ARKANE Thrillers Books 7-9

Chapter 5

5

JAKE ROLLED SIDEWAYS, MUMBLING as he tried to call for help but only succeeding in banging his head on the flagstones. Naomi lay next to him, her dark eyes meeting his, and Jake sensed a calmness in her, a silent message of hope. She had known the name of the herb and if she wasn't concerned, then he was willing to trust her judgement. He breathed more deeply, trying to recall the details of the men who had taken the cross as he waited for the effects to wear off.

It was ten more agonizing minutes before someone came to see why the scholars were so quiet and raised the alarm.

The room was soon crowded with medical staff checking the group and the hubbub of gossip. Half an hour later, the victims began to move more freely, the paralysis released as the drug wore off.

Naomi sat up, rubbing her head where she had knocked it against the stone. She turned to look down at Jake and her long dark hair brushed against his hand. The sensation was magnified by his inability to move, and he willed her to lean in closer. Right now, he would be content to lie here all day, and leave the cross for the police. ARKANE didn't deal with theft or even murder, only with the supernatural, and he had seen nothing of that here today, only a very physical crime.

There was concern in Naomi's eyes as she bent over him.

"I guess you drank more tea than I did, but you'll feel alright in a minute." She smiled with encouragement. "Clearly the dosage was meant to render us semi-conscious but not do any permanent damage."

She stood up and walked away to speak with one of the doctors as Jake's strength returned and he pulled himself up to a seated position. A heaviness still pervaded his limbs and his mind was dulled, his hearing still slightly wavering, but the fog was starting to lift now.

"We're cleared to leave," Naomi said, as she returned and crouched next to him. "The museum authorities called the police about the theft and the poisoning. There was a targeted hack on the security cameras just before the cross was taken, so there's no footage of the men."

"Could they be art thieves?" Jake said, rolling his neck until it clicked. With the combination of jet lag and soporific drugs, he seriously needed some more caffeine. "Don't they steal to hire these days?"

"Hmm," Naomi mused as she helped him up, her hand soft on his arm. "I'm not so sure. The chatter we had on the dark web was linked to a group called the Confessors, and given the wording on the cross, it would make sense if they were involved. We should at least look into it a little more back at the office. After all, what else are you doing today?"

She smiled, her eyes flashing with renewed energy, and Jake thought of a few things that might be more fun than tracking down the medieval cross. But he was here for work, and she was a colleague … as was Morgan, he thought with a trace of guilt. ARKANE didn't make it easy for a relationship to form, that was for sure. Jake followed Naomi back to the car, grabbing another coffee for the ride back downtown.

After negotiating the heavy Manhattan traffic, the car pulled up at the entrance to the United Nations Plaza between First Avenue and the East River, a bastion of international peace and diplomacy in the heart of capitalist individualism. This was a city where such extremes could coexist in a myriad of dimensions. The plot of land was owned by the United Nations, technically extra-territorial although under agreement to follow local, state and federal laws.

Jake wondered how many people around here knew of what lay beneath the official buildings, the hidden world of ARKANE.

Security guards verified their IDs at the gate and checked under the car for any devices, pulling open the doors for the sniffer dogs. Like security guards in sensitive places all over the world, these men were professional but unsmiling. Even though they must see Naomi regularly, there was no banter or casual conversation.

As they checked the vehicle, Jake looked over at the huge sculpture of a .357 revolver, its barrel knotted in a symbol of non-violence that represented one of the aims of the UN. It was an idealism that Jake appreciated, but he was pretty sure that humanity would never shrug off its destructive side. Nature itself was murderous and every species struggled to survive another day – mankind was just a reflection of that struggle.

He looked further across the plaza to the row of colorful national flags, fluttering in the breeze in front of the main UN building. Jake recognized some of the more obscure countries – Armenia and Belize, Nauru and Uruguay – remembering how his father used to test him years ago. It's a big world, son, he would say as they matched countries on a world map to the capital cities and flags of the nations. You need to know that there's more than this, where the color of someone's skin isn't so important.

As a farmer who had worked the land, his father never ventured out of South Africa, planning to travel on retirement when he expected to hand the farm to his son. A flash of memory and Jake saw the world map on the wall spattered with blood: his father, mother and two sisters butchered by a drug-fueled gang years ago. He took a deep breath, tearing his gaze away from the flags, pushing the grief down as they drove into the underground carpark. He had left those memories behind a long time ago and hadn't expected a resurgence in this distant city.

Naomi drove down several levels, finally pulling into a bay painted with silver lines. At the other end of the floor, the parking bays were marked in blue. Naomi caught Jake's glance at the color coding.

"I know it seems petty," she said, "but a parking space is worth killing over in Manhattan. The UN crowd don't really know what we do on this end, but boy are they precious about their turf. Come on, I'll show you the office."

They entered an elevator, swiped their ID cards and waited for verification of their bio-information before it moved further down. Jake's ears finally cleared in the swift descent. The doors opened a minute later onto the New York office of ARKANE.

It was noisier than the London labs under Trafalgar Square, with the bustle of the city spilling over into the enthusiasm of those who worked here. But the lab areas were set up in a similar way, with glass-walled, temperature-controlled rooms where artifacts were investigated for their supernatural properties.

