The Jealous God Read online

  Tremelay’s eyebrows went up as he settled in behind his desk again.

  “Not even my closest associate is aware of the full impact of what I am about to tell you, sir,” Jozsef said quietly and leaned forward. “I need your support more than ever at my back. I want to tell you why I was sent out of New Babylon. I want to tell you a tale that you will find most unbelievable at first, but when you consider it, you will understand what has happened and why.”

  The Prime Minister lowered his head and blinked at the man. He felt his time had finally come and now he would be able to place himself next to the Prophet in a most profound and beneficial manner.

  “Please, go on, Your Grace,” he said solemnly. “I am at your service.”

  “As you know, Prime Minister, it was always my intention and the intentions of the New Order of the Temple to bring all the world’s religions under a peaceful umbrella. That is exactly what I have been working toward for years with what I thought was cooperation of three of the major religions of the world, namely Islam, Christianity and the Jewish Faith. While I was still in power in New Babylon, I was approached by certain members of the Jewish or rather, the Israeli government and certain members of a so-called secret sect of Christians stemming from the old Order of the Temple of Solomon."

  "These people wanted me to join with them in an effort to convert all of the world’s major and minor religions to that of a sort of combination Judaeo-Christian belief centered on a New World Order which would be situated in Jerusalem and run by the members of this secret order in conjunction with the Jewish Sanhedrin. In other words they wanted me to throw in my hat, my support and the military might of the Fox, to help them achieve their ends."

  "Naturally, I was appalled to learn that these things had been developing right under my very nose, even in the palace in New Babylon, itself. I refused, of course, and set about trying to rid the world of this new menace that threatened to undo everything we had accomplished. To make a long story short, I came out on the wrong side of the tracks as it were. I had put my trust in the wrong people. People in key positions, but that was just a by-product of my trusting nature."

  "I take men at their word. It has always stood me in good stead, but alas it proved to be my undoing," he bowed his head and drew a deep, tremulous breath. "I was replaced by an impostor, a certain member of my own family who happened to look a great deal like me and while I was being held prisoner in Afghanistan, he affected a great number of changes that are still in force to this very day."

  "I managed to escape and… well, here I am. I don’t know what has happened in New Babylon of late, nor do I understand how they have managed to make the general masses believe that Colonel Martin St. John is the Prophet, but it is my belief that they are using some very powerful black magick. It is shocking and unconscionable. My own family! And this most recent appearance of the Prophet…” Jozsef squeezed his eyes shut as if in great pain. “Is just another of my relatives impersonating me.”

  The minister sat nodding his head thoughtfully. Tears welled up in Jozsef’s eyes and he looked down at his hands.

  “You have no idea how this has hurt me, Jean,” he said after a moment. “I feel like Christ must have felt when his own disciple, Judas Iscariot, betrayed him. Remember the Word of God, Jean, the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.”

  “By sword and famine shall those prophets be consumed,” Jean quoted another admonition against false prophets and handed him a box of tissues before sitting on the edge of the desk beside him. “I am very sorry, Your Grace. I have never had the misfortune of having my family turn against me.”

  “I have lost my wife and my son to these imposters! I don’t know how they managed to convince her that I had somehow been destroyed and came back in another body.” He wept openly. “Complete absurdity! Here I sit! Look at me!” He looked up at the dark face of the Prime Minister. “How can they see me and deny me?”

  “I don’t know, Your Grace,” Jean told him sympathetically and took his hand, kissing his ring reverently. “I want you to know that I am at your service, one hundred percent. Whatever it takes, we will do it in order to get you back where you belong. Are there any others who still support you? Any that we might contact to set up meetings, perhaps…”

  Jozsef smiled wanly and stood up slowly. “I knew I could count on you, Jean René. There are still a few friends in my court; however, we must be careful as they are only able to hold onto their power by giving lip service to the ‘new prophet’ in Babylon. The King of England is one and the Emperor of Austro-Hungary is another. We might be able to persuade the King of Ethiopia over to our side, as he was a good friend of mine and I also have the backing of General Watkins; though he is only just now recovering from a mental breakdown, for which I am quite certain our new ‘prophet’ is responsible. He will have to play the part of double agent, I’m afraid, or else he will never get out of New Babylon alive.”

  “We will begin work on it immediately.” The Prime Minister’s smile broadened. “I happen to know George very well! My mother and his mother are old friends. We will begin there.”

  “Excellent!” Jozsef nodded amidst newly formed tears of joy. “How can I ever repay you, Jean René?” The ancient demon narrowed his beautiful blue eyes at the Prime Minister and concentrated on a point just between and behind the man’s eyes.

  “That is totally, totally, quite unnecessary.” The Prime Minister shrugged and then frowned. “You know, I have often dreamed, even when I was a boy, of wearing a crown… a gold crown.”

  “Ahhh. Then one you shall surely have if we succeed!” Jozsef assured him and then clasped him in a close hug. He hugged him very tightly. Too tightly, much too tightly. The Prime Minister resisted slightly and then subsided against him. Jozsef released him and took his face between his hands, never taking his eyes off Jean René’s. When they locked eyes, Jozsef pressed the golden hand against the man’s forehead. He tried to move, but was frozen in place. Jozsef kissed him on the lips and then moved his head back, smiling in his face. The Prime Minister stared into the bright blue eyes.

