by G. L. Baron
‘Ask three artists to insert clues in their works?’ Cassini said in a clear mocking tone.
‘Think about it. What you said isn’t madness; it was a dark period, in which knowledge was passed down from books transcribed by skilled copyists. Delicate books, they could be stolen, burned, destroyed… or simply forgotten. Someone had to think that the best way to pass on very important information was to put it in a masterpiece that would live forever. And what better than a painting on canvas or even on the stone wall of a church?’
The professor did not answer. In fact, thinking about it, what the Sheikh said was reasonable… If indeed the surviving Templars had wanted to pass on the secret of Iceland, they could have done it with works destined to last forever. ‘Assuming, by contradiction, you’re right; the painters whom you cited, however, are of the sixteenth century… and the expedition to Iceland is the thirteenth century… there are three hundred years in the middle!’
‘No one says that those works are the only ones to keep the secret… Evidently we haven’t found any clues in the works of the artists of the previous periods.’
‘Why should Leonardo and company have done it? Why put clues in their works?’
‘Maybe because they were part of the Order, perhaps because they shared the secret’s importance, or perhaps, more simply, for money… who knows.’
‘And Dante?’ Cassini continued again. Despite forcing himself to remain calm, he was beginning to give some credit to the Sheikh’s words. Was it possible that the common denominator between Botticelli and the author of the Divine Comedy was the expedition narrated by the Sheikh?
An expedition that had hidden one of the Templars’ secrets in Iceland?
‘I think that now the relationship between the great poet and the pictures should be clear. The works of the sixteenth century contain a coded message… And the key in decoding it is Dante.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We can say that the sixteenth-century paintings are the lock, and the Divine Comedy’s verses are the key to open it! Certainly you know the theory that the poet would be “Mercury” in Botticelli’s Primavera. And that the book read by Epicurus in Raphael’s School of Athens would be the Divine Comedy. Or that Dante could be the subject depicted in the Mona Lisa.’
‘All theories…’ muttered Cassini.
‘All theories that, in one way or another, lead us to investigate Dante and the key that he left us with his work. And you are the author of The Secret of the Cursed Painters; is it your idea that Paradise really exists? How did you write it? “If the ‘dark forest’ is the starting point of the journey and can be identified in the Valley of Jehoshaphat near Jerusalem, this can also apply to the point of arrival; that amphitheatre which the poet called the White Rose of the Blessed, where the souls in Paradise reside. If so, the Garden of Eden could really exist, somewhere…”’
They were his exact words, written five years earlier. That man must have been so conditioned by his theories that he had learnt them by memory.
‘Dante’s point of arrival, where the Templars’ secret is safe-guarded, is in Iceland. The Garden of Eden is Iceland,’ the Sheikh repeated. A satellite image appeared on his chair’s screen; it showed the course of two rivers that composed a strange design and a flashing letter x. Next to it, there were some numbers: 64 ° 27 ' 11”.
64 ° 27 ' 11”.
Cassini assumed they were the co-ordinates where they had conducted the archaeological excavations that Julia had told him about. The professor estimated that for a diameter of several kilometres, around the x, the area was marked by a different colour.
‘In the thirteenth century the island was covered with trees, tall trees and birches. It was an earthly paradise,’ continued the Arab. ‘Then the vegetation was destroyed because of the Little Ice Age, between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. Don’t you find a similarity with the background of Botticelli’s Primavera? Another little clue, if you want…’
‘I understand where you’re going. But you forget one important detail… “A season, in the which, one sent from God, (Five hundred, five, and ten, do mark him out) That foul one, and th' accomplice of her guilt, The giant, both shall slay.”’
Manuel looked away from the monitor to the Sheikh’s lifeless eyes. ‘I admit that the idea to place the Garden of Eden in Iceland is fascinating… but the poet tells us that we would find a leader there, sent by God to restore the church to its spiritual dimension… I’m sorry but I’m afraid there is no talk about treasure in the Comedy.’
‘It’s the exact opposite. The enigma, that you’ve just masterfully recited, means the exact opposite! Five hundred ten five indicates a place, not a leader. Five hundred, ten, five: that is, five hundred and fifteen BC, the year of the Second Temple of Solomon’s reconstruction. The triplet indicates that at the end of the journey, arriving in Paradise, at the white rose you will find a temple in which four objects are kept! Something so powerful and valuable that you will need to hide it from men for a thousand and not more than a thousand… Until the arrival of a chosen one, worthy of that power.’
Cassini looked doubtful, but said nothing.
‘…These objects would be able to obscure the sun and bring down the stars, to unleash a fury that will not even be understood. Those are the words of Dante, not mine, and they hide the secrets of the Templars, that are buried in the temple, somewhere in Iceland.’
In fact, the professor found himself thinking, the significance of the so-called enigma of canto XXXIII of Purgatory was anything but clear… The prophecy of “a thousand and not more than a thousand” had been widely debated and a univocal thesis never existed… although he had never heard that one of the Sheikh’s either. He wondered if the five hundred ten and five could really relate to the reconstruction of the Second Temple by the hands of Zerubbabel. And the four items mentioned by Al Husayn?
