Pavel moaned and nodded, clearly not trusting himself yet to speak.
“Good.” Arkadin looked up at El Heraldo. “Have you finished with your fun?”
“The sonovabitch’s dead.” El Heraldo spat in the water with some satisfaction. “And now its friends have come to feast on it.”
Arkadin looked back down to Pavel and thought, It’s the same with this sonovabitch.
The man with the piercing blue eyes gestured. “Please sit down, Mr. Willard, would you like something to drink?”
“I could do with a whiskey,” Willard said.
The young man whom Willard had followed vanished, only to reappear moments later with a tray on which sat an old-fashioned glass with whiskey, a tumbler of water, and another of ice.
Someone else seemed to be walking on Willard’s legs, pulling out a chair, and sitting down at the refectory table. The young man set the three glasses in front of Willard, then went out the library door and closed it silently behind him.
“I don’t understand how you could be expecting me,” Willard said. Then he remembered his eight hours of scouring the Internet in search of information on the Monition Club. “My computer’s ISP number is protected.”
“Nothing is protected.” The man took hold of the book and, turning it around, pushed it over to Willard. “Tell me what you make of this.”
Willard looked down at an illustration of a series of letters and odd symbols. He recognized the Latin letters, but the others were unknown to him. Then a little thrill rippled down his spine. Unless he was mistaken, this series was the same as the engraving in the photos Oliver Liss had showed him and Peter Marks.
He looked up into those electric-blue eyes and said: “I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Tell me, Mr. Willard, are you a student of history?”
“I like to think so.”
“Then you know about King Solomon.”
Willard shrugged. “More than most, I imagine.”
The man across from him sat back and laced his fingers over his lean stomach. “Solomon’s life and times are steeped in myth and legend. As in the Bible, it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to discern truth from fiction. Why? Because his disciples had a vested interest in obscuring the truth. By far the most outrageous stories arose concerning the hoard of Solomon’s gold. Vast amounts that supposedly staggered the imagination. Historians and archaeologists now routinely ignore these stories as distorted or patently false. For one thing, where did all this gold come from? Solomon’s legendary mines? Even if the king had harnessed ten thousand slaves, he could not have amassed such a legendary hoard in his brief lifetime. So now it’s taken for gospel that there was no such thing as King Solomon’s gold.”
He leaned forward and tapped the book illustration with his crooked forefinger. “This string of letters and symbols tells a different story. It is a clue-but, oh, more than a clue, much more. It is a key telling those who would listen that King Solomon’s gold does, indeed, exist.”
Willard gave an involuntary chuckle.
“Has something struck you as amusing?”
“Forgive me, but I find this melodramatic gibberish hard to take seriously.”
“Well, you’re free to leave whenever you want. Now, if you wish.”
As the man was turning the open book back toward himself, Willard reached out and stopped him.
“I’d really rather not.” Willard cleared his throat. “You were speaking of truth versus fiction.” He paused only a moment. “Perhaps it would help if you told me your name.”
“Benjamin El-Arian. I’m one of a handful of resident scholars the Monition Club employs to deal with matters of ancient history and how it impacts the present.”
“Again, you’ll forgive me, but I don’t for a moment believe that I was suddenly and out of the blue granted an interview with a simple scholar after trolling through the Internet for eight hours trying to find source material on the Monition Club. No, Mr. El-Arian, though you may well be a scholar, that can hardly be all you are.”
El-Arian contemplated him for some time. “It seems to me, Mr. Willard, that you’re far too thoughtful and perceptive to find anything I say amusing.” He took the book and turned the page. “And please let us not forget that it was you who came here, seeking knowledge, presumably.” His eyes lit up in what might have been an instant of merriment. “Or were you thinking of seeking employment in order to infiltrate us as you did with the NSA?”
“I’m surprised you’re aware of that, it was hardly common knowledge.”
“Mr. Willard,” El-Arian said, “there isn’t anything about you we don’t know. Including your role in Treadstone.”
Ah, at last we come to the crux of the matter, Willard thought. He waited, his expression perfectly neutral, but watching Benjamin El-Arian as if El-Arian were a spider sitting in the center of his web.
“I know Treadstone is something of a hot-button issue with you,” El-Arian said, “so I’ll tell you what I know. Please don’t hesitate to correct me if I have any facts wrong. Treadstone was started by Alexander Conklin, inside Central Intelligence. His brainchild gave birth to only two graduates: Leonid Danilovich Arkadin and Jason Bourne. Now you have resurrected Treadstone, under the aegis of Oliver Liss, but almost immediately Liss is dictating to you even more than CI did to your predecessor.” He paused to give Willard time to correct him or make objections. When his guest remained silent, he nodded. “All this is prologue, however.” He tapped the open book again. “Since Liss has given you orders to find the gold ring with this engraving, it might interest you to know that he is not operating as an independent entity.”
Willard tensed. “So who am I actually working for?”
El-Arian’s smile held a sardonic edge. “Well, like all things in the matter, it’s complicated. The man who has been providing his funding and intel is Jalal Essai.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Nor should you have. Jalal Essai does not move in your circles. In fact, like me, Essai makes it his business to remain unknown to people like you. He’s a member of the Monition Club-or, rather, he was. You see, for some years this particular ring was presumed lost. It’s the only one of its kind, for reasons that will become clear to you momentarily.”
El-Arian rose and, crossing to a section of the bookcases, pressed a hidden stud. The section swung outward, revealing a tea service consisting of a chased brass pot, a plate with an array of tiny powdered cakes, and six glasses, each narrow as a shot glass but perhaps three times its height. He loaded them onto a tray and brought them back to the table.
In a ceremonial manner, he poured tea for them both, then gestured toward the plate of cakes for Willard to help himself. He settled himself, sipping and savoring his drink, which, Willard discovered, was sweet mint tea, a Moroccan staple.
“Back to the matter at hand.” El-Arian took a sweet and popped it in his mouth. “What the ring’s engraving told us was this: King Solomon’s gold is fact, not fiction. The engraving contains specific Ugaritic symbols. Solomon employed a platoon of seers. These seers, or some of them at any rate, were versed in alchemy. They had discovered that intoning certain Ugaritic words and phrases in conjunction with scientific procedures they developed could turn lead into gold.”
Willard sat stunned for a moment. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Lead into gold?” he said finally. “Literally?”
“Literally.” El-Arian popped another sweet into his mouth. “This is the answer to the seemingly unsolvable mystery I proposed before, namely, how Solomon amassed such a hoard of gold in his short lifetime.”
Willard shifted in his seat. “Is that what you people do here? Chase fairy tales?”
El-Arian produced one of his enigmatic smiles. “As I said, you’re free to leave anytime you wish. And yet you won’t.”