The Malta Escape

by Chris Kuzneski

  Volkov didn’t know whether to be offended or impressed.

  The old bastard wasn’t the least bit scared.

  He was just happy to still be alive.

  The bigger of the two goons opened the limousine door while the other helped Artamonov inside. Instead of showing any fear, he actually smiled at Volkov.

  “Hello,” he said in Russian. “My name is Boris. What’s your name?”

  Volkov nodded to the henchman, who shut the door from the outside, leaving the two alone. “My name is Volkov. Ivan Volkov. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Artamonov shook his head. “Not at all. Are you famous?”

  “More like infamous.”

  “Sorry, Ivan. I don’t follow the news. I prefer to spend my time in the past.”

  “I’m curious. What did my men tell you about my situation?”

  “They said you needed my help. So I’m here to help.”

  “Just like that?”

  Artamonov shrugged. “I used to work as a full-time curator, but now I’m just a part-time volunteer. Honestly, I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  Volkov smiled an actual smile. For him, this was a refreshing change of pace—particularly after the debacle in Valletta. “If I may be so bold, what is your specialty at the museum?”

  “Over the years, I have worked in just about every building and every department imaginable. I started at the Small Hermitage, which housed the original collection, but then I moved to the Old Hermitage, then the New Hermitage, and the Hermitage Theatre, followed by the Winter Palace. That’s my personal favorite. It’s where Catherine the Great used to live.”

  “So I read,” Volkov said as he leaned forward with excitement. “And what if I told you that I recently discovered a number of ancient documents about Empress Catherine and her family? Would you be willing to explain their significance to me?”

  Artamonov glanced at his watch. “That depends. Will you buy me dinner?”

  Volkov grinned. “I think that could be arranged.”

  “Dessert, too?”

  “If you’d like.”

  Artamonov shrugged. “In that case, why not?”

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Payne and Jones had seen a similar twinkle in Ulster’s eyes on previous occasions, and it usually meant one of two things: either a meal was about to be served, or he was about to blow their minds with a historical fact that would undoubtedly help their cause. Jones obviously hoped for the latter, but Payne would have been fine with either result.

  No matter the time of day, he was always willing to eat.

  Ulster started with a question. “When Marissa told you about the Great Siege of Malta, did she talk about the cannon placement of the Ottomans?”

  Payne answered. “Yeah, she said they positioned them on top of Mount, um…” He glanced at Marissa for help. “How do you pronounce it again?”

  “Mount Sciberras,” she replied.

  Payne nodded. “They put them on Mount Sciberras and then bombarded Birgu with over a hundred thousand cannonballs. And just so you know, we actually visited the Upper Barrakka Gardens and watched the saluting battery before the library. Very cool stuff.”

  “Indeed!” Ulster said with a grin. Since everyone in the group had already been there, it would make what he was about to reveal even easier to explain. “After the Order’s miraculous victory, Grand Master Jean de Valette realized that Birgu was far too vulnerable along the harbor to be able to protect it. He also realized that money would come pouring in from Europe once word spread about his victory over the dreaded Turks. Looking to put his own personal stamp on the region, he selected the Sciberras Peninsula as the site of his new city, laying the foundation stone himself in March of 1566 AD.”

  Payne pointed at Marissa. “We actually know all of this. Your former intern did a wonderful job filling us in on the basics. You should offer her a permanent job.”

  Ulster smiled at her. “If she wants one, she can have it. I’ve been trying to lure her back to the Archives for years, but she’s been too busy shooting up libraries.”

  Marissa laughed. “Once I’m out of bullets, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Excellent!” Ulster said. “In the meantime, would you mind terribly if I highlighted a few pertinent items from your lecture about Valletta? I think perhaps I can shine a light on a shadow or two that you might have overlooked.”

  “It would be my honor. You know how much I love listening to you talk.”

  “Which,” he joked, “is one of my favorite things about you!”

  She laughed and squeezed his arm tight.

  “David!” Ulster said out of nowhere.

  Jones was listening but snapped to attention. “What’d I do?”

  “Don’t worry. You’re not in trouble. I was just hoping you could help our discussion. Being a former soldier and a history buff, I’d like your thoughts on the following: What would have been your first priority if you were building Valletta in 1566 AD?”

  “Whores. You can never have enough whores.”

  Jarkko laughed. “David’s right. They keep the knights happy.”

  “Boooo!” Marissa said as she elbowed Ulster.

  “Boo is right,” Ulster said with a grin. “Boooo!”

  Payne glared at Jones. “Come on, man. Be serious.”

  Jones frowned. “Sorry. My bad. Just trying to keep things loose.”

  “Just like the whores,” Jarkko whispered to him.

  Jones fought hard not to smile. “Considering their recent battle with the Ottomans and their ongoing fight with the Barbary pirates, I would think the fortification of the city would be high on my list. You just said the main reason that they moved from Birgu was because they were looking for somewhere more secure, so I’m assuming that’s what Valette did.”

  Ulster nodded. “You are correct. He built bastions as high as forty-seven meters, which is approximately one-hundred-fifty feet tall to you and Jonathon.”

