by Alex Archer
Preoccupied initially with assessing the casualties, Annja realized with a shock he was right. The yellow metal objects lying on the floor among the human wreckage were jars of bright brass. She knelt and picked one up that lay well away from one of the several broad pools of blood. It had the shape of a globe with a narrow funnel thrust into it from above, with two surprisingly delicate handles curving down away from the top, ending in upward-curled knobs.
“It’s the same as the one I found on Sir Martin Highsmith’s mantel in Kent,” she said, holding it out toward Aidan. “Down to the characters engraved on it.”
He slipped past her. Either he had reasserted his self-control or simply gone numb; he moved in a brisk, businesslike fashion. “They’re all identical,” he said.
He hunkered by a wooden crate whose lid had been pushed in. Inside stood a dozen of the jars, encased in bubble wrap. “And look at this,” he said. “A shipping manifest.”
22
It was raining heavily when they emerged from the front door. But the street wasn’t deserted, as a quick check had indicated. As Annja and Aidan ran out, hoping anyone who saw them would believe they were sprinting from doorway to doorway in the downpour, a tall, slim figure stepped out of an alleyway and approached them. The woman was holding an umbrella above a head of long, dark hair with a white streak above the brow.
“Tsipporah?” Annja asked as she and Aidan skidded to a halt.
The older woman smiled. “You were expecting maybe Madonna?”
“Well—not a whole lot less than you,” Annja said. “Didn’t you tell me I wouldn’t see you again?”
“Change of plans. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your handsome young man?” she asked.
“Do you have someplace else we could go,” Annja said, “out of the rain and out of sight? Like, right now?”
“Of course. Follow me.”
She turned and walked at a businesslike pace down the street away from the Israel Antiquities Authority office. Annja and Aidan followed, crowding under her umbrella. In Annja’s case, anyway, it was as much because to do otherwise would look suspicious, She was numb and pretty oblivious to getting wet. The young Englishman looked confused and more than a little suspicious, but said nothing.
At the end of the block Annja turned and looked back. Through the blinds on the front window of the building they had just left she saw a blue flash. Then with an almost dainty tinkling of glass the window blew out ahead of a billow of yellow flame.
Tsipporah stopped and turned back. “Natural-gas explosion,” she said. “Accidents happen. Or do they?”
Annja looked at Aidan, then at the older woman. “No accident,” she said, “as if you didn’t know. They had a gas feed for Bunsen burners. It got left open. And somebody left a cigarette burning in an ashtray in the basement.”
Fire was billowing upward out the front window, and smoke streamed away from the flat roof. Tsipporah nodded. “I like your style, girl.”
“SO DR. DROR WAS INVOLVED with importing and selling fake jars of Solomon,” Tsipporah said, sitting back from the card table set in the repair bay of a small garage off Chaim Weizmann Street, east of the now-destroyed antiquities authority office toward Kishon Harbor. The family that owned the garage, Tsipporah assured Annja and Aidan, was on holiday in Jaffa for a few days; no one would disturb them here.
Why exactly Tsipporah had picked the place, or how she had gained access to it—or even known about it— Annja had no clue. For that matter she didn’t feel up to hazarding a guess as to why they weren’t holding their discussion in the garage’s business office. The fact it was small and cluttered and almost every horizontal surface was stacked with papers, work orders, receipts and God knew what else may have had something to do with it. In their brief association Annja had figured out that Tsipporah did things according to her own agenda. She probably had good reasons for them. But she was unlikely to explain. So they sat in the murky gray light filtering out of the rainy sky through windows grimy and fly specked, sipping cheap Negev wine from colorful plastic picnic cups.
“As you’re probably aware, various members of the antiquities authority were implicated a couple of years ago in fabricating the fake ossuary alleged to belong to Jesus’s brother, James,” Aidan said.
“I had heard about that, yes,” Tsipporah said with a faintly ironic smile.
