Secret of the Thorns: Political Thriller (Donavan Chronicles Book 1)

by Tom Haase

  “Then we have time. We must be present at ten to get the Holy Koran.”

  “Do you have weapons? Do you need anything?” the Imam queried.

  “It’s so difficult to travel by air with weapons these days. A good knife is all we will need. I want to finish this business in time to be on the afternoon flight,” Akram said.

  “You know I only saw a single sheet of text. I can’t be sure the whole Koran is present there,” Hashim inserted into the conversation.

  At ten minutes to ten, Hashim Mahdi escorted them to a position from which they viewed the museum employees’ entrance. Jibril dismissed Hashim, telling him to wait in the front of the museum to observe, and they would enter through the side door. Hashim set off. He assumed they’d enter with others of their nationality that worked in Poland as laborers. They’d simply walk in with one of the workers who would not even question them.

  “If we don’t find anybody meeting the curator’s description we’ll just go in at ten and find his office. Hashim said the curator may or may not be in on Saturday.” Jibril assumed not many administrative staff would be in this morning so they shouldn’t have to deal with secretaries in the curator’s office.

  “It’s almost ten. Some people have gone in that door but I still haven’t seen our man go in. All those workers look like Arabs or Turks. Let’s just mingle and enter with them,” Jibril said.

  “But we still must be careful and not raise any alarms,” Akram said. “If we can leave here undetected that would be the best solution.”

  “Inshallah,” Jibril said. “I’m tired of waiting. It’s ten. See that one entering the side door. He’s our ticket in. We go.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Office of Museum Curator - 9:50 a.m.

  Bridget followed Scott as he led the way to the curator’s office and pushed the door fully open. He let Bridget precede him. They had arrived ten minutes earlier in hopes that Mr. Wozniak might be in early in light of the discoveries. Bridget blocked his way when she stopped in the doorway. Scott put his hands on her shoulder and pushed her forward.

  “Stop it.” She turned her head back, and over her shoulder said, “There’s a body on the floor.” She hadn’t meant to shout it.

  Scott pulled himself up onto his tiptoes behind Bridget. He nudged her forward into the room and shut the door behind them.

  “It’s Wozniak, the curator.” He looked over Bridget’s shoulder at the prone body. Nausea swept over him. His hands started to shake and his right eye twitched.

  “Get a grip,” Bridget said as she grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “This is the real world. Now concentrate. You can do this. Let’s go see if he is alive.”

  “I feel like my stomach has an overload of beer.”

  Bridget sensed that Scott struggled to control his emotions but at the moment wasn’t having much success. She guessed he was attempting not to appear weak. She watched him for a few seconds as he finally regained control over his emotions.

  She went to the man, knelt down, and felt for a pulse on his neck. “He’s dead. And from the coldness of his skin, I’d say he’s been dead for some time.”

  “I can see blood on his head. Let’s call the police,” Scott said as he moved over to the body.

  “Hang on.” Bridget held up a hand. “Take a minute before we do anything. See that stack of books he slipped on?”

  Her archeological training skills kicked in when she walked to measure the distances between the man and the desk. She remembered once telling Scott of an event at a dig in northern Greece where the bones of one body couldn’t have fallen where they laid but someone placed them there to make the setting look right. She again paced the distances with her feet to double check her data.

  “It’s too far away from that desk, where he apparently hit his head. The curator had to be propelled toward it to hit it from where the books are. Anyone tripping here,” she pointed to where the books lay on the floor, “would certainly not go that far forward to hit his head. It’s over six feet.” She stepped it off to be sure.

  “I guess he may have been pushed, perhaps running for some unknown reason, but…you know it doesn’t make sense. He wouldn’t be running. He’s an old man. I don’t think, no, something is wrong here. I’m beginning to think someone killed him. I’m not a forensic scientist, but I am an archeologist and the scientific methods I use are just as rigorous as those the police employ.”

  “It’s not our concern. We need to call the police.” Scott’s voice cracked. “There’s blood, let them figure out how it happened.”

  “Listen,” Bridget said in a calming tone. “If he was killed it might be because of the manuscripts?” Her eyes widened in alarm “If he was murdered, whoever did it could be after you. Suppose they know…no, just a sec. Is there any way that anyone could find out that you have copies of the originals?”

  “Mr. Wozniak kept all the originals in that large safe next to the secretary’s desk. Its temperature and climate controlled to protect documents.” He turned toward the secretary’s desk.

  “Shit, look. It’s open.” Scott stared at the open safe for a few seconds before crossing the room to search inside. He glanced over his shoulder at Bridget and shook his head. “No documents.”

  She watched him as he searched the desk, the drawers, and underneath it. Nothing. He lifted the lid on the special high tech scanner used for ancient documents and said, “Look, the secretary must have left a page in here when she was scanning. The original isn’t here but this copy was left in the bin of the machine.” He picked it up and it was in Latin. He held it for her to see.

  “This is one of the two pages of the writings of Peter. I saw them both in the original,” Scott declared.

  “Do you think she has more of this on her computer?” She knew he was the geek type when it came to gadgets and computers.

