Now I had much clearer faces and images to work with.
I frowned, looking closer as I blew one of the group photos up large. Three of the people were wearing a type of robe. Freemasons, maybe?
I zeroed in on the person closest to the foreground. A woman. She wasn’t facing the camera, but maybe that was good. Because there was a symbol on the back of the robe.
What was that?
I isolated the symbol and sharpened it with the Photoshop tools. It was basically a ladder stretching diagonally across a hexagon. Monks were climbing the ladder, winged angels and demons surrounding. The symbol looked ancient.
Next, I scrutinised the faces. I didn’t recognise the Wilson Carlisle character that Constance had told me about. Maybe he looked radically different fourteen years ago.
I copied each face in turn and kept it in a separate folder. I’m coming for each one of you, I whispered under my breath. I’m going to find out why you people were at that meeting.
I returned to the picture of the symbol and tried an internet image search on it.
I sat back, stunned, as similar images came straight up.
The other images had a name. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. A religious symbol dating way back. Twelfth century. Monks ascending heaven on the thirty rungs of the ladder, each rung a different stage of the journey.
Okay, so these people were a religious group? That ruled out the Freemasons. So what I had so far was an ancient religious group hiding behind a historical-society shopfront. That sounded nuts. If these people were traffickers, they weren’t like any traffickers I’d heard about. They were a cult.
Constance’s investigator had been right. This group were religious nuts. Religious nuts with bad vices and criminal dealings.
This symbol was a little different to the ones on my screen, but I needed an expert to take a look and tell me what it all meant. A priest? The only church I’d ever heard about in Paris was the Notre Dame—the church everyone had heard of. But I couldn’t afford to spend the time in the hope that a priest would agree to see me or that they’d know anything about the symbol, especially if it was as old as it seemed.
I had to get to Greece and figure it all out there. Besides, the Australian police knew I was in France, and I needed not to be here anymore.
Putting the photocopies away carefully in my bag, I exited the library.
How did I get to Greece now that Interpol were involved? I didn’t have a clue.
49. Constance
I STEPPED FROM THE COOL AIRPORT AT Athens, only to be soaked through with sweat within minutes. Sweat trickled between my breasts, pooled in my navel and then seeped along the waistband of my shorts.
I stood under the broad sunlight, not wanting to know what the back half of my clothing looked like.
Summer in Greece was stupidly hotter than summer in England. I pictured Rosemary. Rosemary wouldn’t have let any of this slow her down.
I’d looked up the names of people working against people trafficking, and now, somehow, I had to track them down.
People pressed in on me from all sides—businesspeople and families excited to be starting their summer holiday. Walking up to a line of yellow taxis, I directed the driver to take me into the city. He asked me for a location, and I couldn’t tell him. I hadn’t planned that far ahead. All I knew was that I didn’t want to head straight to my hotel. Wilson Carlisle knew who I was, and if he was trying to find Gray, then he might have people keeping an eye on me, too. The driver suggested the Acropolis Museum, and I nodded. Going the tourist route might throw them off-track and cause them to discount me as a danger to them. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t win at this game. They had the advantage in every way. I just had to hope they had little interest in me.
A welcome cool enveloped me as I entered the museum. I wandered among the artworks, stopping to grab a cold drink and a bite to eat at one of their cafés.
I stepped through a display named the Archaic Gallery. All white, with soaring ceilings. Marble statues stood on rectangular stands among thick round columns. The statues were clothed and unclothed, dismembered and with missing parts, and had me sweating anew. These relics of an ancient world were all so other in contrast to the world I inhabited. Too vast and too strange.
I leaned against a stone column, letting a wave of nausea pass through me. I needed to take my anti-anxiety pills. This was all too much, and I needed to find a centre of calm. For Kara’s sake.
Deep inside my bag, my phone tinkled. It wasn’t the ringtone of my regular phone. It was the private phone. I’d forgotten to throw it away. I answered tentatively, wondering if the police or a stranger had somehow gotten hold of this number.