“Actually, as you may have surmised, that’s a big part of why we need to have a meeting tomorrow,” Synthe confirmed.
“I got that. Airport at eight?”
“Don’t be late.”
Steven returned to where Moody was waiting and they gathered their bags and loaded them onto the helicopter. Within a few minutes, they were airborne and heading back to Amman. Steven felt something sharp jab him in the leg, and he fished in his pocket to retrieve the offending object. Then he remembered.
“Moody. I need to ask you to do me a favor, and swear you to absolute secrecy about all of this.”
Steven sat patiently in the ornately-appointed room at the Vatican. A hushed reverence hung in the air, and even the man who brought him a cup of coffee seemed steeped in formality and dignity. He studied the art on the bejeweled, ornately-engraved walls, and estimated that any three paintings could finance a small nation’s army for a year.
A door at the far end of the room opened, and a small, white-haired man entered wearing a simple, anonymous white cassock. He approached Steven, who had stood, and motioned for him to be seated.
“I believe we have some business to discuss?” the man began in heavily accented English.
“It would appear so. I’ve already met with one gentleman today, who I’ve described my situation to, and he suggested I speak directly to you, Your Holiness.”
“I’ve been informed of your role in the events of the last week, and I first want to say that you’ve accomplished an extraordinary feat. Several. You should be extremely proud of yourself. And I don’t say that lightly.”
“Thank you.”
“So play me this tape.”
Steven pushed the button on the MP3 player and the room filled with Diego Luca’s voice. When the conversation reached an end, he turned it off and took another sip of his coffee.
“It’s good coffee,
eh
?”
“Very good.”
“Should be. There ought to be some perks to this job.”
Steven didn’t say anything.
“All right, Dr. Cross, tell me what you want.”
“I want what was promised on the tape. I’ve already gotten the money, so that part is taken care of, as are the passports. But there is still the matter of the letters…and the access to the archives,” Steven said.
“I’m told that the perpetrator of this horrible sequence of events was going to hold me up for ten billion dollars.”
“Given the circumstances, I think he felt you would have gladly paid that,” Steven acknowledged.
“Why do you want to have access to the archives? And why not stick me for ten billion dollars?”
Steven had thought about the answer to that question for a long time. He decided the truth was the best route.
“I have money. I’m not rich, but I’m comfortable. More money won’t buy me anything I don’t have already. It won’t make me younger, it won’t find me love, and it won’t save me from death. So money won’t be of nearly as much value to me as knowledge and the ability to satisfy my passion for discovery. I suppose you could say that I view having unrestricted access as worth ten billion dollars.”
He stared at Steven for some time before responding.
“I hear we bought a software company. What do I know about software? I think you should take it back. A man’s got to have something to do, and I can’t have you in the archives all day, every day.”
“You already paid for it.”
“Consider it a bonus. You earned it.”
“That’s very generous. Thank you,” Steven said.
The little man sipped his coffee; a look of deep satisfaction spread across his face. “Do you believe in God?”
“Not in the same way you do.”
The man nodded. “You can never speak or write of what took place, nor of anything you discover in the archives, unless you have my personal authorization. You understand?”
“I do. I’m not interested in how the Church conducts its affairs, or what it does or doesn’t share with the world.”
He studied Steven’s face. “But what is your opinion? Do you think it is right to keep this a secret? Do you question our wisdom in wishing to deliberate before unleashing this on the world?”
“I personally think it’s a mistake. A Church that is more interested in keeping secrets than fostering knowledge is an institution in decline. But then again, who am I to say?” Steven replied truthfully.
“Indeed. I do not make these decisions lightly, nor do I make them alone. But in the end, I must do what I believe is best for the Church, regardless of my personal sentiments.”
“I understand. Yet another reason you deserve good coffee.”
The man allowed a hint of a smile to play across his face, and then withdrew a single sheet of stationary with an ornate embossing. He picked up a fountain pen and scrawled a missive, then signed it. Finally, he affixed a seal, with his ring.
“Two letters are inefficient. One should do. I just added a sentence at the top about the service to the Church. You now have everything you’ve asked for, and I trust I can depend upon you to honor your commitment to keep our matter confidential.”
“I can speak for myself, and for the girl. I can’t commit for the CIA man.”
“Don’t worry about the Americans. I have pull there.” The man finished his coffee with a sigh and shrugged. “Realistically, even if you did talk, at this point, there’s no evidence, so it would just be another crazy claim. We hear a lot of those.”
Steven nodded. “I understand. It would never make it to theaters.”
“Exactly. Too unbelievable.”
The two men stared at each other for a few moments, and then both grinned.
Moody sat nursing a mineral water at a table in the back of a restaurant in Florence. The place didn’t open for two more hours, but he had an arrangement with the owners, as well as a key. The front door chimed, and Steven entered with Natalie on his arm. They peered through the gloom and saw him wave. Natalie showed no signs of having been shot a few short weeks before, and when she approached his table it was with her usual graceful stride. Moody stood and gave Natalie a kiss on the cheek before shaking Steven’s outstretched hand. He sat them down and offered them something to drink.
“I’d like some wine. Red. It’s been fifteen days since the surgery, and the doctor said I could have a glass after two weeks, so this is my big chance,” Natalie said.
Moody looked at Steven, and he nodded.
“You heard the lady. Make it two,” Steven said.
