Gold of Kings (18 page)

Morgenthal shaped the words into bullets. “Titus Flavius Josephus, and Yochanan Ben Zachai.”

Storm handed over the photograph.

Morgenthal studied the page, then demanded, “What is this?”

“I don't know. But I am going to find out.”

W
HEN STORM AND HARRY PILED
into the car waiting by the Georgetown hall's entrance, Emma Webb said simply, “You have to leave. Immediately.”

Harry responded with the same calm he had displayed under attack. “Leave town?”

“I had something a little farther in mind.” Emma gunned the motor. “Where are your things?”

“The Marriott Courtyard out by National.”

She burned rubber around the curve and raced through the Georgetown gates. “Did you register under your own names?”

“No reason not to,” Harry replied. “At the time.”

She hit an open stretch of road and punched the car hard. Storm turned in her seat so she could watch Harry in the backseat. His calm, pin-point focus was all the alert she needed. “What's going on?”

Emma hit sixty across the Key Bridge. She slowed to merge with traffic, swung onto the parkway, and jammed the metal hard. The charmless high-rises of Rosslyn swept by in a blur. “Say you had to disappear. You've got one chance to go to the heart of the matter and work things through. Where would you head?”

Storm recalled, “Sean was planning a trip to Toronto and Istanbul.”

Emma did all but stand the car on two wheels to make the hotel
entrance. She pulled under the front awning and slammed on the brakes hard enough to rock them all. “You have thirty seconds and not an instant longer. No, wait. Give me your credit card, I'll check you out.”

Emma was already back in the car when they returned downstairs. She handed Storm her card and the hotel receipt. “The desk clerk stiffed you for the night's full charges. I flashed the badge but it didn't help.”

“Will you tell us what's wrong?”

“Soon.” Emma appeared grim but calm, not so much tense as extremely focused. “Right now we need to work on your final destination. Toronto's out. The extradition between Canada and the United States is so tight they'll meet you with a warrant at plane side.”

Storm said, “Extradition?”

Harry leaned back in his seat. Glanced out the side window. He might have laughed.

Emma speared him through the rearview mirror. “Something about this strikes you as funny?”

He smiled at Storm. “Answer the lady's question while you still have time.”

Storm took a breath. She could hardly believe she was saying the words. “Istanbul first. Then Cyprus.”

“Forget traveling on to Cyprus for now,” Harry said. “I'll handle that bit.”

Emma asked, “You both have your passports?”

Storm replied, “I always carry mine.” Harry just smiled.

Emma opened her phone, punched speed dial, said simply, “Istanbul. Roger. Both of them.”

Storm said to Harry, “What is going on?”

Harry held up one finger. Wait.

Emma shut the phone and focused on the road for a time, grinding something so hard it clenched the muscles in her cheeks. Finally she said, “Jack Dauer is a menace who wields power like he's firing a Taser. He's also a lousy investigator. And he's got you in his sights.”

Harry said, “You've given this a lot of thought.”

“Jack Dauer is very territorial. He's got a rep for monopolizing all credit, all info. Everything he digs up goes straight to the feebs and nowhere else.”

Harry settled down far enough to put his head on the headrest. The
sunlight poured through the rear window, tightening his gaze to merry slits. “So you went to Interpol.”

Storm demanded, “What is so
funny
?”

“Something's happened, hasn't it, Emma.”

Emma merely pressed harder on the gas. Drilling them down I-295 to the Capital Beltway.

“She's had to declare where she stands,” Harry said. “And she's come down on our side. Haven't you?”

“I've been ordered to arrest you both.”

Storm demanded, “For what?”

Harry said, “It doesn't really matter all that much.”

“Selim Arkut has been murdered. Dauer wants to hold you responsible.” Emma gunned around a slow-moving truck. The tires' thunder almost smothered her words. “You've got to take the next flight out. Get good and lost before Dauer catches wind you're gone.”

Storm said, “Jack Dauer is insane.”

“You won't get any argument from me on that point.” She fished in her pocket and came out with a card, which she gave to Storm. “That's got all my numbers: home and cell and Interpol. Tell me when you arrive. I'll try and catch up with you.”

Her phone rang just as she pulled onto the Dulles Access Highway. She opened it and said, “Webb.” She handed the phone over her shoulder. “Make yourself useful back there.”

“Aye, aye, ma'am.”

She passed back her purse. “Pen and paper in the side pocket. And wipe that grin off your face while you're at it.”

“Sure thing.”

Watching Harry scribble away, Storm said to Emma, “We made some interesting finds today.”

“I need to hear all about it. But not now, okay? I'm scheduled to fly out with Hakim tomorrow, something he wants us to check out together. Soon as we're done, I'll try and catch up with you.”

Harry slapped the phone shut and announced, “Air France to Paris. Three hours layover. Tickets to Istanbul and hotel info will be waiting for us at the information desk. Under the highly original name of Smith.”

Emma entered the short-term lot and pulled into a yellow-banded
emergency-vehicle space. “This is as far as I go. Get through passport control as fast as you can.”

As they clustered by the trunk, Storm reached into her purse and came out with the velvet pouch. “Can you keep this safe for me?”

Harry said, “Good thinking.”

“It's very valuable. You can look at it if you want. It's called a—”

“Right now, the name doesn't matter. I'll set up a lockbox at my bank, the Georgetown branch of Wells Fargo, and leave the key and instructions with the branch manager.”

Emma stowed the triptych away, then looked Storm square in the eye and said, “Before we first met in your grandfather's shop, I already knew you were as genuine as they came.”

Storm was still digesting that latest item when Harry stepped between them and said to Emma, “I never thought I'd ever say this to a cop. But you've just moved to the tippy top of my list.”

Emma's face twisted as though she was trying to smile and keep from weeping at the same time. “Tough guys don't say tippy top.”

“Maybe not.” Harry gripped the woman and held her so tight Storm heard the breath whoosh from Emma's body. “They don't hug cops either.”

He released her and turned to Storm. “Back in the game, lady. We're off and running strong.”

H
ARRY BOARDED THE PLANE BEHIND
Storm and trooped all the way to the last row, the only two seats they'd had available in moo class. Harry didn't mind. Especially not after Storm slipped into her seat, watched the other passengers settle, and shivered when the Air France flight attendant started his preflight announcements in French. She gave him a look that was part Sean in feminine guise and part wide-eyed wonder. Then she leaned over and kissed his cheek. Same place she'd smooched him back in her kitchen, just north of his jawline. She said, “I'm glad Sean chose you and I'm glad you came.”

Harry didn't say anything, basically because he had no idea how to respond. Storm apparently didn't mind his silence. She settled back and was asleep before the plane left the ground.

Harry stared out the side window, his thoughts drifting with the clouds. He found himself recalling early days, back after his parents had died and he got to play shuffle ball inside the Pennsylvania system. His last foster mom had been a woman named Agnes who'd packed as many as seven foster kids into her double-wide. Harry had always assumed the county kept her on their list because she never turned down a kid or kicked one out. To Agnes, they were all just so many sheep. Even the wolves.

Agnes's greatest talent was dispensing hopelessness. She stained her charges with small driblets of poison. Her favorite comment was, “You don't stand a chance.”

Which was why, at fifteen, Harry had robbed a bank.

It wasn't like he'd spent months planning it out. Truth be told, Harry didn't even know what was going down until he was standing there on the sidewalk. He'd been chasing a buddy with this water pistol shaped like a .45 Magnum. At least, it looked enough like a Magnum that when he stuck it in the teller's face, her trembling fingers spilled as many bills on the floor as she managed to stuff into the Burger King bag.

Harry had watched enough television to know what came next. The bank had cameras in every corner, and naturally Harry hadn't thought to cover his face. He didn't even bother to run. Instead, he sauntered out the bank's front doors and slipped into a fancy steak house down the street, a place he knew from standing outside the kitchen and devouring odors of char-grilled steak and delivery truck fumes. Harry passed the maître d' a bunch of tens and asked for a table by the window. He feasted on shrimp cocktail and a fillet well done while cop cars screamed into flanking position and a train of uniforms ran in and out of the bank.

Even then, Harry was blessed with an overdose of dumb luck.

The cops never thought to check downtown's fanciest restaurant for a teenage bank robber. Harry tipped the waiter fifty bucks and asked if the place had a rear entrance.

He reached the end of the alley and realized he had no idea what came next. Then he spotted the doorman in the double-breasted coat and the matching top hat standing outside the city's top hotel.

