by Alex Archer
First she scanned news items relating to Stern and his foundation. There were thousands to choose from. She read of his cutting the ribbon to open a literacy center he had endowed in São Paulo, Brazil, with six-foot-tall blond supermodel Eliete von Hauptstark on his arm. She watched in streaming video as he trudged through an earthquake-ravaged zone in Pakistan in his shirtsleeves, even helping rescuers move rubble off a victim trapped beneath a collapsed wall. It didn’t seem to be staged.
She saw pictures of him attending some Hollywood film opening, laughing with the likes of Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson—both of whom, she was quickly able to find, openly expressed scathing opinions of him, his movement and even their celebrity friends who had fallen under his sway.
One common thread became apparent, especially paging through pictures and videos. Mark Peter Stern was seldom seen, or at least photographed, without at least one strikingly beautiful woman in his company. Most of them were famous to one degree or another, from a teenage-sex-bomb A-list actress who claimed he had rescued her from dependency on drugs and alcohol to tae kwon do black belt Hauptstark, the current rave supermodel, whose grandfather, allegedly, was a Nazi war criminal who had fled to Brazil, where he’d lived to a ripe old age. All these women wore around their gorgeous throats the braided green collar that symbolized committed Malkuth adherents.
On the sites that offered actual words concerning Stern, as opposed to strictly images, Annja found glitz, innuendo, vituperation and outright flackery.
He did profess a keen interest in biblical antiquities. Annja knew how to check on that. One thing you learned to do as an archaeology student was track down grant money like a bloodhound. The foundations and expeditions funded either by the Malkuth Foundation or Stern in person proved he backed his words abundantly with cash.
Interesting but inconclusive, she thought.
She saw three possibilities. He sought the jar for reasons she could accept as benign, in which case they might well find themselves allies. Provided, of course, he could convince her that whatever he intended was really likely to work more good than harm. That would take some doing.
Or he might want to use the jar in a way she deemed destructive—whether or not from motives he believed pure. Idealistic motives had led Sir Martin Highsmith to murder, after all, as well as to order her own execution. If, wittingly or not, Stern meant to use the jar to work evil in the world, she would find him a powerful foe. And vice versa.
Finally, he might have no interest in the jar, at which point she would cross him off the list.
Annja hadn’t expected the puff pieces or the hit jobs to give her any reliable clues. After surfing various news sites, blogs and variations on the theme “markpetersternsucks.com” she took a breath and dived into the official Malkuth Foundation site.
It was professionally done, and unlike a lot of professionally designed sites, actually well done. It was not just visually arresting but lucid and easy to navigate, without oversize images, gimmicky hard-to-find menus or eye-itching Flash animations.
As to what it was all about…that she found somewhat less accessible.
She quickly discovered some concise and readable descriptions of the Tree of Life, the arrangement of the ten sephiroth and the various pathways between them, a colorful representation of which was the foundation’s logo. She glossed over it, as well as a history of both the Jewish and Gentile traditions of the kabbalah. The latter read like respectable popular history, and where it impinged on Annja’s expertise, such as discussing the Renaissance-age origins of modern kabbalistic study, she found it to be accurate. But neither a description of the Tree of Life nor the brief story of kabbalism was what she was after.
What she really wanted to know was what the foundation stood for that set it apart from other mystic groups.
She waded through pages of fairly standard commonsense self-improvement advice, most of it unobjectionable and probably even useful, taken in the proper perspective. And the usual peace and love to all humankind, environmental consciousness, tolerance and the like.
After two hours of diligent reading she had gained nothing but a headache. She didn’t have any clearer idea of what the actual core message of Mark Peter Stern and his Malkuth Foundation might be.
Going back to her searches she was certainly able to find plenty who purported to tell her the foundation was a cult, it was sinister, it was evil, it brainwashed its acolytes.
