by Debra Doyle
The Devil in the Details
By
Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
illustration by dominick saponaro
“The Devil in the Details” copyright © 2014 by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
Art copyright © 2014 by Dominick Saponaro
Publish Date: Wed Jul 2 2014 9:00am
A Tor Original
Introduction
A new adventure of Peter Crossman, special agent of the Knights Templar—a man prepared to administer last rites with one hand while wielding a flamethrower with the other. Now an ancient manuscript of peculiar power has surfaced, and Crossman’s assignment is simple: Get it for the Temple at all costs. This will lead to conflict with entities secular and otherwise—and to a new encounter with Sister Mary Magdalene of the Special Action Executive of the Poor Clares.
This short story was acquired and edited by senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
Thomas put down his beer and asked, “Who’s the best linguist we’ve got?”
The question caught me off-guard. To cover and give myself time to think, I asked, “Who’s ‘we’? The Church in general, or the Knights Templar in particular?”
“Either. Both.”
“If you’re looking for something like proficiency in conversational Assyrian,” I said, “Brother Consolmagno at the Holy Office is probably your man. He did some good work with the Balphamagor exorcism in ’97. For text-based stuff, if you want to stick with our own people, there’s always Mark in the Jerusalem Documents section. First-rate paleographer.”
We were speaking Latin ourselves, though that isn’t any big trick. It’s like French, only without the attitude. Latin is the day-to-day language of the Knights of the Temple. Which is what I am, and what Thomas Cheapside was. This Tuesday afternoon in November found us sitting in the coffee shop of a hotel in Rye Brook, New York. A report that you could walk from the second floor to the fifth floor of the hotel without going up a ramp or a stairway had turned out to have a mundane explanation, so we’d retired to the coffee shop to catch lunch before heading back to the city.
Thomas pulled a TEMPEST-compliant smartphone out of his pocket, opened the photo viewer, and handed it to me. I thumbed through the picture set rapidly. Some of the pics appeared to have come from a security camera in an airport. The first showed an elderly nun walking through a crowded concourse. She was from the generation that still wore nun suits—in her case, a brown robe, a white cloak, and a huge rosary. Other pictures, apparently taken using a telephoto lens, showed the same nun in close-up from various angles.
“That’s Sister Mary Thérèse, Discalced Carmelite,” said Thomas. “She arrived through Kennedy airport yesterday afternoon. Interesting woman; best linguist the Church has. Studied at the Sorbonne, taught at Paris and Heidelberg, has a reading knowledge of almost every human language there is, plus some other languages that aren’t so human. She’s been retired to Montmorency for years.”
“What changed?”
“A bankruptcy sale at an upstate auction house was announced sixty hours ago. SIGINT had a spike in traffic around Montmorency beginning within twelve hours. Sister had a passport and visas issued on a crash-priority basis in under twenty-four hours, and now here she is.”
I looked Thomas in the eye and said, “We didn’t come out here to look at a mis-numbered elevator, did we?”
“Nope,” said Thomas.
I could tell that he was waiting for me to ask the next question. I decided to oblige him. “Blue-on-blue op?”
“Yep.”
“I’m not your boy for this one,” I said. The last pic in the series had a younger nun dressed in grey, with a wide white guimpe and a white rope belt, hovering at the old nun’s shoulder and carrying her bags. I zoomed in on the second nun and handed the phone back to Thomas. “I know her, and she knows me. I’d be made twenty seconds after I showed my face.”
And that was in dim light, at long range, if Maggie was distracted. You don’t see Sister Mary Magdalene of the Special Action Executive of the Poor Clares in full uniform too often. Her magnificent red hair was covered by a black veil, and her amazing body was concealed by her habit, but nothing was capable of concealing the sharp attention she turned on the world. Habit or no, I was willing to bet she had some kind of lethal hardware no farther than one-eighth of an inch from her hand.
“That’s not a problem,” Thomas said. “You’re going in open. If you want, you can wear a name tag that says, ‘Hi! My name’s Pete! I’m with the Temple! Ask me how!’”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and shook my head. Non nobis, Domine. Not for us, Lord. “Sister Thérèse already has the Holy Father’s top assassin for her bodyguard. What’s my role?”
“You’re their guardian angel. If anything goes wrong, you make sure they get out.”
“I’m sure they’ll be grateful,” I said.
“The chancellery has requested a Templar on-site. We’re doing a favor for an allied service.”
“And—?” I waited for the punch line. There’s almost always a punch line in an op like this, and it usually isn’t all that funny.
“And there’s an artifact,” Thomas said. “High value. Get it if you can. If you can’t, make sure it doesn’t fall into unfriendly hands.”
There’s almost always an artifact, too. “Priceless anthropological object, I presume? Mankind the poorer if it’s destroyed? Fate of the world rests on our shoulders?”
“That’s right. And any hands other than the Temple’s are unfriendly. That includes the Vatican’s.” He leaned closer. “Plausible deniability is desired but not required.”
“Whatever it is, it isn’t in Temple hands right now,” I pointed out. “Why not launch an air strike and call it a day?”
