The Seventh Stone (23 page)

Christa shouted above a gust, her cell against her ear. “Percival, I’ve texted Helen. I didn’t tell her anything, like we agreed, except that I’m here at the greenhouse. Give me a little time. That’s all I ask.”

She looked up, saw him, and jammed the phone into her jacket pocket. She rushed up to him and hugged him, tight. He tentatively wrapped his arms around her. Six months ago, he sowed the seeds of their relationship with more hope than promise, but, like the rainforest plants that choked the shelves of the greenhouse, he could adapt to unexpectedly fertile conditions.

“
What are you doing here?” Christa asked. She stepped back and swiped her hair from her face.

“
Storm’s coming,” he said. His answer was too abrupt. He should just tell her the truth. Truth begets truth. He poked his wire-rimmed eyeglasses tighter on his nose. “I wanted to make sure the greenhouse was secure. I heard Gabriella was out of town, so I figured I’d better come take care of her plants.”

Christa grabbed his hand and drew him inside the greenhouse. Her hand felt so small in his. He flushed, not because of the cloying heat. He released her to shut the door behind them, sealing out the cold. He fought with the wobbly knob until it latched with a click. He gathered her in close again. He ached to kiss her. She pushed away. But not for much longer. Not, as Contreras said, if he played this right. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

She crossed to the crude, wooden desk, started pawing through the pile of reference books on the corner. “I need Gabriella’s journal, Daniel. Have you seen it?”

The damn journal. There had to be something in it after all. He came to her side and pretended to hunt through the left-side drawers, which he’d already searched twice. “Sorry I haven’t called,” he said. “End of semester is crazy. Busy grading essays, trying to find an excuse to make a C into an A. Parents don’t pay thirty grand a year for a C.” He brushed his elbow against hers.

She edged away. “Lying today doesn’t help tomorrow.”

She had nerve. Contreras had claimed that she was lying to him. She thought she was smarter than him. Truth was, she was smarter, way smarter. But he had something she didn’t have. Faith. And inside information. “You’re right,” he said. He straightened up and squared his shoulders. “I pretended I didn’t know anything about the Breastplate of Aaron when you told me about your father’s obsession with it. Fact is, Baltasar Contreras, you know, the head of Gabriella’s company, he told me about it when he hired me as historian for last summer’s expedition. He asked me to keep my ear open to any local knowledge in Colombia.”

That got her attention. Her eyes, those amazing Emerald eyes, met his. “And you didn’t tell me.”

“
I figured Contreras was wacky,” he said. “What would the Breastplate of Aaron be doing in Colombia? It’s been lost since the sacking of the Temple of Solomon.” Until, according to Contreras, his ancestor possessed it in the sixteenth century and brought it to the new world. “I was there to gather historical information on medicinal plants to produce new drugs.”

She shrugged the army green pack off her shoulder and removed a paper from it. She thrust it at him. “What do you know about this?”

The drawing was definitely Gabriella’s work, completed in situ, no doubt during their research trip to Colombia. “A plant?” What an idiot. He had let her veer off course. “What’s this got to do with the Breastplate?”

“
That’s what I need to find out,” she said. She began a search of the shelves of plants. The greenhouse was not large, only about fifteen by twelve feet, but Gabriella had packed a surprising variety of greenery into the space. On a sunny day, in the late afternoon, the wet smell of green and soil became suffocating, despite the oxygen the plants breathed into the air.

Daniel had always been better at reading books than people, but he knew Christa. Once she had her sights set on a goal, nothing would stop her. He had crammed in plenty of research on identifying plants so he could impress Gabriella. And it worked. She had introduced him to Christa, even had them both over to dinner until the roots of their relationship had established. The plant had better be what he thought it was. He needed to steer her back towards the journal and the Breastplate.
“It’s not in flower right now,” he said. He gestured to Gabriella’s desk. The desk was plain and rough-surfaced, adorned only with a microscope, pen and pad, and several potted plants. “Looks like Gabriella was working with it right before she left for Colombia this last time.”

Christa hurried over. She planted her palms on the corner of the desk and leaned in for a closer look. The subtle, mellifluous scent of her skin drew his gaze to the gape between her blouse and breasts. She reached forward.

“
Don’t touch it,” Daniel said, grabbing her hand. “If it is an adaptation of belladonna, like Gabriella wrote on this sketch, it could be poisonous.” That fun fact should impress her. The crushingly dull conversation he’d had with the adoring, plant-loving and hopelessly single science teacher at Washington Academy to get close to Christa was paying off. Daniel had also scanned Gabriella’s scant accessible notes into his brain, but he wasn’t able to identify the plant on the desk, even with an extensive Google search. He recalled seeing plenty on belladonna, but when he learned it was an old world plant, he deleted it from his list to free up brain space for the copious exotic species from the South American rainforest. “But belladonna is an old world plant.”

“
True. It’s been used as a poison since ancient Rome,” she said. Of course she knew more about it than he did. “Poison is the perfect weapon to bring down a powerful man. Probably killed Alexander the Great.”

“
Dead at thirty-three.” He could keep up with her. “Can you imagine what else he may have accomplished?”

“
I’d rather imagine how many lives were saved by his death,” she said. “Two Roman emperor’s wives used belladonna to do in their husbands.”

He dared to cup her shoulder with his hand. “Not the first nor last time that one woman has changed the course of history.” Yes, one woman could change history, simply by changing him, making him the man he was meant to be.

“
Maybe more than we know. Gabriella may have discovered a new species, indigenous to the new world,” she said.

“
If we find her journal,” Daniel began.

No need to say more. Christa yanked open the sticky, center desk drawer. With a rolling rattle, a log jam of colored pencils wedged up against a stapler and a pad of paper given out at the local savings bank. She tried the desk drawer to his right, the locked one. She crouched for a closer look.