"I guess you work with objects like this in London?" Naomi paused in front of one of the research bays, where an unusual necklace was strung across a metal stand. A man in a lab coat scraped at it, pushing tiny samples into a test tube.

"I'm usually out in the field, to be honest." Jake squinted at the object. It was made up of animal teeth, beads and shells. "What is this?"

"It's a shaman's necklace originally from Borneo but recovered from a cache in a Queens apartment. What's particularly interesting is the teeth – they don't come from any known species. When boiled they produce the ability to see into other realms. Local legends say the teeth are from dragons in that other universe."

Jake raised an eyebrow, his corkscrew scar twisting.

"Just another day at ARKANE." He grinned. "Gotta love the variety."

"Exactly." Naomi smiled. "Let's get to my office and see what we can find on the cross."

Naomi led Jake past the rows of glass-walled labs and all the way down another corridor, until they reached a little section tucked away from the main area. The word Linguistics was displayed on a sign on the door.

"Because I work across so many cases, I get my own room," Naomi said, opening the door to a messy space not much bigger than a cupboard. "Sorry for the chaos – I do know where everything is, honest."

Looking around the room, Jake had a sense that Naomi spent a lot of time here. There was a kettle and toaster on a little fridge and what looked like a rolled-up sleeping bag and travel mat in the corner. Books were stuffed into floor-to-ceiling shelving on one side of the room, their spines showing all kinds of languages, many he didn't even recognize.

Did she live for her work, as he did?

Naomi grabbed her laptop and whipped it open. Jake caught a glimpse of her screensaver – an older Native American man's face in profile, looking out over the ocean. Her father perhaps, as she had mentioned Cherokee blood. She opened the ARKANE systems, typing quickly and pulling up some documents for Jake to look at.

"As we were lying there after the cross was taken," she said, "I was thinking about the strange script on the titulus. I think it might be Enochian."

"The language of the angels?"

Naomi nodded. "Supposedly. It was recorded in the occult journals of John Dee in late sixteenth-century England. It was meant to be the language that Adam spoke with God, and that was used to name all the animals. I guess you could call it a language of creation. Dee was a mathematician and astrologer, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, with one foot in science and the other in magic."

"But the dates don't match," Jake said. "It's odd that it should be on the cross, considering the age of the carving is way before Dee's time."

Naomi frowned. "I seem to remember something …" She tapped on the laptop, bringing up a copy of the Hermetic work Monas Hieroglyphica. "Here, this is one of Dee's great works and he took a copy to Hungary to present to Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor. If the cross was in Hungary at the time, it's likely that Dee would have seen such an unusual piece, and that could have been the basis for his own Enochian language."

As she flicked through the virtual book, Jake spotted an image on the edge of one heavily illustrated page. It depicted a glass flask full of ruby liquid.

"Stop there," he said, and Naomi zoomed in, expanding the image. "The chatter that ARKANE picked up mentioned something about the blood of an angel," Jake said. "Can you read the text around it?"

Naomi's lips moved silently as she read the strange text, her dark eyes fixed on the screen. Jake could almost see the workings of her mind as she turned over the words, her body taut as she concentrated.

"It's retelling a legend from the mouth of an angel," she said after a few minutes. "The one who drinks the blood will see into the supernatural realm, and may bargain the drops for whatever they desire. Time and space are nothing for those who stand beyond." She shook her head slowly, a smile dawning on her lips. "That's pretty cool, actually. Do you think that the Cloisters Cross holds this relic?"

"It certainly explains the interest in it," Jake said. "And makes me more concerned about getting it back. What else is significant about the cross?"

"As well as the angelic aspects, the cross is about resurrection, which isn't surprising, but it's done in an unusual way." Naomi retrieved some close-up pictures of the cross. Jake bent closer to the screen, feeling the warmth of her skin near his arm. She smelled of coconut and jasmine, and he couldn't help but lean closer.

"You can see the pruned tree on the shaft," she said. "It's a date palm, the Latin name is Phoenix dactylifera. It dies and comes to life again in a similar manner to the phoenix, the bird that rises from the flames."

"So the Tree of Life portrayed as the seat of immortality, like the Fountain of Youth," Jake said.

Naomi nodded, and then pointed at something else on the screen.

"This Tree of Life is mentioned in Genesis, chapter three, And the Lord God said, 'The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.' But the book of Enoch, which is in the biblical Apocrypha, has a verse which states that in the time of judgement, God will give all those whose names are in the Book of Life fruit to eat from the Tree of Life. The book isn't canonical, so most aren't aware of it, but its only extant copy is in Ge'ez, the language of Ethiopian holy writing, one of the earliest parts of the church."

Jake remembered visiting the Ethiopian Coptic church on the roof of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in the hunt for the Pentecost stones. Momentarily, he wondered if Morgan was somewhere near there right now, thinking of him on the other side of the world.

A bell chimed, announcing an incoming message. Naomi leaned in to read it.

"There's been a woman reported missing who fits the profile of the crucified victim. A Sister from the Order of the Guardian Angel." Naomi met Jake's eyes.

"Let's head up there," Jake said, grabbing his coat. "And stop by the weapons locker on the way out."