Solomon's Jar (19 page)

He shook his head. “I'm sorry,” he said, stepping
around the body of the huge black dog. “I'm having trouble with the dog. I can't help it; it just seems harsh to treat an animal so, no matter what it's done. It's just a poor animal. It has no moral judgment. It can't be blamed, after all.”

“You don't know the half of it,” she told him, rubbing the wallet clean of fingerprints with her shirttail, or so she hoped, and slipping it back into the dead man's pocket. She straightened. “Doesn't this strike you as somehow familiar?”

He gaped at her.

“The scene on the bridge of that fishing boat in Corfu,” she said. “The blood splashes. The ripping up of the furniture and the logbooks, apparently out of sheer fury.” She nodded her head at the window opening onto the long lab chamber. “Same thing happened here. Not to mention two brutal murders. At least.”

“You think that dog killed the crew of the
Athanasia
?” Pascoe's voice curled and cut like a whip of sarcasm. “And then what? It swam across the Mediterranean to assassinate Dror?”

“No. Not
this
dog,” Annja said.

“So you suspect an outbreak of some kind of madness—mutated avian flu perhaps—that's making domestic animals run amok and rip up people and commit random acts of vandalism?”

She took a deep breath. “I agreed with you that the
dog wasn't to blame,” she said. “That's because the dog isn't responsible.”

“But you just said—”

“But the same guiding agency did. The same entity. Do you get what I'm driving at, Aidan?”

He glared at her for a moment as if suspecting she was making fun of him. His nostrils were flared.

Then he shook himself, so violently she feared for a moment he was having a seizure. He sighed gustily. “You're speaking of demonic possession.”

“I'm afraid so.”

He shook his head. “It's hard to assimilate something like that.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “it is. Let's look around. We came here to learn some things. We need to get out of here before the authorities arrive, unless you feel like discussing demonic possession with the cops.”

“Right,” he said. “And perhaps we'd best discover if there are any more demonic dogs about.”

“Good point,” Annja said.

The room next to the office was a little storeroom filled with boxes of specimens and overstuffed filing cabinets. A door stood ajar, letting in a slice of sunlight shining down through a break in the heavy overcast. A quick glance showed it opened onto a narrow alley.

Annja caught Aidan's eye with a meaningful look. It
explained how the dog had gotten inside. Or at least, it offered one explanation.

It took all her will and physical courage for Annja to grip the sword in both hands and go down the stairs through the door at hallway's end. The mere physical danger scared her, certainly. But she had faced greater danger—although the horrible savagery of the dog's attack had shaken her as few assaults from humans had. But she felt a creeping conviction that they faced a menace that was more than physical. The dread that had almost overwhelmed her when she faced the animal down clung to her like wisps of fog.

Above all she feared what she might find at the bottom of the stairs.

Her fears were realized.

The stairs turned once. The walls were cool stone and smelled of it; a relief after the abattoir upstairs. “Obviously the modern building's been built on a preexisting site,” she murmured. She wasn't vastly concerned about making noise. If anything awaited them downstairs, it—or they—already knew they were coming.

“Looks nineteenth century, to hazard a guess,” Pascoe said, reaching out to brush the stone with his fingertips. Though he spoke quietly, as she had, his voice was steadier, more controlled than before. In a small way she was tempted to smile. Thinking professionally was an excellent way to break the spasm of shock and horror.

But the respite was brief. The stairs emptied into a small chamber with metal shelves to either side bowing beneath the weight of the customary dusty artifacts, some wrapped in plastic, some exposed. The floor was concrete, laid when the upper structure was built, Annja guessed.

An arm lay in the middle of it. It looked male, to judge by the dark, hairy hand jutting from the blue sleeve. A heavy gold band, probably a wedding ring, encircled one finger. The other end of the sleeve was soaked in purplish blood. A raw bit of bone jutted out, yellow in the single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling.

A similar light illuminated a scene of fresh horror through the doorway. Beyond lay a storeroom with crates and boxes, many of which had been shattered or ripped open. Amid artifacts, many of shiny yellow metal, sundry body parts were strewed. By the usual mathematics—chiefly that she quickly saw two heads—she guessed at a pair of victims, including the original owner of the arm in the outer room.

“Nothing down here,” Annja said. “Nothing alive.” She willed the sword away.

“God,” Aidan said in a choked voice. He held a handkerchief to his mouth, either in an attempt to prevent himself from vomiting or to ward off the stench in the damp basement. “Such rage.”

