Morgan breathed in the tropical air of Macau, an island city in the Pearl River Delta across the bay from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a region of China that had expanded rapidly in the last decade of staggering economic growth.
It was good to be out in the open air after fifteen hours flying on a cargo plane. She had slept easily, a trick picked up during her years in the Israel Defense Force, but Morgan was grateful that the journey was quicker than the many months of open sea that the Portuguese traders would have faced.
Portugal had leased Macau for hundreds of years, establishing it as a trading post in 1557 before finally transferring it back to China in 1999 when it became a Special Administrative Region. Gambling was forbidden on the mainland but encouraged on Macau so the island became a resort destination, the Las Vegas of the East, every square inch packed with elaborate hotels offering every kind of hedonistic pleasure.
As they walked out of the terminal, Morgan’s phone rang. Director Marietti’s name came up on the screen and she answered right away, putting him on speaker so Jake could hear too.
“I have bad news,” Marietti said, his tone somber. “Ines is dead. She was tortured and murdered, her neck burned to the bone with a lump of coal. One of our Portuguese agents found her just a few hours ago when she didn’t turn up for a meeting.”
Morgan could hardly breathe as his words echoed in her mind. The thought of the lively young woman with flowers in her braid suffering and dying because of their visit to Lisbon was too much. Even though they had met only briefly, she had seen so much of her own youthful optimism in Ines. Morgan thought of Father Ben and how he too had died because of an ARKANE mission. How many lives must they lose? Was it all worth the cost?
She handed the phone to Jake and walked away, leaving him to find out any other details.
Morgan looked out to sea and brushed a tear from her cheek, feeling the sting of cool air on her skin. A sensation that Ines would never experience again. She clenched her fists. She would find whoever was responsible and she would finish them.
A gentle touch on her shoulder. “Are you OK?”
Morgan turned and leaned into Jake’s arms. He embraced her, and she buried her head against his muscled chest. He smelled of shaded pine forests, and his heartbeat was strong and regular. Morgan allowed the sound to anchor her and after a moment, she drew back.
His gaze was concerned, but they both knew each other so well now, there was no need to talk. Jake knew intimately of loss, and Morgan knew that he still grieved for Naomi Locasto, in particular, the agent lost on their last mission. But they both believed in something more than this physical world, although perhaps neither of them really knew what that meant. She hoped they would be together until at least one of them figured it out.
Morgan took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We’ll honor Ines by finding the fragments of the map.”
Jake nodded, the muscles around his jaw tight with tension. “And whoever was responsible.”
They walked to the gate and jumped in a taxi for the historic district.
Morgan gazed out the window as they drove from the airport, every block revealing another surprise. Ostentatious wealth in the supercars that whizzed past. Futurist extravagant architecture of hotels like the Morpheus in the City of Dreams, designed by architect Zaha Hadid. The metallic multi-hued blocks of the MGM Cotai reflecting the early morning light, their Chinese jewelry box aesthetic blending the ancient and modern. They passed the Eiffel Tower, half the height of the Parisian original and built to withstand a typhoon, certainly more impressive than the Las Vegas copy.
Much of this land had been reclaimed from the sea, drained and built upon, creating space for consumption and expansion at the expense of the natural environment. But beneath the affluence, there were clues to the hidden side of Macau, those who lived in poverty and spent their lives servicing the rich.
An older woman in a hotel uniform sat by the side of the road, oblivious to the traffic. She rested her head in her hands and her shoulders shook as if she sobbed. Morgan glimpsed a life lived on a knife-edge, perhaps the end of a job that was her only income, or grief for a life ended. Another person chewed up by the voracious city as it serviced those who could afford luxury but cast out the poor.
“Welcome to the historic center,” the taxi driver said as he pulled up near the Ruins of St Paul’s. The stacked arches loomed above them, the facade of what was originally the Church of Mater Dei and St Paul’s College, the first western-style university in the Far East. Built of granite in the early 1600s in a Baroque style, most of it had been destroyed by fire in 1835.
Morgan paid for the taxi as Jake stretched his legs. As she turned to join him on the edge of the plaza, he spotted a pastry shop.
“Oh yes.” Jake grinned. “I’m having some of those.”
He jogged over and bought a bag of three pastéis de nata then sauntered back over, delving into the bag to pop a whole one into his mouth. Morgan couldn’t help but laugh as his cheeks bulged, and he swallowed the sweet pastry down. She pulled another out of the bag before he could finish them all and took a bite, allowing the delicious flavor to rejuvenate her after the long trip. Not quite as good as Belém, but tasty enough.
Morgan looked up at the facade in front of them. At first glance, it was a Christian monument with Mater Dei, Mother of God, inscribed upon the lintel, bronze statues of the Jesuit saints and the Virgin Mary in alcoves, and Jesus with a dove, representing the Holy Spirit. But the mix of cultures made this monument starkly different to anything Morgan had seen before in ecclesiastical architecture. Seven-headed dragons danced amongst the angels next to Portuguese merchant ships. Chinese characters engraved in stone pronounced ‘Holy Mother tramples the heads of the dragon.’ A peony representing China and a chrysanthemum representing Japan completed the frieze, the latter symbol from the Japanese Christian exiles who worked on the church in the early 1600s.
Jake pointed at the center of the third tier of columns. “Is that what I think it is?”
