by Glenn Cooper
‘Your untrained eye,’ Walsingham repeated.
‘I am wholly ignorant of coded messages, my lord. Perhaps there were hidden meanings.’
‘Did you bring me the letter?’
‘I could not. He would surely have known I had taken it.’
Walsingham had a brief coughing fit. When he composed himself, he told Kelley that this was a promising development. ‘Do your utmost to look for future correspondence between Dee and the ambassador. Steal Mendoza’s letters if you can. Try to make faithful copies if you cannot. Let us see if we might discover a nest of vipers poised to strike against our lady. Earn your keep, Master Kelley. Now run along and let me convalesce in peace.’
SEVENTEEN
Cal was waiting for his Uber when Jessica called.
‘Are you at the airport yet?’ she asked.
‘Still at the house but leaving any minute.’
‘Well, be careful.’
‘I don’t think I’m going to be followed to London, Jess.’
‘Did you buy a gun yet?’
‘I ordered it the day I got my license. I’ll have it when I get back. Look, there’s something I probably ought to tell you. Eve Riley’s joining me in London.’
He didn’t know for sure that Jessica was going to be annoyed, but it was better to tell her beforehand. Her tone shifted abruptly. He could picture her squeezing her phone.
‘Oh yes? Her idea?’
‘Mine, actually. I don’t exactly know what I’m looking for. She’s the expert in this shit.’
‘I thought you said she seemed as poor as a church mouse.’
‘I sent her a ticket. We’re meeting at Heathrow.’
‘Won’t that be cozy? Separate hotel rooms?’
‘Of course. Strictly business.’
‘Yeah, business. You’re forgetting that I saw her photo. And you’re also forgetting that I know you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He knew what she meant.
‘You know exactly what I mean.’
‘Relax. She’s not my type. You’re my type.’
‘She’s got two X chromosomes. That makes her your type.’
‘I’ll be good. I promise.’
‘You’d better be. You’ve got enough people who want to kill you already.’
Cal arrived at Terminal 5 at Heathrow and took the shuttle bus to Terminal 3 to meet Eve’s flight. He sipped a Starbucks while waiting for her in the arrival hall feeling a bit guilty that he’d only bought her a coach ticket. He flew business. He’d make it up to her. Their hotel was a good one. The Bloomsbury was a place he liked to hang his hat when he had business at the British Library or the British Museum, and it was only a short walk to the Institute of Archeology. If he was feeling expansive, maybe he’d upgrade her room to match his.
When she emerged from the customs hall, she looked like a backpacking college student heading out on a European tour. She wore a denim jacket over a hippy-ish floral dress, sneakers, and her hair was in pigtails. Plus a backpack. Seeing her, he felt like a preppy with his blue blazer and khakis. It was the way he always dressed and he presumed this was her usual wardrobe. Worlds colliding, he thought, but maybe that was being melodramatic.
She seemed happy to see him, but they settled for an awkward handshake and headed to the taxi rank. On the way into London, she seemed awfully wide-eyed, dropping comments about driving on the left, the size of the cars, and her difficulty understanding the driver’s accent.
The driver overheard and offered that even his missus couldn’t understand him.
‘So, first time,’ Cal said.
‘Yep. Like I told you, the only place I’ve ever been outside the country is Mexico. If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t even have a passport.’
‘Not everyone’s a traveler.’
‘I’d travel like mad if I had any money. I’ve been asked to go to Europe for Enochian conferences before – don’t faint, they’re a real thing – but they don’t pay your way, so I never went. I’ve been to a bunch of them in the States, especially the ones in driving distance from Arizona.’
‘How are they?’ he asked. ‘Pretty sober meetings or do angel people get freaky after knocking back a few?’
She laughed at the concept of freaky angel types. ‘It’s not a wild and crazy crowd for the most part, plus I’m usually the youngest person there by a decade or three. You must travel a lot.’