Annja was aware of conflicting sensations, again
reminiscent of what she had felt on the
Athanasia,
both a sense of intense evil and of power.

“The jar was here,” she said. “I can feel it. But it's not here now. Perhaps the creature expected to find it, and was enraged by its disappointment.”

“The jar itself may not be here,” Aidan said, voice muffled by the handkerchief, “but there are certainly jars here. In plenty.”

Preoccupied initially with assessing the casualties, Annja realized with a shock he was right. The yellow metal objects lying on the floor among the human wreckage were jars of bright brass. She knelt and picked one up that lay well away from one of the several broad pools of blood. It had the shape of a globe with a narrow funnel thrust into it from above, with two surprisingly delicate handles curving down away from the top, ending in upward-curled knobs.

“It's the same as the one I found on Sir Martin Highsmith's mantel in Kent,” she said, holding it out toward Aidan. “Down to the characters engraved on it.”

He slipped past her. Either he had reasserted his self-control or simply gone numb; he moved in a brisk, businesslike fashion. “They're all identical,” he said.

He hunkered by a wooden crate whose lid had been pushed in. Inside stood a dozen of the jars, encased in bubble wrap. “And look at this,” he said. “A shipping manifest.”

It was raining heavily when they emerged from the front door. But the street wasn't deserted, as a quick check had indicated. As Annja and Aidan ran out, hoping anyone who saw them would believe they were sprinting from doorway to doorway in the downpour, a tall, slim figure stepped out of an alleyway and approached them. The woman was holding an umbrella above a head of long, dark hair with a white streak above the brow.

“Tsipporah?” Annja asked as she and Aidan skidded to a halt.

The older woman smiled. “You were expecting maybe Madonna?”

“Well—not a whole lot less than you,” Annja said. “Didn't you tell me I wouldn't see you again?”

“Change of plans. Aren't you going to introduce me to your handsome young man?” she asked.

“Do you have someplace else we could go,” Annja said, “out of the rain and out of sight? Like, right now?”

“Of course. Follow me.”

She turned and walked at a businesslike pace down the street away from the Israel Antiquities Authority office. Annja and Aidan followed, crowding under her umbrella. In Annja's case, anyway, it was as much because to do otherwise would look suspicious, She was numb and pretty oblivious to getting wet. The young Englishman looked confused and more than a little suspicious, but said nothing.

At the end of the block Annja turned and looked back. Through the blinds on the front window of the building they had just left she saw a blue flash. Then with an almost dainty tinkling of glass the window blew out ahead of a billow of yellow flame.

Tsipporah stopped and turned back. “Natural-gas explosion,” she said. “Accidents happen. Or do they?”

Annja looked at Aidan, then at the older woman. “No accident,” she said, “as if you didn't know. They had a gas feed for Bunsen burners. It got left open. And somebody left a cigarette burning in an ashtray in the basement.”

Fire was billowing upward out the front window, and smoke streamed away from the flat roof. Tsipporah nodded. “I like your style, girl.”

 

“S
O
D
R
. D
ROR WAS INVOLVED
with importing and selling fake jars of Solomon,” Tsipporah said, sitting back from the card table set in the repair bay of a small garage off Chaim Weizmann Street, east of the now-destroyed antiquities authority office toward Kishon Harbor. The family that owned the garage, Tsipporah assured Annja and Aidan, was on holiday in Jaffa for a few days; no one would disturb them here.

Why exactly Tsipporah had picked the place, or how she had gained access to it—or even known about it— Annja had no clue. For that matter she didn't feel up to hazarding a guess as to why they weren't holding their discussion in the garage's business office. The fact it was small and cluttered and almost every horizontal surface was stacked with papers, work orders, receipts and God knew what else may have had something to do with it. In their brief association Annja had figured out that Tsipporah did things according to her own agenda. She probably had good reasons for them. But she was unlikely to explain. So they sat in the murky gray light filtering out of the rainy sky through windows grimy and fly specked, sipping cheap Negev wine from colorful plastic picnic cups.

“As you're probably aware, various members of the antiquities authority were implicated a couple of years ago in fabricating the fake ossuary alleged to belong to Jesus's brother, James,” Aidan said.

“I had heard about that, yes,” Tsipporah said with a faintly ironic smile.

