The building had been erected at obscene cost by Richard Oswald Sinclair, the present Richard Sinclair’s great-great-grandfather. The chateauesque mansion had been built between 1888 and 1895 in direct competition with his art-collecting colleague, George Washington Vanderbilt, who built the famous Biltmore Mansion during the same period. The two men had wagered on who would build the largest mansion in the country. Vanderbilt won, with Biltmore coming in at 175,000 square feet to Poplar Hill’s 165,000 square feet. Sinclair argued that if you included the stables, directly connected by the tunnel to the main house, he should have won. The two men never spoke again.
Holliday stayed in his seat for what seemed a long time and then one of the babysitters who had accompanied them on the jet escorted Holliday into the building and across the Main Hall. The elaborate entranceway with its marble floor and soaring ceiling with the inlaid coat of arms made Holliday acutely aware that he was still dressed in the jeans, rough shirt and work boots he’d been wearing on Sable Island. Looking at his watch, he realized that it had barely been four hours since he’d been staring down the throat of a hurricane.
He wondered if Gallant had made it through the storm and silently vowed to find out about the lobsterman’s fate if he got out of his present situation alive, something he was beginning to doubt. If he authenticated the bogus ark for the Sinclairs his continued existence would only be a liability. While driving into the estate he’d seen hundreds of acres of field and forest, all far from any public road; plenty of places to discreetly dispose of a body.
They turned left off the entrance hall and went down a passage that looked like something out of Bucking-ham Palace, complete with dusty Persian carpets on the teak wood floor and heavily framed and individually lit oil paintings on the green, moiré silk walls. The paintings were all European, mostly of horses in battle, their nostrils flared with the scent of fresh blood, their eyes crazed as their riders sliced each other to ribbons with their curved sabers.
They passed what appeared to be the doors of an elevator and a little farther on turned into a relatively small and comfortable-looking sitting room fitted out with couches and easy chairs centered around a reasonably scaled fireplace. Above the mantel was a simply framed painting of a small terrier-like dog in full flight.
“It’s a Galla Creek Feist,” said an elderly, elegant woman seated in one of the armchairs and noticing Holliday’s interest. She had the rasping voice of a heavy smoker. “It’s the kind of dog that Daniel Boone used when he was hunting squirrel. His name was Langford’s Rowdy. He was my favorite.”
Holliday noticed that the ark, uncrated, stood on the coffee table in front of her.
“You must be the mother,” he said.
“My name is Katherine Pierce Sinclair.” She lifted a hand and gestured toward the armchair facing her across the table. “Sit down, Colonel Holliday, you must be very tired after your journey.” She gave the babysitter a look and he withdrew, closing the door behind him. Holliday had the feeling that he wasn’t going far.
“You told Meg your little ruse with the box wouldn’t fool me.”
“It never really had to. We had people watching Miss Blackstock from the beginning. I’m a great believer in leverage, Colonel.”
“I told Meg what I’d do if either Peggy or Rafi were harmed in any way.”
“There’s no need for threats, Colonel Holliday,” said the elderly woman. She lit a cigarette and blew a curling stream of smoke into the air. She held the cigarette like a man, between the lowest knuckles of the first two fingers. “No harm will come to them as long as you authenticate the True Ark.”
“When did you plant it there?”
“More than a year ago. Among other things, Margaret is a trained archaeologist. She was quite capable of following the clues to the whereabouts of the ark herself. Sadly, those clues ran out on Iona. From there they could have traveled anywhere. There were a number of possible answers, including Sable Island, so we manufactured evidence to lead you there. Sable was the most attractive of the possibilities because it would prove the viability of Rex Deus’s assertion that the ark came to the New World. We had the box created using authentic medieval tools and techniques and placed it in the ground on the edge of Lake Wallace. Margaret had the exact GPS coordinates so she knew exactly where to dig.”
“The inscription in Greek was a nice touch.”
“We thought so. Margaret studied ancient languages at Columbia.”
“A real Renaissance woman.”
