by Tom Wilde
I heard her cautious “Hello?” from the phone. “Abby,” I replied with forced cheerfulness. “It’s Blake.”
“Blake? Blake? Blake the seducer of innocent young maidens?”
“Couldn’t be, I’ve never met any of the above. Listen, I need your help.”
“Oh, he does, does he,” she said with sly vexation oozing in her voice. “Well, now, just what is it you need, and how much are you willing to pay for it, is the question.”
“I need to know all the connections among Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and Lord Byron.”
“Epilepsy,” she responded quickly. “They all had it. Are we done now? Good-bye.”
“Epilepsy? No, wait! Abby, damn it, I need you.”
“Oh, sure, now he says such pretty things.” She gave a theatrical sigh that could have blown air through the wires across the Atlantic. “I suppose it’s all life and death, is it?”
“Yes.”
“All right. But you have to tell me exactly what you’re looking for. Right now, the only real connection I see is the one between you and Byron.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re both ‘Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know.’”
“Thanks. I think. Look, what I’ve got right now is a letter addressed to Percy Shelley, but the person who wrote it just signed his name as ‘N. B.’”
“Noel Byron,” Abby explained, then she laughed, never a pretty sound at its best. “His lordship used to say that his initials could have also stood for Napoleon Bonaparte. It was one of Byron’s jokes.”
“So there is a connection between Byron and Bonaparte?”
“It was more of a love-hate thing with Byron. Of course, the only person Byron really loved was Byron, but he was once a big fan of Napoleon’s, and dedicated some poems to him. Then old Bony up and abdicated, and Byron turned on him like a spurned lover.”
I looked at the letter again, noting the traces of brownish ink under the six crucial words. “Is there any evidence that Byron could have been some kind of spy or something?”
“A spy? More like a revolutionary without a portfolio. His lordship was always getting himself mixed up with conspiracies and such.”
“What about around 1822 or so? And is there any connection to Corsica?”
“Corsica? Hmm. Well, I know when Byron was in Italy he was involved with one group … what were they called? The Calamari?”
“Calamari? That’s a fancy word for squid.”
“No, wait. Carbonari! That’s it! The Carbonari were a group that were all about meeting in secret and overthrowing something or other. Byron was thick as thieves with them. Of course, a lot of his lordship’s history has been covered up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, turns out Byron sent his journals and such to his friend Thomas Moore. Only Moore burned all Byron’s memoirs later. Then there was Dr. Polidori, Byron’s personal physician. After he passed on, Polidori’s sister got all his written recollections about Byron. And what does she do with them? She burns them too, that’s what. Curiouser and curiouser, eh? Makes one wonder what was being covered up.”
“Yeah.” My mind flew back to Madam Ombra’s words: “Byron knew. And Shelley. That’s why he had to die.” “Abby, was there anything unusual in Percy Shelley’s death?”
That caused her to snort. “Unusual? That bugger Percy’s death was unusual before, during, and after the event.”
“Like how?”
“Well, it’s been said that Percy Shelley presaged his own death, but the boy was also prone to hallucinations. But in truth he survived actual attempts to assassinate him.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. While he was in Italy, he was almost shot on two separate occasions.”
“Shot? Who the hell would want to kill a poet?”
“Some say the British government. They weren’t happy about his being a rabble-rouser and all. But the day he actually died, he was on his way back to his villa in his private yacht. A storm brewed up, the boat went down, and Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy.”
“Sounds accidental.”
“Except that when the boat was found, the side of it had been staved in. One theory is that Shelley’s ship came under attack from local pirates who rammed his boat to board it, but it sank too fast.”
“Wait. Shelley’s boat was rammed during a storm? That doesn’t sound likely.”
“And yet, it was found staved in. Poor Shelley washed ashore a few days later. Byron and a few cronies later cremated Shelley’s body on the beach in some kind of pagan ritual nonsense. As the legend goes, Shelley’s heart was the only thing not consumed in the fire. Later, his heart was given to his wife, Mary Shelley; you know, the author of Frankenstein?”
“Yeah,” I responded dryly. “I think I heard that once.”
“Sorry, dear boy,” Abby said mock-contritely. “Just being thorough. Anyway, sometime after Shelley washed up on the beach, they named the area where he drowned the Golfo dei Poeti in his posthumous honor. Is any of this helping?”
I was piling up more questions than answers. “So you’re saying Percy Shelley could have been murdered?”
“Some people wouldn’t have minded his shuffling off the mortal coil, and that’s a fact.”
I turned the aged letter over. “So how would something like this figure in,” I asked, and then I read the poem out loud.
When I finished, I heard Abby faintly on the other end saying, “Wait … wait…” I had seen her do this trick before when she was searching her memory, her head back and her eyes staring up, darting from side to side as if reading something only she could see. Finally I heard her say, “‘Endymion’!”
“What?”
“‘Endymion.’ It’s a poem by Keats.”
“Keats?”
