The Last Templar ts-1
Page 4
The archive wasn't, in actual fact, particularly secret. A major part of it was officially opened to visiting scholars and researchers in 1998 who
could, in theory at least, access its tightly
controlled contents. Among the notorious documents known to be stored in its forty miles of shelf space were the handwritten proceedings of Galileo's trial and a petition from King Henry VIII seeking an annulment to his first marriage.
No outsiders, however, were ever allowed where Brugnone was headed.
Without bothering to acknowledge any of the staff or scholars working in its dusty halls, he quietly made his way deeper into the vast, dark repository. He headed down a narrow, circular stairwell and reached a small anteroom where a Swiss Guard stood by an immaculately carved oak door. A curt nod from the elderly cardinal was all that was needed for the guard to enter the combination into a keypad and unlock the door for him. The deadbolt snapped open, echoing up the hollowness of the limestone stairs. Without any further acknowledgment, Brugnone slipped into the barrel-vaulted crypt, the door creaking shut behind him.
Making sure he was alone in the cavernous chamber, his eyes adjusting to the dim lighting, he made his way to the records area. The crypt seemed to hum with silence. It was a curious effect that Brugnone had once found disconcerting until he had learned that, just beyond the limits of his hearing, there really was a hum, emanating from a highly sophisticated climate control system that maintained constant temperature and humidity. He could feel his veins tighten in the controlled, dry air as he consulted a file cabinet. He really didn't like it down here, but this visit was unavoidable.
His fingers trembled as they flicked through the rows of index cards. What Brugnone was looking for wasn't listed in any of the various known indexes and inventories of the archive's collections, not even in the Schedario Garampi, the monumental card file of almost a million cards listing virtually everything held in the archive up to the eighteenth century. But Brugnone knew where to look. His mentor had seen to that, shortly before his death.
His eyes fell on the card he was looking for, and he pulled it out of its drawer.
With a deepening sense of foreboding, Brugnone trawled through the stacks of folios and books.
Reams of tattered red ribbon, bound around official documents and thought to be the origin of the term "red tape," dangled in deathly silence from every shelf. His fingers froze when he finally spotted the one he was looking for.
With great discomfort, he lifted down a large and very old leather-bound volume, which he placed on a plain wood table.
Sitting down, Brugnone flicked over the thick, richly illustrated pages, their crackling loud in the stillness. Even in this controlled environment, the pages had suffered the ravages of time. The vellum pages were eroded, and iron in the ink had turned corrosive, creating tiny slashes, which had now replaced some of the artist's graceful strokes.
Brugnone felt his pulse quicken. He knew he was near. As he turned the page, he felt his throat tighten as the information he was seeking appeared before him.
He looked at the illustration. It depicted a complex arrangement of interlocking gears and levers.
Glancing at his copy of the e-mail, he nodded to himself.
Brugnone felt a headache forming at die back of his eyes. He rubbed them, tJien stared again at die drawing before him. He was quietiy furious. By what delinquency had this been allowed to happen?
He knew the device should never have left the Vatican and was immediately irritated with himself.
He rarely wasted time in stating or thinking the obvious, and it was a measure of his concern that he did so now. Concern was not the right word. This discovery had come as a deep shock. Anyone would be shocked, anyone who knew the significance of the ancient device. Fortunately, there were very few, even here in the Vatican, who did know die legendary purpose of diis particular machine.
We brought it upon ourselves. It happened because we were too careful not to draw attention to it.
Suddenly drained, Brugnone pushed himself upright. Before he moved to return the book to its place on the shelf, he placed the file card that he had carried with him from die cabinet randomly inside it. It would not do to have anyone else stumble across this.
Brugnone sighed, feeling every one of his seventy years. He knew the threat wasn't from a curious academic or from some rutiilessly determined collector. Whoever was behind this knew exacriy what he was looking for. And he had to be stopped before his ill-gotten gain could unveil its secrets.
Chapter 7
F our thousand miles away, another man had the exact opposite in mind.
After closing and locking the door behind him, he picked up the intricate machine from where he had placed it on the top step. Then he moved slowly down into the cellar, his movements careful.
The machine wasn't too heavy, but he was anxious not to drop it.
Not now.
Not after fate had interceded to bring it within reach, and certainly not after all that it had taken to seize it.
The underground chamber, although lit by the flickering glow of dozens of candles, was too spacious for the yellow light to reach into every recess. It remained as gloomy as it was cold and damp. He no longer noticed. He had spent so long here that he had grown accustomed to it, never felt any discomfort. It was as close to being a home as anything could be.
Home.
A distant memory.
Another life.
Placing the machine on a sagging wood table, he went over to a corner of the cellar and rummaged through a pile of boxes and old cardboard files. He took the one he needed to the table, opened it, and gently withdrew a folder from it. From the folder, he pulled out several sheets of thick paper that he arranged neatly beside the machine. Then he sat down and looked from the documents to the geared device and back again, relishing the moment.
