The Ghost Manuscript Page 9

  “Well, next time give me a little knock and a hello so you don’t catch me running around in my bra and panties,” Nicola said.

  “You do that? Cat’s away, mice will play, huh?”

  “Oh yes,” said Nicola. “And the orgies. You wouldn’t want to catch me in the middle of one of those.” Carys shook her head, smiling, and sat at the granite-topped kitchen island. She accepted the ubiquitous cup of tea.

  “What did you think of the journal?” said Nicola.

  “I feel very bad for Lestinus.”

  “I know. Such tragedy. But that defined the era, sadly,” said Nicola.

  “The poem with the clues. Those will be a problem. How do we know the translations are even close?”

  Nicola sat quietly for a moment. “They’re accurate. You can rely on them.”

  “How can you be sure? There are no references for the written Brythonic.”

  “Yes, there were,” said Nicola, looking down into her cup of tea. “But they were very difficult to find. We were able to do the very best translation of those passages that it is possible to do. I can’t promise that some of the meaning of the phrases hasn’t been lost over the centuries, but the words are solid.”

  “I’m not a linguist, but I sure would love to know how you pulled that off,” she said. “Like deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics without a Rosetta Stone. Quite a trick.”

  Nicola sat without speaking. Carys waited. When it was clear the conversation was over, she picked up her tea and headed for the library, then stopped at the doorway and turned back.

  “I’ll be taking a small cutting for carbon dating,” she said.

  Nicola inhaled.

  “Is that necessary? We’ve already done the dating.”

  “Did Mr. Harper use gas or liquid scintillation technology?”

  “No, of course not,” said Nicola.

  “Then you don’t have the most accurate tests possible,” Carys said. “I have a lab in La Jolla that can get us a date within sixteen years of the day they killed the goats. I also intend to send some of the sand and dust particles away to see if we can confirm anything about the provenance that Mr. Harper recited. It’s all supposition, as you know.”

  “The manuscript is so fragile as it is,” Nicola said, placing a hand on her hip.

  Carys laughed.

  “That book was built to last forever,” she said. “It’ll outlive us both and look the better for it.”

  “Do what you must,” said Nicola. She left the kitchen and walked up the grand staircase out of sight.

  Carys spent the next hour selecting a piece of parchment to use for the dating. She eventually chose a section from the last page of the manuscript that had very little of Lestinus’s writing on it—just Lestinus’s final words. “Et nunc reclinat, patriamque navigamus. Dei gratia Riothamus Arcturus. Suscitate viveque.” “And now he rests. We sail home. God save Riothamus Arcturus. Wake and live.”

  She took the tiniest piece of parchment she could, using a custom blade designed to slice this material. She placed the piece carefully in a tiny glass jar. Then, using a sterilized brush, she swept particles of dust, sand, and whatever else was hiding in the manuscript, from between the pages into another glass jar. She labeled them both with a code and put them in her briefcase. She let herself out of the house.

  She posted the parchment via overnight FedEx to a lab in California she’d used before, labeled her request urgent, and included the billing information of the Harper estate. They were expecting the package tomorrow. The testing team at the lab, renowned for its accuracy, would extract a testable section of the sample and she’d have the results immediately. She’d paid for speed—or the Harper estate had.

  She drove the dust sample over to an acquaintance at the chemistry department at Harvard. She knew him through her work at Sothington’s, and he occasionally did her favors like this as a way to train his doctoral students on spectral imaging, and chemical and mineral analysis.

  That afternoon, she returned to the mansion and began the work of confirming the names and places found in the manuscript. She quickly developed a routine. First, she’d read a section of the monk’s Latin writing using the photocopied x-ray of the journal, Lestinus’s words materializing up through the newer writing like an apparition. Next, she’d confirm that Nicola’s translation of the Latin was to her liking. Then, using the index, she’d identify the corroborating material in the library. When she completed that, she returned to the vault to read the next section.

  Every four or five rounds, she’d stick her nose into the spine of the ancient manuscript itself for a good deep sniff.

  At first, the inhaling was just for the pleasure of experiencing the ancient odor of the parchment, a warm, earthy smell that was part barnyard, part perfume—her definition of perfume anyway. But after a few times, she began to get a little high. There was a light-headedness, a pleasant little whoosh that made her feel slightly giddy and, oddly, clearer and more able to quickly process the Latin. It was addictive. She’d never experienced anything like it when she inhaled the scent of other ancient manuscripts.

  Using the index that she’d been so disheartened by on her first day in the Harper library, Carys quickly cross-referenced the various place names in the manuscript to the original material that Harper had accumulated. Many original administrative documents, to her surprise, did in fact list the names of both Lestinus and Riothamus Arcturus. They included census documents, bills of lading—innocuous slips of parchment recording the number of sheep sold to someone, from whom they had been purchased, and how much gold had changed hands. There were letters; there were activity reports from scouts. It was all the business of the last, fading days of the Romano-British empire, with its magistrates and local leaders rearranging the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic.

