The Memorist Read Online Free PDF Page A

least one hidden entrance and exit.
    Entering the sanctum sanctorum, Jeremy stepped into the vast assembly room where columns stood like sentries. An Egyptian mural illustrating the story of Isis and Osiris swept over the walls, and a gem-toned carpet covered the floor. The cupola ceiling was painted the cobalt of a night sky and stars—tiny mirrors that caught and reflected light from below—twinkled above. Every corner of the room was crammed with gleaming spiritual objects and artifacts, but Jeremy ignored it all as he headed purposefullytoward the library and the board members meeting he’d called.
    “Guten abend,” Fremont Brecht said as he put down his newspaper. Seated in a club chair as if he were a potentate and it was his throne, with thousands of leather-bound books behind him, Austria’s ex-minister of defense and head of the Memorist Society was a commanding presence.
    Few members greeted Fremont as warmly as Jeremy did, but men didn’t make Jeremy cower; only mysteries he couldn’t explain.
    “Will we still be able to make the concert or will this meeting take too long?” Fremont asked.
    “We should be fine. And I have my car here.”
    “Good, because I cancelled an appointment regarding next week’s security and technology conference for tonight’s performance of the Emperor Concerto and would hate to miss it after going through all that trouble.” He gestured across the long room to the middle-aged woman with auburn hair seated at a card table, busy scribbling notes. “Erika’s waiting for us.” Fremont was spry, despite his seventy-eight years and almost three-hundred-pound frame, and stood with surprising ease. Only a slight limp as he crossed the room suggested any concession to his age and rich diet.
    In a niche, an ancient quartz Coptic jar sat on a plinth, a pinlight illuminating it with an almost iridescent glow. In a church, an object this precious would be in a gold-tooled reliquary but the Memorists’ relic had no power and promised no magic and the members took the jar for granted. But tonight, Jeremy stared at it as if he could see through the alabaster to the scattered ashes and grime that lay on its bottom.
    “Does this meeting have something to do with our spy?” Erika asked when they joined her. Her amber eyes swept the room as if she was looking for someone who didn’t belong there.
    “No, but I think you’ll be just as interested in what I have to say. Maybe even more so,” Jeremy answered.
    One of Central Europe’s leading authorities on near-death experiences—NDEs—Erika’s personal goal was to have the scientific community take her Memorist-funded research connecting NDEs to reincarnation seriously. No matter that sixty percent of people in the world believed in past life regression, the establishment was not only suspicious of it, they were disdainful. Recently Erika had made some headway but believed someone inside the Society was spying on her when, for the second time in a year, rumors of her research were ridiculed in the press. Since then she’d been actively lobbying for Fremont to hire a detective.
    “What’s on your mind, Jeremy? I really don’t want to miss the concert.” Fremont tapped one fingertip on the leather-topped table.
    “Three months ago I was contacted by a woman who asked me to appraise a Torah that she’d discovered hidden in her grandmother’s apartment in the hopes our Judaica department would be interested.”
    Jeremy explained how he’d walked into Helen Hoffman’s grandmother’s living room to view one treasure and literally lost his step when he noticed another, a dusty afterthought on a side table. Despite never having laid eyes on it before, he recognized the carved wooden box right away. For so many years, through long empty nights and wandering days he’d searched for this phantom, driven by the memory of his daughter as a small child with brown satin curls and doleful pale-green eyes drawing a facsimile of it over