‘I do, actually. Conferences, research. I’m in the UK every year or so, Israel, Turkey a lot, Rome and the Vatican usually at least twice a year.’
‘I suppose you know the Pope.’
‘I do, actually. We’ve grown quite close.’
‘I was kidding,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t. He’s an impressive guy. I can’t wait to tell him about the angels.’
They checked into the hotel and while she showered and set her alarm for a two-hour nap, Cal phoned Omar Rasouly to confirm their appointment for the next day. Rasouly’s machine picked up and Cal left a message. After a shower and a shave, he tried again but there was still no reply. Eve was easier to reach. She picked up right away and sounded eager to get out and start looking around.
Cal made a conscious effort to purge his preppy look and he appeared in the lobby in jeans and an untucked shirt. Eve had apparently made a similar decision to purge her hippie look. She was sporting a knee-length skirt and a demure blouse with flat shoes. They chuckled at each other without referencing their fashion shifts and hit the street on a perfectly glorious sunny day.
‘Hungry?’ he asked.
‘I could eat.’
He knew a good bistro in the neighborhood and they settled in at a window table watching a parade of tourists and Londoners on their lunch hour.
‘It’s so beautiful here,’ she said, ‘and so green.’
‘Where you live is beautiful too.’
‘It is, and I love it, but green is such a pleasant change to brown. Did you reach the man we’re supposed to meet?’
‘Left a couple of messages. I’ll try him again later. Anyway, we’ve got an afternoon to do sightseeing and I’m a pretty reasonable tour guide. Any idea what you’d like to see?’
She replied instantly. ‘The British Museum. Is it far?’
‘Right around the corner. One of my favorite places on planet Earth. It’s a big place. We’ll need a game plan.’
‘Oh, there’s only one thing I want to see.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Don’t you know?’
She ate like a bird. He drank like a fish. She left the restaurant full. He left with a buzz. The afternoon was warm and glowing when they headed off to the museum. He enjoyed watching her reactions to ordinary things that no longer amazed him. In truth, he wished he could recapture the way he had felt when he was a teenager seeing London for the first time, tagging along with his father who had something important to do, whatever it was, long lost to the mists of time.
The sun shone through the steel and glass ceiling of the great court of the museum. Eve took it in, smiling, and then began fast-walking ahead of Cal.
He caught up to her and said, ‘I can ask where we can find them.’
‘It’s this way,’ she said.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I just do.’
Alongside the mummies and the Rosetta Stone, the Enlightenment Room was one of the most popular exhibits. It was a huge gallery that explored the sweeping age of Enlightenment, a time when a conflagration of reason and learning spread across Europe. Cal let her lead the way. She weaved around the cases and then stopped and stared several paces from one particular display.
‘There,’ she said.
She approached it hesitantly, Cal at her heels, and when she could get no closer than the glass, he saw she was crying.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘The Sigillum Dei Aemeth, Dee’s seal of God.’
The wax seal was oatmeal-colored, faintly incised with geometric shapes and squiggly charact
ers. To Cal, it looked like an old overbaked cake that someone had left in a tin for a very long time. Next to it were a pair of smaller seals meant to sit under the legs of Dee’s table.
She was breathing hard. ‘His showstones.’
There was a small crystal ball, the size of a billiard ball, sitting on a tripod, but what drew their attention was a large obsidian mirror with a stubby handle drilled through with a hole. It was flat like Cal’s, slightly thicker and larger, but its surface was not as shiny and brilliant. Still, it was obvious why his father had referenced Dee’s mirror on the notecard.
Cal didn’t want to interrupt her reverie. He occupied himself reading the background information on Dee printed on the display placard. He waited until she sighed before he spoke up.
‘Did he use both showstones?’
‘There’s no way to know,’ she said. ‘He included a drawing of the crystal ball in one of the early diary entries but there isn’t one of the obsidian mirror. Still, I can’t believe he wouldn’t have used it, or rather that one of his scryers like Edward Kelley wouldn’t have used it. It’s the powerful one.’
