The Thieves of Darkness (10 page)

The limo continued on the narrow cobblestone streets, making its way past the Spice Bazaar, the second-largest bazaar in Istanbul, this one filled with spices of every color and flavor, a rainbow of seasonings such as is found nowhere else on earth. There were herbs, honey, nuts, sweetmeats, a cured beef called pastrima. You could buy toys and plants and choose from a wide variety of exotic aphrodisiacs.

A mixture of cultures, locals and tourists, filled the narrow streets, pouring in and out of the Spice Bazaar like worker bees on a mission.

KC rolled down the window. The smell of food was thick in the air, the sounds of bartering merchants competing with the honking horns. She smiled, absorbing the atmosphere, the culture, and the mayhem.

“Close that,” Cindy said nervously.

“Why?” KC asked.

“Just close it,” Cindy snapped.

“Is it normally this jammed up?” KC said to the driver as she looked at the gridlock, ignoring Cindy’s request.

“There is a large reception at Topkapi Palace Friday evening in celebration of Turkey’s full membership in the European Union,” the driver said.

Michael looked at Simon but remained silent as they all took notice of the large police presence. They were everywhere, armed, vigilant behind dark sunglasses, a mixture of Turkish police and supplemental private security guards, scanning the crowds, checking the buildings.

“A lot of police,” Cindy said. Her eyes darted about, looking at their surroundings. “That’s a good thing, it not only keeps the terrorists away but makes people think twice before doing anything stupid.”

“It’s mostly for show,” the driver said. “But they’re keeping a close eye on the mosques and Topkapi. You never know what some nut might do.”

Seeing Cindy’s unsettled air, Michael leaned toward her and smiled. “What do you do?”

“Actually,” Cindy perked up, “I start a new job come Monday.”

“What?” KC reeled her attention back from the streets and closed the window. “When were you going to tell me?”

“Sorry, it’s not like we talk much.” Cindy said without remorse. “As I recall, you’ve been traveling for six weeks … and ended up in jail.” Cindy’s eyes were on fire.

“What was the matter with Goldman Sachs?” You could hear the disappointment in KC’s voice. “You don’t get much better than that.”

“And what are you going to be doing?” Michael asked softly with genuine interest, hoping to steer the conversation before the moment dissolved to an all-out war between the sisters.

“I’m the CFO,” she said, holding her head high.

“I thought you were happy at your old job,” KC said, not backing down.

“I’ve got time to be happy later. It’s more money, more diverse hands-on experience. This headhunting group found me, and I couldn’t wish for better job. They came knocking with a pretty attractive financial package plus a chance to be part of an organization with a global reach.”

“Did you check them out? I mean, who are they? Goldman is a pretty hard act to follow.”

“SQS Capital Partners. They’re a finance group. I get to go in to help enhance and improve their assets, work with the principals on formulating new directions. It’s a big, stable firm.”

“You should have discussed it with me before you made a move, at least gotten my opinion.”

“First off, I knew what you would say; you’re saying it now. You need to relax.” Cindy’s voice was thick with sarcasm. And then she looked at her sister more closely, her voice softening. “My career is like putting a
puzzle together. I have to gather different pieces, which will eventually form me into a full package so I can have my own company. Remember, thirty million by thirty, three hundred million by forty? Time’s ticking.”

KC sat there, all eyes upon her, and she realized she might have been overreacting. She finally smiled at Cindy. “If that’s what you want to do with Oxford … we can talk later. You can explain it to me then.”

“I’ll explain what I was doing,” Cindy said as she tilted her head. “And you can explain to me what you were doing in a prison. And the reason that you needed to come to Istanbul instead of coming home.”

The air instantly grew thick. Busch, Simon, and Michael avoided eye contact as silence took over for the next five minutes. The car continued past the growing sea of tourists who swelled the sidewalks, past enormous mosques with towering minarets, past ancient stone walls from the Middles Ages, past sand-colored buildings out of an Ottoman fairy tale.

