City of Iron

by Williamson, Chet

  "The box he dated to the thirteenth century, though the velvet inside is much later. The knife, he said, is from about the same time. He, uh, asked me where I got it, and I was pretty noncommittal. But he recognized the sign of the Knights Templar on the knife, and told me that most of the designs on the box were connected with the order as well.

  "Then he said to me . . ." Joseph paused, and took a deep breath. Laika couldn't get over how uncomfortable he seemed. "He said, 'So are you going to try to sell this to the press as the Holy Grail?'"

  "So McAndrews, or whoever he was," said Laika, trying to ignore the comment about the Grail, "might truly have been a Knight Templar?"

  "They were supposed to have died out centuries ago," Joseph said. "But there were always stories of their survival. The most persistent story had them being connected to a Scottish Masonic lodge a few centuries ago."

  "And it's a good bet that the eleven who died . . . and McAndrews . . . were all Scottish," said Laika.

  Joseph nodded. "Things tie together even more. In some medieval documents, the Holy Grail is called the Sangraal, which can translate as sang real."

  "'Royal blood,' " said Tony. "The bloodline of Christ."

  Joseph didn't respond. Instead, he sat down at his computer and glided the mouse over the pad, clicking several times. "I got up early this morning," he said, "and scanned the fingerprints we took from McAndrews onto the computer. Then I sent them to the Sûreté and asked them to do two things. One was to see if there were any other suspects captured in the attempted burglary where Robert Gunn was arrested. And if there were, to check their fingerprints against those I sent." Joseph read what was on the screen, and the corner of his mouth twisted in a bitter smile.

  "There was another man," he said. "Ewan McCullough. And the prints match. Perfectly."

  "You mean," Laika said, feeling a numbness start to creep up her back, "that Kyle McAndrews—the man who died last night—burglarized that house back in 1907? Ninety years ago?"

  "Yeah, unless you want to believe that the Sûreté made another 'mistake' like they supposedly did with Gunn."

  Laika shook her head. "They didn't make any mistake."

  "There's something else," said Joseph. "Something I didn't tell you before. The house that was burglarized? The Villa Bethania? I found out when I read the book. You remember the priest who found the documents in the pillar? The one who got mysteriously rich?

  "That priest built and lived in the Villa Bethania. Gunn and McAndrews were trying to break into the house of the man who had discovered the bloodline secret."

  Chapter 44

  "Why didn't you tell us?" said Laika. She could feel her jaw clench, and wanted more than anything to hit Joseph.

  "I . . . I thought Tony would get on the conspiracy thing again. And that you'd go along with it. I thought it was crazy, just a waste of time, but now—"

  "Now what?" asked Tony.

  "Now I know it's not," Joseph said flatly.

  Laika knew why his heart hadn't been in his skepticism of the night before. He had known more than they had, and what was worse, had kept it from them.

  "Joseph," she said, "I warned you before about not backing us up. Last night you proved you could, at least with a weapon. But backing your team means more than that. It means sharing everything you know, and everything you suspect. You didn't do that. You withheld information, important information. Do you have any reason why I shouldn't immediately terminate your involvement in this mission?"

  "Yes," he said instantly. "I do. I'm a skeptic, but I'm not unreasonably stubborn. I know I was wrong to keep information from you, but I did it for what I thought was the good of the mission. I was afraid of losing focus on the facts. But once I saw how the facts could fit together, I knew enough to do it and tell you about it." He paused, sat back in his chair, and interlaced his fingers. "I also think that I know what McAndrews might have been trying to say before he died. It occurred to me on the way back here this morning."

  "What?" said Laika, still angry.

  "It sounded like 'Andra.' But I think it might have been 'Andrea.'" He put the stress on the second syllable.

  "Andrea who?" Laika asked.

  "Johann Valentin Andrea. Remember the Prieuré de Sion? The Priory of Zion?"

  "The secret society that wanted to put the Merovingian bloodline back on the thrones of Europe," Tony said, sitting down at his computer and booting it up.

