C. Palov - Templar's Code

Reaching under the table, Rubin opened a drawer. From it he extracted a handheld magnifying glass, which he passed to Caedmon. “You may have need of this. The devil’s in the details, as they say.”

CHAPTER 48

To kill or not to kill . . . always the question.

Standing beside the unkempt bed, Saviour rubbed a hand over his bare chest as he stared at the sleeping woman. At the bony backside. Softly rounded buttocks. Tousled blond hair. A first for him. The fact that she was a woman, not a blond. It’d been rather amusing, the way she’d gasped in surprise when he took her from behind. But gasps soon turned to whimpers and moans. Then a climactic cry. Anemostrovilos . The Greek word for “cyclone.” So similar to the Greek word for “sodomy.”

In no hurry, he took his fill of the somnolent Jocasta. Although Marnie Pritchard claimed to be thirty-five years of age, he placed her closer to fifty. Old enough to be his mother. It’d been a long time since he’d given that bitch even a passing thought. Five years after leaving the flat in Vardalis Square, he’d caught sight of his mother at the Apokries Festival before Lenten Monday. By then, the anger had mutated into a bland indifference; he’d turned and walked away from Iphigenia Argyros without so much as a wave of the hand. A free man.

Tilting his head to one side, Saviour noticed that Marnie had a mole on her upper left back. And a small pucker of cellulite under the curve of her ass. While she hadn’t been a fount, Marnie had given him some valuable information. For starters, he’d learned that Caedmon Aisquith was impersonating someone named Peter Willoughby-Jones. Making him think that Aisquith/Willoughby-Jones might be a fugitive from the law. He’d changed his own last name from Argyros to Panos after he killed Evangelos Danielides. He chose the new surname in memory of Panos Island. So he would never forget the degradation that he’d suffered and how he bested the dragon.

He’d also learned that Rubin Woolf was an expert on Francis Bacon. While he’d never heard of Francis Bacon, Mercurius was well-acquainted with the name and had been greatly interested to learn of this. Throughout the evening, he’d slyly probed and prodded, but Marnie Pritchard clearly had no knowledge of the treasure. A pity that .

His evening’s work unfinished, Saviour left the bed and padded to the dresser and snatched up Marnie’s expensive leather handbag. Purse in hand, he headed for the en suite bathroom, a luxurious room boasting a claw-footed bathtub and gas fireplace. Taking care not to make any noise, he closed the door. Sitting on the commode lid, he riffled through the bag, commandeering a cherry-red mobile phone and a key ring. He muted the ringer before shoving the mobile into his trouser pocket. Fingering through the keys—the organized Marnie having labeled them for him—he removed the silver key marked SHOP .

About to exit the bathroom, he, instead, stepped over to the gilt mirror that hung above the vanity. Frowning, he leaned closer to the glass, annoyed to see two long scratch marks etched into his smooth skin. Mercurius often admired his muscled physique. The reason why Saviour took such care with his appearance, wanting his mentor to find him physically desirable.

Together, he and Mercurius made a perfect whole. Wisdom wedded to youth. Mind and body united. A fact that Saviour realized not long after Mercurius had found him hiding in the Agía Sophía. That was when Mercurius had offered him the opportunity to be reborn, his beloved bestowing upon him a gift that could never be repaid. Though Saviour happily made the effort, Mercurius the only man, other than Ari, whom he had ever trusted. Dishonesty a trait bred in the womb.

As he left the bathroom, Saviour saw a length of fabric hanging from the back of a chair. A Fendi silk jacquard scarf. Perfect. He plucked the scarf from the back of the chair and walked over to the bed.

As he stared at the sleeping woman, he wrinkled his nose. Patchouli. A certain Düsseldorf banker had also doused himself with the sickening fragrance, the fused aroma of patchouli and sauerkraut having triggered a murderous rage.

Saviour wrapped one end of the silk scarf around his palm. Just as he was about to perform the same motion with his other hand, Marnie opened her eyes and drowsily smiled at him.

“Don’t go . . . sweet sorrow and all that.”

Dangling the length of silk, Saviour slowly trailed it over her bare breasts.

To kill or not to kill . . . always the question.

CHAPTER 49

“ ‘God is in the details.’ Who said that, Flaubert or Mies van der Rohe?” Edie, propped against a menagerie of flounced pillows in the middle of the bed, peered over the top of an art magazine.

“No bloody idea.” Caedmon sat on the other side of the guest bedroom at a large oak desk, his arse planted on another of Rubin’s unbearably uncomfortable chairs. This one a Gothic revival fit for a feudal baron. “On second thought, didn’t Michelangelo first coin the phrase?”

“Well, whoever said it, I agree with Gloria Steinem”—Edie wickedly grinned—“ ‘the goddess is in the questions.’ ”

“Well put.”

Craning his neck, Caedmon glanced at the clock on the night table: 10:05 P.M. Time to set out on his quest, smash his nose to the grindstone, and decipher the rare 1614 frontispiece.

“Still convinced that the Muses have something to do with Bacon’s secret message?”

“Mmmm . . . er, yes.” Elbows on the table, he rubbed his eyes. “In Greek mythology the Nine Muses, offspring of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, divinely inspired the arts. But more important than that, in a time before the printing press was invented, the Nine Muses were the source of oral knowledge.”

Tossing her magazine aside, Edie got off the bed. Silk, satin, and tasseled pillows tumbled in her wake. Unlike Rubin’s boudoir, the guest suite was a veritable explosion of clashing Victorian pattern, the color green being the only common denominator.

Edie stood behind his chair. Wrapping one hand around a spiny Gothic chair post, she reached over top of him and snatched the Mylar-covered print. “Okay, we’ve got Nine Muses with Pallas Athena, the tenth muse, in the twelve o’clock position. We can only hope that a picture isn’t really worth a thousand words. Otherwise it’s going to be a very long message.”

“And that’s a mere sampling of the mythological objects. We mustn’t overlook the occult symbols—the two columns, the ladder, the tree, the mulberry, and of course, the All-Seeing Eye.”

Lifting her wool skirt, she hitched a hip onto the edge of the table. “Yeah, I noticed the ladder, the tree, and the piece of fruit in each of the muse panels, but I thought that was just a decorative element.”

“Trust me, nothing in this frontispiece is purely decorative. In fact, the ladder, the tree, and the mulberry represent the three branches of the hidden stream of knowledge.”

“As in alchemy, Kabbalah, and magic, right?” She scooted closer, her outer thigh pressing against his forearm.

“Correct. The ladder symbolizes magic, specifically the type of celestial divination practiced by John Dee. Since one can climb up and down the rungs of a ladder, it represents direct two-way communication between heaven and earth.” With his index finger, he lightly circled a medallion with a leafy tree. “This is the Kabbalah Tree of Life, which symbolizes the process by which the universe came into being. It’s more familiarly depicted as a diagram with the ten Sephiroth that represents the ten attributes of God.”