Her time was up. What a crappy session. She’d hit twelve out of twenty. She was getting sloppy. She kept seeing Sophie’s smashed face. And worse, she didn’t believe for a minute that they would find her friend’s murderer. How could they identify a killer in Rome when they were in Paris? Jade set her weapon and ear muffs on the small counter to her right and signaled to the shooting-range manager that she was finished.
On her way out, she saw a former lover, a special ops commander.
“Jade? How are you?”
“Fine. Just back from Rome, and you?”
“Shh, state secret.”
“You can cut the act. I know what happened in the Ivory Coast last year. I heard you were there. It wouldn’t have been you who took out those two Sukhoi planes at the Abidjan airport?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, right before the Ivorians bombed one of our bases, killing nine French soldiers.”
“Really?”
“Too bad for you. I could have told you who took out the two Belarusians who piloted the planes. It happened in a Budapest whorehouse.”
“You can’t get me to talk.”
“Go to hell. But give me a call if you’re in Paris for a while.”
“Promise. Later.”
Jade watched him walk off. She missed special ops, and the more she thought about it, the more she wondered if making the switch to security had been the right decision. It had seemed like a good idea, but now she was back in Paris and couldn’t get her bearings. Too many years on the road, running from her past. Her sinister offices made her stir-crazy, and her apartment felt too small.
And then there was Marcas. Every time she saw him, she wanted to slap him, just for fun. He acted so superior, and his sententious Freemason history lessons were seriously getting on her nerves. She had pulled up his file — and was sure he’d pulled up hers. He was divorced, lived alone, and appeared to be interested in only his job and Freemason history, although she did note that he wasn’t averse to an occasional one-nighter.
Definitely not her type. He was pleasant enough to look at, but not boy candy. He seemed so steadfast, in a soothing kind of way. But he was a damned Freemason. Her first reaction was to run.
He brought back memories of that horrible day, seventeen years earlier.
She had skipped school to stay home and listen to the new Cure album. Her mother was a doctor and was away on a weeklong conference. Her father, a chemical-products trader who ran his own business, left early every morning.
The day had started off beautifully. Sunlight was filtering through the trees in the heavily wooded yard. She opened the door of the large, silent house to let some air in and started heading up to her room. She stopped when she heard a noise in her parents’ room at the end of the hallway. She was paralyzed. She had assumed that her father was gone, but what if he was running late and was still in the house? She would be in huge trouble if he found her. He would ground her, and she’d miss that weekend trip to Normandy with her friends.
But what if it wasn’t her dad? Maybe it was thieves. She panicked, ran into her room, and hid under her bed. She heard someone walking in the hallway, past her bedroom and down the stairs, toward her father’s office. One person. She crept farther under the bed and tried to make herself tiny. She heard the steps again. It was her father. She was sure from the way he was walking. But then again, maybe not. She hoped he would leave soon. Things hadn’t been going so well for him. Some people had come twice to take things away, and she had overheard her parents talking about closing the business.
Jade waited twenty minutes. Then a shot broke the silence. She slid out from under her bed, rushed down the stairs, and opened the office door.
Paul Zewinski lay in his old leather chair, his head to one side, his eyes wide open, blood pooling on the floor. She screamed and ran out of the house. She ran and ran until she collapsed. If only she had forced herself to crawl out from under the bed instead of hiding. If only she hadn’t been so afraid. She could have saved him.
The family attorney had explained that a competitor had conspired against the family, and the court had liquidated the business to pay off its debts. The attorney added that the two people behind all of this were Freemasons. At the time, Jade didn’t know who Freemasons were, but the word sounded like an insult. As far as she was concerned, her own cowardice had played as much a role in her father’s suicide as the Freemasons. She dealt with her lack of courage by choosing a high-risk profession. But she still needed to take care of the Freemasons. She had a score to settle.
31
Sophie Dawes had been an excellent archivist. Each document was identified, numbered, and described in detail.
Her analysis was systematic and thorough. She had followed every lead and had run all her theories through to the finish. She was clearly passionate about the subject.
In any case, he understood why these documents had intrigued her. The first papers were ordinary: archives dating from 1801 and 1802 that had belonged to a lodge in the provinces, near Châteauroux. There were presentations, architectural plans, and internal letters, all by the same person: Alphonse du Breuil, the worshipful master of the very respectable Les Amis Retrouvés de la Parfaite Union lodge.
Sophie Dawes had done a comparative study of the lodge’s name without finding anything unusual. From the beginning of the empire, lodges were founded with names related to the virtues of fraternal friendship. It was a way to move past the rifts of the revolution and celebrate a new era.
Worshipful Master Alphonse du Breuil was an archetypal Freemason of his times. He had been initiated before the revolution and in 1793 had joined the army of the French Republic. He participated in the Italian campaign in 1796 and was promoted to lieutenant after being wounded in the leg. In 1799, he took part in the Egyptian expedition as a military attaché with Napoleon Bonaparte’s scientific corps. He reappeared in France at the end of 1800, having left the army as a captain. He purchased land in the Brenne region in central France and declared his support for the new constitution and the first consul, Napoleon Bonaparte.
When the Napoleonic Empire was established four years later, he sought to establish a lodge and requested approval from the Grand Orient of France, the only official Masonic authority in the country.
Marcas could see that this was where things had gotten complicated for Sophie. She had transcribed all the letters between Alphonse de Breuil and the heads of the Grand Orient de France, who were responsible for verifying every lodge. It was clear that neither side was listening to the other.
Breuil wanted to use his own rituals and create his own temple on his land in a hamlet called Plaincourault. That sounded reasonable enough, but the blueprints for the temple had shocked the Grand Orient. Breuil wanted a temple shaped like a screw — at least that was what came to Marcas’s mind when he saw the drawing.
When the Grand Orient expressed its doubts, Breuil asserted that the temple was inspired by religious buildings he had seen in Egypt. Sophie had added “incoherent” in the margin.
Breuil mentioned the design in only one other letter, where he specified that the center of the temple, where there was usually a mosaic, would have “a pit with a bush and exposed roots.” This pit was a key symbol, he said, because it was only in the birth of life underground that the seven heavens could be attained.
According to Sophie’s research, there were no other traces of the ritual envisioned by Breuil, even though it evidently existed, because several letters from the Grand Orient mentioned the rite. In one letter, an official expressed surprise at the importance Breuil gave to the traditional bitter drink initiates were required to consume as a symbol of the difficulty of following the true Masonic path.