The Library of the Kings: A Tom Wagner Adventure

by Roberts, M. C.

  Tom saw Ossana coming from quite a distance. Six feet tall and drop-dead gorgeous, she was hard to miss. She wore a long gown and a magnificent headscarf and strolled easily toward their meeting place beneath the elaborate arched entrance to the souk.

  “Where’s Noah?” Tom growled at her through gritted teeth.

  “Easy, Mr. Wagner. One step at a time. Do you have what I want?” she asked, eyeing Tom warily.

  “That’s not how my name is pronounced, but whatever. The amphoras were too clunky. These were inside.” He popped the cap off the cardboard tube and showed her the scrolls.

  “Mr. Wagner, are you telling me you destroyed 2000-year-old amphorae just so you wouldn’t have as much to carry?” She shook her head, a malicious smile playing on her lips.

  “Where’s Noah?” Tom repeated, growing angrier.

  Ossana produced a cell phone from beneath her gown and held it out to Tom. On the display he saw a live video feed that showed Noah inside a van. “Give me the documents and my men will let him go.”

  “Where? Where will they release him?”

  “Oh, we do home delivery,” Ossana said. “We’ve had our eyes on you and your friends since you left the museum. Give me the tube, and my men will hand Noah over to your friends.”

  Tom hesitated a moment longer, but finally handed the scrolls to Ossana. She murmured a command in Afrikaans into her phone and cut the connection.

  Then she leaned forward and whispered into the ear where Tom wore his earpiece: “I would just like to say hello to my ex-darling François. I will never forget those wonderful months we had together. Such a pity our little idyll back then was so rudely interrupted.” She smiled at Tom, then gave him a peck on the cheek, turned away and was quickly swallowed up in the crowd.

  “Pute stupide,” Cloutard muttered when he heard Ossana’s message on the radio. He had parked the Lancer beneath trees on Hasan El-Adawy, opposite the entrance to the bazaar. A van suddenly appeared next to them, and two black men pushed Noah in his wheelchair out of the back of the still-moving vehicle.

  Noah toppled forward onto the road and the van raced away, tires squealing. Hellen and Cloutard jumped out and got Noah upright again—he was a little disoriented and clearly injured—just as Tom came running. He threw his arms around his old friend’s neck, perhaps a little too warmly.

  Noah groaned, but returned Tom’s hug. “Thanks,” he said, “You saved my life, all of you.”

  Tom lifted his friend into the car, and Cloutard folded the wheelchair and stowed it in the trunk. Then they set off together for the Austrian Embassy.

  At the western entrance to the bazaar, Ossana joined her men in the van. She took out her cell phone and watched a small red dot on the display move slowly across a map of Cairo. She smiled. No one had spotted the small GPS tracker her men had hidden on the underside of Noah’s wheelchair.

  28

  Austrian Embassy, Cairo

  “You’re sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?” Tom asked. He was sitting opposite Noah on a small swivel stool while an embassy staffer who used to work as a nurse patched his friend up.

  “Yeah. Really. It’s not as bad as it looks,” Noah said. He inhaled with a hiss as the woman swabbed a cut over his eye with alcohol.

  “I’m not so sure,” the nurse said. “He could have a broken rib, or worse. They really worked him over.”

  “I’d know if I had a broken rib.” He gave her a wink above a pained smile.

  When all of Noah’s visible wounds had been disinfected and bandaged, and the deep cut over his eye closed with tissue adhesive from the first-aid kit, the woman left the treatment room.

  “Really, I’m all right,” Noah assured Tom.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. You got me back before they got serious,” Noah said, and waved a hand dismissively. “Let’s find the others. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

  Tom pushed his friend down a hallway, and they met Hellen and Cloutard in the embassy conference room. Situated beside the Nile and just behind the renowned Orman Garden, the embassy building offered a sumptuous view over the longest river in the world. Hellen stood and stared out of the window, indifferent to everything.