‘I think I understand what you wanted from me,’ he finally muttered under his breath. ‘You hoped that by introducing ideas into my brain about Botticelli, Leonardo and Raphael’s art by force… my knowledge on the Comedy would enable me to decipher all Dante’s clues of…’
‘The key to Dante…’ muttered the Arab. ‘It took a bit but you got there in the end. But that’s not all.’
‘Well… This is a good crazy folly. There is no key to Dante,’ snarled the professor, now visibly annoyed. ‘And I fear, however, to disappoint you again. There is nothing in my mind that could be useful… I’m afraid your calculations are wrong.’
The door of the room opened, and the rounded figure of Yukiko Nakamichi came in, just staring through her black goggles at the Sheikh.
Behind her was another person, a young red-haired man. He was the one speaking. ‘We’re ready. We can begin.’
Meanwhile, Cassini’s words hung, suspended in the air.
I’m afraid your calculations are wrong.
The Sheikh was silent for a moment, then his voice synthesizer froze the professor. ‘I’m afraid that you are wrong… and you’ll soon realize it.’
67
Dubai, January 5th. 11:38 a.m.
He stared at the curved screen and saw his own reflection.
He was wearing an elastic petrol-coloured helmet, with red and blue wires sticking out from the front and ending in an electronic device next to the wheelchair. Two rubbery discs protected his ears and a strip of plastic material blocked his chin.
In the last few minutes he had regained feeling in his upper limbs and head… perhaps his hands were tied to the armrests with leather strips for that reason. A small venous catheter was grafted onto his forearm and connected to a machine similar to a gas cylinder. On its summit stood a big fan.
‘Beta 25.8. Alfa 12.6,’ muttered a doctor in a white coat. She was slender, round-faced and had black eyes.
Yukiko Nakamichi, with a deceptively mild look, turned to the lab technician behind her, who was holding a metal tray full of vials and syringes. ‘Diazepam. Ten m
illigrams.’
She plugged a syringe into the catheter and inoculated the drug. The milky liquid began to flow and moved slowly in a small transparent tube. When it reached the patient’s forearm, a slight burning sensation shook Cassini.
‘You’re under stress,’ the Japanese pointed out to the professor. ‘We injected a tranquillizer in the lowest dose. It’ll help you to remain conscious but relaxed.’
‘The mapping is complete,’ interrupted Timothy Dempsey, sitting at a console on the other side of the laboratory. ‘There are forty-two markers in all.’
Cassini turned. On the opposite side, towards the window that looked out onto the sunny gulf, there were five computer stations arranged in a semicircle. A few monitors hung from the ceiling and against the wall there was a row of racks, with green and red lights that danced to the rhythm of the fans. It looked like a plane’s dashboard.
Al Husayn was not far away. Settled in his chair, he looked grim and was tense. He was placed under some operating lights and, like Cassini, was wearing a helmet covered with electric cables.
‘How large is the file?’ asked Nakamichi.
The young computer expert moved the mouse, and after a moment looked up. ‘There’s fourteen sectors, all quite bulky… about 0.93 zettabyte.’
Zettabyte.
Manuel had no idea what they were talking about and the Sheikh – on the other side of the lab –must have noticed it, because he felt compelled to explain. ‘One zettabyte corresponds to a trillion bytes, or a trillion trillion.’
The professor looked at him as if he were a Martian.
‘With this amount of data it was impossible to use ultrasound discs, which – however capacious they may be – can only hold a few petabytes at most; the equivalent of one million giga.’
‘Are you telling me that you used my brain… as a kind of hard disc?’ Cassini’s mouth felt pasty from the drugs and he felt exhausted… however, he was strong enough to express his disbelief.
‘Don’t be silly, we used it mainly for what’s inside… Anyway, bio-neural discs are the future… What we did was simple: first we stored the impressions supplied by the markers in my poor wife’s brain, which acted as an intermediary with the other subjects, and then we copied them in yours.’
As absurd as it may have been, that technique – worthy of a Nazi experiment – explained the visions in his brain. The information of all the “guinea pigs” had been collected in Meredith’s bio-support and then all together had been placed in his brain. Had he not experienced this in person, he would have thought the whole thing the ravings of a madman… However, unfortunately, he was a living example that what they had done was for real.
‘Anyway…’ the Arab explained in a conversational tone, ‘if it makes you feel better, we originally planned to conduct the experiment in a different way. We thought we’d use simple ultrasound discs, and not living cells… Fortunately, the early stages showed that there was not enough storage space. So we solved another problem at the same time; if he were still alive we should thank de Beaumont for this. With his unstable personality and his constant mood swings, we understood that by following that path, the experiences impressed would be polluted by fear, anger, sadness, happiness, hope…’
‘So, this is the reason why you did it without my knowledge, drugging me… to prevent stress from defiling your valuable information?’ Cassini’s expression was flat due to the drugs, but inside he felt like a grenade ready to explode with anger.
‘If we exclude some random visions, which I don’t think bothered you that much, I think it worked remarkably well. We just need to carry out a few small upgrade adjustments.’
‘Random visions?’ Cassini was speechless.
