Black Scorpion

by Jon Land

  Home.

  PART FIVE

  HOME

  A man’s character is his fate.

  Heraclitus

  SIXTY-NINE

  THE CITATION

  “Do you always travel like this?” Scarlett asked Michael in the rear of the cabin.

  “No, this is a piece of cake. Usually, it’s really challenging,” he tried to joke.

  She started to smile. Then, just as fast, her features sunk and tears began streaming down her face.

  Michael had moved from the cockpit and settled into the seat next to her, just in time for Scarlett to lurch into his arms when a fresh blast of turbulence shook the Citation.

  “I’m not a very good flier,” she said, breaking the embrace but still clinging to him. “Guess I’m a coward at heart.”

  “The storm will be behind us soon.”

  “Which one?” Scarlett asked him, as turbulence rocked the Citation again and sent her back into Michael’s arms.

  “On second thought, maybe I’ll tell Alexander to circle back. I kind of like this.”

  Scarlett managed a smile that slipped quickly from her face, as she began to sob again. “I’m sorry, Michael, I’m so sorry.”

  “For what?” he asked, still holding her against him, feeling the Citation leveling off now.

  “Making you come all this way, take all this risk.”

  “You’d only have something to be sorry for if you hadn’t called me.”

  She eased herself away from him. “I didn’t know what else to do. What happened … It was so much worse than anything I could imagine. I thought I’d never experience anything like that again after French Guiana. Guess I was wrong. Remember what I told you when we first met, about uncovering a find that would change how we perceive the world, even history itself?”

  “That’s when I told you I wanted to fund that effort.”

  She looked at him plaintively. “To find the truth behind your relic, whether it really does hold some mysterious power dating back to the ancients.”

  “We don’t have to do this now, Scarlett.”

  She eased away, then was thrown back against him by another blast of turbulence. “Yes, Michael, we do. There’s something I never told you about your relic, because I thought the results had to be wrong. Remember when I tried to determine its age?”

  “Through carbon dating or something. You told me the results were inconclusive.”

  “More like impossible, because the readings and analysis were all over the map. They indicated the relic had no age, at least none that could be determined within any degree of reasonable certainty. Almost like it had existed forever, since the dawn of time. I’ve spent the last five years following its trail, spending as much time in libraries as I have in the field. I thought it was a fool’s errand at first, I truly did. A wild goose chase with only dead ends.”

  “But that’s not what you found in Romania, is it?” Michael asked, thinking of all the cities where he’d managed to meet Scarlett. He remembered the first time he’d shown her the relic, avoiding an explanation of the circumstances of how he’d come to possess it, while wondering out loud if the legends others had associated with it might be true.

  If this is what I think it may be …

  She’d left things there, never elaborating further on her suspicions. Until now.

  “No,” Scarlett said finally. “I believe I’ve found proof, Michael, proof of what I suspected about the origins of your relic all along.”

  “What origins?”

  Turbulence rocked the Citation anew, and Scarlett waited for it to subside before resuming.

  “The treasure of the Gods.”

  SEVENTY

  THE CITATION

  “The day before the massacre,” Scarlett continued, “I uncovered an ancient journal, a manuscript written on parchment at the dig site.” She swallowed hard, lips trembling at the memory. “I only got a chance to read a portion of it but the contents were incredible, starting with the author: Josephus.”

  “Most famous scribe of that era.”

  “And a vast amount of what we know of those times comes from his writings,” Scarlett explained. “In this case, he was chronicling discoveries made by others that somehow ended up with him.”

  “You’re losing me, Scarlett.”

  “Then let’s back up a bit to Caesar,” she said, eyes dipping to Michael’s chest where his relic was likely held hidden beneath his shirt. “After conquering Gaul, after returning to Rome a hero in the wake of the civil war and becoming dictator, Caesar became obsessed by the power he was convinced the relic had given him, obsessed by its origins. Where had it come from? What if there were more? What about the gold from which it had been forged? Caesar formed an order of loyalists he instructed to find the answers to those questions for him, no matter how long or exhaustive that quest became. Josephus’s journal indicates the loyalists started their research in Rome sometime in forty-five or forty-six BC and didn’t complete it until more than a decade later.”

  “By which time Caesar was long dead.”

  “You can imagine the loyalists’ dilemma when they had no one to whom to report their findings once they finally returned, not that they had any real desire to do so.”

  “Why?”

  “Josephus’s report was titled ‘The Treasure of the Gods’ because the Romans believed in multiple deities back then, a tradition they inherited from the Greeks. But what the loyalists found on this quest that took them far beyond the borders of the Roman Empire contradicted that dogma long before the Romans began worshipping a single God. Judea, for example, where members of Caesar’s order of loyalists apparently met with a number of scribes and historians, even rabbis, who filled them in what they believed were the treasure’s origins.”

  A fresh wave of turbulence shook the Citation and Michael finally belted himself in.

  “Those origins,” Scarlett continued, “went back all the way to the original Temple of Solomon that was built specifically to house the greatest treasures of the Jewish faith, including the Ark of the Covenant. Among the rest were three pieces that included a candelabra, a pair of trumpets, and the Table of Divine Presence.”

