by Brandt Legg
“We killed Josh,” Gale said finally.
“No. Our actions may have set off a chain of events that resulted in his death, but –”
“Same thing.”
“Damn it, Gale. I’m sorry, but we all make decisions in our lives. Josh could have said no. He didn’t have to take the casing. I could just as easily say it’s your fault. If you and he had done what I asked and left the dig site, he’d still be alive.” Rip instantly regretted the words.
“You’re right. Sure, if I’d never met Josh, if his mother hadn’t given birth to him, if you’d become a God damned car salesman!”
“That isn’t what I meant to say. It isn’t your fault. It’s true, if I hadn’t run off with the artifacts, Josh would still be alive, but we’re here now and the important point is who killed him, and why.”
“What do we have that is so valuable that someone would kill a photographer for it?” Gale asked.
“And how did they know about it so quickly? The FBI came to the camp too soon.”
“How could it be that old?” Gale asked quietly, almost to herself.
“In the end, even if it’s a thousand years old, the Eysen is earth-shattering.” Guilt-ridden and stressed, he looked questioningly at her. “Do the FBI’s tactics involve murdering material witnesses to what should be considered a minor theft? I doubt it.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“They apparently don’t believe anything about the artifacts is minor. Even so, there must be someone else involved. The FBI released Josh and Larsen. You’re right, it doesn’t make sense that they’d want to kill them twenty-four hours later.”
“Damn it. What is the Eysen?” Gale demanded.
“I hope to begin to find out tomorrow. If we can stop running long enough and the sun can turn it on again.”
Thursday July 13th
In the morning, while Gale slept, Rip studied the casing and the amazing array of circles and lines. Every way he looked at it he saw patterns – random and sequenced – and knew it held a message, or maybe many. But it would take time to figure it out. “Protect the artifacts, figure out their age, discover the secrets they contain,” he thought to himself. “Then what? Is what the Eysen has to teach us something we’re ready for? I need time. Hopefully Asheville will give me time . . . and answers.”
Gale awoke and silently watched him trace the carvings with his fingers, eyes transfixed. The brilliant archaeologist-fugitive she’d tied her fate to seemed overwhelmed in that moment. Following him was likely to be the biggest mistake of her life. But, for the first time ever, she felt a purpose and a destiny at work.
After a quick breakfast at a nearby diner, Gale took a walk in a grove of trees beside the motel. She whispered an apology to Josh and asked him to help Sean. Rip had found a payphone in front of a nearby Laundromat and placed a collect call to Booker.
Booker, an only child, born to an African-American father and a Caucasian mother, had been devastated at age nine by the death of his father. The family lost its home in an affluent Philadelphia suburb, and for several years bounced around low-end rental units; until his mother passed her real estate exam. At ten, Booker began buying collectibles at garage sales and reselling them to antique shops, through classified ads, or to a growing list of clients. If he found a Tiffany lamp, he learned all there was to know about them – “knowledge is power,” his motto even then. He dropped out of school a couple of years later, saying he didn’t have time “for fill-in-the-blank busy-work and soda-pop history.” By thirteen, he was submitting materials to auction houses. He bought and sold almost anything, except drugs and guns. He told a friend once, “They may be profitable, but the downside is so steep, you can’t see up.”
Before turning eighteen, he had three full-time employees, paid under the table, of course, and an army of part-time workers. He got into art as the market was getting hot, and his cash piled up. Then he started buying real estate, using his mother as the exclusive broker. It wasn’t long before Booker’s companies filled an old ten-story downtown building. He played the stock options market, and by twenty-one was worth nineteen million officially, and twice that if the IRS wasn’t looking. The press loved him, and he was a folk hero in the African-American community.
It was then that he got serious about money and began buying and selling companies. He was tough, made millions – tens of millions – and the media turned on him as he closed factories and sliced up businesses. The deals kept getting bigger. At thirty-five, Forbes Magazine estimated his net worth at $2.8 billion and Booker was hated. Then the tech boom hit. He put his cash hoard into venture capital for dot-coms, made it out before the bubble burst, and by the time the second wave hit, he was sitting on more than $30 billion in assets. Many suspected his worth to be much higher. He retreated from public view, but his legend -like his power and wealth- continued to balloon. Although the public saw a ruthless tycoon, an air of mystery grew around him; there was another side to this complex individual. It was that man who had phoned the young archaeology student years earlier, it was that man Ripley Gaines knew.
Chapter 17
Booker made sure his line was scrambled; then paced to the window, his view of crashing waves. “Damn it, Rip, you’re lucky to be alive!”
“I know.”
“Do you? The Vatican got Josh Stadler and they mean the same fate for you.”
“The Vatican? How the hell did the Vatican get into this?” Rip knew Booker had legions of valuable contacts around the world, but this information was unfathomable.
“Dover’s got a direct line.”
“The Attorney General?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “How did this get so big? How do you already know so much?”
“Dover is tight with the Vatican, and obviously Rome wants to cover this up. I suspect that anyone who knows anything is in danger, especially if they saw the artifacts.”
