by Tom Fox
Vico had consolidated the whole of his research into a small digital dossier and forwarded it to the boss. Most of it, he imagined, was overkill – but he prided himself on his work, and a bit of ingratiating oneself to others was never wholly off base.
All that was really needed now was the fact that the MAC address of Angelina Calla’s smartphone pinged to cellular towers and open WiFi ports automatically. She had all the ‘convenience features’ of modern portable computing switched on, which meant she was live everywhere.
Which meant she was trackable. Everywhere.
‘Where is she at, right now?’ Vico asked.
‘She’s inside Vatican City,’ Corso answered.
‘Damn it, be more precise than that!’ Vico wasn’t as impatient as his voice suggested, but after the wet teams had lost both the woman and the male target earlier in the day, Emil’s charge to find them again had come with a sufficiently threatening tone to inspire Vico to get back to him with nothing other than a pinpoint location.
‘Belvedere Courtyard inside the Palace,’ Corso continued, squinting through thick spectacles, ‘just a second.’ His fingers danced over his keyboard. ‘North-western quadrant, ten metres to the right of the corner. Let me look that up.’
He began to type again, but Pietro had already cross-referenced the location.
‘That’s the entrance to the Secret Archives.’
Vico stared at the screen, nodding over the other two men’s heads.
‘That’ll do.’
His phone was already open, Emil’s number on the speed dial digit beneath his thumb.
30
Beneath the Cortile Della Pigna
Vatican City
The buzzer on the electronic security door was still going as Angelina followed Ben out of the corridor and then froze in place as she set her eyes on the ‘bunker’ buried beneath the Vatican Palace.
The underground vault was vast. The door at the end of the access corridor permitted entry through the solid metre of metal-reinforced concrete that constituted its walls, opening into a two-storey space that looked like a cross between an industrial warehouse and an overpacked museum. Giant vents circulated air that Angelina presumed was precisely climate controlled; security cameras pointed at almost every square metre of space; and the dual-level expanse was divided by metal-grate flooring built around a series of storage shelving on the top level and rotating stacks on the bottom. It was a vault designed to house as much as possible – and it appeared to be almost entirely full.
‘Welcome to the belly of the beast,’ Ben said, and Angelina could see the pleased smile on his face. Ben was obviously at home. For the moment, it felt like a sentiment she could share.
‘And now,’ he added, ‘let’s find our tablet.’
It took a matter of seconds, not minutes, for Angelina to realise that the majesty of the innermost chamber of the Secret Archives was of an entirely different sort than that she’d glimpsed in the reading rooms above.
She, like most people, had once made her presumptions based more on legend and speculation than any actual knowledge. The very name of the Archives sounded as if the whole establishment was a cloak-and-dagger institution of closely guarded secrets cut off from public access – but on Angelina’s previous visit she’d been divested of some of those delusions. The Secret Archives were open for public research to anyone with suitable academic qualifications and references, and several thousand passed through it each year on various research projects, having gone through a detailed but hardly exotic procedure to secure a readership ticket.
Once inside, the Archives were hardly as cloak-and-dagger as was guessed. It wasn’t filled with gaslit expanses of stone caves piled with dust-covered manuscripts, nor was it home to barometric Plexiglas chambers sealing out oxygen and light. It was, to any scholar who had spent time in some of the more famous manuscript libraries of the world – the Bodleian’s Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room in Oxford, or the Laurentian Medici Library in Florence – an expected space. Rows of wooden shelves housed leather-bound volumes of post-sixteenth century manuscripts in hand-labelled codices, while older parchments were kept in flat-access drawers. It was beautiful, and genuinely awe-inspiring – but hardly unusual. Angelina’s own alma mater had a manuscript wing in its library that, while significantly smaller, looked and felt much the same on the inside.
But the ‘bunker’ was something altogether different.
‘What the hell is this?’
The words, as they erupted from her mouth, surprised Angelina as much as they did Ben. He turned to face her, his features a puzzle.
