The Collector (10 page)

“Nice guy,” Seven said.

“Don’t worry. He got his just desserts. He was killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, in his bath. Revenge for sacrificing their daughter and for taking as his mistress Cassandra, the Trojan princess and prophetess he enslaved. Although some say the curse that followed Agamemnon stemmed back to his father’s crimes. Fearing his own brother’s bid for the throne,” Murphy continued, “he killed his brother’s children and served them to the poor man for dinner.”

“Jesus, those Greeks,” Seven said, earning a kick from Erika under the table.

“One of the reasons the authenticity of Schliemann’s find was called into question was the discovery of the Beehive Tomb, what was believed to be Agamemnon and his father’s true burial chamber. His death mask would have been found there. The tomb itself is a fantastic piece of artistry. Shaped like a beehive, it was buried under the earth, a style originating from the Mycenae shaft tombs—although there is certainly a heavy influence from the Minoan tombs of Crete. Unfortunately, Agamemnon’s true burial chamber was found looted by grave robbers, probably in ancient times. This—” he raised the photograph “—would have been part of that treasure.”

“You said it was part of a larger piece?” Erika asked. “Something worth killing for?”

The professor suddenly fell silent, looking uneasy.

“Professor?”

“I can’t say for certain—I can only postulate without examining the actual piece.”

Erika knew exactly where he was going. “Perhaps that could be arranged. At our offices, of course, under strict supervision.”

Murphy seemed to think about it, weighing his options. “Everything I know about this particular artifact was postulated by Professor Estelle Fegaris of Harvard, one of archaeology’s more colorful characters. Estelle herself was a bit of a Cassandra.”

“Meaning she was a psychic?” Erika asked.

“Goodness, yes. Her family claimed to trace its ancestry back to the original Sibyls of Gaia. She made some amazing finds, bringing tons of attention and money to the program at Harvard…until she revealed her involvement in psychic archaeology.”

“Psychic archaeology?” Seven asked.

“It’s quite an interesting field, actually. Not as ‘out there’ as you might expect,” Murphy explained. “There’s a pretty famous case, the Glastonbury Abbey. Frederick Bligh Bond, an architect, was hired by the Church of England to find the remains of the chapel in the early 1900s. The Church, of course, didn’t know that Bond was an occultist. He sought out the services of a friend, an automatic writer—a psychic writing while in an altered state of consciousness. Through his friend, Bond petitioned spirits associated with the Abbey to help him find the chapel ruins. During the excavation, Bond found everything exactly as the spirits had foretold.”

“Weird,” Seven said.

“Fascinating, actually. In many ways, archaeology is a field that requires intuition. People like Bond and Estelle Fegaris just take it to another level. But it was her connection to Dr. Morgan Tyrell and his research in parapsychology that finally did her in at Harvard.”

“Who’s Tyrell?” Seven asked.

“Dr. Morgan Tyrell, a maverick in the field of parapsychology. He studies psychic ability and its effect on the brain. Of course, he’s since left the university as well, ousted for his controversial methodology…as well as his love for the ladies, some rumored to be students. Very frowned upon by the Trustees.”

“Imagine that,” Erika said.

“Not that it hurt Morgan. He set up his own institute, privately funded. The Institute for Dynamic Studies of Parapsychology and the Brain in San Diego.”

“So how is Estelle Fegaris connected to the artifact?” Seven asked.

“It was basically her life’s goal to find the necklace called the Eye of Athena. This bead would have been part of that necklace,” Murphy said.

Thinking they might be able to go to the horse’s mouth, Seven asked, “How can we get ahold of Fegaris?”

“You can’t. She died some years ago, unfortunately. Killed, presumably, by the very underworld figures she dealt with in order to find the lost treasures of the Beehive Tomb. Although no one was ever prosecuted, there was some suspicion surrounding a student. He was subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing and sent home by the Greek authorities.”

“So tell us about this necklace,” Erika said. “This Eye of Athena?”

“According to Estelle, it was a necklace worn by Athena herself—an amazing object of power that was first used by the Sybil, then later, by the Oracle at Delphi. Somehow, it found its way into Agamemnon’s hands.”

“What kind of power are we talking about here, Professor?” Erika asked.

He looked at them both as if he was talking to someone slow-witted.

“Why, the power to tell the future, of course.”

“We found it in a parrot’s beak,” Erika said. “The bird was decapitated and stuffed in the victim’s mouth. Does that mean something to you?”

Murphy shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

The first short answer of the day,
Seven thought.

“Thank you for your time, Professor.” Erika stood and handed Murphy her card. “One of us will call to talk about the possibility of a physical inspection of the artifact.”

“May I keep this?” he asked, holding the photograph of the bead.

Erika paused a moment. “Of course.”

“I look forward to your call, Detective.”

Once outside the office, Erika and Seven walked briskly back to the car. It wasn’t until they were both inside, that Erika asked, “What do you think?”

“A dead Vietnamese psychic and now tomb raiders?” He dropped his head back against the headrest. “The whole thing gives me a headache.”

