10

“LOUDON WAS A DESIGNER,” Jack said to Espy as she nursed a Starbucks latte in Bath. “He planned the cemetery from the ground up. Every detail.” He had the map opened up on a table, turned so that it faced the right way for Espy. “Look at the path.” His finger traced the path’s course through the cemetery. “What does that look like to you?”

Espy took another sip of her latte and looked down at the map, her brow knit into a frown. “Like a winding path through an old cemetery?”

He nodded. “Right, like a winding path through a cemetery. And all winding paths look like . . .”

Espy set her drink down, looked again at the map. “A snake?” she asked, her voice tentative.

“Exactly.” He used a pen to mark the line of the path on the map, then drew circles around the cemetery’s entrance and exit. “You have the head here.” He pointed at the circle he’d drawn at the spot where he and Espy had exited the cemetery—a rounded clearing that was only missing a forked tongue. “And the tail here.” He indicated the overgrown opening near the mausoleum.

After a while, Espy looked up. “Okay, you may have something there,” she said, though she didn’t sound convinced.

“Work with me,” he said. He turned the map sideways, so the path he saw as a snake looked to be slithering across the table rather than toward his wife. Then, using the pen, he drew a line through it, making sure the ends came out near the path openings. That done, he sketched a few lines at the end designated as the tail. Finally he turned the map around so that Espy could judge for herself.

Jack knew he was reaching, that he could be seeing something that wasn’t there. He watched her face as she reviewed the sketch, as she recognized what he was hinting at.

“You think Loudon designed the cemetery as a replica of the Serpent and Z-rod?” she asked.

“I think it makes sense. The Chambers family has—or at least had at some point—a sculpture in the shape of a Pictish symbol. Then a member of that family gives a renowned architect a sum of money to design a cemetery the family is never going to use. But why would someone whose family has owned prime burial land for hundreds of years donate money to build a cemetery?”

Espy didn’t answer, and after a few seconds, Jack supplied the answer.

“It’s a repository of some sort.”

Espy stayed silent for a long while, and there was nothing on her face to tell Jack what she was thinking. Still, after she reviewed the map for a moment longer, she looked across the table. “Isn’t a map sometimes just a map?”

Jack smiled. “Sure. Except on those occasions when it’s not.”

She looked unconvinced. “Here’s what I’m having trouble with. Say I’m Henry Chambers, a member of some secret organization that’s been protecting the bones of a biblical prophet for three thousand years. In fact, let’s think about that. Not only am I part of a secret society, I’m a member of what might be the oldest priestly, political, and social entity the world has ever seen.”

She paused and took a sip of her drink. Jack could see her mind working.

“So, our purpose is to protect the bones. I’m not sure from what exactly. But that’s not the important thing right now. What is important is that you can’t have any organization exist for that long without developing incredible influence over the rest of the world. And I’m betting more money than most countries have.”

“Is there a question in there somewhere?” Jack prodded when it seemed she was on the verge of letting her initial thought escape.

“The question is, if I’m a man wielding the kind of influence that comes from being a part of something so powerful, what am I trying to hide in a cemetery?”

“I thought that same thing,” Jack agreed. “But don’t forget what we found in Quetzl-Quezo,” he added, taking Espy back to the ruins they’d unearthed in Venezuela. “We ended up uncovering what turned out to be a road map that took us all the way to Ethiopia. Someone placed those stones to show others where to go. Why shouldn’t this be the same sort of thing?”

“Because it shouldn’t have been necessary in the nineteenth century,” Espy countered. “When Quetzl-Quezo was built, there weren’t a plethora of reliable methods for preserving important information. Scrolls disintegrated, and there weren’t all that many books in the world. I mean, half of them were probably being lost at Alexandria right about the time they were clearing the land for the temple.”

Jack nodded as he listened. He couldn’t fault her logic.

“By the time Henry Chambers had anything to do with these people, there shouldn’t have been any need to preserve the organization’s ideas this way. Simply put, the old methods were no longer necessary.”

Jack knew she had a valid point, but he refused to believe that what he hoped to find at Bath Abbey Cemetery didn’t exist. It just meant that if what had happened there more than a century and a half ago wasn’t for the purpose of preserving their information, then there was another reason for it.

“It was personal,” he said. It was the only thing that made sense. At Espy’s questioning look, he continued. “If Henry Chambers didn’t contract with Loudon to create something at the behest of the guardians, then he did it for himself.”