“It would appear Dror and his confederates turned the scheme on its head. Or perhaps inverted it, would be more accurate. Coming into possession of the genuine artifact, they contrived to produce replicas of it to sell to avid collectors, New Age aficionados and religious zealots around the world.”

Annja shifted on her folding chair, not entirely comfortable in her new lightweight cotton dress, white with little floral prints on it, which she was quite convinced was either transparent in certain light or would become so if she ventured into the rain in it. After stashing her and Aidan in the garage, which smelled inexplicably of boiled cabbage as strongly as automotive grease, Tsipporah had nipped off to find replacements for Annja's shirt and slacks, which were pretty liberally spattered with blood. She had come back in a matter of minutes with the dress, presumably from a local market.

“Why not sell the real thing?” Tsipporah asked, leaning back at ease with her hair spilling in great waves down her shoulders.

Aidan shrugged. “Perhaps a lingering respect for the genuinely unparalleled value of the artifact to archaeology. Maybe after cashing in as much as possible from selling the fakes, Dror intended to see the genuine article discreetly into the possession of the antiquities author
ity.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps I'm giving the good doctor the benefit of too much doubt, and he just realized he could make more money selling fake jars a hundred times than the real one once.”

“Why wouldn't he try to make use of its power himself?” Annja wondered.

“Probably he didn't believe in its power. He could have authenticated it readily enough through metallurgy and electron spin resonance dating. But if he had believed, he probably wouldn't have bothered with the counterfeiting, since if I recall correctly legend holds that the reason the jar was dug up in the first place, and the famous seal removed, was to use the demons to find hidden treasure.”

“You're a most knowledgeable young man,” Tsipporah said with a smile.

Annja stifled a surge of irritation that the smile was returned. It may have been that she kept seeing the older woman in softening light, but she looked more than handsome to Annja. And Aidan seemed more appreciative than she liked. She chided herself for being ridiculous.

“It didn't do him much good in the end, though,” Annja said.

“It most certainly did not,” Tsipporah said. “It seems he encountered one of the Goetic demons. Marchosias. He's big and bad—one of the worst. But you stood up to him and won. Not everybody could do that. You've justified your role as champion, Annja Creed.”

“Thanks. But it wasn't much of a fight. Not really. He—the dog he was possessing—just jumped straight at me. And I—” She shrugged. She was a little uncomfortable repeating the details, for fear of setting off the animal-loving side of Aidan again. “I would've expected him to be a cagier opponent, I guess.”

“Don't underestimate either the demon or yourself. Note I don't say his name. I won't again, and I suggest you don't. They can hear their names from a long way off. What you did was confront him and stand. That's what makes you special. Pure moral and spiritual courage.

“I'd say he knew the form he was occupying stood no real chance against you, armed as you were with the sword. So he decided on an all-or-nothing assault that might get lucky—or might intimidate you into not resisting. It's not as if he had anything to lose at that point.”

“Nothing to lose?” Aidan burst out. “Annja killed him.”

“She killed his host, you mean,” Tsipporah said. “Do you think you could hurt a demon, or even cause him serious discomfort, when he's in another's body? If he appeared in his own form as a winged wolf, the sword might do him harm—I can't say, and I'm really unwilling to speculate. It may have caused him physical pain. But only momentarily.”

“And the dog?” Annja asked feeling terrible.

“There was no dog. Except the meat shell. It wasn't possessed, girl. What you encountered was a rare phenome
non the
Catholic Encyclopedia
calls demonic
obsession
. It means the original occupant's mind, will and soul have been flat-out evicted. The demon isn't sharing the space, the way it does in possession. You're dead and gone. It's easier with an animal, obviously,” Tsipporah explained.

Annja shuddered. She felt a stab of pity for the poor dog, and wondered if it might linger as a ghost, after being turned out of its own body by the demon. But she felt a strange, rather silly sense of relief that she hadn't really been the one to kill the poor thing.

“Do you think someone summoned him and sent him to visit those people?” she asked. Despite sharing Aidan's distaste for artifact forgers, she didn't share his tacit but unmistakable feeling that Dror, at least, had got what was coming to him. Not for the first time she noted that her companion, while a sweet enough young man, and definitely an innocent at heart, still possessed a not altogether attractive self-righteous streak.

“More than likely,” Tsipporah said. “It wouldn't be too characteristic for a demon to act so directly on his own. But don't forget the demons have their own stake in this. I can't help wondering if the extreme violence you saw might indicate the demons' own mounting frustration at not being able to find the jar themselves.”