‘Excuse me?’
‘This,’ Angelina waved both arms at their white-lit surroundings. ‘This is . . . not what I’d envisaged.’
Hardly a vision of splendour.
‘It’s a bit different from the rooms upstairs,’ Ben answered, ‘I’ll give you that. But it’s here that some of our most remarkable treasures are kept.’
Beyond them, rows of metal shelving were filled, from one end to the other and in all their height, with muted grey storage boxes, each of which was fronted by a white label of a few centimetres squared, containing nothing but a printed set of filing numbers and a bar code. The overall effect was bland, repetitious, monotonous. Beneath them was more of the same, though the shelving units were on stacked rollers that allowed them to be positioned flush against each other on tracks, cramming nearly a third more storage space into the same footprint, facing shelves only sliding apart when necessary for access.
The magnitude of the collection gradually sank in. Angelina was no expert at maths, but even basic computations of the number of filing boxes to shelves, to rows, to aisles, meant that the bunker contained tens upon tens of thousands of individual grey containers.
‘Do you have any way of knowing which one of these contains the tablet?’
Ben reached confidently into his back pocket and extracted a mobile phone that looked more or less identical to Angelina’s.
‘I thought you didn’t do technology,’ she said, brows raised pointedly, remembering a detail about Ben’s personality. She recalled him describing himself as something of a self-determined luddite.
‘I may not enjoy it intruding its way into my life outside of work,’ Ben answered, ‘but it has its uses when required.’ He swiped his finger across the phone’s display, entering a passcode that looked far longer than the four-digit pin on Angelina’s own, then spent a few seconds navigating through its contents. Finally, he held the screen back up towards her.
His finger pointed at a small icon beneath which were printed two Italian words.
ARCHIVIO SEGRETO
‘You have an app . . . for the Vatican Secret Archives?’ Angelina asked.
Ben’s smile returned. ‘Only for parts of it, and it only works within the building.’
‘Okay, I’m impressed,’ she conceded. ‘But I’ll be more so once I see it work.’
Their mutual smiles lingered a moment longer, then Ben’s face became serious. He stepped across Angelina and held out his hand towards one of the boxes on a shelf at chest level. With a thumb press on his screen, the app switched into camera mode and a small set of red cross hairs positioned itself in the centre of the screen. He focused them on the bar code on the box’s label, steadied his grip, then clicked the shutter button. A moment later, the camera display disappeared and the app displayed a blank screen with a pinwheel rotating at its centre.
Seconds later the pinwheel vanished and the white screen was replaced by a colour photo surmounted with descriptive text.
‘MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, PRE-PUBLICATION EDN, HANDWRITTEN CORRECTIONS BY AUTHOR IN MARGINS, 1519.’
Angelina’s breath stuck in her throat.
‘That’s, in . . . this box?’
Ben’s smile exposed all his teeth, his eyes feathering out with wrinkles that crawled towards his temples.
‘Can I see that?’ she asked, pointing towards Ben’s phone. He nodded
and passed her the device.
‘Pick a box, any box.’
She freely obeyed, taking a few steps down the nearest aisle and aiming the scanner at a random bar code on another in a line of indistinguishable storage containers.
‘GALILEO GALILEI, SIDEREUS NUNCIUS, 1ST EDN, 1610.’
Suddenly, the smile on Angelina’s face was gone.
‘Holy shit.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m, sorry, I’m . . .’
Angelina had been overcome already, but in this instant she wanted to weep. There, just there, on the other side of a piece of acid-free cardboard, her thoughts called out to her. Galileo’s ‘Starry Messenger’. A document that, in the most real way imaginable, changed the way the whole of humanity sees the universe. A book through which the earth became a traveller, soaring through the heavens in its course around the sun, flying in symphony with sister planets and moons and stars in a concert that portended so many of the scientific advances that had come over the centuries since.
She could almost touch it.
