Shadow Ritual (6 page)

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Marcas started. Her voice carried authority, and she was obviously used to giving orders. He looked up and saw an athletically built woman with short blonde hair. She was wearing loose dark-colored pants and a suit jacket—fitted to give her access to her service weapon.

When he stood up, she was right in his face, staring at him with a clear look of disdain.

“Hold up,” Jaigu intervened. “I asked him to come. He’s a homicide detective with the Criminal Investigation Division in Paris. I thought he could help us.”

Jade shot Jaigu a look. “Since when does a man like you think? If you really wanted to use your brains, you would have kept him away from the crime scene. Until further notice, I’m head of security for the embassy. So at the risk of repeating myself, I’ll try to appeal to your inherent intelligence: get the fuck out of here, and take this dude with you!”

Before Jaigu could respond, Marcas spoke up. “You owe him more respect than you’ve shown. But I understand your point of view. I’ll leave you to your investigation. Everyone has a job to do. Alexis, come on. I’ve seen enough.”

What a harpy, Marcas thought as he walked away with Jaigu. She would have ripped him a new one if she’d gotten the chance. Whatever. With any luck, he’d find his movie producer and cap the evening with a little seduction.

Jaigu interrupted his fantasy. “So what are your impressions?”

“About what, that shrew of yours?”

“No, the body.”

“I don’t know. There’s no clear logic in the blows she received. She probably died from blunt-force trauma to the forehead, but I don’t understand why she was hit on the shoulder, unless it was to make her suffer. A broken clavicle can be quite painful. For the rest, you’ll have to trust your Amazon and the Italian police.”

“I doubt that. There’s no way any Romans cops will set foot in the embassy. Officially, the woman’s death will be listed as accidental.”

Marcas looked at his friend for a long time. “You’re not really going to cover up a murder, are you? That’s illegal.”

“Don’t worry. We won’t keep anything from the French authorities. But the Italians have way too many mob-related murders to worry about. A French woman suffering a fatal head injury from a fall will go by the boards. So put all this behind you and have some Champagne on the republic’s dime. I have to go see our friend the ambassador.”

9

Jade Zewinski stared at her friend’s bloody body. Two hours earlier, they had been joking at the reception, challenging each other to come on to this person or that. Jade remembered Sophie’s oval face, the rebellious lock of hair, her childlike smile. Now Sophie’s lifeless body lay in front of her, a mass of dead flesh that would end up in a coffin, her face smashed by the baton on the floor next to her.

Jade shook herself out of her trance. She needed to act quickly. A guard had seen the woman who had come up with Sophie, and a description had been sent to all the security agents.

She shouted out her orders. “Get the on-call doctor here. Have him fix her up a little. Make sure there’s respiratory assistance for the transfer. The oxygen mask will cover up the wounds.”

The doors slammed shut. Only two men remained. They were gendarmes, men who were quick and could be trusted.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She recognized the ambassador’s voice.

“Special Agent Zewinski, what’s going on?” the ambassador asked. “How serious is it?”

They used a code for the level of emergency. It was based on the Richter scale. Nine meant the ambassador’s life was in danger.

For Jade, Sophie’s death was an eight. But she gave the ambassador a detached, professional assessment. “I’d say a five.” The event was worrisome, but controllable.

“Okay, give me a quick rundown. Then I’ve got to take care of our guests.”

“Yes, sir.”

She gave the ambassador a synopsis. He wanted to know if the death could have any political implications. Jade reassured him that the victim was not on the embassy’s staff. Neither was she one of the evening’s VIPs. The ambassador was polite enough not to sigh in relief.

Jade knew the protocol. The body would be flown to Paris the next day with a falsified certificate indicating an accidental death. This would allow them to get the body through customs.

She would make the arrangements herself first thing in the morning. She would order the coffin, and with any luck, the body would reach Paris by evening.

Jade had no illusions that the killer was still on the premises. Jade was sure. She’d have to pull the security footage.

Jade bent down and touched Sophie’s hand one last time before turning to leave. She would find the son of a bitch who murdered her friend.