In for a twenty, Harry thought to himself, and pushed through the revolving doors.

He managed to enjoy three nights of room service and Egyptian cotton sheets before the cops finally wised up. They actually laughed as they cuffed him.

The judge thought it was mildly hilarious as well. He rewarded Harry with three years in juvie.

Put a kid in Day-Glo orange and rubber sandals, and adults all see just one thing: trouble. By his eighteenth birthday, Harry had earned a rep for being less than a stellar example of the juvie system. He was
given two choices: sign up for the men's dance school, or take a two-year stint in the state pen.

Harry went navy because the one jailer he almost trusted said they had the best food and the safest berths. Harry figured, how hard could it be?

The answer was, extremely. On account of two items Harry had failed to factor into the equation. The first was the Gulf War. The second was that Harry found himself volunteering for the Seals. A decision he still to this day cannot understand.

 

MIDWAY ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, THE
whole deal became almost too much for Storm to hold inside. To release it fully meant giving in to a scream of pure pleasure. That was how good it felt.

Harry asked, “You cold?”

“No. I'm fine.”

Harry reached under his seat, came up with a blanket, and pulled it from its plastic pouch. “Here, put this around you.”

She had dozed through the flight's initial hours and woke not refreshed but rather able to balance the solemn lump of pain and loss from the funeral against the flight and the world and the mystery ahead. She let Harry slip the blanket around her. Like a brother might do for his little sister. Like they'd known each other for years.

“I've got something to show you.” She reached for her purse. As she drew out her phone, her fingers touched the envelope holding Sean's letter. For an instant, she felt the old man intensely close, like he had managed to squeeze into a seat between the two of them. Storm opened the phone, scrolled through the photographs, then swiveled the screen so that it faced Harry. “This is the chalice Sean left me.”

Harry squinted over the screen. “Interesting shape. Looks old.”

“It is.”

“Shame about the lack of markings.”

“There is one.” Storm scrolled to the next photograph. “This was inscribed on the interior of the base.”

Harry bent closer. “Are those letters?”

“Ancient Hebrew. It's what I was searching out in the Smithsonian. And this is what I found.”

Harry studied the last photograph set into her phone's memory. “Looks like the same markings to me.”

“Identical. This set was carved into the face of a royal coffin.” She closed the phone and stowed it away. “The Smithsonian archeologist who discovered the coffin died while working on a dig they thought might be the lost city of Herodium. His assistant wrote up the preliminary report I read in the Smithsonian's journal. The dig was on the border of the Judean Desert, inside the West Bank. The archeologist was killed in one of the uprisings, which is why the Smithsonian blocked the assistant from returning and finishing their work. Herod the Great basically built Herodium City from scratch.”

Harry took two waters from a passing flight attendant and handed one over. “This is the same king who rebuilt the Second Temple.”

“Exactly. The markings you just saw are the name ‘Herod,' carved into a sarcophagus of pink Jerusalem limestone. The name was surrounded by an expertly carved floral motif. Exactly what you'd expect to see on a king's coffin.”

“And the chalice?”

“I've been examining the drawing of the arch that doesn't exist. I've found three chalices.”

“Show me.”

She reopened her phone and found the picture. Harry leaned in so close the screen's illumination carved his face into a craven image. His face was not so much grim as hungry. “Herod didn't rebuild the temple out of the goodness of his heart. He was a cruel despot, loathed by his own people. Herod was obsessed with greatness. He was just the sort of man who would carve his name inside a temple chalice. Like donors putting a plaque on the wall of a church to make sure everybody knows about their donation.”

Harry shut the phone. Handed it back. Took a long pull from his water.

“This is real, Harry.”

“I'm not doubting that for a second. But like I told you, people have hunted the Second Temple treasures for five hundred years. Longer. And salvagers have scoured the Med for centuries, hunting the headland carved into your triptych. If that design represented anything along the Cypriot coast, it'd have been found a long time ago.”

“There were earthquakes. Morgenthal just said the capital was destroyed by one—what was it called?”

“Salamis.”

“Couldn't these promontories have been demolished by a big quake?”

In reply, Harry gave her the sort of grin that would have worried her on another man. “This is some high, isn't it.”

“You're saying I could be right?”

“Hey, I'm just your basic treasure dog. I've bet my chips on a lot less than this.”