Shadow Ritual (9 page)

Marcas took a slow sip of his coffee to give himself some time to think.

“In case you don’t know it, I’m on vacation. I’m supposed to be off for another two weeks, and I have lots of fun activities planned, none of which include you. I’m really very sorry about your friend’s death, but I will not, under any circumstances, be involved in this case.”

Zewinski smiled. “But you don’t have a choice. Apparently one of the higher-ups is a fellow of the light—that’s what you call it, don’t you? And he wants you to illuminate this case. I’m no psychic, but I predict you’ll be getting a call from your superiors in no time at all.”

“Well, in that case, thanks for the heads up.”

“Look, I came to get things straight between us. If we’re going to work together, we need to be clear. I’m going to have to stick my nose into your apron-wearing clown act, and I’m not happy about it.”

Marcas set down his coffee.

“I’ll wait until I get my orders. In the meantime, I just have one question.”

“Shoot.”

“Why do you hate Freemasons so much?”

Her eyes hardened. She stood up abruptly and adjusted her coat.

“You’re right. I don’t like what you represent, and I know that Sophie died because of some scheming done by your devious little brothers, adepts of the Great Architect of the Universe. This meeting is over. We’ll see each other in a setting that’s more official before the day is out.”

Marcas stared at her as she turned her back and stomped out, slamming the cafeteria door. There was no way he would team up with that Valkyrie. He paid for the coffees and left, swearing under his breath. Why had he accepted that invitation to the embassy? Besides, he was supposed to fly to Washington next week to meet with American Freemasons at Georgetown University. They’d been planning the meeting for months to share information on alchemical iconography in eighteenth-century rituals.

As he left the library, though, he admitted that his plans were already ruined—a sister had died, after all.

20

His client was not going to be happy. His connection to Paris had been canceled—some anomalies in the plane’s hydraulic system. All the passengers en route to Paris had been asked to disembark at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.

Bashir picked up his luggage—which held the precious Tebah Stone—without any grousing. He left that to the other travelers, most of them French, who were having a go at the airline employee trying to get them on other flights. He opted to take the train to Paris after spending a night in Amsterdam for the pleasure of it. After all, he wasn’t Bashir the feared Palestinian hit man now. He was Vittorio, a fun-loving Milanese Italian who liked wine and pretty women.

A little delay wouldn’t make any difference. What was so urgent about some archeological artifact? He knew practically nothing about his client, a certain Sol. Their contact was limited to e-mails sent through a series of addresses. “Meeting in Paris ASAP,” the most recent one read. “Contact Tuzet at the Plaza Athénée. Ask for the keys to his Daimler.”

He didn’t know who Tuzet was, but as long as he got paid, he couldn’t care less. Before leaving the airport, he swapped his suitcase full of travel souvenirs for a small carry-on for the stone and the accompanying documents. He also sent an encrypted e-mail to Sol, advising him of the delay and saying he would take a bullet train in the morning. He would arrive in the early afternoon.

Now he had some time to kill. He headed downtown. Perhaps he would visit the red-light district. He had heard of some fine restaurants, too. So maybe he would satisfy both appetites tonight: first a little food, then a little sex. Maybe more than a little of each. Strolling the streets and considering his options, he passed a Muslim mother in a niqab. The contrast between the exposed prostitutes in the windows of the red-light district and this mother, entirely covered to protect her from the eyes of men, was striking. Yet weren’t they the same? The prostitute exposed herself to please her male customers. The religious woman might say that she was covering to please God, but wasn’t she also doing it to please her husband—the man in her life who desired her? Bashir couldn’t help thinking how odd it was that Europeans were more shocked by a veil than a thong.

Secular and Islamic tensions had risen in this country since the slaying of a controversial movie producer, Theo Van Gogh. He had made a film focusing on the oppression of women in Islam, and in retaliation, a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim had shot him to death. The slaying had fed the flames of anti-Islamic sentiment, and the people of the Netherlands, who liked to think of themselves as so open and tolerant, were witnessing the same growth of sectarianism that was affecting the rest of Europe. The extreme-right presence of the Vlaams Blok, along with its hateful nostalgia for the supremacy of the white race, was evidence of that.

