The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6)

by Dean Crawford

Gregorie smiled. ‘You first.’

  The pistol’s report was muffled further by the cardinal’s skull as the round tore through his skull and exited the far side to bury itself in a wall. Gregorie glanced back down the corridor and figured he had perhaps a minute or two before somebody came to investigate the noises. Quickly, he grabbed each of the dead Swiss Guards’ bodies by the legs and dragged them into the archives, and then finally the cardinal’s corpse before he let the security door finally close behind him.

  Sealed inside the archive with Warner and Lopez, Gregorie checked his pistol’s rounds and then stalked deeper into the room search of his prey.

  ***

  XVII

  ‘It’s this way.’

  Lopez led Ethan down a series of winding passages, each of them lined with towering shelves filled with folders, many of which were tagged with red labels or marked with Latin inscriptions in black ink.

  ‘Damn, even if somebody did know what we were looking for we couldn’t read these inscriptions,’ Ethan said.

  ‘The Vatican uses Latin to help conceal where things are,’ Lopez confirmed. ‘It’s their way of saying that these vaults aren’t secret, without actually letting anybody find anything. I’ve heard that the ATMs in Vatican City are also in Latin, so you can’t even take cash out unless you know what you’re doing.’

  Ethan followed Lopez deeper into the vaults, the air cool due to the strict temperature controls and the lighting somehow dimmer back here than near the entrance. Ethan knew that the effect must somehow be psychological, for there were as many ceiling lights here as there were elsewhere in the archive, but none the less it felt somehow darker and more ancient.

  Ethan recalled seeing movies where the Vatican’s Archives were portrayed as a technological marvels of secrecy, with retinal scanning locks and temperature controlled rooms encased within impenetrable glass walls. The reality was somewhat less appealing.

  A creaking, aged birdcage elevator connected the archive’s floors, which contained countless millions of documents bound in parchment inventories. The archives had been open to carefully vetted researchers for more than a century, but with no way to identify where any one particular document was other than to ask and be led to it, there was no way to access any of the city state’s darker secrets.

  ‘There are about fifty–two miles of shelving down here,’ Ethan said, noting the presence of 16th Century wooden cabinets lining the walls that contained priceless parchment letters sent by princes, potentates, heretics and heathens to the Holy See. Ethan knew that they held correspondence between the Vatican and some of the most prominent figures in history such as Erasmus, Charlemagne, Michelangelo, Queen Elizabeth I, Mozart, Voltaire and even Adolf Hitler.

  ‘You can smell the age,’ Lopez said as though reading his mind. ‘Must be from the parchments and stuff.’

  ‘Said the seasoned archeologist,’ Ethan replied with a bemused smile.

  Lopez rolled her eyes at him as she paused at an intersection, rows and rows of endless shelves filled with folders creating an immense maze from which Ethan could see no escape. He knew where the entrance was because by habit he kept a mental map of where they were going, but he knew that if he made a single mistake they would quickly become completely lost.

  ‘Here’s the elevator,’ Lopez said as they reached it and she yanked open the creaking metal shutter doors. ‘My guess is that it won’t go into the basement.’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ Ethan said as they stepped inside.

  Within moments they were travelling down to the archive’s lowest floor. The elevator creaked to a halt, and Ethan eased to the side and peered downward. He pulled out his cell phone and illuminated the screen, using the glow to light up the lower wall of the elevator shaft. Instantly he could see that below them there was a cavity, perhaps to hold the mounts to the elevator shaft’s floor, perhaps to descend another level.

  Ethan got up and turned to the controls of the elevator. The fairly modern panel had been installed long after the elevator itself, updated and wired into the older system that he was sure was behind the panel. Ethan reached beneath his jacket and produced a small leather pouch that he opened to reveal a set of lock–picks and other small tools.

  Lopez kept watch as Ethan opened the panel and examined the wiring behind it. Sure enough, there was a pressure pad beneath the other buttons that was not connected. Ethan yanked a wire from one of the pads used to select the archive’s floors, and crudely attached it to the previously unconnected pad and gave the button a press.

