The Seventh Stone (29 page)

Jared sat in the Queen Anne wing chair by the faux hearth and watched her through the partially open door to the bedroom. It seemed she had settled on the skin tight red affair that cost a large amount of money for a small amount of fabric. She turned sideways to the full-length mirror and pressed her hand atop her tummy, assessing it. Still flat.

Although stiff with stress, he craned his neck to watch her shimmy into the bathroom and fluff her dyed blond hair in the mirror. Their suite was peppered with a plethora of gilt-framed mirrors that reflected the reproduction mahogany furnishings and paintings of European landscapes that contrived to lend the air of old world respect. He tried in vain to avoid seeing the most heinous fake of all, his own visage.

“
Darling?” Zoe called, pausing to apply the ruby red lipstick that matched the hue of her dress. “You did call the bank to increase the credit limit on the card, didn’t you? The coat I bought at Harrods for this trip maxed us out.”

“
Yes, Zoe,” he answered, although it still rankled him that the fake lynx had cost more than real. She had explained patiently that she wanted people to know she could afford real fur, but was rich enough not to wear it. The convolution of this deception was absurd. He recognized that keenly, for he was about to perpetrate one of the most odious deceptions in history. Zoe, at least, was true to her false morals.

“
I couldn’t very well wear that raggedy wool thing,” Zoe said, adjusting her rouge. “It wouldn’t do for the wife of the Crown Jeweler.”

He felt mocked by the title. If Alba were here, she’d be ashamed. If only she had survived the cancer, she would have carried her royal bearing in her actions, not her dress, in her rare encounters with the royal family. She would have seen his appointment as Crown Jeweler as a humbling honor, not a bragging right. But she wouldn’t have wanted it. She was quite content in their flat on Portobello. The disease stole that life from them. When he buried her on that bleak November day, he threw down upon her coffin like so many roses his belief in love, in life, in the God that Alba prayed to futilely each day of her painful illness.

He was plummeting down the deep, dark well of a meaningless existence, when Zoe had grabbed him with both arms. He knew, even then, that their introduction and relationship had been artfully arranged. He wasn’t a fool. A woman like Zoe wouldn’t have given him a second look if not for Contreras’s puppetry. He found he didn’t care, like a drunk who could not forgo poison as long as it was served on the rocks.

Zoe floated back into the bedroom. She fished a pair of stockings from the drawer and bunched up the silky legs in her fingers as expertly as Vladimir Horowitz playing Traumerai on the piano. “Will you be seeing Baltasar before the ceremony tonight?” she asked.

Jared wondered if she already knew the answer, but he suspected that Baltasar had severed his strings on her. She had served her purpose. “I’m sure his day is too busy for the likes of me,” he said. Another lie. He hardly knew how to tell the truth anymore.

She pointed her toe, slipped it into the foot of the stocking. “You’re always selling yourself short,” she said. He watched the silk caress her ankle. “You’re the one who was commissioned to create the Lux et Veritas sword.” The curve of her knee. “Quite an arrow in your quiver.” The white of her thigh.

“
I’d like to put my arrow in your quiver,” he said. He never would have said that to Alba.

Zoe giggled. “Baltasar is a good man,” she pressed.

His randiness suddenly rankled. “You don’t know him like I do.”

“
Baltasar believes in you, always has,” she said.

He had been even more completely seduced by Contreras than Zoe. The wooing had begun when Alba was still alive. When Baltasar Contreras had contacted him some seven years earlier, Jared thought the man was a bit daft. Yes, Jared’s nouveau renaissance jewelry designs had caught the attention of some of the lesser royals at the time, but this plump, arrogant man told him that he would one day become the Queen’s personal jeweler and, subsequently, the Crown Jeweler. Of course, Jared maintained a polite decorum with the man. He was the billionaire heir to a pharmaceutical corporation, America’s brand of royalty. Most importantly, Alba was starting to get sick. He needed the money.