Bashir didn’t like Jews, but he had no affection for contemporary fascists either. He had gone into a rage when he found a portrait of Adolph Hitler in the room of one of his young cousins who overflowed with admiration for the Führer.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. A certain portion of the Arab world saw Hitler as a dictator, yes, but also as a standard bearer for the fight against the Jewish peril.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, a fabricated text first published in 1903 in Russia, could still be bought in souks all over the Middle East. In the nineteen twenties, Henry Ford had underwritten a half million copies of the publication, which described a Jewish plot to dominate the world.

Bashir found this grotesque admiration to be pitiful. The Germans had recruited the Arabs as partners during World War II to fight the British. Egypt’s Anwar el Sadat, who signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, had spied for German Field Marshal Edwin Rommel during the war. The grand mufti of Jerusalem, whom Hitler hosted with full honors in 1941, had blessed three Muslim SS divisions: Handschar, Kama, and Skandenberg. “The crescent and the swastika have the same enemy: the Star of David,” the mufti had said.

But Bashir knew that Nazi ideology classified Muslims as inferiors, not much better than Slavs or Latins.

He had met European neo-Nazis in training camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Libya. He knew these skinheads, who gave lip service to the Palestinian cause, would go home and organize racist attacks there.

Bashir had second thoughts about his evening plans. His taste for a tempting nightcap had waned. Instead, he turned toward the city center to find an Indonesian restaurant and order a
rijsttafel
, an assortment of small, tasty dishes the Dutch loved so much.

A bicycle bell rang out behind him, and he barely had time to jump out of the way to avoid being run over. Collecting himself, Bashir saw that he had landed in front of a shop with a window bearing a huge florescent-red mushroom on a dark purple background. The man who had almost hit him parked his bike in front of the same shop, smiled, and walked in. Bashir decided to follow and take a look around. Shelves holding hundreds of small bags containing mushrooms and spores lined the walls. It was like a garden center for potheads.

The young Dutch man at the counter looked as serious as a theology student. He was giving a German couple expert advice on growing magic mushrooms. “It’s all about the soil,” he said, sounding sententious. The couple had chosen twenty or so bags of spores, enough to fill an entire greenhouse.

Bashir picked a bag containing five specimens of a white-fringed mushroom with a phallic cap:
Psilocybe
semilanceata
. He felt their texture and made a face. Not good enough. He waited for the salesman to finish with his customers and asked in English if he didn’t have something better. The employee came around the counter and pointed to another display of multicolored bags decorated with laughing elves. Bashir shook his head.

“I want the best quality. Money is not an issue.”

The salesman smiled and retreated to the back of the store. Bashir could see him removing a box from a refrigerator. There were no comic gnomes, just sturdy, bright-colored plastic boxes containing mushrooms that might have been collected the day before. The salesman returned, took out four mushrooms, and set them delicately on a brushed-aluminum tray.

“The nectar of the Gods, man. Takeoff guaranteed with no hard landing. But you have to be lying down.”

“How much?”

The young man put on a contrite look and said, “I don’t have many left, and you can’t grow these jewels just anywhere.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred euros, and I’m taking a loss, man.”

“Fine.”

Bashir paid and on his way out held the door for an elderly woman with snow-white hair and a fox terrier.

A strange country, he thought as he headed toward Dam Square, in front of the royal palace, where the queen never went. He thought about Sol and the macabre staging of the murder. He would probably never get an explanation.

21

The supple wooden bar sagged under the weight of her leg as she stretched over her thigh, reaching for her calf and making a final effort to grab her ankle. Sweat trickled down her forehead to her cheek, which was now pressed against the leg.

The pain shot up her leg and through her hips as she pushed her flexibility to the limit.

