Ark of Fire

CHAPTER 80

Caedmon glanced up from the map spread before him on the bar counter.

A vacancy having come open at the last minute, he and Edie were seated at the Dragonara Hotel bar waiting for the maid to finish cleaning their suite. To his surprise, Valletta, the capital city of Malta, was quite the convention center; their seaside hotel was currently hosting a large gathering of British plastic surgeons. Because Malta had at one time been part of the British Empire, it was a popular destination with his countrymen. He’d purposefully selected the Dragonara in order to fade into the crowd. If a desk clerk or bellhop was questioned as to whether an Englishman had checked into the hotel, the reply would be “Yes, the hotel currently has two hundred English guests.”

Before returning his attention to the map, Caedmon surreptitiously glanced at the mirrored wall behind the bar, having resorted to old behaviors, scanning each and every bar patron, running mock scenarios in his head, trying to discern who among them would go in for the kill. He would have preferred sitting at an innocuous table in the back of the room, but the overflow of plastic surgeons swilling predinner drinkies had forced them to grab two stools at the bar.

“You know, I’ve been meaning to ask, is there really a big rock inside the Dome of the Rock?”

Caedmon nodded. “In fact, the rock, known in Hebrew as the Shetiyyah, is believed to be the foundation stone of the world. Before it was stolen by Shishak, the Ark of the Covenant rested on top of the Shetiyyah.”

The bartender, a swarthy fellow with an amiable disposition, placed a tonic water and a cola in front of them. Then, with a practiced flourish, he presented Edie with a plate full of fried calamari and a small dish of quartered lemons.

“Grazzi,” she replied in Malti, the response earning her a toothy grin.

Out of the corner of his eye, Caedmon watched as Edie squeezed a lemon, not on her squid, but into her cola. He continued to watch as she pursed her lips around the end of a fuchsia-colored straw. He well recalled how her lips had clamped around him earlier in the day.

Careful, old boy. Now is not the time for prurient thoughts and adolescent longings.

With a renewed focus, he stared at the GPS receiver, continuing the business of transferring the coordinates that he’d discovered in the database file onto a local topographical map with the aid of a map ruler. In the event the GPS batteries died a sudden death, he wanted a hard-copy backup.

“From where I’m sitting, Malta doesn’t look like that big of an island.”

“Approximately three hundred square miles. About the size of the Isle of Wight.” He plotted the last set of coordinates. “Ah! I think I’ve got a location.” Excited to have made such fast work of it, he pointed to a small jut of land off the south-west coast of Malta.

Edie squinted as she peered at the map. “Calypso’s Point,” she read aloud. “Geez, it’s no bigger than my front yard. What do the dark wavy lines mean?” She pointed to the contour lines that distinguished a topographical map from the run-of-the-mill motorist map.

“It means we’ll have to scale a cliff wall. Although there’s a road leading to the point, we must assume that MacFarlane will have the roadway closely guarded.”

He signaled the bartender to step over. When the young man approached, he swiveled the paper map in his direction. “Are you by any chance familiar with a place called Calypso’s Point?”

The bartender barely glanced at the map. “Iva, I know it well. It used to be a hideout for the Barbary pirates until the knights defeated them. But”—he expressively shrugged—“why would you want to go there? It’s uninhabited. You will find only seabirds and the ruins of St. Paul’s torri.”

An abandoned tower . . . how interesting. No doubt a signal tower once used by the Knights of St. John.

“Actually, it’s the sea birds that I wish to see,” he glibly lied, turning the map back in his direction. “I am something of an amateur bird watcher. Would you happen to know anyone who would be willing to take us to the point by way of the sea?”

“My brother-in-law has a fishing vessel. I am sure he could be persuaded to take you there. Assuming the price is right.”

“He has but to name it, the only stipulation being that I would like to depart later this evening.”

If the young man thought it odd that someone would go bird watching in the dead of night, he gave no indication, scribbling his brother-in-law’s phone number onto a cocktail napkin.

Their business concluded, the bartender turned and waited on a portly surgeon who loudly raved about the “jolly good pasties.”

Relieved that the logistics were taken care of, Caedmon neatly folded the map. That done, he slid map and ruler into his anorak pocket. With one more task to attend to, he glanced through the glass doors that fronted the entrance to the bar, able to see across the lobby into the so-called business center. One of the hotel amenities was the free use of a desktop computer, a fax machine, and a color copier. For the last twenty minutes, the computer had been commandeered by a Suffolk surgeon.

“Is he still there?”

“If you’re asking if I can still see the chap’s tonsured pate, the answer is yes.”

“Why do you need a computer, anyway? We got everything we needed from the ferryboat computer. Or at least I thought we did.”

“I need the computer because I intend to put together a dossier for the British consulate. If by tomorrow morning we haven’t returned to the hotel, the dossier will be sent to the consulate office here in Valletta. From there, it will be forwarded to British Intelligence. Hopefully, the lads at Thames House will be able to succeed where we failed.”

“You’re talking about your old buddies at MI5, right?”

He nodded. “One doesn’t need the Delphic Oracle to know that Stanford MacFarlane won’t relinquish the Ark without a fight.”

“And a deadly fight, at that,” Edie murmured; Caedmon could see that she was still distressed by the encoded message they had earlier deciphered. For several seconds she stared at her cola glass, the only sound being the dull clink-clink as she continued to swirl her straw.

Quite abruptly, she set the straw adrift.

“I keep thinking about that proverb, ‘Everything has an end.’ And I can’t help but wonder . . . is this the beginning of the end?”

His thoughts running a similar course, Caedmon cast his gaze at the second set of French doors, which opened onto a terrace; the hotel was set on a scenic perch overlooking the water. The sun had already begun its descent into the sea, creating a glorious explosion of tangerine and magenta. So beautiful, it was almost painful to watch. To his right, the baroque city of Sliema, a burnished maze of stone façades, rose up as if spawned from the sea.

How did he get himself into this mess? More important, how had he gotten Edie so deeply involved in it?

At first it had been simple academic curiosity. The Ark of the Covenant. If he could find it, if he could lay his hands upon it, he could prove himself worthy of the man who’d overseen his ouster from Oxford. Prove to his long-dead father that—

“I’m afraid,” Edie said, her tremulous voice breaking through the silence. “What if we can’t stop him? We were powerless to stop him from walking away with the Ark.”

Turning his head, he peered into Edie’s sad brown eyes. “Although MacFarlane may best us, we’re not as powerless as you seem to think. Knowledge has a power all its own.”

“It’s the guns and bullets that have me worried.”

“They can only kill you. But knowledge lives on.”

Placing a hand on his knee, she leaned toward him. “So does this,” she whispered, brushing her lips against his.