The Secret of Lions

The Secret of Lions

Also by Scott Blade

www.scottblade.com

Get Jack Reacher Series

Gone Forever

Winter Territory

Foreign & Domestic

S.Lasher & Associates Series

The StoneCutter

Cut & Dry

A Black Lion, LLC Publication

Second Edition

Copyright © 2013 by Scott Blade.

www.scottblade.com

All rights reserved. Published in the United States
by Black Lion, LLC,.

Black Lion is trademarked.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places
and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This novel is the intellectual property of the author
and publishers. Reproduction of the novel without the author’s
direct permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

About the Author

“You only have power over people as long as you
don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man
of everything he’s no longer under your power—he’s free.”

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Noble
Peace Prize.

“Have you any children, Kubizek?”

“Yes, three sons.” I said.

“Three sons,” he shouted, impressed. He
repeated it several times with a most earnest expression. “So
you’ve got three sons, Kubizek. I have no family. I am alone. But I
should like to look after your sons.”

I had to tell him all about my boys—he
wanted to know every detail. He was pleased that they were all
three musically gifted…

“I shall make myself responsible for the
training of your three sons, Kubizek,” he said to me.

—August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew,
conversation between Hitler and the author.

Prologue

In the
Gallery

London 1950

1

The art gallery at King’s College cleared
out. The thick crowd from earlier in the afternoon had thinned
because it time to close down.

Grand, white pillars stood tall in front of
a large staircase just inside the entrance. The painting, titled
The Secret of Lions
, hung around the corner. It held
unspeakable secrets, the kind that could unravel history, Barbara's
history.

Barbara stared at the painting for most of
the afternoon. She had so carefully concealed her dangerous past.
Even though she hadn’t seen it in several months, she still
remembered every detail of the painting. Every speck of canvas
symbolized her past life. Every brush stroke and every shadow
represented a piece of a story that only she knew. The light and
dark microscopic fabrics of the canvas wove together and created
the life of the artist. The paint, the textures, the meaning behind
it all seemed to shape the very blood that flowed through her
veins. It forged her skeleton, bone by bone. She would never forget
the man she had loved, the artist who had painted
The Secret of
Lions
.

Someone watched her from beyond the shadows
cast by the beautiful, abstract sculptures that filled the room.
The man was no stranger. He had been someone that she had known
well. He haunted her nightmares. He was the man she ran from, but
he knew she would come to see the painting eventually. He waited to
ambush her. He followed her for a long time and waited for her at
the gallery. He moved through the shadows into the farthest
corner—watching, waiting to strike.

She had come out of hiding to see the
painting on the day of its anniversary. She couldn’t stay away. She
had to look upon it once again. She had desperately tried to stay
away, but it was useless. The desire to look at the breathtaking
work of art overwhelmed her. So she was here, in his trap.

“Closing time,” a short, stocky graduate
student shouted as he walked through the halls and fumbled with his
glasses. “The gallery is closing now.”

Barbara looked around. She had lost sight of
her stalker. He was there somewhere. She was sure of it.

She rose from the small, tarnished wood
bench and reached into her satchel. She pulled out a paintbrush
with a long, jagged black handle, along with a small vial of red
paint. She dipped the brush and began writing something underneath
the painting on the wall. She began writing the name of the artist,
the man she had loved so deeply.

Barbara’s stalker watched with increasing
interest as she wrote. He needed to move quickly. She had grown
suspicious.

Slowly, he crept around a large sculpture,
losing sight of her for only a moment. As he left the shadows and
moved past a spiraling, metal staircase, he noiselessly leapt out
of the shadows with a silenced pistol in his hand.

The pistol was outstretched and aimed at the
spot where Barbara had been standing, but now she wasn’t there. She
had vanished.

Worried that he had scared her away, he
moved quickly to the painting. He scanned the corridor for Barbara,
but he saw nothing. He glanced at what she’d written on the
wall.

In red paint, the letters read:

Unknown Soldier

He looked at the message, puzzled. Then he
gazed back up at the painting and at its description:
The Secret
of Lions
by U.S.

Without warning, she was near once more. He
sensed the warmth of her body. She stood directly behind him. He
was tall, at least a foot taller than her, maybe more.

“Barbara?” he whispered, gripping the handle
of his gun tightly. His raspy, rugged voice sent unimaginable
chills down her spine.

“Yes,” she said. She pointed her own
silenced gun to the back of his head. The nozzle of the silencer
brushed across the stubble of his shaved head softly,
intimately.

“You know the secret. That’s why I follow
you,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have killed him,” Barbara
said and then squeezed the trigger.

With a puff of air and a muzzled flash, a
bullet exited the gun. The bullet ripped halfway through his head.
Blood splattered onto Barbara’s hands and across her face.

The bullet lodged in his skull. His face was
intact, but the back of his scalp peeled forward from the force of
the bullet, spraying blood across the painting.

He swaggered forward and grabbed at the
canvas's surface. As this now harmless enemy slowly fell to the
ground, his blood-soaked hand slid down the painting. It left a
smeared, bloody handprint across the painting of a majestic, black
lion.

