The Templar Salvation (2010)

by Raymond Khoury

  Behrouz felt the contents of his stomach shoot into his throat as he recognized the severed head the stranger was holding up.

  Miss Deborah. His daughter’s favorite teacher.

  Or what was left of her.

  Behrouz lost hold of his body, retching violently as his knees buckled. He collapsed to the ground, gagging and spewing and gasping for air, unable to breathe, one hand clamped across his eyes to block out the horror of it.

  The stranger didn’t allow him any respite. He bent down to his level, grabbed the professor by the hair and yanked his head up so he couldn’t avoid being face-to-face with the hideous, bloody lump.

  “Find it,” he ordered him. “Find this trove. Do whatever you have to do, but find it. Or you, your wife, your daughter, your parents back in Tehran, your sister and her family …”

  And he left it at that, comfortably certain that the professor had gotten the message.

  Chapter 2

  VATICAN CITY

  TWO MONTHS LATER

  As he strode across the San Damaso courtyard, Sean Reilly cast a weary glance at the clusters of wide-eyed tourists exploring the Holy See and wondered if he’d ever get to visit the place with their casual abandon.

  This was anything but casual.

  He wasn’t there to admire the magnificent architecture or the exquisite works of art, nor was he there on any spiritual pilgrimage.

  He was there to try to save Tess Chaykin’s life.

  And if he was in any way wide-eyed, it was an attempt to keep his jet lag and his lack of sleep at bay and stay clearheaded enough to try to make sense of a frantic crisis that had been thrust upon him less than twenty-four hours earlier. A crisis he didn’t fully understand—but needed to.

  Reilly didn’t trust the man walking alongside him—Behrouz Sharafi—but he didn’t have much choice. Right now, all he could do was run through yet another mental grind of the information he had, from Tess’s desperate phone call to the Iranian professor’s harrowing firsthand account during the cab ride in from Fiumicino Airport. He had to make sure he wasn’t missing anything—not that he had that much to go on. Some jerkweed was forcing Sharafi to find something for him. He’d chopped off some woman’s head to show him how serious he was. And that same psycho was now holding Tess hostage to get Reilly to play ball. Reilly hated being in that position—reactive, not proactive—though as the FBI special agent in charge heading up the New York City field office’s Domestic Terrorism Unit, he had ample training and experience in reacting to crises.

  Problem was, they usually didn’t involve someone he loved.

  Outside the porticoed building, a young priest in a black cassock was waiting for them, sweating under the heat of the mid-summer sun. He led them inside, and as they walked down the cool, stone-flagged corridors and climbed up the grand marble staircases, Reilly found it hard to chase away the uncomfortable memories of his previous visit to this hallowed ground, three years earlier, and the disturbing sound bites of a conversation that had never left his consciousness. Those memories came flooding back even more viscerally as the priest pushed through the oversized, intricately carved oak door and brought the two visitors into the presence of his boss, Cardinal Mauro Brugnone, the Vatican’s secretary of state. A broad-shouldered man whose imposing physique was more suited to a Calabrian farmer than to a man of the cloth, the pope’s second-in-command was Reilly’s Vatican connection and, it seemed, the reason behind Tess’s abduction.

  The cardinal—despite being in his late sixties, he was still as husky and vigorous as Reilly remembered him from his previous visit there—came forward to greet him with outstretched arms.

  “I’ve been looking forward to hearing from you again, Agent Reilly,” he said with a bittersweet expression clouding his face. “Though I was hoping it would be under happier circumstances.”

  Reilly set his hastily packed overnight bag down and shook the cardinal’s hand. “Same here, Your Eminence. And thank you for seeing us at such short notice.”

  Reilly introduced the Iranian professor, and the cardinal did the same for the two other men in the room: Monsignor Francesco Bescondi, the prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives—a slight man with thinning fair hair and a tightly cropped goatee—and Gianni Delpiero, the inspector general of the Corpo della Gendarmeria, the Vatican’s police force—a taller, more substantial man with a solid brush of black hair and hard, angular features. Reilly tried not to show any discomfort at the fact that the Vatican’s head cop had been asked to join them. He shook the man’s hand with a cordial half smile, accepting that he should have expected it, given his urgent request for an audience—and given the bureau for which he worked.