To himself, he murmured, "At last." His voice was soft, but cracked from too little use.
Picking up a pencil, he turned his full attention to the first of the documents. He looked at the first line of faded writing, then reached for the buttons on the top casing of the machine and began the next, crucial stage in his personal odyssey.
An odyssey, the end result of which he knew would rock the world.
Chapter 8
A fter finally succumbing to sleep barely five hours earlier, Tess was now awake again and eager to start work on something that had been bugging her ever since those few minutes at the Met, before Clive Edmondson had spoken to her and all hell had broken loose. And she would get to it, just as soon as her mother and Kim were out of die house.
Tess's mother Eileen had moved in with them at the two-story house on a quiet, tree-lined street in Mamaroneck soon after her archaeologist husband, Oliver Chaykin, had died three years ago. Even though she was the one who had suggested it, Tess hadn't been too sure of the arrangement. But the house did have three bedrooms and reasonably ample space for all of them, which made things easier. Ultimately, it had worked out all right even if, as she sometimes guiltily recognized, the advantages seemed more skewed her way. Like Eileen babysitting when Tess wanted to be out evenings, driving Kim to school when she needed her to, and like right now, when taking Kim out on a doughnut run would help get the girl's mind off the previous night's events and probably do her a world of good.
"We're going," Eileen called out. "You sure you don't need anything?"
Tess came into the hallway to see them off. "Just make sure you save me a couple."
Just then, the phone rang. Tess didn't look like she was in any rush to answer it. Eileen looked at her. "You gonna get that?"
"I'll let the answering machine pick it up." Tess shrugged.
"You're gonna have to talk to him, sooner or later."
Tess made a face. "Yeah, well, later's always better where Doug's concerned."
She could guess the reason for the calls her ex-husband had left on her voice mail. Doug Merritt was a news anchor a
t a network affiliate in Los Angeles, and he was totally absorbed in his job. His one-track mind would have linked the raid on the Met with the fact that Tess spent a lot of time there and would definitely have contacts. Contacts that he might use to get an inside track on what had become the biggest news story of the year.
The last thing she needed right now was for him to know that not only was she there, but that Kim was there with her. Ammo he wouldn't hesitate to use against her at the first opportunity.
Kim.
Tess thought again about what her daughter had experienced last night, even from the relative shelter of the museum's restrooms, and how it would need to be addressed. The delay in the reaction, and die odds were there would be one, would give her time to better prepare how to deal with it. It wasn't something she was looking forward to. She hated herself for having dragged her tliere, even though blaming herself was far from reasonable.
She looked at Kim, grateful again for the fact that she was standing there before her in one piece.
Kim grimaced at the attention.
"Mom. Would you quit it already."
"What?"
"That pathetic look," Kim protested. "I'm okay, all right? It's no biggie. I mean, you're the one who watches movies through your fingers."
Tess nodded. "Okay. I'll see you later."
She watched them drive off and walked in to the kitchen counter where the answering machine was blinking, showing four messages. Tess scowled at the device. The nerve of that creep. Six months ago, Doug had remarried. His new wife was a twenty-something, surgically enhanced junior executive at the network. This change in his status would lead, Tess knew, to his angling for a review of his visitation rights. Not that he missed, loved, or even particularly cared for Kim; it was simply a matter of ego and of malice. The man was a spiteful prick, and Tess knew she'd have to keep fighting the occasional bursts of fatherly concern until his nubile young plaything got herself pregnant. Then, with a bit of luck, he'd lose the pettiness and leave them alone.
Tess poured herself a cup of coffee, black, and headed for her study.
Switching on her laptop, she grabbed her phone and managed to track down Clive Edmondson to the New York-Presbyterian Hospital on East Sixty-eighth Street. She rang the hospital and was told he was not in a critical condition but would be there for a few more days.
Poor Clive. She made a note of visiting hours.
Opening the catalog of the ill-fated exhibition, she leafed through it until she found a description of the device taken by the fourth horseman.
It was called a multigeared rotor encoder.
The description told her that it was a cryptographic device and was dated as sixteenth century. Old and interesting, perhaps, but not something that qualified as what one would normally term a
"treasure" of the Vatican.
By now, the computer had run through its usual booting up routine and she opened up a research database and keyed in "cryptography" and "cryptology." The links were to Web sites that were mostly technical and dealt with modern cryptography as related to computer codes and encrypted electronic transmissions. Trawling through the hits, she eventually came across a site that covered the history of cryptography.
Surfing through the site, she found a page that displayed some early encoding tools. The first one featured was the Wheatstone cipher device from the nineteenth century. It consisted of two concentric rings, an outer one with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet plus a blank, and an inner one having just the alphabet itself. Two hands, like those of a clock, were used to substitute letters from the outer ring for coded letters from the inner one. The person receiving the coded message needed to have an identical device and had to know the setting of the two hands. A few years after the Wheatstone was in general use, the French came up with a cylindrical cryptograph, which had twenty discs with letters on their outer rims, all arranged on a central shaft, further complicating any attempts at deciphering a coded message.
