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• Married Diana
Their daughter
• b. 1965 Helen Kohath
• Married David Maynes
Their twins
• b. 1986 Cassandra and Ajax Kohath-Maynes
Nicholas sat back, closed his eyes. Five generations of Kohaths in on this scheme. No wonder Cassandra and Ajax went over the edge when their father handed over the family letters and journals to Elizabeth St. Germaine. The family secrets were worth killing for.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Another ding on his cell phone. Nicholas looked down to see more texted information from Ben:
Jason Kohath, born in 1941, the Kohath twins’ grandfather, is supposed to be some sort of über genius. He didn’t go into archaeology, instead got a degree in mechanical engineering from Imperial College London, then went to MIT for grad work. The man had serious schooling. He even applied to NASA at one point but was turned down because he wasn’t American. He worked for the European Space Agency for a bit, and then he disappeared. Went underground, according to the journals David Maynes gave to St. Germaine. All sorts of rumors about his having agoraphobia, but no verification. He simply disappeared.
I believe he’s the one who’s taken control of the Coil and is running the storms. Since they were involved in Cuba, that would be a good guess for their center of operation.
Ben, it’s all coming clear now, the connection between Cuba and Italy. The storm hasn’t hit Washington, D.C. because the twins don’t know how to make the Coil do it. Is Jason Kohath refusing to level the U.S. capital? They’re headed to this island to talk him into it? Or is it a confrontation? We’ll be in Cuba in an hour. Do you have anything useful on David Maynes?
Hold your horses, Nicholas. Let me upload my notes on him. A minute . . . Here we go. David Maynes never got along with Helen’s father, Jason Kohath, who was adamantly against his daughter marrying him. After Helen’s death, in the Gobi in 2006, word was Maynes went bonkers. And then his children, Cassandra and Ajax Kohath, kicked him out of the Genesis Group. He slunk back to England, pissed off, one imagines, and that’s a good reason why he so joyfully gave over the Kohath papers to Elizabeth St. Germaine. Good old-fashioned revenge.
You’re right, Ben, and it got him dead, about the same time as Elizabeth St. Germaine. The Kohath twins were behind it, of course, using their own private assassin, Lilith Forrester-Clarke. I sent Penderley all the info. He’ll deal with it.
Nicholas looked out the window, down thirty-five thousand feet, clouds mostly, but every once in a while, a glimpse of the ocean. And he thought, If Kitsune hadn’t called, all the storms, all the decades of indiscriminate killing and destruction, would have continued indefinitely.
Nicholas couldn’t wait to learn more. Finally, he got another ding on his mobile with more text from Ben:
When Helen Kohath went missing in the Gobi Desert, the twins were already in their third year at Oxford, in the same college as their father and mother. They were very advanced, very intelligent, very driven. They were devastated by her disappearance, and by her being presumed dead. Maynes was devastated as well, by all accounts, and took a leave of absence from his job. He spiraled for a while, then pulled himself together and got back to work. He never said anything about the situation until he met recently with St. Germaine. And the biggest question St. Germaine had was: How could the Ark get in the Gobi Desert?
According to Kohath family lore, Pope Gregory X was the last known possessor of the Ark of the Covenant. The Kohaths have his secret papers in their possession, letters from the pope himself to a man named Evid Dupuy, a Templar master, and a spy for the Vatican. The letters detail how the Church came into possession of the Ark in 1060, when the Templars took back Jerusalem for the Church. The Templars brought the Ark to Rome, where it was hidden in the Vatican for two hundred years. Gregory X learned word had gotten out about the Ark being in the Vatican vaults and so he had it sent to a secret Templar stronghold, Castel Rigone, which was Dupuy’s wife’s family home. And yes, it is also the current home of the Kohaths. And this is why they bought the palazzo, realizing what they could have. After all, the palazzo was the perfect hiding place, what with all the Templar tunnels beneath the mountain.
Again, according to Kohath lore, Gregory was betrayed, and the Polo brothers, the father and uncle of the infamous Marco Polo, were on their way to open relations with Genghis Khan and apparently stole the Ark from its hiding place in Castel Rigone, took it with them to China. The Kohaths believe one of the Polo brothers got the bright idea to try and open it. Apparently the Ark doesn’t like to be opened by anyone but Levites, direct descendants of Moses, which the Kohaths are, and God sent a huge storm in the desert and the Ark disappeared.
Now, coming along to nearly present day: Helen Kohath found letters hidden in a secret compartment in a wall at the palazzo, letters Gregory had sent to Dupuy. She became completely convinced the Ark was still in the Gobi, lost in a biblical sandstorm that magically appeared to punish the non-Levites who tried to open it. And then she herself was lost in another sandstorm.
These people might be jacked-up crazy, particularly the twins, but it’s true—everything the Kohaths have done for a century has been to find the Ark.
And that, Nicholas knew, explained exactly why Cassandra and Ajax had been focusing their weather storms in the Gobi, and after this last one, he’d bet they’d found their mother’s site.
Nicholas looked over at Mike, saw she was awake. He got himself a bottle of water and orange juice for her, and sat beside her. “When you’re up for it, Ben has texted me fascinating reading about the Kohaths. Explains just about everything.”
She was wrapped in a blanket, snug in her seat, and she reached out her hand. “Now, I want to read it now.”
He handed her the orange juice. “Drink first.”
She did and he handed her his cell phone. When she finished, she said, “The reason Lilith didn’t take all the papers from St. Germaine’s shed or destroy them was because Cassandra and Ajax wanted everyone to believe she’d died of natural causes. To rob the place would invite suspicion. Same with their father. They should have waited a week, then burned the place down. I wonder why they didn’t.”
“I guess since they’d already filed the injunction to get the papers back, they assumed the moment she was dead the courts would comply and give them the material.”
“Or maybe Lilith was supposed to stay in London, and after a suitable amount of time, get those papers out of there. But maybe something happened, and she had to go back to Italy when Kitsune turned up with the staff of Moses.”
Nicholas said, “The exact date Lilith left England for Istanbul corresponds with Kitsune’s grand theft. And then she flew to Italy.”
Mike drank the rest of the orange juice, closed her eyes.
