Solomon's Jar (13 page)

Engine off, the launch coasted into the pier on big folds of green water, their tops trickled with slightly greasy, yellowish foam. Annja took a last slurp at the straw stuck in the chilled orange juice she had been sipping at the dockside café and stood up. She wobbled slightly on her high heels. Whoa, balance, she told herself.

She started walking. It took total concentration to keep her ankles from buckling outward and making her lurch like a sailor in port after six straight weeks in high seas. She couldn't believe models could strut so confidently in such painful footwear.

Gazes followed her from the sidewalk café and among the dockside idlers. She cut a striking figure, she was willing to acknowledge to herself: her considera
ble height defiantly accentuated by the heels and a light yellow cotton sundress that showed off her legs in the late-morning Mediterranean heat and sunlight.

She had to work the wardrobe angle to appeal to Stern, she reckoned. She had been told often enough by eager men—young and old—that she was attractive. While she never gave her appearance much thought, she was clever enough to know how to use her natural gifts if necessary.

At the moment she felt confident the eyes following her progress toward the pier were admiring. Unless behind them their owners were snickering to themselves at the way she walked in the heels and laying odds on when she'd lose it altogether and pitch into the sea.

The launch was twenty feet long and open. A pilot sat up front with two failed-NFL-linebacker types in dark suits, and a sleek aide. On second thought Annja wondered if they were even failed; maybe they were actual players, Malkuth devotees serving their guru in the off-season. She didn't follow the game so she didn't know. They certainly looked imposing enough.

Attendants at the dock caught a line one linebacker threw and helped draw the craft into a fairly smooth landing against the big orange-and-black rubber bumpers cushioning the concrete pier. They tied it fast and the aide stepped ashore. The bodyguards stood on the boat
with their hands folded in front of them. It gave them a ridiculously demure look.

The aide would have been shorter than she was even if it hadn't been for her accursed heels. He was tread-mill slender, his off-white summerweight suit expensively tailored to show his form, a yarmulke not quite hiding a bald spot in his dark hair. He and the football-types all wore the green braided necklaces.

“Ms. Creed?” the aide said, approaching. “I'm Charles Sanders.”

She nodded. “I'm Annja,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.” She extended a hand. He shook it once. To her relief his grip was as firm and dry as it was brief; she feared from the looks of him it'd be damp.

Once again her brilliant disguise was herself. She had spent the morning adding altogether too much to the burden of sorrows of her credit-card balance in a Tel Aviv boutique dressing herself in at least semifashionable mode, when constitutionally and by professional habit she was most at ease dressed in battered khakis and a boonie hat.

Sanders extended a hand to help her into the launch. Liberation be damned, she thought, and she took it and was glad. Spike heels plus rolling boat equaled unsteady Annja. She was not going to risk taking a spill and winding up in the bilge on her backside, with her legs in the air and her pretty skirt up around her waist. That
would gratify the grizzled old lechers slurping their lattes at the café entirely too much. She pictured how Roux would react. Concentrate, she reminded herself.

Sanders saw her seated. The bodyguards with the pneumatic necks cast the boat off. The pilot, a wiry little guy with a big nose and white stubble on his cheeks and no cord around his scrawny neck, backed away from the pier, then turned the boat back toward Crete and wound out the engine. The leather seat pressed against Annja's back and away they went.

Charles, as he graciously permitted her to call him, used his cell phone briefly. Then he sat down across from Annja and made small talk. She answered simply, perfectly aware that she was being vetted to make sure she was who, or at least what, she portrayed herself as being before she was admitted to the presence of the great man. Yes, the 3500-year-old Egyptian gate on Jaffa Hill was a wonder; yes, it was exciting working on
Chasing History's Monsters
. No, she had never considered becoming a model….