She could find as many sites praising Stern and Malkuth to the skies. And all the sites, for and against, sported message boards wherein roared flames of such prodigious heat and volume that she reckoned Dante needed resurrecting from the dead to write up a whole new annex to Hell—a concept he, far more than Scripture, had visualized and inserted into the world’s religious imagination.
When she could practically smell the brimstone she sat back and let her eyes go to soft focus. What has been learned, and what revealed? she wondered, remembering a catchphrase from an author she had gone to hear read as an undergraduate.
For all his flaws, she seemed to sense in Stern a genuine avocation, a sense of true mystic calling. It was hard for her to see at first. He was obviously a showman to a pretty unhealthy degree and, if she were any judge, a charlatan in many ways.
Is it possible, she asked herself, to be both a charlatan and the real thing? A true mystic, a true spiritual leader?
She thought of Roux. He was as fraudulent an old fart as she had ever met. But he was genuine. She had seen and heard and experienced too much to doubt he was what he said he was; if anything, there were depths to him she had yet to so much as glimpse. He was at least five hundred years old. He had witnessed the burning of St. Joan in person. He was a mystical being by virtue of his longevity; she guessed he had been, and likely still was, a sorcerer of some sort. He was also her mentor, a mighty teacher—if often by way of bad example.
That someone lied, and was caught lying, did not mean they didn’t sometimes tell the truth, she reasoned. Even truths that conflicted with all Annja had been taught of science.
She shook her head. This is no time to get sidetracked, she told herself sternly.
None of what she had seen said anything useful about why Stern might want the jar, and whether he would prove foe or friend.
She took a deep breath, sighed it out to the sounds of a Strauss waltz. Well, that clarifies my immediate destiny, she told herself.
She was going to have to go, again, to the source.
Stern was a public figure, easily one of the hundred best-known names and faces in the current world. She reckoned that meant that each and every day a tiny but measurable percentage of all the world’s population was vying for his attention.
Annja knew, even had he not been associated with controversial groups such as radical Israeli settler movements and American Christian fundamentalists, he would require layers of intense security. More than physical security, he would also surround himself with phalanxes of specialists to help him run his organization and to keep people out of his well-coiffed hair.
She had to get past all that to see him. She sighed. It would be only slightly more challenging than getting access to the vaults of Fort Knox with a front-end loader and a bunch of empty crates.
She drew in another deep breath and made a disgusted face. “You know perfectly well what you need to do,” she said aloud. “You’re just in denial.”
She sighed again. “And if I want to swim in it, it’s just one country over.” She began to compose an e-mail.
14
Engine off, the launch coasted into the pier on big folds of green water, their tops trickled with slightly greasy, yellowish foam. Annja took a last slurp at the straw stuck in the chilled orange juice she had been sipping at the dockside café and stood up. She wobbled slightly on her high heels. Whoa, balance, she told herself.
She started walking. It took total concentration to keep her ankles from buckling outward and making her lurch like a sailor in port afte
r six straight weeks in high seas. She couldn’t believe models could strut so confidently in such painful footwear.
Gazes followed her from the sidewalk café and among the dockside idlers. She cut a striking figure, she was willing to acknowledge to herself: her considerable height defiantly accentuated by the heels and a light yellow cotton sundress that showed off her legs in the late-morning Mediterranean heat and sunlight.
She had to work the wardrobe angle to appeal to Stern, she reckoned. She had been told often enough by eager men—young and old—that she was attractive. While she never gave her appearance much thought, she was clever enough to know how to use her natural gifts if necessary.
At the moment she felt confident the eyes following her progress toward the pier were admiring. Unless behind them their owners were snickering to themselves at the way she walked in the heels and laying odds on when she’d lose it altogether and pitch into the sea.
The launch was twenty feet long and open. A pilot sat up front with two failed-NFL-linebacker types in dark suits, and a sleek aide. On second thought Annja wondered if they were even failed; maybe they were actual players, Malkuth devotees serving their guru in the off-season. She didn’t follow the game so she didn’t know. They certainly looked imposing enough.
