The Broken Sword

  THE

  BROKEN SWORD

  Molly Cochran

  Warren Murphy

  Table of Contents

  THE BROKEN SWORD

  PART ONE: The Cup

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART TWO: The Sword

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART THREE: The Magician

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  PART FOUR: The Kingdom

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  PART FIVE: The Legacy

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Epilogue

  Other Books by Molly Cochran

  Excerpt from THE THIRD MAGIC

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  For Sarah Young

  PART ONE

  THE CUP

  Chapter One

  Marrakesh, Morocco

  Beatrice listened to the distant strains of exotic music as she walked toward a food stall packed with Moroccan delicacies.

  "Kibbee," the stallkeeper droned, somewhat less than enthusiastically.

  "Kibbee!" Beatrice squealed. "I've heard of it, Grams. Oh, may I try some, please?"

  Her grandmother looked askance at the array of aromatic dishes. "We don't know when this food was made, dear," the old woman whispered.

  "Made fresh just now, beautiful ladies!" Meryat Haddish, the stallkeeper, waved a fan over the goods, momentarily dispersing the flies that had come to roost.

  Ordinarily he wouldn't have bothered with them. They were English, for one thing. English women were always stupid about food. The old one looked as if she ate nothing but white potatoes, and the other was a girl who probably made faces at everything that wasn't pizza.

  And they were rich. The price of the girl's dress alone could support Meryat's family for a month. What had her father done to pay for that dress? He hadn't stood over an oven all night with grease in his hair and sweat on his face, that was certain. He hadn't walked to the souks at dawn thinking about how his oldest son had cut the leather of his only pair of shoes to make room for his toes.

  He sighed. There was no point in complaining about the strange ways in which Allah worked. Besides, the two English ladies might be the only customers he'd get all morning. The damnable Americans were parading their frail old ex-President through the bazaar, and the Secret Service was practically driving away the crowds at gunpoint. Meryat hadn't seen anyone except photographers and cameramen for the past half hour, and they never ate anything. Meryat could almost see his beautiful kibbee turning rancid in the sun.

  "So, ladies," he said, forcing a smile at the approaching pair. "You try kibbee, okay?" He held up an aromatic stick, to which the wrinkled old bat responded as if it were a turd.

  "I'm sure your... merchandise... is quite nice," Grams said, pulling gently on Beatrice's arm. "Oh, my, there's a stall filled with lovely pots and things. Shall we go over there?"

  Meryat shook the meat stick gingerly. "No, no. No buy pots there," he whispered conspiratorially. "Is thief. Pots made in Taiwan. Only for tourists."

  The old woman was staring longingly at the pot stall.

  "You English ladies?" Meryat asked, waving the kibbee to distract her. "My brother, he go to London now ten years. Drive taxi." From beneath his counter he produced a British Union Jack and stuck it in a crack on the side of his stall.

  "God save the Queen. Is beautiful lady." He broke off a piece of meat and held it out to her between grimy fingers. "Free sample. You like?"

  "Gracious, no," Grams said.

  "I would, please." Beatrice held out her hand.

  She stood two feet away from the stall. Evidently the girl didn't want to venture too close to the natives, Meryat thought. The corners of his mouth turned down belligerently. If the English princess expected him to leave the counter and walk to where she stood in order to offer her a free piece of his delicious food, she would have a long wait. He crossed his arms. The girl stood in silence for a moment, adjusting her movie-star sunglasses, then finally took a step forward.

  "Ah, the beautiful young lady, she knows the food is excellent." Meryat dropped the kibbee onto her palm.

  "Oh," she said, startled. "I was rather expecting a pastry."

  Meryat was incensed. "But you can see—"

  "Don't eat it," her grandmother commanded.

  "Is good," Meryat said, eating the rest of the piece himself. "Typical Moroccan dish, but better in Marra-kesh than Casablanca or even Tangier. Meryat, myself, makes it best of all."

  "Lamb," Beatrice said, sniffing the object. "And saffron, parsley, garlic, and—"

  "It sounds perfectly dreadful," Grams said sourly. "Here's a handkerchief."

  The girl popped the meat into her mouth just as her grandmother lunged to intercept it, knocking off the girl's sunglasses. Both of them immediately went to the ground, the girl's hands making broad sweeps over the dirt.

  Involuntarily Meryat sucked in his breath. He hadn't guessed. The girl was so beautiful, with hair like spun gold and perfect white teeth and her rich-girl confidence.

  She was blind.

  "Now your hands are filthy," the grandmother chided, but the girl seemed to pay no attention to her. She found and replaced her dark glasses and smiled up at the stallkeeper. "Thank you. That was delicious," she said.

  Meryat laughed to cover his embarrassment. "Did I not tell you my kibbee is the best? Now you buy some, please, beautiful lady. Only two dirham."