Moody moved across the floor to the wine cabinet near the bar and, after a few moments, returned with a ready-prepared decanter full of deep, dark Barolo. He selected three glasses, removed the cut-glass stopper, and poured them each a generous measure of wine. They toasted, and then Moody got down to business.
“We were reimbursed for all the expenses associated with the expedition, as expected.”
“Nice to hear they pay their bills on time,” Steven said.
“It looks like the hunt for you two stopped with Synthe’s bullet to the good doctor’s heart. As expected, Frank’s passing didn’t raise any stir.”
“People die all the time,” Natalie said.
“We also did a sweep of your offices and found surveillance equipment. Frank’s, no doubt. So your people are clean. It was the phone lines and modem that weren’t.”
“That’s a relief, although I never doubted it. I couldn’t see them turning on me.”
“Your buddy, Synthe, seems to have fixed things with the Roman police, by the way. My sources say that they dropped you two from their investigation. Something about that part of the file getting lost,” Moody said.
“It’s a flawed world,” Natalie observed.
“We are all cast of imperfect clay,” Steven agreed.
“I’ll drink to that,” Moody added, and they toasted again.
They savored the rich, dark wine, swirling it in the oversized glasses. It was the perfect temperature and opened up nicely, filling the room with its fragrant bouquet.
Natalie stood and excused herself to go to the bathroom. Once she was out of earshot, Moody leaned closer to Steven and spoke softly.
“We did the DNA analysis.”
“And?”
“Puts the age at two thousand years, give or take. But there was an anomaly on the rest.”
“Anomaly? What do you mean, anomaly?”
“I’m not sure how to say this, so I’ll just say it. The bone fragment was human, but it wasn’t. The DNA was very close, but it didn’t correspond to anything they’ve seen before. I had to get it classified as top secret to keep anyone from asking uncomfortable questions.”
Steven considered the news. Moody nodded.
“Holy shit.”
“Yup.”
“The world needs to know about this,” Steven said, still in shock.
“Not from me, it doesn’t. But I agree it deserves to know, for whatever that’s worth.”
Steven swirled his wine again and took another sip. He studied the light as it refracted through the glass, dancing off the ruby-rippled surface. Natalie emerged from the back and walked towards them, and Steven rubbed his face before putting his hand down flat on the table.
He fixed Moody with an intense gaze.
“Does it?”
~
Natalie and Steven ambled slowly down the sidewalk, enjoying the early evening warmth of the new Florentine summer. Hand in hand, they looked happy in the way that only new lovers do.
“The transfer to your account was confirmed today. Two million. I guess you can’t say I never did anything for you,” Steven said.
“I told you that you didn’t have to do that,” Natalie countered.
“It was mostly your fault I wound up with the money in the first place, and everything turned out okay, so what the hell…”
“Very gallant. But you’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”
Steven squeezed her hand. “Ingrate.”
“What have you done for me lately?” she asked, and stopped, tiptoeing to kiss him.
He looked deep into her incredible violet eyes and then grinned, thinking he could get lost in them forevermore. She smiled back.
He kissed her again and then whispered in her ear.
“Can you keep a secret?”
<<<<
finis
>>>>
Excerpt from King of Swords
A Thriller by Russell Blake
(c) 2011
King of Swords is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and real people, living or dead, is coincidental. Having said that, the backdrop and historical context of the novel is based in fact. The drug war in Mexico has been an ongoing confrontation between government forces and the ever-strengthening cartels – now the largest illegal drug trafficking network in the world, whose primary target market is the United States.
Thousands of police and soldiers have been killed over the last ten years, as the war has intensified due to a crackdown by pro-U.S. administrations. Cartel members slaughter one another by the thousands every year, as well as huge numbers of innocent bystanders. The brutality of the turf wars that are a constant and ongoing facet of the trade is stunning; well over a thousand children have been butchered during Mexico’s ‘lost decade’, as have countless family members of traffickers, killed in retribution or as a deterrent.
The last two Secretaries of the Interior for Mexico died in suspicious air crashes. The Mexican cartels are now the largest narcotics distribution entities in the world, with revenues that exceed those of many nation states. Roughly ten thousand people per year die as a direct result of cartel violence in Mexico.
The Sinaloa cartel is real. The Knights Templar cartel is also real, as is the Gulf cartel, the Tijuana cartel, and the Zeta cartel. New cartels pop up when the heads of old groups die, and the names change with some frequency. The only constant is the bloodshed; the natural consequence of the economics of trafficking in an illegal substance that generates in excess of fifty billion dollars a year, wholesale, for the cartels in Mexico; a country where the average person makes a hundred and sixty dollars a month.
A Description of the Tarot Card, ‘The King of Swords’
In full regalia, the King of Swords sits proudly on his throne – with a long, upward-pointing, double-edged sword clutched in his right hand, and his left hand resting lightly on his lap. A ring adorns his left Saturn finger – representing power and commitment to responsibility. The King’s blue tunic symbolizes a desire for spiritual enlightenment; his purple cape symbolizes empathy, compassion and intellect. The backrest of his throne is embellished with butterflies, signifying transformation, and crescent moons orbit around an angel situated by his left ear, positioned, perhaps, to
lend a delicate guidance. The backdrop of the sky has very few clouds, signifying pragmatic mental clarity. The trees dotting the landscape stand still, with not a rustle – reflecting the King of Swords’ stern judgment.