“Which leads us to an obvious question,” Espy said. “What was he trying to do?” She pulled the map closer, leaning over the table to get a better look at it. “Okay, so if the cemetery is a giant reproduction of the Chambers family symbol, what does that mean to us? What would our guy have been trying to accomplish?”

Jack shrugged. “I’m not sure, but I think it may be a matter of perspective.”

While walking through the cemetery, Jack had noticed only two structures large enough to stand out as exceptional. And both of those stood at the two path openings. He didn’t think it inconceivable to believe the mortuary and the mausoleum were meant to serve as points of reference.

Pulling a napkin from the dispenser on the table, Jack unfolded it. With the pen he drew a representation of the Serpent and Z-rod, trying to eyeball the general size of its twin on the cemetery map. When finished, he placed the thin paper over the map. Under the bright lights of the coffee shop he could see through the paper, though not with much clarity.

“I think this was meant as a map,” he said. He turned the napkin, the body of the snake riding along the path marked out on the map. Then, moving the napkin in the other direction, he turned it until the head matched the path’s exit beneath it. Jack was pleased to see that his amateurish drawing had brought the tail to within a centimeter of the other opening.

In the overlay, the line bisected the graveyard, a spear piercing the serpent path at two points. The line fell across four of the graves. When Jack bought the map at the bookstore, they’d told him it was an accurate representation of the grounds.

“You’re kidding,” Espy said, once it occurred to her what he was thinking. When he didn’t respond, she launched into Spanish. Jack didn’t pick up all of it, but he understood enough to realize she would not have said any of it in front of the boys.

He stayed silent, letting it play out. After all, he was asking her to help him with something he’d promised her he wouldn’t make her do. He needed her to help him dig up gravesites.

It was near midnight, and a thick cloud cover mitigated what moonlight might have revealed the two figures moving among the dead. Twin beams of light played over the ground, guiding them along the path leading to the mortuary.

Before returning to Bath Abbey, Jack and Espy had made a few stops. The first was to a copy shop, where they found a picture of the Serpent and Z-rod symbol and then played with scale until they wound up with something that, when printed, matched the dimensions of the map. Then, lining up the head and the tail, Jack was able to draw a more accurate line between the two. In doing so, he discovered that his initial thought was wrong; the line didn’t run through four gravesites. Instead it ran through just two.

The second stop was at a hardware store, where they purchased two good shovels and a pair of flashlights. When Jack handed one of the shovels to Espy, he wondered if she was going to hit him with it.

Once they’d reached the mortuary, Jack was tempted to spend some time going through it again, but with limited hours until sunrise he decided to put the structure at the bottom of the list.

It took some work to find the path again, the opening more difficult to spot using only flashlights. Once on the path, Jack pulled out the map, which now had two gravesites circled, and began heading in that direction. Even with the map as a guide, their objective proved hard to find. Several factors conspired against them, chief among them the damage that years of neglect had wrought on many of the gravestones. As Jack moved the beam of light over the graves, he tried to count them, but there were several plots where their stone monuments seemed to have disintegrated. Others had either toppled over or were obscured by overgrowth.

Still, he kept at it, searching for the right spot—the grave that the invisible line passed over. He was beginning to think they should have waited until morning and returned here without the shovels. If necessary, they could have tried their hands at surveying, viewing the cemetery from an elevated position, getting a clearer idea of what they were looking for. But a sense of urgency had told him not to delay, and so he followed his gut, taking himself and Espy out into the dark.

Jack stopped, more irritated than he wanted to admit, shining the light over the same area he’d scanned six times already. It was a cluster of six plots, any of which might fall beneath the line. And that was if he was even close to being right about where he was standing. He thought he was straddling the line connecting the path’s two access points, and the main structures attached to each, but there was no way to be sure.

Espy added her light to his, illuminating a section of broken stone and wildflowers.

“Sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty,” she said. With that, she stepped from the path and proceeded to the nearest plot that sat within the suspect area. Unlike many of the stones around it, the grave marker identifying the one interred was still standing. Jack joined Espy and studied the stone, his flashlight illuminating the name E. Claudius Finnegan, along with the relevant dates.

He ruled it out right away, the 1917 date of death precluding it as a hiding spot in a cemetery completed in 1843. The adjoining plot fell in the same category, and he started to move on when the irrationality of what he was doing occurred to him. He stopped and turned to look again at the grave he’d all but ruled out.

