Solomon's Throne (5 page)

They disconnected. Gideon sat staring at his ceiling for a few minutes. Once again he punched a button on the phone. There was a beep, followed by a woman’s voice. “Yes, Mr. Quinn?”

“Is Mr. Xavier available, Cynthia?”

“One moment…Yes, he says he has ten minutes if you come now.”

“Great, be right there!” Gideon swung his jacket off the back of his chair and slid into it as he left his office.

“Mr. Xavier… I’m not seeing a lot of action in Lisbon. I know I’m not technically in charge of security there, but I’d feel better if I was on the ground, seeing what happened first hand. And it would probably be best if I knew what was stolen…” Gideon looked his boss in the eye. He knew this wasn’t going to be easy. It wasn’t easy for him to ask. But he took his job seriously, and he could see the obvious distress in his employer. If he could get the thing back? Well, one step at a time. But he was hoping Xavier would let him try.

“I don’t know. It has been a secret for so long… Since 1683. And in my family alone. It is bad enough that I have failed to keep it safe.” Luis Xavier looked exhausted, with purple smudges under his eyes and a drawn pallor.

Gideon was sympathetic, but impatient. “If I don’t know what it is—if no one knows what it is except you and your family—we can’t possibly get it back. Your son is 20 and a student; I don’t think he will be able to find it, do you? Or your wife?”

Xavier just stared at Gideon.
He’s losing it,
Gideon thought.
He’s almost broken.

“Sir. I know this is a terrible shock to you, and you feel responsible. I want to help you, and I would like to try to get it back. But “smaller than a breadbox” is not a description that could possibly lead to a successful outcome. You have trusted me with your business for five years. I’m just asking you to trust me with this, and let me help. Please.”

Xavier scrubbed his face with his hands, and when he looked up, Gideon knew he’d made the decision. “There is a leather pouch. Inside the pouch there is a scroll, which they told me is vellum. A very fine skin, probably of a young goat. A letter is written, in ancient Greek, on this scroll, and it is a letter from the Apostle Paul to the church in Jerusalem. It is… highly controversial. It has not been authenticated by any scholars, but my ancestor into whose hands it fell believed it to be real for a number of reasons. Not the least was that the man who gave it to him was murdered for it, and my ancestor was chased halfway around the world himself.” He went over to a built-in bar and poured himself a tumbler of mineral water. He looked out at St. Stephens, his anchor in the storm, then turned back to Gideon.

“There is a translation of the letter in the pouch, but the pages on which that was written are crumbling. I do not handle those pages now, and only with special gloves. The translation is in Portuguese. Also there is a journal, an old leather bound volume written by my ancestor. That has been kept out of sentimental value, and I am worried that the thieves might destroy it. But the letter…
Deus nos ajude.
God help us.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Lisbon

Present Day

G
ideon left the police station,
discouraged. Detective Azenha was right—the thief wasn’t talking. He hadn’t talked in two days, and showed no signs of weakening resolve. He sat in his cell, still, and to all observers appeared to be in a trance. When moved to an interrogation room, he folded his hands on the table and muttered prayers in Latin. When given a tray of food, in any location, he ignored it completely. He sipped water from time to time, and performed basic bodily ablutions. That was the extent of his cooperation.

Azenha had emailed a photograph of the tattoo the man bore on his forearm, and it was, indeed, unusual. Gideon hadn’t found anything online that was similar to it, and seeing it in person hadn’t shed any light.

It could mean anything. His mother’s initials. A gang or other society name. It wasn’t in any known criminal database, and with no further information—even a nationality—they were unlikely to solve the case with it.

Additionally, de Castro had found nothing in the investigation of his employees. No one had quit coming to work. No one was acting suspiciously. They had so far covertly visited the homes of over half the staff that had access to even a small part of the security system information for the Xavier International office building, and had found nothing unusual. In short, they were no further today than they were yesterday, and Luis Xavier was, by turns, sinking in despair and rattling the windows in rage.

