Stones of Fire

39

Enraged, Stan MacFarlane snapped shut his mobile.

Aisquith and the woman were in Oxford.

Why was plainly evident. They had managed to find out that Galen of Godmersham had uncovered the Ark of the Covenant while on crusade in the Holy Land. Eliot Hopkins must have told them before his death.

‘Do you want me to take care of it, sir?’

Stan glanced over his shoulder. He knew that former Gunnery Sergeant Boyd Braxton was anxious to make amends for the débacle in Washington.

‘Sometimes it’s in one’s best interest to be merciful.’

It took a few moments for the other man’s befuddled expression to morph into an amused grin. ‘Oh, I get it, Colonel. Like Tony Soprano, you want to keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.’

That being as good an answer as any, Stan tersely nodded. ‘Tell Sanchez to put a tail on Aisquith. I want to know the Brit’s every move.’

Turning on his heel, he strode down the lowceilinged hall, his booted footfalls muffled by a well-worn Persian runner. On either side of him hung gilt-framed landscape paintings. ‘A tastefully appointed house for the discriminating traveller.’ When he had leased the house from the Internet website, he hadn’t given a rat’s ass about the decor. He only cared that the manor house was located midway between London and Oxford at the end of a half-mile oak-lined driveway. He needed a base camp to set up operations. Oakdale Manor fitted the bill.

Nodding brusquely, he acknowledged the armed sentry standing ramrod straight beside an upholstered chair. The Heckler & Koch MP5 clutched to the man’s chest came courtesy of a sergeant major in the Royal Marines who routinely supplemented his pension with illegal small-arms sales.

Passing the age-blackened doors that led to the formal dining room, he glanced in, verifying that his highly paid contract worker was busy deciphering Galen of Godmersham’s archaic poetry. A postgraduate student enrolled in Harvard’s medieval studies programme, the scraggly-haired twenty-nine-year-old had jumped at the chance to pay off the nearly seventy thousand dollars in student loans that hung over him like a well-honed axe blade. Softly spoken and effeminate, the man put Stan in mind of a loose bowel movement. If not for the fact that he possessed the rare skills necessary to decipher the fourteenth-century quatrains, Stan would have disposed of the stoop-shouldered pencil dick after yesterday’s meeting with the Oxford highbrow. For the moment, however, he served a purpose.

Satisfied to see the bespectacled scholar staring intently at his laptop, an eight-hundred-year-old map of England spread out on the table beside him, Stan continued down the hall to the kitchen.

For some reason the stone-floored room put him in mind of his grandmother’s kitchen back home in Boone, North Carolina. Maybe it was the green-mottled crocks that lined the open shelves. Or the scarred wooden table that dominated the centre of the room. Whatever the reason, he could almost see his aproned grandmother standing at the oversized gas stove frying up some freshly laid eggs with big slabs of salted ham.

Reduced to eating English slop, he cut himself a thick slice of bread from the loaf on the table. Slathering it with plum jam, he carried it over to the casement window that overlooked the garden. Through the gnarled branches of dead wisteria that framed the outside of the window, he could see a fine-looking white horse frolicking in a distant field.

How much does Aisquith know? Probably not much. That’s why he’s in Oxford consulting the foremost expert on English crusaders. Strange the two men are acquainted. The intelligence dossier on Aisquith makes no mention of the relationship.

Luckily, he’d had the foresight to recruit the professor’s housekeeper. Still it was troubling to discover that Aisquith knew about the quatrains. Although, given he possessed the sole copy of the quatrains outside Duke Humphrey’s Library and given that the library was only open to Oxford faculty and students, the Brit didn’t have a prayer of examining the original codex. Without the quatrains, Aisquith was just pissing in a gusty wind.

He glanced at his watch.

13:31 local time.

He’d hoped to have the quatrains deciphered by now, his excitement mounting with each passing hour. No doubt this was how Moses felt when he crafted the Ark of the Covenant, placing inside it the two stones inscribed with the Ten Commandments. With the creation of the Ark, Moses had ushered in a new world order. The hinge of history had swung upon the Ark. And it would soon swing again.

Praise be to the Almighty! For the battle is the Lord’s.

Although Stan knew he had a tough fight ahead of him, he took solace from the knowledge that he would have at the ready the best weapon a soldier could have. For twenty-five years he’d been readying himself. Love of God. Purity of Heart. Cleanliness of mind and body. Those were the qualities of the Ark Guardian.

Harliss, a burly ex-marine, now a ‘consultant’ with Rosemont Security, poked his head into the kitchen. ‘Sir, he’s got something for you.’

Knowing that ‘he’ referred to the Harvard scholar, Stan headed for the dining room.

‘What do you have?’ he barked without preamble as he entered the room.

The chairs had all been pushed against one wall, enabling free movement around the large oval table. Several framed paintings were also propped against the same wall. The scholar walked over and dimmed the chandelier. A PowerPoint slide appeared on the pictureless wall. Stan found himself staring at the four quatrains that Galen of Godmersham had composed just prior to his death.

‘Just as you thought, this word arca is the key to deciphering the quatrains.’ Using a pointer, the younger man indicated the second line of the third quatrain. ‘Arca, of course, is the Latin word for chest.’

Since the bespectacled idiot hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know, Stan made no reply. While he’d provided his mercenary scholar with a high-speed Internet connection enabling him to hook into the world’s best libraries, he’d briefed him carefully, ensuring the man had no clue as to the purpose of his research.

‘By those who come near me I will be treated as holy.’

Not one to disobey God’s dictates, Stan intended to do all in his power to make sure that the unholy did not cast their gaze upon the Ark. The scholar had merely been told that Stan and his men represented a consortium of art collectors trying to track down a medieval chest believed to have been buried in the mid-fourteenth century somewhere in England. If the Harvard-educated boy wonder wondered at the trio of armed guards, he’d been wise enough to keep his own counsel. Unbridled greed has a way of making a man turn a blind eye.

When no reply to his brief exposition was forthcoming, the pasty-faced scholar nervously rubbed his hands together. ‘Slowly but surely, it’s all coming together. I’ve got the first three quatrains more or less figured out, but I’m still trying to pin down number four. Don’t you guys worry. I’m guessing that I’ll have this baby cracked in the next couple of hours.’

‘You’ve been deciphering the verses since late yesterday. I had expected some tangible results by now.’ Stan made no attempt to hide his annoyance, the scholar unaware that he was working to a carefully crafted timetable.

‘Hey, you can’t rush these things. Although I can tell you that the four quatrains form a rectilinear allegory.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’ Boyd Braxton muttered, staring at the scholar as though he were a turd on the bottom of his boot heel.

Smirking, the turd replied, ‘For those of us who never took geometry, I am referring to the four-sided geometric configuration known as a square.’