“Tell me something,” he said to his wife. “If you’re constructing a cemetery and you’ve been tasked with building some kind of map or treasure box or clue, or whatever, into it, how would you do that if there won’t be any graves until after you’re done?”

The expression that appeared on Espy’s face told Jack that he wasn’t the only one who hadn’t thought of that.

“So we’re not looking for a grave,” she said.

“I don’t think so.”

She stood in silence for a time, her eyes on the same grave that he was staring at. “That complicates things.”

“A bit,” Jack agreed.

Despite the revelation, he decided to check all the remaining burial plots in the area. The markers for the two nearest were deteriorated to the point that little remained besides dust and a few loose stones. There was a larger stone, about the size of two fists, but all Jack could read on it was the number eight. Disgusted, he put the stone back where he’d found it.

The last two graves that he believed were close enough to warrant a review also yielded nothing, no further clues, and so he and Espy started off again, heading for the curve that would take them to the next site. Once there, he found a scene similar to the one they’d just left.

As he looked out over the cemetery, he couldn’t help but feel disappointment in not finding something more, something that suggested they were heading in the right direction and making some progress. Something that would bring them closer to getting back their precious boys.

He cleared his throat, forcing his thoughts back to the task at hand. There was a possibility that if something of the kind he was after existed in this place more than a hundred years ago, time or neglect or even thievery may have removed all traces of it by now.

He’d come across five older graves, markers of gray slate, marble, and sandstone. These seemed to have survived the passing of time better than the others he’d studied earlier. He crossed to the front of the stones to look at the names. Sure enough, the plots were older, with dates showing deaths in the 1840s and ’50s. The first two were common English names, and a third looked French. Jack straightened and glanced at the remaining gravestones, getting the impression of Swedish family names. He was about to walk away when what he’d seen registered. The names were identical on two of the stones: Gerhardsson. More unusual was that the dates they’d lived were the same: 1839–1846. The years marked the passing of children, a brother and sister perhaps, each seven years old at the time of death.

Despite the relentless march of time, Jack was filled with sadness for two children who’d died before his own grandparents were born. Here, though, he was looking at two kids who left the world in the same year. He would have been lying to himself if he denied they made him think of Alex and Jim.

For the past few days he’d been able to function—to survive—by not thinking about Alex and Jim. He had to continue believing what Duckey had told him—that the boys would be safe in the care of their captors. It was a thin deception, but it was one he knew he had to maintain in order to preserve any chance of all of them coming out the other side of this thing.

The one reality he couldn’t shake was that aside from their accommodations, the games they had, the food served them, the boys had to be really frightened. They had to be wondering what was happening, who their captors were, and why they had been taken away from their parents. Most difficult for Jack, they had to be wondering why he hadn’t come for them. Such thoughts put things in perspective for Jack, also causing him to feel incredibly guilty.

And yet he was well aware of the unique circumstances that had brought him back to active fieldwork, and how it meant he would never again be content with spending years at a single dig site hoping to unearth a cooking pot. After a two-week dash across the globe with Espy, the two of them trying to stay a step ahead of people who wanted to silence them, and the recovery of an item he thought was only legend, how could the practice of legitimate archaeology compare?

Granted, there was a lot he could have done without, namely others shooting at him and otherwise doing him bodily harm. But the truth was he’d never felt as alive as he had during that time. He suspected Espy felt the same way. Occasionally he thought he saw glimmers of the woman he used to know bubbling to the surface.

As Jack mulled things over, standing in a foreign cemetery in the middle of the night, he heard what sounded like laughter. It started out quietly, the sound so low that he doubted whether he’d heard anything at all. It was only when his wife began laughing harder that the sound cut through his reverie.

Turning away from the gravestones, he saw Espy on one knee in front of one of the other graves, the one with the French name. She had a hand on its marble headstone. He ran over to where she was.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

Shaking her head, she stood and faced him. She pointed to the gravestone, inviting him to read its inscription. “Take another look,” she said, still chuckling.

When he’d reviewed the stone earlier, he’d noted the French name but little else about it. Monsieur Ammon Prix had been expertly carved into the marble. Jack didn’t wonder about the deceased’s nationality. The proximity of Britain and France made for a wealth of expatriates; he imagined the same had been the case 150 years ago.