The limo came to a sudden stop in the middle of the historic section. KC opened her door and, to everyone’s surprise, stepped out onto an ancient narrow street. An imposing wall, fifteen feet high, capped with staggered merlons and interrupted by period gates and towers, was just behind her.

KC turned to Michael. “Do you want to take a walk?”

Michael was surprised by the suddenness of the offer.

“KC,” Cindy said, “I thought we’d have a chance to talk—”

“We will, I promise. We won’t be long.”

“If you guys need to catch up…” Michael said, deferring to Cindy. “Don’t you need to rest?”

“Rest?” KC shot back. “It’s all right, if you can’t keep up, I can go alone.”

Philippe Venue sat in his stone mansion on Van Druer, sipping a cognac on the slate veranda adjacent to his library. Dubbed Azrael Manor, for the sometime archangel, his home was twenty thousand square feet of old-world English style. With no permanent woman in his life, his oversized house was purely masculine: everything was of dark woods, rich mahoganies, deep cherry; the curtains were thick and heavy, divided between forest green and maroon. He possessed a stunning collection of artwork that had been meticulously acquired over the years, a collection far larger than the one he displayed in his office, with over one hundred paintings adorning the walls of his fieldstone home.

He had a staff of twelve, including two chefs, two drivers, and a host of house servants who catered to his every need. The house sat on a rolling piece of land composed of fields and forests, its six hundred acres straddling two townships in suburban Amsterdam.

As he looked out over his estate, over his gardens and pool, past the stables and tennis courts, a fire ignited within him. It was all disappearing. The creditors had already taken his small island in the Caribbean; his 160-foot yacht,
Crowley
, sat in dry dock, its crew disbanded, its 150,000-gallon gas tanks bone-dry, pending repossession. Azrael Manor and his private jet were owned outright, but as the banks closed
in, it wouldn’t be long before the liens upon them began. While his current holdings still were great, the rate at which he was losing his fortune was increasing exponentially.

And to compound matters, there were rumblings that an even greater threat was closing in, one that would make the loss of his empire a mere afterthought. Some sins, no matter how old, could never be forgotten; some sins could never be forgiven; some sins brought nothing but condemnation, and God knows, Venue was a man whose numerous sins would have to be paid for.

Venue had floated through his early life with no goal beyond his own immediate gratification. By the age of seventeen, he had been expelled from school for too many fights, had spent time in juvenile hall for armed robbery, and had stolen more cars than he could remember. He blamed it all on the fact that his mom had died when he was five, but he still heard her voice in his sad, troubled head, a convenient excuse to a sympathetic judge that returned him to his alcoholic father.

But his larcenous, violent ways never abated, and on his eighteenth birthday, his father tossed him out, telling him never to come back. He spent the next two years in an ever-escalating one-man crime spree that culminated in murder—but in a serendipitous way, as without the murder he would never have found his calling, he would never have found God.

It had been almost forty years ago. Two lifetimes in jail terms.

Venue had lost fifty thousand pounds on a soccer match: Manchester United let him down once again. He refused to pay up, and when the bookie spread the word of his welching, Venue cut out his tongue and stabbed it into his heart, sending the message to all that no one speaks ill of Philippe Venue.

He became the subject of a nationwide manhunt; it was only a matter of days before he would be caught. Venue had run out of places to turn. He wasn’t being hunted just by the police; the underworld had put a contract on his head for killing one of their own. He couldn’t hide on either side of the law. He became a man without refuge, a man without a home, and was forced to seek sanctuary.

And he found it, in much the same way as all those who throughout history had sought sanctuary.

He left the country and entered the Church. It wasn’t that he had felt the calling, it was the only place left to hide. No one within the seminary questioned his intentions or his background; it was a time before background checks and letters of reference. Those who sought to preach the Word were always welcomed with open arms.

And so he entered St. Augustine’s Seminary and became a priest in training, a return to the Christian religion of his youth. One month in, he began to sleep better, his mind calmed, the violent impulses were quelled. After three months he was no longer obsessed with crime or death; the rage that greeted him every day upon waking had disappeared. But the most profound change came at six months. He embraced his faith. He found God in his heart, in his soul, in his every waking breath. Philippe Venue had found his purpose.

