Chapter Four
THEY WERE AT Nathan’s files shortly after ten the next morning, following a substantial breakfast served up by Peter’s wife. Rachel was still asleep, thanks to the light sedative Adam had persuaded her to take the night before, and her younger son, Lawrence, had assumed responsibility for arranging the funeral, which would take place the following morning. As the house began to buzz with the bustle of callers coming to offer their condolences downstairs, Peter conducted Adam and McLeod up to Nathan’s study and gave them a quick briefing on the general form of his father’s research notes.
“There’re these two boxes of index cards,” Peter said, thumping the two green file boxes on the desktop, “and then there’s three—no, four hard-backed notebooks.” He pulled these from a bottom desk drawer and slapped them down beside the boxes. Nathan had kept the notebooks in ballpoint pen, and the pen’s impression on the thin paper had made the pages bulge slightly from between the grey marbleized covers.
“Here’s some more stuff,” Peter went on, pulling out a slim stack of file folders and large manila envelopes. “One of these ought to be—yes: photos of the Seal. I knew these were around here somewhere. He sent me one, years ago, and I used to keep it thumbtacked to my bulletin board at college. Of course, I had no idea how old it was, in those days. Neither did Dad, I suppose.”
Adam glanced at the photo Peter held out, gesturing for him to show it to McLeod, and picked up one of the notebooks at random, riffling experimentally through its pages.
“At least it looks like he kept his notes in plain English,” he observed. “I was half-afraid we might find ourselves having to grapple with some kind of personal cipher.”
“Well, there may be something worse than that,” Peter said, delving into another desk drawer and lifting out a very compact laptop computer. “I know he’d started using this the last couple of years. I’d be willing to bet that most of the recent material is in here.”
As he set it on a clear spot on the desk, McLeod positioned his aviator spectacles more squarely on his nose and gestured toward the chair before the desk.
“May I?” he asked, also including the machine in his gesture.
“Of course.”
Sitting, McLeod opened the screen and turned the computer on. A series of standard commands got the system booted up and running, and finally produced a directory listing such intriguing headings as Britmus, Dundee, Resasst, and Tmplgrng, but it also demanded a password to gain further access.
“I don’t suppose you know what your father’s password was for these files?” McLeod asked Peter, as he tried, first, SEAL and then SOLOMON and failed to get in.
Peter shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t. It’s possible Mother might know, but I doubt it.”
“Well, I don’t know about Noel,” Adam said, “but I’m afraid my computer skills aren’t up to hacking into protected files without some expert assistance. Would you mind if we take this away with us, Peter?”
“Not at all, if you think it will help,” he said. “Good Lord, that must be maddening, to know there’s possibly useful material there, and not be able to get at it.” He glanced at the boxes and notebooks. “Do you think these will be any help?”
“We’ll have a quick scan through them and see,” Adam said, as McLeod shut down the computer and closed its screen. “Meanwhile, if you want to go and see if your mother has stirred yet, or your brother needs help—”
“I can take a hint,” Peter said with an awkward smile. “I’ll leave you two at it. Let me know if I can help you with anything else.”
When Peter had gone, closing the study door behind him, Adam pulled another chair closer and resumed his perusal of the least thumbed of the notebooks. McLeod had already shifted his attention to the first file box, and was flipping through the cards in it.
“What do you think?” Adam said.
McLeod shook his head. “It isn’t going to be easy. This is right out of my league.”
“You may surprise yourself,” Adam said. “What have you got?”
“Well, these appear to be bibliographical references,” McLeod replied. “He’s got books, articles, manuscripts, and other miscellaneous documents, mostly about biblical archaeology and a lot on the Knights Templar and the Crusades. A good many of the citations seem to come from libraries on the Continent.
“Ah, now, this may prove interesting,” he said, pulling out a card and holding its place with a finger as he tilted the card toward the light from the window. “Look here, in the lower right-hand comer. Would you say those are initials? Maybe the initials of the researcher who made the citation?”
