12

THEY WERE ALMOST OUT OF MONEY. After hours of digging, hiding, and running, they were both hungry, and they had spent a good portion of their remaining funds on the shoddy hotel room they now occupied. With the few pounds in Jack’s pocket, they might have been able to find a sandwich to split, but he had his doubts about the edibility of any sandwich they could buy for the money they had.

Right now, though, he was thankful for something with which to occupy himself, to distract him from his empty stomach. Espy had the manila folder open on the bed while he’d placed the duffel bag on a wobbly table by the bolted window. It was a standard green duffel with no markings on the outside to indicate ownership. He unzipped the bag and was unsurprised by what he saw.

There was a handgun on top, a Glock, and two clips. Jack hoped that he wouldn’t have occasion to use either of the guns, but he felt better having them. Still, he reminded himself that these weren’t Gordon Reese’s hired guns, or Victor Manheim’s. These were men and women working security for a well-connected secret society. In some ways, Jack suspected these people were as trained and as capable as the agents they were impersonating. So if he could avoid shooting off even a single round, it was in his best interests to do so.

He set the gun on the table and dug deeper into the duffel. There was a change of clothes, black trousers and a white shirt. Sandwiched between the two articles of clothing lay a passport. Jack shook his head when he saw the French seal. He flipped it open and looked at the picture. It was a young man, twenty-something, clean-cut, unsmiling. There was no way to know if the name was real. He put the passport and clothes on the table and reached for the last item in the bag, his mood immediately brightening. He flipped through the contents of the money clip, a decent amount of cash in euros. As if in acknowledgment of this good fortune, Jack’s stomach made a rumbling sound. He pocketed the money and left the rest out on the table, then crossed to the bed to see how Espy was faring.

The folder lay empty, its contents spread out on the bed. Jack moved so he could look over her shoulder.

“There’s nothing here about us,” Espy said. She picked up one of the pieces of paper, extending it toward him. “Most of it is information about the Chambers. Genealogy, business activities, money trails.” She looked up at him. “There’s a lot here. They’ve either been watching these people for a long while or they’re really good at what they do.”

Given what they’d found in the false grave—what a representative of the Chambers family had seen fit to hide as some sort of insurance policy—Jack suspected the Priests of Osiris had been watching the family for a very long time. Because Jack was convinced that the Chambers family was intimately involved in the organization, he had no idea what this evidence of self-surveillance meant. It was simply another piece of the puzzle to catalog.

“What did you find?” Espy asked.

Jack pulled the money clip from his pocket and showed her. She gave an appreciative nod and then turned her attention back to the contents of the folder.

“How did they know we visited the Chambers estate?”

“I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but I’m guessing your new friend Olivia Chambers did a little investigating after our meeting. And somehow that tipped off our friends.”

That was only a guess, and Jack knew how flimsy it was. Nevertheless, he wondered how, apparently, the organization had tracked them to Parkhurst and then on to Bath Abbey Cemetery.

Espy picked up a stapled packet of paper. “I found this one interesting,” she said, handing it to Jack. While he skimmed it, she gave him the highlights. “From what I can tell, that report details every major business transaction the Chambers have engaged in since 1695. That’s the year after the Bank of England was founded. The Chambers have had a good portion of their money there ever since.”

As he looked through the pages, numbers with a great many zeros, payments and receipts, names of companies and financial institutions all jumped out at him. It was a dizzying array of information, but what he gleaned was that the Chambers had used their position, their permanence among the United Kingdom’s most influential families, to wield incredible influence on the financial world.

“Okay, what am I supposed to be seeing?” he asked. He knew his wife well enough to realize she wouldn’t have pulled these pages out for his review unless there was something significant he should know.

“Look at the third page,” she said. “The bank ledger from 1844 to 1845.”

He did as instructed, and when he found the section she’d mentioned, it didn’t take him long to see what had caught her eye. The section detailed the monthly balance of the Chambers account with the Bank of London. Over the course of five months spanning from late 1844 to early 1845, the Chambers family took a serious financial hit, to the tune of millions in the one bank account alone. Jack looked up at his wife.