He had to distract her. She’d see the scratches where he’d tried to force it open. Damn. The trowel. He’d left it on the desk.

But Christa didn’t reach for it. She crossed the greenhouse to the corner and its small, potted citrus tree. She bent over, lifted the edge of the pot and swooped a small object off the floor. It was a key. “Key lime tree,” she said. “It’s where I would have hidden it.”

She tossed the key to Daniel. She did trust him. He unlocked the drawer. From it, he pulled out a field journal, spiral bound, recycled paper cover. A crude smiley face had been drawn in one corner, Lucia’s trademark. Eureka. This was it. Gabriella’s field journal. Now to convince Christa to give it to Contreras.

Not easy. Christa grabbed the journal from him. She traced her fingertips over the cover, bit her lip, then snapped opened the journal. She sat down in the creaking wooden chair and skimmed the bulleted notes on the first page, outlined under the heading
Belladonna
. “Okay, here’s her notes on belladonna. Berries sweet but highly toxic.” She rubbed the scar on her temple. “Eating as little as two berries can kill a child. Ingesting ten berries can kill an adult.”

She turned the page. As far as Daniel knew, Gabriella’s field journals were typically meticulous, her notes, in situ sketches and observations as orderly as cadets at West Point. Here, he saw a jumble of disconnected thoughts, as if those cadets were tin soldiers tossed and scattered by a mischievous schoolboy. Some words were circled, others underlined, arrows pointing from one to the other, as though Gabriella had tried in desperation an entirely different approach to analyzing the data, flinging it down like seeds to see what sprouted and discovered, like an ecosystem, all had to interconnect.

“
What a mess,” Daniel said. “Listen, Christa, I don’t see anything about the Breastplate here, but I was with Gabriella in Colombia. I’ve made a study of these plants. I’ll take the journal back to my office and sort it out.”

“
Over my dead body,” she said. She turned the page and leaned back in the chair. “Which could be any time now.”

A clever joke? He was never sure. “Christa, what’s wrong?” She hesitated. “You can trust me,” he said.

“
Baltasar Contreras plans to poison the water supply,” she said, “with an extract of this new belladonna species that Gabriella discovered.” She looked up at him. “I thought she had found the antidote, but according to Gabriella’s notes, the only antidote comes from a plant that’s been extinct for five hundred years.”

CHAPTER
29

Baltasar snipped off the dead bloom on the Brassia maculata “Golden Web Weaver” orchid in the southern exposure corner of his orangery. The plant needed to be pruned, to survive and thrive. His plan was just that, a pruning. “Earth began as a garden,” he said. “Animals were an indulgence. And when God created man, that’s when His troubles began.” Still, to kill so many.

He breathed in the citrus lacing the humid air. It calmed him. Baltasar had always felt more at home with plants than people. As a child, he’d spend hours in this orangery, learning the science of botany through observation, as da Vinci had. While others his age wasted hours in frivolous play, slithering down their pitiful slides, competing to throw a ball through a hoop, he was laying the cornerstone for the foundation of a new world. He moved to his prized hybrid rose bush, clipped a bloom so deeply red it was nearly black, and proffered it to his guest. “A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet,” he said.

Bernard Rambitskov grunted. Baltasar recognized that his guest was not the type of man to accept a rose from another man. No, not at all. With his shaved head, bushy, scowling mustache and chest akin to an icebreaker, he intimidated people with his mere presence. He could have been the nicest guy in the world, but people feared him. And he certainly wasn’t a nice guy, in any case. People who dared called him Rambo.

“
Take it, Rambo,” Baltasar said, holding the rose towards him. “You’ll find its scent surprising.”

Rambitskov snatched the rose. A thorn pricked his beefy forefinger. It drew a spot of blood as deep red as the petals. The man didn’t flinch. He held the rose to his nose and sniffed. He didn’t grimace. “You’re perverted,” he said.

Baltasar laughed. He had cultivated the rose himself, crossing it with a foul-smelling carrion flower from the tropics. The rose looked beautiful, but emitted a fetid stench when picked. He took the rose and threaded it into the buttonhole in Rambitskov’s lapel. His fingers marveled at the silky weave of the high quality wool and the fit of the jacket over Rambitskov’s linebacker frame. The man’s tailor was almost as good as Baltasar’s. “Your suit is rather dandy for homeland security government issue,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to raise eyebrows.”

Rambitskov grabbed the rose from his lapel, crushed it like a grasshopper in his burly hand and dashed it to the floor. “I know what I’m doing,” he growled.

Really, did the man always have to be so tough? Sure, it raised him through the ranks. The bastard son of a prostitute who was strangled by her pimp when the boy was ten, Rambitskov was barely making ends meet shaking down dopers as a beat cop in the Bronx. The vice president swings in for a photo op at a charter school opening and Rambo stops some anarchist from burning him alive with a blowtorch. He got second degree burns down both arms, and a free ticket to DC for a job in the Secret Service. Two years later he’s first in command of New York’s Homeland Security office. Right place. Right time. It could create, or destroy, empires.

Baltasar stepped back. Rambitskov could still flatten most takers, but arrogance had softened his middle. Arrogance, paranoia, flattery, they were all tools in Baltasar’s chest, to be carefully selected for the job at hand. “I admire you,” he said. “A good seed planted in bad soil must grow above the weeds to succeed.”

“
I rely more on getting to the point.”

Baltasar laughed again. He could see Rambo as his number two, as long as he kept him pruned. “The finishing touches are complete for tonight,” he said, “with New World Pharmaceuticals as proud sponsor,
naturellement
. I find it quite fitting that the G-20 is holding the premier dinner in the shadow of the United Nations, for this will truly unite them.”