His contrition was honest but remained private. He had yet to reveal his wicked past to his fellow priests and probably never would, as he feared that no matter how much the Church spoke of redemption, how much the Church spoke of forgiveness, he was beyond such things.

As the years went on he embraced his rediscovered faith, becoming a scholar of all things biblical. He absorbed religious history with a fervor, his lust for knowledge extending past the traditional books of the Bible into the more esoteric: the Gospels of Thomas and Enoch, of Judas and Peter and James. He explored the other major religions, wrapping his arms around the similarities of faith: Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism. Religious texts such as the Koran and the Torah became his nighttime reading, which he devoured as others read Grisham or King.

His studies finally brought him to mysticism, that which is hinted at in many religions—Christianity’s divine intervention, the holy trinity; Judaism’s kabala; Islam’s reverence for angels and demons. He immersed himself in the study of witchcraft and druidism. He was fascinated with what people believed, the foundations of belief and blind faith, with religious adherence and sheer devotion.

And then he went deeper. He explored the writings of Dante and the neopaganists. He read of Aleister Crowley, dubbed the wickedest man in the world, of his beliefs and essays, and, in particular, his search in the early twentieth century for the forgotten places of magic and religion. Venue read of the cult of the Golden Dawn, of necromancy and Theistic Satanists, and devil worship. And he found the things of nightmares and of evil, of witchcraft and beasts. As a man who had committed atrocities in his life, he was rarely shocked, but what he found nearly turned his mind. And the more he read the more fascinated he became.

He finally brought these matters to the attention of his brethren, his family within the Church, and shared the mystical world with Father Oswyn.

Francis Oswyn was old-school: He longed for the age of the Latin Mass, for a time when man feared God as opposed to questioning him. He sat at his desk in the seminary and tilted his head, his gray comb-over falling aside as he listened to Venue’s words with attention and courtesy. He never once interrupted him, never once looked away. And when Venue finished, Oswyn spoke in a low tone, almost a whisper.

“Can you look into the heart of evil without being consumed by it?” Oswyn asked. “Seductive evil can be disguised by the goal of research, in the form of the quest for knowledge, but sometimes there is knowledge that we shouldn’t possess.”

“But we are men of God, the most capable to recognize and combat evil,” Venue protested.

“I wish it were so.” Oswyn nodded. “I have watched our pleas for peace, our prayers for the salvation of man go unanswered. Do they fall upon deaf ears or is evil winning the war for our souls?”

“All the more reason for us to understand it.”

“It has become your exclusive fixation, Father. One that has gathered interest and condemnation from those outside our community; even the Vatican has made inquiries about your research.”

Venue sat there listening to Oswyn’s words, watching his gray eyebrows arch with concern.

“You will discontinue this nonsense, this exploration of darkness, of evil. You have obtained an understanding but your dedication has become an obsession and it is at an end.”

“But … to understand God’s goodness don’t we have to understand evil in its darkest forms?” Venue pleaded.

Oswyn would hear nothing further and directed Venue to discontinue his fruitless research and focus his attention on God’s greatness and mankind’s true need.

For the first time in four years, Venue felt rage. It filled his soul. It was the feeling that had coursed through his body for all of his young life, a feeling that he thought he had abandoned when he entered the Church. But his mind calmed itself. He bowed his head in deference and left the monsignor’s office.

Venue had no intention of discontinuing anything. His fascination grew by leaps and bounds; he had become passionate in his pursuit and abandoning his research would have been like abandoning his soul.

So he continued. He became fascinated with the fervor of Aleister Crowley, of his writings and devotion to the occult. He studied the words of Dr. Robert Woodman, a founding member of the Golden Dawn; Blanche Barton, a high priestess of the satanic church; and Madame Blavatksy, a noted mystic who claimed to speak to the dead.

But all the while he continued to embrace his faith, his Church, for it was his home, his family, the air that filled his lungs. His interest did not obviate his faith; rather, it enhanced it. For if there was evil, if darkness and the Devil existed, then surely there was a God and Christ was his savior.