Steve Berry - The Alexandria Link

“That’s not true. In France you checked me out.”

Cassiopeia was right-she’d been thoroughly vetted, and Stephanie learned that the dark-skinned beauty had been born in Barcelona thirty-seven years ago. Half Muslim, though not noted as devout, Cassiopeia possessed master’s degrees in engineering and medieval history. She was the sole shareholder and owner of a multicontinent conglomerate based in Paris and involved in a broad spectrum of international business ventures with assets in the multibillion-dollar range. Her Moorish father had started the company and she’d inherited control, though she was little involved with its everyday operation. She also served as the chairwoman for a Dutch foundation that worked closely with the United Nations on international AIDS relief and world famine, particularly in Africa. Stephanie knew from personal experience that Vitt shied away from little, and she could wield a rifle with the accuracy of a sniper. At times a bit too brassy for her own good, Cassiopeia had been associated with Stephanie’s late husband and understood more about Stephanie’s personal life than she cared for anyone to know. But she trusted the woman. No question. Thorvaldsen had chosen wisely when he sent her.

“I have a serious problem.”

“That much we already know.”

“And Cotton is in trouble. It’s imperative I contact him.”

“Henrik hasn’t heard from him. Malone said he’d call when he’s ready, and you know him better than anyone.”

“How’s Gary?”

“Just like his father. Tough. He’s safe with Henrik.”

“Where’s Pam?”

“On her way back to Georgia. She flew with Malone to London and was leaving from there.”

“The Israelis are in London, too. Assassination squad.”

“Cotton’s a big boy. He can handle it. We have to decide what to do about your problem.”

Stephanie, too, had been thinking about that conundrum. Brent Green himself came and told us to leave. Which might explain why the Capitol Police had been scarce. Usually they were everywhere. She glanced out the taxi and saw that they were near Dupont Circle and her hotel. “We need to make sure we’re not being followed.”

“The Metro might be a better way to go.”

She agreed.

“Where are we headed?” Cassiopeia asked.

She spied the air pistol stuffed beneath Cassiopeia’s jacket. “You have any more darts that rock people to sleep?”

“Plenty.”

“Then I know exactly where we need to go.”

LONDON

7:30 PM

MALONE WATCHED PAM SLEEP. HE WAS SLOUCHED IN A CHAIR beside the hotel room’s window, George Haddad’s satchel lying in his lap. He’d been right about the disinfectant: Pam had bitten hard on the towel as he’d doused the wound. Tears had welled in her eyes, but she’d been tough. Not a sound betrayed her agony. Feeling bad for her, he’d bought her a new shirt from the lobby boutique.

He was tired, too, but his “Billet nerves,” as he called them, supplied his muscles with boundless energy. He could recall times when days had passed without eating, his body charged with adrenaline, his focus on staying alive and getting the job done. He’d thought that rush a thing of the past. Something he’d never experience again.

And here he was.

Right in the middle.

The past few hours could have been a gruesome nightmare except that, in undreamlike fashion, the events played clear in his mind. His friend George Haddad had been shot right before his eyes. People with agendas were after something. All none of his business any other time. But some of those same people had kidnapped his son and blown up his bookshop. No. This was personal.

He owed them.

And like Haddad, he intended to pay his debts.

But he needed to know more.

Haddad had been cryptic in his comments both before and after the Israelis appeared. Even worse, he’d never finished explaining what he’d noticed years ago-what exactly motivated Israel to kill him. Hoping that the leather satchel lying in his lap contained answers, he unbuckled the clasps and removed a book, three notebooks, and four maps.

The book was an eighteenth-century volume, the cover tooled leather and brittle like sun-dried skin. None of its lettering was legible, so he carefully parted the binding and read the title sheet.

A Hero’s Journey by Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius.

He scanned the pages.

A novel written more than two hundred years ago in an unimaginative and pedantic style. He wondered about its significance and hoped the notebooks would explain.

He thumbed through each one.

The tight script was Haddad’s, written in English. He read closer.

…the clues left with me by the Guardian have proven troubling. The hero’s quest is difficult. I’m afraid I’ve been the fool. But not the first. Thomas Bainbridge was also a foolish man. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, he apparently was extended an invitation to the library and completed the hero’s quest. A condition of the invitation must surely be that the visit stay private. The Guardians have not spent two millennia protecting their cache only to have it revealed by an invitee. But Bainbridge violated that trust and wrote of his experience. In an effort to ease his treachery, he couched his tale as fiction titled not so curiously, A Hero’s Journey. The book was printed in limited copies and hardly noticed. In Bainbridge’s day, the world was teeming with fantastic tales (novels regarded with little respect), so the protagonist’s journey to some mythical library was viewed with little enthusiasm. I found a copy three years ago, which I stole from a Welsh estate. Reading it offers little insight. Bainbridge, though, could not resist one final violation of the trust the Guardians placed in him. In the years before he died he erected an arbor in the garden of his Oxfordshire mansion. Into the marble he carved the image of a painting and Roman letters. The painting, by Nicolas Poussin, was originally known as Happiness Subdued by Death but its more common name today is The Shepherds of Arcadia II.

Malone knew little of Poussin, though he was familiar with the name. Luckily, in one of the notebooks, Haddad provided some details.

Poussin was a troubled soul, much like Bainbridge. He was born in Normandy in 1594, and the first thirty years of his life were ones of trials and tribulations. He suffered a lack of patrons, unappreciative courtesans, poor health, and debt. Even working on the ceiling in the Grand Gallery at the Louvre left him uninspired. Not until Poussin left France for Italy in 1642 did a change occur. That journey, which normally would have been one of a few weeks, took Poussin nearly six months. Once in Rome, Poussin began to paint with a new style and confidence, one that did not go unnoticed, one that quickly earned him the label as the most celebrated artist in Rome. Many have speculated that somewhere along his journey Poussin was inducted into a great secret. Interestingly, when The Shepherds of Arcadia was finished, the patron who commissioned the piece, Cardinal Rospigliosi, who later became Pope Clement IX, chose not to hang the work in public, but kept it in his private apartment. Rospigliosi was an artistic man with an interest in the arcane and esoteric. He possessed an outstanding personal library, and historians eventually labeled him “the freethinking pope.”

A clue as to what Poussin may have personally experienced can be found in a letter written six years after The Shepherds of Arcadia was completed. Its drafter, a priest, the brother of Louis XIV’s finance minister, thought what he’d learned from Poussin might be of interest to the French monarchy. I found the letter a few years ago among the archives of the Cossé-Brissac family: