Gospel Truths
Page 32
“I’m glad,” Lyman said.
“I’d like to thank you, Mr. McCoy,” Koster added.
The man with the mustache smiled.
“What now?” Koster asked. “They say we have to make a statement of some kind. About Scarcella, I mean. You know. About what happened to…to…” He could not finish.
“You go ahead, Joseph. I’ll be along in a minute.”
Koster looked plaintively at Lyman. Then he shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I guess I’ll catch you later.”
Koster looked broken, thought Lyman. He looked like a man who’d grab at anything to try and fill the yawning crack that was opening inside him. “You’ll be all right,” Lyman told him. “You’ve still got your whole life ahead of you, Joseph. And your work. You’ll meet someone else. Someone new.”
Koster started to speak. Then he stopped. The words hovered, unsettled, within him. Like butterflies. “Someone new,” he repeated, after a moment. He wiped the rain from his face. “Only numbers live on,” he concluded. “The rest…My work, yeah. There’s always that, I guess.” With that he walked away. “See you up there,” he said, without turning.
McCoy started to follow, but Lyman held him back by the sleeve. “Not so fast,” Lyman said.
“Don’t forget who helped you find the girl’s brother,” said McCoy.
“I know,” Lyman snapped. “And I don’t particularly care what you did earlier today. You’re the one who put that RENOVATIONS sign on the door to the ambulatory. Don’t bother to deny it. That mortar crumbled like dust in my fingers. It was only a few hours old. You picked up the gospel this morning. Didn’t you, McCoy?”
“I’ve no idea what you mean.”
“Don’t lie to me. I’m in no mood. I’ve been killing myself with this thing for a month. Unless you want me to hang you out to dry here with the Chartres police, you’d better learn how to be more agreeable.”
“I’m telling you. I don’t know anything.”
Lyman grabbed him by the collar. “Wrong answer, McCoy. I could make it my business to prove what you were doing this morning. You wouldn’t want that, would you?” He brought his face close. “I could make it pretty uncomfortable for your countess and the G.L.F.”
At that, McCoy looked concerned. “What do you want from me, Lyman?”
“You know what I want. Scarcella’s man. The one at the City of London Police. It wasn’t just Hadley, was it?”
“You won’t like it,” McCoy warned.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“All right then, if that’s what you want. It was Cocksedge. Are you happy now, Lyman? Does the truth make you happier? Cocksedge and Hadley were working together. They were in the same lodge. That’s how Scarcella first met them. That’s how he managed to bribe and blackmail them to help him.”
Lyman closed his eyes, remembering the day of his assignment to the case so many weeks before in London. I’m trying to help you, Lyman, Cocksedge had said. I’m on your side.
And indeed, Lyman thought, he once had been. That was the irony. Lyman would never have become a City of London policeman had it not been for Cocksedge. It had been a favor, a good turn for his dear uncle Jack. One Freemason to another. And Chief Inspector Hadley too. All in the family. One for all, and all for one. And now Lyman would have to destroy him.
Lyman looked up at the cathedral across the open square. No, Lyman thought. Cocksedge had destroyed himself. Like Pontevecchio and Grabowski. Like everyone who had come into contact with Scarcella. Lyman could see that now. It had been obvious for a long time. He had simply kept it hidden from himself, afraid perhaps of what he might find in the dark crypt of his own heart.
Lyman turned toward McCoy. “Thanks,” he said softly.
“Does that mean I can go?”
Lyman nodded. “Tell the countess good luck.”
“I will,” said McCoy.
“Oh, one more thing, though,” said Lyman. “Just out of curiosity.”
“Yes?”
“Where exactly is she taking it?”
“Don’t worry, Inspector Lyman. It’s already en route.”
“But where?”
McCoy raised his eyes.
Lyman looked up. High above the cathedral, above the stone walls, the flying buttresses and spires, the clouds had parted and the backdrop of the night revealed a phalanx of lights in the sky. Bright red and green—an airplane winged west toward America. Lyman laughed quietly. “I hope the new world is ready for it,” he said. Then the plane disappeared, trailing the sound of her passage.
McCoy didn’t even respond.
It had stopped raining, Lyman realized. The sky loomed black and infinite above the cathedral—empty, a void—save for a few blue stars just coming into view: the clear clean fire of the Pleiades.
Chapter XXIV
NEW YORK
October 12th, 1991
THE BOX LAY ON THE MARBLE DESK. HE REMOVED THE remainder of the wrapping, cutting the string carefully. The box was green. It was labeled Au Printemps. It was made of cardboard.
There was a note inside. At first he almost missed it as he pulled the top away. It was hidden in a clot of tissue paper. He picked it up. It was a business card.
From all of us, to all of you, it read. Twin spirits. Congratulations. That was all. He turned it over. At the center of the card, embossed in a simple script, was the name Countess Irene Chantal de Rochambaud.
