Victory of Coins (The Judas Chronicles, #7) (11 page)

Wouldn’t that beat all? Two of the ‘save them for later’ coins were actually one and the same—a single coin.... Oh my God, I could’ve been done with this damned search centuries ago! If only....

“I don’t believe your coin is anywhere in Ethiopia,” said Cedric, after observing my reaction and the uncomfortable looks on Roderick’s and Bennevento’s faces. “All the legends you two have talked about... some of those are from four hundred years ago. Right? According to what you’ve stated before, the Damascus Coin was most recently hidden someplace in Asian Minor, or some shit.... What would that place be called now? ...Iraq? Syria? Israel? Shit, take your pick.”

“Maybe the coin isn’t there, but something that points to where it is hidden
is
there. Perhaps that’s what Dr. Anderson can tell you,” said Bennevento. “If he’s still alive, and if he is coherent enough to tell you... although that’s some very fragile
ifs
.”

“Only one way to find out,” I said, rising from my chair and addressing Bennevento for perhaps the last time. “Sorry, old friend. Looks like we’ll need to postpone a longer visit until after you’re settled in your new home in Switzerland. We need to be on our way.... How about it Rod? Can we get another chartered airplane, you think? Or do you suppose Justin can handle another flight tonight?”

“It depends on when you want to leave,” Roderick replied, as he and Cedric also rose to their feet. “You’re correct, Judas. We can’t afford any more unnecessary delays, especially since we know where our next destination will be.”

“I understand, too,” said Bennevento, seemingly relieved. No doubt he was less than thrilled to have us present, should Kaslow suddenly take offense to the hospitality shown to us and descend on his home and family.

“If Dr. Anderson is still alive, getting there sooner than later would be imperative. The flight to Ethiopia will take at least twelve hours. So, if we can make it an early evening flight, that would leave enough time for Justin to rest,” Roderick advised, “I’ll go ahead and contact him.”

And so our trip to Rome became a mere stopover on the way to our true destination. I prayed that Kaslow wasn’t lying to us about our historian, or worse... setting us up for another trap.

––––––––

I
t was almost midnight Wednesday when our latest chartered jet arrived in Axum. Due to security issues, our original flight was routed to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s modern capital, and then allowed to backtrack another two hours to Axum, located near the northern tip of the country. From there, Roderick arranged for a Jeep to be ready for pickup, even though we would have to wait until the following morning to begin our search for Dr. Geoffrey Anderson.

We rented a single room together at the Exodus Hotel, since it was considered the finest establishment in Ethiopia’s ancient capital—a locale that once flourished as the center of the Axumite Empire, but was now a modest town of fifty thousand souls. Compared to the much larger Addis Ababa, which housed nearly four million residents and was by far the most modernized metropolis in the country, it was a mere afterthought for most of the nation’s populace. Only the deeply religious Christians, Muslims, and those who dreamed of making it past the armed guards protecting the famed Hebrew Arc of the Covenant that was supposedly stored on the grounds of the Church of St. Mary of Zion, ever visited this place from outside Axum... or so I gathered.

“It’s one of more than a dozen possible locations for the ‘real’ Arc of the Covenant, since there are imposters throughout the world—thanks to the Knights of Templar planting fakes to protect the true location,” said Roderick, when Cedric peppered him with questions after he and I briefly discussed the possibility of the Damascus Coin sharing the same vault, or even a different one, buried beneath the treasury building or the actual church itself. “The genuine article isn’t here in this country any longer, although I do believe it was at one time, after the Templar agents brought it to Ethiopia from a hidden vault in Jerusalem during the first Crusade. They subsequently removed it again in one of the later campaigns in the twelfth century. For all we know, the real one might well lay hidden in France, Scotland, or Canada—my favorite three possibilities.”

“Well, regardless of where the Arc is presently located, I can damn well guarantee that my last coin is not here,” I said, taking a moment to peer outside through our room’s lone window. Soft rain pelted the glass and the area behind the hotel was poorly lit, making us easy targets to study if Kaslow or anyone in his employ were watching us from an unseen post in the darkness. “If Dr. Anderson can’t tell us anything useful—and that’s if we find him before he’s dead—we might never catch up with Kaslow.”

