Reilly introduced himself and Aparo. The cop, a sergeant by the name of Milligan, didn't look thrilled. "Don't tell me," he said sardonically, "you just happened to be in the neighborhood."
Reilly nodded toward the charred stables. "Branko Petrovic," he simply stated.
Milligan shrugged and led the way into the stable, where a pair of paramedics were crouched over a body. Propped nearby was a lightweight stretcher.
Reilly glanced at it, then at Milligan who got the message: this had to be treated as a crime scene with a suspicious death. "What do we know?" he asked.
Milligan leaned over the body that lay blackened and crumpled amid splintered pieces of wood. "You tell me. I thought this was gonna be an easy one."
Reilly looked over Milligan's shoulder. It was hard to tell what was smoke-blackened flesh from what was blood mixed with soot and water from the fire hoses. Another gruesome detail that added to the macabre setting was that the man's left arm was lying there by the body, no longer attached to the torso. Reilly frowned. Whatever it was, the mess that had once been Branko Petrovic was barely identifiable as human.
"How can you be so sure it's him?" he asked.
Milligan reached down, pointing a finger at the side of the dead man's forehead. Reilly could see an indentation that, even among all the other damage, was clearly not recent. "He got clipped by a horse, years ago. On the force. Used to be proud of it, surviving a kick in the head."
As Reilly crouched down for a closer look, he noticed one of the paramedics, a dark-haired girl in her twenties. She seemed eager to chime in. Reilly met her eyes for a moment. "You got something for us?"
She smiled and held up Petrovic's left wrist. "Don't tell the M.E. I jumped the gun on this, but someone didn't like this guy. His other wrist's scorched through, but see this one here?" She was pointing at the detached arm. "The contusions on it are still visible. He was tied up." She pointed up at the doorway. "I'd say he had one hand tied to each side. Like he was crucified across the doorway."
Aparo grimaced at the imagery. "You mean someone let the horses stampede over him?"
"Or through him," Reilly added.
She nodded. Reilly thanked her and her partner before walking away with Milligan and Aparo.
"Why were you guys looking at Petrovic?" Milligan asked.
Reilly was studying the horses. "Before we go there, you got any reasons to think someone might want him dead?"
Milligan inclined his head toward the smoldering stable block. "Not particularly. I mean, you know how it is with these places. Wise guys like their horses, and given Petrovic's past . . . But no, nothing specific. What's your take?"
He listened intently as Reilly filled him in on the link between Gus Waldron and Branko Petrovic and their link to the raid at the Met.
"I'll ask for all this to be prioritized," Milligan told Reilly. "Get the crime scene guys over, ask the fire chief to run the arson tests today, push the autopsy to the top of the file."
As Reilly and Aparo reached their car, a fine drizzle had started to fall.
"Someone's tying up loose ends," Aparo said.
"Looks that way. We're gonna need to get the M.E. to take a closer look at Waldron."
"If that's what this is, we need to find the other two horsemen before whoever's doing this gets to them."
Reilly looked up at the darkening sky before turning to his partner. "Two horsemen, or just one," he countered, "if the last of the four is the one doing the killing."
Chapter 26
H is eyes stinging from the strain of many hours spent poring over the ancient manuscripts, he removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes gently with a wet towel.
How long had it been? Was it morning? Night? He had lost all track of time since returning here after his mounted foray into the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Of course, the media, that pack of dysfunctional, semiliterate creatures, were probably referring to it as a robbery or a heist. None of them, or even anyone in higher places, would ever understand his way of thinking of it as an exercise in practical research. But that was what it was. And the time was not too far off when the whole world would know Saturday night's incident for what it really was: the first move in something that would irrevocably alter how many of them looked at their world. A move that would, one day soon, remove the scales from their eyes and open up their petty minds to something far beyond their feeble imaginings.
And I'm almost there. Not long to go now.
Turning, he looked at the wall behind him on which hung a calendar. Although the time of day was unimportant to him, dates always had significance.
One such date was circled with red.
Glancing again at the results of his work with the multigeared rotor encoder, he reread one passage that had troubled him from the moment he had decoded it.
Very puzzling, he mused. Then he smiled, realizing that, unconsciously, he had used the exact right word. It had not been enough for this manuscript to be set in code; before encoding, this particular passage had first been designed as a puzzle.
He felt a flood of admiration for the man who had written this document.
Then he frowned. He had to solve it speedily. So far as he knew, his tracks were thoroughly covered, but he wouldn't be so foolish as to underestimate the enemy. Unfortunately, in order to work out the puzzle, he needed a library. That meant he would have to leave the security of his home and venture aboveground.
He thought for a moment, then decided with reasonable certainty that it was evening. He would visit the library. Carefully. Just in case anyone had made a connection and alerted those working there to report people asking for materials of a certain nature.
Then he smiled to himself. Now you're being paranoid. They weren't that clever.
After the library, he would return here, hopefully with the solution in hand, and then complete the decoding of the remaining passages.
He glanced again at the calendar with its encircled date.
A date seared into his memory forever.