Shortly after they met, Contreras had custom ordered a set of seven golden rings, each inlaid with a unique gemstone, a ruby, golden topaz, Emerald, Turquoise, sapphire, diamond and jacinth. The inner band of each he wanted engraved with an Abraxas, a mythological being with the head of a lion, the body of a man holding a whip in one hand and a shield in the other and serpents as legs. Jared had told him it really wasn’t his specialty, but the pay he offered was too handsome to turn down. Jared should have known then, with the symbol of the Abraxas, which figured in the teachings of the Gnostics, that Baltasar Contreras had more in mind than simple adornments, but the money blinded him. Contreras was paying for client confidentiality, he said, and wanted no one to know of their transactions. Jared agreed.

Zoe poked her naked toes into the other leg of the stocking. “And he’s very generous,” she said.

“
He gets what he pays for,” he muttered. Contreras continued to order sets of these rings over the years, paying in person, with cash. More valuable than the cash were Contreras’s social connections. It seemed the man knew everyone worth knowing and could manipulate them as expertly as Degas could clay. Under Contreras’s tutelage, Jared rose to Her Majesty the Queen’s personal jeweler. Jared grew to respect his patron’s prophetic judgment and value his friendship. Despite Alba’s distrust of the man, Contreras paid for his personal physician to treat her when traditional therapies proved futile. Contreras, too, had lost a loved one, his mother, many years ago. He seemed genuinely heartbroken when Alba passed. After the funeral, Contreras tried to comfort Jared, convince him that he would one day see his beloved Alba again. Jared wondered how such a brilliant man could be so naive.

Gradually, as if unraveling an ancient sacred scroll, Contreras revealed his true purpose. His life’s goal was to complete his family’s mission to find and recreate the Biblical Breastplate of Aaron, a direct link with God. He assumed that Jared was, as a gemologist, familiar with the Breastplate and its twelve legendary stones, which, like the Ark of the Covenant, had been lost to the ages thousands of years ago.

Jared knew it was coming. He just hadn’t wanted to believe it. After all, he was one of the Circle of Seven. It was his sworn obligation to keep this very event from taking place. That had not helped to save his beloved Alba. So why not help the one man who had the wherewithal, determination and faith to unearth and recreate the legendary Breastplate? It would be proof that God did exist, that Alba was basking in a glorious everlasting life. He found himself lusting after the knowledge, the possibility of seeing his one true love again. In fact, he owed it to her.

Jared, on occasion, had scoffed at Alba for believing in the grand words of evangelists, but he found himself enthralled with Baltasar’s plan. With the Breastplate, Contreras would build a new empire, succeed where Britain had failed. He had a multi-national force already in place. He had lost his mother to terrorists, an evil that was elusive and perpetual, immune to traditional defenses. The Breastplate would rally the masses. Some lives would be lost, but humanity saved. And peace would allow for a higher quality of life, more resources diverted to finding cures to sicknesses like the cancer that stole away his beloved Alba.

From there, it was just one small step into treason. He had been so beguiled that he hardly considered it a sin. Part of him felt that he deserved the fortune that Baltasar had promised him. Indeed, he felt the thrill of victory, the pride of accomplishment when he had actually pulled off what would go down in the history books as the crime of the century. Not even when he was committing this heinous act did it strike him as wrong. But now that the thrill of the battle was over, he realized what he had lost.

Zoe was choosing shoes now, rubbing a spot off the toe of the high, strappy ones. “You have to admit, it was nice of him to send up that champagne. Dom Perignon, very classy.”

Jared hadn’t been sure whether the champagne was for the two of them, or his upcoming meeting with Contreras. He was relieved, and surprised, when Zoe didn’t insist on imbibing it. She hadn’t wanted to impair her shopping judgment, he supposed, although he could certainly use a drink.