  With a rattle the elevator groaned into motion again and began to descend toward the basement. Ethan turned his head to look at Lopez with an expectant smile.

  ‘Not bad,’ Lopez smiled back. ‘What’s the chances that Mercati and his people will know what we’ve done via some alarm or something?’

  The elevator stopped and Ethan looked out into a darker, dingier passageway that led into the distance between towering walls of shelves filled with archives.

  ‘We’ll have to hurry,’ he said as they opened the elevator doors and stepped out. ‘You sure you know where we’re going?’

  ‘Down here,’ Lopez said as she led him off down another passage between the folder–filled cliffs. ‘Should be at the end, just to the left.’

  Ethan glanced at his watch. ‘Five minutes. We’re not going to have long to sort this and you said you’d be done by now.’

  ‘I said that just to annoy Mercati. It was either that or shoot him in the head.’

  Ethan was about to reply when he heard something in the distance that sent the hairs on the backs of his arms bristling. Four bursts, like a distant car engine misfiring. Ethan froze where he was, eyes closed as he listened for any further sound as Lopez walked off ahead of him, consumed in her search.

  A silence pervaded the archive and then Ethan heard three further similar distant sounds. A few seconds later he heard an eighth and then silence.

  Ethan was not by nature a paranoid kind of guy, but his time in service with the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan followed by six years in the intelligence services had left him with a deep suspicion of anybody who wasn’t paranoid in this game. Eight rounds was what he heard, and although it could just as easily have been somebody closing windows somewhere else in the archive Ethan had learned to trust his instincts above everything else. Instinct was the only thing that served only you and never failed to alert you to danger.

  Ethan opened his eyes and hurried in pursuit of Lopez. ‘Make it fast, I think we’re already out of time.’

  ‘Mercati’s here already?’ Lopez asked as she glanced behind them in confusion.

  ‘Eight rounds, coming from the entrance area.’

  Lopez didn’t argue, didn’t question Ethan’s suspicions. After so many years of working together, whether he was right or wrong she knew that he wouldn’t have said a word about the noises unless he was genuinely concerned. Lopez quickened her pace as she reached the end of the row of shelves and turned left.

  The rear wall of the archive stretched away to either side of them, Lopez walking slowly to one particular row and peering at it and the drawing she held in her hand. Ethan joined her and looked at the hundreds of vertically racked folders before them.

  ‘It’s here somewhere in this row of shelves,’ Lopez said.

  ‘Great, at least there’s only a few hundred to check.’

  Lopez offered him a dirty look. ‘Aisha did what she could and got us this far.’

  Ethan shook his head and wracked his brains for some way in which they could narrow down the search, but with all of the folders marked with Latin inscriptions and literally hundreds of them to rummage through, even if he deliberately emptied their contents on the floor at his feet one after the other it would take hours to go through them all and…

  Ethan’s train of thought slammed to a halt as he thought for a moment.

  ‘I know that look,’ Lopez said. ‘You get it once in a while when you have an idea.�
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  Ethan looked across the shelves.

  ‘Hellerman said that these tablets would be made of clay, right?’

  ‘Yeah, so what?’

  ‘Clay is heavy,’ Ethan replied. ‘Most of the records in these boxes are likely parchment and paper, even papyrus like the Tulli Manuscript.’

  Lopez didn’t need any further prompting. Ethan hurried to one end of the shelves as Lopez dashed to the other, and one by one they began working their way back toward each other. Ethan used a finger to lift the boxes one after the other, testing the weight as he made his way slowly to the left. Lopez performed the same actions far to his left, moving quickly but methodically toward him until he heard a soft thump as Lopez tested a container.

  ‘Here,’ she whispered urgently.

  Ethan marked his position by pulling one of the containers out slightly and then hurried to Lopez’s side as she lifted one of the containers from the shelves and set it on the floor. Ethan watched as she opened it, lifting the lid to reveal a layer of thin paper wrapped around something.

