Returning to her modest West Jerusalem hotel after her less than satisfactory leave-taking from Aidan Pascoe, Annja was cautious.
Though it was late at night, a surprising amount of activity stirred in the Tower Hotel lobby. A party of Japanese tourists was checking in and some Italians were arguing theology among the potted-palm fronds in the seats by the front window. As Pascoe had predicted she aroused no interest walking through. Catching a glimpse of her reflection in a segment of mirrored wall, though, she almost lost a step.
When she drenched herself in the fountain, the blood spattered so liberally across her once-white blouse had run and faded until it looked like nothing more than pinkish orange swirls or surrealistic flower patterns. Somehow it struck her now as far more horrific than obvious bloodstains would have been. Frowning, she made it to the elevator and then her fourth-floor room before running to the bathroom and throwing up.
A shower helped her compose herself. Baths and showers tended to soothe her mind and spirit, as well as her body. Still, dressed in a fluffy white-and-blue hotel terrycloth robe with a towel wrapped around her hair, she found herself too jangled by the day’s events to contemplate sleep.
Needing something to occupy her brain, and fend off random crying jags, she sat down on the bed and popped the top on her notebook computer. The hotel offered free Internet access through its wireless network. In a moment she was looking at page one of over 180,000 Google hits for Mark Peter Stern.
She made an indeterminate noise low in her throat and set the computer aside. The bedside clock-radio offered a selection of Moroccan-roll, Israeli hip-hop and bland Europop, all of which struck her ears as about equally unlistenable at her current space-time coordinates. Finally she found a classical station. Mozart was always good. Rearranging the towel around her still wet hair, she piled up pillows at the head of the bed, picked up the computer again and lay back for some serious data mining.
First she scanned news items relating to Stern and his foundation. There were thousands to choose from. She read of his cutting the ribbon to open a literacy center he had endowed in São Paulo, Brazil, with six-foot-tall blond supermodel Eliete von Hauptstark on his arm. She watched in streaming video as he trudged through an earthquake-ravaged zone in Pakistan in his shirtsleeves, even helping rescuers move rubble off a victim trapped beneath a collapsed wall. It didn’t seem to be staged.
She saw pictures of him attending some Hollywood film opening, laughing with the likes of Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson—both of whom, she was quickly able to find, openly expressed scathing opinions of him, his movement and even their celebrity friends who had fallen under his sway.
One common thread became apparent, especially paging through pictures and videos. Mark Peter Stern was seldom seen, or at least photographed, without at least one strikingly beautiful woman in his company. Most of them were famous to one degree or another, from a teenage-sex-bomb A-list actress who claimed he had rescued her from dependency on drugs and alcohol to tae kwon do black belt Hauptstark, the current rave supermodel, whose grandfather, allegedly, was a Nazi war criminal who had fled to Brazil, where he’d lived to a ripe old age. All these women wore around their gorgeous throats the braided green collar that symbolized committed Malkuth adherents.
On the sites that offered actual words concerning Stern, as opposed to strictly images, Annja found glitz, innuendo, vituperation and outright flackery.
He did profess a keen interest in biblical antiquities. Annja knew how to check on that. One thing you learned to do as an archaeology student was track down grant money like a bloodhound. The foundations and expeditions funded either by the Malkuth Foundation or Stern in person proved he backed his words abundantly with cash.
Interesting but inconclusive, she thought.
She saw three possibilities. He sought the jar for reasons she could accept as benign, in which case they might well find themselves allies. Provided, of course, he could convince her that whatever he intended was really likely to work more good than harm. That would take some doing.
Or he might want to use the jar in a way she deemed destructive—whether or not from motives he believed pure. Idealistic motives had led Sir Martin Highsmith to murder, after all, as well as to order her own execution. If, wittingly or not, Stern meant to use the jar to work evil in the world, she would find him a powerful foe. And vice versa.
Finally, he might have no interest in the jar, at which point she would cross him off the list.