The flashbacks that had pestered him in the last few days because of that experiment, were simple side effects for the Sheikh. The visions that had made him believe he was going crazy, risking his life in trying to understand them better, even believing that he was a murderer… were just something to be fixed with a software update?
‘And the most important thing is that the information is now in your long-term memory. At present, they are part of your knowledge, and soon will be part of mine—’ the voice synthesizer stopped short. The Sheikh moved the chair and turned towards the American, as if he suddenly had a flash of inspiration. ‘How’s the lossy factor?’ he asked.
The redhead examined the file on his console, then looked up and smiled. ‘You were right, it seems that the markers have tracked them.’
The Sheikh turned again towards Cassini, immobilized on a chair similar to his, and continued; ‘You see this fat man? He has an IQ of two hundred but he believed that if the information had not been transmitted within two hours, it would be useless. Obviously he was wrong.’
Cassini was still. He had not yet understood exactly what to expect, but he was sure it would not be pleasant.
‘We’re ready,’ Dempsey announced finally.
Al Husayn stared at the big OLED screen on the wall and then flicked his pupils towards the American. ‘Let’s begin.’
68
The red sun, low at sunset, was a vitreous ball that made the sky resemble a bleeding wound.
At the bottom of a chasm excavated through the earth, between outcrops of grass and rocky spikes, an ashen river flowed angrily.
He turned, bewildered; a forest loomed threateningly over his head. He walked among the dense foliage, the light streamed through the leaves and his shadow stretched in front of him.
Then, suddenly, the dark.
Silence.
Fear.
He took a few more tentative steps on the rough terrain, following an unearthly clamour that gradually became more intense.
He walked for an indefinite time, breathing with difficulty, his heart beating more and more intensely.
But the more he walked, the more the voices grew louder around him; thousands of overlapping murmurings and intrusive chatter that pierced his mind.
He pressed his hands to his temples and squeezed hard, trying to silence the rabble of invisible people. But in vain. They were always there, hidden in the darkness but more and more penetrating.
Little by little, the darkness thinned, leaving room for another river that appeared in front of him. On the opposite bank stood standards that towered towards the sky and seemingly without end. And then the flames, so high and intense, that they coloured the air like a painter’s brush strokes.
He thought he saw a line of people proceeding, slowly, two by two. ‘Blessed are you among the daughters of Adam, may your beauty be blessed for eternity!’ They sang, among the thousands of voices that pierced his eardrums.
Behind the fading procession, he saw four feathered animals with six wings appear, and in the middle, a cart drawn by a griffin.
Then, a deafening thunderclap, and suddenly, more darkness, darker than a moonless night.
A shudder ran up his spine when he felt the cold water on his skin.
Now he was at the mercy of a rushing stream, his head facing skywards in search of oxygen. His heart thundered in his chest.
The voices rose again, piercing his eardrums.
Everything in his mind was terribly confused; the few images seen before the darkness were tarnished and overlapping, as if they were reflected in a cracked mirror.
He felt out of place. He wondered if he was dreaming, if he was under the influence of some substance, or, simply, if the operation had failed.
It was dark, cold and the current tossed him about.
He would die.
Mohamed bin Saif Al Husayn’s eyes widened, aghast. For the first time in his life, he was really scared.
69
Paris, January 5th. 2:57 p.m.
Nigel Sforza walked along the Champs-Élysées with a surprising sly smile painted on his face. He had had it printed on his face since the previous evening, and as hard as he might try to keep a stern hold on things, he just could not.
The meeting with th
e woman who said her name was Julia had resolved – at least for a while – his problem with money. With a million euro he could enjoy women and booze without worrying about some loan shark hovering nearby.
He had, nevertheless, decided to keep a low profile; no one must know that his financial situation had changed. The smartest thing to do – the best way to prevent someone in Lyon suspecting and asking questions – was to pretend nothing had changed. Just like after winning the lottery.
And the best way was to continue his work… After all, he still had a case to solve: finding Meredith Evans and Andrea Cavalli Gigli’s killer.
‘Look for a Japanese with one green and one brown eye and you’ll have found the murderer,’ the blonde had hissed on the runway of Ciampino – more or less the same information provided by Manuel Cassini after the meeting at Castel Sant’Angelo.
The professor, however, had added one more element: a golden gun.
They were not much as clues, but he had Fabien Bérot enter them in the Interpol database and, incredibly, had got a hit: a complaint by a Hertz employee in Paris, three days earlier. The young woman had reported being threatened by some men, and the one who looked like their boss was a Japanese affected by heterochromia. Incidentally, he had also waved a gun with a golden barrel.
Sforza pushed the glass door and entered the car rental. The room was surprisingly small. There was a teak counter in front of the window, a swan-neck lamp, two simple velvet armchairs, and a clock ticking on the wall.
‘What can I do for you?’ asked the young woman.
‘I am Inspector Sforza from Interpol,’ he said, showing his badge.
‘I’ve already told the police everything!’ she growled, her hands outstretched on her round hips. ‘The guy threatened me with a gun… I still tremble when I think about it, after several days.’
‘What did he want exactly?’
