The Julian secret lr-2

by Gregg Loomis

  The walk took a sharp right turn, ending at a small building housing both ticket office and a restaurant with outdoor tables overlooking the ruins. From the concrete pad surrounding the structure, Lang could see what had been a seawall. Along the wall, several tents had been erected. He guessed that was the site of the present dig. Indeed, that was the only place left for archaeological exploration.

  Two or three hundred yards the other way, the direction from which he had come, a steep hill crowned with apartment buildings stood. Sheets, shirts, underwear, anything that had been laundered that morning flew from the clotheslines between rails of balconies as proudly as pennants from the yardarm of a man-o'-war. The paradox of a cheap checkered tablecloth flapping over the villa of a long-gone, wealthy Roman had a message, Lang supposed, even if he couldn't verbalize it.

  What was certain was that the expense of shoring up dozens, if not hundreds, of people's homes made digging in this direction impractical if not impossible.

  He stepped inside the building and bought a ticket. Outside, a flock of guides waited on tourists who simply weren't there. Lang supposed the crowded streets at the top of the hill and lack of visible parking sent the big tour buses to Pompeii, a much larger if less preserved ruin that could accommodate thousands of sightseers daily. Two hundred people would clog the few narrow streets so far exposed here.

  Climbing down the steps, he followed the seawall until he was opposite the place canvas covered the base. Standing with a piece of stone in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other was Indiana Jones. Or at least his Italian counterpart. Tall, with a broad-brimmed hat, military-style khakis, and knee boots, he was intent on whatever he was inspecting.

  "Dr. Rossi?"

  Indiana turned and looked up with eyes that had become myopic from close scrutiny of too many antiquities. The face was tanned and prematurely lined from exposure to the sun. A queue of white hair protruded like a tail from under the hat. There was nothing defective about the smile as bright as young Savelli's.

  "Mr. Couch?" He shifted the glass from one hand to the other, put both it and the stone down, and extended a hand. "Enrico must have called even as you were leaving the museum. It is not every day we are honored by an American newspaperman."

  The accent was more British than Italian.

  In spite of a twinge of guilt at the deception, Lang produced a small tape recorder, setting it down on a stone that might have served as a bollard for Roman galleys. "I'm particularly interested in forensics, the tools you use to read old and obliterated inscriptions or ancient and faded texts."

  The archaeologist nodded. "There is no magic in that, Mr. Couch." He picked up the stone he had been holding. "Note the indentations on this. I suspect it was some sort of a marker, perhaps what we today would call a slip number for someone's private watercraft. Centuries of abrasion in the sand of the beach have worn it nearly smooth." Even through the magnifying glass Dr. Rossi held, Lang could see only faint indentations and grooves. He stood back. ''You have something that will enable you to read that?" The Italian crossed the small enclosure to lower the flap of canvas. With the light breeze shut out, sweat instantly began to prickle Lang's neck. The archaeologist reached into a box and produced a contraption that resembled a hair dryer.

  "Please forgive the heat, but it is necessary to exclude as much light as possible. This is an ultraviolet scanner." He held it so the beam would run along the surface of the stone before he turned it on. "There!"

  Like a magician's trick, the faint grooves became readable: ''XXI.'' "Twenty-one?" Lang asked skeptically, still unsure what he was seeing.

  "Twenty-one," Dr. Rossi confirmed. "What we don't know is if that is a slip number, the number of a boathouse, or part of a larger inscription. This business is full of puzzles."

  He seemed more elated than overcome by the prospect.

  "That light," Lang asked. "How does it work?"

  Rossi put down the stone and opened the flap. The air rushing in was warm and moist but refreshing, like opening the kitchen door after broiling a roast.

  '''When a stone or any hard substance is engraved, by hand or machine, the groove frequently goes deeper than the human eye can see, albeit very narrow. The ultraviolet simply picks up and casts shadows from the otherwise invisible grooves. This one was fairly easy. Had we not been able to read it, I would next have used this."