  With a snort of exasperation, Grams reached into her pocketbook and gave him two coins. In exchange, Meryat handed her a greasy paper with three pieces of kibbee placed lovingly upon it.

  The old woman grabbed Beatrice's hand and spread her flowered handkerchief over it before handing over the food. "I suppose it will be pointless to make plans for dinner now," she said. "I expect you'll be complaining of stomachache by this evening."

  "Never a stomachache, beautiful lady—"

  "Oh, do stop calling me that!" Grams snapped. "Excuse us, but we really must… Good heavens, that's President Marshall," she exclaimed.

  Meryat peered past his awning. "Kibbee!" he roared. Quickly he replaced the Union Jack with an American flag.

  "My brother, he drive taxi in New York ten years!"

  Grams gave him a hard stare. Meryat shrugged.

  "God bless America!" he shouted as the elderly English lady propelled the young blind girl toward the pot stall.

  Former President William C. Marshall picked his way slowly through the bazaar, smiling genially for the photographe
rs, trying without much success to hide the limp from his bad knee.

  He was sixty-seven years old. It had been more than a decade since he had held any official position with the American government, but it seemed he was busier now than he had ever been. Despite a less than stellar reputation with the American press, he had been called upon more than fifteen times since leaving office to settle some disagreement or other in foreign countries ranging from obscure new African countries to international hot-spots.

  His own government had not sent him on these missions. They were too dangerous, the National Security Council said after the first foreign emissary had journeyed to Marshall's home in Pennsylvania. The United States would take no responsibility for his death while attempting to negotiate a peace in some unpronounceable country in which civil war had been raging for years, said the CIA. Aside from the usual Secret Service protection granted any former President, Marshall was to be on his own.

  "He'll make a laughingstock of me," said the current President.

  Yet Bill Marshall had succeeded alone where the entire political apparatus of the international community had failed. And he had done it fifteen times.

  About fourteen times too many, he thought as he pretended to admire a ceramic incense burner. Who used incense, anyway, he wondered. If someone smoked a cigar or passed wind, you opened a window. You didn't stink up the place even worse with something that smelled like charred flowers.

  Marshall set down the pottery after the cameras were finished with him and took out his handkerchief to wipe his face. It was hot as blazes out here, and his bum knee was killing him. This job, he decided, had even more of a downside than the Presidency. He still had to put up with the ill-mannered photographers and reporters, but his stints away from home were now measured in months, not days.

  He missed his house on Apple Tree Road, where he had lived since he was a boy. He missed his wife, who had accompanied him everywhere when he was in office. It was too dangerous for her now. Without the extraordinary precautions taken for a visiting head of state, he was a sitting duck for any of a thousand terrorist organizations that wanted to get its name on the evening news.

  That was especially true of this mission. The United Nations had long since abandoned hope of negotiating any sort of treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. In Marshall's own heart, too, he believed this effort would fail. He had been approached, not by a representative of either government, but by a contingent of rabbis and Islamic holy men. This would be a mission of peace, they had argued at the house on Apple Tree Road, brought about by men with differing faiths but the same God.

  And so it had been for God that William Marshall had undertaken the task of meeting with both reluctant parties in the neutral setting of Marrakesh, because God could work miracles, and it would take no less than a miracle to pull this off.

  But God and Man were two different species. No one was holding his breath on this one.

  "Good heavens, that's President Marshall!" a refined-sounding old English woman shouted from the next stall.

  Marshall sighed as the four Secret Service agents assigned to him closed ranks. They assumed everyone was an assassin, even white-haired old ladies who squealed at him in recognition.

  She was towing an adolescent girl who didn't seem to be able to walk as quickly as the old woman might have liked. The girl tripped over some camera equipment and fell sprawling on the ground. Then the cameraman started shouting, the old woman shouted back, and the Secret Service agents were all over everyone like a coat of paint.

  "For crying out loud," Marshall muttered. "She isn't—"

  Something ripped into his chest. A split-second later, as he was falling backward into the pottery stall, he heard the report from the gun.

  It all seemed to happen so slowly: The Secret Service men, forgetting the scuffle between the tourists and the cameraman, leapt up into a crouch as if they had been jerked upright on strings, their weapons drawn, their heads all swiveling in the same direction. On the ground, the teenage girl screamed first, followed by other, more distant shrieks. Marshall felt the flimsy stall counter collapse under his weight. One by one, the wares for sale crashed onto the ground. The incense burner that he had been holding flew out of his hands and glided past the stallkeeper, whose horrified expression seemed to be permanently frozen onto his face. Two of the agents broke into a run, their legs pistoning in unison as a leisurely stream of clay pots struck Marshall's pulpy, blood-soaked chest. Another barked into a cell phone. The fourth turned with the slow grace of a runner in a dream, and loped toward the ex-President.