A date he could never forget.
He had a small but important—and painful—duty to perform. After that, all being well, and with the manuscript fully decoded, he would fulfill the destiny that had been unfairly thrust upon him.
Chapter 27
Monsignor De Angelis sat on the hard rattan chair in his bedroom on the top floor of the austere Oliver Street hostel where the diocese had arranged for him to stay while he was in New York. It wasn't all bad. The hostel was practically located for him, being only a few blocks east of Federal Plaza. And from its upper floors, the view of the Brooklyn Bridge couldn't fail but inspire romanticized visions of the city in the hearts of the purists who normally occupied these rooms. But the view was wasted on him.
He wasn't exactly in a purist frame of mind right now.
He checked the time, then flicked open his cell phone and dialed Rome. Cardinal Rienzi answered, balked a little about disturbing Cardinal Brugnone, then acquiesced, as De Angelis knew he would.
"Tell me you have some good news, Michael," Brugnone said, clearing his throat.
"The FBI people are making progress. Some of the stolen objects have been recovered."
"That's encouraging."
"Yes, it is. The Bureau and the NYPD are keeping to their word and devoting a lot of resources to this case."
"What of the robbers? Have they arrested any others?"
uNo, Your Eminence," De Angelis replied. "The man they had in custody passed away before they could question him. A second gang member also died in a fire. I spoke to the agent overseeing the case earlier today. They're still waiting for results of forensic tests, but he believes the man may have been murdered."
"Murdered. How terrible," Brugnone sighed, "and how tragic. Their greed is consuming them.
They're fighting over the spoils."
The monsignor shrugged. "It seems that way, yes."
Brugnone paused. "Of course, there is another possibility,
Michael."
"It has occurred to me."
"Our man could be cleaning out his house."
De Angelis nodded imperceptibly to himself. "I suspect that to be the case."
"This is not good. Once he's the only one left, he'll be even more difficult to find."
"Everyone makes mistakes, Your Eminence. And when he does, I'll make sure we don't miss it."
De Angelis could hear the cardinal shuffling around uneasily in his seat. "I'm not comfortable with these developments. Isn't there anything you can do to expedite matters?"
"Not without what the FBI would deem to be unwarranted interference."
Brugnone was silent for a moment, then he said, "Well, for the moment do not upset them. But you must ensure that we are kept fully abreast of the investigation."
"I'll do my best."
Brugnone's voice took on a more ominous tone. "You understand how important this is, Michael.
It's imperative that we recover everything before any irreparable damage is done."
De Angelis knew exactly what the cardinal's stress on the word "everything" meant. "Of course, Your Eminence," he said. "I understand perfectly."
After he had hung up, De Angelis remained seated for some minutes, thinking. Then he knelt beside the bed to pray; not for divine intervention, but that personal weakness might not cause him to fail.
There was far too much at stake.
Chapter 28
W hen the printouts from Columbia came through to Tess's office that afternoon, they appeared to be disappointingly thin. A quick skim confirmed the disappointment. Tess couldn't find anything that was of use. From what Clive Edmondson had told her, she was not expecting anything on the Knights Templar. It wasn't William Vance's official area of expertise. Mostly, he had concentrated on Phoenician history up to the third century before Christ. The link, though, was a natural one and seemed promising: the great Phoenician ports of Sidon and Tyre became, a thousand years later, formidable Templar strongholds. It was as if one had to peel through layers of Crusader and Templar history to get a peek at Phoenician life.
Furthermore, nowhere in his published papers that were sent to her was there any mention of the subjects of cryptography and cryptology.
She felt deflated. All the reading and research she'd done at the library, and now Vance's papers—none of it had helped her get any closer to figuring this out.
She decided to do one last trawl online, and the same several hundred hits came up again when she entered Vance's name into the search engine. This time, though, she decided to take her time and study them more carefully.
She had run through a couple of dozen sites when she came across a site that only mentioned Vance in passing and in an unashamedly mocking tone. The article, a transcript of a speech given by a French historian at the Universite de Nantes almost ten years ago, was a scathing review of what its author considered less than worthy ideas that were, in his view, muddying the waters for more serious academics.
The mention of Vance came two-thirds of the way into his presentation. In it, the historian mentioned in passing how he had even heard the ridiculous notion, from Vance, that Hughes de Payens may have been a Cathar, simply because the man's family tree indicated that he was originally from the Languedoc.
Tess reread the passage. The founder of the Templars, a Cathar? It was an absurd suggestion.
Templarism and Catharism were as contradictory as could be. For two hundred years, the Templars had been the unflinching defenders of the Church. Catharism, on the other hand, was a Gnostic movement.
Still, there was something intriguing about the suggestion.
Catharism had originated in the middle of the tenth century, taking its name from the Greek katharos, meaning "the pure ones." It was based on the notion that the world was evil and that souls would be continually reborn—and could even pass through animals, which was why the Cathars were vegetarians—until they escaped the material world and reached a spiritual heaven.