  Carefully, Lopez unwrapped the paper to reveal a clay tablet no larger than a hardback book, engraved with the tightly packed cuneiform script that they had seen in the images that Hellerman had showed them.

  ‘We don’t know what it says,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘This could be somebody’s three–thousand–year old shopping list for all we know.’

  ‘We don’t have much choice,’ Ethan said as Lopez hurried back to the shelves and kept searching. ‘You check the rest and then let’s get out of here.’

  Lopez hurried through the rest of the pieces on the shelves as Ethan carefully photographed the front of the tablet.

  Lopez reached his side and noted that there had not been a single other clay tablet on any of the shelves this far back in the archive. Although Ethan could not speak a single word of Latin, he figured that whatever was written by the Vatican’s archivists on the outside of the tablets container had nothing to do with ancient Sumer.

  ‘Done,’ Lopez said. ‘Let’s move.’

  ‘Wait,’ Ethan said. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  Lopez watched for a moment as Ethan grabbed another box from the shelves, and then they turned and began to walk back toward the entrance of the archives. They were half way there when they heard a distant, horrified scream that drifted down through the elevator shaft toward them.

  Although Ethan could tell that it was a woman’s voice and that it came from the archive entrance on the floor above them. The memory of the gunshots he had heard echoed vividly through his mind, as did the knowledge that somewhere outside the building people would be scrambling for telephones as Swiss Guards rushed to the scene.

  ‘We’re not armed,’ Lopez whispered as they both froze in position deep inside the archive.

  Ethan nodded but his mind was already racing. Whoever was inside the archive with them was also aware that their presence had been discovered, and they would now hunt Ethan and Nicola with extreme prejudice.

  ‘There’s no way out of here but the elevator,’ Lopez added. ‘They don’t fit secret archives with multiple exits.’

  Ethan listened in silence, waiting to hear the man he felt sure was closing in on their position give his position away. It was only a few moments before he heard soft foot falls just meters away to their right. Ethan pointed Lopez to move to one side and then he stepped out toward the entrance again.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  The voice was Russian accented, quite deep and coming from Ethan’s right. He froze and turned to look directly into the uncompromising gaze of a tall, bulky man in a tailored suit, a 9mm pistol pointing straight at him.

  A sudden commotion of voices rang out from the archive entrance somewhere far above them, the deep voices of Swiss Guards bellowing to one another. Ethan remained still as he turned to face the man, who looked at the container tucked under Ethan’s arm.

  ‘Slide it to me,’ he growled.

  Ethan crouched down slightly as he lowered the container to the floor and then kicked it toward the Russian. The box slid most of the way there and came to rest alongside one of the shelves.

  The Russian carefully approached the container, never taking his eyes off Ethan’s as he crouched down alongside the box and lifted the lid from it. With one hand he brushed aside the wrapping paper to reveal nothing but an empty box.

  The shelf beside the Russian suddenly burst outward as a dozen containers tumbled off the top shelves and plunged down onto him. The gunman staggered to one side as Lopez shoved the material down onto him and Ethan leaped out of sight.

  Ethan sprinted down a corridor past the Russian and joined Lopez as she rushed into view and they fled toward the elevator. They were half way there when they heard the voices of men pouring into the archive, shouts and warnings that echoed through the miles of shelves.

  ‘The Swiss Guard are inside,’ Lopez hissed as they slid to a halt and concealed themselves behind a row of large cabinets. ‘If they find us down here, we’re done.’

  Ethan searched for any sign of the gunman they knew to be inside the archives with them, but he could see no sign of the Russian.

  ‘Ivan’s in the same boat,’ Ethan whispered.

  ‘We could make it to the elevator, cut around behind them,’ Lopez suggested.

  ‘No,’ Ethan shook his head. ‘They’ll have posted a guard on the elevator to prevent that. We need another way out of here.’

  ‘There is no other way out but the elevator!’

  Ethan looked at the walls of the archives and searched their aged surfaces, and then he smiled to himself and headed off down the corridor once more, away from the advancing Gendarmerie.