She looked back. Beyond wake and waterfront the town tumbled almost into the water down the Jaffa Hill headland. She saw a collection of sand-colored buildings of sundry sizes stuffed way too close together. Some of the crowding was deliberate, she was moderately sure, to enhance that old-timey Middle Eastern–village flair for the tourists. Jaffa was far older than Tel
Aviv, of which it was more or less a suburb—although Tel Aviv had started as a suburb of Jaffa. It was a bit more organic and relaxed. But what you mostly saw of it now was not so old. It also struck Annja as more than a little self-consciously quaint, sort of like Santa Fe. And as in the New Mexican capital, municipal codes required buildings to
look
old, even if they went up last month. They were likely as not to hold an artist's studio, a Starbuck's with wireless Internet access or a twee boutique.

She looked forward again. The pilot threaded his way among a plentiful flock of pleasure craft, mostly riding to anchor in the easy swell. One of the world's most ancient seaports, Jaffa hadn't been a serious commercial anchorage for a century or so. Now it was mostly a tourist trap. A fair number of the tourists arrived by water, or so it appeared.

Mark Peter Stern's yacht lay out to sea beyond the common herd of the pleasure craft of the merely rich.
Zohar II
surprised Annja somewhat. A ketch with two masts, white with blue trim, fore-and-aft rigged and sails furled, showing a superstructure housing bridge and cabin above deck. At eighty feet over waterline, it was far from
modest
by any means. But it was nowhere near the ostentatious showboat Stern's flamboyant public persona had led her to expect.

So far as Annja could see, no supermodels or barely
legal Hollywood actresses lounged topless on deck. That's a relief, she thought.

 

“I
T'S HARD
for most Westerners to think of ‘nothing' as a positive thing—the ultimate creative force,” Mark Peter Stern said, gazing out the porthole of the compartment he used as his office. Outside the sky was an almost painful blue. Cloudless. “Yet it is. From primal nothing, which is really
no-thing,
derives that which is without limits. And from there—light. Limitless light.”

He turned. “From there derives our human potential, Ms. Creed. We are sprung from the light, and we know no limits. If only we let ourselves
see.
”

The office, while spacious, was surprisingly spare in furnishings. There was dark-stained oak paneling to sternum height, cream-painted bulkheads above, a large desk with a globe and a computer on it, a rendering of the Tree of Life behind it. Given Stern's notorious love affair with the camera, Annja was surprised to find no photographs at all in evidence.

Sitting on a tubular-steel-and-black-leather chair that was far more comfortable than it looked, Annja let herself smile tentatively. “I'm afraid I don't follow, Dr. Stern.”

He laughed, smiled, waved a hand. “Please forgive me. I have a tendency to preach. I have so much to share with a human race that needs the truth so badly.” He
shook his head. “I'm sure your viewers would prefer to be spared the proselytization. Or your producers at any rate.”

Thinking of boy-wonder producer Doug Morrell, who held the world's “my eyes glaze over” land-speed record, she said, “That's for sure.”

She tried to remember to keep her knees closed tight. She didn't want any embarrassing moments.

Unlike her famous predecessor she was no virgin. Nor did she think of herself as a prude. But she was using her sexuality as a dodge here, as bait, and it made her feel cheap.

“You're known for your financing of archaeological researches and expeditions,” Annja said.

Stern smiled. He was a handsome man who looked much younger than his forty-one years, with open features, green eyes, a shock of straw-colored hair. Indeed in person he seemed more compelling. The camera, no matter how artfully plied, could not capture the full impact of his personality.

He wore a light tan suit, cream shirt, black-and-gold silk tie. All impeccably tailored, of course; renunciation of worldly things wasn't part of his teachings—exactly. As near as Annja could tell from visiting the Malkuth Foundation's Web site, Stern's conception was that materialism was something humans had to get out of their systems before advancing upward along the spiritual
path, rather like a childhood sweet tooth or adolescent acne. She wasn't clear, really.

“If you're interested, I'm always open to proposals for new digs,” he said.

She smiled back. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Mark.”

“Mark. Thank you. But right now I'm most interested in exploring possibilities for doing a show.”

“I hope I'm not considered one of history's monsters,” he said with an engaging grin. “Other than by some of my detractors, of course.”