“A daughter a mother can be proud of.”
“Handy with a gun, too,” said Holliday dryly.
“She’s been hunting at Poplar Hill since she was a child. She’s a better shot than her big brother.”
“The next president of the United States?”
“Quite so,” she replied.
“Why me?” Holliday asked. “There are plenty of better-known medievalists around.”
“I’ve been interested in you ever since your trip to the Azores a while back,” she said. Her thin smile reminded Holliday of a snake swallowing a small animal. “As much as we need you to authenticate your little find on the table, I’d very much like to leaf through that little notebook that Brother Rodrigues gave to you with his dying breath on Corvo. I presume you have it safely hidden away.”
In a safe-deposit box in a bank in Geneva, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. “You presume correctly.”
“Excellent. You can fetch it for us after the authentication at the conclave tomorrow. We’ll take the G5 and make it a little celebration.”
“What makes you think I’ll do that?” Holliday said, even though he already knew. Katherine Sinclair smiled and took a heavy drag on her cigarette, taking it deeply into her lungs. When she spoke smoke burst out of her mouth like a dragon exhaling. An emaciated dragon at the end of its withered, leathery life.
“You’ll do it because your life depends on it and the lives of Miss Blackstock and her new husband.”
31
After Holliday’s brief conversation with Katherine Sinclair he was escorted to one of the third- and top-floor tower rooms that overlooked the porte cochere and the lavish, formal terraced gardens at the front of the castle. The view was as grandiose as the castle itself. From the love seat beneath the curved glass windows Holliday was able to see the entire town of Frankfort nestled in the valley below the estate, surrounded on all sides by low hills, their flanks covered by lush green forests. From the high round room he could see the dome on the state capitol and the winding course of the Kentucky River, making its slow way north to join the broader reaches of the Ohio.
The tower room was lavishly decorated with scattered Persian carpets on the floor, a huge four-poster canopy bed at the far end of the room, a delicately scrolled marble mantel over a sizable fireplace hearth and a gigantic flat-screen television on one wall with a soft, comfortable couch in front of it. An en suite bathroom was next to the enormous bed and there was an antique circular breakfast table with two matching chairs next to the couch. There was even a bar fridge stocked with airline bottles of booze, mixers, cans of soda and a big jar of macadamia nuts. All the comforts of home if home happened to be a Hilton hotel.
After checking to see if the big oak door was locked, which of course it was, Holliday spent a long time pacing out the perimeters of the room and mentally going over his options. He knew he could almost certainly jimmy the old skeleton key lock on the door, but where would that get him? There could easily be a guard posted at his door, and even if there wasn’t there were almost certainly lots of armed guards all over the estate.
The top floor of mansions like this was usually given over as the servants’ quarters, but it could just as easily be a barracks for the security people. And barracks was the word; the security people he’d seen so far were all ex-military, Holliday was sure of it; none of the ragtag mercenary wannabes from that Blackhawk bunch; these guys were the real McCoy.
He tired of pacing the floor eventually and flopped down on the couch. He picked the remote up off the coffee table in front of him and clicked on the flat screen, scrolling through rock-star reality shows, Maury Povich dealing with an endless supply of pregnant trailer-trash women wanting DNA tests and reruns of
CSI
and
Law and Order
.
He watched ten minutes of Claudette Colbert in the title role and Henry Wilcoxon as Mark Antony in the original, 1934 version of
Cleopatra
on Turner Classic Movies and finally settled on CNN. There was no mention made of any abductions in Israel, but that didn’t really mean anything; CNN seemed to think that the only international news worth reporting was plagues, floods, earthquakes and wars. Outside dusk was falling, the air itself glowing with the strange, ozone-heavy yellow light that usually precedes a storm.
At 6:00 p.m. on the dot he heard the sound of his door being unlocked. A few seconds later two of Kate Sinclair’s goons appeared, the one in the lead carrying a large silver tray. Behind the two men Meg Sinclair appeared. She was wearing formal riding clothes, including tall black boots and jodhpurs. Her hair was tied back with a black velvet ribbon. The man with the tray set it down on the round table beside the couch and began setting the table for two and unloading the food, including a vacuum carafe of coffee.