“Why would Kaslow lead us here if he didn’t intend to provide bread crumbs to keep us on the hook to follow him?” asked Cedric, while staking ownership to the lone bed in the room.

He made sure the mattress coils wouldn’t tear through the bed’s worn fabric as he lay down; his hands behind his head and his feet kicked up, as if he had commandeered a backyard hammock. Roderick and I deferred to Cedric’s dibs on the bed that night, since he required much more sleep than either of us did. His youthfulness was similar to the blessing bestowed upon Amy, Jeremy, Alistair, and Beatrice, but instead of coming from the Tree of Life crystals, Cedric’s return to his early twenties from mid-sixties came from his time in Paititi, a sacred realm hidden above Lake Titicaca in Bolivia.

“Was it just to find the professor, you think?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense, since I don’t feel the coin’s call—even faintly. In fact, if I knew nothing of the legends that tell of at least one of my blood coins being in the possession of Thomas and others down through the early ages, I would never believe that any of my coins were ever here.... I feel nothing—not even a faint tremor. So, unless the Damascus Coin is presently buried near the earth’s core below us, it isn’t here. I’d stake my very soul on it.”

“I thought we had already determined that we wouldn’t find it here, my brother,” said Roderick, armed with his open laptop and determined to use the hours before daybreak to scour the Internet for anything that could further aid our search. The hotel’s Wi-Fi access was the deciding factor as to why we chose it over other inn-options in the area. “The biggest thing is to find Dr. Anderson—hopefully alive and coherent enough to tell us where to look next. As you know, this particular coin has changed hands numerous times, and its presence has been reported in nearly every European nation—in the past three hundred years alone. So, we’re going to need a lot more information than we presently have, if we want to gain precious time on Kaslow.”

“He has all the cards,” I whispered, disgustedly. “Just like it’s been since he survived Bochicha’s realm—”

“And, then helped Hurakan destroy Paititi,” added Cedric, cutting me off. “I must have a serious death wish to be pursuing this shit with y’all.”

“You can stay here and we’ll come back for you after we check out the Church, obelisks, and also the partially buried churches we talked about earlier tonight,” Roderick told him. “I realize that Tampara imparted better healing to you than the Tree of Life crystals afforded everyone else, in regard to partial immortality. But you can still be easily killed by Kaslow, Cedric, and the son of a bitch knows it.”

“He could kill you, too, you know,” Cedric retorted, sitting up when Roderick responded with one of his catbird smirks that I loathed almost as much as Cedric did. “You and I might think we’re invincible, Rod, but really only William has proven he can’t die—and that’s only because he can reincarnate. But Kaslow? ...You remember the security camera footage from Bennevento that you showed me from last summer, when the fucker walked through a smelting furnace in the Ukraine and the flames and molten steel didn’t singe a single blonde hair on the asshole’s body?”

“When was that?” I asked, surprised Roderick had left me out of the loop on that incident.

“Almost a year ago, in August,” he told me, after casting an irritated glance at Cedric. “You and Beatrice were still working through your grief about Alistair... you didn’t need anything else added to your plate.”

“The hell you say, brother!” I hissed, feeling a familiar surge of anger welling to the surface. “You don’t think that if I had known what Kaslow was up to that I might’ve taken that into consideration when we began making plans for our spring Civil War tour? Hell, I assumed that none of us had heard anything from that sick fuck in over a year!...”

I stopped myself from saying anything else, since all I could see was red. A deluge of tears and lashing out with bitterness that would surely be regretted would soon follow if I didn’t stop then. Roderick and Cedric looked alarmed and prepared to approach where I stood, as I continued my vigil by the window. I waved them off.

“It was never intended to hurt you in any way,” Roderick said softly, from where he stood. “Knowing that Kaslow had returned to our reality and did it in a war-torn area is not the same as stalking us in Mississippi and Tennessee. Kaslow loves war—you know this. Implying that he would just as soon come after what amounted to fawns feeding in a meadow, and chose that over wartime bloodshed.... You know as well as I do that it isn’t his normal M.O....” His voice started to crack, and I could tell my accusation had reopened his own emotional wounds from losing Beatrice, Amy, and Jeremy that hadn’t begun to heal any more than mine.