“It’s not just the Bank of London account,” she said. “If I’m reading this correctly, they lost almost three-quarters of their wealth in less than six months. It’s as if every business holding they had tanked at the same time.” She shook her head. “The Chambers were diversified before diversified was a thing. Yet they still lost almost everything.”

Jack flipped through a few more pages and continued reading. In 1845, the family’s financial situation had become so dire that they came close to losing even the land they’d held since the twelfth century. Then, just when it looked as if they were on the brink of losing everything, they began to recover. The record of that was almost as dramatic as the other, with whatever forces that had worked to bring the family to the brink of destruction seemingly putting on the brakes as they teetered on the edge of a cliff. Over the next several years, the family wealth grew again, investments proved successful, and businesses thrived. But Jack couldn’t look at all this without seeing a coordinated attack, and perhaps a stayed hand.

“It looks to me like an attack on every facet of their financial identity,” he said.

“I thought the same thing,” Espy agreed. “Like the Chambers were being punished.”

Neither of them had to vocalize who they believed to be responsible for the discipline of one of Britain’s most powerful families. The fact that they could do something like this spoke of their power and ability to manipulate markets and financial institutions. It was frightening to consider.

“And Henry knew it was coming,” Jack said.

What Espy had found shed new light on the purpose of the cemetery. Henry Chambers had some kind of advance warning that he’d earned the wrath of the Priests of Osiris—enough notice to commission Loudon to design Bath Abbey Cemetery. He meant it as an act of defiance, a way to get back at those he thought were set to ruin him.

That new revelation made Jack mentally salivate about what might be in the book he’d dug up. If a man in a spiteful frame of mind wrote it, it might be the equivalent of an exposé.

The book was sitting on the counter just inside the door, next to a coffee maker with a frayed cord. He’d set it there when they’d entered, knowing if he got into it right away—before going through the items they’d taken from the car—he would have been lost for the night. Now, though, there was no reason for him to hold off any longer.

Handing the financial papers back to Espy, he retrieved the book, found a chair as equally wobbly as the table, and settled back to learn as much as he could about the enemy.

Jack hadn’t moved in two hours, but the time had passed almost without his notice. He’d read every word of Henry Chambers’s notebook twice, then gone back to reread certain sections a third time. His overarching state of mind was one of disbelief, as Henry had put flesh to a phantom. It was a bit unsettling seeing something that had existed on the fringes—something about whose existence he’d even harbored doubts—brought into the light of day.

Still, despite the wealth of knowledge there, Chambers was careful about what information he chose to share. The bulk of it was old history, such as the events that saw a small group of Hebrew priests, committed to protecting the holy relics, secret them to Egypt, only to see their coalition evolve over the centuries into a cross-national, multiethnic power that had wrought great, often terrible influence over world affairs. Yet, from what he’d read in the book, there was very little about the actual structure of the Priests of Osiris—no names, no seats of power. It was influence without much substance, at least historically.

Because of Jack’s profession, there were parts of Henry’s writings that provoked particular interest. An entity that had existed for as long as this one, in a variety of incarnations, and with so many different players, had to have had an impact on a great many cultures. Studying certain areas of the archaeological arena in light of what he was discovering could turn some established theories on their heads. It had certainly helped Jack better understand a few of the mysteries surrounding Quetzl-Quezo.

There was enough here that Jack had to take care not to get lost in it, not to give in to the urge to become the academic. If he and Espy and the boys made it through this, if they came out the other side with their lives and freedom, then he would have all the time he needed to explore the ramifications of this information. For now, he had to concentrate on the bits that he could use immediately.

He had to remind himself that there was no way to know how much of it was even true. Every bit of what he’d read could be fabrication—brilliant misinformation. What he needed to concentrate on was motive. After reviewing the report on the family’s finances, Henry Chambers appeared to be a man with a motive for his actions. And Jack’s gut was to accept all of it, which meant he had to decide where to go from there. And that was where one of the passages that had earned a third read played a prominent role.

