The Rose Conspiracy (11 page)

W
hile dining on roast duck with wild rice, and vegetables that Dee proudly announced had been grown organically on his own estate, the English lord and J.D. Blackstone made small talk.

Blackstone finally decided to home in on another concentric circle of information.

“I notice that you call this estate Mortland Manor,” Blackstone pointed out. “Yet Mortland is not very close by—in fact, it is in the southwest, just outside of London.”

Lord Dee smiled at that.

“Indeed,” he said. “Very observant.”

“Which leads me to believe that this manor house was named Mortland not because of where it is situated geographically. But rather,” Blackstone continued, “because of
who
once lived in Mortland.”

“Very good, Professor,” Dee replied. “As you have probably read, my distant ancestor, John Dee, lived his life out in the late 1500s and early 1600s in the village of Mortland. This estate was named in honor of him.”

“Ah yes,” Blackstone remarked. “The one whose ‘shoe you were not worthy to untie'—something similar was once said about another religious figure once, but that one lived in the Middle East. You aren't contending that John Dee was able to walk on water, are you?”

“Not literally,” Dee said. “But John Dee did some extraordinary things. Some might even say
paranormal
things.”

“While I am conversant with the teachings of most religious systems,” Blackstone said, “you won't find me a very willing subject, I'm afraid. I relegate the accounts of spiritual realities and supernatural miracles to the frailties and foibles of the human psyche. All tales of religious experience are nothing more than the substrata of man's psychology, trying to come to grip with things he can't comprehend.”

Lord Dee put down his knife and fork, which he had been using nonstop since sitting down. He leaned back, folded his hands in his lap, and gave a knowing stare at Blackstone.

“I know you doubt such things,” Dee said. “You see, I know a great deal about you.”

“Apparently, not enough,” Blackstone said with an edge to his voice. “Otherwise, you wouldn't have had to hire a private investigator to tail me everywhere I went.”

“Oh, that,” Dee said with an offhand laugh. “Please—Professor Blackstone, that is not why I hired Mr. Mercer to follow you.”

“No?”

“Of course not,” Dee said. “I hired him to see how long it would take you to detect him and then trace him to me. That, in itself, was my test to determine whether you were every bit as clever as I thought you would be. And you proved me correct, of course. Congratulations.”

“I don't like being graded when I don't know I'm taking a test,” he retorted. “That's fundamentally unfair.”

“Perhaps,” Dee said with a smile. “But very effective nonetheless. In any event you passed, sir.”

“Then let me give you one of
my
pop quizzes,” Blackstone said. “What was in the John Wilkes Booth diary pages? And why was someone willing to commit murder for it?”

Lord Dee's eyes left J.D. Blackstone and drifted to somewhere else, beyond the huge rubber plants, wild orchids, and orange trees that filled up the glass-walled conservatory.

“For me to answer that question,” Dee said cautiously, “I would have to know the contents of those diary pages. Which would make me complicit in their theft, perhaps even complicit in the act of murder. But I am no thief. And certainly no murderer. You will notice I did not have my solicitors with me during our little meeting tonight. That is because I
have nothing to hide. Thus, Professor, I cannot tell you with any certainty what was in those pages.”

“But I bet you had some inkling of what might be in the diary of Lincoln's assassin. You wanted those newly discovered pages. Vinnie Archmont told me that. You must have had a reason. And I am betting it had something to do with your religious philosophy, and your self-aggrandizing notion of discovering the ‘ultimate secret' of the Freemasons.”

“If that were my motivation,” Dee said cautiously, “then it would be rather pointless for me to reveal such a secret to you, wouldn't you agree? The point of secrets is to keep them, not give them away.”

“Why all this obsession with secrets?” Blackstone said, his voice rising. “Would you rather keep a secret than protect a woman wrongly accused of murder?”

“I would do anything for dear Vinnie.”

“Then tell me the truth. Do you know anything, personally, about the murder of the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the theft of the Booth diary pages?”

There was a long pause. A woman from the staff came in to fill their water glasses, but Lord Dee waved her away. Then Dee finally spoke up.

“I know nothing,” he said, “that could help you, or Vinnie.”

Then after another pause he added, “Professor, you mock the need for secrecy in my pursuit of transcendent truth. You simply cannot appreciate the risk that those, like myself who adhere to the esoteric religions, have to face in the world.”

“Try me,” Blackstone replied.

“Those collections in the glass cabinets,” Lord Dee responded excitedly, “the fossils…the crystal that John Dee himself used to study the refraction of light…all of them.”

But then Dee stopped talking and looked for an instant as if he had swallowed a bite of food too large for his throat. He took a sip of water, and then continued talking.

“These antiquities…antiquities…they…were…they were…gathered by Mr. Dee,” Lord Dee continued, now picking up steam again, “to observe the natural world in an effort to break through into the supernatural
realm. But the local rabble couldn't understand. In November of 1582, while he was traveling in Europe, the villagers, fearful of his philosophies, stormed his house at Mortland, destroying it and most of his exquisite library. No need for secrets, you say? I beg to differ, sir.”

