Gold of Kings Read online

  Harry said, “What else.”

  “A platter for the show bread. Solid gold.” Storm looked up. “This is where it gets interesting.”

  Emma had shifted over so that her shoulder and her arm were in tight contact with Harry. “What’s it been up to now?”

  Harry liked how he could keep his voice easy. “The lady sure knows how to make an entrance.”

  “The last three items,” Storm said. “The breastplate, the crown, and the golden vine.

  “The breastplate first, the chosen ha-mispat. This was worn by the High Priest. According to Josephus, he wore two or three sets of robes, depending upon the ceremony or the festival. Over that came the ephod, the waistcoat. The breastplate went on top, and was inset with twelve jewels in three rows of four. Each jewel was inscribed with a name of one of the tribes. The breastplate itself was solid gold and connected to the ephod by two gold buckles. There was also a gold chain that went around the priest’s neck.”

  “Which meant it was heavy enough to need double support,” Harry said.

  “Next, the crown. Also worn by the High Priest when he entered the Holy of Holies. It was solid gold and shaped in three tiers. The crown also had a gold forehead plate, upon which was inscribed the name of God.

  “And finally, the vine. This was something new. Josephus describes this in great length. He actually states this was Herod’s idea. The vine itself was a golden rod that ran across the top of the main temple doors. The rod was five inches thick, if my calculations are right, so I’m assuming that, even though it may have been made of real gold, the rod was probably a pipe, with a hollow core.”

  Harry repeated, “Across the main temple doors.”

  “That’s right,” Storm said. “Both of them.”

  “How big is that?”

  “Forty feet.”

  “A solid-gold pipe forty feet long.”

  “According to Josephus, it became a practice of Jews coming to Jerusalem from wherever they had been scattered to buy a golden leaf and have it attached to the rod, or vine. This symbolized their being rejoined to the family of Israel. Paul also refers to that in the New Testament, as Christians are grafted onto the vine.”

  She stopped. Folded her notes. Stowed them and the phone away. Waited.

  Emma said, “What comes next?”

  “I’ve located the positions of the first three Christian settlements. We need to check those out. And then something else, a long shot. I found a mention in the Smithsonian archives of an article from a Cyprus English language newspaper. The newspaper doesn’t have a Web site. I need to go to their offices and check their back copies.”

  “Where’s the paper?”

  “Lefkosa. The Turkish side.”

  “How do we get there?”

  Harry said, “I’ve been working on that.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  HARRY HAD FIGURED THEY WOULD need to hit the island’s northern side sooner or later. And do so quietly. He had visited the place twice while on salvage ops in the eastern Med. The southern side, the Greek side, was a European nation in the making. Investment capital was flooding in, as well as waves of tourists from all over Europe.

  North Cyprus, on the other hand, was the Wild West of the Med.

  What had actually caused the island’s partition depended on who was talking. Harry had heard both sides and figured there was enough blame to spread around, with plenty left over for Britain, Turkey, Greece, and the United Nations. The latest began some forty years ago, when the mainland Greek government made threatening moves and Turkey responded by landing seventy thousand troops on the island’s northern shores. As the military pushed south, almost two hundred thousand Greek Cypriots fled in their path. Bloody reprisals began in the island’s southern half against Turkish families who had lived there for centuries. In the north, many Greeks who refused to leave their homes were never heard from again.

  Forty years later, North Cyprus remained a pariah state, shunned by the UN and officially recognized only by Turkey. Adding fuel to the flames, North Cyprus had opened its doors to emigration from Turkey, drawing fifty thousand new inhabitants from the poorest farming villages of Anatolia. These families occupied farms whose titles still belonged to Greek families.

  Recently there had been an even more volatile set of newcomers. Smugglers operating throughout the Arab world saw North Cyprus as a safe haven. They invested in new houses and apartments erected on Greek-owned land. Every time a new Middle East crisis brewed, speedboats crisscrossed the Mediterranean, ferrying families and goods and guns.