“Booker, for all they know I just stole an ancient artifact from federal land.”
“They know it’s not an ordinary find. The Church has been on you since Cosega was published.”
“Yeah, kill me, but an innocent photographer?”
“Unfortunately, you’ve underestimated the importance people place on the acceptance of creationism.”
“Creationism is a fairy tale! Evolution overthrew it decades ago.”
“Not to the 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. Evolution just gave them something to fight against, but Darwin has too many holes to be a real threat. What you found might threaten the very foundations of the Church itself.”
“The Church will find a way to dispute it.”
“If you’d found a human skeleton that predates current thinking, that would be fairly easy to discredit. But you discovered intricate human carvings in eleven-million-year-old rock. Are the symbols a language?”
“I need time to study it.” Rip’s mind tried to process the information Booker had hit him with. “But it’s much more than just the carvings; there is meaning.”
“I assumed so, or the Vatican wouldn’t be on the warpath.”
“The Vatican,” Rip repeated. Old fears twisted inside him. “How do they know already?”
“They are connected to everything.”
“I know the Catholic Church has been the most influential force in the western world for more than a thousand years, and they’ve gotten very good at concealing their power during the last century, but to exercise control over the US Attorney General and to kill people to stop word getting out . . . ”
“You’ve spent your entire career looking for proof that humans predate creationism and evolution. The Church doesn’t like that.”
Rip looked around as a young couple exited the Laundromat, suddenly worried that anyone might be a Vatican agent. “How many will the Church kill to suppress this find? We are not living in the God damned Middle Ages!”
“The Vatican may be the most powerful institution on the planet. Why do you think the feds are co
ming on so strong? If you’d run off with an old Indian burial mask, the FBI would send one agent out of Oklahoma to work the case. If you have any doubt, just ask Josh Stadler.”
Rip recalled the secrets from his youth. Because of them, he’d always feared the Church would come for him. He considered telling Booker the whole story, but quickly pushed the thoughts back into the past. “Can you help us disappear?” He watched Gale walk toward him from the motel, her hair still wet from a shower.
“Of course,” Booker said. “I’ve got too much invested to let the Pope get you. Larsen called in already. One of my people is on the way to his house in Florida. We’ll keep him safe. Meantime, I’ll arrange a rental car for you and Kruse, one of my best guys, who’s close by. He’ll meet you.”
“Thanks, Booker. I’ll never know why you’ve done so much for me over the years, but I’m grateful,” Rip said. “I just need time to figure all this out.”
“Time’s a funny thing,” Booker said, before ending the call, “it might not be there when you need it.”
Booker held business interests all over the world. For years, he’d employed investigators to probe every aspect of a takeover target’s operations, including the lives of its officers. There were people on his staff whose only job was to get hired by a company he was interested in buying, or a competitor he wanted to destroy. He played hardball with organized crime, crossed every line in business, pushed, bribed and eluded federal agencies – his contacts were everywhere. Along the way, he recruited and trained a smart and loyal army of agents for his security force known as “AX.” No one knew what AX stood for, but they knew the meaning, its agents handled everything, from simple firings that turned ugly- to protecting executives in trouble spots. While the majority of AX agents worked in corporate espionage, some did more “controversial” work. One of Booker’s best AX agents was a man known simply as Kruse, based in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Kruse, a weapons expert, had worked for Booker for almost a decade; his title – “Director of Research for the Southeast region of Boardwalk, Inc.” – didn’t really match his duties. Boardwalk – a product development company ultimately owned by Booker – actually served as a corporate espionage network with offices throughout the world. Kruse, who had been on standby for the Gaines assignment, but was surprised when Booker told him that nothing was more important to the billionaire.
Chapter 18
The rental-car employee picked them up at the motel and after dropping the driver at his office, they stopped at an Asheville health food store. Gale picked up groceries, while Rip waited in the car out of sight.
About thirty miles outside of town, Rip slowed down on the narrow country road. There was hardly a visible entrance, simply an eight-foot break in a mature hedge. A long gravel drive, bordered on each side by sycamore trees, extended for half a mile. Long ago, the underbrush had encroached, leaving the trees to defend the lane. It ended at stone columns adorned with antique black iron gates; Rip used a key on the big rusty padlock. After a curve, Gale commented on a tiny stone building with an oxidized green copper roof; Rip told her it was the wellhouse. The view opened and the drive circled the front of a large two-story, well-maintained stone cottage. Ivy covered the north walls and manicured boxwood the periphery.
“It’s lovely, but are we safe here?” Gale asked.
“Other than my father, no one knows of my connection to it.”
“Then who takes care of it?”
“It belongs to a cousin. It used to be my uncle’s home. He had the best gardener for years. Even after he died and they closed up this place, old Topper couldn’t let it go. He’s maybe seventy-five now but I’ll bet he shows up here once a week or so to keep it up.” Rip smiled. “He’s like a grandfather to me.”
“Has it been in your family for generations?”
“No, my uncle bought it in the 80s and we spent summers here while I was growing up. My cousin and her husband live in London; he’s a journalist, with The Guardian.” They stopped in front of the small portico supported by four wood columns matching the shutters and door. No one knew where they were; it was peaceful and their first chance to breathe.