Annja laughed. She didn't have to force it. He was unquestionably likable. And something more. She remembered that the men who brutalized Aidan Pascoe in that alley wore the same green leather braids around their necks as Stern. Not that she was convinced he was complicit in the attack, but she had to keep perspective.

She was trying to channel Sabine Ehrenfeld, the German-born model who did the Overstock.com commercials. As little as Annja watched television, the model had made an impression. A woman in her forties, Ehrenfeld struck Annja as both beautiful and devastatingly sexy in a sophisticated way, without being flashy or cheap. Annja also admired the woman because she had a pilot's license and had learned how to use a handgun. Obviously, she was not afraid of her own competence.

Annja was well aware of her own sexual nature, despite wondering periodically just how it squared with her destiny as the keeper of Joan's sword. She had grown up with little by way of role models in being sexy. At least in any dignified way; plenty of the girls at the orphanage oozed overt sexuality, precisely to aggravate the nuns. Annja hadn't exactly majored in partying at college. Her studies happily obsessed her. Despite her lifelong affinity for exercise and athleticism she was at core a nerd, and knew it. So she found the most appropriate role model she could and ran with her.

“Were someone to discover an artifact such as King Solomon's fabled jar,” she asked, “wouldn't that interest you?”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“You don't think of King Solomon's Jar as monstrous in any way, surely?”

“No, no. But it is reputed that Solomon bound demons within it. That's the connection for our show. The demon aspect,” Annja explained.

He studied her a moment. “If the actual jar was found, I'd be delighted, of course.” He smiled warmly. “I'd like nothing better than to see it on display at the Rockefeller or the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.”

Annja had the sense he was playing to an unseen audience—out of habit, perhaps, not necessarily bugs.
Although she wouldn't put it past him to videotape his own interviews out of sheer vanity.

“Do you have evidence the jar has been found, Ms. Creed?” Stern asked.

“Nothing more than rumors at this point,” she said. “What I wonder, from the standpoint of
Chasing History's Monsters
, is what you as a professed mystic make of the legends of the jar? They say Solomon bound the demons within it after employing them to build his temple in Jerusalem and that the jar was thrown into the Red Sea and later found by parties who released the demons to find treasure for them. What's your take on those?”

He shrugged. “I'm familiar with the legend, of course. Like much of what Christians call the Old Testament, I believe it's an allegory composed by early kabbalists. It represents Solomon's quest for spiritual mastery. It was never intended to be taken literally.”

He gave her a rogue's grin. It made him look even more boyish. She felt a stirring inside, and experienced a certain epiphany as to why so many glamorous actresses and supermodels were so attracted to his teachings.

“Trust me, Ms. Creed,” he said.

Whatever embers had been smoldering to life damped at once to cold embers. With Tsipporah's warning echoing in her brain, Annja bit her lip for a moment. This isn't going the way I expected at all she thought. She took a deep breath and then the plunge.

“Why was the phone number of your New York central office found on the caller ID list on the telephone of a murdered shopkeeper in Amsterdam, Mr. Stern?”

He stood looking at her in silence for a long moment. She could not truly say that his facade slipped—and regardless of guilt or innocence in this matter, she knew full well he was showing her a facade. Certainly the question, with its implicit accusation, must have been like a bucket of ice water dumped on his head.

I sure feel as if I've dived into ice water, she thought. I think I just led with my chin again. But her intuition had told her to ask the question.

“I had no idea that it had been,” he said in a measured voice. “If your information is correct, it's certainly unsettling news. I hope I scarcely need to assure you that my respect for antiquities, not to mention the sorely needed international laws and treaties controlling traffic in them, tends to keep me from pursuing ancient relics in curio shops. Most likely someone in my organization has allowed commendable zeal to get the better of their judgment.”

He shook his head. “It can only be coincidence in any event. No one involved with the Malkuth Foundation, with its well-known commitment to peace and justice, could conceivably have been involved in a murder over an alleged artifact.”