The Secret of Lions Read online

  The Secret of Lions

  Scott Blade

  Also by Scott Blade

  www.scottblade.com

  Get Jack Reacher Series

  Gone Forever

  Winter Territory

  Foreign & Domestic

  S.Lasher & Associates Series

  The StoneCutter

  Cut & Dry

  A Black Lion, LLC Publication

  Second Edition

  Copyright © 2013 by Scott Blade.

  www.scottblade.com

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Black Lion, LLC,.

  Black Lion is trademarked.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This novel is the intellectual property of the author and publishers. Reproduction of the novel without the author’s direct permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  “You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer under your power—he’s free.”

  —Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Noble Peace Prize.

  “Have you any children, Kubizek?”

  “Yes, three sons.” I said.

  “Three sons,” he shouted, impressed. He repeated it several times with a most earnest expression. “So you’ve got three sons, Kubizek. I have no family. I am alone. But I should like to look after your sons.”

  I had to tell him all about my boys—he wanted to know every detail. He was pleased that they were all three musically gifted…

  “I shall make myself responsible for the training of your three sons, Kubizek,” he said to me.

  —August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, conversation between Hitler and the author.

  Prologue

  In the Gallery

  London 1950

  1

  The art gallery at King’s College cleared out. The thick crowd from earlier in the afternoon had thinned because it time to close down.

  Grand, white pillars stood tall in front of a large staircase just inside the entrance. The painting, titled The Secret of Lions, hung around the corner. It held unspeakable secrets, the kind that could unravel history, Barbara's history.

  Barbara stared at the painting for most of the afternoon. She had so carefully concealed her dangerous past. Even though she hadn’t seen it in several months, she still remembered every detail of the painting. Every speck of canvas symbolized her past life. Every brush stroke and every shadow represented a piece of a story that only she knew. The light and dark microscopic fabrics of the canvas wove together and created the life of the artist. The paint, the textures, the meaning behind it all seemed to shape the very blood that flowed through her veins. It forged her skeleton, bone by bone. She would never forget the man she had loved, the artist who had painted The Secret of Lions.

  Someone watched her from beyond the shadows cast by the beautiful, abstract sculptures that filled the room. The man was no stranger. He had been someone that she had known well. He haunted her nightmares. He was the man she ran from, but he knew she would come to see the painting eventually. He waited to ambush her. He followed her for a long time and waited for her at the gallery. He moved through the shadows into the farthest corner—watching, waiting to strike.

  She had come out of hiding to see the painting on the day of its anniversary. She couldn’t stay away. She had to look upon it once again. She had desperately tried to stay away, but it was useless. The desire to look at the breathtaking work of art overwhelmed her. So she was here, in his trap.

  “Closing time,” a short, stocky graduate student shouted as he walked through the halls and fumbled with his glasses. “The gallery is closing now.”

  Barbara looked around. She had lost sight of her stalker. He was there somewhere. She was sure of it.

  She rose from the small, tarnished wood bench and reached into her satchel. She pulled out a paintbrush with a long, jagged black handle, along with a small vial of red paint. She dipped the brush and began writing something underneath the painting on the wall. She began writing the name of the artist, the man she had loved so deeply.

  Barbara’s stalker watched with increasing interest as she wrote. He needed to move quickly. She had grown suspicious.

  Slowly, he crept around a large sculpture, losing sight of her for only a moment. As he left the shadows and moved past a spiraling, metal staircase, he noiselessly leapt out of the shadows with a silenced pistol in his hand.

  The pistol was outstretched and aimed at the spot where Barbara had been standing, but now she wasn’t there. She had vanished.

  Worried that he had scared her away, he moved quickly to the painting. He scanned the corridor for Barbara, but he saw nothing. He glanced at what she’d written on the wall.

  In red paint, the letters read:

  Unknown Soldier

  He looked at the message, puzzled. Then he gazed back up at the painting and at its description: The Secret of Lions by U.S.

  Without warning, she was near once more. He sensed the warmth of her body. She stood directly behind him. He was tall, at least a foot taller than her, maybe more.

  “Barbara?” he whispered, gripping the handle of his gun tightly. His raspy, rugged voice sent unimaginable chills down her spine.

  “Yes,” she said. She pointed her own silenced gun to the back of his head. The nozzle of the silencer brushed across the stubble of his shaved head softly, intimately.

  “You know the secret. That’s why I follow you,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have killed him,” Barbara said and then squeezed the trigger.

  With a puff of air and a muzzled flash, a bullet exited the gun. The bullet ripped halfway through his head. Blood splattered onto Barbara’s hands and across her face.

  The bullet lodged in his skull. His face was intact, but the back of his scalp peeled forward from the force of the bullet, spraying blood across the painting.