  "Right. This Andrea was supposed to have been the head of the organization sometime during the seventeenth century. He wrote a lot of occult texts, and practically founded Rosicrucianism single-handedly, and Rosicrucianism ties right in to the Grail legends and the Knights Templar. It's just all too interconnected to be a series of coincidences."

  "Unless McAndrews didn't mean Johann Andrea in the first place," said Laika. "Maybe he meant a woman's name, or the French name André, or he was trying to say 'under,' or half a dozen other things."

  "Now you're trying too hard to be me," Joseph said with an apologetic smile. She had never seen him as diffident as he was now, and she could feel her anger recede as a result. "You may be right," he conceded, "but so many things point to, for want of a better phrase, a religious conspiracy, that it seems unlikely there's any other, less sensational explanation."

  "If you want to add fuel to that fire," said Tony, looking at his monitor, "here's another log. When I got up this morning, I did what you suggested, Laika, and put in a request for information on the Drummond Building. Guess who's owned it for the past seven years?"

  "The Catholic Church," Laika said.

  "You got it. The Archdiocese of New York."

  Joseph grinned. "God bless 'em, they're everywhere. Look," he went on, warming to the topic, "I can't begin to explain the longevity angles here, how these two Scots could have lived to be over a hundred and look like they're thirty. But this whole bloodline plot is something that I can explain, something it doesn't take any faith in divinity to believe in. Like I said before, I believe in what I can see and understand, and I can believe in human passions. I can understand greed."

  "What do you mean?" Tony asked.

  Joseph leaned forward and spoke with a sudden intensity. "I mean the lust for kingdoms and thrones and power. Look, I don't believe Jesus was divine, but I think there's plenty of evidence for an historical Jesus. The man existed, he wasn't mythical, though the stories that sprang up around him were. Since he existed, it's very possible that he could have fathered children, whether he survived his crucifixion or not. And those children could have had children of their own, and so on down the generations, for hundreds of years. And somebody kept track, okay? Somebody knew that these were Jesus' great-great-great-grandchildren. But maybe that was a secret that the church didn't want to get out."

  "All right," said Laika, "I can see why—the early church was fairly jealous of the competition. A descendant of Christ would have challenged their power."

  "So what do they do to the heir when they find him—or when he comes to claim his ancestor's kingdom?" said Joseph.

  "They imprison him."

  "I can't buy that," Tony said. "I mean, they'd have made him Pope or something. He was Christ's descendant."

  "No," Joseph insisted. "He was Jesus' descendant. The concept of Christ makes it necessary that Jesus was divine, and if he wasn't chaste, he sure as hell wasn't divine. Gods, or at least, a god like the Catholic Church worshiped, didn't go around getting women pregnant. There's a descendant? Proof that Jesus was a man and not a god? Boom, there goes the church. So lock him up out of sight."

  "But for two thousand years, Joseph?" said Laika. "Why not just have him killed? Some of the early popes were pretty unscrupulous."

  "And some of the later ones weren't real charmers, either. But how could they kill the descendant of Christ? The popes might have been infallible, but hey . . ." Joseph laughed. ". . . they didn't know everything. The ways of God, to those who believed in him, were always strange and inexplicable
. Maybe there was a divine reason that Jesus spread his seed on earth. And were they going to risk eternal damnation by destroying the result? Not too likely. So they kept him alive, and maybe more than that, they kept the line alive."

  "What the hell are you saying?" Tony said. "That they bred him?"

  "To keep the bloodline intact," Joseph said. "It's certainly possible, and apparently it had to happen somehow, if the prisoner, who more than just we are looking for, is really alive somewhere. Why would the church fathers have wanted the bloodline of their Lord to die out? For all they knew, that could have been blasphemy or worse. So, yeah, I'm saying it's altogether possible that they found him a nice girl . . . maybe a nun, since they're supposed to be brides of Christ anyway—"

  "This is bullshit!" Tony said, turning away from Joseph and Laika and stalking to the window.

