Tears of the Jaguar (36 page)

“Wait,” said Deborah. “So he
is
CIA?”

Nick said nothing. The black man gave her a smile and a nod.

“Like I said,” he remarked to Deborah. “Serious trouble.”

“This is British soil,” said Nick. “Nowhere more so. Escort him to a safe room.”

The CIA man stepped away, but though the riflemen kept him in their sights, pivoting and adjusting with mechanical precision, he never took his gaze from Nick until they had directed him up a wooden staircase and out.

“Come on, Deborah,” said Nick, holstering his weapon and offering his hand to help her up. “It’s time we talked.”

For a moment Deborah just stared up at him, then, very slowly, she took his hand and rose awkwardly, testing her weight on her aching leg. Her mind was racing, and she couldn’t quite banish the thought that she should still be running. Since when did Nick Reese order soldiers around? Who did he work for?

He led her out of the White Tower and through the deserted gift shop.

I should get something for Adelita
, she thought wildly.

But then they were out in the open and crossing the equally deserted inner ward to the Waterloo barracks. The crowds were gone; in fact it looked like the entire castle had been evacuated. Only the yeoman warders and the soldiers were visible, and the empty fortress felt uncanny, like she was on a movie set or inside a dream. She hesitated at the doorway he had led her to, and he turned.

“What?” he said. “This is what you came to see, isn’t it?”

She nodded, still mute.

“So let’s do it,” he said. “I won’t quiz you, or insult you by pretending not to know why you are here. I’ll tell you what you came for, and we’ll take it from there. OK?”

She nodded.

“After you,” he said, stepping aside so that she could stroll in—no waiting for busloads of tourists to shuffle through in front of her—to the Tower’s most famous exhibit: the crown jewels.

“I was sorry to hear about Professor Hargreaves,” said Nick. “Doubtless you already figured out who did it.”

“Stroud,” she said.

“Is that a guess or did you know?”

“I knew as soon as I saw her face caught by the security cameras.”

“Any idea why?”

“She has two specialties,” said Deborah. “One of them is Mayan epigraphy, the other is royal regalia. Sometimes the two overlap, but she was hired for her work on Mayan writing. It was only later that I started to wonder about the jewels and their link to crowns, scepters, and other things European.”

As they talked, they wound their way through the rope swag that usually channeled hundreds of visitors at a time from room to room. The difference was that now, it was just the two of them.

“I spoke to the boy who worked in the gift shop,” said Nick.

“Barry,” she added reflexively. She still felt numb with confusion.

“Barry, right,” said Nick. “He told me the names of the two gentlemen Hargreaves had been researching for you—George Withers and Sir Henry Mildmay—and I knew you’d come here. You didn’t need to, of course, but that’s you, isn’t it, Deborah: impetuous but thorough. It wouldn’t have been enough for you to leaf through a book or two. You had to actually come.”

“What did you threaten Barry with?” she countered. “To get him to talk to you, I mean.”

“Barry was keen to assist Her Majesty’s government with their inquiries.”

“Meaning what?” she demanded. “You’re not police.”

“No,” said Nick, “I’m not.”

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a wallet not unlike the one the CIA man had flashed. The badge showed a stylized lion surrounded by a series of gates and stars with a crown at the top. It read “Security Service,” and below the motif it read “
Regnum Defende
,” but in smaller print was the name she knew: MI5.

“You’re an agent?” said Deborah.

“An officer,” said Nick. “Yes.”

For a long moment, Deborah just stared at him. She knew instantly that he wasn’t lying. He clearly had the authority to evacuate the Tower of London and order around its guards, and he was more convincing in this role than he ever had been as an affable photographer.

“MI5,” she repeated. “And you were going to tell me about this when?”

“I wasn’t,” he said. “Sorry if you feel misled, but that’s the nature of the work.”

“I don’t
feel
misled,” she said. “I
was
misled.”

“Like I said,” Nick answered. “The nature of...”

“The work, yes,” Deborah concluded. “I get it.”

“When we were in Mexico...”

“Forget it,” she said quickly, not wanting the further humiliation of hearing him defend his flirtation with her in the name of queen and country.

“I don’t want you to think that I was only pretending to have a good time with you. I liked you. Like you. You’re interesting. Different.”

She gave him a sharp look.

“In a good way,” he said. “And beautiful, though you do your best to hide it.”

She stared at him until he looked away.

“Great,” she said, adding, “I guess. And this CIA guy, Jones, you knew him?”

Reese laughed ruefully.

“Let’s just say we’ve met,” he said.

“Which means what?”

“He and some of his mates arranged a little party for me in a Skipton parking lot,” he said. “I suppose he wanted to ask me a few questions about your adventures in Mexico. We didn’t get off on the best foot.”

Deborah felt annoyed. Reese seemed to have all the pieces of the puzzle but only wanted to dole them out to her bit by bit.

“I’d like to look at what I came here to see,” she said, her tone cool.

Reese’s voice became cautious, professional. “Yes, you should take a proper look at the cases. You’re getting a private tour, after all. We even shut off the conveyor belts, so you can
have rather more than the allocated twenty-eight seconds visitors usually get. Take as long as you like. When you’re done, I’ll be sitting by the exit and we can talk.”

“Fine,” said Deborah. “Oh, and you might want to examine this,” she added, handing him the spring water bottle from her bag. “I’m sure you military intelligence types have the very best labs.”

“What is it?”

“You tell me,” she said.

Deborah walked through the deserted Jewel House exhibition in a daze. Here she was, alone, surrounded by the most dazzling display of opulence and power in the world.

