The Templar's Code (8 page)

“I don’t care what the homicide detective told us,” Edie said as she walked into the living room of her Adams Morgan row house. “I’m not buying that it was a crime of passion. It was . . . I don’t know, too much like an execution. An aggrieved lover wouldn’t kill from a distance. A person consumed with jealous rage would have stabbed Jason Lovett thirty or forty times. At least that’s how it always plays out on those true-life crime shows.”

Carrying a brown paper bag, Caedmon followed in her wake. “I, too, am lukewarm to the scenario concocted by the police. However, there’s a possibility that it was an act of violence aimed at the Freemasons. The group has incurred many enemies over the centuries.”

“Again. Doesn’t ring true,” Edie countered, taking the paper bag from him. “The lecture was open to the general public. And if someone was PO’d at the Freemasons, wouldn’t they have gone on a rampage?”

As she spoke, Edie removed several food containers from the bag and placed them on an oversized bronze platter. Supported underneath by a matched pair of Indian stone elephants, the gigantic platter did double duty as a coffee table. Her next-door neighbor Garrett never failed to mention that her living room looked like the inside of the bottle from
I Dream of Jeannie.
Caedmon was too much the gentleman to comment. Having spent several weeks at his Paris flat, she knew that he preferred the dark woods and fabrics one expected to find in an English library.

With her free hand, Edie gestured to the plastic containers of sushi and the small sake bottle. “I’ll serve up the fish while you pour the libations.” Garrett had just returned from a business trip to Tokyo and had smuggled a couple of bottles of sake in his luggage. Anxious to give the stuff a test drive, she placed two demitasse cups on the platter next to the cerulean blue bottle.

Caedmon seated himself on the velvet sofa. About to plop down on the sisal carpet, Edie, instead, cocked an ear toward the doorway. Hearing the
whhrr
and hum of the fax machine, she said, “Sounds like we’ve got an incoming. What do you wanna bet that’s the fax you were expecting?”

“Trent is, if anything, dependable.”

“Stay put. I’ll go check.” Motioning him to remain seated, Edie walked across the hall to her home office. Sure enough, there were several sheets of white paper in front of the fax machine. Earlier in the day, Caedmon had contacted his old group leader at MI5 to request a background dossier on Jason Lovett.
Must be nice to have friends in high places.

In addition to the faxed sheets of paper, she snatched her laptop computer before heading back to the living room.

She set the laptop on the sofa, then, holding the fax aloft, said, “Do you want to read it or should I?”

Caedmon’s brow slightly furrowed. “Er, by all means,” he deferred, indicating that she should do the honors.

Seeing that creased forehead, Edie belatedly realized she’d overstepped her bounds. She handed him the faxed sheets of paper. “On second thought, it
is
addressed to you.”

A tad self-conscious, Edie seated herself on the floor and made a big to-do out of opening the food containers. Stilted interludes like that made her wonder how they were ever going to make a transatlantic relationship work. Because of the lengthy amounts of time spent apart, when they did hook up, it often seemed as if they reverted to square one—the awkward “getting to know you” stage. Off-kilter conversations. Mumbled apologies.
Sharing the bathroom!
The only time they were in sync was in bed. However, man cannot live by bed alone.

Amused, Edie giggled.

Caedmon glanced up. “Care to share the joke?”

“Nope. So, what’s the scoop on the dearly departed archaeologist? Any deep, dark secrets?”

Setting the fax aside, Caedmon shook his head. “No red flags if that’s what you’re asking. According to the dossier, Jason Lovett had a bachelor’s degree in cartography and two advanced degrees in archaeology. After graduation, he spent some time in Key West working with the Fisher team trying to locate shipwrecked Spanish galleys.”

“Politely put, he was a professional treasure hunter.” Ravenous, she used a chopstick to smear a healthy amount of wasabi on top of several sushi rolls. That done, she opened a packet of soy sauce with her teeth, slathering it over the green-coated rolls. “Which begs the question . . . Do you think the fabled Templar treasure is really as big as Lovett claimed?”

“I don’t know if it would be worth so staggering a sum as a hundred billion dollars. However, if it does exist, the Templar treasure would be sizable,” Caedmon replied, partially validating the dead archaeologist’s outrageous claim. “And if the Templars had the Ark of the Covenant in their possession, the sacred relic would have been smuggled out of France along with the monetary treasure. As you know, I’d give anything to get my hands on the Ark.”

“We
are
talking about events that occurred seven hundred years ago.”

Edie reached for a California roll. Sushi was one of her favorite take-out meals, probably because she got to eat it with her fingers. Caedmon, on the other hand, veered away from the wasabi, used chopsticks, and always kept a napkin at the ready. Just another reminder that they were polar opposites. The fact that he’d gone to Oxford, and she’d spent time in the foster care system after her junkie mother overdosed, meant they grew up in two different worlds.

No doubt, his highbrow education was the reason why Caedmon sometimes acted with a cerebral detachment. She tended to act on her intuition. Head and heart. She was still trying to figure out whether, together, they made a complete whole. As far as jobs went, though, she thoroughly enjoyed being Caedmon’s research assistant. Never a dull moment.

“I don’t mean to burst your Templar bubble, but the treasure may already have been discovered,” she said, pointing out the obvious.

“The evidence suggests that the treasure has not been found.”

“Really? And what evidence is that?”

Caedmon dabbed at his lip with his paper napkin before answering. “When the Spanish returned from the New World with their ships loaded with Indian gold, silver, and gemstones, the country suffered from massive inflation because of the sudden influx of capital on the Spanish markets. Had the Templar treasure been found, a similar thing would have happened. Since there’s no record of an unexplained capital influx in the European markets, we can safely assume the treasure has not been discovered.”

