The eye of the lion

My confusion and excitement gave way to astonishment when I entered the van twenty minutes later, to see Jessica, still dressed as Nicole Kidman in “Moulin Rouge”, with a color photo from a digital camera in her hand.

I was dumbstruck: Jessica the cigarette-seller, my agent, had in a moment of brilliant audacity, taken a digital photograph of the interior of Waiss’ briefcase.

After I had personally scanned the photo right there in the van and brought it up on the computer screen, I looked at the image with immense interest, and what I saw only deepened my already unbearable curiosity: beneath the glass of the cryogenic chamber, clamped to its white base with tiny plastic clips, was what looked like a lock of hair.

That night on the plane to New York, as I was examining the data from the investigation that my team had loaded onto my computer that evening, including the information from that vital meeting between Waiss and Voquessi, I realized that without an explanation from Colonel Carter it would be almost impossible to move forward with the investigation.

There were so many blanks that only he could fill in, and without a satisfactory answer to my questions there would be no way for me to see the whole picture, so I could only blunder along, stumbling like a drunkard.

I picked up my phone and called the Colonel. We would meet up as soon as I landed at Kennedy.

That afternoon in New York, (or was it the evening? I hate the hassle of time-changes when I fly!) I found myself in a damp, cloudy city. It had been raining for several days and, as I read in the evening paper, the New York Times, in the taxi on my way to meet the Colonel, the water had already caused serious damage to the public transport system and huge floods in various parts of the city.

I arrived at the hotel in Manhattan where I was to stay that night, and, as arranged, I set off on foot to the Starbucks two blocks away, where the Colonel was waiting for me. The downpour had let up for a few minutes.

When I arrived at the cafe and found him at our usual table, I noticed that something wasn’t right. Despite his usual smile and the brightness of those blue eyes beneath his white hair still combed impeccably in the military style, something about

the old soldier had changed. He greeted me fondly, although he was obviously tense.

“Haile! How was your flight?”

“Fine,” I lied, “as usual.”

I sat down and ordered a cappuchino with Irish Cream. After a long silence, the Colonel looked at me with his deep sea-blue eyes and sighed.

“I read the stuff you emailed me from the plane.”

“Did you listen to the conversation as well?”

The Colonel took a draw of the cigar he’d just lit and nodded, and for the first time in a long time I saw a trace of anxiety in his eyes.

“Small problem,” he commented looking thoughtfully towards the coffee-shop entrance, keeping an eye out for any movement, an old habit he’d never lost since his days in active service for the government.

“Colonel, I need you to tell me what’s going on. If we want to finish this job successfully I need all the information you can give me.”

The Colonel nodded again. “I know, Haile,” he replied with a paternal tone to his voice. “Of course I know that... but this

time I can’t reveal the client’s identity to you. For your own safety. This job is... different.”

He was staring at me as he said it, and I couldn’t help shivering.

This was the first time in seven years that I had heard the Colonel utter those words and I realized something that made me shudder: The Colonel was afraid.

“As for the rest of it, what those two said in their conversation, I don’t think I know much more than you do.”

“What happened to Edward Kelly, Colonel?” I blurted out.

I knew very few details of the incident, as I had spent the whole of that year in Mexico investigating a notorious kidnapping. I only remembered what I’d seen on the news, which consisted merely of sensationalist conjectures, rumors, and morsels of gossip.

Edward Kelly had - supposedly - made an incredible architectural discovery which sent the world into a frenzy for two weeks, and transformed him from unknown archeology teacher at Cornell, into media superstar.

He claimed to have discovered, in a distant French hamlet called Renne-Le-Chateau, a tomb containing the mortal remains of Christ.

It was a world-wide bombshell. The media had a field-day, people talked of nothing else for weeks, and it became an international incident that surprisingly ended in tragedy.

One night a fire started in the crypt, and Kelly supposedly died trying to put it out. The cave collapsed, killing three people. All of the purported discoveries that Kelly had made were lost for ever. The French government (mysteriously) ordered the cave to be sealed up with concrete, and that was the end of the story that had turned the world upside-down. After a few days of a carefully planned smear campaign, Ed Kelly became little more than a phoney, a fraud, a clever manipulator of the media, who had tried to deceive the world with the so-called “Biggest Archeological Find in History” and who’d ended up as a victim of his own circus. A few months later, he was completely forgotten.

However, since that afternoon in Paris, his name had started to echo in my head with alarming regularity; and to me, his story had made so much sense of the whole business that it chilled me just to think about it, and that deep-down I didn’t want to see the pieces of the puzzle falling into place before my eyes.

The Colonel sipped his cappuchino and looked at me.

“Nobody knows this for sure,” he said after pondering for a few seconds, “but... there’s a rumor, affirmed by someone from the NSA, that he’s alive. Of course the French are sticking stubbornly to their “official” version, that the body couldn’t be recovered because after the cave collapsed access was impossible due to the tons of rock blocking the entrance, and it was impossible to get heavy equipment capable of removing it up the mountain. Anyway, there are various rumors, but nothing that can be trusted, you know how it is...”

“In any case...” he added, almost reluctantly,

“I’ve already sent the other team, Fouchet’s, to investigate that business.”

I couldn’t hide my surprise as I looked at the Colonel. In my seven years in the company, only once had two teams participated in a job at the same time, and that was for a real emergency.

Despite the casual way that Colonel had made that comment, I realized the man was worried. He must have read my glance and tried to formulate an excuse.

“It’s too extensive a business for one team, and... it’s a very important client.”

It was an effort not to ask him again who he was talking

about, but my curiosity was killing me, so I put out a bait.

“He must pay well,” I conjectured.

A tense, enigmatic smile came to the Colonel’s lips, but he didn’t bite, limiting himself to four intriguing words.

“You have no idea.”

But I did.

That night as I returned to my hotel room after a long conversation with the Colonel in which we came to various hypotheses and planned our strategy for continuing the investigation, I found a yellow envelope on my bed. The envelope had the Colonel’s cobalt blue “C2” printed on the front. It contained twenty thousand dollars and a simple note in his handwriting which said “For travel expenses”.

“To what planet?” I murmured to myself, surprised.

The following day I took the plane to London. I was going to shadow Elias Waiss.