The Rose Conspiracy (46 page)

A
day and an half later, Blackstone was handing some pound notes to an English cabbie. He looked out the window of the cab where it was stopped in downtown London.

“This is it—the address on Great Queen Street?” Blackstone asked.

“It is, sir,” the cabbie said. “And that's the very building—rather odious and yet impressive, don't you think? Here, buried in this building, is where they keep all the records and the archives of the United Grand Lodge of England and the Supreme Grand Chapter. Or so they say. But I don't belong. So I couldn't really say for sure.”

Blackstone looked at the old, gray stone building, rising up several stories in a pyramid-type series of levels, with tall columns on either side of a massive door that was deeply inset within a portico. The effect was imposing. The placement of the door created the effect of a kaleidoscope. As if the front entrance was beckoning the visitor into a series of deeper and deeper mysteries.

Blackstone stepped out of the cab and strolled up to the front of the building.

He knew it was the right place. Lord Dee had arranged for their meeting at that precise location: the historic Library and Museum of Freemasonry.

There was the sound of a car slowly pulling to a stop at the curb in back of him. Blackstone turned around and saw a long, black Bentley limousine.

Teddy Darrow, Lord Dee's driver, decked out in his black brimmed
cap and black coat, scurried around to the curbside passenger's rear of the limo and opened the door.

After a few seconds, Dee, with Teddy assisting, climbed out of the Bentley and onto the sidewalk. Dee looked much the same as he had appeared when Blackstone had last seen him, with his beard flowing down to his chest and hair cascading down to his shoulders. But this time he was sporting a walking stick with an ornate silver knob, and he seemed to be walking slower.

Lord Dee nodded his head as he saw Blackstone.

Then two men exited the limo behind him, both in suits.

“Professor Blackstone,” Dee said, reaching out his hand to Blackstone. “You look to be in good health. Pleasant to see you again.”

After they shook hands, Dee motioned to the two men in suits standing behind him.

“Professor,” Dee said, indicating the two men standing close by, “this is my solicitor, and this is my bodyguard. They have taken to following me around…they say it is for my protection. I won't bother to introduce them—as they will not be joining us today.”

With that, Lord Dee gave a slow wave of his hand to the two men who nodded and disappeared back to the interior of the limo.

“Follow me,” Lord Dee said, and began making his way across the open terrace to the recessed front door of the building. Then Dee stopped at the door and turned to face Blackstone.

“You said in our telephone conversation you had a question to ask me?”

“That's right,” Blackstone said. “I believe what you have to tell me will be essential if I am to be able to unravel the truth behind the Smithsonian crimes.”

“So, it is truth that you are after?” Dee asked.

But before Blackstone could respond, Dee continued.

“I told you at our last meeting, as we dined together at my home at Mortland Manor…that…that you…that you.” Dee quit talking and now was swallowing hard, bobbing his head a little as he did.

When he was finished swallowing, he continued.

“That you were,” Dee said, “you were…were…a skeptic. And as a result, I refused to share the deeper metaphysical concepts of our beliefs…
beliefs…held in common by those of us in the highest echelon, in the elite of the esoteric mysteries.”

“I recall that,” Blackstone replied.

“Why should I change my mind now, Professor?”

“Because I know what you believe, and what you are after,” Blackstone said. “While I don't share your beliefs, I certainly understand them now.”

“How can you…you…possibly understand?” Lord Dee sputtered. “How? You of the brash, scientific age…cold…and soulless…how could you know the deep secrets we pursue?”

“Try me. Test me,” Blackstone said. “And you will find out, Lord Dee, that I already know the one thing that you've been desperately chasing.”

“Then open the door,” Lord Dee commanded, pointing with his walking stick to the massive door in front of them. “And we shall see, Professor Blackstone, exactly what it is that you do, and do not, understand.”

Blackstone opened the door and the two men entered the front lobby. Lord Dee slowly led the way through a dark, underlighted passageway to a room that opened up into a large library full of ancient floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with books and journals and records. An elderly custodian with a Freemason's badge sat silently on a velvet chair off to the side. There was a musty sense about the place. Here and there around the room there were rows of glass cabinets filled with ancient Masonic artifacts. The room was open in the center with a tiled mosaic on the floor, and historic paintings on the walls.

“Now, Professor,” Lord Dee said, “I am the teacher…and you…and…you are…you are the student. The test will now…begin…you…have sixty seconds to show me that you have the least inkling of what I am after…and what it is that I pursue. And if you fail, then you and I will not be speaking again, I would wager.”

Lord Dee found a dark leather chair with scrolled armrests, which was close to him, and he sat down on it. He perched his hands on top of the silver knob of his cane, which he held out in front of him.

Then Lord Dee said one final word to Blackstone.

“Proceed,” he said.

Blackstone strode into the middle of the room and then quickly began
to scan, in a circle, everything in the room—the stacks of books—the museum cases filled with hundreds of years of Masonic history and relics—the pictures—the ornamental scrollwork in the high ceiling and crown moldings.

Then he suddenly stopped. A strange look took over his face. And he closed his eyes and gave out a little chuckle, as if realizing the folly of something, or realizing some private joke.

“Alchemy and geometry,” Blackstone whispered to himself.

Blackstone looked over at Lord Dee, who was sitting forward, leaning on his cane with both hands. Dee's eyes were fixed on Blackstone like an audience member watching the act of a magician on stage, straining to discover the flaw, the trick, the illusion.

Raising his right hand up in the air, index pointing up, Blackstone then brought his index finger slowly downward, until it was pointing at the floor beneath him.

Blackstone was standing in the open space in the middle of the Freemason's museum. Then he started speaking.

