The Last Templar - Страница 6

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 multi-geared 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 17

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 mem. 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 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.