  Noah told them in a few words about how Ossana’s people had ambushed him a few days earlier in Tel Aviv, dragging him into a van on a public street in broad daylight. Hours or days later, he’d woken up in a basement—in Egypt, as he had discovered only today.

  “One of the guards left his mobile lying around. That’s when I tried to reach you. But the connection was terrible; I wasn’t getting my hopes up. After that, they decided to teach me a little lesson.” He prodded gently at the wound over his eye. “What did you have to do to set me free? And by the way: thank you all. I am so glad to be out of there.”

  Even Hellen gave him a momentary smile, but then turned back to the window.

  “All Ossana wanted was two old vases,” said Tom with a shrug.

  “Two amphorae,” Cloutard corrected him.

  “And what was in them?” Noah asked.

  “A few papyrus scrolls. One of the amphoras got broken and the other one was empty, so all we had were the scrolls. That seemed to satisfy her because—surprise, surprise—she kept her word,” said Tom.

  “Yes . . . frankly, it was all a little too simple, if you ask me,” Cloutard added. “She could have found an easier way to get her hands on the scrolls than to kidnap Noah and to ‘hire’ Tom to steal them for her.”

  “Well, it wasn’t quite as simple as you say,” Hellen said bitterly.

  “What do you mean?” Noah could see that she was hurt.

  “It’s not something I want to talk about. Not now. It won’t change anything, will it? I found the two amphorae because of an anonymous tip,” Hellen said. She was gazing out the window again. “In the Anfushi Necropolis in Alexandria. But they were taken away from me. Long story. There were three scrolls inside. That’s all. All I can say with certainty is that the two amphorae came from the Library of Alexandria, or the Library of the Kings, as it’s also known. They carried the mark of the library.”

  “Ah, and that’s the connection. Now something I overheard yesterday makes sense,” Noah said. “Ossana called someone and said something about the Library of Alexandria. I only picked up scraps of the conversation.”

  As wide-eyed as children listening to an exciting story, Tom and Cloutard sat at the conference table and leaned closer to Noah.

  “Her last words before she hung up were: ‘We’re one step closer to our goal,’” Noah said.

  “I always thought the library was a myth, but if Ossana is also looking for it, then maybe there is something to it,” Cloutard said thoughtfully. “Whatever’s in the library would be priceless.”

  “The question is: where do we go from here?” said Tom.

  Hellen turned away from the window, but did not look at Tom, her eyes shifting between Noah and Cloutard. “My father might be able to help with that,” she said.

  “I thought your father disappeared,” Tom said.

  Hellen continued not looking at him. “Okay, the papers in my father’s house might be able to help us,” Hellen said with irritation.

  “Where is your father’s house?” Noah asked.

  “Belgium,” Tom and Hellen said together. Their eyes met and Tom smiled sheepishly, but Hellen’s expression did not change.

  “Then we should get to Belgium, the sooner the better,” Noah said enthusiastically.

  “François and I can take care of that. Doesn’t Rambo here have to fly the chancellor back to Vienna or something?” Hellen said quickly. She grasped Cloutard by the hand and pulled him along with her out of the conference room.

  “What the hell’s going on with you two?” Noah asked, rolling closer to Tom.

  “Nothing. When we were in Rome back then, I asked her if she wanted to go to the States with me, but she had other plans. Her own plans. I haven’t seen her since. And today of all days,
I run into her in the Egyptian Museum . . . her and her boyfriend, as it turns out.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So why is she so mad at you? She’s literally flying to another country to get away from you.”

  “I shot Hellen’s boyfriend. In the museum. He’s dead,” said Tom meekly.

  “You . . . what?!”

  “He shot at me first. If I hadn’t reacted, I’d be the one lying dead in the museum.”

  “Still, you killed her boyfriend. I think you can forget having any kind of relationship with her.”

  Tom said nothing but nodded imperceptibly, his mind elsewhere.