Part One

Host of Sparrows

Chapter
One

Beautiful Paintings

2

Some believe that sparrows are transporters,
that they carry the dead across the threshold between life and
afterlife. Evan had crossed that threshold in a way. He had died
many deaths, or rather his identity had. Evan wasn’t his real name,
but his name had changed so many times over the years that it
ceased to matter what his name was. Now, he was Evan, a
groundskeeper at King’s College in London.

A sparrow flew overhead and he was reminded
of the myth of this black bird. He stepped out of his flat dressed
in his groundskeeper uniform. The jagged keys on his ring jingled
as he twisted one into the lock of his front door. After he locked
up, he headed down a series of long, spiraling paths, past the
music hall, and through the quad until he reached the art
gallery.

The sun was still low in the early morning
sky. Most of the campus remained asleep. Evan began most of his
days this way. He was the first to rise and the last to sleep.

Today was different than most for one
reason. Today, he carried a large, double-wrapped canvas under his
arm. It was an old painting, one that he’d created a long time ago.
It was a secret, his secret. Yet he wanted people to see it.

Painting was his only outlet. It was his
only reason to live. After being in hiding for so long, he couldn’t
help but feel cheated of the life he wanted. He should have lived a
life of painting, of art. He was robbed of that life. Now the only
solace afforded to him was working on a college campus, surrounded
by art students and great works of art. Here he could freely study
the most beautiful paintings and sculptures in the world. He could
do this without fear of being caught.

Evan ran from a past so dark that no matter
how much blood it swam in, it would never drown. Painting all night
in secret in his flat was the only safe haven for him now. Even his
dreams were nightmarish reflections of his past.

Evan climbed the short steps to the art
gallery’s entrance. He looked around. There was no one. He snuck
into the gallery, past the rows of paintings and sculptures, to the
curator’s office. He found the lock to the office easy to pick. He
flipped on the light switch and peered at the stacks of mail on top
of the curator’s desk.

Evan set the double-wrapped painting on the
side of the desk. He reached into his jacket pocket and removed a
typed letter that donated the lost painting to the museum. The
letter was unaddressed; it mentioned that the painting was once in
Hitler’s possession and it was signed only:

Anonymous

The curator would be ecstatic. Evan had a
nice place picked out to hang the painting. He hoped that the
curator and gallery employees would appreciate it and hang it in
that very spot.

He beamed with pride but only for a moment
and then he glanced at his watch. The gallery would be opening
soon. He left the building, locking the doors behind him.

Outside, he slipped on a pair of gardening
gloves, picked up a large pair of shears, and reached into his
pocket. He pulled out a nametag and pinned it to his shirt. It read
“Evan.”

Evan had a new life. He breathed in heavily
and walked proudly to the rolling greens of the campus. He had a
lot of hedges to trim.

3

New York

University of Art

1949

Birds flew through the sky, their wings
fluttering across the treetops. Students strolled through the park.
Some picnicked; others ran around throwing a disk, or flying
saucier, a rare game. Washington Square Park stood small and quant,
not like the grandness of Central Park, but a favorite for
students.

New York University consisted of an array of
buildings. The art building was on the eastern side of campus.
Inside the building, Barbara focused her hands on the jumble of
colors that soaked the large canvas in front of her. The painting
had not yet taken shape. The image resembled the dark wing of a
butterfly resting on a darker petal of a flower, but she could not
be sure. It was definitely a melancholy painting.

Barbara moved her brush in whatever
direction her imagination would take it. She had always painted
that way, no real plan—just abstract ambition. She followed her
instincts. Ever since childhood, her mother had encouraged her to
just let it flow. “Just follow your heart,” she would say.

Paint covered Barbara’s hands and wrists.
Her skin was smudged with blacks, greens, and reds. Green paint
rested on the bottom of her cheek, just above the place where the
crinkly line from her smile began.

Barbara’s superb brown eyes reflected the
wet canvas. She stopped for a moment and gently brushed a strand of
long, dark hair out of her eyes. As usual, it fell across her face
and obstructed her vision. She would cut it short, but her mother
loved it long. She would always remind Barbara, “This is not
Europe. Here women are proper. In America, girls grow their hair
long and behave properly.”

Barbara dreamed of Europe. She so badly
wanted to live there, away from what was “proper.” She thought
about London. She was hoping it would be different there. She still
wasn’t sure that she would take the scholarship to study at King’s
College. She had put it off a year ago, when her mother first grew
ill. And now, it seemed like a form of betrayal for her to leave
her mother as she continued to grow sicker and sicker.

Barbara pictured her mother. She thought of
the day that she’d found out that her mother had been moved into
the hospital.

She couldn’t leave for London. Not when her
mother was so sick. Barbara knew that her mother would make her go
even though she was not a fan of Europe. It had been Barbara’s
dream her whole life to study under the best artists in the world.
She knew that London was probably the closest she would get. But
her mother was the only family she had left.