Adam glanced over at what he was doing and gave a nod. “That would be my guess. Are there many different sets?”
Returning the card to its place and fingering along farther in the stack, McLeod made an affirmative grunt.
“Looks like there could be a dozen or so. The entries themselves have been typed on a variety of machines, apparently over quite a span of time. Some of these cards look pretty old and dog-eared. Shall I try to pull a list of initials?”
“Yes, and it wouldn’t hurt to see if you can match any of them to names in Nathan’s address book, if we can find that,” Adam replied, setting aside the notebook he had been looking at and leaning in to open the desk drawer. As he bent to peer inside, feeling toward the back among the untidy piles of envelopes and index cards, McLeod conducted the same sort of search in the drawers on the left.
The elusive address book turned up in the top drawer on the right. Adam flipped through it briefly, illogically hoping that a name would pique his attention, then handed it to McLeod.
“See what you can do with that,” he said, picking up the stack of notebooks. “If you can come up with a list of initials in the next hour or two, I’ll ask Peter to have a look at it when we break for lunch. Meanwhile, the address book may provide some preliminary guesses.”
As McLeod moved a yellow pad closer and pulled a pen from an inside coat pocket, Adam took the stack of notebooks over to an. armchair nearer the window, where he settled down for a serious read. The most recent one had only half a dozen entries, mainly having to do with background on seals similar to the one until recently in Nathan’s possession. Apparently Nathan had recently received confirmation of his own Seal’s antiquity.
Prepared for a long and probably fruitless search, Adam set the notebook aside and picked up the next most recent one. As he flipped to the end, intending to work backwards from the material he had already read, the notebook fell open to a letter-folded piece of paper tucked snugly into the crease of the binding. It proved to be a photocopy of a letter from a Dr. Albrecht Steiner, in the art history department of the Sorbonne, to someone named Henri Gerard at a Paris address. It was dated the previous March.
“Noel, do the initials ‘H.G.’ appear on any of your cards?” Adam asked, as he skimmed over the typewritten French with growing interest.
“Yes, quite a few,” McLeod replied. “What have you got?”
“A copy of a letter to a Henri Gerard from the Sorbonne,” Adam replied. “It appears to be a report on a metal sample taken from Nathan’s Seal and sent to their labs for—well, now.”
McLeod looked up. “What does it say?”
“Well, unless my French has totally failed me, the man who wrote this letter dates the piece from around 950 B.C.—what’s known as the First Temple Period. He apparently was working from detailed photographs of the Seal. And listen to this,” he said, translating. “Chemical analysis of the sample provided is compatible with bronze samples taken from the prehistoric mineworks at Tell el-Kheleifeh, more popularly known as King Solomon’s Mines.”
“King Solomon’s Mines?” McLeod repeated. “Adam, do you think the stolen Seal really is the Seal of Solomon?”
Adam shook his head. “I wouldn’t go that far, based on the evidence I’ve seen so far. But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility, either. I wonder what other intriguing tidbits we’re going to find. Oh, Nathan, I wish you could have told me more about what’s going on . . .”
They carried on with their research for the remainder of the morning, until Peter Fiennes came to summon them downstairs for lunch. Lawrence had gone to the airport with Peter’s wife to collect Nathan’s sister and her family, so they were only four at table.
“What can you tell me about Henri Gerard?” Adam asked, over green salad and grilled cheese sandwiches washed down with a crisp Riesling. “I gather that he was one of your father’s researchers.”
Peter exchanged a glance with his mother, who was looking reassuringly composed as she settled into her first full day of widowhood.
“What makes you ask about him?” Peter replied.
“Just that I found a copy of a letter to him. Apparently he had lab tests run on a metal sample taken from the Seal.”
He showed the letter around while he related the general findings of the report.
