Solomon's Jar

by Alex Archer

  He took a sip of the whiskey he’d bought in the hotel lobby and shook his head. “Bah. Vile stuff. Not as bad as their gin, but there you have it.”

  Annja splashed more tepid water on her face. It made her feel a little better. It cut the salt sting if nothing else. It didn’t improve what she saw in the slightly cloudy glass, however.

  “Could it have been?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Terrorists?”

  “Not a chance. Who’d rent a helicopter like that to a Palestinian? An expensive bit of work, that Dolphin. And also if one was positively frantic to get put under a microscope by the Israeli security service, that would be just the ticket, wouldn’t it?”

  “You’re right.” Her arms braced on the sink, Annja drew a deep sigh and considered her reflection in the mirror. She sported two black eyes and looked like a raccoon. Her cheeks were puffy and her upper lip split. Her nose had, amazingly, not been broken again.

  “It’s all right,” Pascoe called out. “You look beautiful. Relax.”

  She laughed ruefully. “I look as if I just had a not very promising debut in the middleweight division.”

  “You should see the other guy.” Pascoe joked.

  She shuddered and turned away from the mirror. “Please don’t say that.”

  “Ah. Sorry. Just trying to sound like a Yank. I wasn’t thinking. Forgive me, please.”

  Smoothing back her hair, which felt as if it were pulling at her scalp with a thousand little hands as all the salt dried in it, she came into the main room. “It’s all right,” she said. “I can’t hide from things I do. That way lies madness—of one kind or another.”

  He tipped his head and looked at her like a curious bird in the gloom. She sat on the edge of a bed.

  “What was that thing that blew up Stern’s yacht?” she asked. “Some kind of rocket?”

  “Antitank missile. Almost certainly laser guided. It was much too big for a free-flight rocket such as an Armbrust or a Milán. And a wire-guidance system won’t work over open water. Shorts out, you see.”

  He set his drink on the little round table by his armchair and leaned forward, knitting his hands together. For the first time she noticed they were large hands, substantial hands. They looked strong. They looked out of place with the rest of his pink-cheeked, almost juvenile appearance, although she of all people knew a working archaeologist wasn’t going to have the fine, soft hands she’d somehow expected to find on the ends of the pretty young man’s arms.

  She put her arms straight back to either side and leaned back on them. She raised an eyebrow at him. “How come you know so much about it?”

  “I was with a Javelin antitank team in Northern Ireland for a year,” he said, “Royal Fusiliers. Bloody foolishness, really, since the Provos never managed to come up with any tanks.”

  “Was it dangerous?”

  “Not for us. It was after the Provos started negotiating with Downing Street. There were a lot of nasty incidents that never made it to the telly, but they were directed almost exclusively against rival drug dealers. Lucky for me I mustered out before First Battalion got stuck into that mess over in Iraq.”

  “Why were you keeping watch on Stern?”

  “Same reason you are,” he said. “We’re all looking for Solomon’s Jar, aren’t we?”

  “What put you onto Stern in the first place?”

  “You didn’t think you were the only one to know about that last-call recall trick, surely? Although to be wholly candid, I merely read the telephone number over your shoulder.”

  She laughed. “I didn’t really think about it until now. I guess I should’ve connected it all once I learned you were seeker23.”

  “You took your own sweet time coming to the Holy Land,” he told her. “Did you try the Malkuth offices in New York?”

  “The White Tree Lodge, in Kent,” she said. “You saw the card, too, I’m sure.”

  “Yes. How’d that turn out?”

  She felt her expression harden without intention. How much dare I tell him? she wondered.

  She kept it terse. She admitted having been forced to kill to escape a death sentence in the churchyard behind Ravenwood Manor. She did skip past exactly how she’d fought her way free of her would-be executioners.

  He leaned toward her, blue eyes intent. “We need to talk,” he said.

  She smiled faintly and pushed back a stray lock of hair that was tickling her forehead. She was very aware of her own stale smell of dried seawater, sweat and petroleum fractions. “I thought we were talking,” she said.

  He picked up his glass, looked into it. An inch of brown liquid stood at the base of a small pile of slumping ice cubes. He took the glass in both hands and, leaning forward, swirled it between his legs, elbows on thighs. The ice made tinkling music in the glass.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m an archaeologist. Although I believe you once characterized me as a pothunter.” She couldn’t help the last coming out with some asperity; it was the ultimate insult one archaeologist could pay another.

  “I think that whatever my suspicions were, they’ve moved well past that, Annja my dear,” Aidan Pascoe said. She found she didn’t mind him calling her that, even though he said it with an edge of sarcasm. “What I meant to ask was rather more along the lines of, are you human?”

  She laughed. “Do you expect me to turn into some kind of reptilian alien before your eyes?”

  “I’m not sure what to expect. I’d have said rubbish to all that about aliens passing as humans when I woke up this morning. That was before I saw what appears to be a very attractive and intelligent but otherwise altogether unremarkable young woman bring down an SA-366 helicopter by chucking an anchor at it.”

  “I told you, that was just a lucky—”

  He showed her a forestalling palm. “Please. I suspect we need to trust each other. To start, I’d like to be able to trust you not to insult my intelligence. Too much has gone on, from your astonishing presence of mind, not to mention competence, during our escape in Amsterdam, to that distinctively European cross-hilted broadsword you made such short work of those bully-boys with in the Old City, which mysteriously appeared and just as mysteriously vanished. What are you, Annja?”

  She sighed. “I’m afraid if I tell you the truth, you’ll really believe I’m insulting your intelligence.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  “What would you guess, if you had to?”

  “I don’t believe in superheros. Although you’d look smashing in a cape and tights. Or tights, anyway. Then again, I no longer pretend to know. I accused you of being some kind of CIA agent or special-operations type, back in that canal in Amsterdam, but that doesn’t answer it, either. There’s not a training course in the world that could teach you to make a cast like that with the anchor. Much less summon a sword out of thin bloody air. I was never the sort to swot for the SAS. But even I know that much,” he said. “So suppose you tell me, Ms. Creed.”

  “I’m on a mission from God.”

  He blinked. “You and the Blues Brothers?”

  She shrugged helplessly. “Believe it or not, that’s the least…silly…way I can think to put it. I’m not even formally religious. I was raised in a Catholic orphanage, mostly, but like a lot of kids who went through parochial school growing up, that tended to make me more defiant and antireligious than anything. Or at least mistrustful of organized religion.”

  “Very well. Go on.”

  She explained how she had found the medallion in the cave in France, how she had, without conscious intent, much less knowing how, spontaneously restored the broken blade with her touch. She mentioned Roux and what he had told her about her legacy as successor to Joan of Arc. She didn’t see any good reason to mention Garin Braden. She wasn’t sure she believed the story any more than she’d expect Pascoe would. She shrugged and looked at him.

  “Good Lord!” Pascoe exclaimed when she’d finished. “You make it sound a
s if I’ve been serially rescued by Buffy the Vampire Slayer!”

  “Well—not really. There hasn’t been any unbroken succession of champions or anything. After they lost Joan, it basically took half a millennium for conditions to be right to appoint a new champion of good. Or anoint. Whatever.”

  It was not, of course, either the whole truth or nothing but the truth. But Annja felt guilty telling him even this much. He certainly didn’t have a proverbial need to know more details—or even more correct ones. As it was she’d told him this edited version of the truth because she could only see worse problems arising from trying to stonewall him. He was keen and analytical enough to arrive at the truth on his own—and imaginative enough to concoct potentially disruptive theories if he missed the mark.

  “That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said finally. “Then again, nothing less preposterous would begin to account for what I’ve experienced in your company.”