‘You can tell?’
‘Oh yes, I can tell. It’s what guided me here.’
She stared for a while longer. Standing behind her he caught her reflection in the mirror, looking awfully dark and mysterious.
When she stepped away he asked, ‘You want to take a picture?’
‘There’s no need. It’s going to stay with me.’
That morning Omar Rasouly was eating a bowl of cereal in the kitchen of his north London house when the doorbell rang. The elderly man put down his spoon, blotted the milk from his lips, and slowly made his way to the front door where the silhouette of a very large man filled the frosted glass panel.
Barzani smiled when the old man opened the door and asked whether this was Professor Rasouly.
‘Yes, I’m Omar Rasouly. How can I help you?’
‘I was wondering if we could talk about a papyrus from Iraq you worked on some years ago?’
Rasouly wrinkled his face in puzzlement. ‘Are you Professor Donovan from Harvard?’
Barzani quickly replied that he was.
‘I’m terribly forgetful these days. Weren’t we meant to meet at the Institute?’
‘Yes, but I was passing your house and thought we could go together.’
‘I see. Well, come inside. As you can see I’ll need to get my shoes.’
Barzani thanked him and asked if he should remove his shoes too.
‘You’re fine. You know, you don’t look anything like Hiram.’
‘Who?’
‘Your father, Hiram Donovan.’
‘I get that a lot. The papyrus is in your office, right?’
‘Well, I think so. We’ll have to have a look, won’t we?’
A few minutes later the professor appeared with shoes and sports jacket.
‘I do hope that this isn’t one of Bettina’s days to come.’
‘Who is she?’ Barzani asked.
Rasouly went to the kitchen where a printed sheet was fixed by magnets to a board. It was a calendar with the name Bettina printed on every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday square. The sheet had the logo of a company, Home Memory Care Support.
‘She helps around the house, that sort of thing,’ Rasouly said. ‘Do you know what day this is? Is it Thursday?’
Barzani inspected the sheet and lied. ‘It’s Friday.’
‘Oh good.’
Barzani had a car parked outside Rasouly’s unruly front garden. Traffic slowed their journey into town. Rasouly was chatty at first but then got sleepy and announced he would take a short nap. Barzani told him that was fine and drove on. It took him a while to find a place to park. Once on foot, Barzani got lost but Rasouly’s mind happily kicked into gear and he led them straight to Gordon Square Garden and the Institute of Archeology. They took the lift to the third floor, and walking down the corridor one of the curators, a woman in a hijab, beamed.
‘Omar, it’s so good to see you.’
Rasouly smiled back and seemed to struggle to remember her name.
‘It’s Nadia, Omar, and I hope we can have a cup of tea together before too long.’
‘That would be marvelous, Nadia. Thank you. I’m just in to find something. I don’t come in very often, you know. Oh, this is Hiram Donovan’s son, Calvin. He’s at Harvard too I believe. Did you know Hiram?’
‘I don’t think I did,’ she said.
She greeted Barzani who mumbled a hello back then dropped his head to look at his phone. The woman told Rasouly that she looked forward to seeing him again and went on her way.
Rasouly’s office was locked. A plastic tag on his loop of keys was marked office and he opened the door. Inside, the small, windowless room to which he had been transferred when he was granted emeritus status was neat and uncluttered. A few pieces of unimportant mail had been held for him and a stack of recent and unread journals.
Barzani closed the door and folded his arms across his broad chest.
‘Why was it we’re here?’ Rasouly asked.
‘The papyrus! The papyrus that Hiram Donovan found in Iraq at Rabban Hurmizd. Before 1989. He sent it to you.’
‘Oh yes. Now where might that be?’
‘Can you look for it, please?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll do that.’
Rasouly began pulling open file drawers all the while talking to himself about old projects, old publications, old friends. Every ten minutes or so he asked what he was looking for and Barzani repeated it with mounting impatience. Finally, there was an ‘aha!’ and Rasouly pulled out a thick folder with a tab, Rabban Hurmizd Monastery – Harvard/Baghdad Excavations.