“Aside from the information being very interesting, though, it’s the name that interests me,” he said, as he took the letter back. “Henri Gerard is the first name we’ve come up with, who we know is connected with Nathan’s research. Noel has compiled a list of initials he’d like you to look at, after you’ve finished lunch, to see if you can assign names. We suspect they’re other researchers who have worked with your father, and the police will probably want to talk to some of them, to start forming a profile of who might have wanted to steal the Seal.”
“Well, I can’t imagine any of them would be involved in something like that,” Peter said. “Gerard’s a little older than most of the assistants Father worked with, over the years—a bit of an eccentric, in the manner of many dedicated scholars, but I’m sure he’s harmless.”
“He probably is,” Adam replied. “How did he and your father meet?”
Peter gave a halfhearted shrug. “Gerard spent a sabbatical here a couple of years ago, right after a team of archaeologists uncovered a previously unknown burial ground in the medieval Jewish quarter of the city. At the time, he was pursuing some crackpot theory that the Knights Templar had been making an in-depth study of Jewish necromancy. That’s what I meant by ‘eccentric,”” he added at Adam’s look of surprise. “The trial of the Templars is his area of special expertise. He was hoping the grave sites might yield up some support for his theory. He needed some help with some Hebrew translations, so the site supervisor put him onto my father.”
“Was there evidence of Jewish necromancy?” Adam asked.
“Of course not. So far as I know, that research never came to anything. But he got interested in what Dad was doing, that summer he was here, and he sort of became Dad’s continental contact for tracking down obscure references. I know he has access to parts of the Vatican Archives that most people can’t get at. Can’t tell you much more about him, though.”
“Well, that’s probably sufficient on him for now,” Adam said, glancing at McLeod. “How about taking a look at Noel’s list of initials, and seeing if you can supply us with some more names?”
“Sure. Let’s see,” he said, turning his attention to the list McLeod passed him. “Ah, ‘N.G.’ That would be Nina Gresham. She was a dear. She did a Ph.D. under Dad’s supervision a couple of years ago. I think she’s at some private institute in Italy now. She isn’t Jewish, but her Hebrew is almost as good as Dad’s. I don’t know where she picked it up. She has six or eight ancient languages. Works with documents from the time of the Crusades.”
“What about this ‘T.B.’?”
“That would be Tevye Berman. He’s Israeli, was working on a dig in Jerusalem near the site of the old Temple. A good guy. I think he’s dead now, though.”
“And ‘M.O.’?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“How about ‘K.S.’?”
“Karen Slater, maybe. Or it could be Keith Sherman. They’ve both worked for Dad, over the years.”
In the next quarter hour, Peter Fiennes was able to assign names to almost all of the initials McLeod had gleaned from the file cards, with his mother supplying a few he had not known. After coffee, Adam and McLeod went back upstairs to continue their research and leave the family their privacy.
Most of the names matched those McLeod had been able to glean from Nathan’s address book, compiled on a second list with addresses and telephone numbers. The ones that matched, McLeod ticked and copied onto a master list, while Adam continued to read in Nathan’s notebooks. By four, when it was clear that McLeod had done about all he could at this end, he rang Walter Phipps at York Police headquarters to arrange for transportation to the airport for the 5:50 flight back to Edinburgh.
“There’s really no point in my hanging around here for the funeral, since I didn’t know your Nathan,” he said, when he had made the call. “I can probably do a whole lot more from home. When Walter collects me, I’ll give him this copy of the names and addresses of the research assistants, and let his lads follow up on the conventional aspects of the case. Meanwhile, I’ll have a go at cracking those computer files tonight.”
“That might save us some time,” Adam agreed. “There’s nothing in the last notebook since spring, so it’s quite possible that some of his recent correspondence is in there—anything that might give us a clue what we’re up against. What about this Henri Gerard? Am I grasping at straws, just because Peter said he was a bit eccentric, or do you think he figures in the case? There is a Templar connection.”
