Ark of Fire (29 page)

Satisfied to observe the bespectacled scholar intently staring at his laptop, an eight-hundred-year-old map of England spread out on the table beside him, Stan continued down the hall to the kitchen.

For some reason the stone-floored country kitchen put him mind of his grandmother’s kitchen back home in Boone, North Carolina. Maybe it was the green-mottled crockware that lined the open shelves. Or the scarred wood-planked table that dominated the center of the room. Whatever the reason, he could envision his aproned grandmother standing at the oversized gas stove frying up some freshly laid eggs with big slabs of salted ham.

Reduced to eating English slop, he cut himself a thick slice of bread from the loaf that’d been left on the table. Slathering it with plum jam, he carried it over to the casement window that overlooked the garden. Through the gnarled branches of dead wisteria that framed the outside of the window, he could see a fine-looking white horse frolicking in a distant field.

Probably not much. That’s why he was in Oxford consulting with the foremost expert on the English crusaders. How ironic that the two men were acquainted with one another. The intelligence dossier on Aisquith had made no mention of the relationship. Luckily, he’d had the foresight to buy off the housekeeper.

Still it was troubling to discover that Aisquith knew about the quatrains. Although given that he possessed the sole copy of the quatrains outside Duke Humfrey’s Library and given that the library was only open to Oxford faculty and students, the Brit didn’t have a prayer of examining the original codex. Without the quatrains, Aisquith was just pissing in a gusty wind.

He glanced at his watch.

It was 1331 local time.

He’d hoped to have the quatrains deciphered by now, his excitement mounting with each passing hour. No doubt this was how Moses felt when he crafted the Ark of the Covenant, placing inside it the two stones inscribed with the Ten Commandments. With the creation of the Ark, Moses had ushered in a new world order. The hinge of history had swung upon the Ark. And it would soon swing again.

Although he knew that he had a tough fight ahead of him, he took solace in the knowledge that he would have at the ready the best weapon a soldier could have.

For twenty-five years he’d been readying himself.
Love of God. Purity of heart. Cleanliness of mind and body.
Those were the qualities of the Ark guardian.

Harliss, a burly ex-Marine, now a “consultant” with Rosemont Security, poked his head into the kitchen. “Sir, he’s got something for you.”

Knowing that “he” referred to the Harvard scholar, Stan headed for the dining room.

“What do you have?” he barked without preamble as he entered the room. The side chairs had all been pushed to one wall, enabling a free flow of movement around the large oval-shaped table. Several framed paintings were on the floor, propped against the same wall.

The scholar walked over and dimmed the overhead chandelier, a PowerPoint slide projected onto the now-pictureless dining room wall. Stan found himself staring at the four quatrains that Galen of Godmersham had composed prior to his death.

“Just as you thought, this word
arca
is the key to deciphering the quatrains.” Using a pointer, the younger man indicated the third quatrain. “
Arca
, of course, is the Latin word for ‘chest.’”

Because the bespectacled nimrod hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know, Stan made no reply. Although he’d provided his paid scholar with a high-speed Internet connection enabling him to hook into the world’s best libraries, he’d parsed his words carefully, refusing to disclose the details of the mission.

Not one to disobey God’s dictates, Stan intended to do all in his power to ensure that the unholy did not cast their gaze upon the Ark. The scholar had merely been told that he and his men represented a consortium of art collectors trying to track down a medieval chest believed to have been buried in the mid-fourteenth century somewhere in England. If his Harvard-educated boy wonder wondered at the trio of armed guards, he’d been wise enough to keep his own counsel. Unbridled greed had a way of making a man turn a blind eye.

When no reply to his
“arca”
comment was forthcoming, the pasty-faced scholar nervously rubbed his hands together. “Slowly but surely, it’s all coming together. I’ve got the first three quatrains more or less figured out, but I’m still trying to hammer out quatrain number four. Don’t you guys worry. I’m guessing that I’ll have this baby cracked in the next couple of hours.”

“You’ve been deciphering the verses since late yesterday. I had expected some tangible results by now.” Stan made no attempt to hide his annoyance; the scholar was unaware that he was working on a carefully crafted timetable.

“Hey, you can’t rush these things. Although I can tell you that the four quatrains form a rectilinear allegory.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Boyd Braxton muttered, staring at the scholar as though he were a turd on the bottom of his boot heel.

Smirking, the turd replied, “For those of us who never took geometry, I am referring to the four-sided geometric configuration known as a square.”

More slowly this time, Caedmon reread Galen of Godmersham’s poetic quatrains.

“Admittedly, we are clinging to the thinnest of reeds.”