  “What can we do for you, Agent Reilly?” the cardinal asked, ushering them into the plush armchairs by the fireplace. “You said you’d explain when you got here.”

  Reilly hadn’t had much time to think about how he would play this, but the one thing he did know was that he couldn’t tell them everything. Not if he wanted to make sure they’d agree to his request.

  “Before I say anything else, I need you to know I’m not here in any professional capacity. This isn’t the FBI sending me out here. It’s a personal request. I need to be sure you’re okay with that.” He’d asked to take a couple of days of personal leave after Tess’s call. No one back at Federal Plaza—not Aparo, his partner, or Jansson, their boss—knew he was in Rome. Which, he thought, may have been a mistake, but that was how he’d decided to play it.

  Brugnone brushed his caveat away. “What can we do for you, Agent Reilly?” he repeated, this time emphasizing the “you.”

  Reilly nodded gratefully. “I’m in the middle of a delicate situation,” he told his host. “I need your help. There’s no way around that. But I also need your indulgence in not asking me for more information than I can give you at this moment. All I can tell you is that lives are at stake.”

  Brugnone exchanged an unsettled look with his Vatican colleagues. “Tell us what you need.”

  “Professor Sharafi here needs some information. Information that, he believes, he can only find in your records.”

  The Iranian adjusted his glasses, and nodded.

  The cardinal studied Reilly, clearly discomfited by his words. “What kind of information?”

  Reilly leaned forward. “We need to consult a specific fond in the archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

  The men shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Reilly’s request for help was looking less benign by the second. Contrary to popular belief, there was nothing particularly secretive about the Vatican Secret Archives; the word “secret” was only meant in the context of the archives being part of the pope’s personal “secretariat,” his private papers. The archive Reilly needed access to, however, the Archivio Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei—the Archive of the Inquisition—was something else altogether. It held the Vatican archives’ most sensitive documents, including all the files related to heresy trials and book bannings. Access to its shelves was carefully restricted, to keep scandalmongers at bay. The events its fondi covered—a fond being a body of records that dealt with a specific issue—were hardly the papacy’s finest hour.

  “Which fond would that be?” the cardinal asked.

  “The Fondo Scandella,” Reilly answered flatly.

  His hosts seemed momentarily baffled, then relaxed at the mention. Domenico Scandella was a relatively insignificant sixteenth-century miller who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. His ideas about the origins of the universe were deemed heretical, and he was burned at the stake. What Reilly and the Iranian professor could want from the transcripts of his trial didn’t raise any alarms. It was a harmless request.

  The cardinal studied him, a perplexed expression lining his face. “That’s all you need?”

  Reilly nodded. “That’s it.”

  The cardinal glanced at the other two Vatican officials. They shrugged with indifference.

  Reilly knew they were in.r />
  Now came the hard part.

  BESCONDI AND DELPIERO ACCOMPANIED REILLY and his Iranian companion across the Belvedere Courtyard to the entrance of the Apostolic Library, where the archives were housed.

  “I have to admit,” the prefect of the archives confessed with a nervous chortle, “I feared you were after something that would be more difficult to … honor.”

  “Like what?” Reilly asked, playing along.

  Bescondi’s face clouded as he searched for the least compromising answer. “Lucia Dos Santos’s prophecies, for instance. You’re familiar with her, yes? The seer of Fatima?”

  “Actually, now that you mention it …” Reilly let the words drift, then flashed him a slight grin.

  The priest let out a small chuckle and nodded with relief. “Cardinal Brugnone told me you were to be trusted. I don’t know what I was worried about.”

  The words bounced uncomfortably inside Reilly’s conscience as they stopped at the entrance of the building. Delpiero, the inspector general, excused himself, given that he didn’t seem to be needed.

  “Anything I can do to help, Agent Reilly,” the cop offered, “just let me know.” Reilly thanked him, and Delpiero walked off.