McLeod sat back in his chair and pulled off his glasses with a sigh, to massage the bridge of his nose.
“I think he may be a player, Adam. Call it a cop’s sixth sense, if you like, but to use a cop term I picked up in the States, there’s something ‘hinky’ about him.”
“You think so too, eh?”
“Good, then. I’m glad it isn’t just me,” McLeod said. “When I get back, I’m going to make a couple of calls to Paris. My friend Treville at the Sûreté owes me a favor or two. I’d like to see whether he knows anything about our man.”
He replaced his glasses and put the lids back on the two file boxes, then pushed them farther toward the back of the desk. “You planning to catch the same flight tomorrow night?”
Adam nodded. “The funeral’s at eleven, so the timing’s just about perfect. A lot of people will be coming back to the house afterwards, so I shouldn’t have any trouble getting someone to run me to the airport. If you could call Humphrey and alert him when you get back, I’d appreciate it.”
“Will do.”
When McLeod had gone off with Phipps, Adam returned to join the Fiennes family for the soothing and civilized ritual of afternoon tea, made more formal by the subdued clothing and conversation of those partaking. Members of the Fiennes clan had been arriving all afternoon, from far-flung comers of the world, and Rachel and Risa, Peter’s wife, were diverting their sorrow by catering to their guests. After tea, to give the family some privacy, Adam took himself off for a walk into the ancient city of York, with notice to Peter that he would find his own evening meal. He needed time to assimilate what he had been reading, and space apart for an hour or two, to deal with his personal sorrow at Nathan’s passing.
His meanderings soon took him into the grounds and then the rear entrance of the cathedral, which was in the midst of Evensong. Especially drawn by this offering of thanksgiving and praise after the sorrow of the past twenty-four hours, he slipped inside and sat listening quietly in the back, for he did not wish to intrude on the service in progress. Heard down the length of the great nave, the pure sound of the boys’ voices floated poignant and sweet. As Adam settled back to actually listen to what they were singing, he realized that they could not have chosen better, had they known that they marked the passing of Nathan Fiennes.
“Remember, Lord, how short life is,
How frail you have made all flesh.
Who can live and not see death?
Who can save himself from the power of the grave . . . ?”
Much moved, Adam slipped to his knees and offered up a silent prayer of thanksgiving for the life of Nathan Fiennes, knowing that his old friend would not mind that it was given in a Christian place of worship. The actual words of the scripture readings that followed did not carry well to where he was seated, so he let the drone of the reader’s voice simply carry him deeper into communion with the All. After a while, kneeling there with his eyes closed, he found the image of Nathan’s Seal before him in his mind’s eye, dispelled only when the choir began to sing the Nunc dimittis. “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word . . .” That, too, was a fitting farewell to his old friend.
After the service was over, Adam lingered for a little while to savor the beauty of the cathedral, strolling up as far as the transept to crane his neck backwards and gaze up at the soaring vault of the lantern tower, the largest of its kind in England. Shortly thereafter, vergers began quietly herding visitors toward the door, so he drifted outside to mount the city wall at Bootham Bar and stroll along its esplanade, gazing out over the city by the light of the dying day.
After tea so late in the afternoon, he did not feel like eating dinner, so he returned to the Fiennes residence at about half past nine and, after inquiring whether there was any way he could assist the family, declared his intention to head up to bed for a proper night’s sleep after the short hours of the night before. Before retiring, however, he paused at the phone in a niche at the foot of the stairs to make a brief call to McLeod.
“Hullo, Noel,” he said without preamble, when McLeod himself answered. “I know you’ve only been home a few hours, but any progress?”
“None on Gerard,” McLeod replied, “though I did talk to Treville. He’s supposed to get back to me sometime tomorrow. I had some luck with Nathan’s computer, though. Have you got a minute?”
“What did you find?”