  Scott sat down at the desk and powered up the secretary’s computer. Within a minute he found the file. “I’ve got it.”

  “Can you transfer it to a disc?” Bridget asked.

  “It’s over three and a half gigs. Looks like she had finished copying all the documents. But, I remember seeing blank DVD discs when I searched the desk.” Retrieving one, he started the transfer. “Come on, we really need to call the police, we’ve done enough damage here already.”

  “No, let’s copy this and leave. We’ll wipe our fingerprints first. Someone else will find the body and we won’t —”

  The door flew open and two men rushed in. One was brandishing a knife and shouting, “Where is the Holy Koran? We know you found it. Where is it?”

  Scott turned from the computer and the man thrust the knife toward him. Bridget reacted with lightning speed. Grabbing the man’s arm, she pulled him toward her using his forward motion to throw him off balance. He tried to twist his arm to slice at her, but she kicked him in the groin. His grip relaxed on the weapon. She grabbed the knife from his hand. She promptly spun around using a high kick position, missing his head with her foot but plunged the dagger into his neck as she rotated. After quickly regaining her balance, she savagely rotated the blade knowing that she had to kill this one if there was to any hope of neutralizing the other attacker.

  Scott grabbed a paperweight from the desktop and threw it at the stunned man who saw his partner stabbed in the neck. His target dodged the projectile. Swinging around, the attacker ran toward the door.

  “We’ll be back to kill you,” he shouted before moving into the doorway. “We have seen you. We know who you are and what you have. You will pay.” Then he ran.

  Scott went over to close the door, checking the hall to make sure he was gone. “What the hell?” Scott exclaimed as he reentered the room.

  “Those bastards were going to kill us to get the manuscripts. They’ll blame us. They knew about the Koran. How?” She clenched her fist, then ran her hand over her scalp and ruffed up her red hair.

  “From their accents I would guess they’re Iranian,” Scott mu
rmured with a tremble in his voice.

  “Scott, how did they find out about the manuscripts?” She crunched her eyes shut, then let out a gurgling moan.

  “How in the hell should I know? I didn’t tell anyone but you. No one, I swear. Now, we call the police.”

  “They’re threatening us with death. Us. Not the police. Us. They know who we are. He saw you working on the computer and he’ll figure out there may be . . . we’ve got to clear out of here. Is the disk finished?” Bridget asked.

  “Almost. I’m getting scared. No, I’m sacred shitless. They mean business, don’t they?”

  “No kidding.” Bridget started to wipe off all surfaces she remembered them touching. “Can you erase the hard drive on the computer?”

  “You realize that we’re getting in deeper and deeper. We’re breaking a lot of laws, even here in Poland.”

  “You’ve been in academia too long. The real world is different. They’ll try to eliminate us for the information we have and they’ll do it even if they get the hard drive on that computer. Don’t you get it?” She could see Scott trying to comprehend what she said. He checked the progress on the download and then swung back to face her.

  “Yes, they’ll certainly try to murder us.” Bridget continued, “And we’re not going to give them anything. Especially not what they’re looking for. Surely, they will want revenge for me killing this man.” She pointed at the body on the floor next to the curator’s corpse. Bridget took a few moments to collect her thoughts.

  “We might as well go after the original documents ourselves. We don’t even know if they are real, but if we obtain them, we can validate them. Right now our lives are in danger and we need to get out of here.” A plan leapt to the front of her brain as she annunciated it.

  “What are you suggesting?” Scott queried.

  “We need to find all of the originals, and expose them to the world along with whatever is on that list you have.”

  “You think that’ll save us?” Scott asked.

  “I don’t know but I do know that as soon as that thug is able to get some of his friends, they’ll be back to get that computer and us.”

  The Mac Pro computer signaled the end of the download with a chime.

  “I’ve finished the download. Instead of erasing the internal drive, which some expert might restore,” he opened the side of the computer by lifting the lever at the back and exposing the four hard drives and took out the first hard drive. The one he found the files on disappeared from the screen. He had the right one. “I can erase it for good. What you say makes sense if we’re going to do this.”

  She believed that he was coming round to her way of thinking.

  He used the retrieved metal paperweight from the floor and smashed the drive, making deep indents in both top and bottom. “No one can put that back together.”

  Bridget took the copied DVD and put it in a plastic protector and handed it to Scott. He put it in his pack. She surveyed the room to see if there were any remaining tasks. She used her handkerchief to wipe everything they had touched.

  “I’m sorry, sis. This is not what I thought academic research would be,” Scott mumbled in a low voice. “If we get the Koran they’re after and expose it, do you think that we’ll be safe?”

  “Probably not, but maybe, I think it’s worth trying and it may be our only salvation from these goons. Come on. Let’s get out of here. Better yet, we need to get out of Poland. If we go to the police, the assholes will know all about us from the info we’ll have to provide. We only have copies of two pages of the gospel, two of the Koran plus the DVD with all the photos of all the documents. We need to find all of whatever is on that list of yours and maybe we’ll be safe.”

  “Don’t we need time to solve the code? To figure out what the small piece of paper means? Why not hide here for a few days?”

  “You want to make it easy for them to find us in this city? No, sir. Do you finally get why we have to run?”