She pulled the heavy door open and almost slammed into Jaigu’s detective buddy, who was out of breath.

“I need to check something on the body,” he said.

“That’s out of the question. Get out of here before I have you removed.”

“Don’t be idiotic. Listen, even if you won’t let me see her, go in and check the body. Look at her neck. Please. It’s important.”

Jade glared at the cop and then shrugged. “Okay, but if you’re wasting my time, you’ll regret it.”

She went back to the body and then returned to the detective. Now she was even more troubled. “There was a blow to her neck. It probably broke her cervical bones. How did you know?”

The detective reached for her arm. “We should talk about this somewhere else,” he said.

Jade pulled away. “That’s enough. Talk! Right now, right here!”

“Sophie was your friend, wasn’t she?” he said after a few seconds. “Did she have some connection to the Freemasons? Was she a Mason?”

“What does that have to do with her murder?”

“Answer me, please. It’s not a trick question.”

Jade pursed her lips. “Yes, she was a Freemason. Now explain yourself.”

The detective scanned the paintings of Florentine masters. “The flesh falls from the bones,” he said.

10

Helen struggled to contain her rage. She had searched the hotel room twice and had found no trace of the documents. Her boss would by very displeased with this turn of events. That bitch had played her.

She sat on the soft bed and tried to regain her composure. She had been trained to think calmly. She took deep breaths and chanted, something she had seen a Serbian priest do during the Bosnian War. She would never forget the serene look on his face amid all the chaos. He even wore that look in death, after he had been shot in the gut. Helen didn’t know anything about liturgical chanting—she had no interest in religion—so she made up her own phrases and pulled them out in moments like this one.

She had to think.

Dawes had seen only one person in Rome, her school friend who worked at the embassy. Nobody else could have the documents. They had to be in the embassy, but she couldn’t go back there. She had failed in her mission.

Helen left the room, slipping her passkey into her pocket. Ever since hotels had abandoned keys for magnetic-strip keycards, it was a child’s play to break into rooms. She had bought a little electronic encoding machine at a Chinese shop for a mere ten thousand euros. Now she could go wherever she wanted in any hotel in the world that hadn’t started using radio-frequency identification or another more secure system.

She took the elevator down and slipped out unnoticed. She would wait until morning to report in.

11

Jade had Marcas repeat himself.

“The flesh falls from the bones,” he said. “It’s a sentence from a Freemason ritual referring to the murder of Hiram, the founder of the order.”

“What does that have to do with this murder? Bring it down a notch so a simple layperson like me can understand. I gather you are a member of that group.”

Marcas rubbed his cheek. He could already feel the stubble.

“Three blows: to the shoulder, to the neck, and to the forehead, as in the legend of Hiram. You see, according to Masonic tradition, the architect who built King Solomon’s temple held powerful secrets. Three workers grew jealous of him. They conspired against him, and one night they set a trap.”

Marcas could see the tension in Jade’s arms.

“This is ridiculous!” she spit out. “Sophie just got murdered, and you’re reciting the Bible. I must be hallucinating.”

“Let me finish. The first worker struck him on the shoulder. Hiram refused to talk and fled. The second worker hit the architect on the neck. He managed to escape again. But the third worker finished him off with a blow to the forehead.”

Now she was listening.

“This story is very important to us. It is highly symbolic. But there’s something else.”

“What?”

“These murders generally accompany a period of anti-Masonic persecution.”

“There you have it—a conspiracy! You’re out of your mind.”

“And you’re close-minded! For more than a century now, there have been murders such as this one. It’s always the same: a blow to the shoulder, a blow to the neck, and a blow to the forehead. It’s almost like marking the victims as martyrs.”

“How do you know about these murders?”

“I’ve heard about them at various lodges.”

“And?”

“This is undoubtedly a message.”

“So do you have any idea who it’s from? You’ve got so many enemies.”

“Most people who don’t like us aren’t enemies. They’re just ignorant.”

Jade shook her head.