  Instilling order, thought Carys. It is how we humans survive. Create a routine in the face of chaos, terror, madness. It won’t save you, but you’ll live a little longer with the illusion of normalcy. Sometimes that’s all you need to make it through the day. Sometimes, that next day is when the chaos begins to end.

  And sometimes not.

  Carys spent the rest of the day reconstructing Harper’s work, which was proving flawless. She knew she would be expected to visit him soon and report on her work, even though he would likely just smile, roll his crazy eyes, and say, “I told you so.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  The West Newton sky was a thick blanket of indigo fringed by an orange glow coming from the lights of Boston five miles away. Carys got out of her car and went into her apartment, put on her sweatpants and a T-shirt, fed Harley, made and ate a tuna sandwich, got a glass of wine, and plonked down on her red leather chair with a modern translation of Gildas’s bitchy little indictment of the British kings, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, originally composed, it was believed, in the mid-500s. Her work on Lestinus’s manuscript was just retracing steps that someone else had already taken, but it still gave her forward momentum. And she hadn’t laid eyes on George Plourde for days, which was a lovely thing.

  Around nine-thirty, her lids grew heavy, her head dropped, then jerked up, only to drop down again and stay down for about an hour. When she woke up, she realized that she was drooling slightly. She stroked Harley, who had ensconced himself on her lap on top of the book. She picked up the cat and gently placed him on the floor.

  “Time for bed, furry boy,” she said, rubbing sleep from her eyes with the other hand. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw movement back in the hallway behind her. She turned sharply to her left.

  There, in the middle of the hall, stood a man.

  She gasped and froze.

  The man was perfectly still, looking straight at her. He wasn’t tall, but he looked big because of the robe he wore, made of a dark woolen fabric, belted at the waist with a rope. His head w
as shaved. He was smiling ever so slightly.

  She wanted to scream, but it got stuck in her throat. After what felt like an hour of staring straight at the man, she forced herself to move.

  She leapt from the chair, ran into the kitchen through the dining room, and grabbed a butcher knife from the holder on the counter. Adrenaline pulsed so hard through her veins that she thought her heart would explode. She swung around the other exit to the kitchen and into the hallway to face the intruder, ready to do whatever she had to do to protect herself.

  He was gone.

  “Get out of my house!” she screamed. She ran into the living room as Harley flew out of it and back down the hall. “Get out of my house or I will kill you!”

  She moved in a circle, scanning the room.

  There was nothing there that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  She ran to the door that led to the outside stair landing. It was still dead-bolted from the inside. All the windows in the living room were closed and locked.

  The adrenaline sent electric shocks up her arms and legs, keeping her body prepared to fight.

  Knife held out in front of her like a flashlight, she crept back down the hallway to investigate the bedroom. Both it and its clothes closet were empty, and there were no broken windows or signs of disturbance.

  She backed out of the bedroom and returned to the hall. The bathroom door was ajar.

  Standing in front of it, heart pounding wildly, she lifted one foot and kicked it in, and it slammed open against the bathroom wall.

  Nothing.

  She moved slowly, her hand slightly shaking, to the shower. She listened with every ounce of concentration for the sound of someone breathing or moving. There was no sound. She reached out, grabbed the curtain and yanked it back, her knife held high.

  No one.

  Her mind began to spin. Where the hell did he go? Should she call the cops?

  A moment later, unfazed by the outburst or the door slamming, Harley brushed against her leg, purring. Harley hated strangers and would have been hiding underneath her bed if there had been someone else in the apartment.

  She turned slowly around one last time, looking for anything out of place. She examined the floor for dirt, or large footprint impressions on the deep Persian carpet, any sign at all that someone else had been in the apartment.

  She found none.

  It was just a dream. It had to be. Please let it be a dream.

  7

  Friday, June 15

  Frank sat in his rented Ford Focus in the parking lot of the Home Depot in South Cove. There were no quaint brownstones, there was no ocean, no Red Sox. Just a freeway, industrial parks, and what looked like acres of run-down council flats. It looked like his hometown of Tottenham, a neighborhood north of central London where you did not want to find yourself alone at night, or during the day.

  It was a mystery why George Plourde had chosen this busy place to meet when there were so many other remote locations not under twenty-four-hour surveillance, like a beach or park. Plourde was probably scared to be alone with him. Rightly.

  At 9:00 a.m., a black Jaguar XJ pulled up next to the Ford. The driver wore a tweed jacket and a light-green silk pocket square, all resting atop a mountain of stomach that barely fit behind the Jag’s steering wheel. He had never met Plourde before. So far, he wasn’t impressed.

  The man looked over at him and nodded dourly.

  Here we go, Frank thought.

  He’d been hearing about this guy for years. Plourde started out as just another auction house executive, sourcing legal antiquities and art for the personal collection of Martin Gyles, world-renowned antiquities repatriation expert. It had all been aboveboard and legal. But at some point, Gyles learned that he and Plourde had something in common: they both had a second, less savory but far more profitable business. Plourde trafficked illegal items to unsuspecting customers, and along the way, he’d become an expert at creating fake but extremely authentic-looking provenance documents—customs forms and bills of lading, old sales agreements and invoices, or any type of document commonly used to prove a legal ownership trail. Gyles said they were the best he’d ever seen.

