The Rose Conspiracy Read online

  The Bentley pulled into a sweeping circular drive and stopped at the main entrance in front of a massive black oak door with two hoop door knockers the circumference of volleyballs. Before Blackstone could slide out of the limo, a butler and a manservant opened both front doors, and then stepped down to greet their visitor. Then they took his briefcase and bag.

  “Good day, Professor Blackstone,” the butler said. “Come this way, everything is prepared for you.”

  They led him through a large foyer with black-and-white checkered marble floors, and then into a larger great room with a massive stone fireplace. On each side there were two winding staircases. He was led upstairs to a bedroom just off the top floor landing. Blackstone tossed his bag and briefcase onto the canopy bed.

  “May I bring you anything before dinner?” the butler asked.

  Blackstone said he was fine.

  “Dinner is in an hour,” the butler announced. “In the conservatory on the first floor. Lord Dee requests formal attire for dining. We’ve taken the liberty of furnishing some evening wear for you. You will find it in your closet.”

  When dinner approached, Blackstone donned the black silk evening jacket, bow tie, and striped pants that were in the closet. They fit him perfectly.

  He walked down the staircase to the first floor and strolled around on the way to the conservatory. There were several large glass display cases containing collections of various kinds, just outside a huge library with floor-to-ceiling shelves.

  He looked into one of the glass cabinets, and found a variety of small stuffed wildlife. In another, he saw a collection of fossils and skeletons of various woodland animals, including what appeared to be a two-headed otter. In yet another, he saw a glass box, with gold gilded corners, that contained a large chunk of crystal.

  But his concentration was broken by a voice.

  “Good evening, Professor Blackstone,” someone behind him announced in a rich, powerful baritone.

  He turned, and found himself face-to-face with Lord Magister Dee.

  His appearance was remarkable. A man in his early fifties, thick-shouldered and a little stout, Dee had a full, flowing beard that ended at his throat and long hair, rock-star length, that came down to his shoulders. His hands were tucked in the front pockets of his purple velvet jacket. Dee pulled out a hand to shake Blackstone’s, and gave a powerful grip that was just short of crushing.

  “Admiring my collections, I see,” Dee remarked, then led the way down the hall that led to the conservatory. “Though in actuality, they are not mine. Not really,” he said as they walked toward the garden room where they would be dining.

  As they entered the conservatory where the staff was standing at attention next to the dining table, Lord Dee turned to address Blackstone.

  Then Lord Dee pointed back in the direction of the glass museum case in the hallway from which they had just come.

  “You should know,” he said solemnly, “that those oddities of nature were collected by someone else…someone whose shoes I am hardly worthy to untie.”

  CHAPTER 16

  While dining on roast duck with wild rice, and vegetables that Dee proudly announced had been grown organically on his own estate, the English lord and J.D. Blackstone made small talk.

  Blackstone finally decided to home in on another concentric circle of information.

  “I notice that you call this estate Mortland Manor,” Blackstone pointed out. “Yet Mortland is not very close by—in fact, it is in the southwest, just outside of London.”

  Lord Dee smiled at that.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Very observant.”

  “Which leads me to believe that this manor house was named Mortland not because of where it is situated geographically. But rather,” Blackstone continued, “because of who once lived in Mortland.”

  “Very good, Professor,” Dee replied. “As you have probably read, my distant ancestor, John Dee, lived his life out in the late 1500s and early 1600s in the village of Mortland. This estate was named in honor of him.”

  “Ah yes,” Blackstone remarked. “The one whose ‘shoe you were not worthy to untie’—something similar was once said about another religious figure once, but that one lived in the Middle East. You aren’t contending that John Dee was able to walk on water, are you?”

  “Not literally,” Dee said. “But John Dee did some extraordinary things. Some might even say paranormal things.”

  “While I am conversant with the teachings of most religious systems,” Blackstone said, “you won’t find me a very willing subject, I’m afraid. I relegate the accounts of spiritual realities and supernatural miracles to the frailties and foibles of the human psyche. All tales of religious experience are nothing more than the substrata of man’s psychology, trying to come to grip with things he can’t comprehend.”

  Lord Dee put down his knife and fork, which he had been using nonstop since sitting down. He leaned back, folded his hands in his lap, and gave a knowing stare at Blackstone.

  “I know you doubt such things,” Dee said. “You see, I know a great deal about you.”

  “Apparently, not enough,” Blackstone said with an edge to his voice. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have had to hire a private investigator to tail me everywhere I went.”

  “Oh, that,” Dee said with an offhand laugh. “Please—Professor Blackstone, that is not why I hired Mr. Mercer to follow you.”

  “No?”

  “Of course not,” Dee said. “I hired him to see how long it would take you to detect him and then trace him to me. That, in itself, was my test to determine whether you were every bit as clever as I thought you would be. And you proved me correct, of course. Congratulations.”

  “I don’t like being graded when I don’t know I’m taking a test,” he retorted. “That’s fundamentally unfair.”

  “Perhaps,” Dee said with a smile. “But very effective nonetheless. In any event you passed, sir.”