  Payne chimed in. “We saw the bastions when we sailed in and out of the harbor. We also saw them from the overlook in Sliema on our first night here. They’re impressive.”

  “Maybe so,” Ulster said, “but they’re also a problem. If you build a medieval city on top of a bluff and your enemy surrounds you down below, how do you get supplies? Back then, there were no planes or drones to drop things from the sky, so what were the knights to do? And if you don’t know, think back to our first adventure together. What did they do in Orvieto?”

  “A well!” Jones said, remembering Pozzo di San Patrizio, a historic well that was commissioned by Pope Clement VII, who had taken refuge in Orvieto during the sack of Rome in 1527. “They dug nearly fifty feet into the plateau until they hit water.”

  “And the Knights did something similar, digging deep into the soft limestone of the Sciberras Peninsula in order to build a system of cisterns and sewers. But while they were down there, they also did something else. They built hundreds of chambers, some of them small but many as tall as three stories high, from one end of the city to the other. They did this to store their most precious supplies in case of a siege, whether that be food, weapons, or—”

  “Treasure!” Jarkko shouted.

  Ulster grinned. “To reach these chambers, they also built an intricate network of tunnels, some of which were so top secret that only the grand master himself knew where they went. Which got me thinking. If the Knights of Malta did, in fact, have a secret treasure, there’s only one place they would have kept it—and that’s underneath the city of Valletta!”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Marissa smiled at her mentor. Although she knew that tunnels existed underneath the city of Valletta, she had never thought to mention them during her history lesson. Not because they weren’t pertinent, but because they weren’t the type of thing to be described in textbooks or taught in classrooms. They were merely interesting footnotes.

  Suddenly Ulster’s comment about shining ‘a light on a shadow or two that
she might have overlooked’ made perfect sense to her in two completely different ways. On one hand, he was talking about the dark underworld of the tunnels themselves, which was obviously going to play a big role in Hompesch’s supposed escape attempt, but he was also talking about her tendency to be so focused on the black and white that she missed the gray stuff in between.

  That’s where the real history could be found.

  Hiding in the shadows of the spotlight.

  “Petr’s right,” she said as she squeezed his arm. “If the grand master had a secret treasure, he wouldn’t have kept it at the Order’s treasury, which was located in Piazza Tesoreria—the square outside of the national library. He would have kept it elsewhere underground.”

  “Have you been in the tunnels?” Payne asked.

  She nodded. “I’ve been in some, but certainly not all. Recently the government opened up a few tunnels to the public as tourist attractions. Some of the chambers are as tall as modern buildings and reinforced with elaborate brickwork. The problem is there are so many tunnels, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. The Order certainly built a number of them when they constructed Valletta, but in the four centuries since, countless more have been added by locals who dug into the ground for a variety of reasons.”

  She smiled as a story came to mind. “The Knights weren’t the only group who tried to conceal things in the limestone of the Sciberras Peninsula. During World War Two, the British—who still controlled Malta at that time—decided to build a submarine base underneath Valletta. They brought in the equipment and started to build a secret lair that would be large enough to store one of their subs. Halfway through the construction, they realized that the expense of the lair was going to cost twice as much as the sub they were trying to hide, so they stopped the project and used the leftover money to build an additional submarine.”

  “Was it yellow?” Jones asked with a grin.

  She laughed at the Beatles reference. “I can’t answer that, but the half-built lair still exists to this day. The Brits don’t like talking about it, but I know where it is.”

  Payne smiled. He had been around the military long enough to know how often they wasted money on ridiculous projects. He also knew that they rarely liked to talk about them. “What about the other tunnels? Would you know how to access those?”

  “Some,” she said as she used her hands to illustrate the problem. “Unfortunately, they crisscross the peninsula like a game of Dig Dug. Some start high and go deep. Others stay straight for blocks. And dozens were built as fallout shelters during World War Two. Most of those zigzag back and forth to diffuse shockwaves from enemy bombs.”

  Payne shook his head. “Unless I’m overlooking something, we’re not interested in those. We’re looking for the ancient tunnels that were built by the Knights themselves.”

  She nodded in understanding. “One of the major tunnel systems has an entry point in the basement of the national library. I’m assuming the tunnel originally led to the Conservatoria—the place where the Order’s treasury stored its gold and silver bullion until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But it was moved to make way for the library. Of course, all of this would have been done under Grand Master Emmanuel de Rohan-Polduc, the immediate predecessor to Hompesch. Call me crazy, but if I’m Hompesch, there’s no way I would have used a tunnel that was built by Rohan’s men. Not at a time when French knights couldn’t be trusted.”

  Ulster grinned with pride, glad that Marissa was connecting the dots on her own. Although he was in Malta to help the team find the Order’s treasure, he viewed every situation as a teaching moment. If he had wanted to, he could have jumped in and dominated the conversation, but he preferred it when those around him came to realizations on their own.

  In his mind, how else were they going to learn?

  But at some point, Ulster knew that he needed to reenter the discussion in order to get them to where they needed to go. “I agree with Marissa. I think we’re probably looking for a tunnel system that was known to a select few. Possibly one that has been forgotten by time.”

  Jones grimaced. “And how are we supposed to find that?”