“Go back to your stories and legends. I have a murder to solve, the murder of someone very dear to me. If she hadn’t joined your sect, she’d be alive.”

“Don’t insult me,” Marcas said. “I don’t belong to a sect, and I don’t think your friend would have shared your point of view. Since you’re not interested in what I have to say, I’ll leave. I have my own cases to tend to.”

His voice bounced off the palace walls, which had echoed so many other arguments and conspiracies since the time of the Farnese family.

This time, Jade grabbed his arm, and it was Marcas who was glaring. He didn’t like this woman and wanted her to know it. “Special Agent Zewinski, your ignorance matches your incompetence. Remove your hand. It’s in your best interest.”

She shot him a challenging smile. “What are you going to do?” she said. “Call your boyfriends to come over and put a spell on me?”

Marcas’s anger rose two notches, but he didn’t show it. “Oh no, just the media. Your bosses at the foreign office will love it. It’s not every day that a French national gets bumped off at the Farnese Palace.”

“You won’t have time to do that.”

“You forget my
boyfriends
. Some of them are reporters and editors,” he said, taking out his cell phone. “Would you like me to make a call? I’m all for transparency.”

Jade balled her hands into fists. “That’s blackmail. Transparency my ass. How ironic from a Mason. You and your buddies love conspiring in the lodge.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“You’ve got to understand how we outsiders—the common mortals—see it. Meetings that ordinary people can’t attend, aprons, hand tools that never get dirty, and all that playacting. And oh, if you need a job, just call your Mason buddy. He’ll take care of everything. But silly me, I’m just making all of that up, aren’t I.”

“I won’t do you the honor of making a response.”

“A thousand apologies. After all, I’m just a layperson—what do you call us? Profanes?—deprived of the light of the Great Architect of the Universe?”

“We have nothing to hide.”

“You could have fooled me. But then, everyone has secrets.”

Marcas narrowed his eyes. “So what are yours?” he asked.

“My secrets? Let’s just say I’m an exception. I don’t have secrets. I don’t lead a double life as a cop and a hoodwinked brother. But I do have to admit that it would have given me a leg up in my career.”

“And just maybe it would have knocked that chip off your shoulder. In the meantime, though, you’ll just be pulling off some secret agent body-vanishing cover-up of your friend’s murder.”

Marcas and Jade stared at each other a good ten seconds, and then the cop turned on his heels and walked away.

12

“So what is this stone?” Bashir said to himself when he got to his hideout, a small apartment not far from the archeology institute. Unwrapping the item, he wondered if it was worth more than what he was charging his client. The frenzy for artifacts from Palestine hadn’t slackened since the 1946 find in Qumran—the Dead Sea Scrolls, an ideological bombshell. For conservative Jews the scrolls proved that Christians were nothing more than the descendants of a very minor Jewish sect, the Essenes, who predicted the Apocalypse and ran off to the desert. Jesus was just a bottom-tier prophet. Later, of course, other studies brought into question the Essenien origin of the scrolls, and the famous purification pools that attracted tourists were now thought to be ordinary sedimentation pits.

In any case, ideology didn’t interest Bashir. Money did. Some decadent Westerners were willing to pay a small fortune to get this find to Paris. He pulled out the documents he’d retrieved along with the stone and looked them over. Then he opened a map on his laptop and studied the coastal road that ran along the Sinai Desert from Eilat—a real furnace this time of year. And he’d encounter a number of Egyptian Army roadblocks. Too risky. Egypt was a bad idea.

He clicked again and tried flights from Jordan. He could cross the border when it opened in the morning, although it would be no picnic. Searches were systematic. But he had an idea. He could get to Amman by midmorning.

He reserved the flight from Amman to Paris, via Amsterdam.

13

Marcas rolled the toothpick from the salmon hors d’oeuvre between his fingers. What a ridiculous confrontation he’d just had with the head of security. He was annoyed with himself for backing off, but what good would it have done to argue? She had attacked him for being a Freemason, and nothing would have changed her mind. She would never understand his real commitment and the beauty of the rituals. She saw only the dark side.