  ‘Follow me.’

  Ethan hurried along to the back wall of the archive with Lopez close behind, and turned to where the broad main wall of the archive spread out to the left and the right, rows of ceiling lights tracing a line to the distance.

  ‘There’s nothing but a wall, and shelves,’ Lopez uttered. ‘How the hell are we going to get out of here?’

  ‘Help me with this,’ Ethan said.

  Lopez moved to assist him even as they heard the Gendarmerie guards calling out.

  ‘They’re here!’

  ‘Quickly!’ Ethan snapped.

  ***

  XVIII

  Sergeant Marco Rossi of the Vatican’s Gendarmerie hurried along with his pistol drawn and held before him in a double handed grip, his eyes scanning the corridors and shelves of the archives as his men spread out around him.

  ‘A male and a female, both American,’ he said into his microphone in a hushed whisper. ‘They were the last people to be signed into the archive. They’re armed and dangerous.’

  His radio crackled as a subordinate replied from somewhere else in the archive basement. Rossi knew that his men were spreading a wide net from left to right across the basement and then advancing forward. He checked right and left and saw his men lining up. With a jerk of his head, Rossi ordered them forward and they began to advance as one, each covering an aisle of their own.

  Rossi did not know how the two Americans figured out how to get into the archive basement and he didn’t care. All that mattered were the prefecture dead upstairs, surrounded by the bodies of his escort. Rossi had no idea what kind of international uproar would be caused by the brutal homicides or what had driven the two Americans to commit murder on such a scale, but he had a pretty good idea of what would happen if he didn’t capture them and bring them to justice real fast.

  ‘Keep your eyes open, they could be anywhere down here,’ he whispered.

  The basement archive was accessible only using the elevator, upon which he had stationed no–less than three men to prevent their quarry from slipping by and escaping topside. With no other exits, Rossi knew that this would end either in two arrests or a bloodbath to match the gruesome crime scene at the archive entrance.

  ‘South aisle clear,’ came a report into his earpiece.

  ‘
Cut north,’ Rossi ordered. ‘Close the net down.’

  His men had reached the eastern wall of the archive basement, and now they were turning north as the rest of Rossi’s team swept east toward them from the elevator. The number of places the Americans could hide was diminishing swiftly, and it would be only moments now before gunfire was exchanged. Rossi did not believe in his heart of hearts that the two killers would surrender. They would fight to the death and…

  ‘East wall is clear.’

  Rossi frowned, acknowledged the call, and closed in on the north wall. He saw other members of his team moving alongside him in other aisles, closing in on his position as he advanced, and then all at once they emerged into the aisle running along the basement’s north wall.

  Rossi looked left and right and lowered his pistol.

  ‘What the hell? This is impossible. Where did they go?’

  One of his officers looked back toward the west wall. ‘Maybe they got behind us?’

  Rossi turned and looked behind them as he keyed his microphone.

  ‘Pierre, Alan, do you see anything?’

  The radio hissed in static, no answer from his companions.

  Rossi broke into a run and sprinted back across the basement even as he heard the elevator’s mechanical engine clatter into life and climb away. He burst out of the main aisle and saw three bodies sprawled on the floor in the aisle, eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling, blood spilling from massive wounds in their necks in which were buried steel throwing stars.

  ‘No!’

  Rossi dashed to the elevator’s doors and peered up into the darkness to see the elevator climbing sedately away from them. He keyed his radio and shouted a warning to those above.

  ‘They’re coming up! The Americans are in the elevator!’

  *

  The Gendarmerie soldiers poured into the archive, twenty men streaming past the detectives already examining the bodies of the dead guards and their prefect as they rushed to the elevator.

  The men, all dressed in black camo fatigues and cradling assault rifles, swarmed into strategic positions across the archive, crouching behind shelves and desks as they aimed their weapons at the elevator gates and waited. The sound of weapons being cocked in readiness echoed briefly across the archives and then there was nothing but the sound of the elevator’s antiquated mechanism hauling the elevator up from the basement.