  “Then let me give you one of my pop quizzes,” Blackstone said. “What was in the John Wilkes Booth diary pages? And why was someone willing to commit murder for it?”

  Lord Dee’s eyes left J.D. Blackstone and drifted to somewhere else, beyond the huge rubber plants, wild orchids, and orange trees that filled up the glass-walled conservatory.

  “For me to answer that question,” Dee said cautiously, “I would have to know the contents of those diary pages. Which would make me complicit in their theft, perhaps even complicit in the act of murder. But I am no thief. And certainly no murderer. You will notice I did not have my solicitors with me during our little meeting tonight. That is because I have nothing to hide. Thus, Professor, I cannot tell you with any certainty what was in those pages.”

  “But I bet you had some inkling of what might be in the diary of Lincoln’s assassin. You wanted those newly discovered pages. Vinnie Archmont told me that. You must have had a reason. And I am betting it had something to do with your religious philosophy, and your self-aggrandizing notion of discovering the ‘ultimate secret’ of the Freemasons.”

  “If that were my motivation,” Dee said cautiously, “then it would be rather pointless for me to reveal such a secret to you, wouldn’t you agree? The point of secrets is to keep them, not give them away.”

  “Why all this obsession with secrets?” Blackstone said, his voice rising. “Would you rather keep a secret than protect a woman wrongly accused of murder?”

  “I would do anything for dear Vinnie.”

  “Then tell me the truth. Do you know anything, personally, about the murder of the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the theft of the Booth diary pages?”

  There was a long pause. A woman from the staff came in to fill their water glasses, but Lord Dee waved her away. Then Dee finally spoke up.

  “I know nothing,” he said, “that could help you, or Vinnie.”

  Then after another pause he added, “Professor, you mock the need for secrecy in my pursuit of transcendent truth. You simply cannot appreciate t
he risk that those, like myself who adhere to the esoteric religions, have to face in the world.”

  “Try me,” Blackstone replied.

  “Those collections in the glass cabinets,” Lord Dee responded excitedly, “the fossils…the crystal that John Dee himself used to study the refraction of light…all of them.”

  But then Dee stopped talking and looked for an instant as if he had swallowed a bite of food too large for his throat. He took a sip of water, and then continued talking.

  “These antiquities…antiquities…they…were…they were…gathered by Mr. Dee,” Lord Dee continued, now picking up steam again, “to observe the natural world in an effort to break through into the supernatural realm. But the local rabble couldn’t understand. In November of 1582, while he was traveling in Europe, the villagers, fearful of his philosophies, stormed his house at Mortland, destroying it and most of his exquisite library. No need for secrets, you say? I beg to differ, sir.”

  “I have no interest in stories about villagers with pitchforks and torches,” Blackstone shot back angrily. “I’m here to keep my client, your dear Vinnie, from the death chamber.”

  “I will help in any way I can. But there are certain things, certain profound metaphysical truths, that I cannot share with a person like you. A skeptic. Someone who bitterly mocks the esoteric path. At least for the time being.”

  Lord Dee was about to excuse himself and retire for the night, when Blackstone decided to go in for the kill.

  “What do you know,” Blackstone said bluntly, “about a four-line code, a coded poem? Something that may have been contained in Booth’s diary?”

  Dee’s face took on the expression of a bystander to an automobile collision.

  “Poem…four lines,” he stammered. “Is that what you said?”

  “Did I?” Blackstone said, trifling with his host.

  “You did. What did you mean by that, man—what?”

  “Unfortunately for you, I can’t elaborate. A federal judge in our case has ordered me not to tell you. Sorry.”

  Dee leaned forward over the table, his face intense.

  “I could make you fabulously wealthy. I can do that,” Dee said. “Very easily. All you have to do is give me authentic proof of what you were just talking about.”

  “Can’t do it,” Blackstone snapped back. “Besides I make a good living at the law school. And I charge exorbitant but well-earned legal fees in my law practice, as you ought to know. I’m comfortable financially. So all in all I would rather not violate a federal court order and be disbarred.”

  “You have no idea how very important this is,” Lord Dee said, his voice shaking.

  “No, there you are wrong,” Blackstone shot back. “I know exactly how important this is.”

  There was strained silence between the two men for several minutes. Blackstone kept eating until he was finished. But Lord Dee just stared at him with a strange smile.

  Then, pushing himself away from the table, J.D. Blackstone thanked Lord Dee for the meal, excused himself, and retired to bed.

  CHAPTER 17

  There was no television for Blackstone to watch in his state room in Mortland Manor during the late-night hours. The only sounds in his bedroom were the ticking of an ancient windup alarm clock on his nightstand and the creaks of a mansion house that was three hundred and fifty years old. As usual, Blackstone was being tormented by sleeplessness.

  Blackstone had brought his jogging clothes along and was tempted to take a run down the road, but then, sometime after three in the morning, he felt his eyes finally get heavy, and he tried to lie down on the goosefeather bed to sleep.

  The next thing he knew, he was rushing around the room, packing up and trying not to miss his flight. Teddy was there, driving him in the Bentley.

  But they didn’t go to the airport.

