Gus let Leonard lead him out of the van. They were parked on a busy street, and the traffic hurtling past seemed louder and faster than any Gus had ever seen before. Also, it all seemed to be going in the wrong direction, but Gus assumed that he was merely suffering from jet lag or van lag or tied-up lag.
Fortunately Gus didn’t have to worry about crossing the street. Leonard pulled him away from the curb and down a tree-laden path that led away from the traffic.
“Where are we going?” Gus whispered to Shawn as Leonard came closer to Chip.
“Not to the London Eye, that’s for sure,” Shawn said loudly. “No one actually believes that’s where the sword is.”
Chip cuffed Shawn across the back of the head with his free hand. “Shut up.”
Gus glanced up to see that Leonard was eying Chip suspiciously. But before he could stoke that particular fire further, the path rounded a curve and they found themselves at their destination.
At least Gus assumed it was their destination, because the path ended at the banks of a wide gray river that even he knew to be the Thames. And because both Polidori and Kitteredge had stopped and were staring up at an enormous tapering pillar of reddish granite that sat on a huge marble base. The obelisk towered at least six stories above them, covered on all four sides by ancient hieroglyphics. Bronze sphinxes watched it from either side.
“What is that?” Gus whispered to Shawn.
“Looks like a big rock to me,” Shawn whispered back. “Aside from that, your guess is as good as mine.”
“But you made them bring us here,” Gus said.
“Did I?” Shawn said.
Gus thought back on the conversation in the warehouse. What had Shawn said? As Gus played it back he realized that Shawn hadn’t actually said anything specific. He’d restated the words in the poem, and Kitteredge and Polidori had filled in the blanks.
“I can tell you what it isn’t,” Shawn said loudly. “And that’s the London Eye. Because that’s over there.” Shawn pointed across the river, where a gigantic Ferris wheel towered over all the surrounding buildings. “Clever of them to bring us here where they can keep an eye on it—and still keep you away.”
Leonard looked longingly at the wheel until Chip shoved him toward the stone pillar.
As Shawn and Gus were led up to the pillar’s base, Polidori and Kitteredge were already deep in speculation.
“Is it possible?” Kitteredge said in wonder. “Have we finally uncovered the mystery of Excalibur?”
Shawn glanced up at the pillar. “If that’s the sword, Arthur must have been a pretty big guy,” Shawn said.
“This is Cleopatra’s Needle, you fool,” Polidori said.
“So the sword is even bigger?” Shawn said. “Because a sword’s got to be bigger than a needle.”
“Professor Kitteredge!” Gus tried to rush to him, but Leonard held him back. “This man is your mortal enemy. Stop now before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late,” Kitteredge said sadly. “I know he’s going to kill me after this, and he will have the sword. But he is letting me finish my life’s work first.”
“Do you think he might do us the same favor?” Shawn said. “Because I’ve always seen my life’s work as dying at ninety-three.”
“I am sorry that won’t be possible,” Polidori said. “But at least you have the privilege of seeing one of the world’s great mysteries solved first.”
Chapter Forty-three
Gus tried to pull away from Leonard. He wanted to run to the professor and shake some sense into him. But he couldn’t get free, and even if he could, he knew all the shaking in the world wouldn’t do any good. Kitteredge was in the grip of an obsession, and it would never let him go. Gus knew that because it had dragged him in, too, and if he’d spent any more time on it, he might not have been able to escape, either.
“It’s the sword’s resting place,” Polidori said. “It has to be. It fits the poem perfectly: ‘Let not my rusting tears make your sword light! Ah! God of mercy, how he turns away!’ Can’t you see it?”
Shawn and Gus looked up at the pillar.
“I see a big rock,” Shawn said.
“It was you who gave us the final clue,” Polidori said.
“That was the spirits,” Shawn said. “They didn’t bother with subtitles.”
“We should have seen this all along,” Polidori said. “The obelisk was erected in 1877, just five years before Rossetti painted that last picture.”
