City of Shadows Read online

  Toynbee and Fowler exchanged a look that I couldn’t interpret. Toynbee said, “Ah. So you think that this will be used to finance an attack? On New York.”

  Pearson stepped in for me. “Something like that.”

  Fowler shrugged. “I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense.” He looked me up and down. “Just don’t get up to any cowboy antics while you’re in our fair city. You wouldn’t want to upset the bobbies, now would you?”

  I nodded. “Of course not.”

  “Hmmm…. Come along, Polly. Let’s leave the detective to his business. Though we expect to be kept apprised of any news of our stone. We spent a pretty penny securing it.”

  “Of course.”

  The two of them kept an eye on me until they moved into the next room.

  Pearson leaned in. “Terrorist attack?” he whispered. “And just how did you know my specialty?”

  I looked at him and said in a whisper, “I didn’t. I don’t know anything about a terrorist attack either. And no, I didn’t make it up either. My mouth ran away without me. I suspect God slipped me that script.”

  Pearson cocked his head. “Does that happen often?”

  “Usually not.”

  “This is going to be so much fun,” he snarked.

  4

  Leverage

  I looked back the way Toynbee and Fowler left. “Though I should ask, our stone? You’d think he made it personally. Did they dig it up or something?”

  Pearson shook his head. “They spent a lot of money to get it out of customs. No one is quite clear on how or why it came about, but they’re apparently well connected. They were both called in on examining evidence and artifacts taken from Iraq. They donated it to the museum. Though whether or not it still belongs to them is a question they never answer directly.”

  I frowned and furrowed my brow, sparing him a glance. I felt this compulsion to keep my head on a swivel. While the great marble hallways were lit with enough track lighting and glass walls and skylights, I had this strange prickling sensation all along my spine and scalp. It was as though I was covered in crawling bugs. If that was what the comic books referred to as a danger sense tingling, I didn’t want it. I had to restrain a shiver, despite all the temperature control.

  I hadn’t felt something quite so dark since a demon infested my house.

  “Was it taken from an Iraqi museum?”

  “Worse—one of Saddam’s palaces. It was kept in a basement torture chamber.”

  He had my full attention now. “But you called it an artifact. I didn’t know he collected any.”

  “Oh, but this one was special.” Pearson paused and frowned. “Technically, they’re all special. We never mentioned the various and sundry objects that Saddam pilfered from his own museums, though plenty got lost in the vast collection of actual looters, museum employees who stole their own exhibits to protect them from rioters, and government officials who just wanted a bauble for the mantelpiece. But this one had a special purpose to it. When it was found in the palace, it was bagged up with the rest. But there were notes that came along for the ride. You see, Thomas, this is supposedly from the capital of First Dynasty Egypt. The location was never discovered, but the notes, the legend behind it, is that this stone wiped the city from the face of the Earth.”

  “The capital?” I paused for a moment. “Didn’t they dig that up in the first Indiana Jones movie?”

  Pearson rolled his eyes. “Americans,” he sighed.

  I ignored him to lean down to look at the image on the pedestal. It was a rock. It was a very pretty rock. In fact … “Is that a black diamond?”

  “Maybe. No one could sample anything off of it, so it could be obsidian. It could be a diamond.”

  I frowned deeper. It was beautiful, in a goth sort of way. It was like a black, Satanic Faberge egg. “I need a blow-up. I’m not even certain what I’m looking at.”

  Pearson smirked, crossed his arms, and leaned up against the pedestal. “You’re not the only one, mate. Trust me, it gets weirder.”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek, analyzing exactly what I saw. It was egg-like but not as smooth as stone. It was multi-faceted, like a modern cut gem. “Nice knife work.”

  “’Tisn’t a knife.”

  I straightened. “What do you mean?”

  “That diamond has never been cut by man or beast. Not even mother nature did it. There isn’t a single sign of a tool mark on the entire stone. I—here, wait a moment.”

  Pearson pushed off of the case, strode a few paces, and looked off a split in the hallway. He reached over and came back with a pamphlet for tourists, opening the tri-folded paper. It was clearly the draw since it took up an entire page. Large font proclaimed it THE SOUL STONE.

  It was brilliant, translucent, and dark. The very sight of it filled me with dread. There were natural, almost fluid striations on either side, within the stone itself. They were clearly below the gleaming, faceted surface. One set of striations were blood red. The other set was a startling silver. If they weren’t embedded inside of a millennia-old diamond, I would have thought they were runes.

  “Soul stone?” I asked. I would have laughed, but nothing about the implications of that name filled me with cheer.

  Pearson nodded. He tapped the facets on the soul stone image. “What you saw is what in the diamond industry is called a rose cut. Or it would be if it had a flat bottom. The thing is, the technique is only around for over a century. But we know it’s far older than that because of the striations.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because it’s a language that no one has ever seen before. It predates … everything. Yet there are no tool marks on the stone. There’s no way that this should exist. The soul stone is entirely impossible. If one didn’t know any better, it would be as if it were done by aliens.”

  I scoffed. “Thanks. I watched that History Channel show. Once.”