  “You kiss very well, Jean René,” Jozsef told him. “Does your wife appreciate you properly?”

  “I have no wife,” the Prime Minister told him flatly.

  “Oooohhh. That is a shame. How will you get in touch with your feminine side if you have no wife?”

  The Prime Minister blinked at him in confusion and Jozsef kissed him again before releasing him. But something had changed profoundly in the brief encounter. Jean Rene would never be the same man again. There was a hollow feeling in his chest as if something had been taken from him. Something that he was quite sure the Prophet could return to him somehow. He tried to speak and Jozsef pressed one finger against his lips.

  “No, no, don’t thank me, Jean; you have done all the work. When you are ready to learn what it is you want, come and see me.” Jozsef stepped back and waited while the Prime Minister seemed to gather his wits before speaking again. “When I am moved in and comfortable at the Presidential residence, you must drop by and have a few drinks with me, no?” Jozsef asked him and raised both eyebrows. “I believe that we can be very good friends. You’ll have no trouble re-locating, will you?”

  Jean René shook his head slowly and Jozsef stuffed his hands in his pockets.

  “The press is waiting, sir,” he told the confused man. “You must make an announcement. Remember what I have taught you. The rabble will always follow a strong leader, Jean, and you are a very strong leader now.”

  Again, Jean René nodded and they walked toward the door together.

  Chapter Two of Fifteen

  I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness

  Eduord de Goth wandered about the empty corridors of the
castle in a daze. His raid on the Villa had done nothing more than anger the Templars and he was quite sure they would now send the Knight of Death after him, if not a whole contingency of assassins to annihilate the Order of Jerusalem. The men he had sent there had returned with the news that they had killed one and injured another of the residents of the Templar complex in southern Italy. That had not been in the plan. It was simply meant to send a message, a two-fold message: I know where you are, I can take what you have!

  He had planned to use the success of the raid as leverage for the release of his sister. He had procured some valuable, but essentially useless artifacts from their chapel. Unfortunately, they had not been caught sleeping as he had thought they would be. Years of observation had told him that d’Brouchart was becoming complacent and lazy in his anonymity. Only the recent developments in the last century or so had brought the formerly secret Order of the Temple to the light of day and those incidents had been fleeting and insignificant in the overall scheme of things. Their rise to fame had been surprising and amusing to the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order as he had thought how frustrating it must have been to Edgard to have his precious Knights brought into the living rooms of millions by modern technology. He remembered how shocked and pleased he had been to see the face of Mark Ramsay plastered on his television set and on the pages of the gossip rags in a dozen languages with wild speculations. What he knew of Ramsay made it even more interesting. How it must have irked the Knight of Death to be slandered and used as entertainment for the masses by the New Order Templars!

  Eduord had become du Morte’s biggest fan, collecting stories and photographs of him, compiling an extensive file for future reference on the elusive Scot. His trained eye had soon discovered that there were some very pronounced differences among the photos and video clips of the Knight as he went about making a reputation for himself as a criminal, imposter, revolutionary, etceteras. Eduord had counted at least five different men closely resembling the Knight and, apparently, closely associated with him, but not quite him. The first signs that something was amiss in Lothian had come in the first decades of the century when a certain Father John had set up shop in the old chapel on the property, but his ministry there had been short-lived and he had disappeared into oblivion. After that had come Omar, the Prophet, no doubt a relative. Then Omar’s associate, the mysterious Luke Ramsay, was not quite an exact replica, but had turned out to be the Knight's son. Then there was the real imposter who had first appeared in New Babylon several years ago and then disappeared only to return with an enigmatic golden hand like something out of an old spy thriller. This man, Eduord knew, was not Omar Kadif. Eduord had been appalled that the world had not seen the differences immediately. He had also glimpsed a few photos of Ramsay’s hot-headed brother, Luke Matthew, surprisingly still around after all these years.

  During Omar’s rise in the Middle East, he had seen a very strange character that seemed straight out of the Arabian Nights, which was oddly enough, purported to have been the Prophet’s own father. There were very few pictures of him, and most were odd glimpses of the man, dressed in purple satin, digging about in ruins or poking into caves and once seated atop one of Omar’s desert tanks with a brass telescope in his hands, watching something in the night sky. He had been unable to learn anything more about this most intriguing figure. Omar’s father bore a striking resemblance to Mark Ramsay when examined with computer imaging equipment.

  He had continued to watch the growing Scottish clan with great interest through the years as opportunity allowed and had seen many startling things. Among the most unusual developments had been a sort of hybrid image of Mark Ramsay with golden eyes and golden skin whom he had identified as one Lavon de Bleu, also a member of Edgard’s elite council. Mark Ramsay had been very busy over the years.