Erika put the car into Reverse and backed out of the parking slot. “And here I thought things were just getting interesting.”

Back in his office, Professor Murphy flipped open his copy of
The Iliad
and slipped out a folded sheet of paper. He smiled, seeing that his hands actually shook.

“Jesus,” he whispered, trying to catch his breath.

The paper was old enough that the edges had yellowed. How many years had it been since he’d even looked at this?

He picked up the phone, dialing the number on the sheet of paper. He had never really thought he’d have an opportunity to call this number.

His pulse revved up the instant he heard the woman’s voice on the other end.

“I may have something for you,” he said.

T
errence McGee stared at the tall blonde standing at his office door. To be precise, she wasn’t standing at his door, or even in his office, for that matter. Terrence didn’t have an office or a door. He had a cubical. Still, being the head honcho of the ragtag team of ten that made up the National Institute for Strategic Artifacts, NISA, Terrence had a rather nice cubical.

NISA had a distinguished history—something along the lines of Roswell and Area 51. It was an offshoot of the famed STARGATE program, the collective name given to a group of intelligence programs initiated when the military perceived a possible “psy-gap” with the Soviet Union. Most of the research involved intelligence gathering through remote viewing, the ability to train psychics to observe or control events from great distances.

A lot of people pooh-poohed STARGATE as one of those paranoid military programs, but Terrence, an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency at the time, had been part of an oversight committee. He’d seen firsthand the results of one remote viewer by the code name 009. The things he’d witnessed still haunted him, making him wonder if there wasn’t this whole other dimension. Could psychic powers be something akin to when quantum physics first came on the scene, with its study of subatomic particles? It was there all along, we just didn’t know it?

The FBI guys liked to joke that NISA was their
X-Files,
the agency’s purpose—to find artifacts of global importance—merely a cover for their true mandate: discover legendary objects of power that could have possible military significance. The NISA officers were buried in a basement of a nondescript federal building in D.C., understaffed and underfunded. Unfortunately, in an era of international terrorism, artifacts that might or might not exist got the short end of the stick when it came to national security issues.

The young lady waiting at the entrance was Carin Barnes. Built like a pole-vaulter, Carin stood just over six feet. She’d been part of the NISA team for more than a year now. Terrence figured she was in his office maybe twice a week with a new “find.” At the moment, dressed in a black pullover and jeans, she was bouncing up and down on her toes in what looked like black ballet flats, her body language saying it all.

Another find….

Terrence didn’t discourage her. Quite the opposite. Enthusiasm was a gift down here in the rabbit hole.

The problem was it never lasted. Typically, it took a mere ten to fifteen months before a new recruit gave in to total apathy or transferred out to something that actually mattered. The Holy Grail, the Spear of Destiny, the Ark of the Covenant—these things weren’t exactly falling out of the sky. And then there were the poor schmoes who got demoted into Terrence’s able hands, NISA being a kind of FBI purgatory.

In a way, Terrence himself had been sentenced here. A well-spoken black man with a degree in linguistics, he should have gone far within the military hierarchy—if only he’d been willing to play the game.

Terrence used to be a vital part of the NSA, the National Security Agency. Like many young black men, he’d entered the military thinking to pay for his education. He’d grown up in Oakland, California, and found solace in the local library. He’d tested high enough that the military paid to put him through the prestigious Monterey Institute. Fluent in five languages, he’d been a rising star.

But as is often the case, the faster you rise, the bigger the target. When he ended up running afoul of a top bureaucrat, he went from a corner office with a window to the basement in a nondescript building. It wasn’t a demotion per se. Terrence was top dog at NISA. But unlike his position at the National Security Agency, there was no possibility of promotion. From here, the next step was retirement.

The curious part about his current situation was how much happier he was locked away in his basement cubical. He recalled toasting his aborted career with a bottle of Springbank single malt when his wife had pried him out of his funk with a few choice words. Even now, he smiled, remembering he was married to a saint of a woman who had the impossible gift of looking at the glass as always half-full.

Whenever he pointed out this cliché in her personality, she would only smile and say, “Some people are just born with the happy gene, Terry. Luckily, I gave mine to Kelly.”

Their daughter, Kelly. Now a budding assistant professor of math at NYU.

“You never know, Terry,” she’d said with a quick kiss. “This could be your dream job. No one to tell you what to do…?”

Which was the point. He’d never been very good at taking orders, despite his military background. It’s what got him that basement cubicle in the first place.

And now, with more white than black in his closely cropped hair, he was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t become a bit complacent.

Unlike Carin. He had to give the woman credit. At eighteen months and still going strong, she was a true holdout to the normal apathy that accompanied a job of searching for things that might not exist.

Right now, her face literally lit up with excitement, her blue eyes shining as she held up a file folder.

“I found something,” she said.

Of course you did,
Terrence thought.

But he put on his reading glasses and motioned her into his roomy cubical. He held out his hand for the folder.

And for the first time since he’d committed himself to this basement office—well, cubical—Terrence McGee found himself caught off guard.