“It would appear Dror and his confederates turned the scheme on its head. Or perhaps inverted it, would be more accurate. Coming into possession of the genuine artifact, they contrived to produce replicas of it to sell to avid collectors, New Age aficionados and religious zealots around the world.”
Annja shifted on her folding chair, not entirely comfortable in her new lightweight cotton dress, white with little floral prints on it, which she was quite convinced was either transparent in certain light or would become so if she ventured into the rain in it. After stashing her and Aidan in the garage, which smelled inexplicably of boiled cabbage as strongly as automotive grease, Tsipporah had nipped off to find replacements for Annja’s shirt and slacks, which were pretty liberally spattered with blood. She had come back in a matter of minutes with the dress, presumably from a local market.
“Why not sell the real thing?” Tsipporah asked, leaning back at ease with her hair spilling in great waves down her shoulders.
Aidan shrugged. “Perhaps a lingering respect for the genuinely unparalleled value of the artifact to archaeology. Maybe after cashing in as much as possible from selling the fakes, Dror intended to see the genuine article discreetly into the possession of the antiquities authority.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps I’m giving the good doctor the benefit of too much doubt, and he just realized he could make more money selling fake jars a hundred times than the real one once.”
“Why wouldn’t he try to make use of its power himself?” Annja wondered.
“Probably he didn’t believe in its power. He could have authenticated it readily enough through metallurgy and electron spin resonance dating. But if he had believed, he probably wouldn’t have bothered with the counterfeiting, since if I recall correctly legend holds that the reason the jar was dug up in the first place, and the famous seal removed, was to use the demons to find hidden treasure.”
“You’re a most knowledgeable young man,” Tsipporah said with a smile.
Annja stifled a surge of irritation that the smile was returned. It may have been that she kept seeing the older woman in softening light, but she looked more than handsome to Annja. And Aidan seemed more appreciative than she liked. She chided herself for being ridiculous.
“It didn’t do him much good in the end, though,” Annja said.
“It most certainly did not,” Tsipporah said. “It seems he encountered one of the Goetic demons. Marchosias. He’s big and bad—one of the worst. But you stood up to him and won. Not everybody could do that. You’ve justified your role as champion, Annja Creed.”
“Thanks. But it wasn’t much of a fight. Not really. He—the dog he was possessing—just jumped straight at me. And I—” She shrugged. She was a little uncomfortable repeating the details, for fear of setting off the animal-loving side of Aidan again. “I would’ve expected him to be a cagier opponent, I guess.”
“Don’t underestimate either the demon or yourself. Note I don’t say his name. I won’t again, and I suggest you don’t. They can hear their names from a long way off. What you did was confront him and stand. That’s what makes you special. Pure moral and spiritual courage.
“I’d say he knew the form he was occupying stood no real chance against you, armed as you were with the sword. So he decided on an all-or-nothing assault that might get lucky—or might intimidate you into not resisting. It’s not as if he had anything to lose at that point.”
“Nothing to lose?” Aidan burst out. “Annja killed him.”
“She killed his host, you mean,” Tsipporah said. “Do you think you could hurt a demon, or even cause him serious discomfort, when he’s in ano
ther’s body? If he appeared in his own form as a winged wolf, the sword might do him harm—I can’t say, and I’m really unwilling to speculate. It may have caused him physical pain. But only momentarily.”
“And the dog?” Annja asked feeling terrible.
“There was no dog. Except the meat shell. It wasn’t possessed, girl. What you encountered was a rare phenomenon the Catholic Encyclopedia calls demonic obsession. It means the original occupant’s mind, will and soul have been flat-out evicted. The demon isn’t sharing the space, the way it does in possession. You’re dead and gone. It’s easier with an animal, obviously,” Tsipporah explained.
Annja shuddered. She felt a stab of pity for the poor dog, and wondered if it might linger as a ghost, after being turned out of its own body by the demon. But she felt a strange, rather silly sense of relief that she hadn’t really been the one to kill the poor thing.