  “Sunday school stuff.”

  “Maybe, but what’s not was the reason for the creation of those objects in the first place. How well do you know the Old Testament?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it states that God gave the plans for a great temple to David but refused to let him build it.”

  “So that task ended up falling on his son Solomon. More Sunday school stuff.”

  “Not according to what I was able to decipher in the early parts of Josephus’s writings summarizing the expedition. ‘He gave of gold,’” Scarlett quoted. “That’s from Chronicles. And it implies God didn’t just provide detailed plans for the sanctuary he wanted built, He also provided the gold that made up at least some of that sanctuary’s contents.”

  “Origins of this treasure of the Gods…”

  “Josephus’s writings suggest that David gave only the plans to the temple to Solomon, but hid the actual treasure until the temple was complete and ready to accept the three objects in question and everything else it was built to safeguard.”

  “But the temple was destroyed and all its contents looted. By Nebuchadnezzar, I think.”

  “No,” Scarlett corrected. “Nebuchadnezzar sacked and looted the second Temple of Solomon. The original temple, built by Solomon with plans passed from David, was destroyed centuries earlier by the Egyptian pharaoh Shishaq, also known as Sheshonk the First, who ‘took away the treasures of the house of the Lord.’ Quoting Chronicles again, as opposed to Josephus.”

  “Keep going,” Michael urged, after another surge of turbulence had subsided.

  “Speaking historically, it wasn’t long after the Egyptians sacked the temple that the Assyrians sacked the Egyptians—in nine hundred eleven BC, to be specific.” Scarlett returned her gaze to Michael’s shirt, agai
n picturing the medallion beneath it. “Remember the markings on the relic, what I told you the first time you showed it to me?”

  “You said the language was Phrygian,” Michael recalled. “And that the initials stood for King Mita, who ruled Phrygia, what’s now Turkey, in the 8th century BC.”

  “Mita accumulated vast stores of gold and became the wealthiest and most powerful ruler of his time. He also struck a truce with Sargon of Assyria, accepting great riches as a token of Sargon’s desire to avoid war. So what if…”

  “Part of those riches was this treasure of the Gods plundered by the Egyptians,” Michael completed.

  “King Mita takes the gold and melts it down so he can forge different treasures of his own making, treasures forged from gold provided, according to Josephus’s writings, by God Himself.”

  Michael traced the outline of his medallion beneath his shirt, feeling its warmth against his chest.

  “And there’s something else you need to hear.”

  SEVENTY-ONE

  THE CITATION

  “Alexander the Great,” Scarlett continued. “His travels took him to Phrygia, Gordian specifically, in search of the famed Knot which he ultimately severed. According to Josephus’s writings compiled from the reports of that order of loyalists, though, he had come there in search of something else entirely.”

  “The treasure plundered from the temple of Solomon?”

  “No, Michael, because that treasure no longer existed. Mita supposedly melted it down, remember? And Alexander came to Phrygia in search of whatever items Mita had forged from it. Came away empty and died not too long afterward. You realize what all this means, don’t you? It’s proof that Caesar really did possess your relic, proof that Alexander the Great was after it, too, and at least a suggestion of where it actually comes from. That was as far as I got in the manuscript before the massacre,” Scarlett told him, not bothering to elaborate further. “But what if the man in black came looking for what I found? What if he’s after the treasure of the Gods? Why, though, why kill all those people for a manuscript?… Michael?

  He heard her but didn’t respond, his mind elsewhere.

  * * *

  It had been the night before another massacre at his own home when his father slipped into his room and took a seat at his bedside while Michael laid in bed reading a book.

  “Hello, Papa.”

  “It’s time to show you something special, Michele,” Vito Nunziato said, opening his hand to reveal a gold medallion. Even weathered with age, it was the most beautiful thing the boy had ever seen. “I found this medallion one day off Isla de Levanzo when I was little older than you. It is the treasure of kings, Michele. There are men in Sicily, scum really, who steal and murder for money and power. But they will never be kings.”

  With that, Vito pressed the medallion into his son’s hand, Michael taking it as if he never wanted to let it go.

  “What are those words, Papa?”

  “Somnia, aude, vince. Latin. It means, ‘Dream, Dare, Win.’ Words to live by. Someday the medallion will be yours and will inspire you to become a king, not another mafia pig … or farmer. No matter what happens, when that day comes, you must never part with it.”

  With that, his father had hugged Michael for one of the few times the boy would ever remember.

  “Be a king, Michele,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Be a king.”

  * * *

  “What are you thinking about, Michael?” he heard Scarlett ask him, but he wasn’t ready to return to the present yet.

  Had his father somehow sensed what was coming? he wondered, as another wave of turbulence shook the Citation. Could his choosing the very night before the massacre to show his son his cherished medallion been nothing more than coincidence?

  Michael remembered his father’s hug, the gesture unusual not just for its rarity, but also for something else. He remembered Vito Nunziato trembling through the embrace. As if he sensed, even knew, what was in the offing, just as he knew there was nothing he could do to prevent it, because it was fated just as was Michael’s own destiny.