  Since Gil Pairaud had been recruited and embedded in the very heart of the Ramsay estate, Edourd had made vast headway in his studies. Gil reported some highly imaginative stories about dragons, elves and faeries, even claiming to have seen some of these creatures himself while employed with the Templars at the Isle of Ramsay and later at the estate in Lothian. Gil had cleared up much of the mystery concerning Ramsay’s family for him and he now knew who most of these people were and how they fit into the puzzling family tree of the Order of Solomon’s Temple. Eduord stopped pacing and chewing his thumbnail, returning his attention to the more pressing matter of what to do next.

  The leader of his disastrous mission in Italy had told him there had been a man in the parking lot at the Templar HQ in Italy when they had approached the Villa. They’d had no idea where he came from and he had apparently been sleeping in his vehicle or some such. The man, whose identity was yet unknown to him, had come at them from behind and they’d had no choice but to eliminate the threat. Somehow the other residents had been alerted and the students in the dorm had been more formidable opponents than they had reckoned. They had cut one of them quite severely and then had paid in return by the loss of two of their own. A minor disaster! Eduord had no doubt that Edgard d’Brouchart would know exactly who had sent them and if the student, most likely some kith and kin of the great Grand Master had suffered a serious injury, it would only mean that Edgard would be after him now with more vengeance than ever in his heart.

  He debated whether or not he should go to the Isle of Ramsay himself and search for Catharine. The likelihood of success was very slim and if anything Gil had told him was true, he might find himself in serious trouble if he ran afoul of Edgard’s people living on the islands. No, he could not go to Scotland or Ireland.

  To add further to his worries, in his absence, someone had been in his rooms at the castle. Nothing was missing and the skull was safe, but there were signs that someone had been there. Subtle traces that might have been missed by others, but signs none-the-less and he had to assume they had learned from Catharine where he was. He could sit and wait; or he could take action. But what kind of action? What should he do?

  De Goth had amassed a great deal of wealth and a tremendous following through the years, but he had no real army. He had sent his best young Knights to Italy and they had botched the entire thing. He had sent a message all right, but it was not what he’d intended though he had learned one thing for sure. The skulls were not in the chapel or in the passages beneath the Italian Villa. His Knights had scoured the entire complex with the electronic tuning forks he had provided for them, but none of the readings they had collected indicated the presence of the anomalous signature, the unmistakable hallmarks of the crystal skulls. The skulls had to be on one of the two islands in the Irish Sea that Ramsay controlled. So far, Guillaume had not been able to find anything in Scotland that would lead him to believe that the skulls were hidden on Mark Ramsay’s estate. The old chef had surreptitiously combed the entire house, the outbuildings and the barn, along with much of the surrounding meadows and wooded areas, searching for some sign of their presence. He had found many anomalies there but not the skulls.

  Guillaume had requested leave to visit his friends on the Isle of Ramsay and at St. Patrick’s. It would take another week or so to hear anything significant back from him concerning the ancient structures on St. Patrick’s Island, but the old cook would never be able to cover the entire Isle of Ramsay with a tuning fork that was designed to look like a simple metal detector. Not alone and certainly not on foot or even on horseback. The islands were small, but not that small and the buildings on St. Patrick’s were crowded with Edgard’s own sons and daughters, apparently. Pairaud had found only one reading worth investigating at the estate in Lothian, but before he had managed to investigate the thing more closely, it had disappeared from the upper reaches of the house. Either Dambretti or the younger Ramsay had taken it.

  Another odd thing bothered Eduord, when he had used his powers to search for the skulls by using the one he had in his possession to sense the presence of its sisters, he had seen them quite clearly… in Ramsay’s house in Lothian!
/>   He’d had Guillaume check the house again and then again, from top to bottom, but the device had turned up nothing other than the one fleeting presence and that one had been something entirely different from what he had been sensing from Romania and Germany. The skull, or so he assumed it to be a skull, that Gil had found traces of, had been somehow deformed or misshapen. Yet, when he looked through the eyes of his treasure, he could see them! They were carefully encased in small boxes of wood and metal, stacked very neatly in what appeared to be an attic room. Guillaume had become quite perturbed with him after the third search of the attic. There were no skulls there, he had insisted. He’d gone through every crate and chest in the attic and had almost been discovered by Ramsay’s son during the last of these searches.

  It was maddening. Something was wrong! Guillaume had taken the machine into Edinburgh and he had one of his own technicians fly there to check it out. The man who had designed the ingenious device assured him that it was in perfect working order. If the skulls were within fifty feet of the sensor, it should have gone off the scale. He slammed his fist against one of the mahogany pedestal tables on the landing and hurried away down the long corridor to his room. He would look again. Perhaps they had moved them again, but each time he looked for them with the aid of the skull in his own possession, he saw the same thing. Over the past few years, they had been moved several times, but during the last year, they had been in the same place. Nothing had changed. He should have snatched them when he knew exactly where they were. He chastised himself severely for his procrastination.

  He pulled the linen-wrapped bundle from the brass urn and plopped down on the rug with it like a mischievous child, uncovering the glittering artifact haphazardly in his haste. He placed it on the expensive, yet worn Persian rug on the floor in front of him and then got up, looking down at the smooth surface accusingly.