Contents

The Gutenberg Rubric

Twenty-One

KEITH AND MADDIE were awake before 8:00 in the morning. It was only an hour time change, but they had slept little the night before. Unfortunately, their stay in the luxury hotel was to be short. Keith called the driver and gave instructions.

“We’ll be ready to depart at 9:30. We need a store that sells mountain gear and cold weather clothing. Can you be ready?” He waited while the driver gave him instructions and then hung up.

“Cold weather clothes and mountain gear?” Maddie asked. “Adana is beautiful and balmy. Where are we going?”

“Northeast into the mountains,” Keith answered, “and our driver is impatient to get started. He says he only wants to drive during daylight hours and it’s at least five hours to our next stop.”

“Can’t we stay here another day?” Maddie asked.

“No, but I have a nice hotel reserved for us tonight,” Keith said. “Maybe we can stop here on our way home.”

“What did you tell the man at the desk last night that got us this incredible suite?” Maddie asked. “Are you suddenly made of money?”

“No,” Keith answered. “I told him we were newlyweds on our honeymoon and could only spend one night here. He did the rest.”

“I like that,” Maddie said, tying her robe and opening her suitcase. She tossed the remaining items from her planned trip to Jamaica onto a chair then pulled out wool slacks and a shirt. “I miss having my cell phone. It’s how I check the time.”

“You can use mine if you need to make a call,” Keith said. “It’s a satellite phone and where we’re going there isn’t much cell coverage.”

“Why did you send our phones to Cairo?” Maddie asked.

“For the same reason I sent Granddad to Cairo,” he said carefully. “The terrorists have been tracking us through some means. It could have been your calls to your brother. It could have been someone inside the Guild. I’m sorry to say, it could have been Granddad. Or maybe they just were tracking our phones. In any case, I had to get rid of anything that might give our location away.”

“You didn’t dump me,” Maddie said flatly. “I haven’t called anyone since we left the country. I don’t even know who I’d call.”

“Maddie,” Keith said softly, “your brother was in Indianapolis when the bomb went off there. We’d just left. And he knew we were coming to Mainz.” Maddie was silent—near defiance. A tear trickled from one eye down her cheek.

“Joey is a good kid,” she said, shaking slightly. “He wouldn’t do anything like that. He’s always afraid someone is chasing him. Maybe he thinks ‘they’ are after me now. Keith, do you think we—I—would do anything to hurt you or a library? Joey read every issue of The Printer’s Devil, just like I did. He should be in the Guild. How could you think that of him? How could you believe I would…?” The tears flowed freely with the outburst. Her sobs became so violent that she pushed Keith away and rushed to the bathroom. Keith could hear her throwing up. He went to her and wiped her face with a cloth and warm water. He sat down on the marble floor with her and held her in his arms.

“I wasn’t accusing you of anything,” Keith said. “We promised to be honest with each other. Ditching our phones and keeping our destination secret was a condition for getting Agent Fry’s help.”

Both Keith and Maddie were drained by the sudden outpouring of emotion. They sat on the cool tile of the bathroom and held each other. When Maddie spoke, it was scarcely above a whisper.

“I didn’t know my dad was hunting for a hidden treasure at the time. He never told me about it before he died. Aunt Virginia told Joey and me the story just before I left home for college,” she said. “I was born near Cairo during the Egypt-Israeli 7-Day War. My mother was killed in an air raid. Aunt Virginia raised me, but Dad went back to the Middle East—first Iraq and then Iran. That’s where he met and married Lily. He brought her back to the U.S. where Yousef—Joey—was born. He parked them with Aunt Virginia, too. But Dad went back to Iran. He was in the far north of Iran during the revolution in 1980 and was killed as a decadent western infidel. With the hostage situation in Tehran, no one officially even recognized he was missing. Lily’s cousins brought word when they escaped.”

“And you didn’t find any of this out until you went to college?” Keith asked gently, petting her hair and holding her close.

“I knew the basics, but not the why,” Maddie responded. “Dad was following some kind of clues he’d found, but Virginia didn’t know what they were. I asked Errol, but all he would say was that it wasn’t Dad’s to find and I should never think of it again. As Joey reached his teens, though, he became more and more convinced Dad was killed because of the treasure, not because of the revolution. ‘They’ were coming to get us next.”

“I hate to even suggest this,” Keith said, “but do you suppose your father and brother were trying to follow the clues in the Gutenberg manuscript we found?”

“How could they do that?” Maddie asked.

“The page of Guild ritual we found in that manuscript could only have been removed by a third degree master. Errol was the last person before me to undertake the ritual. Of course,” Keith hastened to add before Maddie could respond, “the page could have been removed a hundred years ago. We wouldn’t know without asking your grandfather. But something Frank said has been puzzling me ever since I examined the documents. He said that Errol just disappeared from the Guild after his elevation.”