  He produced a camera with a very short, wide lens.

  "Thirty-five millimeter with a huge macro lens and ultraviolet filter. We would have put the rock on the table there, turned on the klieg lights, and photographed it."

  "Like trying to read the numbers filed off a firearm,"

  Lang suggested.

  ''At least in your television crime dramas, yes."

  He put the camera down and picked up its twin. "This one has the same lens but with an infrared filter. When we come across writing on parchment, papyrus, any form of material that would have required some form of ink, we use this. Often the pigment has long ago faded but it leaves a residue, one this camera can pick up. In fact, the Oxyrhynus Papyri, found in the nineteenth century in what amounted to ancient garbage dumps, have yielded parts of Aristophanes' plays long lost, early parts of the Gospels, all sorts of things tossed onto the rubbish heap from the second century B.C. to the seventh A.D. With this camera, we can actually read what the original discoverers could not."

  Lang braced himself for the full duration of an academic lecture. He was surprised when Dr. Rossi came up short.

  "I digress from your question. You might want to remember 'Oxyrhynus Papyri' if you have any questions about how this sort of equipment is being used. I'm sure there's an Internet site."

  He spelled the words for the benefit of the empty tape recorder and lifted his watch to inches in front of his face.

  "Oh my. It's past time to stop work for the afternoon recess. The men will be complaining. Do you have labor unions like that in America, Mr. Couch?"

  Lang started to suggest the doctor ask any out-of-work airline employee. Instead, he said noncommittally, "We certainly have them. Doctor, you've been most helpful."

  They were stepping out from under the canvas.

  "Could I perhaps persuade you to stay for tea? Or perhaps something a little cooler?" the archaeologist asked.

  Lang was about to reply when something streaked across the corner of his eye. A flash of a reflection, the early-afternoon sun dancing off of glass. A small, polished piece of glass.

  "Shit!"

  Lang threw himself to the ground, an arm extended to knock down the Italian. Tiny fragments of rock stung his cheek a millisecond before he heard the flat crack of a rifle.

  Dragging the doctor behind him, he rolled under the canvas, which would screen them both.

  The man outside the Rome museum on the cell phone, no doubt a call to a confederate in Naples. A tail in traffic so thick it was impossible to detect. The man who had watched him enter the path to the ruins.

  And enough time to get a rifleman with a telescopic sight in place in one of hundreds of apartments facing the ancient town.

  Dr. Rossi was breathlessly speaking into a cell phone. Lang heard the word polizia more than once.

  A burly workman, dirt caked to his hairy bare chest, took the doctor by the arm, helping him to stand on none-too-steady legs. Even without understanding the words, Lang knew the archaeologist was assuring his workers he was OK.

  He turned to Lang, a nervous grimace twitching at the corners of his mouth. ''You think it's safe now?"

  Lang nodded. "Whoever it was, he's long gone. Trying another shot's too risky now that we know the area where it came from."

  The doctor made a show of brushing himself off and said with forced humor, "I knew the crew expected me to observe the midday recess, but they could have simply asked."

  The police arrived in force, made a detailed if futile search of the apartments, and interviewed everyone in sight, including the horde of guides. The few visitors had
been evicted for the afternoon closure before the shot had been fired.

  As far as Lang could tell, the local cops were pretty sure Rossi had been the intended victim. There had been a rumor that the apartments were to make way for complete excavation, a possibility a number of the inhabitants opposed vociferously without inquiring into its actual existence.

  Only one policeman, Lang guessed the only English speaker, paid him any heed at all. After taking his name, address, and residence in Italy, the man asked, "The doctor says you shoved him out of the way. He would be dead had it not been for you. How you know someone gonna shoot?"

  Lang shrugged modestly. "The doctor is mistaken. I heard the shot and hit the ground, pulling him with me."

  The cop eyed him suspiciously.