  He was thirsty. As he closed his eyes, Marshall saw an image of his house back in Pennsylvania. There was an old well up in the woods, now dry and boarded over, where his grandfather used to keep a bucket and a battered tin ladle. Occasionally the bucket would bring up a tiny spring frog or a dead junebug, but nothing tasted better than the water from that well.

  Something warm was on his body. His hand closed around it. It was metal, like the tin ladle at the well. He squeezed it tightly, feeling the pulse in his fingers as his heartbeat ebbed. He tried to lick his dry lips, but found he lacked the energy. Blood was pooling on the inside of his cheek.

  The two remaining Secret Service men were approaching him, and the souks had broken into a wild pandemonium, but Marshall no longer saw or heard anything.

  The ladle in his hand was warming. Warming... getting hot...

  An errant thought passed through his mind that it wasn't really a ladle at all, but some sort of battered metal cup. He wasn't back on Apple Tree Road. He was in Marrakesh, and he'd been shot in the chest by some invisible assailant, and he had lost a lot of blood. The wound was bad. Bad and getting...

  …better …

  Better?

  Much better, Marshall thought with astonishment. He opened his eyes. An ambulance was blaring into the souks. Propping himself up on his elbows, he sat up. Immediately two Secret Service pushed him down again and then lifted him carefully, expertly, onto a gurney. One of them took the metal cup from his hand and tossed it away.

  "The cup," Marshall said weakly, but no one paid attention to him.

  As soon as he was in the ambulance, a paramedic cut open his shirt. The ambulance was already roaring out of the marketplace when the blood-soaked strips of broadcloth were peeled away and Marshall’s chest was swabbed.

  The paramedic looked up, bewildered. "Where is the wound?" he asked one of the Secret Service men.

  "For chrissake," the agent snapped. "Right—" A deep line creased his forehead. With his fingers, the agent probed around the iodine-tinted hair on Marshall's chest.

  All he could find was a single puckered dent, like an old healed scar.

  Chapter Two

  Inside the souks, a cameraman kicked the battered metal cup out of his way as he shot some footage of the blood-spattered stall where Marshall had fallen. The cup rolled along the ground, coming finally to rest beside the blind girl.

  "Grams," Beatrice sobbed, casting about with her hands. She hadn't risen since she fell over the camera operator's equipment. Her white stockings were torn at the knee, and her sunglasses lay crushed a few feet away. "Grams, please be all right."

  "I'm here, darling." The old woman's voice quavered above the wail of the ambulance siren. She crawled over the rubble of fallen pots toward the girl and wrapped her arms around her. "Thank God you weren't hurt." Her tears fell on the dirty skirt of Beatrice's dress. "Oh, my, you've torn your stocking," she said, touching her handkerchief to the girl's scraped knee.

  "What happened, Grams? Was someone shot?"

  "I'm afraid so, dear. It was the American Pres... Good heavens." She rubbed Beatrice's knee with her finger. Her glove had blood on it, yet the wound was gone. "Your knee..."

  "Grams, something's happening to me," Beatrice whispered. Trembling, she sat upright. In her lap was a green-tinged metal cup. Slowly, Beatrice's fingers closed over it. "It's coming from this," she said slowly. "It
's warm."

  "That? Why, it's nothing but an old..." She rubbed her fingers together. The blood on her gloves was still damp. “... thing...”

  "I can see," the girl said.

  Startled, the old woman looked up. Her granddaughter's eyes, clouded and crossed from birth, were staring directly at her, blue as the sea. "Beatrice, you must be—"

  "I can see you, Grams."

  She stood before the mirror in the hotel room, touching again and again the smooth surface of the glass. The walk back from the bazaar had been nearly overwhelming for her: The riot of color and shapes and motion teeming around her was like suddenly finding herself on another planet. The sensations offered up to her had been so strong that she had felt neither joy nor fear, only immense surprise that compounded with every passing second.

  But nothing had prepared her for the sight of her own face.

  All her life, she had thought of her "self" as something internal—her thoughts, perhaps, or something beyond them. A being that only perceived, not an object in itself. And yet here she was, a girl who was nearly an adult, with creamy skin and red cheeks and frightened eyes the color of the sky she had seen this afternoon. And hair, gold-colored hair that hung down her back and tangled in front of her eyes.

  "We should call a doctor," Grams said uncertainly, still reeling from the shock of Beatrice's revelation that her sight had been restored.

  "No, not yet. I want to get used to things first. Everything's so strange."

  It would have been different if she had been sighted at one time. She would have remembered what it was to see. But Beatrice had been blind from birth. She had never had a concept of the color red, never seen printing, never appreciated that old people looked very different from young people. She had not had time to prepare for the onslaught of visual sensations that had bombarded her from the moment she had picked up the rough metal cup, and the experience was at once magnificent and terrifying.