“But the demons are supposed to be good at finding treasure,” Aidan said. “Why can't they find the jar the same way?”

“The jar has ways of avoiding discovery through magical means. The demons are flying as blind as the rest of us in this.” Tsipporah turned her intense dark gaze full on Annja. “You seemed to react pretty strongly to something I said, there.”

“Can they do that to anyone?” Annja felt tremendous fear once again.

“Can they tempt you? That's up to you,” Tsipporah said.

Annja felt her heart pounding. “But I thought—” Her voice dwindled into futile nothingness.

“You thought you'd be immune?” Laughing softly, Tsipporah patted her cheek. “You're a sweet child. But occasionally, not so bright. You have to choose between right and wrong. Every minute of every day. Just like the rest of us. Only, now, even more so. You think maybe it should be easier on you than on the average shlemiel?”

Annja could find nothing to say.

Tsipporah studied Annja a moment. “Interesting. You may have attracted some unfortunate attention, young lady.

“But believe it or not,” Tsipporah said, “the reason I broke my earlier resolve and looked you up again, Annja, had nothing to do with our friends from the jar. Or only peripherally. I have some information about the human players that might prove useful to you.”

“Tell me,” Annja said.

“First, Sir Martin Highsmith and his White Tree Lodge. He and his little chums desire the power of the jar to remake the planet. They wish to overturn the modern world and restore all to a state of nature.”

“He did seem pretty nostalgic for the Paleolithic when I spoke to him,” Annja said.

“If not the Pleistocene, before there were any nasty people running around bothering the animals. Since their little plans envision overthrowing the whole order of the world, undoing all of civilization and technology and reducing the Earth's population to a few thousand happy hunter-gatherers, it's safe to assume they won't hesitate to kill anyone who gets in their way. But I guess you've had a bit of firsthand experience of that, haven't you?”

Annja nodded.

“Now, Mark Peter also wants the power to do good for everybody, whether they like it or not.”

“Mark Peter?” Annja said. “You mean Stern?”

“He's dead,” Aidan said. “I don't know if you follow the news, but someone blew up his yacht off Jaffa with an antitank guided missile. About two minutes after our dear Annja leaped over the rail into the sea.”

“What interesting lives you young people lead these days. I do occasionally see a television news broadcast, when I can't help it. I've even been known to go on-line a time or two. As it happens I'm aware of all the things
you said. And one thing more. Stern wasn't on the yacht when the
mafiya
blew it up,” Tsipporah said.

Annja frowned. “But I had just finished talking to him.”

“Really? Just that instant? You walked up on deck and, wham?”

“Well—not exactly.” She described her encounter with Eliete von Hauptstark.

“So you might have been a bit distracted for a minute or two. Long enough for Mark Peter to grab a mask and some tanks and roll over the seaward rail, where his Russian minders wouldn't spot him. A resourceful boy, is Mark Peter. Gotta give him that. A certified scuba diver, too.”

“But why would he do that?” Annja asked, shocked by the turn of events.

“Maybe because somebody tipped him off,” Tsipporah said.

Aidan exhaled loudly. “I thought nobody turned on the Russian
mafiya,
” he said.

“Somebody turns on everybody,” Tsipporah said. “The
mafiya
have some people in it who are terrifyingly smart and some who are terrifyingly brutal, and sometimes they're the same. They have a total lack of scruples and a healthy respect for the power of terror. All true. But it
isn't
true nobody ever turns on them. That's just propaganda they spread, with plenty of help from various police agencies. The same way the Western
defense establishment used to go along with the Soviet army's policy of vastly exaggerating its capabilities and combat worth. It's budget-positive behavior.”

“Still, why would anyone risk crossing people like that for the sake of a man like Stern?” Aidan asked.

Tsipporah shrugged. “Why would anyone help the Russians against him, for that matter? You think the
mafiya
ran that hit on Stern's yacht without some sort of cooperation inside the Israeli government? Maybe it was just corruption, maybe it was a disagreement, let's say, with some of Stern's aims and methods—such as the covert way he's been arming radical settler groups to fight the central government. Maybe it was both. Now, I don't know, but I suspect the likeliest answer to how Stern knew to go over the side in advance of that missile was that somebody in government got wind of the plan, didn't like it and tipped him off. Maybe it was even one of his followers. Somebody outside the
mafiya
would, I grant you, have a lot less trepidation about putting a spike in their wheel than an insider.”