  The medallion had not helped Vito Nunziato become anything more than the farmer he was when he died, so poor in the end that he nearly sold his cherished relic to a broker to save the farm he’d built for his family. So why had he been chosen to find it in the first place?

  Maybe he was meant to find it to give to me.

  If his father had not shown the relic to him that fateful night in the farmhouse, if Michael had not lifted the relic from Vito Nunziato’s drawer the next morning, his family’s killers would’ve found it and who knows how different his life would have been.

  “My father,” Michael answered finally. “I was thinking about my father.”

  “Your life changed entirely, you became a multimillionaire the moment that relic became yours,” Scarlett told him, eyes boring into his. “Because you’ve been chosen, Michael, chosen by forces we can’t even come close to comprehending. I know this all sounds crazy, but it’s not, not according to the legacy of your relic. It’s invaluable, priceless. And now we’ve got actual proof of its origins. And there’s something else that separates the treasure of the Gods from other artifacts of lore.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Unlike those that rise exclusively from Judeo-Christian teachings, what could very well be the treasure of the Gods is referenced both in Islam and Chinese. The prophet Mohammed writes in the Koran that one day ‘the river Euphrates dries up to unveil a mountain of gold.’ And the Chinese have a legend about something called the Jade Treasure. During an ancient time when seven Chinese kingdoms battled for supremacy, the king of one received a piece of jade that was different from all others. According to the legend, it shined in the dark and could heat an entire room when it was cold or cool it when it was hot. ‘You must always guard it,’ the stranger who bequeathed the jade to the king advised, ‘because this is a magnificent priceless treasure.’ Sound familiar?”

  “Talk to me about the dig site,” Michael said, still tracing the shape of his medallion and needing to change the subject, at least for the moment. “About what happened to that manuscript.”

  Scarlett shrugged, shifting uneasily in the confines of her seat belt. “I don’t know. It could have been destroyed, along with everything else.”

  “Not if it’s what drew those killers there. If they came for it, it’s a safe assumption they left with it. The Romanian authorities reported finding absolutely nothing, as if the camp had never existed at all. The scene had been sanitized.”

  Scarlett shivered. “I can’t get it out of my mind. Every time I close my eyes, I see the gunmen, the bodies, all the blood. They were my friends, Michael, my friends! And there’s something else. In the village, where I went after, more gunmen came looking for me. They wore masks that looked like skulls, led by a man dressed all in black wearing a veil instead. He called himself—”

  “Black Scorpion,” Michael finished for her.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  “Interesting choice for a meeting,” Naomi Burns said, approaching FBI special agent Del Slocumb in the lobby of the Mob Museum, one of Vegas’s more recent tourist attractions.

  “I thought it to be especially fitting,” Slocumb returned, smiling tightly. He looked around them. “Familiar territory for you, given your association with Michael Tiranno.”

  “Some courts would consider that grounds for a harassment suit, Agent, given that your accusations have no foundation in fact.”

  “They do now, Ms. Burns.”

  Located in the former and very first federal building in Las Vegas, the building was listed on both the Nevada and National Registers of Historic Places. It contained the very courtroom where one of fourteen national hearings to expose organized crime to America took place in the years 1950 and 1951. The museum’s builders were able to maintain the building’s original neo-classical architectural style, period perfect for the age it sought
to replicate while providing an authentic view of the Mob’s impact on Las Vegas history and the imprint left on America. The Mob Museum, also known as the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, prided itself on bringing true stories to life in a bold, contemporary style via engaging exhibits and multisensory experiences with high-tech theater presentations, interactive displays, themed environments, and authentic, iconic artifacts.

  “Let’s talk as we walk,” Slocumb resumed.

  The lobby lighting was warm and ambient, the bulk of it inside the main display area beyond trained toward the wall-mounted pictures and exhibits staged inside glass cases with the spray of bulbs focused out instead of in. Naomi walked slightly behind Slocumb, letting the agent dictate the pace and at least their initial destination.

  That destination turned out to be an exhibit room marked MOB BUSTERS. Slocumb veered toward it from memory, not needing to read the signs. The interior featured both wall-mounted and floor displays of photographs and artifacts highlighting the war on organized crime undertaken by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover, Estes Kefauver, and Eliot Ness.

  “A man can dream, I suppose,” Naomi commented, as she surveyed the scenery.

  “So can a woman, Counselor. Of not going down when I nail her boss, anyway.”

  “I appreciate the concern, Agent.”

  “Then you’ll appreciate this even more: We’re not here right now and the conversation we’re having never took place.”

  Slocumb spoke from beneath a mural of Estes Kefauver holding one of his many hearings into organized crime, making it seem as if the agent was actually standing even with the dais on which the Kefauver Committee sat. A dull patch of light seemed to shade Slocumb’s face in even more shadows than usual, shadows that dug themselves into the furrowed lines marking both his cheeks.

  “Okay,” Naomi said suspiciously.

  “I assume I don’t have to review the RICO statutes for you, that once I nail your boss it’ll be easy to make a case for you as being connected to a criminal enterprise. This meeting is your one chance to use your get-out-of-jail-for-free card. Cooperate with me and you’ll have a life and career after I put Michael Tiranno away.”