‘Let’s see what we shall see,’ the professor said, removing the folder to his desk.
Barzani hovered and asked if the papyrus was there but Rasouly ignored him because he was thumbing through papers, reading a line here, a paragraph there. He seemed focused and happy.
‘I don’t have all day,’ Barzani said.
‘Research takes time,’ Rasouly replied gently. Then he came across a letter in a pale blue airmail envelope with Rabban Hurmizd – Epigraphy scrawled in his own handwriting.
‘Maybe something here?’ Rasouly said to himself.
The old man began reading the letter. Midway through the second page he stopped and began nodding to himself.
‘That’s right. Now I recall. That’s where they are! Have a look.’
Barzani read the paragraph, grimacing. He asked Rasouly if he could keep the letter and the professor readily agreed, saying that it was good for a son to have an interest in his father’s legacy.
Then he added, ‘I should have my lunch before long. Do you know if Bettina is coming today?’
He stood up and Barzani told him to turn toward the door. The old man asked why.
‘Just do it, please.’
Rasouly did a half-turn and Tariq reached his arms around his chest and began to squeeze. The air that slowly expelled from his lungs made a low whooshing sound. He tried to speak but the only thing that came out were some guttural clicks. His face screwed into an alarmed confusion before it got dusky, then purple. The big man continued to squeeze, hard enough to prevent Rasouly from expanding his chest with air, but gently enough not to break ribs. When the old man finally went limp, Tariq kept squeezing for another couple of minutes. Then, satisfied with the result, he opened his arms and let him fall onto the floor.
He checked to make sure there was no pulse, closed the file drawer with his foot, and shut the office door with a handkerchief on his way out.
That afternoon, Cal kept ringing Rasouly’s number with increasing frustration. He took Eve to Covent Garden for dinner and an evening walkabout, and before they returned to their hotel, he told her she really had to experience a bit of pub life. He chose one about as close to a neighborhood pub as you could get in the area and insisted she try some real ale. She was a sport, sipping at her pint
while he downed a couple.
‘What are we going to do if he doesn’t answer?’ she asked over the clamor of the public bar.
‘Go to the Institute, I guess,’ he said, worried that he might have dragged her halfway around the world for a non-meeting.
After his third pint he got a little tipsy and then he got a little pushy, exhorting her to finish her drink before they left. It was bad luck to leave beer in the glass, he told her, making it up. The result was that she got tipsy too and they both laughed their way back to the hotel. In the lobby he caught himself. A pretty woman. Booze. A hotel. Was his promise to Jessica just a load of nonsense? Could he really not control himself?
‘I’m going to call Rasouly one more time,’ he told her. ‘Let’s meet for breakfast and if I still haven’t reached him, we’ll head over to the Institute.’
‘My head’s spinning,’ she said. ‘What do they put in their beer here, anyway?’
‘A shit-ton of alcohol, that’s what.’
When the lift stopped on her floor he asked if she could manage and when she said she’d be fine, she touched his arm to thank him for dinner. He smiled and let the door close behind her.
The following morning was bright but in the restaurant, Cal’s mood was stormy. Rasouly still wasn’t picking up and there was nothing to do but head over to the campus and make inquiries there. Eve seemed to pick up on his tension and neither of them talked much on their brief walk to Gordon Square.
When they rounded the park onto Endsleigh Place they saw that the street in front of the Institute of Archeology was clogged with police cars and an ambulance. A knot of Institute workers was on the street chatting and smoking. A police officer stood on the entrance stairs checking for university badges.
Cal went up to him and asked what was going on.
‘Nothing that ought to concern you, sir. Are you an employee?’
‘No, a visitor.’
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘Yes, we’re going to meet one of the members of staff.’
‘We’re just holding off on admittance for a short while until our incident team is finished.’
‘Could I just ring up to Dr Rasouly’s office to see if he’s there?’