Attendants at the dock caught a line one linebacker threw and helped draw the craft into a fairly smooth landing against the big orange-and-black rubber bumpers cushioning the concrete pier. They tied it fast and the aide stepped ashore. The bodyguards stood on the boat with their hands folded in front of them. It gave them a ridiculously demure look.
The aide would have been shorter than she was even if it hadn’t been for her accursed heels. He was tread-mill slender, his off-white summerweight suit expensively tailored to show his form, a yarmulke not quite hiding a bald spot in his dark hair. He and the football-types all wore the green braided necklaces.
“Ms. Creed?” the aide said, approaching. “I’m Charles Sanders.”
She nodded. “I’m Annja,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.” She extended a hand. He shook it once. To her relief his grip was as firm and dry as it was brief; she feared from the looks of him it’d be damp.
Once again her brilliant disguise was herself. She had spent the morning adding altogether too much to the burden of sorrows of her credit-card balance in a Tel Aviv boutique dressing herself in at least semifashionable mode, when constitutionally and by professional habit she was most at ease dressed in battered khakis and a boonie hat.
Sanders extended a hand to help her into the launch. Liberation be damned, she thought, and she took it and was glad. Spike heels plus rolling boat equaled unsteady Annja. She was not going to risk taking a spill and winding up in the bilge on her backside, with her legs in the air and her pretty skirt up around her waist. That would gratify the grizzled old lechers slurping their lattes at the café entirely too much. She pictured how Roux would react. Concentrate, she reminded herself.
Sanders saw her seated. The bodyguards with the pneumatic necks cast the boat off. The pilot, a wiry little guy with a big nose and white stubble on his cheeks and no cord around his scrawny neck, backed away from the pier, then turned the boat back toward Crete and wound out the engine. The leather seat pressed against Annja’s back and away they went.
Charles, as he graciously permitted her to call him, used his cell phone briefly. Then he sat down across from Annja and made small talk. She answered simply, perfectly aware that she was being vetted to make sure she was who, or at least what, she portrayed herself as being before she was admitted to the presence of the great man. Yes, the 3500-year-old Egyptian gate on Jaffa Hill was a wonder; yes, it was exciting working on Chasing History’s Monsters. No, she had never considered becoming a model….
She looked back. Beyond wake and waterfront the town tumbled almost into the water down the Jaffa Hill headland. She saw a collection of sand-colored buildings of sundry sizes stuffed way too close together. Some of the crowding was deliberate, she was moderately sure, to enhance that old-timey Middle Eastern–village flair for the tourists. Jaffa was far older than Tel Aviv, of which it was more or less a suburb—although Tel Aviv had started as a suburb of Jaffa. It was a bit more organic and relaxed. But what you mostly saw of it now was not so old. It also struck Annja as more than a little self-consciously quaint, sort of like Santa Fe. And as in the New Mexican capital, municipal codes required buildings to look old, even if they went up last month. They were likely as not to hold an artist’s studio, a Starbuck’s with wireless Internet access or a twee boutique.
She looked forward again. The pilot threaded his way among a plentiful flock of pleasure craft, mostly riding to anchor in the easy swell. One of the world’s most ancient seaports, Jaffa hadn’t been a serious commercial anchorage for a century or so. Now it was mostly a tourist trap. A fair number of the tourists arrived by water, or so it appeared.
Mark Peter Stern’s yacht lay out to sea beyond the common herd of the pleasure craft of the merely rich. Zohar II surprised Annja somewhat. A ketch with two masts, white with blue trim, fore-and-aft rigged and sails furled, showing a superstructure housing bridge and cabin above deck. At eighty feet over waterline, it was far from modest by any means. But it was nowhere near the ostentatious showboat Stern’s flamboyant public persona had led her to expect.