Yet now that he was focused on the marker, he had to admit it looked unusual. The chief thing that struck him was that the headstone was absent the two dates that would indicate when Monsieur Prix had lived and died. Even so, Jack couldn’t find anything that would explain Espy’s amusement.

“I don’t get it,” he admitted.

Espy’s smile widened. “It’s the name.”

Jack turned his attention back to the marker. “Ammon Prix,” he said aloud. He let it roll around in his brain for several seconds before shrugging. “Still nothing.”

“Ammon isn’t a French name. It just sounds a little like one—enough so that most people wouldn’t notice.”

Jack frowned and spoke the name again, realizing he was imparting a French pronunciation to the name Ammon because of its connection with the family name, which he was certain was French.

“So if it’s not French, what is it? And why does it matter that Mr. Prix’s parents were multicultural ahead of their time?”

“It’s Greek,” Espy said. “But its roots are Egyptian. The name Ammon means hidden one. Or just hidden in some translations.”

The moment her words reached his ears, he felt something familiar run its fingers up his spine. It was the intellectual excitement, the expectant energy that came from discovery.

“It could just be coincidence,” he said, trying to keep himself from jumping to conclusions.

“Could be,” she agreed. “But it’s not.”

He gave her a quizzical look.

“Prix is French,” she said.

“And I’m guessing it means something relevant to why we’re here?” he asked.

“It means prize.”

Jack tried to keep his mouth from falling open, but failed. “What you’re telling me is that the literal translation of the name is Mr. Hidden Prize?”

Espy nodded, but the gesture was slowed by something. Whatever it was, it had turned her grin into a slight frown. Then it hit him too, and he knew what she was thinking. What she’d discovered was so spot-on that it bordered on the ridiculous. It was almost too convenient. What Espy had to be thinking was that this wasn’t a clue at all. Rather, it was either a coincidence, a clever joke played by the dead man’s parents, or it was something meant to throw seekers like them off the trail.

What kept him from diving headlong into that pool, though, was the conversation he and Espy had had at Starbucks before coming out. They’d established that if Henry Chambers’s intention was to use Bath Abbey Cemetery as a cache of some secret knowledge, it was likely he’d chosen to do so for personal reasons. Perhaps, whatever his motive, he didn’t want the other members of his organization in on the secret. It was an intriguing thought.

“If Henry Chambers hid something here, it was because he didn’t trust it anywhere else,” Jack said, assembling his theory as he spoke. “He wanted it hidden because he didn’t trust the people in the organization. Which means he would have wanted whatever’s hidden here to be found in case—”

“In case something happened to him,” Espy finished.

“That’s my guess.”

Espy nodded, her eyes on the headstone. “What now?”

“We dig.”

When he said it, he saw it dawning on her, the task her triumph had pledged them to.

He reached for a shovel. Espy gave him a dirty look and set the point of her own shovel on the ground, leaning it against an adjoining gravestone.

“I told you I won’t help you desecrate a body,” she said, crossing her arms. “I won’t.”

Her tone was the kind that brooked no argument, and so Jack did the only thing he could do: he started digging, beginning near the headstone. He dug for a long while, guessing at the edges of the original plot. After more than an hour, it appeared that Espy was starting to feel guilty, because she finally let out a sigh and then picked up her shovel and joined him.

The work went much faster with her helping out. In another hour they had pulled up perhaps three feet of the soft ground. Somewhere along the way it occurred to him to wonder if this was even a grave—if there was anyone interred in the plot. He thought it possible that this one marker was here the day the cemetery was consecrated, an addition by Loudon at the request of his benefactor. Or perhaps Chambers had someone else come later and set the marker, with the prize he thought so much of buried in place of flesh and bone.

Jack was also thinking about how much time they had. At sunrise they would lose the opportunity for further exploration. Even as untended as the cemetery was, it wouldn’t be long before someone noticed their nocturnal activity. And when that happened, security protocols would likely change to make anything of the sort impossible for them to repeat. Even worse, the work they’d done might get the wrong people to look more closely at the headstone with the peculiar name and no dates. If that happened, if others began to investigate the plot before he and Espy could find and remove whatever was there, they could lose their chance forever.

With that thought hounding him, he dug faster, tossing dirt out of the deepening hole as quickly as he could, with all pretense of preserving the site forgotten. Yet despite the extra effort, the ground was getting harder, the packed earth more difficult to carve into. He was just about to take a short break, to climb from the hole and get a drink of water, when the point of his shovel struck something that made a decidedly metallic sound.