I wish I could say that Thomas didn’t look tempted by the thought. But he shook his head. “We’d prefer to have the thing itself.”
He opened a document file on the phone and passed it back to me. “Let me give you the highlights. There’s a book. It’s about six inches by nine, the size of a modern trade paperback. Vellum, sewn into quires of sixteen pages each. First documented in Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf the Second’s library in Prague back in the sixteenth century, but could be much older. Cataloged by Dr. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth the First’s personal astrologer. Here’s the thing: It’s written in no known language, in no known alphabet. It’s illustrated with pictures of no known plants, and with star charts showing no known constellations.”
“The Voynich manuscript,” I said, skimming off the backgrounder file on the phone. “Named for the last collector who owned it. Currently located in the Yale Library in New Haven.” I looked up at him. “None of that is classified. Word is, it’s a hoax, a fraud created by a sixteenth-century mountebank named Edward Kelley in his never-ending quest to get into Doctor Dee’s bank account and Mrs. Dee’s pants.”
“Somebody showed that it could be a hoax,” Thomas countered. “How many things do we have in the archives right now that are covered with the legend that they’re hoaxes?”
That slowed me down a bit. I’d been involved in ops like that myself: the Rood of Grace, the Shroud of Turin, a couple of others.
“Here’s the thing about the Voynich manuscript,” Thomas said. “Several pages have been missing for who-knows how long. Now they’ve turned up. With an interlinear gloss.”
It wasn’t hard to guess at the implications. “Those pages could be a Rosetta stone.”
“Exactly,” Thomas said. “The key to what might be incredibly powerful magic, or to an angelic tongue. The glosses are in Crimean Gothic, which is what you could call a rare language all on its own. But Sister
Thérèse speaks it like a native.”
I put that information away for the moment and asked, “So what’s the op?”
“The person who currently holds the artifact is offering it for sale to the highest bidder,” said Thomas. “He’s invited all the heavy hitters from the Three Letter Agencies and representatives of every religious group from the Albigensians to the Zoroastrians.”
“Even if Voynich itself isn’t a hoax,” I said, “what makes us think this particular document is the real deal? No chain of custody, previously unknown, all of a sudden it turns up in New York. Why do we care?”
“Efficient agencies are acting like it’s real,” Thomas said. “We can’t afford not to. Be that as it may, you have a ticket to the auction. If it turns out to be a hoax you’ll have had a nice drive in the country. You’re going to a private conference center upstate near Apalachin. To date we haven’t gotten anyone through the door, so you’re going in blind. Snoop around, see what you can find, keep the nuns alive, and make sure that if the Temple doesn’t get that document, no one does.”
“‘There are some things Man was not meant to know’?”
“Or woman either. Sister Thérèse can sight-read the text. If she does, she comes home with you. As far as the auction itself is concerned, your bidding limit is the entire Templar treasury. Let us know if we need to start liquidating assets.”
Speaking as an asset myself, that didn’t sound good.
I must have looked worried, because Thomas said, “Prester John selected you personally for this op, Pete. You have his complete confidence.”
He put a set of car keys on the table, then laid a credit card and a keycard for a room in the hotel beside them. “You’re on the guest list under the name ‘Crossman.’ Directions to the site are on the phone. You’re expected there straight up on noon tomorrow. Car’s parked out front. Luggage is upstairs in your room. Stay tonight and leave for Apalachin in the morning.”
I picked up the cards and the car keys. “Thanks.”
“Not for us, Lord,” he said. “Not for us.”
“But to Thy name give glory,” I answered.
After he left I ordered a Black and Tan, then sat back and watched the bubbles rise until it was flat.
The next morning I swept the car for bugs and bombs, and found nothing. Either I hadn’t yet shown up on anyone’s radar, or so far nobody thought that I was worth the trouble. The car itself was a sporty little two-door, red, with a rental slip in the glove box telling me to turn it in at LaGuardia a couple of days hence. I put the two suitcases the Temple had been good enough to supply me with into the trunk: toiletries, a couple of changes of skivvies, a suit, a cassock, and enough technical gear to break into a Russian embassy if I took a mind to do so.
The trip up to Apalachin took about three hours, heading west on Route 17 through rolling hills that a week or two earlier would have been gaudy with autumn leaves. I was in civvies with Templar crosses on my blazer buttons. My .45 revolver was a comforting lump in its shoulder holster.
The conference center was a big Victorian pile situated at the top of a hill, up a winding gravel drive past iron gates where a uniformed guard checked my invitation and ID. Dead leaves were falling from the trees that lined the drive, blown into drifts by the autumn winds. The grounds of the estate were surrounded by a high yew hedge backed by tangles of multiflora roses—almost as good as a chain-link fence and concertina wire for discouraging unwanted visitors, but a lot easier on the eyes.
The nice young man behind the desk (blond, pinstripe shirt, maroon blazer, gold-tone name badge that said ‘Mort’) inquired how many beds; I took one single. He asked incense or no incense; I took incense.
“And will you be needing any special accommodations?”
After the incense question, I had to wonder what counted here as special. “No, thanks. I’m okay.”