He looked down at his hands. His slender, nimble fingers were his stock and trade, like a surgeon. He could craft the finest detail, one that nobody but he and the bearer of his creation might be privy to, but that’s why he stood apart. Now, these fingers were responsible for the care and restoration of Britain’s crown jewels, but they tingled with the numbness of a traitor. He stood and walked closer to the fireplace. He forced himself to look into the gilt mirror over the mantel. He tried to command his trembling fingers to tighten the knot in his ascot and straighten the stray, gray hairs that refused to stay orderly. They did not obey.

Jared moved stiffly to the window. He peered down from his seventeenth floor aerie at the people scurrying along Park Avenue. A fight had broken out between two men, one in a suit and the other in tattered jeans. A small group stood and watched. Others barely glanced at the action before moving along, cell phones at their ears.

Zoe came to the sitting room threshold and opened the door wide, posing jauntily. “How do I look?”

Jared smiled, but was overcome with dread. “You’re my little vixen,” he offered. Their pet phrase rang hollow. He had, indeed, made a deal with the devil, Baltasar Contreras. He wanted to be reassured of the veracity of everlasting life. He grew to realize that reassurance would only mean he would spend eternity in hell for what he had done. And that he’d be meeting that end soon. He had been a fool to think Contreras would simply pay him and let him go. He sat heavily in the Queen Anne wing chair by the hearth.

She padded over to him and alighted on his lap. “What’s wrong? You and Baltasar used to be best of friends. He’s made you what you are today.”

That was precisely why Jared had to betray him. It was his only hope for redemption. At best, it would mean shame. At worst, death. Everlasting damnation loomed on the near horizon. It terrified him more than both of those outcomes. He wrapped his arm around her impossibly small waist, willing his hands to stop trembling. “You’d look just as lovely in a jumper and jeans at a cottage in the Cotswolds.”

“
But I dress this way for you. I’m the wife of the Crown Jeweler.” Her pride was painful. She kissed him on the forehead. “I believe in you, Jared. I believe that you can do anything you put your mind to.”

Jared pressed his cheek against her breast. Her heart beat softly. For a moment, he allowed himself to think it would all turn out all right. That the two of them would live a quiet, country life, where people ignored him, if not forgave him. He prayed. For one who had disdained God not long ago, he was praying a lot lately. If he could only turn things back, do the right thing, correct the deadly wrong that he had done, then God might give him a second chance at life. “Am I too late?” he whispered, as if praying for a sign he knew would never come.

She slapped his shoulder teasingly. “Speaking of late,” she said, scooching back on his thighs. “I was waiting to tell you this after the ceremony tonight, but,” she placed her hand on her tummy and smiled brightly. “We are going to have a baby.”

He shook his head in utter surprise. He had long ago given up on the dream of having children. He allowed a sense of hope and joy to warm him like the rising sun. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “Ten weeks along. I didn’t dare tell you until we passed the point, you know, where we lost our last one.”

He hugged her tightly. He had been given a sign. This baby, the promise of new life, he was being given a second chance after all. “I am elated, Zoe,” he said. “Elated.” And terrified. Yet another precious life had been placed in his trembling hands. He knew what he had to do, yet the impending danger reared up like a deadly monster, threatening not only him, but Zoe and his unborn child.

“
Let’s celebrate,” she said. “Forget Neiman Marcus. Order room service. I have an urge for caviar.”

“
Yes,” he answered, reaching for the phone on the desk. Then, “no,” eyeing the reproduction Napoleon clock. Contreras would be arriving in a half-hour. He nudged her off his lap. “You’ve been looking forward to this shopping trip for weeks, getting a new dress for tonight.”

She shrugged. “I’m sure I can find something to wear.”

Contreras would kill him if he denied the man. He had to get her out of here. “No, darling,” he said. He hugged her, then forced himself to release her. “I need to do something, something vitally important. We’ll celebrate tonight, like you planned.” He quickly crossed the room to the closet and handed her the fake fur coat and Coach purse. “Get the doorman to wave down a cab,” he said. “No walking in those heels.”