  Lang gilded the lily. "I was in the Gulf War. I know what a rifle shot sounds like, and getting down is still instinct." Now that he was a war hero, the policeman seemed satisfied and wandered off to question the workmen.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Rome

  The Hotel Hassler

  That evening

  The train ride back to Rome had provided an opportunity for thought, more so than Lang would have preferred. He was fairly certain he knew the actual mechanics of getting a sniper in place, but he had no more idea as to the reason than before. Whoever was trying to kill him seemed to be intensifying the effort the closer he came to whatever secret the Emperor Julian had left and Skorzeny may have attempted to solve.

  What possible relationship was there between a fourth-century pagan Roman and a twentieth-century SS officer?

  The answer kept coming back the same: None.

  Except both may have discovered a document that contradicted the conventional view of Christ.

  OK, come around on another tack: Don Huff had been killed because of his work, a book on unpunished war criminals, Nazis. As Franz Blucher had pointed out, it was unlikely an ever..decreasing number of old men could or would form a consortium to keep a secret over sixty years old, but such an organization had been put together sixty years ago. What if it still existed with new members?

  Instead, Lang was inclined toward the theory that Skorzeny, either at Montsegur or Rome, led to a larger, older mystery, one of such theological significance that some group was willing to keep on killing to prevent its solution. To the ordinary person, such a hypothesis might rank right up there with UFO cover-ups and JFK conspiracies. But Lang wasn't ordinary, at least not in that sense. Only a year before he had uncovered what could, arguably, be called the oldest and greatest conspiracy of all time. He had also confronted one of the world's richest and most powerful entities, a name unknown to even the most sophisticated.

  Religious intrigue existed, and there were undoubtedly secrets some groups would kill to keep.

  Then there was Skorzeny himself, the brilliant and rarely photographed Austrian. What, if anything, did the information Hemphill had provided have to do with the necropolis? Although Lang had found proof positive, the Himmler order, that the elusive Skorzeny had, in fact, been in Rome, had he had time to explore the secret of the necropolis before returning to Berlin? Likely. Huff's pictures showed him in front of the Vatican.

  And after Berlin…? The capture of the Hungarian prime minister, according to Blucher.

  The takeover of the Hungarian government. Where…? Had he read something about the subject? Possibly, although modern history was of little interest to him. There was something just outside Lang's mental reach, as ephemeral as a dream and just as likely to disappear into the mist of uncertain memory.

  Dh, well, the most certain way to retrieve a scrap of recollection was to put it out of conscious thought, let the old subconscious drill for it until it suddenly gushed to the mind's surface like oil from a newly discovered well.

  Once back in Rome, Lang sat in his room, staring at the BlackBerry-like device Reavers had given him. Its function was similar to that of the intra-agency communicating device he had used to contact Hemphill but, apparently, more sophisticated. He pushed the three letter identifier for the Frankfurt chief of station.

  "Howdy, pard'nuh!" Reavers's Texas twang came through the device as clearly as though the man were sharing the room. "What can Ah do fer ya?"

  Lang got up and stood at the window, watching the congregation of young loafers on the Spanish Steps. "I need some fairly sophisticated equipment. You insisted on being committed to tracking down whoever killed Don and Gurt."

  "As intent as a coyote diggin' after a prairie dog. Whatta ya need?"

  Lang recited Dr. Rossi's list. "A fluoroscope, the sort of thing used to read serial numbers filed off guns. An infrared scope as well as a thirty-five millimeter camera with macro lens and both ultraviolet and infrared filters."

  "Great Sam Houston, whaddaya find, another collection of Dead Sea Scrolls?"

  "Might find," Lang corrected. "I don't have unlimited access to the place I may need to use all that stuff. I'm hoping one more trip will do it. I don't want to need something and not have it."

  "God forbid any of us not have what we need. You remember the safe house cross the street from that church, has all the skulls and bones arranged in patterns?"

  Lang didn't have to think. "The Capuchin's Santa Maria della Concezione on the Via Veneto? There used be a couple of rooms on the third floor directly across the street."

