She rubbed her fingers and could not stop remembering the feeling she had when she touched the contents of the artifact. Thompson said it had been tested and found free of anthrax, but somehow she had already known that—known that the box and its contents were not dangerous to her. Why had her father buried it? How had he gotten it?
Amarintha lay in bed and allowed images to come into her head, images she’d been thrusting away as impossible. She, living in the new house on Church Street. A man, faceless in earlier musings, but now clearly Thompson, working beside her in a garden, planting ferns. Ava visiting often, eventually with grandchildren. Could all this now be possible?
Who could tell her more about the reliquary? The only person who had any knowledge of its history was Monsignor Ogier. Would he speak to her? Just before she drifted back to sleep, she decided to call him when Richard took them back to Charleston.
Chapter 78
“It’s ok, honey,” Kate said to Sara. “I need to do this.”
Sara let go of Kate’s hand. “Ok, Mom. Dad and I will be right outside.” The two of them left the hospital room.
Kate was sitting in her hospital bed, still attached to an IV line. She felt jittery and lethargic at the same time, and willed her thoughts to focus. The monitor beeped her heart rate and occasionally the blood pressure cuff on her arm inflated and deflated with a low whine. She watched two women arrange some recording equipment, including a video camera.
Jack had initially responded to her insistence that he call the police by asking her to take a sedative and sleep. She had refused, telling him that she was afraid that if she waited any longer to tell what she knew, she would forget what had happened over the last four weeks. He had finally called a Detective Edson from Charleston Police. That man, along with a man introduced to Kate as Thompson Denton from Interpol now sat in chairs at the foot of her bed. As soon as the detective arrived, she had started talking, but he had asked her to stop, telling her that they needed to wait for the FBI. It had taken over an hour for these four to assemble here, and she felt words piling up inside her mouth, like horses at the starting gate.
One of the women spoke, “Dr. Strong, I’m Brook Reynolds, the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge for South Carolina. Are you ready to begin?”
“I am. These people are trying to find germs to plant in the Middle East. You’ve got to stop them.” The monitor beeped louder, and Kate fell back. “I’m just so upset. You have to do something.”
Agent Reynolds said, “Tell us what happened, beginning with the day you disappeared.”
Kate looked at her hands lying on the sheet. “Jack and I had a fight the night before, so when Dr. Atay told me about the new underground city, and how he needed someone to look at the parchments, I just, I just went.” It sounded unbelievable to her now that she had gone to work one morning, prepared for a normal day, and had ended up in Istanbul that same night.
“Slow down a bit. Tell me the name of the person you and your boss met with that morning.”
Kate told them how the meeting had begun, that there seemed to be urgency to the situation, and that the man from Istanbul had promised her she would be back before spring break. “I didn’t think it through. Atay gave me a temporary cell phone. I went home and packed, and then met him and the pilot at the airport.” The heart monitor registered an
increase in her heart rate and she blurted, “Is it true? Is Adam dead?”
“Yes. We believe that a man named Imran Sadat killed him,” said Detective Edson.
“Imran Sadat?” Kate cried. “He and his brother gave me a ride to the College that morning when my bike broke. He murdered Adam? Why?” Kate began to wail, and Jack rushed into the room.
“Can we stop this?” asked her husband.
“I’m all right,” said Kate, blowing her nose. “I need to tell them everything.”
Jack looked at Kate, nodded, and then left the room, closing the door very softly.
Reynolds prompted her, “Dr. Strong, right now we need to know what you were asked to do once you got to Istanbul.”
Kate looked at the woman, who smiled in encouragement. She took a deep breath. “I was asked to look at photographs of parchment pages from a codex hundreds of years old. A codex is a collection of parchment bound like a book. Three of them were found in an underground city in eastern Turkey, in the desert. Everything in this city, not just the parchments, was in tunnels many feet underground, so they were preserved.”
The Interpol agent asked, “Did you see the original documents?”
Thompson Denton was his name, she thought, and Jack had told her to trust him.
“No,” said Kate. “Just photographs, but I’m certain they were authentic. The lab had everything you need to study photographs. I was expecting to be flown back to Charleston on the third day, and made a preliminary report to Dr. Kemal Atay of my findings that morning.”
“Do you have any pictures, any notes from your work?” said the agent.
“No, I don’t.” She paused, and turned to Agent Reynolds. “Did anyone find Dr. Atay? His family was in danger, too.”
“Dr. Atay went to Interpol. The local authorities have him and his family under protection,” said the FBI woman. “Please tell us what you found in the documents.”
Kate took a deep breath. “After the sack of Constantinople by Europeans in 1204, a Byzantine priest seeded twelve reliquaries with material from bodies. Blood, animal skins, that sort of thing. He sent them to France. Notes on these twelve were marked with the Greek name for false—pseudos—in the parchments. The story was in the palimpsest.”
“Would you describe what that is, please.”
“It’s writing that was done on the parchment originally. A later scribe scraped the parchment, but with special equipment, you can read the original writing. That’s what I did.”
“You can do that from photographs?”