There were gold ceremonial staffs and maces—massive two-handed things—and the gold ampula shaped like an eagle, which contained the coronation oil. Of course there was the coronation spoon. There were robes and stoles, spurs and swords. There were orbs and scepters, also gold but set with pearls and precious stones and topped with crosses and doves. One looked almost exactly like the one she had glimpsed in the Mayan tomb. Another scepter was set with a massive teardrop-shaped diamond weighing, according to the display, over five hundred carats. Other cases contained gold chalices and plate, candlesticks, flagons, Christening fonts, ornate salt cellars, cisterns, ladles, and other meticulously crafted golden objects.

Then there were the crowns: St. Edward’s crown, which was used in the coronation of the present monarch, and the crowns of the Queen Mother and Queen Mary, both trimmed with ermine and set with thousands of diamonds, many of them huge and flawless. There was the imperial crown of India and countless others, including Queen Victoria’s dainty confection of almost twelve hundred diamonds. It was overwhelming.

What it was worth, Deborah couldn’t begin to guess. One of the minor crowns alone would be worth millions. And yes, the official story was that it was all real, that the display contained no copies, only the genuine article. The doors she had passed through were huge steel affairs so that it felt like you were stepping into a massive safe.

She went back through the exhibit to be sure and then sat beside Nick Reese, saying nothing.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who I was,” he said.

“You had your reasons,” she answered, not looking at him.

“And my orders.”

“So now what?” said Deborah. “You want to know what I know?”

“Yes. What you don’t know, I’ll tell you. Fair enough?”

“Sure. And Nick? How about nothing but the truth from you from now on.”

Nick nodded and even smiled.

“Edward Clifford was born to a poor woman in Pendle called Janet Davis,” she said. “He was a dwarf, and very clever. He was adopted by Lady Anne Clifford of Skipton, through whom he got a good education and was trained as a court scribe and counselor. As a boy he served King Charles the First as a page and seemed to have been on the fast track to power, but something went wrong in 1634, and he fell from favor. I don’t know why.”

“Me neither,” said Nick.

“Anyway,” Deborah continued, “Edward remained loyal to the king, and when Cromwell and the Parliamentarians took over, Edward fought for the royalist cause against them. He garrisoned Skipton Castle and held out despite a long Roundhead siege.

“But the Royalists lost,” she went on. “King Charles was imprisoned, tried, and finally executed in 1649. Cromwell was a Puritanical iconoclast who despised the pomp and ceremony of kingship. He sent a poet called George Withers to the Jewel House at the Tower of London and, with the permission of the Parliamentarian keeper of the Jewel House—Sir Henry Mildmay—had all the crown jewels impounded. They played with them, trivialized them, dressed up in them, like boys playing with a dead snake. Mildmay and his associates then broke the crowns up and sold the entire royal regalia off cheap, deliberately, I suspect, to show how little they thought of them; no wonder Mildmay’s enemies called him the Knave of Diamonds. Anyway, while a few pieces were later recovered during the Restoration of the Monarchy ten years later, the ancient crown jewels of England effectively ceased to exist.”

She paused, but when Nick didn’t respond, she continued.

“The present crown jewels of Britain date from the Restoration, when King Charles the Second was crowned in 1658. By then Cromwell had been dead two years and his son had been unable to keep the Protectorate alive. Parliament opted to revert to a constitutional monarchy, and the body of Cromwell was dug up, tried for treason, and “executed”: his body hung in chains and his head displayed on a pike outside Westminster Abbey. Efforts were made to recover the lost crown jewels, but apart from a twelfth-century coronation spoon—currently on display back there—no major pieces were found, and the royal regalia had to be rebuilt based on what they could remember. In terms of ancient history, everything in there,” she said, nodding back to the glittering exhibits, “is new.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the original crown jewels, items going back to before the Norman Conquest, regalia associated with Alfred the Great, Edward the Confessor, and all the medieval kings and queens of England, from Henry the Second in the twelfth century through to the Tudors, weren’t totally destroyed. I think most of their crowns, scepters, orbs, and diadems of all kinds were bought up or otherwise collected by Edward Clifford, a royalist from Pendle, and smuggled out of the country.”

She sat there, thinking about it, feeling at last the weight of all that history, and then added, half to herself, “Somehow he wound up in Mexico, and that is about all I can tell you, except that at some point he must have sent one stone back to England, or perhaps he took it up to Lancashire himself before he left the country, and buried it at Malkin Tower Farm. Why, I couldn’t say, but it’s too much of a coincidence to say it got back to the parish where he was born by chance.”

“A tiny portion of this huge trove of jewels was in the tomb we unearthed at Ek Balam. I’m not sure how it got there, but I think—and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who believes this—that the gems and bits of metal we found were part of the regalia of England’s ancient monarchs. How you could begin to put a price on what such a find would be worth, I don’t know.”

“And it is the position of the British government,” said Nick, inserting himself into her monologue at last, “that they must not find their way onto the open market, that they should be returned to England to be kept as a national treasure of boundless cultural significance.”

Deborah felt the weight of her knowledge like a tangible force pushing her into her seat.

“As you can imagine,” Nick said, still professional, “I am empowered to take extraordinary action to ensure that that happens.”

“How nice for you,” she said.

“This isn’t the way I wanted things to go, Deborah,” he responded, frowning.

“Hey,” she said with a shrug. “It’s your country.”

“Mother Britain?” he said, gesturing toward the exhibit of riches she had just left. “Hardly.”

“Because you’re just a working-class lad from Lancashire?” she said, unsure why she was being so caustic but unable to play nice. “Or was that a lie too?”

“Not a lie,” he said. “And yes, I have to protect the interests of Her Majesty’s government, including its cultural property. That’s my job. But no, kings and nobles and power isn’t the world I came from either.”