“What has been lost? What is it that is pursued from the ends of the earth?” Blackstone said as if in a rhythmic chant, paraphrasing the Freemason's ritual.

“The secrets of the Master Mason,” he continued. “And how shall they be found? By finding the center—the center that is the point within the circle.”

When Blackstone finished those words, he stepped perfectly within the very center of the tiled floor underfoot and then looked down, studying the mosaic designs in equidistance from him. There were figures of ornate cherubim in the floor. But that is not what caught his attention. What he was staring at was something else altogether.

“The four corners,” Blackstone announced, and with that he pointed as he pivoted around to four designs within the four quadrants of the open center.

“The symbols of the ancient tree of immortality,” Blackstone said as he pointed to each of the four spots, “bordering the entire circle.” In each design there was the unmistakable image of the acacia tree leaf in mosaic design.

“I am willing to bet,” Blackstone continued, “that you won't find any
reference to those leaves in any of the neat little museum signs that are posted around the room.”

Lord Dee was silent, waiting.

“You seek an ancient flowering plant, Lord Dee,” Blackstone continued. “It carries with it the gift, you believe, of prolonging human life indefinitely. The Freemasons have used the symbol of the acacia tree to hide its meaning. Over the centuries, others have called it the ‘rose,' perhaps because the plant allegedly took on a reddish appearance. And in fact, the rose is the truer symbol, which accounts for the fact that in the very earliest Freemason's lodges ever recorded, they had roses painted on the ceilings. The rose came to be known not only as the symbol for the keeping of a great secret—but also as the essence of the secret itself, the search for the means to achieve, through the supposed power of alchemy, the power of an everlasting life.

“The ancient ‘rose' you seek,” Blackstone went on, “is supposedly imbedded in a crystal, which worked to preserve the potency of the plant—something possessing the power to work miraculous healings, or extended life, to those who simply come close to it. As of 1610, during the heyday of playwright Ben Jonson, the word was out that this was some kind of ‘ruby flower' that contained the ‘elixir' of life. Elias Ashmole, schooled in the occult arts, picked up the hunt for it in the later part of the 1600s. And he was followed by his curator, the professor of chemistry, Dr. Robert Plot. And that is where the chase seems to have ended—until, in your way of thinking, nearly two hundred years later, when Albert Pike, the American Masonic philosopher and a handful of Confederate members of the Knights of the Golden Circle finally figured it all out—or at least so you believe.”

Blackstone stepped over to Lord Dee and gazed down at him, sitting in his chair. Dee was now deep in thought.

“And so,” Blackstone concluded, “that is what you believe, Lord Dee. And that is what you seek.

“But there is still one last element I haven't discussed,” Blackstone said. “Namely—
why
you seek the rose crystal. It could be simply the esoteric thrill of finding something so fabled throughout the annals of alchemy and occult philosophy. Or maybe the desire to taste immortality—a universal desire, I suppose. Could be. But I don't think that is your motivation.”

Now Blackstone was standing directly in front of Lord Dee. He knelt down next to the English lord.

“No, I think your motivation hits much closer to home,” Blackstone said. “At first I thought the symptoms you showed evidenced Parkinson's disease. But then I saw the combination of your problem swallowing and verbal blockage with words—then I had a pretty good idea of what it was. Something I had run across in my graduate studies in the subject of neuropsychology.

“I'm very sorry, Lord Dee,” the law professor continued. “It looks like you are suffering from corticobasal degeneration. Correct?”

Dee half-smiled and nodded.

“There is no cure. None at all,” Dee said. “Not even the Parkinson-slowing medications are successful in treating it,” he said glumly. “Gradual death of brain nerve cells in the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia. In a little while, I will be unable to walk. Unable to feed myself. Not able to talk. Then eventually, no movement at all. Death. Slow, debilitating. Agonizing. In about…oh…prob…probabl…probably two years at most…or maybe less.”

“May I ask my question now, Lord Dee?” Blackstone asked quietly.

Dee nodded.

“According to press reports,” Blackstone said, “you are England's third-wealthiest man. So my question is this—since Vinnie was charged criminally at the very beginning of this case—since that time to the present, have there been any attempts from anyone to sell you the Horace Langley note?”

“Just one.”

“When?”

“Recently. A few weeks ago.”

“How?”

“A letter I received at my address at the House of Lords.”

“What did it say?”

“For forty million dollars, someone would give me an exact copy of the note that Horace Langley wrote when he copied down the Booth diary entry, and then the Booth diary itself.”

“Did you try to trace back the letter?”

“It was mailed from a city in America.”

“What city?”

“Savannah, Georgia.”

“And you understand the historical significance of that city to the Freemasons in particular?”

“Of course, of course,” Dee replied quickly.

“What were you required to do?” Blackstone asked.

“If I was interested in pursuing it, I should post an advertisement in the London
Times
on a certain date—which I did—asking for help in finding a ‘missing rose garden.' ”

“Did the letter indicate what would happen if you didn't?”

“Yes—the letter-writer professed the ability to control the critical documents, and the copies, threatened to destroy the Booth diary pages, as well as Horace Langley's notes and any evidence of both of them.”

“So after posting the advertisement, then what?” Blackstone asked.

“The letter said that after I posted the ad in the
Times,
then in ‘a little while' I would be told where a rendezvous would be set up. My agent was to pick up the Horace Langley note, which ‘will be supplied along with absolute proof of its authenticity.' The sender of the letter indicated I should beware of others who might allege they had true copies of the Horace Langley note because they are all ‘frauds.' Well, at the time of my receipt of the Langley note we would simultaneously wire twenty million dollars to a designated offshore account…and following that there would be a separate transaction sometime later where I would be given the actual Booth diary pages and I would wire the final twenty million.”