He smiled. Underneath the tissue paper was another box, much smaller, made of wood. There was an odd little window in it at the very top, which he realized was some kind of electronic gauge to monitor humidity. He reached down and lifted it onto his desk. The latch was on the side. No, there were two, he noticed. He opened them and took a long, deep breath. Then he lifted the top of the wooden box and the air around him seemed to fill with golden dust, floating, spinning, pinpricks of light. He put the top down on the desk and the gold dust settled into paper motes, fragments of parchment from the ancient weathered text within.
A buzzer sounded and he reached across his desk.
“What is it, Denise?”
“It’s that editor from PW again. You promised him an interview.”
“Tell him I’ll have to call him back. And hold my calls, please. I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Yes, Mr. Robinson.”
Epilogue
WINCHESTER, ENGLAND
October 12th, 1991
THE RIVER WOUND ITS WAY ALONG THE VALLEY FLOOR, across the open fields and hedgerows, heavy with rain, wavering the weeds and willow branches. Lyman stood in the center of the chalk stream breaking in a brand-new pair of Orvis waders, newly arrived from the United States. He wore his old felt Irish fishing hat and a thick wool sweater. A landing net hung at his side. The sun was starting to descend and he could see the last ring of a rise against it.
A hatch of flies had just exploded on the water. After weeks of hanging on to weeds and river bottom, the insect larvae had finally made it to the surface. Lyman watched the profusion of flight with one eye as he tied an olive dun to the tippet of his line. The artificial fly looked tiny in his hand. He blew on the hackles carefully to straighten them.
The trout rose with the understated swelling of a heavy fish. Lyman barely heard the surface of the river breaking. He looked up and saw the circles rolling toward him from upstream. Then the river settled once again. He waited and waited and the shadow rose. The brass plane broke and in a second it was over. The insect was sucked down. The river closed around it. The strong jaws of the trout slipped back and disappeared.
Lyman heard his name called out long before he saw the boy. It was the warden’s son, John. He was hurtling along the footpath on the far side of the river, running full out, ignoring the weeds, the holes of water rats, running for the hell of it.
Lyman flung the fly up in the air, whipping his arm back simultaneously, letting the weight of the line shoot the olive dun back through the air behind him. Then forward, then back, buildi
ng momentum. The fishing line curved perfectly.
“Nigel. Nigel,” the boy shouted from the bank. His voice vanished across the open fields. “London’s on the phone. Mr. Randall got a call from Interpol. They say that everything’s a mess since they took Cocksedge out. They want you back there right away.”
Lyman stripped a few more yards of line from his reel and let it slip through his fingers slowly. His cast extended across the surface of the river, inching closer toward the rise.
“Nigel? They say it’s an important case. Nigel!”
Lyman felt the power in his arm as he brought the rod back once again. He counted as the line extended far behind him. Two. Three. And then he leaned a little forward in a grim determined way. His right arm fell, the rod curved and the line unrolled itself. He felt it slipping through the fingers of his left hand, rushing off the water through the air, above the trout rise, straight, straight, straight down the center of the river as if it would go on forever.
About the Author
Born in Chicago, raised and educated throughout Europe, and a graduate of Amherst College, J. G. Sandom founded the nation’s first digital ad agency (Einstein and Sandom Interactive—EASI) in 1984, before launching an award-winning writing career. Sandom has authored five adult novels, including Gospel Truths and The Hunting Club, and three young adult novels under the pseudonym T. K. Welsh, including The Unresolved and Resurrection Men. He is currently working on a sequel to Gospel Truths called The God Machine, coming soon from Bantam Books.
Visit the author at www.jgsandom.com.
If you enjoyed J. G. Sandom’s
GOSPEL TRUTHS,
you won’t want to miss his next thriller.
Look for
THE GOD MACHINE
Coming soon from Bantam Books
When Ben Franklin’s coded journal is accidentally unearthed in Philadelphia, it reveals the presence of a secret map, hidden by Franklin at the birth of our nation, a map to the possible resting place of the Gospel of Judas—a two-thousand-year-old Gnostic text that threatens to unravel Christianity, and undermine the very foundation of the Church. Working unwittingly for a secret Gnostic Masonic lodge, mathematician and architect Joseph Koster, accompanied by the beautiful and intelligent engineer Savita Sajan, begin a quest to discover the gospel’s hiding place, a quest that takes them from Philadelphia to England and France. But they are not alone. For the Knights Templar, military agents of the Catholic Church in Rome, and minions of the American Christian ultra-right, are right behind them … and they’ll do anything, kill anyone, to prevent the discovery of the Gospel of Judas. All seems lost, when Koster realizes that Franklin’s map leads not just to the Gospel of Judas, but reveals a plan for the construction of a terrible device—a God machine—that if completed, would open a doorway to heaven itself… or to hell.
GOSPEL TRUTHS
A Bantam Book
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1992, 2007 by J. G. Sandom
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Ultimate Atrocity,” from Collected Poems by Siegfried Sassoon. Copyright © 1918, 1920 by E. P. Dutton. Copyright © 1936, 1946, 1947, 1948 by Siegfried Sassoon. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-26067
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-75535-3
www.bantamdell.com
v3.0