Kate squirmed. “Well, someone had found the original writing, but it was in code. I deciphered the code.”
The Interpol agent murmured, “Incredible.”
“And why were you asked to do the translations?” asked Brook Reynolds.
Kate sat up straighter. “This is my expertise, religious artifacts. I also am proficient in the Greek that the Byzantines used in the parchments.” Kate unconsciously touched her forearms. “I found out later that Anton Bunin wanted someone who could disappear for a while, someone he could manipulate. He drugged me through the vents with something while I was there, to get me to work day and night.” She looked up, a bleak look in her eyes. “And I did.”
“The doctors here say you had amphetamines in your system and faint traces of a derivative of LSD,” said the detective.
Kate wiped her eyes. “Zora Vulkov kept me from getting the full dose. She told me not to swallow the tea. I suppose that was right before they took me to the embassy. Has anyone found her? She helped me.”
The FBI agent said, “The Istanbul authorities say that a plane registered to the New Institute that Anton Bunin runs left for Russia an hour after you were found. We presume that Dr. Vulkov was on board.” Agent Reynolds waited and then said, “Let’s get back to your findings. What happened at the end of the two days, when you expected to be returned to Charleston?”
“That’s when I met Bunin. He told me that I was going to be kept in Istanbul until I identified the exact locations of the reliquaries that were seeded with these disease agents. Atay’s people had done some work, but Bunin needed someone with my background to finish it. He chloroformed me then locked me in the castle’s basement rooms. I refused to work, but then Atay showed me pictures of Jack and Sara. Atay said Bunin would hurt them if I didn’t cooperate.”
Kate put her hands over her face, remembering the desolation of her daughter’s face in the photographs. “I did the work; I can’t really tell you how. Honestly, I don’t remember doi
ng all of what I did, but I do know that I identified twelve reliquaries that had been contaminated. Zora Vulkov passed notes to me in lipstick tubes. She explained why Bunin wanted the reliquaries identified.”
Kate looked at the FBI agent. “He is trying to create some kind of epidemic in the Middle East. Zora told me that the Russian government was paying Bunin to do this. Is that even possible?”
She saw the four people in her hospital room look at each other. Finally, the detective said, “The Middle East. Are you certain that Bunin wanted to target the Middle East and not somewhere in the United States?”
“That’s what Zora told me.”
The FBI lady said, “We need to take a break. Please stop the recording.” Brook Reynolds motioned to the woman running the equipment to stay in the room, and walked out. The Charleston detective and the Interpol agent followed her.
Kate stared out the window of her hospital room, not certain she had done all she could to stop Anton Bunin.
Chapter 79
Monsignor Ogier rose from his knees. He sat on his hotel bed and lifted the reliquary from its worn leather bag. An impeccably suited FBI agent had brought it to him an hour before, the young man asking for identification, and then handing him a form to sign. The exchange felt like picking up a prescription, and the monsignor had wanted to laugh at the agent and tell him the leather bag held the most wondrous prescription man had ever known.
It wasn’t the most imposing artifact he had ever seen, a rather simple wooden box with a cloisonné figure of a man with long hair. The man had his arms out, hands outstretched. In one hand was an infant, in the other a red flower. If authentic, the red diamond in the middle of the flower was valued at ten million dollars, or so the bankers at the Vatican had told him. He was certain the conservators in Rome would discover that the stone was glass, the diamond long gone, broken apart so that the Huguenot thief could survive. Who could blame her? Marin Postel had been a young woman, what the world called now a teenager, forced to flee her country, everyone she loved dead or gone, her only option to come to Charles Towne.
He brought the reliquary to the small hotel room desk and reached into his briefcase for a leather binder with a lock on its front. Turning the pages, he came to a copy of a document written in 1690. The original was in the Vatican archives, but even in the copy, he could see remnants of the folds, tears, and ink marks that marked the old parchment. The document was a certification of a miracle that had happened at the Convent of Corbie in France in 1685. He had given the FBI a version of this original report—a document created in 1890.
The document answered the question the Interpol agent had asked him—did the Vatican believe the children had been cured? The monsignor had been careful not to lie to the man; in fact, he deeply desired to make the story of the reliquary public, if only to validate the life decisions he had made.
Monsignor Giuseppe Ogier had begun life as Joe, a black bastard brought up by his resentful maternal uncle. Joe’s mother had gotten pregnant by a white boy, and the uncle had reluctantly taken the infant when the sister died—the placenta, Joe, and most of her blood blowing out of her like a rocket onto Huger Street. The uncle had hired a wet nurse, named the baby Joe, just Joe, not Joseph, no middle name either, and then thrust the kid onto the nuns at the Catholic school as soon as possible. The nuns nurtured his artistic talents—talents mocked by his uncle, his cousins, his neighbors, and in particular, mocked by the other black boys who regularly pummeled Joe
not only for being a bastard, but also for carrying a painter’s box.
Sister Jericho, a black teacher from Barbados, had shoved Joe through junior high and high school, and through some machinations that the monsignor knew now had to have been considerable, if not miraculous, Joe received a scholarship to study at the London School of Art. While there, a priest, a visiting curator for the Vatican Museum, had given a lecture on the art of reliquaries and Joe had become obsessed with relics, finally realizing that to study them up close, he would have to become a priest.