Or the thinnest of reads, depending on one’s take.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been ensconced in the wood-paneled reading room of Duke Humfrey’s Library, muddling his way through a thorny conundrum. In his student days, he’d spent countless hours in this very room seated at the very same table, medieval texts piled high.

Believing that a tidy work area elicited a similar tidiness in one’s thinking, he organized the miscellaneous items that had been placed on the reading table. The librarian, no doubt spurred by Sir Kenneth Campbell-Brown’s advance phone call, had been most solicitous in delivering the requested materials to their table. In addition to a leather-bound codex that contained a selection of fourteenth-century poetry, including Galen’s quatrains, she had conveyed a slim volume that contained the Godmersham Feet of Fines records for the years 1300 to 1350. Paper, pencils, and cotton gloves had also been provided.

An exasperated frown on her face, Edie pointed a gloved index finger at the open codex. “Just look at this, will ya. It’s written in Old English. Which is whole lot like saying it’s written in a dead language.”

Noticing that several library patrons irritably glowered, Caedmon raised a finger to his lips, reminding Edie that silence reigned supreme within the paneled walls of Duke Humfrey’s Library. If one must speak, a muffled whisper was the preferred mode of communication.

“Actually, the quatrains are written in Middle English rather than the more remote Old English—thus enabling me to produce a fairly accurate interlinear translation.”

“You’re talking about a line-by-line translation, right?” Her voice had noticeably lowered. “When I was a graduate student, I wrote a research paper on the Wife of Bath. You know, from
The Canterbury Tales
. The paper was for a seminar class on women in the Middle Ages, and it darned near did me in.”

Hoping to bolster her spirits, he patted her hand. “Don’t worry. I’m certain that you’ll survive the ordeal.” Then, not wanting to dwell on the fact that an ordeal was by its very nature a trying endeavor, he reached for a pencil and a sheet of blank paper.

Although it’d been a number of years since he’d last translated Middle English, he managed to quickly work his way through the archaic spelling and phraseology with only a few missteps.

“Hopefully, this will make for more coherent verse,” he said, pushing the sheet of paper in his companion’s direction.

Lifting the handwritten sheet off the table, Edie held it at arm’s length from her face. Lips silently moving, she read the translation.

As she wordlessly lowered the sheet of paper to the table, Caedmon discerned from Edie’s frown that she was as befuddled by the translation as she had been by the original text.

“I suggest that we take the allegorical and symbolic references in turn. Phrases such as ‘the merciless west wind,’ ‘the befouled shepherd,’ and ‘the veil between two worlds’ should be thought of as pieces of code which have been strategically placed within the quatrains. The key to solving the riddle will hinge on how we decode the symbols contained within each line of verse.”

“And what if Galen loaded his word puzzle with a bunch of mixed signals?” she asked, still frowning.

“Oh, I have no doubt that Galen deliberately inserted semiotic decoys into the quatrains. The medieval mind was quite nimble when it came to inserting secret messages into seemingly innocuous text.”

Edie stared at the handwritten sheet of paper. “Something tells me that we’re gonna need a CIA code breaker.”

“Here, take this, for instance,” he said, pointing to the first line of text. “‘The merciless west wind rode forth from Solomon’s city jubilantly singing.’ I detect a bit of linguistic legerdemain at work. Clearly, this refers to the pharaoh Shishak leaving Jerusalem after successfully pillaging Solomon’s Temple. Death then followed in the Egyptian’s wake, the first quatrain ending with Shishak leaving the pilfered treasure behind as he and his army scurried back to Egypt.”

Edie’s eyes suspiciously narrowed. “Unless I’m greatly mistaken, you’re actually enjoying yourself.”

“Who among us does not enjoy the intricacies of a well-constructed word puzzle?”

“Well, me, for starters,” his companion groused. “I’m more of a sudoku person. It’s a number puzzle that—Never mind.” She waved away the thought. “You know, the only reason we’re sitting here in Duke Humfrey’s Library is because we
assume
that when Galen of Godmersham composed his quatrains, he was actually leaving clues as to where he hid the gold chest.”

“That is our base assumption,” he said with a nod.

“Then I guess it’s already crossed your mind that someone may have deciphered the quatrains and recovered the treasure long years ago.”

“Since the cart has yet to pull the horse, we shall deal with that issue if and when it presents itself.”

Edie smiled, a teasing glint in her eyes. “I think this is where I’m supposed to make a rude comparison between you and the back end of a horse.”

Unable to help himself, he stared into those lively brown eyes. Since the earlier kiss on the Oxford coach, the air between them had become more sexually charged. He wondered if the storm would pass without fanfare. Or if they would be caught in a driving rain.