“Looks like a decent hideout.”
“Topper’s is the closest house, a mile through those trees.”
Gale looked toward the woods where he pointed and tried unsuccessfully to see Topper’s house.
“There’s a book in the library inside that has a lot of history of the place. Ancestors of the man who sold it to my uncle built it in the late 1790s, but originally there was a cabin here that predated the Revolutionary War,” Rip said, clearly proud of the historic home.
As they approached the house, on the edge of the woods behind a small iron fence, seven or eight antique gravestones stood like old storybooks concealing exciting tales. Rip looked over at them and thought of Josh, feeling responsible for his death and considering how well Gale seemed to be handling the loss of her friend. He walked toward the graves, absorbed in his own guilt. She followed.
She read the stones out loud; some dates were barely visible, the earliest, 1743-1774, belonged to Elizabeth, no last name; she found that odd. For an archaeologist, those years were almost yesterday but so much had changed in the 270-some-odd years since Elizabeth had been born. Instead, he considered the events prior to her life: the first permanent settlement of whites a few hundred miles northeast at Jamestown in 1607, and before that the continent belonged to the Native Americans. They roamed for thousands of years living in harmony with nature – an easier time, fewer people, a practically endless expanse of land and an abundance of game.
He thought of ancient ancestors walking across the Bering Strait, Africa’s early humans, Neanderthals, and all the space between the time when someone placed the Eysen inside the stone casings and then it became buried in the cliff. What civilization could have created such objects to last and light up after millions of years? The constant running left no time to explore the extraordinary artifact in his pack.
Gale circled a pair of graves, the dates 1863 and 1864. “Brothers?” she asked.
“Civil War took them. It wiped out an entire generation,” he said. “War, killing . . . all of human history is soaked in blood and violence, and for at least two thousands years religion has been at the heart of it all.” He shook his head and motioned to the house. “We need to look at the Eysen. There may not be much time.” As they headed toward the house, he thought about telling her of the Vatican connection; she deserved to know. Her life was in danger, too. Rip considered the fortitude Gale had already exhibited and wondered from where it had come. He would soon rely on her strength even more.
While waiting for Leary at the hospital, Nanski slipped a card-reader into his laptop. He’d found a memory card in a hidden pocket, under a false bottom in Josh Stadler’s camera case. Knowing Stadler’s history, Nanski assumed it had been used to get photos out of unfriendly countries. Even before he inserted the card, he knew the FBI didn’t have these. It was immediately clear that these were photos taken after the ones of the cliff and the casing. There were about a dozen shots of the casing, similar to the images he’d already seen. “What horror did all those carved circles promise?” Then he saw the Eysen.
“Phialam insignem lapidem ponetis,” he whispered to himself. “It’s an evil-looking black ball,” he thought with dread.
Next he saw the glowing lights from inside. “Dear God.” His eyes closed. “Malachy knew. Stone bowls bearing carvings. Two bowls together hold the secret that will end the Church.” It was the apocalyptic prophecy of the Ater Dies. “It is real and Gaines has found it.” What Gaines had dubbed the Eysen, the Church had for centuries secretly referred to as the “Ater Dies,” Latin for “Black Day.”
This was way beyond Pisano. Nanski kissed his Saint Christopher medal and dialed a phone number in the Vatican he’d been given years earlier, but had never used.
A cardinal answered in Italian, “It has come to this.”
Chapter 19
“We’ve got more than seventy federal agents and hundreds more state and local officers, and we’ve not found one solid trace of an egghead and a ditsy nature writer,” Barbeau yelled at Hall as they drove to the federal building in Erie. “We started with two good witnesses, now the photographer is dead and we’ve lost Larsen Fretwell!”
“I guess we should have held them.” Hall couldn’t help but second-guess Barbeau’s strategy.
“If we had kept them in custody, we wouldn’t know that Gaines is coming to Pennsylvania,” Barbeau blasted. Most of their resources were now concentrated in the northwestern portion of that state. A few other agents would be in Florida to pick up Larsen again if he tried to go home.
Hall’s ringing phone interrupted their frustrating conversation. It was a quick call. “Ian Sweedler is missing,” Hall reported.
“Sweedler? The lab rat?” Barbeau asked.
“Right. An associate of Gaines. Stadler took the casing to him for dating. His wife reported him missing a few hours ago.”
“Think he ran?”
“The local PD doesn’t think so, and neither does our agent down there.”
“Incredible!” Barbeau hit his hand with his fist. “We’re missing something, Hall. There’s something about this case that’s wrong. If we find that invisible element, we’ll find Gaines.”
Nanski and Leary chartered a flight out of Richmond to Erie, Pennsylvania. Leary, with bruises, two cracked ribs, and a broken nose, had been hoping to catch up to Larsen, but Pisano sent someone else to Florida to wait for him there. Their mission differed from the feds in one important way. Although both groups were trying to retrieve the artifacts, the feds planned to arrest all those involved, whereas the Church needed anyone who had seen the artifacts dead.