C. Palov - Ark of Fire

MacFarlane stared at him, long and hard.

“We hit the road at first light,” he said at last. Then, his gaze narrowing. “But if you’re thinking about sidestepping me like that li’l Harvard pencil dick, you think again, boy.”

Although he took exception to being called “boy” Caedmon kept his ire in check. “Bear in mind that Swanley may simply be where we find the next clue.”

“What are you saying, that this is going to turn into some sort of scavenger hunt?”

“If you wish to hide a tree, you must hide it in a forest. We won’t know if the Priory of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the forest we seek until we can properly examine the site.”

“Well, you better hope to God that it is the right forest.”

At hearing that, Caedmon intuited what would happen should they not find the Ark. It was an intuition that involved slit throats and bodies buried at the low-water mark.

CHAPTER 64

Dawn arrived, damp and gray, the passenger windows on the Range Rover still ice-rimmed. The cold went right through Edie, causing her teeth to loudly clatter—though she suspected that fear had as much to do with her teeth clacking as the outside temperature.

Rudely awakened only a short time earlier, she and Caedmon had been ushered into the backseat of the waiting vehicle. Seated in front of them was the driver, Sanchez, a sullen man given to muttering in Spanish, and his copilot, Harliss, a southerner with an accent so thick he might as well have been speaking in Spanish. Both men were armed. And both had made it very clear that they would not hesitate to use their weapons.

Leading the pack in a second Range Rover were Stanford MacFarlane and his right-hand man, Boyd Braxton. To Edie’s relief, she’d had little to no contact with the hulking brute since the attempted rape. Knowing that Caedmon had enough on his plate, she’d made no mention of the near miss.

“Didn’t you say something about swans and geese being interchangeable in the medieval lexicon?”

“Hmm?” Clearly lost in thought, Caedmon tore his gaze away from the window. “Er, yes, I did say that.”

“Making it all the more likely that this place Swanley is where we’ll find the Ark.”

“Actually, I have no idea if the Ark is hidden at the nunnery. The Priory of the Blessed Virgin Mary may simply be where we find the next clue.”

Jealously she watched as MacFarlane’s henchmen passed a thermos filled with hot coffee back and forth between them.

“My feet feel like two blocks of ice,” she complained in a lowered voice, pointedly glancing at the pair of green wellies she’d earlier been issued.

Caedmon, decked out in an identical pair of boots, commiserated with a nod. “The English Wellington was designed to keep the foot dry, not warm. Although we’ll be glad of them should we have to traipse through a damp field.”

Edie didn’t bother to point out the obvious—that a full-speed sprint through that same damp field would be next to impossible in the clunky rubber boots.

They’d driven through the postdawn gloom for approximately twenty minutes when Edie sighted the first road sign for Swanley. As they approached the town limits, she was surprised that Swanley looked a whole lot like any American residential suburb, the outskirts littered with strip malls and fast-food eateries.

How were they going to find the Ark in the midst of so much suburban sprawl?

“Don’t worry. The priory is located in the outlying countryside,” Caedmon remarked, correctly guessing at her thoughts.

As if on cue, Sanchez exited from the superhighway, veering onto a two-lane country road. Peering out the window, she’d forgotten how simple things—trees in the distance, brown pastures, stone farm fences—could exude a stark cinematic beauty; the contrast between the countryside and the nearby town was like midnight and high noon.

Up ahead, MacFarlane’s Range Rover came to a halt, pulling to the side of the road. Sanchez pulled in a few feet behind.

“Is this the place?” she asked, not seeing anything in the rural landscape that even remotely resembled a medieval nunnery.

“I believe so,” Caedmon replied. “MacFarlane plotted the course on a computer navigation system. Although we’ll probably have to trek across a field or two to reach our destination.”

Harliss opened the passenger door. “Get out.” Gun in hand, he ushered them toward the other vehicle while Sanchez unloaded several large, bulky canvas packs from the Range Rover’s cargo bin.

As MacFarlane huddled his men, she and Caedmon were ordered to stand to one side. She could see that Harliss had a handheld GPS receiver, which all four men intently studied. Although she tried to listen in, she could catch only a few snippets— avenues of approach . . . terrain features . . . obstacles . . . reconnaissance.

“They’re treating this like some sort of military operation,” she whispered to Caedmon.

“Apparently so.”

“Making us the enemy combatants, huh?”

Too busy scanning the surrounding area, Caedmon made no reply.

“Move ’em out,” MacFarlane gruffly ordered.

Sandwiched between two pairs of armed men, she and Caedmon moved with the pack in a northeasterly direction. In front of them about two hundred yards in the distance was a dense grove of trees. As they trudged across the field, Edie wondered if Philippa of Canterbury had had any notion of the deadly train of events she would someday trigger with her quatrains.

More than likely she had.

Why else would the noblewoman-cum-nun have gone to such lengths to hide her dead husband’s gold arca ? Philippa had survived the horror of the plague and no doubt blamed the Ark for the deadly wave that swept across England.

Last night Caedmon had informed her that Philippa belonged to the Gilbertine Order, an order of nuns founded in England. In a span of only six years, Philippa had risen through the priory ranks, eventually becoming the cellaress, a position in which she oversaw all of the food production. A capable woman with a flair for management, she could have easily arranged for the Ark of the Covenant to have been brought to Swanley. Maybe she let her fellow nuns in on the secret. Because they lived a life devoted to religious worship and contemplative prayer, there was little fear that the secret would be revealed to nosy outsiders.

Holding the GPS receiver in his right hand, Harliss led them through the grove of trees, the gnarled leafless limbs like so many arthritic hands.

Just beyond the bare boughs, Edie glimpsed a stone wall.

“I see it!” she exclaimed, raising her right hand and pointing, inexplicably excited. “It’s on the other side of the grove.”

“Roger that,” Harliss responded, leading them toward to the right.

A few moments later, they entered a clearing.

Edie quickly glanced from side to side.

“Oh God . . . it’s been destroyed.”

CHAPTER 65

Stunned, the six of them stood rooted in place.

“What the fuck happened?” Braxton muttered, expressing what everyone in the group was no doubt thinking. All that remained of the Priory of the Blessed Virgin Mary was three stone walls punctuated with arched windows; tangled strands of dead ivy cascaded from the glassless openings.

“It looks like it was hit by mortar fire.” This came from MacFarlane, his leathery cheeks flushed with what Edie assumed to be barely contained rage.

“My guess is that the Priory of the Blessed Virgin Mary was destroyed during the Tudor reign,” Caedmon quietly remarked. “In 1538, Parliament, at the behest of Henry the Eighth, issued an official edict known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The new law enabled Henry to confiscate all property owned by the monastic orders. Aided by an overzealous population who hoped that church riches would trickle into their greedy hands, the king’s men demolished many a monastic building; the lead in the roofs was removed and the stone reused for secular building projects.”