“Do you think someone summoned him and sent him to visit those people?” she asked. Despite sharing Aidan’s distaste for artifact forgers, she didn’t share his tacit but unmistakable feeling that Dror, at least, had got what was coming to him. Not for the first time she noted that her companion, while a sweet enough young man, and definitely an innocent at heart, still possessed a not altogether attractive self-righteous streak.
“More than likely,” Tsipporah said. “It wouldn’t be too characteristic for a demon to act so directly on his own. But don’t forget the demons have their own stake in this. I can’t help wondering if the extreme violence you saw might indicate the demons’ own mounting frustration at not being able to find the jar themselves.”
“But the demons are supposed to be good at finding treasure,” Aidan said. “Why can’t they find the jar the same way?”
“The jar has ways of avoiding discovery through magical means. The demons are flying as blind as the rest of us in this.” Tsipporah turned her intense dark gaze full on Annja. “You seemed to react pretty strongly to something I said, there.”
“Can they do that to anyone?” Annja felt tremendous fear once again.
“Can they tempt you? That’s up to you,” Tsipporah said.
Annja felt her heart pounding. “But I thought—” Her voice dwindled into futile nothingness.
“You thought you’d be immune?” Laughing softly, Tsipporah patted her cheek. “You’re a sweet child. But occasionally, not so bright. You have to choose between right and wrong. Every minute of every day. Just like the rest of us. Only, now, even more so. You think maybe it should be easier on you than on the average shlemiel?”
Annja could find nothing to say.
Tsipporah studied Annja a moment. “Interesting. You may have attracted some unfortunate attention, young lady.
“But believe it or not,” Tsipporah said, “the reason I broke my earlier resolve and looked you up again, Annja, had nothing to do with our friends from the jar. Or only peripherally. I have some information about the human players that might prove useful to you.”
“Tell me,” Annja said.
“First, Sir Martin Highsmith and his White Tree Lodge. He and his little chums desire the power of the jar to remake the planet. They wish to overturn the modern world and restore all to a state of nature.”
“He did seem pretty nostalgic for the Paleolithic when I spoke to him,” Annja said.
“If not the Pleistocene, before there were any nasty people running around bothering the animals. Since their little plans envision overthrowing the whole order of the world, undoing all of civilization and technology and reducing the Earth’s population to a few thousand happy hunter-gatherers, it’s safe to assume they won’t hesitate to kill anyone who gets in their way. But I guess you’ve had a bit of firsthand experience of that, haven’t you?”
Annja nodded.
“Now, Mark Peter also wants the power to do good for everybody, whether they like it or not.”
“Mark Peter?” Annja said. “You mean Stern?”
“He’s dead,” Aidan said. “I don’t know if you follow the news, but someone blew up his yacht off Jaffa with an antitank guided missile. About two minutes after our dear Annja leaped over the rail into the sea.”
“What interesting lives you young people lead these days. I do occasionally see a television news broadcast, when I can’t help it. I’ve even been known to go on-line a time or two. As it happens I’m aware of all the things you said. And one thing more. Stern wasn’t on the yacht when the mafiya blew it up,” Tsipporah said.
Annja frowned. “But I had just finished talking to him.”
“Really? Just that instant? You walked up on deck and, wham?”
“Well—not exactly.” She described her encounter with Eliete von Hauptstark.
“So you might have been a bit distracted for a minute or two. Long enough for Mark Peter to grab a mask and some tanks and roll over the seaward rail, where his Russian minders wouldn’t spot him. A resourceful boy, is Mark Peter. Gotta give him that. A certified scuba diver, too.”
“But why would he do that?” Annja asked, shocked by the turn of events.
“Maybe because somebody tipped him off,” Tsipporah said.
Aidan exhaled loudly. “I thought nobody turned on the Russian mafiya,” he said.
