Shadow Ritual (21 page)

“You’ll never use your hand again. In case you wondered, one of my instructors taught me that little trick. He learned it from a Congolese army officer. It’s customarily used to punish thieves.”

Before she got up, Jade slapped the woman’s face.

“And that’s just to humiliate you. The problem with us girls is that we’re taught to repress our urges. It feels good to let go from time to time, don’t you think? Adieu, bitch.”

Zewinski checked the bonds to make sure Joana couldn’t escape and then went to the window and climbed out. The grounds were silent. She grabbed the cornice and in less then a minute landed softly on the gravel. Two men, probably armed, were walking along the gate, blocking the way out.

Jade slipped toward the greenhouse and crawled about three hundred feet under the windows. When she reached the other side, she raised her head and peeked through a window. The gardener was inside watering a strangler fig. He was talking to it. The image of the poor tortured man came to mind, and the taste of anger filled her mouth. She didn’t have time to kill him. She needed to get out of there and reach Marcas.

The gardener interrupted his monologue and turned toward Jade. Her heart skipped a beat. He looked in her direction for a while, his ears pricked, and then went back to watering his plants. Jade let out a sigh of relief and stole into the woods at the edge of the property.

54

Marcas’s phone vibrated. The screen indicated an unknown number. He answered and heard a woman’s voice.

“Marcas, I need you to come get me right away.”

“I know, Jade.”

“What do you mean you know?”

“You think I’ve just been waiting around for you? You stand me up and don’t answer my messages. I check your place, and it’s been trashed. Your car’s on the street—with a parking ticket, I might add—and you think I’d go back to the office and sit on my hands until you whistle for me like I’m some chauffeur?”

“I was kidnapped by Sophie’s killers.”

“I had your cell tracked. We located the estate where they took you, and I’m watching the gate right now. The cavalry’s on the way. At first I saw only two guards, but things are definitely picking up in there. Where are you, Jade?”

“In Dampierre. It’s a nearby village. It looks completely deserted. Good thing I memorized your number. Hurry. They’re going to be after me.”

Her tone was urgent.

“I’ll be right there.”

“Marcas?”

“What?”

“You called me Jade.”

“Chalk it up to the adrenaline rush.”

55

The gardener looked down at the tied-up woman, his eyes full of disdain. What incompetence. She had endangered Orden. His men had searched the estate, in vain. The prisoner had fled into the woods, and the chances of getting her back were slim. He had just three men to secure the château, not enough to organize a search party. And he had more urgent issues to tend to. Orden would have to erase any trace of its presence before the police arrived.

Each of Orden’s properties had an emergency evacuation plan. The staff here did a timed test run twice a year. Phase one: retrieve any papers from the safe and activate the fire system. Phase two: take out the six bodies kept in freezers, and put them, along with their fake identity papers, in the bedrooms. Phase three: leave the grounds, using the station wagons parked in a garage. In the last drill, the team had accomplished everything in exactly twenty-five minutes.

The gardener freed Joana.

“That bitch destroyed my hand! Give me some morphine.”

The man didn’t respond. Had it been up to him, he would have put a bullet in her head—the usual procedure for incompetents. She was responsible for bringing down a house of Orden and letting a hostage escape—someone who could identify those in the mansion, including him. But she was one of Sol’s protégés, the daughter of a board member. Untouchable.

“Hans will bring you a shot. We leave in fifteen minutes. I’ll report your failure. Because of you, Orden is losing a precious base, and I’m losing my little dearies.”

~ ~ ~

Joana’s hand was killing her.

“Your dearies?”

“My darling plants. They’ll die in the fire. I’ll never get over it. I’m very sensitive.”

Joana fell back, looked at the ceiling, and let out a laugh.

“You’re a madman. You cut people up with pruning shears and cry over your damned plants.”

The gardener glared at her and turned to leave the room. “Fifteen minutes, no more,” he shouted. “That’s when the fire starts.”

Joana pulled herself up. The gardener wouldn’t spare any details in his report. She knew her errors wouldn’t be forgiven, and her injuries would keep her from doing what she liked best: killing. She didn’t expect any pity from Orden. Only weak people showed pity. That was what Sol preached. Her only chance of salvation lay in her father.