Espy’s head jerked up, her eyes wide. She tossed down her shovel and crossed to Jack’s side of the hole. Carefully he used the point of his shovel to prod whatever it was he’d struck. The sound of dull metal came again, and he felt the thing give beneath the pressure of the shovel.

Dropping the shovel, Jack went to his knees. He started to pull away the dirt with his hands, his heart racing. Espy got down beside him and did the same. It didn’t take long before he saw it, the sheen of gray metal turned dull and rusted after its long burial.

Jack shared a look with Espy, whose face mirrored the anticipation he was feeling. He pulled away more of the moist earth until he found the edges of the thing. It was a metal box, its dimensions about ten by fourteen inches. There was no handle that he could see. He clawed away the dirt along the side facing him, digging another six inches before he could get his fingers beneath the box. Then, taking that final step that took him from archaeologist to grave robber, he thrust his hands beneath it, got as firm a hold as he could, and yanked.

He wasn’t ready for it to come free without a fight, which was why he found himself on his backside when the box slid out of the ground as if of its own accord. It knocked the wind out of him, but the thrill of the find had him righting himself even before catching his breath again. He got to his knees while Espy scrambled to join him. He held the box out and examined it.

It was a plain metal box, with a simple hasp and staple lock. It didn’t even require a key. Jack suspected the man who’d planted it there believed that if someone proved smart enough to find it, the person would be entitled to its contents without having to hunt for a way to open it.

He set the box down at the edge of the hole, twisted the lock, and lifted the lid. Espy, holding one of the flashlights, held it steady during the reveal. The first thing Jack saw was a dark cloth. Slowly he lifted the cloth from the box, and Espy’s light beam fell on the brown leather of a book.

Jack carefully removed the book from the box. It looked like a journal or ledger of some kind, its size and binding common for the early nineteenth century. He opened it and found unlined pages covered in handwriting, the text neat and meticulous.

Espy drew closer, bringing the light to bear on the book. Jack opened it to the front. There was no title, no name, nothing to designate whose hand had left the words. So he started to read, skimming through the first paragraph. As he absorbed the information, as the magnitude of what they’d found became apparent, that tingle of discovery he’d felt earlier came rushing back.

“What is it?” Espy asked.

Jack didn’t answer immediately. The truth was that he wasn’t certain what it was he held. All he knew was that in the small portion he’d read, it appeared to be the writings of someone intimately involved with the society that had dogged Jack’s steps for so long—someone who’d felt the need to pen a secret account of that association.

Then another thought struck him. Without answering his wife, he scanned the pages with increased intensity, searching for the one thing that had eluded him through the years. It was almost ten pages before he found it, and when he did, he placed his finger on the page directly beneath the words. At that moment he felt a sense of accomplishment that superseded even their improbable success in locating Henry Chambers’s treasure.

For the first time, he had a name.

When Gordon Reese had hired him to locate Elisha’s bones, and then as he began to unearth hints that an ancient secret society existed, he heard whispered names: Chevrier, Manheim, Fraternidad de la Tierra. But none of those names belonged to the society itself.

One of the things he learned during that period was that the guardians preferred to use others to handle the tasks associated with protecting the relics, including acting as their caretakers. Jack had always imagined that sort of subcontracting allowed them to protect their anonymity, or at least muddy the waters enough to make it impossible to determine the real power behind the scenes.

But now, as he paged through the handwritten thoughts of a man whose family had played a direct role in the protection of the bones, he finally knew the name of the ones pulling the strings.

“Sacerdotes Osiris,” he said.

The words brought with them a sense of satisfaction, even as they raised a number of questions. Still, he allowed himself to enjoy the moment. The time would come when he would have to ask new questions, to consider what this discovery meant, but for now the name sufficed.

Because of her field of expertise, Espy didn’t need a translation.

“Priests of Osiris?” she asked.

Jack nodded, then studied the book for a brief moment longer before standing, leaving the metal box in the hole where it had spent the last century and a half.

Now that he had what they’d come for, all he wanted to do was get out of there, to find someplace to sit and read, to absorb everything written on the pages. He was just about to say as much to Espy when he noticed that her attention was no longer on him. Her eyes had shifted to something over his shoulder, and then widened.

He started to turn and was halfway around when it seemed the largest flashbulb in the world stole his vision. The next sensation he felt was that of being lifted in the air. Then everything went dark.