  “Can’t blame a guy for having a laugh.”

  I looked around at all of the random gunfire all over the walls. “Did the action start here? I would have thought that we’d see more bullet holes on the way out than at the starting point.”

  “I didn’t bring you here the way they left, believe it or not. I’ll save that for the walk-through.”

  “Let’s start. I like to get a chain of events on what happened.”

  During the night of the robbery, Harrods Department Store had been bombed. This wasn’t terribly uncommon. Harrods was to department stores as the King David Hotel was to tourist resting places—the most bombed in the world. Harrods was first blown up frequently by the IRA. Now the jihadists had taken over the job. The world of terrorism is not a very subtle place. You may have noticed that from… almost any actual terrorist attack. Subtle terrorists are television villains.

  As Harrods burned, fifteen minutes later, the shooting started here. Over two dozen perpetrators opened up around the soul stone. They whipped out AK-47s from underneath raincoats and screamed Allahu Akbar before the bullets flew. Half the bullets went into the ceiling and the other half into the surrounding area. The case was blown up with a length of det cord wrapped around a strip of Semtex. It was looped around the case, secured, detonated. The camera around it was shot out, then the stone was taken. It took them over twenty seconds to get to the next nearest camera, only twenty feet away. Why? According to one bystander who was playing dead, the man who grabbed the stone screamed. He dropped to one knee. The bystander couldn’t tell the difference between agony or joy in the scream.

  Either way, it only lasted a few seconds. They were on the move, with the occasional shots to encourage people along. Security largely didn’t get in their way, since they didn’t have the manpower or firepower to stop them.

  Then there were the scorch marks.

  Apparently, two guards had tried to intervene. Charles Woods and Stuart Preston.

  The camera didn’t quite catch what had happened. Woods and Preston got in the way of the advance. The
y had jumped to the front of the caravan of thieves, going melee immediately.

  On the cameras, the leader pointed the stone at the guards. The cameras suffered from a massive burst of static. When they came back clear, Woods and Preston were gone, as were the thieves they fought.

  All that remained were two shadows, burned into the wall.

  Pearson and I stopped for a long moment. I didn’t have to study the shadows for more than a moment to realize that they were shadows of four men struggling in hand-to-hand combat.

  We kept going.

  When the thieves got to the front door, that’s when the fun started. The police barricade formed outside. Sure, the Harrods bombing had sucked up the majority of the resources, but this was The Museum. Even if it wasn’t the primary museum in all of the UK, it was still huge. It took them more than ten minutes to get through it at a dead run. By then, the police had figured out that Harrods was a distraction, and sent over a dozen police cars to the scene of the action.

  Then it got weird.

  The thieves had opened fire on the police, but only a short burst before the heavy artillery opened up … on the police.

  No one saw it, but they presumed at the time that it had been a grenade launcher. The first detonation blew off part of a front column of the museum. The second blew up the back wall of an apartment building. The next few blasts created craters in the sidewalk and the lawn.

  Then the police got hit.

  The first blast to hit the mark punched a hole through a police car, igniting the gas tank after the men hiding behind the car had been killed. The second blast slammed into the car like a fist. That car skidded sideways, running over the officers hiding behind it. Once the guys on scene realized that their own cars were of no use, the only option was to hold the scene until the AFO showed up

  You are probably aware that the police in the UK are unarmed. In case you’re wondering, there are few gun deaths … but far more violent crimes committed with every other weapon under the sun. It’s why one had to be 18 years old to buy a steak knife. It’s moronic, but no one asked America. What you probably didn’t know is that they’re not totally brain damaged. They do have “authorized firearms officers (AFO).” However, out of the thirty thousand cops in the Metropolitan police force, only five thousand officers in the entire country were allowed to carry guns.

  Looking back at it, even without the deployment of the primary explosive weapon, the responding police force didn’t stand a chance.

  “How did I not hear about this attack?” I asked.

  Pearson sighed. “You have freedom of the press in America. Here, we don’t have that luxury. Anything not in the public interest could be locked down without any consequences.”

  I frowned as I inspected the damage against the column. Half the stone was blasted away, as though by the explosion. The part closer to the door—closer to the shooter—seemed … melted.

  “Father, you see this?”

  Pearson frowned at it through his beard. “That’s odd.”

  I nodded as I trotted down the stairs. I darted over to the nearest divot in the dirt. It was exploded, yes, but the crater was half glass. Same with the impact points for the sidewalk and the street.

  “Did anyone notice that these impact points look like something from … I don’t know? A science fiction plasma gun?”

  Pearson frowned. “No. Most everyone else was busy being shot at.”

  I frowned. “How much progress have the police made into this?”

  Pearson hesitated. “Not much…”

  I arched a brow. There were moments that I was tempted to see if I could read minds, like wonder workers before me … except those incidents had been in or around a confessional. While a combination of smelling evil and reading minds would have made my job easier, it would have felt awkward asking God to do everything but make the perpetrator light up like a neon sign.

  Instead, I would have to settle for pulling teeth the old fashioned way. “I’ve come a very long way. I took a nonstop flight, so I was in a chair for nearly five hours. Holding back on me at this point? Not a good idea. Just tell me.”