“You left out how he loves to hate for hate’s sake even more than watching soldiers and revolutionaries kill one another, Rod,” I said, determined to sound compassionate, knowing I would regret anything harsher. “Kaslow loves violence, yes.... But he can’t resist striking innocence for the sake of old grudges. I can’t help but think he is toying with us right now; and I can scarcely believe we will discover a living English historian waiting for us later today.... If Dr. Anderson is still alive, I’d bet my entire net worth that the man will certainly wish to God he wasn’t.”

Nothing more was said between us about this subject, and nothing else for at least an hour. Cedric somehow managed to sleep, and as the clouds broke and the dawn’s light began to creep in through the window’s curtains, Roderick and I began to map out our day.

Since Kaslow had given so little to go on, we decided to knock out the obvious places first. Once Cedric was ready to roll, we stopped at a local restaurant for breakfast and then headed for the main tourist attractions. Yes, it felt strange doing this—like searching for a hidden bomb at Disneyland. Even so, I expected Kaslow to follow some symmetry to his former life and ‘habits’. Thinking about how he had played us all back in the States, especially in Shiloh and Corinth, I kept an eye out for something to not jive with the local environment. Trouble was, since the area was unfamiliar it could be anything.

The weather was perfect, and as expected, St. Mary’s Church and the adjacent ‘Treasury of the Arc of the Covenant’ attracted a number of visitors. We walked through the areas left open to the public, as if we wanted nothing more than to marvel at the architecture that marks the style of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and dream of what lay hidden behind its guarded doors. But, also as expected, there were none of the attendant physical symptoms, such as my throbbing left arm that I had experienced at Shiloh when the Stutthof-Auschwitz Coin suddenly appeared. The Damascus Coin was nowhere near this place, and after we determined Dr. Anderson was likely absent as well, we moved on.

It was the same experience when we visited the famed black obelisks—some rising roughly thirty meters into the air. One of these Azumite monuments stands in Rome today, after being transported there after World War II. Yet, for us it proved to be another waste of time. Other than marveling at how centuries of exposure to wind and other elements had eroded some of the intricate images carved onto the monuments, there remained no sign of my coin or the good professor.

“Cedric, do you think you can hold off stopping for lunch until we have a look in the last location we’ll visit today?”

I could tell from the tiredness in Roderick’s voice that he shared my growing dismay, and I believe he began to consider that Kaslow had successfully duped us.

“Sure,” said Cedric. “But once we’re done with everything on your list, are we just going to hang out here while we wait for something to hit us on the head?”

“Maybe... or maybe not,” I interjected, as I could tell that Roderick wasn’t in a teasing mood. “But it might take a few hours to get through the churches of Lalibela. There are a dozen of them—either carved into cliffs or carved directly out of bedrock. Roderick and I had spent time examining the bedrock structures when we journeyed through the northern section of Africa, following the last Crusade.”

These churches—which are usable structures cut from rock—are among the most extraordinary architectural creations on the planet. Completely unique, the bedrock versions have always been my personal favorites, created with deep moats surrounding the church structures. And, considering that these churches were constructed more than eight hundred years ago, the painstaking approach to the work and artisanship is something that leaves me truly in awe.

When we arrived at the Lalibela site, surprisingly there was almost no one present aside from us... And yet despite the few tourists and guards dotting the area, a familiar feeling came upon me. And it wasn’t simply because a cloudless sky had become overcast during the past half hour. I was about to ask my companions if they felt anything odd, when Cedric remarked about it.

“What in the hell?” he mumbled under his breath, looking around him while trying to pinpoint where the sensation originated.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” asked Roderick, to which I nodded. Kaslow managing to alter his energy signal was an aspect that I could tell was deeply troubling for my druid buddy.

“No shit?” Cedric sounded impressed.

“He’s watching us from somewhere close,” I confirmed, leading the way to the first church. “Bet we find Geoffrey Anderson very soon.”