  At first, Gyles dealt with Plourde anonymously. Gyles ran his illicit businesses under the pseudonym JB—the initials of James Brian, his deceased older brother. None of his customers or suppliers had ever met JB—well, they sometimes did, but they didn’t realize it. JB maintained a network of secure and completely anonymous, hack-proof and encrypted electronic channels, bank accounts, and phones. When Gyles needed a human involved, he deployed Frank, and if he wasn’t available, Tommy. They were the only two people who knew Gyles’s true identity. Gyles had been very good, perfect in fact, at keeping his two lives completely separate. Even Frank and Tommy had never spoken to or met each other, although they were well aware of each other’s existence.

  But Plourde offered access to a new, lucrative line of business. To be exploited, Gyles had to reveal his other identity to the man. Gyles had taken the risk that it would be worth it, and so far, he’d been right.

  Thanks to Plourde’s exceptional ability to make illegal items look perfectly legit, and sell them into extremely reputable collections via Sothington’s, many of those same trafficked items were finding their way into museum collections. Their deal was this: Plourde would tip off Gyles when one of these illegal items showed up in a museum collection, and Gyles would report the presence of the trafficked objects—discovered by “complete chance”—to officials in the object’s country of origin. Then he’d extract a heavy repatriation consulting fee from said government. He’d give a cut to Plourde. The two men profited from both ends, and their deal helped Gyles burnish his professional reputation. They always waited until the item was several sales removed from Sothington’s, so no reputational damage befell Plourde or the auction house. The few times the illegal items were traced back to Sothington’s, Plourde’s fake documentation proved as convincing to the authorities as it had to his buyers.

  Even Frank had to admit it was a bloody brilliant setup. Only he, Plourde, and Gyles knew the extent of one another’s involvement in this international scam, but they had so much dirt on one another that their silence was sealed by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Of course, the destruction of he and Plourde was far more assured than that of Gyles if something went amiss.

  Frank got into the passenger side of the Jag.

  “Nice wheels,” he said. Plourde’s cologne, or the car freshener, or whatever it bloody was, nearly choked him. He pressed the electric window button to let in some fresh air.

  “Nice to meet you finally, after all these years.” Plourde extended his hand.

  “Likewise,” he said, roughly shaking Plourde’s hand. “Let’s make this brief. I’d like to get to my hotel for some kip before I get started.”

  Plourde looked confused.

  “Sleep,” Frank said. “I need a nap.”

  “Right,” said Plourde.

  “Do you have the picture, address, all that?”

  “I’ve got everything you need,” said Plourde. “I should probably give you a little background on Carys Jones.”

  Gyles had warned him about Plourde and his stories. “Pretend you respect him,” Gyles had said. “He’ll do anything you want.” Frank settled in and turned toward Plourde.

  “My source at the asylum is a nurse’s assistant who—”

  “I don’t need to know who your sources are,” he said. “They’d probably prefer it that way, huh?”

  “Of course. Right. Anyway, Carys Jones. She’s a rare-book authenticator. Very good at what she does, but a total bitch. She’s cute, late thirties, doesn’t have a pot to piss in, essentially an orphan as far as I know,” Plourde said. “Keeps to herself. She has a cat. She was authenticating the Harper collection for the private sale to Mr. Gyles, as you may know,
but then things went, well, they got confused.”

  “That happens in this business,” said Frank. “Nothing that can’t be handled.”

  “May I ask what Mr. Gyles wants with her?” asked Plourde.

  “He’ll loop you in later,” he said. That would not happen.

  “Great. Whatever it is, if you decided to use a little more force than strictly necessary on Ms. Jones,” said Plourde, “I would consider it a personal favor to me. As a thank-you for my assistance in this matter.”

  Frank leaned ever so slightly toward Plourde. Plourde backed away.

  “Aren’t you already being well thanked?” he asked.

  Plourde’s ruddy cheeks drained of their color.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Plourde. He fiddled with his pocket square. “I’ve got a briefcase in the trunk. It’s got a photo of Jones, brief bio, home address, the address of the Harper mansion, and a handgun. It’s unregistered, serial number scrubbed. Box of bullets as well.”

  “Brilliant. I’ll grab it and be on my way.”

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?” asked Plourde.

  “No,” said Frank. “We’ll take it from here. You received your payment for service and the weapon already, yeah?”

  “Yes,” said Plourde.

  “Then we’re through for now. Thank you for your help,” he said. “Pop the boot, and when I close it, drive away. Cheers.”

  “Happy hunting,” said Plourde.

  He hopped out of the car, and the trunk swung open. He grabbed the brown leather briefcase out of the back, closed the trunk, and knocked on it twice. Plourde drove slowly away.

  Frank got back in his car and dialed Gyles.

  “I’ve got what I need here,” he said. “I’m going to scope out the locations. Make contact later today. Should have something in hand by end of day. Anything new on your end that I should know about?”

  “No,” said Gyles.

  The chair squeaked on the other end of the line. The sound always made Frank’s hair stand on end. Gyles’s low, slow voice came through the phone.