“Yes. Shelley and Keats were good friends, but Byron didn’t care for him at all.” Abby’s voice trailed off as she added, “Now, that’s funny.”
“What is?”
“When Percy Shelley’s body washed up on the beach, they found him with a book of Keats’s poetry in his pocket.”
A cold shock ran through me, and I knew now and for a certainty that the letter I’d rescued from the Castle Joux was a vital key. A message in secret from Byron to Shelley; a letter that Shelley kept with him inside a book of Keats’s poetry that he took with him down to a watery grave. A letter that was his own death warrant.
I was brought back to the here and now by Abby’s voice. “You know, Blake, it’s actually kind of nice to talk to you again,” she said warmly. “I hate to admit it, but I’ve missed you. So how’s the world been treating you lately?”
“Me? Uh, fine. Oh, I’m married now.”
Abby’s voice went flat. “Married? You?”
“Yeah. Look, I’ve got to go.”
“Oh, you do that. You go. You go straight to—”
I hung the phone up on the wall, sorry I didn’t part with Abby on better terms. But I still needed more information. I had enough history; what I wanted now was geography. I also needed to make certain no one else was going to see the Byron letter. I pulled myself off the bed, gritting my teeth against a groan as I forced my bruised body to my will. I picked up my letter, folded it carefully, and placed it in my shirt pocket over my heart, then went downstairs to the lobby. My friend the concierge was still on duty, and his long, droopy face lifted somewhat into the semblance of a smile. “Ah, monsieur. I was about to call your room. There are some difficulties with your carte bancaire.”
I should have known Nick Riley would waste no time cutting me off from every aspect of the Argo Foundation. The foundation kept emergency accounts in banks in Switzerland, Singapore, and the Cayman Islands, so money was never a problem before. But now my fancy company credit card had been demoted to just another improvised weapon and burglary tool. I put a bewildered smile on my face and produced cash, and in turn the concierge produced a real smile.
“Merci, monsieur, is
there any other service required?” I requested a mailing envelope and addressed a letter to the Argo Foundation’s New York address. I slipped the Byron letter inside and handed the concierge enough money to ship a bowling ball across the world in exchange for his promise to mail my letter at the first opportunity in the morning. I also purchased a pair of maps, one of France and the other of the European Union. We concluded our business and I was wished bonsoir.
I returned to my room and angled the table lampshade. I spread my map of France out on the table, then laid out my map of Europe. Squinting at the cartography, I wished I hadn’t lost my pocket monocular/magnifier. I found the Golfo dei Poeti, on the western side of Italy, across from the island of Corsica. I turned to the map of France, folding it down until I was looking at only Corsica. The main island itself was bordered by smaller islands. I started at the eastern side, closest to Italy, and worked around clockwise. I was all the way on the western side of the island when I spotted them—the Iles Sanguinaires, the Islands of Blood. Right off the coast of Ajaccio, the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Thoughts collided in my head, and my mind felt electrified as the connections hooked up: Napoleon’s first stop upon returning from Egypt was home to Corsica.
I folded the maps up and stuffed them in my jacket’s inner pocket. There was nothing more I could do at the moment, and I was completely exhausted. I decided to get what sleep I could. Wheels were already set in motion, and if I was right, I was destined for a rude awakening.
And I desperately wanted to stop thinking of what Caitlin could be going through right now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Rise and shine, Blake.”
Being awakened by an angry man holding a gun is not a novel experience for me. Still, it’s an event one never really gets used to. I opened my eyes, squinting against a glow of early morning sunlight bleeding in between the cracks of the curtains, to see Sam Smith standing near the foot of my bed. He was dressed all in black, and his dark features blended with the shadows in the room, leaving his eyes as hard, glittering points of light that reflected the glint from the small stainless steel pistol he held rock steady in his hand.
“You told me back in Paris you didn’t have a gun,” I said.
“I lied.”
“Now I know you’re with the government. You planning to shoot me?”
“What I should do is knock you upside your head and leave you tied up. And I may get around to doing just that. But first, we have to have a little talk.”
“May I get up?”
“Sure. Just do it real slow.”
That last order was easy to comply with. My body felt as stiff as if it had been left to harden in concrete overnight. I wasn’t planning to show any weakness in front of Smith, but I failed in my effort as sharp-edged jolts of pain shot through my chest when I pulled myself into a sitting position on the side of the bed. I had been expecting company ever since Mr. Singh warned me that our phone call was being monitored, and I’d elected to sleep in my clothes.
“What the hell happened to you?” Smith asked.
“People keep shooting me.”
“That I can believe.”
“What time is it?”
“After six. Why? You think you’re going somewhere?”
I did, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. The five hours’ sleep I got should have done me some good, but at the moment I felt like I’d overslept a century or two and was feeling my age. I watched as Smith placed a small metal briefcase on the table with his left hand, all the while never taking his eyes or gun off me. He opened the case and I could make out the form of a laptop computer inside, just like the one Mr. Jonas used in New York during our meeting at the Metropolitan. Smith aimed the monitor toward me, tapped a button, and the device sprang to life. From the machine on the desk I heard the voice-from-the-grave sound of Mr. Jonas. “Good morning, Mr. Blake. You have a lot of explaining to do.”