  Marissa answered. “If you’d like, I could make some calls to local historians to see if they have any suggestions. Maybe one of them could—”

  “Are you nuts?” Jones said with a laugh. “You want to endanger the lives of others by getting them mixed up in this shit?”

  “You’re right,” she said as she shook her head in embarrassment. “I can’t believe I forgot about the Russians and all the guns. You guys must be rubbing off on me.”

  Jarkko grinned. “Jarkko would like to rub—”

  “If you finish that sentence,” Payne threatened, “I swear to Poseidon that I will drag you from the couch by your hairy feet and throw you off your yacht.”

  Jarkko frowned. “But Jarkko captain.”

  “Then act like one.”

  Jarkko glanced at Marissa. “Jarkko sorry.”

  She nodded her forgiveness to Jarkko and her thanks to Payne.

  Both of them smiled in return.

  “Anyway,” Ulster said, “I think I have an answer to David’s question.”

  “What question is that?” Jones asked.

  “The one about finding the correct tunnel.”

  “Oh yeah,” Jones said. “That was a great question. What’s the answer?”

  Ulster grinned. He had been holding back an important piece of information since his arrival. “Late last night, while I was awaiting the call from Jonathon that never came, I started to think about Grand Master Hompesch and his treasure. Obviously the tunnel system underneath the city immediately sprang to mind, and it dawned on me that I had seen some ancient blueprints of Valletta at one point in my career. Unable to sleep after devouring the delightful fruit torte that I told you about—you know, the one with the mango, papaya, and Chinese gooseberries. Did I happen to mention the hand-whipped cream?”

  “Focus,” Payne ordered.

  “Yes, of course, how foolish of me! Anyway, with no sleep in my future, I decided to putter downstairs to my collections to see if I could dig up—pun intended—anything on the construction of the city. As Marissa will surely attest, I have a fair amount of information on Malta in the Archives. An island system such as theirs, which sits at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, has been touched by more civilizations over time than just about any place on earth. It truly is a remarkable place that has seen empires come and go. And yet, as I flipped through my records, I was unable to locate the document that I had certainly seen before.”

  Marissa chimed in. “Unless you acquired it during the last few years—which is certainly a possibility given your facility—I can say with near certainty that the document was not in your Maltese collection. And the reason I can say that with such confidence is because I was the intern who helped you reorganize that entire section.”

  She turned to the group. “You see, the problem with Maltese history is that it has been mixed with so many other cultures over the centuries—whether that be the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Byzantines, the Normans, and so on—that it is next to impossible to sort through the overlaps. For instance, if you find an ancient scroll from the Roman Empire on Gozo, do you put it in your Roman collection or your Maltese collection? In the Archives’ original system, before the dawn of computers, it was up to Petr to connect all of the threads in that genius brain of his and remember that he had placed that scroll in his Roman room.”

  “Unfortunately,” Ulster admitted, “my genius brain has seen better days, so sometimes I’m not as fast or reliable to make those connections, which is why we are scanning everything into the computer system that Jonathon was kind enough to donate…. Wait. Where was I?”

  Payne smiled. “You were flipping through Maltese records.”

  “Right!” Ulster blurted. “As I was flipping through my Maltese collection, I came across a document that described the Vatican’s contribution to
the rebuild of Malta after the Great Siege, and just like that, it came to me. I was looking in the wrong place. I shouldn’t be looking in my Maltese collection at all. I should be in my Vatican vault!”

  Jones’s eyes lit up. “The pope’s dude!”

  Payne glanced at him. “Excuse me?”

  Jones stood up in his excitement. “I know where Petr is going with this!”

  “Oh!” Marissa said, catching on. But she was so swept up in the moment, she completely blanked on his name. “Michelangelo’s assistant!”

  “That’s him! The Italian guy!”

  Jarkko jumped up, too. “Jarkko remembers name. It was Francesco Lasagna!”

  “Boom!” Jones said as he started to dance. “It was Frankie Lasagna!”

  Ulster burst out laughing. “Although I could go for a nice slice of lasagna covered in Bolognese right about now—which I do believe I saw in a takeout container in the yacht’s refrigerator— the man you’re referring to was actually named Francesco Laparelli.”

  Jarkko grinned. “That’s what Jarkko said: Francesco Lasagna.”

  Payne cursed to himself. He hated being the last one to figure out things. “Now I remember. He was the Vatican’s military architect, the one sent to Malta to design Valletta.”

  “Exactly!” Ulster said with a smile. “So I hustled over to my Vatican vault and scrolled through my files on Pope Pius the Fifth, and there it was: the original blueprints of the city of Valletta by Francesco Laparelli.”

  “That’s fantastic!” Marissa said before she gave it some thought. “I’d love to see the original plans, I truly would. But how will they help us? The tunnel system that we’re looking for would have been dug after Laparelli’s death in 1570 AD. In case you forgot, the Valletta project was actually completed by his assistant, a Maltese architect named Girolamo Cassar. He went on to build many things in Malta including the auberges.”

  “Trust me, my dear, I’m well aware of Mister Cassar and quite happy that he was the builder who finished the project.”