“Pain gives birth to dreams,” the French poet Louis Aragon had written, and for Helen, the more intense it was, the clearer her thoughts became. She had many techniques for emptying her mind, but nothing worked as well as torturing her body with extreme stretches.

Hvar’s neo-medieval building had twenty-five rooms, three meeting rooms, relaxation rooms, a Jacuzzi, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a heliport, and a pier that could host large ships. It was Orden’s second-largest estate after the one in Asunción, Paraguay, which had a ranch and a golf course, as well. Orden had similar estates in Munich, Cannes, London, and five other cities in the Americas. Two palaces were under construction in Asia. Members used them for retreats and meetings far from prying eyes.

The castle, entirely renovated by the state in 1942, had served as offices for the German diplomatic delegation and had also housed an outpost of the Ahnenerbe, the Riech’s institute for archeological and cultural studies of the Aryan race. When Yugoslavia was liberated, the castle became a people’s palace under Josip Tito and was used solely by the aged statesman’s bodyguards.

After the fall of communism, a consortium of German and Croatian businessmen quietly bought the building to house the Adriatic Institute of Culture Research, one of Orden’s many retreats.

Surviving members of the Ahnenerbe, all with the Thule, chose the name Orden following the demise of Nazi Germany. “Before Hitler, we existed. After his death, we will continue to exist.”

Anyone looking for the owners of the castle would find a Zagreb-based real estate company held by a Cyprian trust and managed by three phantom foundations in Liechtenstein. The same setup was used for other properties the organization owned. Only the most astute observer would notice that all these luxury residences were cultural institutes whose focus varied from one location to the next: artistic symbolism in London, for example, or the working-class culture in Munich, or pre-Colombian musical instruments in Paraguay.

Unfolding from her position, Helen felt a rush as her body released the tension. She had the sensation of being weightless. She picked up the wall phone and called the front desk to schedule a massage. Grabbing a towel, Helen gazed at the sea outside the gym’s large window. The waves glistened in the moonlight. Three lit-up yachts passed in the distance, and a fishing boat was leaving the shore.

“Tired?”

She turned to see a man in the doorway. She felt his steel-gray eyes giving her a once-over.

“A bit. And you?”

“Same old routine. You must succeed this time. We are counting on you.”

“Yes. I won’t fail again.”

“I should hope not. Will you be joining us for dinner?”

“No. It’ll be an early night for me.”

“Good night, then,” the man said. After a moment, he added, “You bear such a resemblance to your mother. It’s like I’m seeing her all over again in you.”

“Good night, Father.”

He looked thoughtful, then turned and left.

Helen wiped her forehead and looked at herself in the mirror. The mention of her mother catapulted her back to a time when she wasn’t called Helen or any of the other names she used for her missions, a time when she was simply Joana, a child lost in a civil war. The last image she had of her mother was a Serbian officer shooting her between the eyes. Her skull had exploded before her body crumpled to the ground. The officer then put a gun to Helen’s head. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. He leaned in, and she felt the heat of his breath on her ear. “I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “I’m not a pig like your father, who massacred my village and killed my twelve-year-old sister. You’ll live to tell him that I’ll wring his neck with my own hands. Nod if you understand.”

She had nodded.

The man holstered his gun. It was over. Five minutes later, the Serbs were gone. Helen had fallen to her knees next to her mother’s body, howling in hatred and pain. But when her father returned, she was done crying. Without emotion, she gave him the message.

A year later, her commando unit captured a small band of Serbians. She recognized her mother’s murderer. Her father let him loose in an abandoned village and offered her a manhunt. She took half an hour to kill the man, first lodging bullets in his knees, then taking a knife to each part of his body. His shrieks echoed off the crumbling walls of the houses. “You made me the person I am today,” she whispered calmly in his ear. “You gave me a gift, that of granting death.” Then she shot him between the eyes. She was sixteen.

It took her only a few years to build her reputation as an efficient and ruthless killer. At the end of the war, she transitioned to working as a contract killer and brokering traffic of all kinds. There were few women in the field.