  The three halls of the library, resplendent with ornate inlaid paneling and vividly colored frescoes that depicted the donations to the Vatican by various European sovereigns, were unnervingly quiet. Scholars, priests from various nations, and other academics with impeccable credentials glided across its marble floors on their way to or from the tranquillity of its reading rooms. Bescondi led the two outsiders to a grand spiral staircase that burrowed down to the basement level. It was cooler down there, the air-conditioning straining less than aboveground to keep the summer heat at bay. They ambled past a couple of junior archivists, who gave the prefect small, respectful bows, and reached an airy reception area where a Swiss Guard in a sober dark blue uniform and black beret sat behind a counter-type desk and a bank of discreet CCTV monitors. The man signed them in, and five taps into the security keypad later, the inner sliding door of the air lock was whishing shut behind them and they were in the archive’s inner sanctum.

  “The fondi are arranged alphabetically,” Bescondi said as he pointed out the small, elegantly scripted nameplates on the shelves and got his bearings. “Let’s see, Scandella should be down this way.”

  Reilly and the Iranian followed him deeper into the large, low-ceilinged crypt. Apart from the sharp clicks of their heels against the stone floor, the only noise in there was the constant, low hum of the air-management system that regulated the room’s oxygen level and kept harmful bacteria at bay. The long rows of shelves were packed tight with scrolls and leather-bound codices interspersed with more recent books and cardboard box files. Entire rows of ancient manuscripts were suffocating under blankets of dust, as, in some cases, no one had touched or consulted them for decades—if not centuries.

  “Here we are,” their host said as he pointed out a box file on a low shelf.

  Reilly glanced back, toward the archive’s entrance. They were alone. He nodded his appreciation at the priest, then said, “Actually, we really need to see another fond.”

  Bescondi blinked at him, confused. “Another fond? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry, Father, but—I couldn’t risk you and the cardinal not allowing us down here. And it’s imperative that we get access to the information we need.”

  “But,” the archivist stammered, “you didn’t mention this before, and … I’d need His Eminence to authorize showing you any other—”

  “Father, please,” Reilly interrupted him. “We need to see it.”

  Bescondi swallowed hard. “Which fond is it?”

  “The Fondo Templari.”

  The archivist’s eyes widened and did a quick dart to the left, farther down the aisle they were standing in, and back. He raised his hands in objection and stumbled back. “I’m sorry, that’s not possible, not without getting His Eminence’s approval—”

  “Father—”

  “No, it’s not possible, I can’t allow it, not before discussing it with—”

  He took another step back and edged sideways, in the direction of the entrance.

  Reilly had to act.

  He reached out, blocking the priest with one arm—

  “I’m sorry, Father.”

  —while the other dove into Reilly’s jacket’s side pocket and pulled out a small canister of mouth freshener, swung it right up to the archivist’s startled face, and pumped a cloud of spray right at him. The man stared at Reilly with wide, terrified eyes as the mist swirled around his head—then he coughed twice before his legs just collapsed under him. Reilly caught him as he fell and set him down gently on the hard floor.

  The colorless, odorless liquid wasn’t mouth freshener.

  And if the archivist wasn’t going to die from it, Reilly needed to do something else—fast.

  He reached into another pocket and pulled out a small ceramic syringe, yanked its cap off, and plunged it into a throbbing vein in the man’s forearm. He checked his pulse and waited till he was sure the opioid antagonist had done its job. Without it, the Fentanyl—a fast-acting, incapacitating opiate that was part of the Bureau’s small and unpublicized arsenal of non-lethal weapons—could send the prefect into a coma, or as in the tragic case of more than a hundred hostages in a Moscow theater a few years back, it could kill him. A quick chaser of Naloxone was crucial to make sure the archivist kept breathing—which he now was.

  Reilly stayed with him long enough to confirm the drug’s effect, countering the caustic discomfort he felt at what he had just done to their unsuspecting host by thinking of Tess and what Sharafi had told him her abductor had done to the schoolteacher. Feeling that the archivist’s breathing had stabilized, he nodded. “We’re clear.”

  The Iranian pointed down the aisle. “He looked that way when you mentioned the fond. Which fits. ‘T’ is the next letter.”