Everything within her pulled, churned, compelled her to petition, Please, can I see it? Could she possibly stand so close to such a monument of history and not set her eyes upon it?
But then, in the strange light of the LED bulbs high above them, the tightening in Angelina’s chest changed. It had started as awe, but as it increased it gripped differently at her heart – more ferociously, more painfully. Her breathing shortened, and in her ears her pulse became audible as anxiety turned the beats into memories of gunshots.
Panic came suddenly, without warning, and it took every ounce of Angelina’s already waning strength to shove it down, somewhere deep inside her, and keep control over the moment.
She turned to face Ben directly.
‘So, this app can search contents as well as reveal them, right?’
The question, with its obvious answer – the whole reason Ben had shown her the app in the first place – thrust him swiftly back into complete seriousness.
‘Of course.’
‘Then let’s find what we came here for.’
31
Outside the entrance to the Secret Archives
Across the Belvedere Courtyard
‘She’s in there?’ André turned his face to Ridolfo as his nod signalled the wooden door of the Vatican Secret Archives, next to one of the maintenance entrances to the main Vatican Library. They’d entered Vatican City as tourists, just like floods of others, though Ridolfo had realised that with the descending darkness of evening their motion towards, rather than away from, the monuments of the religious capital was beginning to make them look out of place. He’d opted for them to find their way to a discreet corner of the courtyard, and then position themselves behind a low stone wall built to conceal a collection of coloured rubbish bins.
‘That’s what the tech team’s told us,’ he answered, not taking his eyes off the entrance. He knew they couldn’t get in, not at this time of day. By now its office was shut and any staff who might open the door to an enquirer had long since gone home.
‘What the fuck are we supposed to do, then?’ André asked. The man was still pissed off he’d let Angelina Calla slip away from them earlier in the day. He had a bloodlust on his face that Ridolfo could see through the darkness, outlined as clearly as the opulent architecture of their surroundings.
He glanced at his watch. Fake gold, but still a pleasant make. ‘We wait.’
André spun at him. ‘I’m not just going to stand here, twiddling my goddamned thumbs!’
God, Ridolfo wanted to smack him. André and he had become close friends over the years, but that had never hindered their ability to get on each other’s nerves.
‘You won’t be standing for long.’ He looked at his watch again then let his hand fall to his side. ‘Don’t you remember the second prophecy?’
André halted. A rant was on the tip of his frustrated tongue, but his friend’s words silenced it. The second prophecy.
His tension lessened as the thought overtook him, and Ridolfo nodded at the sight of André’s sudden calm.
‘It will push them out,’ he said, turning his attention back to the door. ‘And it’s only a few minutes away.’
32
The bunker
It didn’t take long for Ben to locate the tablet. With a little collaborative brainstorming with Angelina over which search terms to use, the app on his phone had given up its shelving details and new location in the belly of the Archives.
‘NEW ACQUISITIONS: AKKADIAN – ROME/CLEMENTE STELE 1435.2002AF.’
The results glowed on the tiny screen of Ben’s phone. A moment later, they were both moving.
The location code led Ben towards a staircase nearly steep enough to be called a ladder, which led down to the bottom floor of the vault. Angelina followed him as he made his way carefully down, and then over to the control panel for one of the banks of rolling stacks. Ben entered the call number on to a digital keypad, and the whirring of an electric motor sounded the instant ‘ROW 27’ began to flash in response. A second later, the enormous shelving rows began to move along rails laid into the concrete floor, vast banks of them sliding to the left while a few moved to the right. When they were done and a small chime sounded, row twenty-seven was open and accessible, all the other rows compressed to a width of no more than six centimetres each.
‘This way,’ Ben said and started down the aisle. Angelina noticed that his words were barely more than a whisper, and the thought occurred to her that the deeper they got into the bunker, the closer they drew to the tablet, the quieter Ben became. She’d initially assumed it was merely focus, but the timidity of his words hinted at something more.
