Stones of Fire

25

Eliot Hopkins slowly hung up the telephone.

Just as the monsters at Rosemont Security Consultants had predicted, Edie Miller had initiated contact.

The first piece of a very complicated puzzle had fallen into place.

He sighed, a long drawn-out breath that was equal parts regret and pain. Regret because he was fond of the quirky and offbeat Miss Miller. Pain on account of the cracked rib he nursed, courtesy of a muscled behemoth with a misplaced sense of civility, the fiend having grinned and said ‘Howdy do’ after administering the unexpected blow. The men of Rosemont wanted his cooperation. And they’d gone about gaining it in a most primitive fashion.

Why negotiate when one can use fists and threats to achieve the same end?

Glancing at the imposing John Singer Sargent portrait that hung above the mantel, Eliot thought he caught the hint of a smirk on his great-grandfather’s stern visage, the coal magnate having put down more than one strike with clubs and bullets. Unlike Andrew Carnegie, who had suffered with a guilty conscious, Albert Horatio Hopkins had never lost a single night’s sleep worrying about the plight of the men who earned him his immense fortune. A true vandal, Albert Hopkins had raped the West Virginia mountains for their minerals and stripped his employees of their dignity.

Long live King Coal.

While he was the great-grandson of Albert Hopkins, he was also, and more importantly to his mind, the grandson of Oliver Hopkins. In his day and age, that being the feel-good, anything-goes frenzy before the Great Depression, Ollie Hopkins had had a well-deserved reputation as a ne’er-do-well. Turning his back on the family business, he instead supped with African chieftains, rode wild horses with Mongolian warriors and explored the licentious world of the harem with Arab potentates.

Along the way, he had spent a king’s ransom searching for the relics of the Exodus.

As a young boy, Eliot would sit for hours at his grandfather’s knee, enthralled by his exciting tales, which rivalled any adventure book. His particular favourite had been the time that his grandfather, disguised as a Turk, had tunnelled into the bowels of the Temple Mount, only to be discovered by Sheik Khalil, the hereditary guardian of the Dome of the Rock. Chased through the streets of Jerusalem by an angry mob, his grandfather made his getaway in a motor yacht hijacked from the port of Jaffa.

Considered a wastrel by his father, Oliver was eventually disinherited. Penniless when he died, he had left his favourite grandson the fruits of all his labours — an immense collection of artefacts and relics mined over the course of some fifty years. The collection became the cornerstone of the Hopkins Museum of Near Eastern Art, the museum founded in homage to the man who had given Eliot the only familial affection he ever knew.

His grandfather had also bequeathed to him a magnificent obsession — the Stones of Fire.

It had taken decades of dangled carrots and very large bribes, but he had finally found it.

Only to lose it in the blink of a jaded eye.

Had he been a religious man, he might have thought it God’s punishment for daring the unthinkable. Certainly, he’d been a fool to entrust Jonathan Padgham with the holy relic. But the man had been an expert on Near East antiquities and Eliot needed to verify that what he’d found in the sands of Iraq was in fact the fabled Stones of Fire. Blinded by his obsession, he had never considered that there might be others even more intent on finding the treasures of the Bible. Men unfettered by the rule of law.

Wearily, Eliot rose to his feet. There being no time to ponder the ethics of the situation, he walked over to a panelled door on the far side of the rosewood-lined library. Pressing a hidden latch, the door swung open. He turned on the light, the small room windowless. In turn, he surveyed each glass case, his collection of antique weaponry a private passion. Out of respect for his thirteen-year-old daughter Olivia, who had an unnatural fear of guns, he kept his collection out of sight.

Pausing in front of a velvet-lined case, he briefly considered the Colt revolver once owned by gunslinger Buffalo Bill, but in the end settled on a World War II-era Walther PPK. The handgun of choice for the German SS.

Over the years, he’d dealt with greedy dealers, ruthless brokers and pompous curators. Last night was the first time he’d come face to face with religious zealots, the interaction shocking. One could not reason with such men for they served but one master.

One could only acquiesce.