  He swaggered forward and grabbed at the canvas's surface. As this now harmless enemy slowly fell to the ground, his blood-soaked hand slid down the painting. It left a smeared, bloody handprint across the painting of a majestic, black lion.

  Part One

  Host of Sparrows

  Chapter One

  Beautiful Paintings

  2

  Some believe that sparrows are transporters, that they carry the dead across the threshold between life and afterlife. Evan had crossed that threshold in a way. He had died many deaths, or rather his identity had. Evan wasn’t his real name, but his name had changed so many times over the years that it ceased to matter what his name was. Now, he was Evan, a groundskeeper at King’s College in London.

  A sparrow flew overhead and he was reminded of the myth of this black bird. He stepped out of his flat dressed in his groundskeeper uniform. The jagged keys on his ring jingled as he twisted one into the lock of his front door. After he locked up, he headed down a series of long, spiraling paths, past the music hall, and through the quad until he reached the art gallery.

  The sun was sti
ll low in the early morning sky. Most of the campus remained asleep. Evan began most of his days this way. He was the first to rise and the last to sleep.

  Today was different than most for one reason. Today, he carried a large, double-wrapped canvas under his arm. It was an old painting, one that he’d created a long time ago. It was a secret, his secret. Yet he wanted people to see it.

  Painting was his only outlet. It was his only reason to live. After being in hiding for so long, he couldn’t help but feel cheated of the life he wanted. He should have lived a life of painting, of art. He was robbed of that life. Now the only solace afforded to him was working on a college campus, surrounded by art students and great works of art. Here he could freely study the most beautiful paintings and sculptures in the world. He could do this without fear of being caught.

  Evan ran from a past so dark that no matter how much blood it swam in, it would never drown. Painting all night in secret in his flat was the only safe haven for him now. Even his dreams were nightmarish reflections of his past.

  Evan climbed the short steps to the art gallery’s entrance. He looked around. There was no one. He snuck into the gallery, past the rows of paintings and sculptures, to the curator’s office. He found the lock to the office easy to pick. He flipped on the light switch and peered at the stacks of mail on top of the curator’s desk.

  Evan set the double-wrapped painting on the side of the desk. He reached into his jacket pocket and removed a typed letter that donated the lost painting to the museum. The letter was unaddressed; it mentioned that the painting was once in Hitler’s possession and it was signed only:

  Anonymous

  The curator would be ecstatic. Evan had a nice place picked out to hang the painting. He hoped that the curator and gallery employees would appreciate it and hang it in that very spot.

  He beamed with pride but only for a moment and then he glanced at his watch. The gallery would be opening soon. He left the building, locking the doors behind him.

  Outside, he slipped on a pair of gardening gloves, picked up a large pair of shears, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a nametag and pinned it to his shirt. It read “Evan.”

  Evan had a new life. He breathed in heavily and walked proudly to the rolling greens of the campus. He had a lot of hedges to trim.

  3

  New York

  University of Art

  1949

  Birds flew through the sky, their wings fluttering across the treetops. Students strolled through the park. Some picnicked; others ran around throwing a disk, or flying saucier, a rare game. Washington Square Park stood small and quant, not like the grandness of Central Park, but a favorite for students.

  New York University consisted of an array of buildings. The art building was on the eastern side of campus. Inside the building, Barbara focused her hands on the jumble of colors that soaked the large canvas in front of her. The painting had not yet taken shape. The image resembled the dark wing of a butterfly resting on a darker petal of a flower, but she could not be sure. It was definitely a melancholy painting.

  Barbara moved her brush in whatever direction her imagination would take it. She had always painted that way, no real plan—just abstract ambition. She followed her instincts. Ever since childhood, her mother had encouraged her to just let it flow. “Just follow your heart,” she would say.

  Paint covered Barbara’s hands and wrists. Her skin was smudged with blacks, greens, and reds. Green paint rested on the bottom of her cheek, just above the place where the crinkly line from her smile began.

  Barbara’s superb brown eyes reflected the wet canvas. She stopped for a moment and gently brushed a strand of long, dark hair out of her eyes. As usual, it fell across her face and obstructed her vision. She would cut it short, but her mother loved it long. She would always remind Barbara, “This is not Europe. Here women are proper. In America, girls grow their hair long and behave properly.”

  Barbara dreamed of Europe. She so badly wanted to live there, away from what was “proper.” She thought about London. She was hoping it would be different there. She still wasn’t sure that she would take the scholarship to study at King’s College. She had put it off a year ago, when her mother first grew ill. And now, it seemed like a form of betrayal for her to leave her mother as she continued to grow sicker and sicker.

  Barbara pictured her mother. She thought of the day that she’d found out that her mother had been moved into the hospital.