I stared at the square, Cyclopean eye of the laptop, knowing that everything I said was going to be recorded. And every utterance I made was going to be a step on a high wire with no safety net.
Sam Smith said, “Let me get the ball rolling. Where’s Caitlin? Last you told me, you were going to go find her.”
“I did. Only now she’s on Vanya’s private Greek island. At least she was when I saw her yesterday morning.”
Jonas voice from the machine said, “Start the story from Paris. Do not leave anything out.”
The light in the room was starting to brighten as I recited the events that had brought me here, from the discovery of the map in the gilded eagle to the catacombs beneath the church of Val de Grâce, to the abduction to Vanya’s island and his plan to recover the body of Alexander the Great, and Rhea’s revelation of Vanya’s plan for global genetic genocide, and up to the murderous events at the Château de Joux. I told the whole ugly truth. I just kept one tiny fact to myself.
When I finished, the room was silent for a moment, quiet enough to hear the sounds of a door down the hall opening and closing, and footsteps walking away. Ordinary sounds that belonged to an ordinary world, a world that was light-years from here.
The man on the other end of the machine finally asked, “Mr. Blake, have you heard any mention of Trieste, Italy, during this time?”
“Trieste? Wait; yes. It’s where Joseph Fouché died.”
Smith said, “Fouché? You mentioned him back in Paris. He was Napoleon’s spymaster, right?”
“Right. Is that what you mean?”
“No,” came the cold voice from the computer. “Trieste is the location of the International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. Did Vanya or the Rhea woman ever mention that?”
“No. Why?”
“Because we have information that Vanya has been a sponsor for the institute. More to the point, almost a year ago several scientists from the institute supposedly died in a boating accident. Only no bodies were ever recovered. At the time of the event, Vanya’s yacht was in the vicinity, and it promptly sailed back to his island after the scientists went missing. Have you seen any sign of these people?”
The laptop’s screen lit up and displayed color photographs of three men and a woman in succession. After I saw the slideshow, I said, “I think I’ve seen the Asian woman and one of the men on the island, but I’m not certain.”
The voice of Mr. Jonas said, “You said Rhea told you that Vanya has scientists who are, as she put it, prisoners on his island?”
“That’s what she said. Only I can’t say how reliable her information is. She did try to kill me, you know.”
Sam Smith just shrugged at that thought as I continued, “I did see medical facilities down underground on the island, but I wasn’t given a full tour.” I felt a lump of ice coalesce in the pit of my stomach. “Are you saying that Rhea was telling me the truth about Vanya’s biological terror plot?”
Jonas’s voice from the laptop’s speaker came into the room like a frozen wind. “Yes. And though I have serious doubts in regard to Vanya’s scheme to successfully resurrect Alexander’s genetic material, much less produce a viable living being, I have no such doubts about his capability to create a lethal genetically engineered virus. Our own Department of Defense has produced a report called the Pathogen Genome Project. In short, modern science gives us the ability to genetically manufacture specifically designed plagues on demand. We know Vanya has the resources and a fanatical following all around the world, and if he has indeed recruited people with the scientific knowledge, he could have everything he needs to start a twenty-first-century version of the Black Death. Only far, far worse.”
“But Rhea, or Suzume Saito, or whatever her name is, also said she was a Japanese government agent. Was she telling me the truth about that?” I asked.
Mr. Jonas said, “I’ve just run her name through our database. Is this the woman?”
The computer screen changed again, and this time it showed a color photo of Rhea. In the picture she w
as younger and her hair was straight, with bangs, but there was no mistaking her beautiful features. “That’s her,” I said with certainty.
“Interesting,” Jonas’s voice mused from the machine. “Suzume Saito, according to our liaisons with the Japanese government, is listed as a former operative of their Public Security Investigation Agency, and that agency includes their foreign counterintelligence operations. They’ve issued a notice to the allied intelligence services stating that they wish to be advised of any sightings of her. But at the same time the Japanese have made it quite clear that they wouldn’t complain if any other government happened to liquidate her. Ah.”
Smith and I waited for Mr. Jonas to continue, and he resumed by saying, “Now this is most interesting. It says here that Agent Saito’s last assignment was in connection with the investigation into the Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway. Therefore, I believe the fact of the matter is that the woman has defected and willingly joined Vanya’s cause. As for you, Mr. Blake, just how long did you think you could deceive us?”
I put on my best poker face, the one I use on Nick Riley when I’m holding a busted flush. “What are you implying, Mr. Jonas?”
Smith coughed a rude noise. “Oh, please; you’ve got way too many twisted moves to be a mild-mannered antiques geek. And you sure as hell ain’t one of us. So just where did you learn all your voodoo jujitsu anyway?”