“But decades after the poem was written,” Kitteredge said. “That was what kept me from understanding the truth. The fact that the verse itself was not written to be a clue to the puzzle, but that Rossetti and Morris chose to construct their clue out of an existing work.”
“Well, sure, if you’d just said that before, we all would have gotten it,” Shawn said.
“Tears are water that runs down from the eye,” Polidori said. “In this case, that has to be the eye of the Needle. Tears that appear to be rusty because of the red granite it’s made of.”
“Of course, that could have meant so many things,” Kitteredge said. “But the next line is what seals it. ‘Ah! God of mercy, how he turns away!’ That could be no place but here.”
“Uh-huh,” Gus said.
“Look at the sphinxes,” Polidori said. “They should be guarding the obelisk, but instead they seem to be looking at it. That’s because they were installed backward—they turn away!”
“Which would mean nothing, unless you know that the golden cherubim on the biblical Mercy Seat are actually believed to be sphinxes,” Kitteredge said. “This has to be the place.”
“It all seems to fit,” Shawn said. “Except for one thing. What about the eye?”
Polidori stepped up to the obelisk and rapped on the marble pedestal it sat on. “In here,” he said. “The eye of the needle. It has to be.”
“When the obelisk was erected, they put a time capsule in the base,” Kitteredge said. “It contained all the usual things you might find in such a container—the day’s newspapers, a Bible, a portrait of Queen Victoria.”
“And the sword of King Arthur?” Gus said.
“You’d think someone would have noticed,” Shawn said.
“When Rossetti’s wife, Lizzie, died, he placed the manuscripts of his most recent poems in the casket with her,” Kitteredge said. “Several years later he was desperate for money, and his only prospect was the publication of those poems. So he sneaked into the graveyard in the middle of the night, dug up his wife’s grave, and took the papers back.”
“Is it such a stretch to believe he and Morris would repeat that stunt with the sword?” Polidori said.
“If you’ve stretched things this far, why not?” Shawn said. “So what do we do next? Steal the pillar?”
“This is the point at which our destinies diverge,” Polidori said. “Professor Kitteredge, Chip, and I are going to wait here until long after dark, at which time we will attempt to find the mechanism to open the time capsule. I’m afraid that you will be going with Leonard to a slightly less scenic spot.”
For the first time since they had left the warehouse, Kitteredge seemed to be aware of the reality of the situation. “There’s no reason for that,” he pleaded. “Let them stay—at least until they see the sword.”
“You can describe it to them when you see them in heaven,” Polidori said. “Leonard.”
Leonard took the van keys out of Chip’s outstretched hand and dropped them in his pocket, then grabbed Shawn’s arm with one hand and Gus’ with the other.
“I have a better idea,” Shawn said. “Why don’t you just have Leonard hit us over the head and dump us into the river right here?”
“Thanks for the suggestion, but I’d prefer not to bring the police down to this particular spot,” Polidori said.
“What police?” Shawn said. “Put rocks in our pockets; no one will ever know.”
“Except all the tourists lined up for the boat tour below,”
Chip said. “Nice try.”
“Then let Chip take us,” Shawn said. “Leonard can stay here.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said. “I’d like to see the sword.”
“Chip’s been my partner in this for years,” Polidori said. “He deserves to be here when we retrieve it.”
Leonard looked unhappy. He didn’t move.
“It’s okay, Leonard,” Shawn said soothingly. “I’m sure they’ll still be here when you get back. It’s not like they’re going to wait here until you’ve gone, and then make a dash for the real hiding place.”
Gus felt Leonard’s grip loosen on his arm a little. “Sure—they already told you there’s no way the sword’s at the London Eye,” Gus said. “They wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“Not to you, Leonard,” Shawn said. “You know how much they think of you.”
For a second, no one moved. Then Leonard let go of Shawn and Gus. His hand dug in a pocket and came out with a pistol. He leveled it at Chip.
“Chip takes them,” Leonard growled. “I wait for the sword.”
