The Last Templar Read online

  This unfortunate situation, however, called for neither a leader nor a committee. It was something Brugnone would have to deal with himself. That much was clear to him from the moment he had seen the news footage that had been broadcast around the world.

  His eyes eventually settled on Cardinal Pasquale Rienzi. Although he was the youngest of them all and only a cardinal-deacon, Rienzi was Brugnone’s closest confidante. Like the others seated at the table, Rienzi was speechlessly engrossed in the report before him. He looked up and caught Brugnone’s eye. The young man, pale and earnest as always, promptly coughed gently.

  “How could something like this happen?” one man asked. “In the heart of New York City? At the Metropolitan Museum…” He shook his head in disbelief.

  How foolishly otherworldly, Brugnone thought. Anything could happen in New York City. Hadn’t the destruction of the World Trade Center proved that?

  “At least the archbishop wasn’t harmed,” another cardinal stated somberly.

  “It seems the robbers escaped. They don’t yet know who is behind this…abomination?” another voice asked.

  “It’s a land of criminals. Lunatics inspired by their amoral television programs and sadistic video games,” another answered. “Their prisons ran out of room years ago.”

  “But why dress as they did? Red crosses on white mantles…They were masquerading as Templars?” asked the cardinal who had spoken first.

  There it is, Brugnone thought.

  That was what had set off his alarm bells. Why, indeed, were the perpetrators dressed as Knights Templar? Could it be simply a matter of the robbers seeking a disguise and fastening onto whatever happened to be available? Or did the apparel of the four horsemen have a deeper, and possibly more disturbing, significance?

  “What is a multigeared rotor encoder?”

  Brugnone looked up sharply. The question had been asked by the oldest cardinal there. “A multi…?” Brugnone asked.

  The old man was peering short-sightedly at the circulated document. “‘Exhibit 129,’” the old man read out. “‘Sixteenth century. A multigeared rotor encoder. Reference number VNS 1098.’ I’ve never heard of it. What is it?”

  Brugnone feigned studying the document in his hands, a copy of an e-mail that contained a provisional list of items stolen during the raid. Again, he felt a shiver—the same shiver he felt the first time he spotted it on the list. He kept his face impassive. Without raising his head, he flicked a quick glance around the table at the others. No one else was reacting. Why should they? It was far from common knowledge.

  Sliding the paper away, he leaned back in his chair. “Whatever it is,” he stated flatly, “those gangsters have taken it.” Glancing at Rienzi, he inclined his head slightly. “Perhaps you will undertake to keep us informed. Make contact with the police and ask for us to be kept abreast of their investigation.”

  “The FBI,” Rienzi corrected, “not the police.”

  Brugnone raised an eyebrow.

  “The American government is taking this very seriously,” Rienzi affirmed.

  “And so they should,” the oldest cardinal snapped from across the table. Brugnone was pleased to see that this elder appeared to have forgotten about the machine.

  “Quite,” Rienzi continued. “I’ve been assured that everything that can be done will be done.”

  Brugnone nodded, then motioned to Rienzi to continue with the meeting, his gesture implying, wind it up.

  People always had deferred to Mauro Brugnone. Probably, he knew, because the way he looked suggested a man of great physical strength. If it were not for his vestments, he knew that he looked like the burly, heavy-shouldered Calabrian farmer he would have been had the Church not called him more than half a century ago. His rough-hewn appearance, and the matching manner he had cultivated over the years, first disarmed others into thinking he was just a simple man of God. That he was but, because of his standing in the Church, many proceeded to another assumption: that he was a manipulator and a schemer. He was not, but he’d never bothered to disabuse them. It sometimes paid to keep people guessing, even though in a way, that was in itself a form of manipulation.

  Ten minutes later, Rienzi did as he asked.

  AS THE OTHER CARDINALS filed from the room, Brugnone left the meeting room by another door and walked along a corridor to a stairwell that took him out of the building and into a secluded courtyard. He made his way down a sheltered brick pathway, across the Belvedere courtyard and past the celebrated statue of Apollo, and into the buildings that housed part of the Vatican’s enormous library, the Archivio Segreto Vaticano—the secret archive.

  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 dead bolt 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 the back of his eyes. He rubbed them, then stared again at the drawing before him. He was quietly furious. By what delinquency had this been allowed to happen? He kn
ew 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 the legendary purpose of this 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 the 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 ruthlessly determined collector. Whoever was behind this knew exactly what he was looking for. And he had to be stopped before his ill-gotten gain could unveil its secrets.

  Chapter 7

  Four 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

  After 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 the 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 at 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 the 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 there, 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 twentysomething, 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 at 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 thought 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.