark in the midst of so much suburban sprawl?

  “Don’t worry. The priory is located in the outlying countryside,” Caedmon remarked, correctly guessing at her thoughts.

  As if on cue, Sanchez exited from the superhighway, veering onto a two-lane country road. Peering out the window, she’d forgotten how simple things—trees in the distance, brown pastures, stone farm fences—could exude a stark cinematic beauty; the contrast between the countryside and the nearby town was like midnight and high noon.

  Up ahead, MacFarlane’s Range Rover came to a h
alt, pulling to the side of the road. Sanchez pulled in a few feet behind.

  “Is this the place?” she asked, not seeing anything in the rural landscape that even remotely resembled a medieval nunnery.

  “I believe so,” Caedmon replied. “MacFarlane plotted the course on a computer navigation system. Although we’ll probably have to trek across a field or two to reach our destination.”

  Harliss opened the passenger door. “Get out.” Gun in hand, he ushered them toward the other vehicle while Sanchez unloaded several large, bulky canvas packs from the Range Rover’s cargo bin.

  As MacFarlane huddled his men, she and Caedmon were ordered to stand to one side. She could see that Harliss had a handheld GPS receiver, which all four men intently studied. Although she tried to listen in, she could catch only a few snippets—avenues of approach . . . terrain features . . . obstacles . . . reconnaissance.

  “They’re treating this like some sort of military operation,” she whispered to Caedmon.

  “Apparently so.”

  “Making us the enemy combatants, huh?”

  Too busy scanning the surrounding area, Caedmon made no reply.

  “Move ’em out,” MacFarlane gruffly ordered.

  Sandwiched between two pairs of armed men, she and Caedmon moved with the pack in a northeasterly direction. In front of them about two hundred yards in the distance was a dense grove of trees. As they trudged across the field, Edie wondered if Philippa of Canterbury had had any notion of the deadly train of events she would someday trigger with her quatrains.

  More than likely she had.

  Why else would the noblewoman-cum-nun have gone to such lengths to hide her dead husband’s gold arca? Philippa had survived the horror of the plague and no doubt blamed the Ark for the deadly wave that swept across England.

  Last night Caedmon had informed her that Philippa belonged to the Gilbertine Order, an order of nuns founded in England. In a span of only six years, Philippa had risen through the priory ranks, eventually becoming the cellaress, a position in which she oversaw all of the food production. A capable woman with a flair for management, she could have easily arranged for the Ark of the Covenant to have been brought to Swanley. Maybe she let her fellow nuns in on the secret. Because they lived a life devoted to religious worship and contemplative prayer, there was little fear that the secret would be revealed to nosy outsiders.