Annja hadn’t expected the puff pieces or the hit jobs to give her any reliable clues. After surfing various news sites, blogs and variations on the theme “markpetersternsucks.com” she took a breath and dived into the official Malkuth Foundation site.
It was professionally done, and unlike a lot of professionally designed sites, actually well done. It was not just visually arresting but lucid and easy to navigate, without oversize images, gimmicky hard-to-find menus or eye-itching Flash animations.
As to what it was all about…that she found somewhat less accessible.
She quickly discovered some concise and readable descriptions of the Tree of Life, the arrangement of the ten sephiroth and the various pathways between them, a colorful representation of which was the foundation’s logo. She glossed over it, as well as a history of both the Jewish and Gentile traditions of the kabbalah. The latter read like respectable popular history, and where it impinged on Annja’s expertise, such as discussing the Renaissance-age origins of modern kabbalistic study, she found it to be accurate. But neither a description of the Tree of Life nor the brief story of kabbalism was what she was after.
What she really wanted to know was what the foundation stood for that set it apart from other mystic groups.
She waded through pages of fairly standard commonsense self-improvement advice, most of it unobjectionable and probably even useful, taken in the proper perspective. And the usual peace and love to all humankind, environmental consciousness, tolerance and the like.
After two hours of diligent reading she had gained nothing but a headache. She didn’t have any clearer idea of what the actual core message of Mark Peter Stern and his Malkuth Foundation might be.
Going back to her searches she was certainly able to find plenty who purported to tell her the foundation was a cult, it was sinister, it was evil, it brainwashed its acolytes.
She could find as many sites praising Stern and Malkuth to the skies. And all the sites, for and against, sported message boards wherein roared flames of such prodigious heat and volume that she reckoned Dante needed resurrecting from the dead to write up a whole new annex to Hell—a concept he, far more than Scripture, had visualized and inserted into the world’s religious imagination.
When she could practically smell the brimstone she sat back and let her eyes go to soft focus. What has been learned, and what revealed? she wondered, remembering a catchphrase from an author she had gone to hear read as an undergraduate.
For all his flaws, she seemed to sense in Stern a genuine avocation, a sense of true mystic calling. It was hard for her to see at first. He was obviously a showman to a pretty unhealthy degree and, if she were any judge, a charlatan in many ways.
Is it possible, she asked herself, to be both a charlatan and the real thing? A true mystic, a true spiritual leader?
She thought of Roux. He was as fraudulent an old fart as she had ever met. But he was genuine. She had seen and heard and experienced too much to doubt he was what he said he was; if anything, there were depths to him she had yet to so much as glimpse. He was at least five hundred years old. He had witnessed the burning of St. Joan in person. He was a mystical being by virtue of his longevity; she guessed he had been, and likely still was, a sorcerer of some sort. He was also her mentor, a mighty teacher—if often by way of bad example.
That someone lied, and was caught lying, did not mean they didn’t sometimes tell the truth, she reasoned. Even truths that conflicted with all Annja had been taught of science.
She shook her head. This is no time to get sidetracked, she told herself sternly.
None of what she had seen said anything useful about why Stern might want the jar, and whether he would prove foe or friend.
She took a deep breath, sighed it out to the sounds of a Strauss waltz. Well, that clarifies my immediate destiny, she told herself.
She was going to have to go, again, to the source.
Stern was a public figure, easily one of the hundred best-known names and faces in the current world. She reckoned that meant that each and every day a tiny but measurable percentage of all the world’s population was vying for his attention.
Annja knew, even had he not been associated with controversial groups such as radical Israeli settler movements and American Christian fundamentalists, he would require layers of intense security. More than physical security, he would also surround himself with phalanxes of specialists to help him run his organization and to keep people out of his well-coiffed hair.
She had to get past all that to see him. She sighed. It would be only slightly more challenging than getting access to the vaults of Fort Knox with a front-end loader and a bunch of empty crates.
She drew in another deep breath and made a disgusted face. “You know perfectly well what you need to do,” she said aloud. “You’re just in denial.”
She sighed again. “And if I want to swim in it, it’s just one country over.” She began to compose an e-mail.