“Well, he’s got some very interesting files in here,” McLeod said. Adam could hear the gentle click of the keyboard as McLeod called up material on his screen to refer to it. “A lot of it is diary-type entries, probably similar to what you were reading in the notebooks, but he’s got some actual transcripts and translations of some of his documents as well. Do you want to hear some of this?”
“Give me a sampling,” Adam replied, pulling a notepad closer and taking out a pen. “I don’t want to tie up this line too long, in case relatives are trying to get through to the family, but it might give me something to work on while I sleep. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted after last night’s late hours.”
“So am I,” McLeod agreed, to the accompaniment of more keys clicking. “I nodded off on the flight home, slept right through the landing. I’ve never done that before. Anyway, I’m looking at a chain of references that appears to link the Templars with our Graeme of Templegrange, who pawned the Seal. A minor demesne called Templegrange is mentioned in a letter of 1284 from King Alexander III to the Bishop of Dunkeld. The wording leaves it uncertain whether Templegrange belongs to the King or the bishop, but Nathan cites later evidence suggesting that the property was probably a minor Templar commandery at the time of the Order’s dissolution in 1314. The Order had a lot of land in Scotland, as you know.”
“Yes, Templemor has a similar history,” Adam said, jotting down notes. “Go on.”
“A little later on, Nathan references a grant of lands by Robert the Bruce to a Sir James Graeme of Perthshire, in gratitude for support given to the King at the Battle of Bannockburn the previous year. There’s no transcription of the document itself, but even I remember that Bannockburn was also 1314. After that, something else is obviously missing, but Nathan somehow makes the connection that Templegrange was the particular land granted to Sir James Graeme, and concludes that this same Sir James may have been an ancestor of the Graeme of Templegrange who pawned the Seal in 1381. Have you got all that?”
“It seems like a straightforward chain of logic, if it’s all supportable,” Adam replied. “The important thing is the Templar connection—though we’d supposed that, from the name Templegrange.”
“There’s more,” McLeod continued, “and you’re going to feel really foolish over this one. I certainly did.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I also cracked the Dundee file. I think Nathan meant the person, not the place-as in ‘Bonnie Dundee,’ whose full name was—?”
“John Grahame of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee,” Adam supplied, feeling foolish as predicted—though how the Seal of Solomon and a Templar secret connected with a seventeenth-century Cavalier general, he had no idea.
The man remembered as Bonnie Dundee was perhaps one of the most flamboyant and controversial figures of the early Jacobite period of Scottish history. Known to every educated Scot as the victor of the Battle of Killiecrankie, fought in 1689 against a superior force of English soldiery, Claverhouse had been feared by his enemies as “Bluidy Clavers” and adored by his Highland followers as their “Dark John of the Battles.” Though he had not survived his famous triumph, his undoubted courage and gallantry had made him the hero of many a song and story—none, so far as Adam knew, with any connection to Knights Templar or mysterious seals. It briefly occurred to him to wonder whether Nathan’s whole story might be just as fanciful as the historical fantasies of Henri Gerard—except for the urgency of Nathan’s dying declaration.
“I know you’re probably hunting for a connection, the same as I’ve been doing,” McLeod said, intruding on Adam’s brief speculation. “Other than the link of the names—Graeme and Grahame—I haven’t a clue what that connection might be, since the Seal was pawned well over three hundred years before Dundee died. And it’s been another three hundred years since then.
“But Nathan obviously thought there was a connection,” McLeod went on, “or he wouldn’t have cluttered up his hard disk with all these Dundee files. We have to assume that Graeme of Templegrange never redeemed the Seal, since it ended up in the Fiennes family; so where does John Grahame of Claverhouse come in?”
Adam shook his head, even though he knew McLeod could not see it.
“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” he said truthfully. “Not even an inkling. There’s nothing in all that Dundee material to suggest anything?”