  "All right, then," said Joseph, "maybe it wasn't a nun. Or rather, they weren't nuns. This would have had to happen, after all, every thirty years or so for there to be a new generation."

  "This is . . . this is sick, Joseph, perverse."

  "Tony, maybe you're not aware of the things some of the popes did? One of them made a pact with the Devil and was beaten to death by a husband who found him screwing his wife. Another one had six thousand people killed in a personal vendetta against a rival family. And Alexander the Sixth, who was one of the Borgias, would sell cardinalships, poison the new buyers, and sell them again! So you're telling me that people like that, with an unbridled lust for worldly power, couldn't have come up with a plot like this?"

  "Sure, there were bad popes," Tony said, "but that was centuries ago!"

  "And centuries ago," said Joseph, "was when this was all put into place. Things like that become self-sustaining. It's altogether possible that the Popes themselves might not have known about this for hundreds of years now."

  "Joseph," Laika said slowly, "twenty-four hours ago, you would have said that this was all a huge theory, tied together by a dozen coincidences. What changed your mind?"

  "I saw all the pieces, but I hadn't put them together. Now I have, and I think they all fit. It's like . . . if I tried to put together a jigsaw puzzle and all the pieces fit, and it made a picture of a duck, I wouldn't be stubborn enough to say that random chance produced that duck. And as far as I'm concerned, when I look at all these pieces together—the unknown captive, the two Knights Templar, the two-thousand-year-old wooden cup, the involvement of the church—and everything else, well, goddamn it, Laika, it looks like a duck, it waddles like a duck, and it quacks like a sonofabitch.

  "So who am I to say it's a chicken?"

  They talked for a long time, trying to fit in the other stray pieces, like Peder Holberg's sculpture and his fugue states, the cultists who wanted to find the unknown captive, and the old priest buried alive in the tomb. Tony suggested that Father Samuel might have tried to free the descendant (if that was who he truly was) and been punished by his subterranean imprisonment. That, however, did not explain the man's preternatural age.

  They pondered, too, the flat black lead walls that had surrounded Father Samuel, and how the Peters tomb apparently had never been built to house any caskets. "Could it have originally been the place they housed this prisoner?" asked Laika, receiving shrugs and nods that replied, "Why not?"

  "But why make the walls out of lead?" she went on. "Is there any religious significance to lead?"

  "Not that I know of," said Joseph. "They had lead in biblical times, of course, but as for any connection—Tony?"

  He shook his head. "Nothing in Catholicism that I ever came across. It's about the heaviest metal, isn't it? So if they wanted to really lock somebody away, it would at least give the impression of entombment better than any other substance."

  Laika finished what seemed like her tenth cup of coffee and sat back with a sigh. "We could go on like this for days. But I think the thing to do now is to get back to the warehouse, reassemble that sculpture, and find out where it's going to steer us next.

  "The map is still the answer, though I'm damned if I can figure out what the question is."

  Chapter 45

  They arrived at the warehouse by mid-afternoon and worked feverishly at putting the pieces of the puzzle into the proper order. Five hours later, Joseph switched off the torch, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and pronounced, "That's it. We're finished."

  When they pushed away the steel ladders, they saw that the pattern of pipes and rods came together unmistakably at a central point nearly twenty-five feet above the floor of the warehouse. So many of the pipes met at the locus that it resembled a star, the pipes the beams of light radiating outward from the core.

  "Jesus, I can't believe it," Joseph said. "If we'd had this at the beginning, this would've been our first stop. I mean, how can you ignore something like that? It anchors the whole thing."

  "And now you can see," said Tony, "that the blast, or whatever it was, must have started from there. The pipes are in the worst shape, the rust is worse—look how red it is—shit, how did Guaraldi make a mistake like that?"

  "Near exhaustion, "Laika said, "and the fact that putting this ... monstrosity together was certainly more complex than anything he'd ever done before. And unfortunately, what we see here apparently also made sense in the way that Guaraldi looked at it."