“I have no interest in stories about villagers with pitchforks and torches,” Blackstone shot back angrily. “I'm here to keep my client, your dear Vinnie, from the death chamber.”

“I will help in any way I can. But there are certain things, certain profound metaphysical truths, that I cannot share with a person like you. A skeptic. Someone who bitterly mocks the esoteric path. At least for the time being.”

Lord Dee was about to excuse himself and retire for the night, when Blackstone decided to go in for the kill.

“What do you know,” Blackstone said bluntly, “about a four-line code, a coded poem? Something that may have been contained in Booth's diary?”

Dee's face took on the expression of a bystander to an automobile collision.

“Poem…four lines,” he stammered. “Is that what you said?”

“Did I?” Blackstone said, trifling with his host.

“You did. What did you mean by that, man—what?”

“Unfortunately for you, I can't elaborate. A federal judge in our case has ordered me not to tell you. Sorry.”

Dee leaned forward over the table, his face intense.

“I could make you fabulously wealthy. I can do that,” Dee said. “Very easily. All you have to do is give me authentic proof of what you were just talking about.”

“Can't do it,” Blackstone snapped back. “Besides I make a good living at the law school. And I charge exorbitant but well-earned legal fees in my law practice, as you ought to know. I'm comfortable financially. So all in all I would rather not violate a federal court order and be disbarred.”

“You have no idea how very important this is,” Lord Dee said, his voice shaking.

“No, there you are wrong,” Blackstone shot back. “I know
exactly
how important this is.”

There was strained silence between the two men for several minutes.
Blackstone kept eating until he was finished. But Lord Dee just stared at him with a strange smile.

Then, pushing himself away from the table, J.D. Blackstone thanked Lord Dee for the meal, excused himself, and retired to bed.

CHAPTER 17

T
here was no television for Blackstone to watch in his state room in Mortland Manor during the late-night hours. The only sounds in his bedroom were the ticking of an ancient windup alarm clock on his nightstand and the creaks of a mansion house that was three hundred and fifty years old. As usual, Blackstone was being tormented by sleeplessness.

Blackstone had brought his jogging clothes along and was tempted to take a run down the road, but then, sometime after three in the morning, he felt his eyes finally get heavy, and he tried to lie down on the goosefeather bed to sleep.

The next thing he knew, he was rushing around the room, packing up and trying not to miss his flight. Teddy was there, driving him in the Bentley.

But they didn't go to the airport.

Instead the car pulled up to a nondescript building, then circled around to the back, where he was led down a stark corridor with linoleum tiles and green walls.

“Mr. Blackstone?” a man in a shirtsleeves and a tie said to him. “So very sorry. Please follow me.”

They passed through two polished steel doors that swung open, and metal cabinets were to the left and a few aluminum-surface tables to the right.

The man in the white shirt reached to the wall to pull out two of the big cabinet drawers, and as he did, Blackstone noticed that the underarms of his white shirt were stained with circles of sweat.

Then the two drawers slid open.

There was one black zip bag in each drawer.

And the black zip bags were unzipped.

There, with face exposed from within one of the bags, was his wife Marilyn. Her skin was pale and grayish, and her hair was uncombed. That was not like her to leave her hair uncombed, Blackstone thought numbly.

Someone must have stopped the time on the clock on the wall as he looked at the deep, red gash on his wife's forehead. But no blood was coming out of the wound, and he struggled, in the middle of the swirling vacuum of confusion, to process the terrible thing he was seeing.

He was keenly aware there was nowhere for him to grab, nothing to hold onto. It was as if he were about to fall off the edge of the world. Gravity could no longer hold him safely down.

Slowly, excruciatingly, he looked over to the other drawer. It was his daughter, Beth, with her young face discolored in death, framed by the hideous black zip bag.

Then a third drawer opened, seemingly on its own.

Blackstone was moving like a swimmer, walking underwater on the bottom of a swimming pool, over to the drawer. He looked down.

It was Vinnie Archmont. She was laid out in the drawer. On her chest was a single red rose.

And her hands were crossed over her breast, with all five fingers on one hand extended, but only one finger of the other hand pointing while the other four were curled into a fist.

His eyes looked up, and at the end of the morgue there was a window. And through the window he could see a church spire. And there was a sound. Was it the sound of church bells?

“Professor Blackstone!”

Someone was calling. There was a knocking on the door.

Blackstone bolted up in his bed, out of his dream he had been having.

On his nightstand, the clock was still clanging, but barely audible, as it was winding down.

Blackstone threw on a bathrobe and stumbled to the door.

It was Teddy, with his coat and tie and cap, wearing a fixed smile.

“Morning, Professor,” he said. “Car leaves in thirty minutes. Would you like some tea or breakfast brought up while you dress?”

Blackstone shook his head no, and then closed the door.

He made his way to the bathroom, and turned on the faucets and splashed some water on his face.

Then he walked into the bedroom and sat down on an upholstered sitting chair. And let his head clear.

He thought about his dream. The unsettling feel of it was still haunting the room like an apparition.