“I honestly don’t know,” McLeod replied. “It took me a while to hack into these files, and I’ve only had a chance to skim through. Would you like me to print out what’s here? I could have Donald run the hard copy out to Strathmourne tomorrow, so it’ll be waiting for you when you get in. I’ll have to stick close to the office myself, to wait for that callback on Gerard.”
“I think that might be a good idea. Yes, do that.”
They parted on the understanding that Adam would try to check in again between the funeral and leaving for the airport. Meanwhile, he had been given much new food for thought. As he headed upstairs, he chided himself again for missing the Dundee connection with John Grahame of Claverhouse.
And how did the Jacobite hero connect with the Templars and the Seal of Solomon? That was not at all clear. Dundee had been a staunch supporter of the Stuart cause—but again, how did that connect to Templars?
He let his brain mull the questions as he brushed his teeth and readied for bed, and found a traditional, haunting melody running through his head, accompanied by the immortal words of Sir Walter Scott:
To the Lords of Convention ‘twas Claver’se who spoke,
‘Ere the King’s crown shall fall there are crowns to be broke;
So let each Cavalier who loves honour and me,
Come follow the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee.
The melody stayed to haunt him as he drifted off to sleep, with snatches of the lyrics weaving in and out of consciousness until at last he sank beyond awareness. The first few hours were dreamless, as he made up for the night before. But then images of increasing vividness began to tease at semi-consciousness.
The source of the initial impressions was not difficult to determine: glimpses of Dundee astride a great, plunging bay steed, sword in hand as he urged his followers on—the archetypal Cavalier hero. Then, gradually, the buff-coated Highland cavalry following him became crusader knights charging into battle, red crosses emblazoned on their white surcoats and the black and white beauceant banner of the Order of the Temple fluttering overhead in the bright sun of desert climes.
But there was a tension building. Suddenly the equestrian images yielded to a ghostly apparition of King Solomon himself, bearded and potent, majestically robed in flowing vestments of scarlet adorned with Qabalistic symbols, and crowned with a shining golden diadem that looked like a six-pointed star with the points bent up. In his left hand he held up what was surely Nathan’s Seal like a protective talisman. His right hand wielded a sceptre or wand, its tip so brightly glowing that Adam could barely look upon it.
Adam’s dream-self flung up an arm to shield his eyes, but a word of command from the great King bade him look where the Sceptre pointed. Trembling, Adam obeyed—to find himself being drawn toward a roil of churning yellow cloud, alive with sickly flickerings of greenish-yellow light. From within the clouds came waves of such dread as to make his stomach turn.
He woke in a cold sweat, gasping, his heart pounding as he instinctively drew on deep protections to envelop and protect him. He did not turn on the light, for by the sliver of light leaking underneath the bedroom door from the hall, he could see that there was nothing physically there. But certain it was that the dream had been a warning—whether merely from his unconscious, embroidering on what he had been reading about Nathan’s speculations regarding the missing Seal, or from some external source, he could not tell.
But this was not the time or place to find out, alone and in unfamiliar surroundings, without even a clear picture of the problem yet, much less the solution; and certainly not under the added tension of the palpable grief in the Fiennes house. The urgency was unmistakable, but more active investigation must wait until tomorrow, when he returned home, and as more of the background became clearer.
Yet the residue of menace lingered, so much so that eventually he got up and fetched from the pocket of his suit coat a handsome gold signet ring set with a dark sapphire. Slipping it on his finger as he padded back to bed, he simultaneously offered up a formal prayer for protection and then touched the stone to his lips in salute. The ring was an outward symbol of his esoteric calling, and sometimes a tool of that vocation, and the little ritual grounded him firmly back in the realms of reason.Further ritual before he lay back down again made of his bed a focus of celestial protection—a simple rite known as Sealing the Aura, which called upon the great archangels to guard the quarters and was sealed at last with a six-pointed star. His sleep thereafter was undisturbed by dreams, but he still slept lightly, as a part of him kept watch and pondered what had surfaced.