Everything the Cathars believed in was anathema to the Church. They were dualists who believed that, in addition to a merciful and good God, there had to be an equally powerful but evil God to explain the horrors that plagued the world. The benevolent God created the heavens and the human soul; the evil God entrapped that soul in the human body. In the Vatican's eyes, the Cathars had sacrilegiously elevated Satan to God's equal. Following this belief, the Cathars considered all material goods evil, which led them to reject the trappings of wealth and of power that had undeniably corrupted the medieval Roman Catholic Church.
More worryingly for the Church, they were also Gnostics. Gnosticism— which, like Cathar, is derived from a Greek word, gnosis, meaning higher knowledge or insight—is the belief that man can come into direct and intimate contact with God without the need for a priest or a church.
Believing in direct personal contact with God freed the Cathars of all moral prohibition or religious obligations. Besides having no use for lavish churches and oppressive ceremonies, they had no use for priests either. Religious ceremonies were simply performed in homes or in fields.
And if that wasn't enough, women were treated as equals and were allowed to become "parfaits," the closest thing the Cathari faith had to a priest; since physical form was irrelevant to them, the soul residing within a human body could just as easily be male or female, regardless of outward appearance.
As the belief caught on and spread across the south of France and northern Italy, the Vatican got increasingly worried and ultimately decided that this heresy could no longer be tolerated. It didn't only threaten the Catholic Church, it also threatened the basis of the feudal system in Europe, as the Cathars believed oaths were a sin, given that they attached one to the material—hence, evil—world.
This gravely undermined the concept of pledges of allegiance between serfs and their lords. The pope had no trouble enlisting the support of the French nobility to put down this threat. In 1209, an army of Crusaders descended on the Languedoc, and, over the next thirty-five years, proceeded to massacre over thirty thousand men, women, and children. It was said that blood flowed ankle deep in the churches where some of the fleeing villagers had taken refuge, and that when one of the pope's soldiers complained about not knowing whether he was killing heretics or Christian believers, he was simply told to "Kill them all; God will know his own."
It simply doesn't make sense. The Templars went to the Holy Land to escort the pilgrims—the Christian pilgrims. They were the Vatican's storm troopers, its staunchest supporters. The Cathars, on the other hand, were the Church's enemies.
Tess was surprised that someone as learned as Vance would advance such a wild proposition, especially when it was based on the flimsy premise of one man's provenance. She wondered if she was barking up the wrong tree, but what she really needed, Tess knew, was to talk to him in person.
Regardless of such an academic faux pas, if there were a connection between the Templars and the robbery, he would probably nail it in a flash.
She dialed Columbia University again and soon got through to the History Department. After reminding the secretary of their previous conversation, she asked her if she'd had any luck in finding anyone at the department who knew how to reach William Vance. The woman said she'd asked a couple of professors who taught there at the same time as Vance, but they'd lost touch with him after he'd left.
"I see," Tess said wistfully. She didn't know where else to turn.
The woman picked up on her dismay. "I know you need to reach him, but maybe he doesn't want to be reached. Sometimes, people prefer not to be reminded of, you know . . . painful times."
Tess snapped to attention. " 'Painful times'?"
"Of course. And after what he went through ... it was all so sad. He loved her very much, you know."
Tess's mind was racing, trying to think of whether or not she had missed something. "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I know what you're referring to. Did Professor Vance lose someone?"
&nb
sp; "Oh, I thought you knew. It was his wife. She fell ill and passed away."
This was all news to her. None of the sites she'd looked at mentioned it, but then, they were purely academic and didn't delve into personal matters. "When did this happen?"
"It's been a few years now, five or six years ago? Let's see ... I remember it was in the spring. The professor took a sabbatical that summer and never came back."
Tess thanked the woman and hung up. She wondered if she should forget about Vance and concentrate on getting in touch with Simmons. Still, she was intrigued. She went online again and clicked onto the New York Times's Web site. She selected the advanced search function and was relieved to find that the archive went back to 1996. She entered "William Vance," ticked the obituary section, and got a hit.
The brief article announced the death of his wife, Martha. It only mentioned complications after a brief illness, but gave no more details. Casually, Tess noticed where interment had been scheduled to take place: the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. She wondered if Vance was paying for the upkeep of the grave. If he was, it was likely that the cemetery would have a record of his current address.
She thought about calling the cemetery herself, then decided against it. They probably wouldn't release such information to her anyway. Reluctantly, she found the card Reilly had given her and called his office. Told that Reilly was in a meeting, Tess hesitated about telling the agent on the line anything and decided she'd wait to speak to Reilly in person.
Glancing back at her screen, her eyes fell on the obituary, and suddenly a flash of excitement struck her.
The secretary was right about Martha Vance's death having occurred in the spring.
It had happened exactly five years ago tomorrow.
Chapter 29
"The autopsy confirms Waldron was also murdered," Reilly stated as he looked around at the others seated at the table in the Bureau's viewing room. The only outsider present was Monsignor De Angelis. "We found traces of Lidocaine in his blood. It's an anesthetic, and it wasn't administered by anyone looking after him at the hospital. The high dose triggered his heart failure.
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