memories of Nazis parading through the streets of Vienna. In the decades after, he’d actively battled the Soviets and challenged their puppet regimes that had dominated Austria. Hermann money dated from the Hapsburgs and had managed to survive two centuries of volatile politics. During the past fifty years the family fortune had grown tenfold, and much of that success could be traced to the Order of the Golden Fleece. To be intimately associated with such a select group from around the world came with advantages that his father and grandfather had never enjoyed. But to be in charge-that provided even greater benefits.
His tenure, though, was coming to an end.
At his death, his daughter would inherit everything. And the thought was not comforting. True, she was like him in some ways. Bold and determined, and she appreciated the past and coveted, with an enthusiasm similar to his own, that most precious of human commodities-knowledge. But she remained unpolished. A work in progress. One he feared might never be completed.
He stared at his daughter who, like him, slept little. He’d named her Margarete, after his mother. She was admiring the model of the Library of Alexandria.
“Can we find it?” she quietly asked.
He stepped close. “I believe Dominick is near.”
She appraised him with keen gray eyes. “Sabre is not to be trusted. No American should be.”
They’d had this discussion before. “I trust no one.”
“Not even me?”
He grinned. They’d had this discussion before, too. “Not even you.”
“Sabre has too much freedom.”
“Why begrudge him? We give him difficult tasks. You can’t do that and expect him to work as we see fit.”
“He’s a problem-American ingenuity and all that-you just don’t know it.”
“He’s a willful man. He needs purpose. We provide that to him. In return he furthers our goals.”
“I’ve sensed more from him lately. He tries hard to mask his ambition, but it’s there. You just have to pay attention.”
He thought he’d taunt her. “Perhaps you’re attracted to him?”
She scoffed at his question. “That’ll never happen. In fact, I’ll fire him once you’re gone.”
He wondered about her assumption that she would inherit all that he owned. “There’s no guarantee you’ll be Blue Chair. That selection is made among the Chairs.”
“I’ll be in the Circle. I assure you. It’s a simple step from there to where you are.”
But he wasn’t so sure. He knew of her contacts with the other four Chairs. He’d actually encouraged them as a test. His wealth far surpassed that of the others in age, volume, and scope. Financial institutions he controlled were heavily entangled with many members, including three of the Chairs. Never would any of them want others to know of that vulnerability, and the price of his silence had always been their loyalty. He’d manipulated their weaknesses for decades, but his daughter’s attempts had been feeble. So a word of caution was in order. “Once I’m gone, it’s true, Dominick will have to deal with you, as you will with him. But don’t be so quick. Men like him, with little emotion? No morals? A daring heart? You might find them valuable.”
He hoped she was listening but feared, as always, that her ears remained filtered. Her mother had died when she was eight and, in her youth, she’d seemed a product of him-
But the reports from there had not been encouraging.
“What would you do if you found the library?” she asked.
He concealed his amusement. She apparently did not want to discuss Sabre or herself anymore. “It’s beyond imagining what great thoughts are there.”
“I heard you speaking yesterday about those. Tell me more.”
“Ah, the Piri Reis Map, from 1513, found in Istanbul. I was running on about that. I didn’t know you were listening.”
“I always listen.”
He grinned at the observation. They both knew it wasn’t so.
“I was telling the chancellor of how the map had been drawn on a gazelle hide by a Turkish admiral who was once a pirate. Full of incredible detail. The South American coastline is there, though European navigators hadn’t yet charted that region. The Antarctic continent is also shown, long before being coated with ice. Only recently, using ground radar, have we been able to determine that shoreline’s contour. Yet the 1513 representation is as good as ours. On the face of the map, the cartographer noted that he used charts drawn in the days of Alexander, Lord of the Two Horns. Can you imagine? Perhaps ancient navigators visited Antarctica thousands of years ago, before the ice accumulated, and recorded what they saw.”
Hermann’s mind swirled with what else may have been lost from the fields of mathematics, astronomy, geometry, meteorology, and medicine.
“Unrecorded knowledge is either forgotten or muddled beyond recognition. Do you know of Democritus? He conceived the notion that all things were made of a finite number of discrete particles. Today we call them atoms, but he was the first to acknowledge their existence and formulate the atomic theory. He wrote seventy books-we know that from other references-yet not one has survived. And centuries passed before other men, in other times, thought of the same thing.
“Almost nothing Pythagoras wrote remains. Manetho recorded Egypt’s history. Gone. Galen, the great Roman healer? He wrote five hundred treatises on medicine. Only fragments remain. Aristarchus thought that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. But Copernicus, who lived seventeen centuries later, is the man history credits with that revelation.”
He thought of more. Erathosthenes and Strabo, geographers. Archimedes, the physicist and mathematician. Zenodotus and his grammar. Callimachus the poet. Thales, the first philosopher.
All their ideas gone.
“It’s always been the same,” he said. “Knowledge is the first thing eradicated once power is attained. History has proven that over and over.”
“So what is it Israel fears?” she asked.
He knew she’d eventually work him around to that subject.
“Perhaps it’s more fear than reality,” she noted. “Changing the world is difficult.”
“But it can be done. Men-” He paused. “-and women have done it for centuries. And violence has not always brought about the most monumental changes. Often it’s been mere words. The Bible fundamentally changed mankind. The Koran likewise. The Magna Carta. The American Constitution. Billions of people govern their lives by those words. Society has been altered by them. It’s not so much the wars as the treaties that follow that truly alter the course of history. The Marshall Plan changed the world more expressly than World War II itself. Words are indeed the true weapons of mass destruction.”
“You dodged my question,” she said in a playful tone, one that reminded him of his long-dead wife.
“What is it Israel fears?” he repeated.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“Perhaps I don’t know.”
“I doubt it.”
He considered telling her everything. But he hadn’t survived by being foolish. Loose talk had been the downfall of more than one successful man.
“Let’s simply say that the truth is always difficult to accept. For people, for cultures, even for nations.”
STEPHANIE LED THE WAY INTO THE REAR YARD AND WAS STARTLED by its manicured appearance. Flowers abounded. Colorful asters, waxbells, goldenrod, pansies, and mums. A terrace formed a peninsula, its flagstones dotted with wrought-iron furniture, more blooms sprouting from decorative pots.
She guided Cassiopeia to the thick trunk of a tall maple, one of three stately trees shading the garden.
She checked her watch: 9:43 PM.
She’d brought them this far through a combination of anger and curiosity, but the next step was where she irrefutably crossed the line.
“Get that air pistol ready,” she whispered.
Her cohort slid a dart down the barrel. “I hope you note my blind obedience to this foolishness.”