Scrolling down, her eyes fell on a picture of a device that looked vaguely similar to the one she had seen at the museum.
She read the caption underneath it and froze.
It was described as "the Converter," an early rotor encoder, and had been used by the U.S. Army in the 1940s.
For a second, it felt as if her heart had stopped. She just stared at the words.
1940s was "early?"
Intrigued, she read through the article. Rotor encoders were strictly a twentieth-century invention.
Leaning back in her chair, Tess rubbed her forehead, scrolled back up to the first illustration on the screen, and then reread its description. Not the same by any means, but pretty damn close. And way more advanced than the single-wheel ciphers.
If the U.S. government tJiought that its device was early, then there was little wonder the Vatican was eager to show off one of its own devices; one which appeared to predate the army's by some six hundred years.
Still, this bothered Tess.
Of all the glittering prizes he could have taken, the fourth horseman had zeroed in on this arcane device. Why? Sure, people collected the weirdest things, but this was pretty extreme. She wondered whether or not he might have made a mistake. No, she dismissed that thought—he had seemed very deliberate in his choice.
Not only that, but he took nothing else. It was all he wanted.
She thought about Amelia Gaines, the woman who looked more like someone out of a shampoo commercial than an agent of the FBI. Tess was pretty certain that the investigators wanted facts, not speculation, but even so, after a quick moment's thought, she went into her bedroom, found the evening bag she'd carried last night, and pulled out the card given to her by Gaines.
She placed the card on her desk and flashed back to the moment the fourth horseman had picked up the encoder. The way that he had picked it up, held it, and whispered something to it.
He had seemed almost . . . reverent.
What was it he had said? Tess had been too distraught at the Met to make a big deal out of it, but all of a sudden it was all she could think of. She focused on that moment, pushing everything else out of her consciousness, reliving the scene with the horseman lifting the encoder. And saying . . .
what? Think, damn it.
Like she had told Amelia Gaines, she was pretty sure the first word was Veritas . . . but then what?
Veritas? Veritas something . . .
Veritas vos? Somehow, that seemed vaguely familiar. She trawled her memory for the words, but it was no use. The horseman's words had been cut off by the gunfire that erupted behind him.
Tess decided she would have to go with what she had. She turned to her computer and selected the most powerful metasearch engine from her links toolbar. She entered "Veritas vos" and got over twenty-two thousand hits. Not that it really mattered. The very first one was enough.
There it was. Calling out to her.
"Veritas vos liberabit".
The truth will set you free.
She stared at it. The truth will set you free.
Great.
Her masterful detective work had uncovered one of the most trite and overused sound bites of our time.
Chapter 9
Gus Waldron emerged from the West Twenty-third Street station and headed south.
He hated this part of town. He wasn't a big fan of gentrification. Far from it. On his own turf, the fact that he was the size of a small building kept him safe. Here, his size only made him stand out among the fancy piss-ants scurrying along the sidewalks in their designer outfits and two-hundred-dollar haircuts.
Hunching his shoulders, he knocked a few inches off his height. Even then, big as he was, it didn't help much and neither did the long, black, shapeless coat he wore. But he could do nothing about that; he needed the coat to conceal what he was carrying.
He turned up Twenty-second Street, heading west. His destination was a block away from the Empire Diner, located in the center of a small row of art galleries.
How were you supposed to know if it was any fucking good if you didn't know what it fucking cost?
His destination was now two doors away. To outward appearances, Lucien Boussard's place looked like a slick upmarket antiques gallery. In fact, it was that and a whole lot more. Fakes and pieces of dubious origin infected the few genuine, unsullied objects. Not that any of his neighbors suspected as much, for Lucien had the style, the accent, and the manners to fit in seamlessly.
Very cautious now, eyes alert for anything or anyone that didn't look right, Gus walked past the gallery, counted off twenty-five paces, then stopped and turned around. He made as if to cross the street, still couldn't see anything that seemed out of place, and went back and was inside the gallery, his movements quick and light for a man his size. And why shouldn't they be? In thirty fights, he had never once been hit hard enough to go down. Except when he was supposed to.
Inside the gallery, he kept one hand in his pocket, wrapped around the butt of a Beretta 92FS. It wasn't his handgun of choice, but he'd had a couple of misfires with the .45 ACP, and, after the big night, it wasn't smart to carry the Cobray. He took a quick look around. No tourists, or any other customers for that matter. Just the gallery's owner.
Gus didn't like many people, but, even if he had, he would not have liked Lucien Boussard. He was a smarmy little shit. Narrow face and shoulders to match, he wore his long hair pulled back into a ponytail.
Fucking French fag.
As Gus came in, Lucien looked up from behind a small spindly legged table where he sat working and faked an elated smile, a feeble attempt to hide the fact that he had instantly started sweating and twitching. That was possibly the one thing that Gus did like about Lucien. He was always on edge, as if he thought Gus might at any moment decide to harm him. The greasy little fuck was right about that.