  “Two of the thieves were killed during their escape. They’ve both been identified. They were from the East London Mosque.”

  I considered everything he said on the way in. “Let me guess, no one has talked to their friends? Their families? Their Imam?”

  “Oh, they don’t have any family,” he said airily. His tone turned darker as he elaborated. “They were refugees from Syria.”

  I rolled my eyes. I didn’t care who the perpetrator was. When cops had a suspect—or better, the dead body of the perp—the investigator should talk to every friend, family member, and coworker of the diseased. If a cohort was at large, the odds were better than even that the accomplice was among that list, somewhere.

  I perked up … for a moment. “Wait. What about MI-5? Aren’t they independent of the Met police?”

  Pearson smiled. “True. I could put out some feelers.”

  I nodded. “Indeed. This would be the point where I should ask how exactly you’ve done all of this and how you gained all of this data.”

  Pearson merely smiled. “I wasn’t always a priest.”

  “I figured that out when you punched the thug in the street.”

  Pearson kept smiling. “I’ll see what I can find. But first, we should probably get you checked in and settled for the night.”

  On the one hand, the sun was still up and shining. On the other, it still seemed … muted. The shadows seemed longer than they had any right to be. I tried to do the math, but I had jumped time zones twice in the last three days. I was on the road to the airport at nine in the morning in Rome. My flight left at 11, took four and a half hours, another half-hour to get off the plane, and another half-hour to drive from the airport to The Museum. After examining the crime scene, it should have been 5:30, maybe six.

  “You have a deal,” I told him.

  “Great. On the way, I can tell you all about the legends of the soul stone.”

  I arched a brow. That was a strange way to put it. “How many are there?”

  Pearson shrugged. “Only two. We did just find it after all. Toynbee and Fowler have dismissed the original legend. I think they prefer it as an alien artifact.”

  “What’s the original?”

  “Oh, that it was given to the first pharaoh by Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead himself. And if it were ever misused, it would annihilate any who use it.”

  I rolled my eyes. Great. I’ve entered an Indiana Jones movie. I hope no one tries nuking a refrigerator while I’m here.

  5

  Ecumenical Discourse

  Apparently, during the summer, the sun doesn’t really go down until well after ten at night. Closer to eleven, actually.

  Despite that, no matter what I did, or where I walked, or what angle I looked at the city, the shadows seemed to be long and dark and deep. It was the sort of day where I would look out the window and conclude that it was overcast, and we were in for nothing but rain. Everything I have seen or heard about London should have prepared me for that. Except, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky since I arrived.

  The hotel I was in was … old fashioned. How old fashioned? The keys look like something you’d see in a medieval castle, only three inches long instead of a foot. The room was on the top floor, so the ceiling was slanted, to match the roof.

  When I checked in, the room was dark, despite the sun shining directly through the window. There was that one bright spot in the room. The sun only penetrated six feet in and stopped.

  Maybe it was the smell of evil that covered the city like a blanket so thick that I had to ask God to turn off my sense of smell. Maybe it was that it felt like they had put a dimmer switch on the sun. Perhaps I had spent too many weeks jumping at shadows … perhaps because I’d fought a warlock who had tried to feed me to shadows.

  No matter the reason, I turned on all the lights in the hotel room. T
hey were all turned on high. I still felt like I slept in the pitch dark. I prayed myself to sleep.

  I usually don’t dream. But that night, I did.

  And they were nightmares. There were living shadows that tried to eat my soul. To flee them, I ran into a burning building. My coat caught fire without slowing me down. Then my skin burned. I tried to run upstairs, but they gave way. Then so did the floor.

  Basically, it felt like I was living in a Lovecraft novel.

  At the heart of the dream was the soul stone itself…a black, rose-cut oval obsidian piece with red and silver striations within the surface. The striations formed deliberate glyphs that should be indecipherable, but I was certain I could read it. The rose cut and the glyphs had no tool marks as if it were naturally formed that way…

  At that, I shot out of bed. I resisted the urge to clear under the bed and in the closet. It was tempting. But I didn’t. Jeremy didn’t even do that, and he was 10.

  I slowly lowered myself back to the bed, closed my eyes, and prayed for a little more sleep before—

  Then my alarm went off.

  “Of course,” I murmured.

  I rolled out of bed and onto one knee, for my daily prayer. It was from another Saint Thomas— Aquinas.

  Grant O merciful God, that I may ardently desire, carefully examine, truly know and perfectly fulfill those things that are pleasing to You and to the praise and glory of Your holy name. Direct my life, O my God, and grant that I might know what you would have me to do and for me to fulfill it as is necessary and profitable to my soul. Grant to me, O Lord my God, that I may not be found wanting in prosperity or in adversity and that I may not be lifted up by one nor cast down by the other. May I find joy in nothing but what leads to You and sorrow in nothing but what leads away from You. May I seek to please no one or fear to displease anyone, save only You.

  Grant to me, O Lord God,

  —a vigilant heart that no subtle speculation may ever lead me from You;

  —a noble heart that no unworthy affection may draw me from You;