So far as Annja could see, no supermodels or barely legal Hollywood actresses lounged topless on deck. That’s a relief, she thought.
“IT’S HARD for most Westerners to think of ‘nothing’ as a positive thing—the ultimate creative force,” Mark Peter Stern said, gazing out the porthole of the compartment he used as his office. Outside the sky was an almost painful blue. Cloudless. “Yet it is. From primal nothing, which is really no-thing, derives that which is without limits. And from there—light. Limitless light.”
He turned. “From there derives our human potential, Ms. Creed. We are sprung from the light, and we know no limits. If only we let ourselves see.”
The office, while spacious, was surprisingly spare in furnishings. There was dark-stained oak paneling to sternum height, cream-painted bulkheads above, a large desk with a globe and a computer on it, a rendering of the Tree of Life behind it. Given Stern’s notorious love affair with the camera, Annja was surprised to find no photographs at all in evidence.
Sitting on a tubular-steel-and-black-leather chair that was far more comfortable than it looked, Annja let herself smile tentatively. “I’m afraid I don’t follow, Dr. Stern.”
He laughed, smiled, waved a hand. “Please forgive me. I have a tendency to preach. I have so much to share with a human race that needs the truth so badly.” He shook his head. “I’m sure your viewers would prefer to be spared the proselytization. Or your producers at any rate.”
Thinking of boy-wonder producer Doug Morrell, who held the world’s “my eyes glaze over” land-speed record, she said, “That’s for sure.”
She tried to remember to keep her knees closed tight. She didn’t want any embarrassing moments.
Unlike her famous predecessor she was no virgin. Nor did she think of herself as a prude. But she was using her sexuality as a dodge here, as bait, and it made her feel cheap.
“You’re known for your financing of archaeological researches and expeditions,” Annja said.
Stern smiled. He was a handsome man who looked much younger than his forty-one years, with open features, green eyes, a shock of straw-colored hair. Indeed in person he seemed more compelling. The camera, no matter how artfully plied, could not capture the full impact of his personality.
He wore a light tan suit, cream shirt, black-and-gold silk tie. All impeccably tailored, of course; renunciation of worldly things wasn’t part of his teachings—exactly. As near as Annja could tell from visiting the Malkuth Foundation’s Web site, Stern’s conception was that materialism was something humans had to get out of their systems before advancing upward along the spiritual path, rather like a childhood sweet tooth or adol
escent acne. She wasn’t clear, really.
“If you’re interested, I’m always open to proposals for new digs,” he said.
She smiled back. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“Mark.”
“Mark. Thank you. But right now I’m most interested in exploring possibilities for doing a show.”
“I hope I’m not considered one of history’s monsters,” he said with an engaging grin. “Other than by some of my detractors, of course.”
Annja laughed. She didn’t have to force it. He was unquestionably likable. And something more. She remembered that the men who brutalized Aidan Pascoe in that alley wore the same green leather braids around their necks as Stern. Not that she was convinced he was complicit in the attack, but she had to keep perspective.
She was trying to channel Sabine Ehrenfeld, the German-born model who did the Overstock.com commercials. As little as Annja watched television, the model had made an impression. A woman in her forties, Ehrenfeld struck Annja as both beautiful and devastatingly sexy in a sophisticated way, without being flashy or cheap. Annja also admired the woman because she had a pilot’s license and had learned how to use a handgun. Obviously, she was not afraid of her own competence.
Annja was well aware of her own sexual nature, despite wondering periodically just how it squared with her destiny as the keeper of Joan’s sword. She had grown up with little by way of role models in being sexy. At least in any dignified way; plenty of the girls at the orphanage oozed overt sexuality, precisely to aggravate the nuns. Annja hadn’t exactly majored in partying at college. Her studies happily obsessed her. Despite her lifelong affinity for exercise and athleticism she was at core a nerd, and knew it. So she found the most appropriate role model she could and ran with her.