He had spent the better part of it smoking and thinking. If you could call it thinking.His mind was torn between the information he had to process and the woman with bruises on her wrists and ankles sleeping in the room next to his.Now he knew what was written on the Tebah Stone. Jade had told him about the dying man’s delirium, and his repeated mention of a stone and the word bvitti. They would never know who the man was, but he had contributed a significant piece to the puzzle. Then there was what that female assassin had added about the archeologist’s report, about it being a substance that could “seed the mind with prophesies.”Bvitti. The word was familiar. He’d read it somewhere, but where? He pulled out his laptop.It took him a good half hour to find an article on a site on African religions. French ethnologists had studied initiation rites practiced in a village in the jungles of Gabon. The village was in a large area belonging to the Mitsogo tribe.Bwiti was both a religion and a science that enabled its initiates—who underwent a secret three-day rebirth ceremony—to enter another spiritual dimension where they could communicate with their ancestors and come to understand the relationship of the earth and the beyond.To experience Bwiti, an initiate would ingest the root bark of a sacred plant, Tabernanthe iboga.