  * * *

  When they left the conference room, Hellen excused herself for a moment and went to the ladies’ room. She checked first that nobody else was inside, then sat down on a closed toilet seat and burst into tears. All the pent-up feelings from the last few hours came pouring out. Arno was dead. And her ex had killed him. Nothing made any sense. She knew Tom. She knew him well. He was high-spirited, thoughtless, sometimes reckless, an adrenaline junkie—but he was also a professional. He wasn’t afraid of a gunfight, and he would not have made a mistake like that. She was confused, and her emotions were in an uproar. Tom would never have shot blindly, not without a reason. But in God’s name, what reason could there have been? Tom claimed that Arno had fired first, but that just didn’t make sense. Why would he?

  She was jolted abruptly out of her thoughts when someone suddenly knocked on the door of the cubicle.

  “Hellen? Are you all right? Can I help in any way?”

  “Yes. You can bring my boyfriend back to life.”

  “Tom had no choice. Aaron—”

  “ARNO!” Hellen corrected. “And Tom always has that excuse, doesn’t he? That he had no choice . . . of course he had a choice. He just thinks with his fists or with his gun, every time.”

  She wiped her eyes with toilet tissue, then stood up and threw the wad of tear-stained paper into the bowl and flushed it away. Grief, anger and despair were at war in her head, and there no sign of a clear winner yet. She found it unbelievably difficult, but she had to focus on the task at hand. Losing her nerve now would help no one. The rational scientist in her managed to gain the upper hand: she washed her hands and face and turned to Cloutard with new strength.

  “Whatever the truth is, I don’t want to be anywhere near Tom right now. You and I will fly to Belgium by ourselves and see what we can find in my father’s papers.”

  29

  Archaeological Institute, Vienna

  The American and his contact, Steinberg, had spent almost the entire day combing through the archives of the Archaeological Institute. Steinberg had tapped his connections and the head of the library had been exceptionally cooperative, but they had turned up nothing of any value—and nothing at all about an Italian questioned by the Nazis about the whereabouts of occult artifacts. The two men finally left the magnificent palace, which had housed the University of World Trade until its redesignation as the headquarters of the Archaeological Institute in 1975.

  “Maybe we’ll have better luck at the Documentation Centre,” said Steinberg.

  The American looked at his watch. “It’s almost eight. Will they still be open?”

  Steinberg took a bunch of keys out of his pocket and held them up for the American to see. “For me, they’re always open.”

  Steinberg flagged down a taxi, they climbed in, and Steinberg barked: “The old City Hall, Wipplingerstrasse.” The taxi driver pulled away.

  The Documentation Centre of the Austrian Resistance had dedicated itself to the collection of documents and other materials pertaining to resistance, persecution and exile during the National Socialist regime in Austria. It also concerned itself with Nazi war crimes, postwar justice, right-wing extremism in Austria and Germany since 1945, and restitution and reparation for Nazi injustices. It was already late in the evening when the two men reached the foundation’s archive, which was housed in Vienna’s old City Hall.

  “Our best bet will be the O5 documents,” said Steinberg as he unlocked the door and they stepped inside. Steinberg punched a few digits into the alarm system, and they made their way downstairs.

  “O5?” the American asked.

  “O5 was an Austrian anti-Nazi resistance group. It first appeared officially in 1944, although it was probably around much earlier than that. O5 was a kind of trademark for an umbrella organization that brought together various resistance groups, all dedicated to the struggle for a free Austria, beyond party lines and ideologies. O5 is an abbreviation: the fifth letter in the alphabet is ‘E’, and if you put an ‘O’ and an ‘E’ together, you get ‘Ö’ for Österreich—Austria. Even today, there’s an ‘O5’ carved into a wall of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, just down the street.”

  Steinberg logged into the computer system and typed a few keywords into the search engine. For the next fifteen minutes he mumbled away to himself, grumbling and cursing. The American stood quietly by and did not interfere in the process. It was clear that research work was not one of Steinberg’s favorite pastimes.