“Somebody turns on everybody,” Tsipporah said. “The mafiya have some people in it who are terrifyingly smart and some who are terrifyingly brutal, and sometimes they’re the same. They have a total lack of scruples and a healthy respect for the power of terror. All true. But it isn’t true nobody ever turns on them. That’s just propaganda they spread, with plenty of help from various police agencies. The same way the Western defense establishment used to go along with the Soviet army’s policy of vastly exaggerating its capabilities and combat worth. It’s budget-positive behavior.”
“Still, why would anyone risk crossing people like that for the sake of a man like Stern?” Aidan asked.
Tsipporah shrugged. “Why would anyone help the Russians against him, for that matter? You think the mafiya ran that hit on Stern’s yacht without some sort of cooperation inside the Israeli government? Maybe it was just corruption, maybe it was a disagreement, let’s say, with some of Stern’s aims and methods—such as the covert way he’s been arming radical settler groups to fight the central government. Maybe it was both. Now, I don’t know, but I suspect the likeliest answer to how Stern knew to go over the side in advance of that missile was that somebody in government got wind of the plan, didn’t like it and tipped him off. Maybe it was even one of his followers. Somebody outside the mafiya would, I grant you, have a lot less trepidation about putting a spike in their wheel than an insider.”
She shrugged. “We’ll never know, likely. Does it matter that much? Stern escaped, he’s still in the game as much as before—and now, being officially dead and all, he’s got a lot more scope for action, which would be good to keep in mind. Are the ins and outs that important?”
“Not really,” Annja admitted.
Aidan was looking at the older woman with his head tipped to the side and a hard little smile. “If your mystic arts tell you all this,” he said, “why don’t they show you where Solomon’s Jar is?”
Tsipporah laughed. “How do you know they don’t, and I’m not telling you? Seriously, I can’t trace the jar. It has ways of disguising itself, you might say, from spiritual detection. But the information I’m giving you now isn’t quite so esoteric in origin.”
“Ha! I knew it!” Aidan leaned forward. “You’re intelligence. Or counterintelligence. Mossad or Shin Bet.”
Tsipporah laughed again. “Whoa! Slow down, cowboy. You’re riding that there horse too far, too fast. Let’s just say I have my sources in this plane—and if they’re a bit on the occult side, using the actual meaning of the word, well, a girl’s entitled to her secrets, isn’t she?”
“But you do know for a fact that Stern is still alive?” Annja asked.
“Oh, yes. And not too happy about the loss of his yacht and crew—and his Brazi
lian supermodel. But he probably writes them all off as sacrifices necessary for spiritual progress—his own. And the good of humanity, of course.
“He’s drawn Israeli fanatics, especially among the settlers resisting evacuation of the occupied territories, to help him with promises of magically rebuilding the temple and creating a globe-spanning Israeli empire. He’s also got well-heeled, rapture-happy U.S. fundamentalists bankrolling him big time with promises of kicking off Armageddon, also by restoring the temple.”
Tsipporah lit a cigarette. “But he has no intention of doing so. What he wants is for the demons to make him king of the world. For the children, of course.”
“Did he really do that?” Annja asked.
“Who, sweetie? You got me a bit confused.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t very clear. King Solomon. Did he really use the demons to build the temple in one night?”
For a moment Tsipporah looked at her through a cloud of smoke. “No,” she said. “Not literally. The temple yarn is just a metaphor. As we’ve seen, the demons have a hard time acting directly in our world. Shaping and hoisting blocks of stone is a little hands-on for their capabilities.”
“What about our Russian friends?” Aidan asked. “What’s their interest in the jar? Or have they strayed so far from dialectic materialism that they’re believing in evil spirits now, too?”
“You’d be surprised just what most Russians—including some very highly placed ones—did believe during the Soviet years. But as it happens their interests in the jar are impeccably materialistic enough to satisfy the most doctrinaire Marxist. Money. They’ve accepted a commission from an oligarch who’s a rich and powerful collector. He’s a total atheist. He basically wants to put it in his personal museum and leave it there under massive guard, so he and only he can look at it when he wants to. World without end, amen.”
Aidan tossed back the last of his drink. “How selfish!” he exclaimed in disgust.