  She couldn’t leave for London. Not when her mother was so sick. Barbara knew that her mother would make her go even though she was not a fan of Europe. It had been Barbara’s dream her whole life to study under the best artists in the world. She knew that London was probably the closest she would get. But her mother was the only family she had left.

  Her father had run off years ago. Barbara remembered little about him. He was a speck of dust in the hourglass of her memories.

  Suddenly, she stopped painting. She realized that she was lost in the wasteland of memories. A single tear escaped her eye. It rolled down her cheek and stopped below her glossy, red lips. She let it hang there for a moment, existing in limbo.

  She wiped it away.

  Her attention returned to her current project. She looked beyond it to the far wall where one of her award-winning paintings hung. It was of a sparrow. It was the painting that had won her admittance to finish her study at the King’s College School of Art.

  “Oh no,” she said, noticing the clock hanging near the painting. She was supposed to be visiting her mother. She would have to hurry. The hospital’s visiting hours were only from 10 a.m. till 6 p.m. It was already 5:35 p.m.

  Barbara dropped her paintbrush and leapt out of her chair. She stopped at the exit of the studio. Her reflection peered back at her from the mirror next to the doorway. She saw the paint on her face. She took the sleeve of her sweater and wiped it off. She rushed out the front door and down the sidewalk.

  Barbara made her way to the hospital in a little over twenty minutes. She stopped outside the front doors and tried to catch her breath. She could feel her legs and chest pounding. The exhaling breath was fighting the air that was trying to come in. Although she was tremendously lean, twenty minutes across several city blocks during heavy traffic was no easy feat.

  She stood outside the double doors to the hospital’s lobby for a moment, giving her lungs time to slow to the normal rhythm of breathing. Once they steadied, she pushed through the doors.

  Barbara walked past an empty receptionist's desk. She made her way to the stairs. She had climbed these stairs almost every day for the last year. As she climbed each step, she felt her calf muscles throb. It was a slight pain, but it was sharp enough to remind her of when she had taken ballet.

  Barbara’s mother had forced her to take ballet when she was a young girl, another way of making a proper young woman out of her; although, ballet probably achieved the opposite. Barbara had always thought of herself as clumsy because she could never keep up in class. But she never quit. She never gave up anything her mother convinced her to try. But she was never that good at it either.

  Despite being clumsy and feeling awkward in her teenage years, Barbara realized that she was a beautiful woman. Boys flirted with her frequently. The only person who noticed her beauty more than the boys was her mother. Not having a father around meant that Barbara's mother had to scare off the teenage boys. Her mother never approved of any of them for Barbara. And when Barbara thought back to all the boys she had gone out with, she was grateful that her mother had never let her settle for any of them.

  Barbara made her way to her mother’s hospital room. She saw that the light was off. She thought that maybe her mother had gone to sleep early, so she decided that she was only going to peek in on her.

  Barbara grabbed the handle to the door, opening it slowly. Inside she saw the bed was neatly made up, but no one rested in it. Suddenly, a feeling of panic filled her like a flame engulfs a stream of gasoline.
She felt confused.

  Must be the wrong room, she thought. She looked up at the number on the door. It was the right room. It was the same one that she had visited many times before. Then, she thought, they moved her.

  She walked back to the desk. A short woman with red hair was now seated behind it. The woman flipped through a book so fast it appeared that she was frantically trying to find out what happened next. She wore a nurse’s outfit. Barbara did not recognize her. She figured that she was new.

  “Excuse me,” Barbara said. “Where is Mrs. Howard?”

  “You mean the woman from room 208?”

  “Yes,” Barbara answered, panic-stricken.

  “Oh dear. Are you kin?” The nurse asked. She stood up and put down her book.

  “I’m her daughter. Where is she?”

  “Wait here,” the nurse said. She left for a long, excruciating moment and then returned with a gray-haired doctor.

  “This is Mrs. Howard’s daughter,” the nurse said, pointing at Barbara.

  “Where is my mother?” Barbara asked. She nervously tugged at the bottom of her sweater. She could feel her calf muscles throbbing again. They pounded so badly that they were almost unendurable. Her throat began to swell up. She felt a hot sensation clamped to the back of her neck. It was so warm it made her notice that her fingers and toes were freezing. The saliva in her mouth watered up and began flowing between the crevices of her teeth.

  “Mrs. Howard,” the doctor began, trying to maintain a calm voice.

  “Where is she? What have you done with her?” Barbara asked. She could hardly control her balance. She was waiting for an answer.

  “Your mother passed about an hour ago,” the doctor said. “She’s gone. I’m sorry.”

  Barbara stared at a set of scuffed shoe prints tracking down the corridor. She didn't know what to say or how to react. Everything changed. Everything.