The Last Templar - Страница 7

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

A fter 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 die 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 die 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 tliere, 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 twenty-something, 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 to 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 tJiought 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.

Not only that, but he took nothing else. It was all he wanted.

She thought about Amelia Gaines, the woman who looked more like someone out of a shampoo commercial than an agent of the FBI. Tess was pretty certain that the investigators wanted facts, not speculation, but even so, after a quick moment's thought, she went into her bedroom, found the evening bag she'd carried last night, and pulled out the card given to her by Gaines.

She placed the card on her desk and flashed back to the moment the fourth horseman had picked up the encoder. The way that he had picked it up, held it, and whispered something to it.

He had seemed almost . . . reverent.

What was it he had said? Tess had been too distraught at the Met to make a big deal out of it, but all of a sudden it was all she could think of. She focused on that moment, pushing everything else out of her consciousness, reliving the scene with the horseman lifting the encoder. And saying . . .