  "But it doesn't—not really," Joseph said. "It was chaos before, and now it's not. It has a center." He walked along its length, pointing. "See the relationship it has to the other two places we were at already? It triangulates here."

  Laika followed the imaginary lines Joseph drew in the air. The new locus did seem to be the point of a triangle, the two points of whose base were made up of the locations of St. Stephen's Church and the abandoned subway station. "So is it a pattern?" she said. "Any three points will make a triangle, you know."

  "A perfect isosceles?" Joseph asked. "Look at it!"

  "I'm looking," said Laika, "but you're just eyeballing. It might not be anywhere near perfect. How long will it take for you to make the changes in the computer program so we can find the exact location in the city?"

  "A few hours," Joseph answered.

  "Then get to it instead of admiring this thing. It's a map, that's all, so let's go where it tells us to."

  While Joseph tackled the computer, Laika and Tony spoke softly at the other end of the room. "Does it look like a perfect triangle to you?" she asked him.

  "I kind of hate to say it, but yeah, it does. And with the rise from the floor up to that top point, you can just imagine a plane connecting all three points, and it looks like a giant wing, or something. Taking us right up to the top of . . . of what? The city? Some building?"

  "But why those three points?"

  Tony shook his head. "We can only guess. The prisoner might have been held in the crypt, and maybe it's possible that he—or an ancestor, if this other theory of ours is valid—was also held in the subway station—after it was abandoned, of course. If that follows, then maybe, just maybe, the current prisoner is being held in this new location, and that's why it's the locus of the map." He let out a self-deprecating laugh. "But that's one helluva lot of maybes."

  "And if that's all true, then we have to assume that Peder Holberg either talked to this prisoner, who told him the locations where he was held, or . . . ?"

  "The fugue states were when Holberg was being dictated to by this other mind. 'Doo-bee-doo-be, doo-bee-doo-bee . . .'"

  Laika recognized the theme from The Twilight Zone. "Telepathy, huh? This thing just gets goofier and goofier. The religious conspiracy I can almost believe. It's farfetched, but possible. But telepathy?"

  "What about Joseph's dream? You think that was just a coincidence, too? Or did whoever got into Holberg's head pay a visit later to Joseph's?"

  "A few days ago I would've said it was a coincidence. Now I'm not so sure."

  "I've got it!" Joseph cried from the other end of the warehouse. Laika and Tony trotted toward him, and he went on. "I
t's a block off Broadway, just north of the financial district. It's a thirty-three-story building called the Weyandt Tower, built in the 1890s, pretty tall for its time. There are a couple of shops on the street, but the rest of the building—"

  "Is vacant," Tony finished.

  Joseph smiled. "And I bet you can even tell me who the owner of the building is."

  "The Archdiocese of New York?" Laika offered.

  "Right again. May I suggest we pay the Weyandt Tower a visit?"

  "Sure," said Laika. "But first we need to set a few things straight."

  Joseph tensed. "Like what?"

  "Like what we're going to do if we get there and find a prisoner being held by the Roman Catholic Church. I don't think the Vatican has its own version of the Mossad, so I doubt if they're going to open up on us with Uzis, though I could be wrong. But if they do, are we going to fire back? Tony?"

  "I wouldn't fire on priests, no. But there won't be any priests shooting at us. There may be somebody, but not priests."

  "What about nuns?" Joseph asked.

  "Go to hell."

  "Who knows what the night may hold?"

  Laika ignored the exchange. "Kidnapping, if that's the crime here, is a federal matter."

  "What," said Tony, "you're suggesting we get the FBI in on this?"

  "Just an observation. My point is that no matter what happens, who this person turns out to be, we have to maintain a low profile. A nonexistent one."

  "So we free them and ride off into the night," said Joseph. "That shouldn't be difficult."

  "It could be very difficult. I want to consider this evening's incursion as a scouting expedition. We'll try and discover exactly what the situation is. If we find we can take some sort of action, we may. But we're not going to go in expecting a firefight or anything more than a reconnaissance."