Ben walked them down the length of row twenty-seven, glancing at section markers on engraved plaques on the shelving, until they came to a section about three quarters of the way towards the aisle’s end. Turning to face left, he counted up shelves from the bottom until he reached the fourth, which ran at just about his shoulder level.
‘This should be the spot.’ He scrutinised the call number on his phone again, then looked back at the row of indistinguishable grey storage boxes. ‘And that should be the one.’
The box he indicated sat at the level of Angelina’s eyes, and she silently observed as he held up his phone and scanned the bar code on its white label.
‘It matches,’ Ben announced, matter-of-factly. ‘We’ve got our tablet.’
A question had been percolating in Angelina’s mind since they’d started their descent from the upper floor to here. Now, with the box containing the tablet right in front of them, she could no longer keep it to herself. The design of the shelving system made it imperative.
‘Ben, are we going to be able to open it?’
Ben’s face registered immediate comprehension.
‘All the shelves are access controlled,’ he answered, motioning towards two steel bars that ran across the row of filing boxes, one descending a few centimetres from the shelf above and the other rising a few from the shelf beneath, fixed across the surface of the boxes and effectively preventing them from being removed from their spot. Angelina had spotted the bars and correctly surmised their purpose.
‘You need to enter an access code to release the security bars,’ Ben added. ‘It allows us to keep track of which shelves are accessed, and by whom.’
Angelina’s eyes were no longer on the box; they were squarely bored into Ben’s face.
‘I assume you have access?’
He hesitated, ‘Yes, though we’re not meant to use it without . . .’
But the words died in his mouth. Protocols were protocols, but they were both here for the same reason.
‘Just give me a second,’ he finally said, straightening himself. He squeezed past Angelina and made his way back to the head of the aisle. There he entered a few more strokes on the same keypad that had formerly shifted the rolling stacks to life, and a second later a buzz emerged from the shel
f at Angelina’s head.
She watched as the two metal restraint bars moved on electric hinges and freed up access to the shelf that contained their box.
‘Give me just a second and I’ll get us a stepladder and some equipment to—’
Ben’s voice continued in the distance, but to Angelina it had become background noise.
‘No more time to waste,’ she whispered.
She reached out and took the grey box firmly in her grip.
The box came off the shelf more easily than she’d thought it would, weighing less than its size suggested. As there were no tables nearby, Angelina opted to lower it gently to the floor, then laid it on its side.
From the end of the aisle, Ben saw her movements. ‘Wait, Angelina, what are you doing? We can’t just open that here!’
He rushed towards her, and a moment later his hand was on her shoulder.
‘We need to take it up to one of the reading rooms. There needs to be padding, we need gloves. For God’s sake, there’s history in there!’
It wasn’t that Angelina didn’t agree with him. But inside her, emotion had grown too strong a force to resist. The tablet is here, and I need to see it. Now.
A string wound around a peg held down the box’s closure, and Angelina calmed her breath, focused her attention, and unwound it.
With a flick of her wrist, the lid came open.
The tablet lay encased in a custom-cut foam embrace. History it may be, but it was history in its sanitised and curated form. There was no dust to be blown away, no cobwebs to brush aside. The box was clean, its interior pristine.
But a muffled ‘My God’ fell from Angelina’s mouth all the same. The tablet was right . . . here.
Her whole, short-lived academic life had been spent studying the culture and language of the people who wrote in this script, and she had seen photographs of just about every clay tablet and inscribed stone on which Akkadian pictographs had ever been written. They recounted the famed hanging gardens of their culture’s most famous city; they spelled out legal codes that predicted the Enlightenment by millennia. They told the stories of gods and goddesses; they recounted the life of a civilisation that had once been spread across the earth, but which Greeks and Persians and other forces of history had gradually eliminated completely. All their history, from beginning to end, impressed as triangles and dashes into the runic figures in clay that Angelina had come to love.