  As soon as Harry told the taxi driver at Larnaca Airport what he had in mind, the three of them had an ally. The driver was short and severely bowlegged. His shock of white hair was startlingly bright against darkly tanned skin. Harry had been hoping for an older guy. He figured someone who had lived through the troubles might be more sympathetic.

  The idea had come to him while reading the International Herald Tribune article on the Bosphorus ferry. What they needed was a way over the border without being noticed. At the time, Harry hadn’t been thinking specifically about the assassin. He was just using a treasure dog’s love of guile.

  The driver’s English was limited to a few words and a lot of hand gestures. He pointed to the women’s shorts and said, “No good for Agios Mamas.”

  Harry asked, “You ladies pack any long pants?”

  “It’s hot,” Storm protested.

  “It’ll be dark in a few hours. Things will cool off.”

  But the driver wasn’t done. He flattened his hands down both sides of his face, then formed a knot below his chin. Harry interpreted, “And you’ll need head scarves.”

  The driver took them around the outskirts of Larnaca and stopped at a market for locals. He personally selected two brightly colored scarves and bartered on their behalf.

  When Harry then said he needed three backpacks, the driver gave him a knowing squint. “You no come back?”

  “You have a problem with that?”

  “My family is from Salamis. You know?”

  “In the north.”

  “Yes. Now city’s name is Famagusta. My father, he stay to…” The driver stood as if holding a rifle at parade rest.

  Harry supplied, “He stayed to guard your home.”

  “Home, land, sheep. Many sheep. We farm sheep, olives. My father…” The driver blew on his fingers. Dust in the wind. “Never word. Nothing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The driver motioned with his chin to where the women returned from changing in a café restroom, carrying a sack of drinks and sandwiches. “Your friends, now they are ready.”

  “Maybe you should come too.”

  “When land is ours, yes. Land, farm, sheep. Now, is nothing.” The driver handed Harry two long candles he had purchased in the market. “You light these for me, yes? In church. One for father and one for family.”

  “I’d be honored.”

  The driver clapped him on the shoulder. “Is good.”

  Harry handed a backpack to each of the women. “Take only what you can carry. We’ll replace the rest later.”

  The drive to the border took another forty minutes. The road paralleled the Trodos Mountains. Storm sat in front and constantly shifted about, watching the mountains, the driver, the road, the broad central plain they traversed. Heading north.

  The Tribune’s article had stated that after thirty years of padlocks and steel shutters and graffiti, the Church of Agios Mamas was to reopen. For two weeks.

  The most famous church in Cyprus was over one thousand six hundred years old. The church itself had long been an icon, revered as a place of prayer and miraculous healings. But for the past thirty years the Turkish army had used it as a grain warehouse.

  Three years earlier, a Greek Cypriot had flown a hot-air balloon up next to the border and shot the church through a bazooka lens. Photographs of the decrepit weed-strewn building had been cut from the local magazine, mailed to displaced frie
nds and relatives, and posted on thousands of walls around the world. The church was home to more than the remains of Cyprus’s patron saint. It symbolized all that had been lost in the island’s division.

  The island’s situation was grave and growing ever more entrenched. One of Kofi Annan’s last efforts before retiring as UN secretary-general had been to broker a peace accord. Annan had wanted to make a reunified Cyprus the jewel in his legacy’s crown. He had failed. Turkish Cyprus had voted in favor, but the Greek Cypriots had turned Annan’s proposal down flat. The Greeks wanted their land back. They wanted a unified island under a single government ruled by a Greek majority. They wanted the fifty thousand Turkish immigrants to be expelled. Until then, they were determined to use their growing power within the European Union to keep Turkish Cyprus isolated. Shunned. Banned from the worlds of finance and tourism and politics and progress.

  Recently North Cyprus had elected a new government. This new government wanted to renegotiate. As a symbol of good faith, the new Turkish Cypriot government cleaned up the church and erected a temporary border crossing.