“Even if he had it—and I’m not denying the possibility—how could Joey have it and hide it in a manuscript for you to find? That would require a degree of cleverness and manipulation that is beyond Joey. It sounds more like Derek.”

“Who?”

“You remember—my ex.”

“Oh yes,” Keith said. “The one I never got to thank for my hospital stay. Why do you say it’s more like him?”

“He always has a scheme of some sort going on. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took up with Joey at Princeton just to get an introduction to me,” Maddie confessed. “The difference between his schemes and others you might have heard of is that his schemes always seem to work. He’s incredibly wealthy as a result.”

“And you think he might have used Joey to get to you?”

“I’m sure I’m flattering myself,” Maddie laughed. “Derek never seems to do anything without a reason. He and Joey started hanging out together when Joey was a freshman and Derek was a junior. Derek sponsored him for fraternity membership. I was finishing my Master’s and was ready to start my PhD and had pushed for Joey to join me at Princeton. Pretty soon, it was the three of us hanging out in our free time. At first I thought Derek was just being polite to me for Joey’s sake. He was always kind and generous. Had a great sense of humor. And he seemed to have a soothing effect on Joey. Joey was fluent in Farsi and English before college and picked up three more languages in school. He has a real gift and Derek encouraged him all the way. When he asked me to marry him, it seemed like a fairytale come true.”

“What happened?”

“When Derek’s father died, he was named the executor of the estate instead of his older brother or sister. That also put him at the head of his father’s computer company. They make custom super-computers. All of a sudden, Derek was gone all the time. I never knew where he was, but he kept piling up more and more money. He bought his siblings out of their share of the estate and hasn’t spoken to them since.”

“And…?”

“And one day I went to see him at the office. I’d just received confirmation that I’d been named to the staff at the Kane Memorial Library. I wanted to celebrate. Instead, I found him with his “assistant” in a position that left nothing to the imagination. Come to find out, he’d been sleeping with her ever since he took over the company. I was crushed, bitter, angry, betrayed, vengeful, spiteful, and generally rude. It was one of the fastest divorces in history.”

“You lived in a community property state. Are you saying that you are fabulously wealthy and I didn’t know it?” Keith asked.

“Pre-nup. I got to keep the name of Zayne, since it was on my PhD and I had already built a professional reputation with it. I got a $250,000 trust fund. And I got to say goodbye.”

“But Joey stayed friends with him?”

“I could scarcely tell Joey he had to quit his best friendship, but I put a lot of pressure on Derek. It wasn’t Joey’s fault. It was right after the divorce that he gave me this locket with the pictures of my mother and father in it. He said we’d both lost loved ones and that he was sorry my marriage didn’t work out. The locket would be a reminder that they were still in my heart,” Maddie said.

“May I see the pictures?”

“No. Joey didn’t want me to ever have to take it off, so we went together to a jeweler and had it soldered shut. I’ve never taken it off,” Maddie said. They sat in silence for a few moments. Then Keith straightened himself.

“I’m afraid we have to go,” he said. “Our driver was insistent about leaving the city before noon and we have a lot of shopping to do.”

“Where are we going? You have to tell me, Keith.”

“I’ve tried to tell you everything that I was free to reveal and not break my oath to the Guild,” he answered. “Granddad and Rolf weren’t pleased that I was bringing you with me, but I insisted that it was the privilege of the third degree to choose my companions. That wasn’t exactly true. But since we’ve come this far, I’m ready to go all the way. We’re headed to Nemrud Dagi, about 250 kilometers northeast of here,” he said. “I don’t know exactly where from there because there are stages of the puzzle that I have to solve when I see them. Somewhere beneath the tumulus, King Antiochus and the Ptolemy treasure are buried. No one has ever found a way in as far as we know. But Gutenberg saw it. He left the clues.”

“Let’s leave, Keith,” Maddie said, suddenly shaking again. “Let’s not go there. Let’s fly back to the U.S. and forget we ever heard anything about this treasure. It scares me, and what it does to us scares me. I always thought Joey’s treasure-hunt was silly. Now here I am, maybe looking for the same treasure that my brother is and my father did. I’m getting as paranoid as my brother. I don’t want anything to happen to us.”

“The time has come, Maddie,” Keith said. “The treasure needs to come to light. I might be able to find the damn thing, but if it is a manuscript or collection of manuscripts, no one could care for it like you could. And there might be more.”

“I’m frightened, Keith,” Maddie said.

“We’re safe. It’s not worth getting sick over again,” Keith soothed.

“I didn’t get sick because we were fighting exactly,” Maddie said. “I’m pregnant.”

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