56
Marcas could never sleep well in a hotel, and this night was no exception. He had spent the better part of it smoking and thinking. If you could call it thinking.
His mind was torn between the information he had to process and the woman with bruises on her wrists and ankles sleeping in the room next to his.
Now he knew what was written on the Tebah Stone. Jade had told him about the dying man’s delirium, and his repeated mention of a stone and the word bvitti. They would never know who the man was, but he had contributed a significant piece to the puzzle. Then there was what that female assassin had added about the archeologist’s report, about it being a substance that could “seed the mind with prophesies.”
Bvitti. The word was familiar. He’d read it somewhere, but where? He pulled out his laptop.
It took him a good half hour to find an article on a site on African religions. French ethnologists had studied initiation rites practiced in a village in the jungles of Gabon. The village was in a large area belonging to the Mitsogo tribe.
Bwiti was both a religion and a science that enabled its initiates — who underwent a secret three-day rebirth ceremony — to enter another spiritual dimension where they could communicate with their ancestors and come to understand the relationship of the earth and the beyond.
To experience Bwiti, an initiate would ingest the root bark of a sacred plant, Tabernanthe iboga. The sacred chemical substance was ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid. It had powerful hallucinogenic properties and purportedly didn’t cause dependency. In fact, it had been used in the West since the mid-nineteen eighties to treat cocaine and alcohol addiction.
Jouhanneau would be thrilled. He would have the second ingredient.
As Marcas read the article, a shiver ran up his spine. The coincidence was troubling.
There are striking similarities between Bwiti and Freemason initiation rites. Ultimately, the outcome is the same: knowledge of the mystery of the beyond, which Freemasons call the sublime secret. More surprising, however, is that the Freemason ritual uses three strikes of the mallet in memory of the assassination of Hiram, the architect of the Temple of Salomon, because of his refusal to reveal the sublime secret.
The researchers noted that during the Bwiti ceremony, “the initiate was struck three times on the head to free his spirit.”
It was almost too much for Marcas to take in. How could the Bwiti practice find itself inscribed on a Hebraic stone several centuries old? Perhaps via Egyptian merchants who had contact with African tribes or perhaps via Ethiopian traders, which also sent expeditions into deepest Africa.
His imagination was running wild. Did Sheba, the queen of Ethiopia conquered by King Solomon, offer this plant to the Hebrews?
His mind exhausted, he closed his laptop and went to bed. In the morning, his eyes were red, and his face was pale and hollow. He’d hardly gotten three hours of sleep.
Marcas stretched and walked over to the window. Dawn was chasing away the final scraps of night. He couldn’t get the Thule off his mind. Who were these people who could kidnap a trained army officer like Jade in the middle of Paris to drug and torture her for some fantasmagoric secret? The same people who had killed his brothers in other times and places?
He picked up his phone and called Jouhanneau again.
“Marcas here.” He quickly briefed Jouhanneau on Zewinski’s kidnapping, her sequestration with the dying man in a state of delirium, and her flight and rescue. He told Jouhanneau that they had taken refuge in a hotel run by a brother.
Then he shared his discoveries about Bwiti.
“You’ve caught up with the Thule,” Jouhanneau said. “Now you need the third ingredient and the dosage. Go to Plaincourault, where that eighteenth-century Freemason du Breuil wanted to create the new ritual.”
“The shadow ritual.”
“One of the keys to the ritual is in the fresco. You both have to get to Plaincourault as soon as possible.”
“Hold on, brother. We’re not trying to make this drug. We’re after killers.”
“Did you catch anyone?”
“Well, no. By the time the police arrived, they’d burned down the estate. I’m presuming the bodies in the ashes weren’t theirs. We need to track them.”
“Sophie was in Plaincourault before she went to Rome. She left me a message about an extraordinary fresco in the chapel. I’m sure it holds a key.”
“Listen, our priority is—”
Jouhanneau’s voice hardened. “A lot is at stake. The fresco is apparently a representation of the original sin. Eve’s temptation. The missing link — and maybe a code, a formula — is in there. Call me when you get to Plaincourault.”
Jouhanneau ended the call.
Marcas sipped his hot chocolate. He thought about the Breuil papers and how the man had insisted on a pit with a bare-rooted bush in the center. Was it coincidence that some people referred to the iboga as the Garden of Eden’s tree of knowledge?
They were getting closer. But closer to what? They had two ingredients: iboga and Saint Anthony’s fire. Just one more ingredient and they’d have the mind-blowing cocktail. But Marek had found something on the stone, something relating to a substance that “would seed the mind with prophesies.” The danger was evident. The wrong dosage could mean the difference between heaven and hell, between the gates of horn and ivory.
Marcas pushed his hot chocolate aside. It was all too much, and none of it seemed to be getting him any closer to the reason he was here in the first place — finding Sophie’s killers.
57
Frozen fries dumped in a burning-hot vat of oil of indeterminate age and origin, with greasy sausage on the side. Jade dabbed some ketchup on the fries to give them a pop of color, then scowled.
“Who eats this stuff?” she said.
Marcas looked in the rearview mirror and changed lanes to pass a camper. A little girl in the camper stuck out her tongue. Zewinski made a scary face in return, and the girl screamed and turned away. The parents glared. Marcas sped up, and the fries fell on Zewinski’s pants.
“Careful. This damned junk food just stained my pants.”
Marcas smiled. “Send the cleaning bill to Darsan. He’ll be thrilled.”
“You really couldn’t find anything more suitable to eat?” she said, holding up a limp fry. “This is an insult to gastronomy in general and potatoes in particular. And I won’t even mention this soggy thing they call sausage. It even stinks.”
“There wasn’t anything else at the service station. No sandwiches, no salads, nothing. And you were sleeping. Just another hour, and we’ll be there. We can find something to eat then.”
Zewinski put the food back in the paper bag and tossed it in the backseat. She made herself comfortable. They drove by forests, followed by monotonous fields that she found reassuring.
By the time Darsan had gotten his team to Chevreuse to arrest the Orden members, smoky ruins were all that was left. The firefighters had found six bodies, and everyone in the area sincerely lamented the loss of the people at the French Association for the Study of Minimalist Gardens, especially the nice Dutch gardener.
Zewinski hadn’t reacted at the news of the fire. Darsan wanted to see them for a debriefing, but she had agreed to go along with Marcas’s plan. She told Darsan that they were following a new lead and wouldn’t be back until the next day. Zewinski was thinking about the crazies who had held her hostage and were now running free. A human life was nothing to them, nothing more than an opportunity to practice their absurd doctrine.