  Up to now, rules governing the border changed from week to week, sometimes hour to hour. The Greek side instituted some change, and the Turks retaliated. One day, visas went from being free to costing five hundred dollars. The next, visa applications went from a few verbal questions to running twenty pages. The following week, only non-Cypriots could pass. Then only EU citizens. Or Cypriots could cross to the other side only once a year. Or only for a week, a day, or sunrise to sunset, or they could remain only within the confines of Nicosia.

  Not everyone within the new North Cyprus regime was in favor of change. A lot of people made a lot of money from the status quo. These opponents couldn’t stop the event, but they could make it as difficult as possible. The church and the border crossing would reopen for just three days. No vehicles were permitted to cross. All visitors were required to walk the five miles from the border to the church. Journalists and photographers were forbidden.

  Harry knew they had arrived because the traffic simply congealed. People began pulling to the side of the road—buses, campers, farm tractors pulling trailers piled high with people. They passed dozens of people in wheelchairs. Hundreds.

  “Ladies, scarves.” Harry handed out the packs, asked the driver, “You’ll take care of the suitcases?”

  “Is no problem.” He accepted the payment, shook Harry’s hand, waved to the ladies, and was gone.

  They were close enough to the front for Harry to watch the system collapse. The border was a pair of barbed-wire fences thirty feet high, with fifty yards of no-man’s-land between the Greek and Turkish sides. When the Greek soldiers lifted the bright yellow barriers, the crowd surged forward. At the procession’s head walked a row of black-robed orthodox priests. Each priest held an icon, a framed portrait of some bearded saint. As they approached the Turkish side they lifted the icons over their heads. The Turkish soldiers cranked open the gates, then shouted and gestured for the oncoming crowd to split in two and head for the pair of grey trailers set up as temporary customs sheds.

  The priests kept moving straight ahead.

  The soldiers shouted and gestured angrily. The crowd kept coming. The soldiers raised their weapons. Taking that as some kind of signal, many within the crowd raised up icons of their own. Thousands of icons, their heavy gold frames glinting in the sun. The people who weren’t carrying icons held bunches of candles. No one spoke. They simply kept moving.

  Beside Harry, Emma took a long, tense breath.

  An officer stood on the back of a jeep and shouted something. The soldiers backed off, moving to the side of the road. The people surged forward.

  When they made it past the barrier and were into North Cyprus, Emma said quietly, “This was your big idea?”

  “I guess I didn’t totally think it through,” Harry said.

  Emma started to say something more, but Storm said, “We’re in and there’s no record. Harry did right.”

  Emma looked at the younger woman but said nothing more.

  A mile farther on, Harry took over pushing a wheelchair because the old guy wheeling his wife looked totally done in. Harry’s head was growing so hot he was about ready to ask for one of the lady’s scarves. The sun burned through his shirt and evaporated the sweat almost before it formed. What the old lady in the chair thought of the heat, dressed as she was in head-to-toe black, she didn’t say. She sat with her gnarled fingers curled around her own personal icon, milky eyes fixed on the horizon. Her husband’s gaze was as tightly locked as his wife’s. A dozen or so tall white candles emerged from one coat pocket.

  Emma asked Harry, “Want me to take your pack?”

  “I’m good.”

  “You are, you know. Better than you give yourself credit for.”

  Storm glanced over and smiled. After that, Harry didn’t mind the sun so much.

  As they crested a rise, Harry took time to look behind. The road was packed, far as he could see, by a silent tide of people. In the far distance, people continued to pass through the border.

  As they approached the church, something remarkable happened. The road became rimmed by Turkish Cypriots. So many people they managed to gently shoulder the Turkish soldiers to the background.

  An old man stepped forward and murmured words as he handed the woman in the wheelchair a plastic cup of water. For the first time since the procession had entered North Cyprus, the woman’s gaze shifted from the church just ahead. Her eyes followed the old man back to the side of the road, then she turned and looked at her husband.