Gideon’s cell phone rang. “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me,” Rei said. “Listen, Mr. Xavier just called me to his office. I don’t know what’s up, but since he pulled me out of the preservation room, it’s got to be about whatever was stolen, right? The letters and stuff are old—maybe he’s worried about the thieves exposing it, or handling it? I don’t know—what should I do? What do I say? I hardly know the guy, Gid… He runs the company, but he doesn’t actually handle the art.”

“See what he has to say. Try to get him to tell you what was so important about the letter, for one thing. All he said was it was supposedly written by Saint Paul. Maybe you can reassure him that the parchment and book are probably ok.”

“Yeah, ok. He kinda scares me, especially now… I’ll call ya back.”

Gideon strolled down the street, looking at the GPS on his phone to figure out the route to get him to the Cathedral. He was lost in frustrated thought, pondering once again the implications of such a targeted attack on a particular vault. Was it the vault or the letter? That knowledge was key to recovering the stolen property—if he could ever find out what significance the stolen property actually had. Right now, there was just no way to know.

He had taken an informal tour of the Cathedral, admiring the windows and stonework. His heart wasn’t in it, as much as he normally enjoyed these amazing architectural tributes. The more he thought about it, the more he became certain that the theft had to be about the specific items in the vault. It was too much of a risk otherwise, when there was so much valuable art so much more readily accessible. In the time they took to rob one safe, they could have stripped dozens of canvases from their supports, rolled them up, and been gone. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars in paintings and sculpture in the Lisbon office, not counting the pieces stored in the other basement vaults. The company bought, collected, restored, leased out and sold art to businesses and individuals all over the world. It just didn’t make any sense that all the easy money was bypassed for whatever was behind an unknown curtain. Then again, all that preparation and money to steal a letter didn’t seem to make much sense either.

His phone rang again, and he hurried towards the main doors of the Cathedral as he punched it on.

“Yeah?” He whispered.

“It’s me—what are you doing?” Rei asked.

“Sorry, hang on…” He got outside to the front steps. “I was in the Cathedral. Go ahead.”

“Ok, so he is one flipped out guy.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Gideon couldn’t help but smile. His wife was very even keeled. She could hold her own if needed, but she was more likely to kill you with sticky sweet Southern charm than snap your head clean off.

“OK… So there were a few things in the box. Three different time periods, I guess you’d say. The first was the letter. This is the only significant artifact, both from a historical and a monetary point of view.”

“The letter from Paul to Jerusalem?”

“Right. Supposedly, if the translation done by the great great great whatever was accurate, the letter was written by Paul, to the church at Jerusalem. The letter says how pleased Paul is that Peter has been made the bishop of the church at Jerusalem, and further affirms that the church there, in Jerusalem, is the center of the faith.” She paused for a response.

“Uhhhh… I don’t think I get it.” Gideon slowly strolled along the tree lined street away from the Cathedral, listening.

“You wouldn’t, since we’re not Catholic. OK, so short version is, the Catholic Church has always claimed that Peter was the first Pope, because Jesus called him the “rock” on which He was building His church. And Peter was traditionally thought to have been the bishop of the Church of
Rome
, the Roman Empire being the dominant world order of the day. The Church has gained tremendous wealth and power—the Vatican is a
country
, for heaven’s sake!—by staking its legitimacy on the Peter heritage. So if Peter was actually the bishop of the church in Jerusalem, and if Paul confirms in his letter that the church in Jerusalem is the base for this new religion of The Way, or Christianity…”

“Then the Roman Catholic Church gets the stilts pulled out from under their beach house.”

“Exactly.”

“But would anyone really much care about that these days?”

“Well, that’s hard to say. The Catholic Church still has a tremendous amount of wealth, and there are millions of Catholics throughout the world who worship not just the Trinity, but the Pope, and Mary and all those saints they have. But the main thing is, when the great great great grandpappy of Mr. Xavier got hold of this letter, the Portuguese Inquisition was still technically in effect, and it would have been considered the greatest heresy. The Pope had issued a five year cease-and-desist in Portugal, to try to regroup and see what was what with those Inquisitors and all, but the five year hiatus had expired, and the whole infrastructure was still intact. And not just in Portugal—in Spain, in India, in all of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial holdings. This was not a safe thing to possess.”