  "That's the one. Go to the church day after tomorrow, look in the side chapel, the one with a picture of that faggy-Iooking guy…"

  "St. Michael?"

  "Yeah, the one puttin' his foot on the head of the bald guy crawlin' outta a hole that's on fire. Has a sword in one hand."

  "St. Michael slaying the devil. coming out of hell," Lang supplied. "Devil, hell. Could be some beaner tunnelin' under the border at Juarez, all I care. You know the place?"

  A good spy was one who could become invisible. Like evading congressionally mandated annual ethnic, cultural, and racial sensitivity seminars.

  "I know the picture. It was a specially commissioned altarpiece

  …"

  "Okay, n'mind the art lecture. On one 0' them benches in front of the chapel, there'll be a package. Your stuff'll be in it:"

  A number of the male kids on the steps were turning to watch a fat girl in a very short skirt make her way upward. From the attention being paid a woman who resembled Miss Piggy, Lang guessed she was wearing thong underwear. Or none at all. "Wouldn't it be just as easy to deliver the stuff to the concierge at my hotel?"

  "Just as easy, pard'nuh, but not as secure. See, we can watch, make sure you're the one gets the package. Gotta go."

  The line went dead. Except there was no line, only air. Lang shook his head slowly. Agency motto: Never do openly what you can do covertly. He returned to the room's only chair, a worn club upholstered in what had once been grass green. Now the lawn had wilted somewhat.

  As he knew it would, the shadow of recall on the train took on full substance. Something he had read… A newspaper story about Budapest? The details were still fuzzy around the edges.

  He got up and left the room.

  The man behind the desk in the lobby directed him to the hotel's business center with a look of bewilderment. Work after business hours? The actions of Americans were truly incomprehensible.

  Lang sat in one of four cubicles containing computers and studied the keyboard. There were a few language keys, umlauts, acutes, inverted question mark, and the like that he recognized as peculiar to several European dialects, German, French, Spanish. Everything else looked ordinary. Turning the machine on, he followed the multi-language instructions on entering his room number, which served as his password. After two attempts, he managed to bring up the Atlanta Journal-Constitution index for the past twenty-four months. Not exactly the Times, but if he had read it in a newspaper, it would have been the one in Atlanta. During the baseball season, the Atlanta paper was, understandably, the only one with full coverage of the Braves. As long as he had the paper, Lang occasionally
read news articles that caught his interest. It was the faint recollection of one of these he was looking for.

  He tried the word "Hungary" and got over a hundred references. Too broad. He tried "Hungary" and"1944." Thirty-two articles. Better, but still too many.

  What was the gist of the article?

  He tried "Hungary,"

  "1945," and "train."

  A single article, a feature in the Weekend section, a hodgepodge of stories that might be of interest but not necessarily current news, everything from scientific discoveries of dubious application to human interest. In short, a journalistic landfill.

  Budapest (AP) Hungarian authorities have joined Jewish advocates in their demand the Austrian government return art objects allegedly taken by the occupying Nazis from Jews being sent to death camps. The articles, paintings, sculptures, even jewelry, were loaded onto a train as Russian troops approached in late 1944.

  Austrian officials note the same train was loaded with much of that country's own art objects for the same reason.

  The train, intercepted by the Allies within days of the end of hostilities in Europe, was never completely inventoried and an unknown part of its cargo was used to furnish the headquarters of the occupying army and subsequently disappeared.

  Descendants and relatives of Holocaust victims claim Austria is making no effort to differentiate between objects from that country and those stolen from Jewish families.

  Hungary, originally one of the Axis Powers, was prepared to surrender separately to Russia when a German-backed coup replaced the government with one friendly to the Nazis.

  Lang reread the article. Nothing to connect Skorzeny with any of it. He had been involved in the "coup" described by the article but had been in Belgium in December '44 and January '45, the Battle of the Bulge. Was it possible he had gone back to Hungary? Either way, how had the inscription at the Vatican's necropolis figured in?

  In forty-eight hours, he might have his first solid answer.