56

Marcas could never sleep well in a hotel, and this night was no exception. He had spent the better part of it smoking and thinking. If you could call it thinking.

His mind was torn between the information he had to process and the woman with bruises on her wrists and ankles sleeping in the room next to his.

Now he knew what was written on the Tebah Stone. Jade had told him about the dying man’s delirium, and his repeated mention of a stone and the word
bvitti
. They would never know who the man was, but he had contributed a significant piece to the puzzle. Then there was what that female assassin had added about the archeologist’s report, about it being a substance that could “seed the mind with prophesies.”

Bvitti
. The word was familiar. He’d read it somewhere, but where? He pulled out his laptop.

It took him a good half hour to find an article on a site on African religions. French ethnologists had studied initiation rites practiced in a village in the jungles of Gabon. The village was in a large area belonging to the Mitsogo tribe.

Bwiti was both a religion and a science that enabled its initiates—who underwent a secret three-day rebirth ceremony—to enter another spiritual dimension where they could communicate with their ancestors and come to understand the relationship of the earth and the beyond.

To experience Bwiti, an initiate would ingest the root bark of a sacred plant,
Tabernanthe iboga
. The sacred chemical substance was ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid. It had powerful hallucinogenic properties and purportedly didn’t cause dependency. In fact, it had been used in the West since the mid-nineteen eighties to treat cocaine and alcohol addiction.

Jouhanneau would be thrilled. He would have the second ingredient.

As Marcas read the article, a shiver ran up his spine. The coincidence was troubling.

There are striking similarities between Bwiti and Freemason initiation rites. Ultimately, the outcome is the same: knowledge of the mystery of the beyond, which Freemasons call the sublime secret. More surprising, however, is that the Freemason ritual uses three strikes of the mallet in memory of the assassination of Hiram, the architect of the Temple of Salomon, because of his refusal to reveal the sublime secret.

The researchers noted that during the Bwiti ceremony, “the initiate was struck three times on the head to free his spirit.”

It was almost too much for Marcas to take in. How could the Bwiti practice find itself inscribed on a Hebraic stone several centuries old? Perhaps via Egyptian merchants who had contact with African tribes or perhaps via Ethiopian traders, which also sent expeditions into deepest Africa.

His imagination was running wild. Did Sheba, the queen of Ethiopia conquered by King Solomon, offer this plant to the Hebrews?

His mind exhausted, he closed his laptop and went to bed. In the morning, his eyes were red, and his face was pale and hollow. He’d hardly gotten three hours of sleep.

Marcas stretched and walked over to the window. Dawn was chasing away the final scraps of night. He couldn’t get the Thule off his mind. Who were these people who could kidnap a trained army officer like Jade in the middle of Paris to drug and torture her for some fantasmagoric secret? The same people who had killed his brothers in other times and places?

He picked up his phone and called Jouhanneau again.

“Marcas here.” He quickly briefed Jouhanneau on Zewinski’s kidnapping, her sequestration with the dying man in a state of delirium, and her flight and rescue. He told Jouhanneau that they had taken refuge in a hotel run by a brother.

Then he shared his discoveries about Bwiti.

“You’ve caught up with the Thule,” Jouhanneau said. “Now you need the third ingredient and the dosage. Go to Plaincourault, where that eighteenth-century Freemason du Breuil wanted to create the new ritual.”

“The shadow ritual.”

“One of the keys to the ritual is in the fresco. You both have to get to Plaincourault as soon as possible.”

“Hold on, brother. We’re not trying to make this drug. We’re after killers.”

“Did you catch anyone?”

“Well, no. By the time the police arrived, they’d burned down the estate. I’m presuming the bodies in the ashes weren’t theirs. We need to track them.”

“Sophie was in Plaincourault before she went to Rome. She left me a message about an extraordinary fresco in the chapel. I’m sure it holds a key.”

“Listen, our priority is—”

Jouhanneau’s voice hardened. “A lot is at stake. The fresco is apparently a representation of the original sin. Eve’s temptation. The missing link—and maybe a code, a formula—is in there. Call me when you get to Plaincourault.”

Jouhanneau ended the call.

Marcas sipped his hot chocolate. He thought about the Breuil papers and how the man had insisted on a pit with a bare-rooted bush in the center. Was it coincidence that some people referred to the iboga as the Garden of Eden’s tree of knowledge?

They were getting closer. But closer to what? They had two ingredients: iboga and Saint Anthony’s fire. Just one more ingredient and they’d have the mind-blowing cocktail. But Marek had found something on the stone, something relating to a substance that “would seed the mind with prophesies.” The danger was evident. The wrong dosage could mean the difference between heaven and hell, between the gates of horn and ivory.

Marcas pushed his hot chocolate aside. It was all too much, and none of it seemed to be getting him any closer to the reason he was here in the first place—finding Sophie’s killers.

57

Frozen fries dumped in a burning-hot vat of oil of indeterminate age and origin, with greasy sausage on the side. Jade dabbed some ketchup on the fries to give them a pop of color, then scowled.

“Who eats this stuff?” she said.

Marcas looked in the rearview mirror and changed lanes to pass a camper. A little girl in the camper stuck out her tongue. Zewinski made a scary face in return, and the girl screamed and turned away. The parents glared. Marcas sped up, and the fries fell on Zewinski’s pants.

“Careful. This damned junk food just stained my pants.”

Marcas smiled. “Send the cleaning bill to Darsan. He’ll be thrilled.”

“You really couldn’t find anything more suitable to eat?” she said, holding up a limp fry. “This is an insult to gastronomy in general and potatoes in particular. And I won’t even mention this soggy thing they call sausage. It even stinks.”

“There wasn’t anything else at the service station. No sandwiches, no salads, nothing. And you were sleeping. Just another hour, and we’ll be there. We can find something to eat then.”

Zewinski put the food back in the paper bag and tossed it in the backseat. She made herself comfortable. They drove by forests, followed by monotonous fields that she found reassuring.

By the time Darsan had gotten his team to Chevreuse to arrest the Orden members, smoky ruins were all that was left. The firefighters had found six bodies, and everyone in the area sincerely lamented the loss of the people at the French Association for the Study of Minimalist Gardens, especially the nice Dutch gardener.

Zewinski hadn’t reacted at the news of the fire. Darsan wanted to see them for a debriefing, but she had agreed to go along with Marcas’s plan. She told Darsan that they were following a new lead and wouldn’t be back until the next day. Zewinski was thinking about the crazies who had held her hostage and were now running free. A human life was nothing to them, nothing more than an opportunity to practice their absurd doctrine.

In her line of work, Zewinski had seen harsh, compassionless human beings who carried out summary executions, terrorist attacks, and revenge killings. But only once before had she seen such cruelty. That was under an Afghan warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum.

These memories were eating at her. Adding to her unease was the fact that she had gotten closer to Marcas in the last several hours. Marcas—why was she surprised? She had always had a thing for men who put themselves on the line.

“Don’t you find something completely off about this story of archives and the Templars?” she asked.

“Off?”

“Yeah. Hunting for an ancient secret that might not even exist at a time when the world has more pressing issues: dictatorships, disease, hunger…”

Marcas just looked at her.

“And here we are, taking a drive in the country on some occult treasure hunt. If it weren’t for the murder and kidnapping, it would be ridiculous.”

“Correction. Two murders, counting Marek—three, if you include your cellmate,” Marcas said, lighting a cigarette. That wasn’t counting the other Hiram-like murders he’d heard about. “And to answer your question, no, I don’t have a problem with our ‘occult treasure hunt,’ as you call it. When you accepted that job offer at the Rome embassy, did you think you’d be taking medicine to sick kids in Africa? Sorry. You’re not working for UNICEF. I’m not either. I’m a cop doing my job. And right now my job’s tracking down those killers, who happen to have an agenda.”

“True enough. But I’m trying to put all this in perspective. With you, I have the feeling that I’m chasing a ghost, running after the wind, trying to grab a fantasy. Indiana Jones chasing the Holy Grail.”