So, he did. In later years, when telling the story to his peers, they marveled at the determination and motivation of a young mixed race student to join holy orders. None of them would ever understand. Not one had experienced regular beatings by boys who saw no future for themselves, and who had bombarded their unvoiced despair onto a skinny kid who did not share their bleak outlook. One of those boys, a budding psychopath, had chopped off two fingers from young Joe’s left hand with a switchblade, an incident that had shocked
the miscreant more than Joe, and thereafter Joe had been left alone.
It helped that Joe had never had any desire for women or men, and the thought of children as sex objects had never occurred to him. When the scandals connected to pedophilic priests erupted, he was so horrified he had almost left the church.
Once these same peers realized that Joe, now Giuseppe, had no political ambition, they had helped him achieve his goal: becoming a curator at the Vatican Museum. There he had been for thirty years, studying relics and the reliquaries that held them. His life was replete with devotion, art, and debates on how best to repair gold that was a millennium old.
Then, while examining an old document from the early 1600s, he saw a drawing of a small reliquary, and recognized it as the object an army captain had tried to sell to him in 1969. The Vatican’s inventory showed the object still resident at the Convent of Corbie’s church.
“The reliquary isn’t in the church,” he told the head curator. “I saw it in 1969.”
It had taken two years to persuade the bureaucracy that controlled such things to bring the altar to Rome.
He had not been there when the altar was opened and the formal inventory was taken, and once he received word that “Giuseppe’s reliquary,” as the other curators called it, wasn’t in the altar, his story from 1969 was fully believed. He was given open access to the archives to research what had happened to this seemingly insignificant object. Perhaps it would be found, perhaps not, but anytime the Vatican thought one of their irreplaceable artworks had been stolen, Interpol was called. The last location of the reliquary was shared, and Monsignor Ogier began his research.
For ten days, the monsignor scoured the archives to find references to the reliquary, focusing on the most obscure and ancient documents. Just as he had begun to comprehend the story of the small wooden box, the researchers working on the altar became ill, and all of his access to the archives was closed down.
It didn’t matter though. He had found what little was there.
The monsignor read the certification again, noting the testimony of a Sister Anne from the Convent of Corbie and of two Huguenot women imprisoned there, who later returned to the Catholic faith. The conclusion of the local bishop was that a miracle had occurred, and that the Holy Spirit moved the Huguenot women to recant their faith and become Catholics. No mention was made of Marin Postel, who certainly had not recanted, and who had been the catalyst for the miracle.
He stood up and went to the desk by the window where the transcript of the interview with Kate Strong lay. He had not been shocked at Anton Bunin’s goal. Let him try to spread some ancient disease through the Middle East. Monsignor Ogier had the cure.
He had already taken steps to obtain the original parchments found in the underground city in Cappadocia, as well as the results of Kate Strong’s research. The government of Turkey privately supported the Vatican taking possession of the parchments. Dr. Strong’s research, incredible though it might be, would go no further, and Turkey would not need to explain to the world how the Byzantines had attempted to sow diseases in France.
The Turks’ desire to protect an eight-hundred-year-old secret would seem comical to the Americans, whose collective memory rarely survived a single generation. However, Monsignor Ogier knew that if the research were made public, the Islamic hardliners would use it to argue that all traces of the pre-Islamic Byzantine
Empire should be destroyed. Icons, portraits, churches, the Theodosian walls, everything connected with the millennium long empire would be destroyed if groups like ISIS had their way.
A rap at his door startled the monsignor. He called out, “One moment, please.” He returned the binder to his briefcase and put it and the reliquary in the closet’s safe. He straightened his robe and opened the door. A woman stood there, dressed in jeans and loose shirt.
“I hope I am not interrupting you. I’m Amarintha Sims. May I come in?”
He stood still, not believing she was here. He had received a call from this woman the day before asking if he would see her. For some reason, he had not believed she would actually show up. He had been foolish to request that the FBI quarantine the woman, and he felt his face burn as he thought about how ridiculous his request must have sounded.
The monsignor waved his hand to a small table near the desk. Amarintha went to the small table by the window and sat down. “What may I do for you?” he asked. The woman had a radiant glow about her, and she was smiling. She was very thin but did not seem frail.
“I know that the FBI told you that I touched what was inside the reliquary. I want to talk to you about it,” she said.
Her directness surprised him. He had been expecting—what had he been expecting? A simpering caricature of a Southern woman? If what he had been told was accurate, this woman no longer had cancer. Was she another miracle that could be attributed to the treasure now in his closet?
“Please sit down.” The monsignor motioned to the desk and they both sat in the uncomfortable small chairs that fronted an equally small table.
“What exactly is supposed to be in it? I suppose you know that one of my ancestors stole the reliquary from the convent in 1685. On her behalf, I ask for the Catholic Church’s forgiveness.” Amarintha was smiling at him broadly now, and he smiled back at her.
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