“Put that away, you fool,” Polidori hissed. “Don’t you realize where you are?”
“I’m not up front with the smart guys. I know that,” Leonard said.
“That’s because you’re not smart,” Chip snapped. “Now put that gun back in your pocket.”
“It’s a little too heavy,” Leonard said. “Stretches out the fabric. Maybe if I lightened it a little. Just by the weight of a couple of bullets.”
He kept the gun and his gaze aimed straight at Chip. Which meant he didn’t see Polidori reaching into his own pocket and pulling out his own pistol.
“I told you to put that away,” Polidori said. “I should kill you right here. But there’s no more time. We have to move—now!”
Chip pushed past Leonard’s gun and grabbed Gus’ arm.
“What’s going on?” Gus whispered to Shawn as Chip started to pull him away. “What happened?”
“Nothing yet,” Shawn said. “But there’s a funny thing about England. It’s—”
Something hit Gus in the back and knocked him to the ground. He threw out his hands to protect his face as he fell, landing hard on his palms. He tried to turn around to see what had struck him, but before he could move, someone grabbed his wrists and whipped plastic cuffs around them. He lifted his head, but all he could see was a swarm of black uniforms and yellow Windbreakers.
“—the biggest surveillance state in the world,” Shawn said as he was cuffed. “You can’t go anywhere in public without the police seeing you.”
Chapter Forty-four
If it had occurred just a day earlier, Gus would have thought the flight back to the States was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Handcuffed to his seat, accompanied by a uniformed U.S. marshal, he knew that everyone who walked by his row was staring at him and wondering what he had done. But compared to the ride in Polidori’s van, this was better than the luxury flight in Flaxman Low’s private jet.
And spending ten hours flying back to Santa Barbara was definitely preferable to ten years in an English jail, which was what their arresting officer had originally threatened them with. That threat began to ease when it became obvious that neither they nor Kitteredge was carrying a gun, and that there seemed to be little with which to charge them. When a routine search of their names turned up the California warrants, the English government was only too happy to turn them over to American officials.
That wasn’t the case with the Polidoris. They would be going away for a long time, especially once the police started to inventory what turned out to be multiple warehouses of stolen antiquities. It seemed that a certain division of Scotland Yard had long been suspicious of Polidori and Son Antiques, and now planned to devote substantial resources to uncovering every illegal transaction in the firm’s long history. That task would prove to be substantially easier once Leonard started talking about everything he’d been involved with, starting with directions to the barn containing Malko’s body.
“Do you realize what this means?” Gus had said to Shawn while they sat in a holding cell waiting for the marshal to transport them to the airport. “They’re going to break up the entire Cabal.”
Shawn stared at him. “Maybe you want to join Professor Kitteredge in the other cell,” he said. “This one is reserved for sane people.”
“What?” Gus said. “You can’t still be denying the Cabal exists. They nearly killed us.”
“An antiques dealer nearly killed us,” Shawn said. “Which, by the way, is nothing to brag about if you happen to tell this story to that blond sales rep at next year’s Christmas party.”
“He wasn’t just an antiques dealer,” Gus said. “He’d spent his life searching for the sword, just like Kitteredge said.”
“Yes, just like Kitteredge said,” Shawn agreed. “Because that’s where Polidori heard about it. Or, more precisely, his son heard about it from Kitteredge in class. And Chip told Daddy. And the hunt was on.”
Gus was about to object, then stopped to think it through. “You mean, this entire thing started with Kitteredge’s obsession? And that’s all there ever was to it?”
“What did I tell you about the third kind of conspiracy theorist?” Shawn said. “They’re the ones who are dangerous to themselves and others, because they’re smart enough to invent theories that are so plausible and compelling they can make otherwise sane people believe them.”
Gus thought that over. There was still one problem. “But that means the poem wasn’t really a clue,” he said. “Or the painting. That fifty-five on the two shields. Why was that there?”