  “Y-e-s,” Scott said stretching his response out. He took in a deep breath, slowly letting it escape.

  “They really would find us here in Warsaw,” Bridget said as she led him out of the room. “Hell, they already have — once. We must get moving.”

  She pushed him toward the door. When they reached the front entrance she stopped, and said, “Besides, I may already have figured out the code.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Outside the National Museum - 10:09 a.m.

  Jonathan McGregor watched the entrance to the museum through the car windshield. He and the polish priest sat in silence as they waited. The city hadn’t come to life on this Saturday morning. By noon this broad tree lined street would probably be filled with pedestrian traffic, but fortunately right now it was minimal. If he rotated his head, Jonathan could see the employees’ entrance.

  Suddenly, one of the two men, who had entered a few minutes before, came running out the side door. That man jogged to where a younger, dark-skinned man stood in front of the museum. They spoke for just a few seconds before the older man walked away. The younger one moved from the front of the museum and crossed the street, approaching close to Jonathan’s position. The young man, wearing a light green jacket with a white collar, stopped in a position where he could survey both entrances.

  Jonathan decided to confront the young man. Just as he stepped out of the car, he caught sight of Bridget and a young man rushing out of the front of the museum. This must be her brother. Jonathan reached back into the car, took his Canon digital from his briefcase, and quickly snapped a few pictures as the pair moved toward the street. From the corner of his eye, Jonathan picked out the green jacket man going toward the pair. He tried to get the young observer’s picture but the man rounded the corner before Jonathan could catch a shot. This was getting stranger by the minute, he thought

  He returned to the car. Jumping inside, he yelled a command, “Follow those two. The red-headed woman and the young man.”

  “No problem,” the Polish priest replied.

  At the curb Bridget hailed a taxi. He motioned for the priest to pull over and he took more pictures of Bridget and her brother. Once she and her brother had gotten inside and the taxi drove away, Jablonski pulled his car in behind the taxi and followed at a safe distance.

  After a few minutes, the priest said, “It’s obvious to me that they’re going to the airport.”

  “We’ll follow to make sure that’s where they’re heading.”

  At the airport the pair jumped out of the taxi and disappeared into the terminal. Jonathan ordered Jablonski to follow the two inside.

  “Call my office,” Jonathan said, handing the polish priest his card. “Tell them to obtain information on all flights in Europe outgoing from this airport, including passenger lists.

  When the polish priest sputtered a protest, Jonathan reminded him of his oath. With that, the priest reluctantly got out of the car.

  “Where are you going?” Jablonski asked.

  “I’ll take the car and go back to the museum.”

  Once he’d reached his destination, Jonathan hurried to the museum’s side entrance and found the door slightly ajar. What luck he thought and went up to the second floor where he found the curator’s office. He opened the door.

  “Oh my God!” escaped Jonathan’s mouth. He went over and examined each body. What had happened here? He had seen the two Middle Eastern men enter the museum and here lay one of them. He looked around, took in the details of the office, and surmised that the brother and sister team must have killed the man he saw enter a few minutes ago.

  The other corpse must be the curator. He touched the neck. Cold. This one had been dead some time. Father Joblonski’s story accounted for the curator, but why the other man? He could have attacked one or both of the Americans. The pair possesses more skill than he had given them credit. The woman’s army training as a ranger could account for what he observed. The brother was not a muscular man, so one or both must be martial arts train
ed in addition to military service. He surmised this was possible from the position of the wound inflicted on the dead man’s neck. The stabbed corpse, based on his size and physical condition, should have been able to handle either or both Donavans with ease. However, the Donavans had obviously prevailed.

  Then he noted the crushed hard computer part. There was only reason he could imagine for destroying it. The drive from the computer must have connected to the scanner, and to destroy it would eliminate any trace of the copied files. Jonathan collated the facts in front of him and concluded the curator had indeed lied to the Polish priest. A copy of the documents the priest had sent to Rome must still exist. The girl and her brother had found the files on the computer. Then they destroyed the entire drive so no one could ever put it back together. Right, but they were not stupid. No, they must have copied the files. They had to have taken the copy with them. Jonathan realized that a distinct possibility existed that a copy of the documents survived and it was not under his control. The Cardinal would not be pleased.

  What are they after? The writings of St. Peter, even if verified as authentic, couldn’t cause the combined death of the curator, the slaying of the Middle Eastern man and the headlong flight of the brother and sister. No, there had to be something else. Perhaps something that might endanger his church. Some writing that potentially might bring discredit to part or all the Church’s teaching. The Cardinal had ordered him to get all evidence of the documents and to ensure no trail led to Rome. He had to go after them. Their flight meant more than just having the sacred writings. But why did they flee? Why not go to the police? That had to be discovered. He had to find out for sure, but he already knew. They stole the hard drive with copies of all the documents.

  Jonathan moved over to the body of what he took to be a Middle Eastern looking man. Looking down at the corpse, he began by assuming the man had to have known about the scriptures. The fight in this office, the call to the Cardinal, the curator’s death, this one’s killing, all added up in his mind to someone else knowing about the manuscripts. Whoever he was, the dead man probably sought the Arabic documents.