The Hollow Ones(76)
Save me, Hugo. Find me and save me.
The true face of the Orleanna fetch before him was revealed. Horribly smooth and nearly featureless, its mouth open in a groan.
Hands grabbed at Blackwood. Dee and Talbot, pulling at him. Ripping at his clothes, trying to shake him free.
The pain, having traveled up his arm to his shoulder and spread like a plague down his midsection to his legs, reached a crescendo. Blackwood’s hand sprang open, releasing the crystal sphere, which dropped to the floor with the weight of a ball of lead.
The interior cracked but the globe held its shape. At once the sickly green emanant energy began to fade. The vision before him, the unnatural messenger from beyond, was grabbed by the swirling cyclone in the room, caught up in it, whipped around and around until it came apart, disappearing into the swirl of papers and mist.
Blackwood simultaneously felt the grip of extraordinary agony and a complete numbness—as though every limb had been cut away but he still experienced their pain. He fell next to the cracked orbuculum on the floor and suffered fits of convulsion, his body not coming to rest until the tempest in the philosopher’s library spun out to nothing.
The history of barrister Hugo Blackwood ended on that day. His accounts were settled, but his property fell into disrepair over time and eventually was considered abandoned. The home, believed by some to be haunted, was razed; its exact location is now unknown, only its proximity to John Dee’s address in Mortlake is known today. Both the parish register in Mortlake and Blackwood’s gravestone are lost to history.
A pall was cast over Dee’s own house and his career. Within the year, he had locked up his home, setting out rather mysteriously for Bohemia with Edward Talbot. Over the next six years, the two occultists led a nomadic existence, traveling abroad throughout Central Europe, Dee writing books and still attempting to communicate with angels…even as occult practices fell out of favor with the aristocracy, and the general public soon followed, unpersuaded by his florid accounts of magical entities.
It is not known why Dee remained in exile for so long. After splitting with Talbot, he finally returned to England in 1589, only to find that his home in Mortlake had been broken into and vandalized. His famed library had been looted in his absence, his rare books on the occult and unnatural practices stolen, along with his instruments for divining and spellcasting. His deep scholarship of necromancy and the supernatural arts was believed lost. What few possessions he had remaining, he sold off, piece by piece, living his final years in poverty in the same decaying mansion. The once-renowned astronomer, geographer, mathematician, royal court adviser, and occult philosopher died in Mortlake at the age of eighty-two.
Odessa sat in the spacious backseat of the Rolls-Royce Phantom, Mr. Lusk at the wheel, Hugo Blackwood sitting at her side, motoring through Queens. The bank branch was not far east of the hospital, on the other side of Flushing Meadows Park, on 108th Street.
Odessa said, “We can’t cruise in to the crime scene riding in a Rolls-Royce. I don’t know what we can do, to be perfectly honest, but I know we can’t do that. We also can’t go in there with a bunch of roosters. What do you expect we can achieve here?”
Blackwood watched out the window, unusually distracted.
“Well?” she said.
“Solomon never spoke to me like that before,” said Blackwood.
Odessa said, “That’s because his mind is going. The fungal infection that caused the stroke is affecting his brain.”
Blackwood said, “That is why I am worried. It leaves his mind vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable to what?”
The Phantom took a hard corner and then abruptly stopped. A traffic cop standing before a blue NYPD sawhorse was frantically waving cars along, trying to prevent gridlock. The main police barricade was another block down, a bottleneck of safety vehicles with lights flashing.
“Keep going,” Odessa told Mr. Lusk. “Pull over as soon as you can.”
He did, and Odessa sprang to the curb, Blackwood following. She doubled back to the traffic cop, finding another police officer blocking the sidewalk. Odessa showed him her badge and credentials.
The cop waited for Hugo Blackwood to offer identification. “Who’s this?” he asked.
Odessa said, “He’s with me.”
They pushed on through. Odessa hustled ahead toward the staging area the New York Police Department’s Crisis Intervention Team had established. They had a mobile command center truck parked outside the barricade, and a portable video surveillance tower elevated off its mobile stand, a twenty-foot-high vantage point.
Odessa immediately made the FBI contingent on the scene, a knot of four men in suits conferring near an unmarked Ford Fiesta. The Bureau was on scene because it was a federal crime to rob any member bank of the Federal Reserve System. The FBI used to investigate each and every bank robbery in the country, but that changed after 9/11, when resources were redeployed to antiterror investigations and homeland security concerns. Now the Bureau focused its attention on serial offenders, robbers who crossed jurisdictional boundaries, and the most violent bank crimes.
Odessa steered clear for fear of being recognized. She led Blackwood to the edge of the blocked intersection, their best angle on the Santander branch on the opposite corner of the next block. Odessa could see movement inside, the branch manager moving back and forth deep within the bank, but they were too far away to make out anything clearly.