“Come to gloat?” Holliday asked.
“I’m not the gloating type,” said Meg. “I just thought you might like some company for dinner.”
“Very hospitable of you.”
“We don’t have to be adversarial about this, Doc.”
“Yes, we do,” he answered. “Your mother had Peggy and her husband kidnapped. You’re holding me against my will. You can’t get much more adversarial than that.”
“They won’t come to any harm and neither will you.” She sat down at the table.
“As long as I do precisely what you and your mother want.”
“Come and eat your dinner, you must be starved.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” said Holliday, sitting down. The dinner was four-star-restaurant grade: porcini-stuffed and balsamic-glazed filet mignon with a baked potato and grilled mushrooms. The soup was lobster bisque, some kind of ironic little joke from Meg, no doubt. Dessert looked like crème caramel.
He ate a spoonful of the bisque; it was perfect right down to the slight brandy aftertaste and the dollop of crème fraiche and flat- leaf parsley stalks floating on the pale pink surface of the white ceramic bowl.
“Why would it be so difficult to do what we ask?”
“Because it’s a lie. A setup, a fake.”
“In aid of a good cause, though.”
“Who says?” Holliday asked, slicing into the filet mignon, the rich stuffing oozing out.
“I say,” answered Meg, beginning to work on her own meal.
“From what I gather you’re going to use the counterfeit contents of the box as leverage to have your brother made head of your little cult.”
“The little cult, as you call it, has combined net assets of half a trillion dollars, and that’s becoming a problem. Power tends to corrupt,” said Meg.
“And absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,” said Holliday, finishing the quote. “The first Baron Acton. It’s the only noteworthy thing he ever said. It was in response to Pius IX’s Bull about papal infallibility back in the 1860s.”
“Well, that’s what’s happening within Rex Deus. The order has so much power concentrated in such a small group of people that it has been corrupted. There are some people within the order who see it as a means to an end, that end being personal gain. They’ve lost sight of the principles that made this country great. They’ve lost their way, just like the rest of America.”
“And your brother’s going to get the country back on track?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think he’d be any better able to do that than anyone else in the Senate or anywhere else?”
“Doc, if the president is elected to a second term it will be too late. The country will become a socialist hellhole with the government sticking its nose everywhere, in business, health care, industry, Wall Street. Another Kremlin.”
“You really believe that?” Holliday said.
“I not only believe it, I
know
it,” answered Meg, fire in her eyes. “Some of the members of Rex Deus know it too, and they’re planning to take advantage of it.”
“How?”
“The cadre involved, if they can convince the other members of the order, want to manipulate another market crash, among other things. When the smoke clears they’ll be even richer and the entire country will be in extremis. It might never recover; we’d turn into a third-rate power overnight. We can’t let that happen, Doc.
You
can’t let it happen.” Holliday nodded thoughtfully. She’d used his nickname three times since entering the room, something she’d never done once that he could remember when they were together.
“So you want me to lie for you.”
“Not about anything real, about a myth, something that probably never was. Is that so hard?”
“Who’s to say I want to put your family at the helm of the ship of state?” said Holliday.
“It’s better than sinking it,” answered Meg Sinclair.
“This thing has been a lie from the beginning. You lied to me and now you want me to lie for you?”
“I’d lie if it was my family’s lives at stake,” said Meg.
“All right,” said Holliday. “If you promise to release Peggy and Rafi as soon as I’ve done what you want.”
“Of course,” said Meg. “You have my word.”
Holliday didn’t believe it for a minute, but he said nothing. Better to live and fight another day.
“Okay,” he said. He put down his fork, his appetite gone.
“What will you need to open up the box when the time comes?”
Holliday thought for a long moment then spoke. “A pencil butane torch and a utility knife or a heavy-duty box cutter.”