  Instead the car pulled up to a nondescript building, then circled around to the back, where he was led down a stark corridor with linoleum tiles and green walls.

  “Mr. Blackstone?” a man in a shirtsleeves and a tie said to him. “So very sorry. Please follow me.”

  They passed through two polished steel doors that swung open, and metal cabinets were to the left and a few aluminum-surface tables to the right.

  The man in the white shirt reached to the wall to pull out two of the big cabinet drawers, and as he did, Blackstone noticed that the underarms of his white shirt were stained with circles of sweat.

  Then the two drawers slid open.

  There was one black zip bag in each drawer.

  And the black zip bags were unzipped.

  There, with face exposed from within one of the bags, was his wife Marilyn. Her skin was pale and grayish, and her hair was uncombed. That was not like her to leave her hair uncombed, Blackstone thought numbly.

  Someone must have stopped the time on the clock on the wall as he looked at the deep, red gash on his wife’s forehead. But no blood was coming out of the wound, and he struggled, in the middle of the swirling vacuum of confusion, to process the terrible thing he was seeing.

  He was keenly aware there was nowhere for him to grab, nothing to hold onto. It was as if he were about to fall off the edge of the world. Gravity could no longer hold him safely down.

  Slowly, excruciatingly, he looked over to the other drawer. It was his daughter, Beth, with her young face discolored in death, framed by the hideous black zip bag.

  Then a third drawer opened, seemingly on its own.

  Blackstone was moving like a swimmer, walking underwater on the bottom of a swimming pool, over to the drawer. He looked down.

  It was Vinnie Archmont. She was laid out in the drawer. On her chest was a single red rose.

  And her hands were crossed over her breast, with all five fingers on one hand extended, but only one finger of the other hand pointing while the other four were curled into a fist.

  His eyes looked up, and at the end of the morgue there was a window. And through the window he could see a church spire. And there was a sound. Was it the sound of church bells?

  “Professor Blackstone!”

  Someone was calling. There was a knocking on the door.

  Blackstone bolted up in his bed, out of his dream he had been having.

  On his nightstand, the clock was still clanging, but barely audible, as it was winding down.

  Blackstone threw on a bathrobe and stumbled to the door.

  It was Teddy, with his coat and tie and cap, wearing a fixed smile.

  “Morning, Professor,” he said. “Car leaves in thirty minutes. Would you like some tea or breakfast brought up while you dress?”

  Blackstone shook his head no, and then closed the door.

  He made his way to the bathroom, and turned on the faucets and splashed some water on his face.

  Then he walked into the bedroom and sat down on an upholstered sitting chair. And let his head clear.

  He thought about his dream. The unsettling feel of it was still haunting the room like an apparition.

  Blackstone struggled to focus. He quickly analyzed all three of the ciphers.

  The part about Marilyn and Beth he knew too well. And he knew, also, why they followed him, as they often did, into his subconscious world.

  And why he could not escape from the dread about them that haunted him constantly.

  The symbolic appearance of Vinnie, too, was clear, and so was the rose and her numerical arrangements of her six fingers.

  “Rose of 6,” he found himself saying out loud.

  As for the third component of the dream, the church bells, he knew that one also. It bore a message he had been suppressing.

  And as he started dressing he was thinking about that. About how it was distasteful for him to have to bring his uncle into the Smithsonian murder case. On the other hand, from a strategy standpoint, it would be inexcusable not to. It would be critical for Vinnie’s defense to be able to glean some insight from Reverend Lamb’s unique knowledge of the Freemasons and the world of esot
eric religion, if for no other reason than to calculate how Lord Dee was connected to the Booth diary pages and Langley’s notes.

  It was decided. When he was stateside, J.D. Blackstone would call his uncle, Reverend John Lamb.

  And he would ask him if they could meet and have a talk as quickly as possible.

  CHAPTER 18

  Somewhere, flying thousands of feet over the limitless Atlantic, J.D. Blackstone believed he had begun to figure out one small piece of the four-line coded poem that had been jotted down by Horace Langley as he studied the Booth diary.

  The first line of cryptic note read,

  To AP and KGC

  Blackstone had been harboring an idea about who “AP” was. But he wanted to be certain. Now he was.

  In his seat in first class, he had a stack of books Julia had ferreted out on the Lincoln assassination, on Booth, and on the Confederate resistance movement at the end of the Civil War. There was also a separate book specifically on the Freemasons. After scanning them, Blackstone was beginning to see a connection.

  And what lay in the very epicenter of that tangled web was one man: Albert Pike. For Blackstone, here was the “AP” of Booth’s diary entry.

  Pike was not exactly a household name in the history of the War Between the States. But then, that was probably fitting, considering the nature of the man and the weird, secretive, philosophical bent he had.

  Pike had been a lawyer by trade and even served on the pre-war Supreme Court of Arkansas as a justice. During the war he became a Confederate officer and rallied Indian tribes to attack federal outposts. There was much controversy about whether he had generated Indian “atrocities” against the North. But when the Confederate cause failed, he was charged with treason. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who was not a Freemason, Vice President Andrew Johnson, a high-ranking Freemason himself and also president by succession, narrowly escaped removal from office after being impeached.