  Steinberg’s exclamation was so sudden that it made the American jump. “Finally!” Steinberg cried, and his high voice resounded in the empty archive. “Follow me,” he said, scribbling a file number on a scrap of paper. “We have to go down to the basement.”

  Lined up down below were hundreds of yards of ceiling-high shelves, packed with file folders and cardboard boxes. Steinberg quickly found the shelf and the folder he needed. The folder contained handwritten notes and reports from various O5 members, records of their countless contacts with numerous resistance groups throughout Europe. One of those reports was the key.

  “Here, look!” Steinberg tapped his finger on a name. “A man made contact with O5 and said he had an important package for the Americans, one that had to be kept safe from the Nazis. According to this, O5 made contact with the Americans and the package was duly handed over. After that, the man was captured by the Nazis, interrogated and shipped off to a concentration camp in Poland. His name—”

  Steinberg broke off. He seemed surprised.

  “Well, isn’t that interesting. His name was Angelo Negozi.” Steinberg frowned, thinking hard. “Negozi? Negozi? Of course. He was the brother of Giuseppe Negozi, prefect of the Vatican Archive from 1925 to 1955.”

  The American raised his eyebrows. That made sense.

  30

  Hellen’s parents’ house, Antwerp, Belgium

  Hellen hesitantly pressed the doorbell and stood waiting, shifting nervously from one leg to the other—she dreaded the thought of facing her mother now, especially so soon after Arno’s tragic death. She had no desire to quarrel with her mother, but conversations with her unfortunately tended to culminate in differences of opinion at best, if not in outright arguments. Cloutard, who had shown himself to be a true friend in the last day, placed his hand gently on her shoulder. A sense of calm spread through her. Hellen and Cloutard had grown a great deal closer on the flight together. The art thief and the curator . . . an odd couple, to be sure, but they did share common interests. Of course, they would remain friends; Cloutard was old enough to be Hellen’s father. But that was exactly what Hellen liked—she really did see him as a kind of father figure.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  It had happened again. Hellen’s voice had switched to being excessively correct and respectful as soon as her mother opened the front door. Hellen stepped past her into the house.

  “Bonjour, Madame,” Cloutard said in his unmistakable accent. He raised his hat and kissed Hellen’s mother’s hand. She gave him a disconcerted smile, taken by surprise by the charming gentleman accompanying her daughter.

  “Uh, hello. Please come in. I have to say, you seem somehow familiar.”

  “Mother, you must know Monsieur François Cloutard.”

  “François Cloutard. The . . . the art smuggler?” Blindsided, Theresia de Mey’s serious face returne
d the instant she turned to Hellen.

  “Do not tell me that you’re here because of your father’s fantasies.” She grasped Hellen by the arm and pulled her to one side. “And why would you bring a criminal wanted internationally into my house?”

  “Mother, really, you of all people ought to give him a little credit,” Hellen said, freeing herself angrily from her mother’s grip. “You know what he did for Blue Shield, and that without him—”

  “Yes, I know. Still . . .” She swallowed whatever else she was about to say. “Well, what’s this all about . . . daughter?”

  Hellen hesitated. “Well, it’s—”

  “I knew it! Why are you still chasing after your father’s absurd fairy tales? Do you want to share the same fate as—” She fell silent when Hellen suddenly held a clay disk about six inches in diameter under her nose. Mrs. de Mey reached for it as if hypnotized.

  “That’s the symbol of . . .”

  “Yes.” Hellen smiled. Her mother was spellbound.

  “And these markings . . .” Hellen’s mother turned the disk in her hands, examining the small holes arranged on it in no discernible order.

  Suddenly, an athletic-looking and very attractive young woman emerged from the living room.

  “Mrs. de Mey, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have the director of UNESCO on the line. She wants to arrange a time for the budget talks,” she said, a cordless phone in her hand. She acknowledged the two guests with a nod and waited for an answer from her new boss.

  “Not now, Vittoria. Tell her I’ll call her back in a little while,” she said, and her assistant, vanished back into the living room.