  A pair of middle-aged North Cypriot women stepped forward and pressed flowers into their hands—the old couple, then Storm, then Emma. One of the women smiled and patted Harry’s hand where it held the wheelchair. On and on the greetings came, a soft defiance against two regimes who had forgotten how the vast majority of Cypriots had lived in harmony for centuries.

  The Greeks responded with gifts of their own. They parceled out their loads of candles, until by the time Harry pushed the wheelchair through the church entrance, every set of hands he saw held either flowers or candles or both.

  At his word, Storm and Emma remained in the growing throng outside the church. Harry pushed the wheelchair inside and swiftly checked the place out. As expected, the church revealed nothing of any use. Faint shadows of ancient mosaics covered the walls and floors, but the decorations had long since been scraped off and sold on the black market. He lit the taxi driver’s candles, set them on the stand, and returned to the ladies just as the priests began the service.

  They slipped away as soon as dusk hid them. The road into Turkish Cyprus was strewn with buses and parked cars and taxis waiting for return fares, much the same as on the Greek side, only dingier. Storm and Emma clutched each other as they followed him, stunned to silence by a combination of the church service and sheer exhaustion. Harry found a taxi driver who agreed to take them to Lefkosa, as the Turkish side of the divided capital was now known. Before starting off, they all turned and gave the church another long look—Harry, the ladies, and the driver.

  Black fields stretched out beneath an almost full moon. A farmhouse in the vague distance cast a dim glow. Departing cars marked the road with headlights. The only other earthbound illumination came from the church, which was rimmed by candles. Thousands of candles. The church windows glowed like lanterns. The surrounding meadow was a sea of flickering lights. As he slipped into the taxi, Harry heard the crowd begin to sing again. There was an ancient cadence to the melody, one that carried the weight of centuries. Their taxi trundled off the verge and headed away, into the night.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE NEXT MORNING, STORM LISTENED to Emma’s soft breathing in the bed next to her own and recalled life in Palm Beach. Five-thirty in the morning was as close to Gothic as Palm Beach ever came. Mist often blanketed the predawn waterfront. The yachts docked along billionaires’ row were vague etchings of wealth sketched from impossibl
e dreams. Storm usually ran six miles, less if the humidity clogged her lungs. She often took it slow on her return down Worth Avenue, using parked cars as stretching rails and stopping for a bagel and coffee at her favorite side-street deli. She’d window shop with her breakfast, the street quiet enough for her dreams to thrive. The passage back to her shop and apartment were flanked by personal favorites. Chopard, the French jeweler, stood to her left, Bottega Veneta to her right. Across the street beckoned Hermès and Jimmy Choo. A girl could do a lot worse for neighbors. That morning she reflected on the utter strangeness of having a lifelong dream finally fulfilled, journeying through danger and mystery, searching for treasure. Yet here she lay, still bone weary after a full night’s sleep, yearning for the life she had left behind.

  A man’s heavy tread marched down the hotel hallway and stopped in front of their door. Storm had not realized that Emma was awake until the woman slipped from bed and moved to the door in one fluid motion. One hand held a pistol down by the trailing edge of her Redskins T-shirt. “Yes?”

  “It’s me.”

  Emma unlatched the door, the pistol glinting in the light filtering through the hotel room drapes. Harry stood holding a tray with coffee and toast. He took in her thigh-length nightshirt and gun and smirked. “I believe I’ve had that very poster on my wall.”

  Emma slipped the pistol back under her pillow as Harry stepped inside, shut the door, and deposited the tray on the table between their beds. “When you’re ready, there’s a place down the street where we can rent a car. I thought I’d go check out Salamis while you hit the newspaper archives.”

  “Thirty minutes,” Emma said.

  “I’ll see you ladies downstairs.”

  When he was gone, Storm accepted a cup from Emma and said, “I’ve been lying here missing the way things used to be.”

  “That makes two of us.” When Emma drained her cup, the cords of her neck stood out in taut precision. “Okay if I take the bathroom first?”