  “We’ve got around twenty minutes before he wakes up, maybe less,” Reilly told him as he stalked down the aisle. “Let’s make them count.”

  Chapter 3

  Tess Chaykin’s lungs hurt. So did her eyes. And her back. In fact, there wasn’t much of her that didn’t hurt.

  How much longer are they going to keep me like this?

  She’d lost all sense of time—all sense of anything, for that matter. She knew her eyes were taped shut. As was her mouth. Her wrists too, behind her back. And her knees and ankles. A twenty-first-century mummy of shiny silver duct tape and—something else too. A soft, thick, padded cocoon, wrapped around her. Like a sleeping bag. She felt it with her fingers. Yes, that’s what it was. A sleeping bag. Which explained why she was drenched in sweat.

  That was just about all she was sure of.

  She didn’t know where she was. Not exactly, anyway. She felt like she was in a cramped space. A hot, cramped space. She thought she might be in the back of a van, or in the trunk of a car. She wasn’t sure of it, but she could hear the distorted, muffled sounds coming in through the tape around her ears. From outside. The sounds of a busy street. Cars, motorcycles, scooters, rumbling and buzzing past. But something about the sounds jarred her. Something felt out of place, wrong—but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  She concentrated, trying to ignore the heaviness in her head and break through the fog that was clouding her memory. Vague recollections started to take shape. She remembered being grabbed at gunpoint on the way into town from the dig in Petra, Jordan, all three of them—she, her friend Jed Simmons, and the Iranian historian who’d sought them out. What was his name? Sharafi. Behrouz Sharafi, that was it. She remembered being locked into some grotty, windowless room. Not long after that, her abductor had made her call Reilly, in New York. Then she’d been drugged, injected with something. She could still feel the prick in her arm. And that was it, the last thing she remembered—how long ago was it now? She had no idea. Hours. A whole day, maybe? More?
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br />   No idea.

  She hated being in here. It was hot and cramped and dark and hard and smelled of, well, car trunk. Not like the trunk of some scuzzy old car that had all kinds of stinky residue wafting around. This car, if it was one, was clearly new—but still, unpleasant.

  Her spirits sank further the more she thought about her predicament. If she was in the trunk of a car, and if she could hear noises outside … maybe she was on a public road. A sense of panic swelled up inside her.

  What if I’ve just been dumped here, just left to rot?

  What if no one ever realizes I’m in here?

  A vein in her neck started throbbing, the duct tape around her ears turning them into echo chambers. Her mind raced wildly, spurred by the maddening internal drumbeat, wondering about how much air there was in there, how long she could survive without water or food, whether or not the tape might make her choke. She began to picture an agonizingly slow and horrific death, shriveling up from thirst and hunger and heat, just wasting away in a dark box as if she’d been buried alive.

  The fear of it hit her like a bucket of ice water. She had to do something. She tried twisting around to change position, maybe get some leverage to try to kick up against the lid of the trunk or whatever the hell it was she was in—but she couldn’t move. Something was holding her down. She was pinned down, strapped into place by some kind of restraint that she could now feel was tugging against her shoulders and her knees.

  She couldn’t move at all.

  She stopped fighting against the ties and settled back, heaving a ragged sigh that echoed in her ears. Tears welled up in her eyes as the notion of death solidified around her. The beaming face of her thirteen-year-old daughter, Kim, broke through her despair and drifted into her consciousness, beckoning her. She imagined her back in Arizona, enjoying the summer at the ranch of Tess’s older sister, Hazel. Another face glided into the picture, that of her mother, Eileen, who was also there with them. Then their faces dissipated, and a cold and hollow feeling grew in her gut, the anger and remorse over leaving New York and coming out here, to the Jordanian desert, all those weeks ago, to research her next novel. The summer dig with Simmons, a contact of her old friend Clive Edmondson and one of the leading Templar experts around, seemed like a good idea at the time. Coming out to the desert would allow her to spend time with Clive and give her a chance to expand on all the Templar knowledge that was the backbone of her new career. Equally, if not more importantly, it would give her the space she needed to think things through on a more personal front.