He nodded, and another nice young man, identical clothing, name badge that identified him as ‘Sam,’ took charge of my bag, and I followed him up. The place didn’t appear to have elevators; I wondered about their ADA compliance. Then I recalled that the Temple hadn’t been able to get anyone inside. Maybe building inspectors couldn’t get in either.
The room was clean and brightly lit with compact fluorescent lamps, like a room in any upscale conference center. If previous occupants had taken advantage of the incense option I couldn’t smell any traces of it lingering on the air. The carpets weren’t tacked down, and the floor was solid hardwood underneath. The bathroom had a locked door on the far side that could turn this room and the one adjoining into a suite if needed. Curtains covered walled-over patches where windows used to be. The only unusual feature besides the not-windows was another absence: no room phone. I checked the phone in my pocket. No signal. Someone was running a jammer. I swept my room for bugs and did a quick exorcism, flinging Holy Water into all four corners. By the time I had finished, it was nearly one p.m.—time to scout out the lay of the land and learn the details of the auction.
I spotted a familiar face by the indoor pool. A spectacular redhead was lounging poolside, sipping a tall drink decorated with a little umbrella, and wearing a black bikini cut to “why bother?” proportions. Since I wasn’t supposed to be covert, I went right over.
“Hi, Mags. Providing temptation to bad thoughts?” I asked.
“Providing a source of grace to those who resist,” Maggie replied. “I do what I can for the salvation of mankind.”
“Where’s your friend?”
“Taking a nap. Can’t say I’m surprised to see you here. What are your orders?”
“To control a package. Yours?”
“To put the talent in the same room as the package for five minutes. Anything else? Am I going to have to kill you, or are you going to try to kill me?”
“No. To both.”
Lying is against the eighth commandment, and breaking the commandments tends to run into mortal sin territory. I don’t like it when I have to sin.
Maggie rose gracefully from the lounger and wrapped a towel around her waist, sarong style. “Generally my room number is on a need-to-know basis, but in case you have a need to know, my friend and I are in three-zero-one. Have you had lunch?”
“Not yet.”
“The Vatican’s buying. See you in the restaurant, ’kay?”
I nodded. She sashayed out; I strolled back to the lobby, where a sign directed me to a basement dining room made up to look like a grotto, with tables in various side-rooms off of the rocky chamber. The server—yet another nice young man, who looked like he’d come in a matched set with the guy behind the front desk and the guy who’d taken me up to my room—showed me to a booth in the back.
Before too long, Maggie, once again in full habit, and Sister Thérèse arrived and joined me.
“I wonder if a flashlight comes with the menu?” Maggie said, eyeballing the cave-like decor.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, “as long as they have shrimp cocktail and martinis.”
They did. The shrimp was fresh and the martini was dry. Both the cook and the bartender had resisted any temptation to get cute with the classics. I followed up with a steak, rare, and a baked potato; Sister Thérèse had the broiled chicken with saffron rice. Maggie had the Cobb salad.
We talked of this and that, places we’d been, things we’d done, people we’d met, all on an unclassified basis. How much Sister Thérèse knew about Maggie’s job and mine, I couldn’t tell. She didn’t say much, except for a few brief anecdotes of life in an unnamed resort town somewhere on the coast of France some time in the middle decades of the twentieth century—the sort of reminiscences that you might expect from someone who had once signed a piece of paper that said she would never reveal anything that was classified or could be classified. I decided that Sister Thérèse had hidden depths.
As we were finishing up, a guy in a full cassock with a Roman collar came over to our table. He was tall, thin, and nervous-looking; he gave the appearance o
f being the sort of socially inept soul who’d find the sight of nuns in full habit reassuring.
“Join you?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said—I was fairly certain his nervousness was an act, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t be polite while I tried to figure out his angle—and slid in to give him room. That pinned me against the wall, but it also put him directly across from Maggie. “What’s on your mind?”
“Aloysius Laurence, S.J.,” he said, by way of introduction. “I’ve been here since yesterday and you’re the first Catholics I’ve spotted.”
“What can you tell us about the setup?” I asked. “Have you had a chance to see the goodies?”
“If you’re asking about the pages, no one’s seen them. There’re supposed to be private showings sometime this evening, before the auction. The auction proper starts at nine o’clock sharp tonight.” He glanced around, leaned closer to me, and said in a stage whisper, “If the chicks in chitons invite you to a party in their room, do not go.”
While he was talking, his hand dropped below the table, and I felt him press a folded piece of paper into my palm. Then he lifted his hand back up, brushed his hair behind his ear, and went on with his spiel.
“Best of luck with the bidding tomorrow,” he said.
“Thanks,” Maggie replied. “We’re the Vatican’s reps, so if you want to sit it out, that’s okay with us.”
“I don’t think the Superior General would go for that,” Aloysius said. “But thanks anyway. It’s always good to see some friendly faces. If it’s just us bidding, let’s not push it too high, okay?”
With that, he stood and departed.
“Really?” Maggie commented as soon as he was out of sight.
“Apparently so,” I said. “Feeling out the opposition.”
“He seemed like a nice young man,” said Sister Thérèse. “But a bit out of his element.”
“Right you are, Sister,” I said, and thought again, Hidden depths.