“It wasn’t,” Shawn said. “Unless you chose to look at it that way. There were a couple of animals on the shields. Everything else came from Kitteredge, with some help from Low.”
Gus still couldn’t let go. “But it led us to the Needle. You led us to the Needle.”
“I didn’t lead us anywhere,” Shawn corrected him. “I made up some nonsense about a line of poetry, and they invented meanings for every word. It’s what Kitteredge has been doing for years.”
Gus still wasn’t convinced. There had been such an elegant complexity to Kitteredge’s theories that he hated to give it all up for the sad reality of coincidences and misunderstandings. But the more he worked it through, the less persuasive the evidence became, and by the time they were halfway across the Atlantic he thought back on his belief in the Cabal with the same sort of embarrassed nostalgia that accompanied memories of his once firm faith that Phil Joanou would eventually surpass Steven Spielberg in the directing hall of fame.
But there was still one piece to the puzzle that Gus couldn’t figure out. He’d mentioned it to Shawn in the cell, but the answer he got back didn’t make him feel any better.
“So if there’s no Cabal, and Polidori is just a crook with an antiques business, who killed Clay Filkin?” he said.
“It’s still possible it’s Kitteredge,” Shawn said. “He did have the bloody murder weapon in his pocket. Although our lives are going to be a lot easier if he didn’t do it. I don’t think the penalties are quite as harsh for helping an innocent man escape.”
Gus had been so busy assuming he’d never see his home again that he’d forgotten what was waiting for him there. “I’m sure he didn’t,” Gus said. “Someone must have framed him. And whoever it was must have stolen the painting as well.”
“I hope you’re right,” Shawn said. “And I hope we can figure it out before we get back to Santa Barbara. Because if we can’t, we’re going to have to blame it on the Cabal. And I don’t think anyone else is going to buy that.”
Gus groaned. “If only that picture hadn’t been stolen,” he said. “If Kitteredge had been allowed to look at it for as long as he wanted, we never would have gotten involved like this.”
Shawn was about to respond, but then he stopped himself. A smile spread over his face. “We kept thinking it was the Cabal that stole the painting.”
“But there was no Cabal.”
“So who had a reason to steal it?” Shawn said.
“I don’t know,” Gus said. “Anyone who wanted a painting worth millions of dollars.”
“Maybe,” Shawn said. “Or maybe it was someone who didn’t.”
Chapter Forty-five
Gus had always liked this courtroom. When he’d been here before, either as a witness or as just a spectator, he’d always taken time to admire the high beamed ceiling, the bright white plaster walls, the oaken benches, and the murals of Santa Barbara’s founding painted on the back wall.
But now that he was sitting at the defendants’ table, waiting with Shawn and Kitteredge for their arraignment to be over, he couldn’t remember why he’d been so enthusiastic about it. All he wanted was to get out as quickly as possible.
Whether that was going to happen would be determined in the next few moments. They had been brought straight from the airport to the courthouse for their arraignment. The district attorney had offered them some time to meet with their state-appointed attorney first, but Shawn had merely slipped him a list of names and sent him away. Gus had expected Kitteredge to say something, but he’d been completely silent since they’d been arrested in London. It was as if learning that the Cabal had never existed had sucked all the life from his body.
Now the courtroom was packed with the people Shawn had asked the lawyer to fetch. Lassiter was sitting right behind Gus, his badge gleaming brightly on his belt, flanked by Henry Spencer and Chief Vick. It took Gus a moment to recognize the thin man sitting a few rows back, because he’d seen Hugh Ralston, the museum’s executive director, only that one night. But Flaxman Low he spotted right away. And there were two uniformed officers he thought were the ones who’d wanted to hire them for the bachelor party.
Gus had sat silently through the first parts of the proceedings except for the moment when the white-bearded judge came in and he was ordered to rise. He’d only half listened as the prosecutor, a sharkish young woman named Sarah Willingham, had laid out the charges against them, although that half was enough to convince him that they’d all be going away for a long time.
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