Edie stared at the digital voice recorder in plain view on top of the bronze platter. “Earlier today, Lovett presented a
very
fanciful theory. Unless he’s got a map with a big X marks the spot, listening to that thing is going to be a colossal waste of time.”

“Perhaps Dr. Lovett will flesh out his fanciful theory on the voice recorder,” Caedmon countered in a measured tone. “Besides, I have a morbid curiosity. Dead man talking from the grave and all that.”

“Speaking of which, Lovett was out-of-his-mind delirious right before he, um”—she searched for a tactful phrase—“passed over. I didn’t mention it earlier, but he kept repeating the words ‘
aqua sanctus
.’ ”

“
Aqua sanctus
. . . how curious. It’s Latin for ‘holy water.’ ” Caedmon reached for the digital voice recorder. “An overly anxious archaeologist babbling in a dead language. This should prove interesting.”

The man behind the wheel of the leased Audi A6 braked to a full stop and cut the ignition. The burned-out streetlamp, suspended from an iron base adorned with paper flyers that gently flapped in the evening breeze, provided a dark pocket in the otherwise well-lit residential neighborhood.

Leaning across to the passenger seat, Saviour Panos opened a hard-sided case. From its depths, he removed a parabolic dish with microphone, a headset, and tape recorder. The same surveillance equipment he’d used to good effect with the archaeologist.

This night he had a different target, his beloved Mercurius anxious to ascertain how much Caedmon Aisquith knew about the massacre site and the Templar treasure.

Acting on a hunch that he’d find the Brit at the police precinct, Saviour had earlier followed the red-haired man from the police station to the row house situated on the other side of the street. To his surprise, the historian was still in the company of the curly-haired woman from the Masonic temple. Curious as to the nature of their relationship, he’d made inquiries of a middle-aged man walking a ridiculously shaved miniature poodle. The gossipy dog owner had been a fount, and Saviour learned that Edie Miller, a photographer by trade, was romantically involved with the British writer, the two having just returned from a trip to Ethiopia.

The information had been freely given. But of course. Beautiful people rarely came under suspicion. A defect in human nature that Saviour often exploited to his advantage.

Able to see two blurry shadows through the sheer fabric that hung at the window, Saviour aimed the parabolic dish in that direction.

“. . . he spent some time in Key West working with the Fisher team trying to locate shipwrecked Spanish galleys.”

Smiling, he turned on the recording device, his two lovebirds coming in loud and clear.

Able to finally relax after a hectic day, he retrieved a box of Dunhill cigarettes and a silver lighter from his jacket pocket. The lighter, engraved with the Creator’s star, had been a birthday gift from Mercurius. A man of deep religious convictions, Mercurius had an almost fanatical attachment to the eight-pointed star. It was much the same way that his mother, Iphigenia, had been slavishly devoted to the Virgin Mary, their squalid flat inundated with her unsmiling image. Personally, Saviour preferred the image of Jesus on the cross, a writhing half-naked man in his death throes.

As he flipped open the lighter, Saviour cursed under his breath, his right hand, now swollen, throbbing from the earlier run-in with the Brit. Somewhat clumsily he lit the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth with his left hand. Inhaling deeply, his lungs filling with smoke, he savored the calming effects of the tobacco. A gift from the gods.

However, the gods had not always smiled so favorably upon him. There was a time when he could barely afford to buy one or two cigarettes, let alone an entire pack. That was when he knew what living on the knife’s edge meant. The hunger. The fear. The utter exhaustion. The simple desire for a soft bed and a full belly had become an obsession. But not for himself. He could do without. Instead, he coveted the small luxuries for his beloved Ari.

When Ari first took ill with a bad case of the chills, they naively assumed the hacking cough and elevated fever would soon dissipate. A few weeks later, he began to spit up blood, the respiratory ailment worsening, Ari so weak he could barely make the ten-block walk to the hospital. When the doctors diagnosed his friend with having a virulent strain of antibiotic-resistant pulmonary tuberculosis, Saviour had refused to believe it.

My God! It was a death sentence. He’d been sorely tempted to grab one of the shiny instruments off the bedside tray and jab it into the doctor’s soft underbelly. He was that enraged. And when the hospital staff quarantined Ari, refusing to release him until the danger of contagion had passed, Saviour had to be dragged from the hospital by two burly security guards.

Painfully aware that his friend needed more comfort than his meager income could provide—servicing dockworkers kept him fed and shod but paid for little else—Saviour quickly devised a plan to earn more money. Even a seventeen-year-old wharf rat knew that the male prostitutes who paraded along the Leoforos Nikis were in great demand; wealthy tourists and businessmen paid a hefty price for the pleasure of their company. Saviour also knew that those same tourists and businessmen had discriminating tastes. Meaning he had to somehow transform himself from a dirty wharf rat to a stylish escort.

Determined to provide for his ailing friend, he spent hours studying the haughty young men who strolled the Leoforos Nikis, the café-lined promenade that hugged the Thermaic Gulf. He spent even longer hours staring into a cracked mirror, affecting an aloof expression that conveyed a purposefully ambivalent message—that he might deign to spend some time with a client. Provided the price was right. Even then, it wasn’t absolutely assured. Because in those hours spent on Leoforos Nikis, he’d noticed a curious phenomenon: For the wealthy men with the well-padded wallets, it was all about the ritual of the hunt.

Needing to properly outfit himself for the ritual, he must have sucked a hundred cocks before he had enough money to buy a pair of white trousers, a striped boatneck jersey, and a small bottle of Paco Rabanne cologne. In a cost-saving measure, he’d stolen a pair of handmade leather loafers from a five-star hotel, sneaking in while the maid was changing the bedclothes.

His thick wavy hair professionally styled, his body bathed and scented, Saviour was now ready to join the other beautiful young men on the Leoforos Nikis.