While he’d read, Espy had done the smart thing, taking sleep where such could be found. What he’d culled from the book had him energized enough to want to wake her, to tell her what he’d learned, but he couldn’t do it. In fact, he decided to join her. There was nothing more he could do at such a late hour, and he wasn’t even sure that, even with the money that came from the agent’s bag, they had enough to do anything substantial. He hoped that by getting some rest, as well as something good to eat, such things would aid their decision-making.

Setting the book on the table, Jack stood and stretched, feeling the effects of two hours of sitting there motionless. He turned off the light and moved to the bed, where he took off his shoes and slipped in beside his wife, trying to keep from waking her. Even so, he hadn’t finished settling in when her voice came out of the darkness.

“An engrossing read?”

Jack didn’t answer right away. He knew if he started talking about what he’d learned, he might not be able to stop.

“There’s a lot in there,” he finally said.

“I’m assuming that’s the understatement of the year?”

He chuckled and rolled onto his side, his hand finding her shoulder. She was facing away from him. He slid over, closer to her ear. “The short answer is that the Priests of Osiris are more powerful than we realized. They probably have people highly placed in governments around the world. And if we had any sense, we’d give ourselves up to McKeller and take our chances. We could be facing our deaths if we keep moving forward. Beyond that, I didn’t learn much.”

He felt Esperanza’s body move under his hand and he recognized a silent laugh. “Well, if that’s all,” she said.

“Oh, and I learned that Henry Chambers knew the meaning of the word vindictive.”

“Which is a plus for us.”

Jack went silent for a while, waiting to see if sleep would come or if the Chambers notebook would keep him wide awake. He heard steady breathing coming from Espy and assumed she’d returned to sleep, but then, as if reading his mind, she stirred.

“I’m worried, Jack. I need to talk to Alex and Jim, to hear their voices and know they’re both okay.” She paused, sounding on the verge of tears. A few moments later, she asked him, “What do we do next?”

Jack heard a weariness in her tone. He squeezed her shoulder and assured her the boys would be all right. Then he whispered, “I think tomorrow we need to figure out how to get to Saint Petersburg.”

“We have to go where now?”

Giving up on any chance of sleep, Jack told her what he’d discovered, filling her in on the history of a band of Hebrew priests who’d fled to Egypt with Elisha’s bones and co-opted a religious institution in order to protect the relics. He told her about the influence of the Priests of Osiris throughout history, of the things Henry Chambers claimed they’d done. He filled her in on the gaps—the things Chambers seemed intent on keeping from the reader. It was one of those gaps that made Saint Petersburg their next destination. It was the only path Jack could see that pointed them toward the true leadership of the Priests, not those members they conscripted to do their bidding.

“At three points in his writing, Henry talks about the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg,” Jack said. “That struck me as odd during the first read through, so when I read through it all again, I found that each reference to the Fortress comes in a paragraph following a statement about the organizational hierarchy.”

While he was talking, Espy had barely moved. He knew she’d absorbed every word, shifting bits of information around, joining seemingly unconnected facts and ideas. She was, after all, an academic at heart, and one of the most intelligent people he knew.

“And you’re certain it’s not just a coincidence?” she asked once he’d gone silent.

“The sentences that talk about the leadership are ten words long each. The ones about Saint Petersburg are seven.”

At that, his wife shifted her position, turning so she could see his face.

“I double-checked it,” he said. “I went three paragraphs above and below each reference, and there are no other sentences or sentence couplets that match that construction.”

Even in the dim light he saw the spark of interest in her eyes, the intrigue of a puzzle in need of solving.

“One last thing,” he said. “Each sentence couplet is separated by seventeen sentences, none of them the same length, but all totaling 123 words.”

Espy started to speak, and Jack was fully expecting her to ask follow-up questions, to help come up with an agenda for when they arrived in Russia. He’d have to tell her that what they’d do when they reached Saint Petersburg was still an open question, and that for now it was enough to have a direction, a focus. He was unprepared, then, when she asked nothing of the sort.

“Will you pray for us? For the boys?”

Jack did. And as he took their circumstances before God, who had proven his power over and over again, he felt his wife relax. By the time he’d finished, he could hear the regular breathing that comes with sleep. He stayed awake for a long while after that, thinking about tomorrow. At some point, sleep came for him too.