  He rubbed his forehead. She sat in silence in the gloom and gave him time to think. It was hard. She liked him. She felt a need to be understood by him. Yet she didn’t dare give him more details than she had already. And though she didn’t think of herself as particularly adroit at relations with living people, she realized at some level the best thing she could do was bite down and hold her peace, whatever it cost, and let him sort out what he’d choose to believe.

  He raised his head. His eye met hers. They were large and luminous in the dim. After a moment he smiled.

  “Let’s get cleaned up and go for dinner,” he said. “Adventuring is hungry work, I find.”

  “HOW DOES a self-professed agnostic get selected to be the champion of good?” Pascoe asked after they returned to the room. Once more he sat on the chair while she lay on one of the beds, propped on pillows. She’d had a tougher day than he had. They had turned on the lights by the beds. It still wasn’t very bright. That seemed to suit both of them.

  Dinner had passed in uncontroversial conversation. That had been by tacit agreement. Once Pascoe accepted the situation he was in, he either had a proper sense of discretion or was taking boyish delight in playing secret agent. Or, she reckoned, both.

  “You aren’t the first one to ask that question,” she told him. “You’re not the first to get an entirely unsatisfactory answer to it, either.”

  He looked at her a moment, then laughed. “Do you believe in Him now?”

  “Well, I sort of have to. I guess. Although the impression I’m getting is that our religions don’t necessarily get all the details exactly right, let’s say.”

  “What would your illustrious predecessor say if she heard you talking like that? The angels talked to her on a regular basis, didn’t they?”

  “I think she may have been delusional,” Annja said. “Roux never really contradicted me when I suggested that to him. Although I did feel bad about it after the fact because Joan’s such a painful subject for him.”

  “So no angelic voices for you, eh?”

  She shrugged. “If angels did try to talk to Joan, they might have had their work cut out getting a word in edgewise, if you catch my meaning. That may have been what led to her downfall—trouble sorting out the signal from the background noise and all. May the spirit of my revered predecessor forgive my saying so.

  “You know, all of this isn’t any easier for me to digest than it must be for you,” she said.

  “I suppose not,” Pascoe said thoughtfully.

  “In any event, no angels have spoken to me so far that I know of.”

  “What happens if they start?”

  She smiled almost shyly. “Cross that bridge when I come to it?”

  He laughed. He had a good laugh. Solid, louder and fuller than she’d expect to come out of his somewhat slight frame.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  He blinked. “Me? No, no angels have spoken to me, either. Not that it’s ever occurred to me to listen,” he said.

  “No. I mean, what drives you? You seem just as determined as I am to find the jar. You’d have to be, to keep at it after all that’s happened to you so far.”

  “Well, I do seem to have acquired my very own guardian angel, have I not?” He smiled. “Still, I’d like to think I’d have persevered in spite of what’s happened had you never intervened. Provided I survived, of course, which I’m realistic enough to know is far from a given.”

  He sat back with his chin sunk to his chest a moment, contemplating. “I could give you a load of rubbish about desire to keep a priceless artifact out of the hands of unscrupulous men but I’ll spare you reciting the whole laundry list. I’m sure we both know it by heart by now.”

  “If we even know all the players in the game,” she said.

  “Lovely thought, that. It’s true enough, of course. Like any responsible archaeologist I detest pothunters.”

  For a moment he fell quiet. Annja had closed her eyes, resting them, but she could feel his scrutiny like the glow from a heat lamp on her cheek. He still doesn’t altogether trust me, she thought. Well, who could blame him?

  “But I have to admit, thoroughgoing rationalist and modernist that I am, I’ve always harbored a hope, deep down inside, that things like the jar are real,” he said quietly.

  “I think most of us feel that way—if we’re honest with ourselves,” Annja said, opening her eyes. “Not many of us are brave enough to say so.”

  “You think? You might be right, judging from the postings on alt.archaeo.esoterica. Then again I’m sure archaeologists aren’t any more prone to self-honesty than all the rest of the ruck. I frankly doubt I’d believe a word of your story if I hadn’t repeatedly seen you do things which defy what I once considered rational explanation. But if I’m forced to swallow one impossibility, to say nothing of an entire set of them, others become more palatable, somehow,” Pascoe said.