To the right of the Virgin Mary was what looked like a Tree of Life, its roots delving down into stone, its branches neatly pruned, its wildness tamed into allegory.
Morgan squinted up. It seemed too much of a coincidence, but yet, it was really there, carved by the faithful hundreds of years ago. History never ended, and symbols persisted through the ages, pointing the way to those who could read the signs.
“You’re right, it’s definitely a tree. We must be on the right track.” She pulled out her phone and retrieved the information that Martin Klein, ARKANE’s archivist, had sent on their way over. “Three hundred converso families settled here in the first wave of immigration and in 1579, the Jesuit Francisco de Meneses wrote of the existence of a Jewish community.”
Jake frowned. “The Jesuits didn’t have a great reputation for dealing with Jews.”
Morgan shook her head. “No, but the closest inquisitors were in Goa, India, and it seems that this community managed to survive. In 1842, when Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain, they moved over there and the first synagogue was established in 1857. But it’s far more likely that any manuscripts were retrieved by the Jesuits and held in their library. It’s not far from here.”
They walked away from St Paul’s along the pedestrianized streets toward the Church of St Dominic. Morgan found herself fascinated by the cultural mix of the city. This part of the historic district had clear signs of its colonial past, now enshrined as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Signs were trilingual, with directions in English, Portuguese and Cantonese. There were even some traditional Portuguese azulejos, colorful ceramic tiles, along the side of government buildings. But it was also totally Asian, with Chinese lanterns hung above the pavements, the smell of delicious spicy Macanese food, and the sound of Chinese spoken by most of the surrounding tourists along with the blare of horns from the busy traffic.
The nearby sixteenth-century Church of St Dominic sat on the edge of a plaza paved with the traditional hand-cut Portuguese stone in waves of black and white, the calçada portuguesa. The church had three tiers in an elaborate Baroque style, painted in shades of ivory and mustard yellow with forest green shutters and doors.
Morgan and Jake walked inside and up into the bell tower, which now held the Museum of Sacred Art. It was a relatively small collection, arranged in groups of sacramental objects. Religious statues, chalices for Mass, liturgical vestments, and two large bells.
Morgan frowned. “This is nothing special. We need to find the library or somewhere the Jesuits might have kept their manuscripts.”
Jake waved her over to one cabinet. “Wait a minute, check this out.”
Morgan walked closer to the glass case. There was a piece of a manuscript inside, similar to the image the Rabbi had shown them in Amsterdam, with part of a tree in hues of brown and green, a blue river and words etched in Hebrew and Portuguese.
They had found the second fragment.
Frik remained in the shadow of a palm tree on the edge of the plaza as Jake and the woman he now knew as Morgan Sierra disappeared into the darkness of the church. The Fidalgo wealth and contacts had bought him a private jet to Macau, and he had arrived a few hours before the ARKANE agents on their cargo flight.
He had used the journey to fill in his knowledge with what he could find about the secretive agency and their public face in archaeological research and religious heritage. He had learned much from the young woman, Ines, before forcing that final burning coal through her neck. Frik smiled to himself as he remembered those last moments, the smell of smoke as it rose from her charred skin, her final breath choked into silence. It wouldn’t be long until he watched Jake Timber die the same way.
Frik strode across the plaza toward the door of the church, clenching his fists as he readied himself for the confrontation he had dreamed of for so many years. As he reached the door, he typed a short code into his phone and began the countdown in his head.
Jake bent to the glass to examine the piece more closely. It certainly looked like part of the Tree of Life, but it still made little sense as a map. They would need help to figure out what it meant and whether it led to an actual physical location.
His own faith was rooted in the Christian tradition with the Bible as the literal word of God. But violence had shaken Jake’s belief after the massacre of his family in a drug-fueled frenzy by a gang in Walkerville near Johannesburg. He had spent years in the military as part of the struggles of the nations of Africa to escape their colonial past, but also to free themselves from internal rivalry, tribal allegiances and corruption.
As a white South African, Jake understood the struggle of race. The color of his skin made many people dismiss his love of Africa. Yet his blood ran with the dust of the Great Karoo and the salt of the Cape, his lungs took their first breath in the rarefied air of the Drakensberg and he only felt truly at home when he touched the soil of his great continent.
As Morgan leaned in closer to examine the fragment, he smelled the coconut scent of her shampoo and part of him longed to brush the curls from the nape of her neck. They were both a mixture of cultures, a blend of the religious and historical choices that their ancestors had made and still echoed down the generations. Perhaps that’s why they both felt at home within ARKANE’s view of the world, where reality and the supernatural collided.
A deep boom roared up from outside.
The church shuddered.
The glass windows exploded inward with the force of the blast.
Jake reached for Morgan as they both leaped away from the hail of shards, pulling her into his arms as they tumbled to the floor. Glass rained down around them and Jake took most of it on his back, his jacket shielding them both.
A brief silence, then screams and the sound of sirens from outside.
“What the hell?” Morgan scrambled up and shook herself free of broken glass.
“We need to get out of here.” Jake was on full alert now. The display case had shattered in the explosion and he reached in for the Eden fragment, tucking it inside his jacket pocket.
BOOM.
The explosion came from directly below this time. A blast of hot air beneath their feet. The billowing of fire igniting.
The old wooden floor cracked and crumbled into burning timber. Morgan tumbled into the flames.