He flipped through the pages, reading quickly. “Where did you get this?”

Carin sat down at the chair beside his desk. Immediately, her legs started pumping up and down like pistons. “A source. In California.”

Carin was thirty-five, brilliant and unmarried. She had a doctorate in neurobiology from Caltech and was completely dedicated to her work here at NISA.

Her work
and
her younger brother. She had an autistic brother named Markie fifteen years her junior. She’d been caring for him ever since her parents had died in a car accident seven years ago.

“This,” she said, tapping the file, “is an extremely reliable source.”

Terrence allowed himself a small smile. She was practically hyperventilating.

“The Eye of Athena,” she said, with something approaching reverence in her voice.

It had been years since he’d even heard the name. Not since the death of Estelle Fegaris.

Not many people knew of the artifact’s existence. Some even said it was a figment of Estelle’s imagination. She claimed to be a descendant of the Sybil at Delphi, a title belonging to one of many a prophetess who reportedly received her powers from Gaia, the goddess of the earth and the mother of Cronus and the Titans. The Eye of Athena was a necklace presumably worn by the Sybil and later by the Oracle at Delphi. According to Fegaris, the Eye magnified the powers of the prophetess who wore it, somewhat like a lens magnifies an image. Fegaris spoke of the piece as if it were a family heirloom.

Fegaris had always been a controversial figure in her field, psychic archaeology. She tended to be a little too successful in discovering archaeological finds of great significance. When it became public knowledge that Fegaris herself claimed to have psychic abilities—powers she used in her work—her very credibility came under fire, psychic archaeology not exactly being in the mainstream. And then there was her partnership with Morgan Tyrell, the famed parapsychologist. Eventually, the top names in the field proclaimed her a fraud.

Terrence knew better.

Eventually, Fegaris had been marginalized by her contemporaries, but by then she had her own following. They called themselves Lunites, a reference to the Greek word
feggari,
meaning moon. Carin Barnes had been one of the group’s most fervent members.

He knew in his heart the Eye was Carin’s raison d’être here at NISA. With the death of Fegaris, she needed their resources. Still, it wasn’t as if he could afford to turn down someone with her qualifications, even if she was a closet fanatic. And God bless her, looking over the file, he realized she just might have an honest-to-God lead.

At the back of the file was a fax of a photograph. Not very good quality, he thought, squinting past his reading glasses. He took off the glasses and gave them a dirty look as he placed them on his desk. He hated getting old.

“All right,” he said, leaning back in the chair. “What’s the story?”

This was what Terrence always asked his people. He liked open-ended questions. In his organization, Carin was a “finder.” He wanted the finder to guide the discussion.

Theirs was far from an exact science. In point of fact, it wasn’t science at all…even if most of the people who ended up in his basement cubicles had an alphabet of degrees behind their names.

“It’s a bead from the necklace,” Carin said, pitched forward on her chair. “It has to be the Eye, Terrence. I can feel it in my gut. And here’s the punch line. They found it at a murder scene.”

Carin’s blue eyes met his, her rare smile practically the “ta-da!” before lifting the veil to show her prize.

“The murder victim, Terrence. She was a psychic.”

From years of practice, he kept his expression neutral. Just lifted his hands as if to say,
So what?

“You’re kidding,” she said, visibly deflated by his lack of reaction.

“From what the file says, Carin, your source hasn’t even examined the piece.”

“Look at the photograph,” she said, jabbing her finger at it. “The distinctive cat’s-eye line down the center. The detectives from homicide even said it changed color, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Blue to red.”

“And?” he asked, holding up the page.

“Come
on,
” she said.

He could see that Carin didn’t like to be challenged. She’d been an acolyte of Fegaris for too many years—one of those trowel-carrying neophytes willing to work for grub and a tent over her head just to be part of the expedition. Still, up until today, he couldn’t fault Carin’s work. She hadn’t made the Eye her focus at NISA. Quite the opposite. Besides, he couldn’t deny that one of the reasons he’d wanted her on board in the first place was the well-thought-out presentation she’d made about the existence of the artifact.

Shuffling back to the grainy faxed photograph, Terrance had to admit he could feel a hitch in his pulse.

He handed the file to Carin, meeting her gray-blue eyes. In many ways, she reminded him so much of himself. She was the kind of agent who went with her gut…and wasn’t often wrong.

“So what do you propose to do?” he asked.

“I want to go back there. To California. I want to see the stone firsthand.”

Terrence tried to imagine what it would be like to let Carin loose on the local authorities, flashing her badge and talking the talk. But then again, why not? She’d worked harder than most. It might be nice to give her a taste of fieldwork before she started growing moss.

Terrence asked, “Are you free for lunch?”

“Of course,” she said, doing a poor job of hiding her surprise.

He stood, getting his coat. Time to give Carin an education on the importance of subtlety—not the woman’s forte.

He smiled. “I’m okay with any kind of food. Just as long as the place has good coffee. We’re going to needs lots of coffee.”