  “All my life I’ve wanted to make a difference, Annja. I’ve always been appalled by how much ugliness I’ve seen in the world, how much evil. War, starvation, neglect. It’s naive, I suppose, but I’ve never been able to see people suffering without wanting to help them.”

  “You’re kind,” she said.

  He leaned forward. “Think what it would be like if the jar is real, Annja. That kind of power. What couldn’t we do to make the world a better place?” His cheeks were flushed. His eyes glowed like beacons.

  “With demons, Aidan?”

  He laughed. “It sounds improbable, I know. But Solomon was a great man, a wise man. A good man, even if a lot of his contemporaries thought the worst of him for building pagan temples for his favorite wives. He didn’t use the power for evil. Perhaps he even built the temple in Jerusalem using the demons, and that’s a righteous thing, to be sure. It must be possible to subordinate the demons to one’s will for good, as well as for wicked purposes.”

  Annja thought back to what Tsipporah had told her. She hadn’t shared anything about the mysterious American-born kabbalist sage with Pascoe. But from the information she had provided, Annja suspected he was correct.

  She felt a certain disquiet.

  You’re just tired, she told herself. Being silly. He’s an innocent.

  Pascoe had relaxed for a moment. Then his intensity returned. “What do you intend to do with the jar if you get your hands on it?” he asked, eyes narrowed.

  She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know yet.”

  19

  “Ah.” The man’s teeth were brown and crooked surrounded by his short, grizzled beard. “You must mean Mad Spyros.”

  The quayside watering hole was not one of your quaint tourist tavernas. Nor did the clientele consist of tourists, glossy and well-scrubbed. Womb dark after the brilliant Ionian Sea sunshine outside, the tavern smelled of the same things its patrons did: fish, varnish, sweat and brutally harsh tobacco. It was a mixture nearly as potent as tear gas. Annja found it hard to keep smiling and not blink incessantly at the stinging in her eyes.

  Pascoe g
ave her a look. His blue eyes were clear. I’m surprised they’re not bloodshot, she thought.

  “Spyros?” she said tentatively. “Could that be your cousin, Aidan?”

  He shrugged. “Well, he’s a bit on the distant side. And I’ve never actually met him in person, you know.”

  “It is short for Spyridon,” their informant said helpfully. He was a short, thick man with bright black eyes shining from red cheeks, and a cloth cap mashed down on graying curls.

  Annja and Pascoe had spent a sweaty, footsore day tramping the dives along the waterfront in Corfu, where the hills crowded with whitewashed buildings tumbled down almost into Mandouki Harbor. They had climbed up the Kanoni road past the archaeological museum and the old fort on its island across a causeway, along the esplanade and around the tip of the peninsula to Arseniou, then along the north shore past the containership fleet landing of the old port, past the late-sixteenth-century Venetian new fort toward the new fleet landing and the Hippodrome. They were posing as a pair of tourists on a genealogical vacation, tracking down a missing relative of Aidan’s. Despite the fairness of his skin, his curly black hair made it plausible he had Levantine ancestry.

  To Annja’s eyes he looked rather Byronic, in his white shirt with open collar and sleeves rolled up and his faded blue jeans. She knew George Gordon, the sixth Baron Byron, had come to the nearby Ionian island of Cephalonia to fight in the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Turks. Indeed to Annja’s eye her companion bore a slight resemblance to the infamous poet.

  The man who had mentioned Mad Spyros spoke in Greek to his companions. They were a tough-looking lot, professional fishermen like the object of Annja and Aidan’s search. They all laughed and nodded. Most of them were short, some wiry, some wide. One tall man with a touch of bronze to his beard loomed over Annja and rumbled something in a voice like thunder. He finished his speaking with the word “Nomiki,” suggesting to Annja that was their informant’s name.