The Book of 21 (32 page)

After glancing at the ceiling above, she asked, “The keystone was the correct panel?”

“Yes, but if you missed the tomb altogether and simply brought the Key of David here, that would have worked too. Those in the know would just come here with the key. The tomb recorded the way for those not in the deep inner circle, and gave outsiders a few ways to fail. Now that we know what the symbols are, the next step is to figure out whether they should be pressed in the same order. That is, starting with the top-left.”

“Yes,” Amy confirmed with a nod. “If we use the order we used on the sarcophagus, it’s correct.”

“How do you know?”

“I fucking know,” she barked. She pointed at the symbols as she spoke, “The Star of David is the philosopher’s stone, the spiral symbolizes enlightenment, and the bull is a symbol found in most European Mithraea.”

John gaped at her, and asked, “So?”

“So, the stone sarcophagus gave us enlightenment and led us here. The Romans and Phrygians made Mithraea—little caves like the one we’re in—to worship.”

“I guess we don’t have much else to go with…”

“Enough, open it.” Amy motioned toward the tile with the muzzle of the gun.

John leaned over to the tiles and used his thumb to push on each of the three characters in sequence. Each of the three tiles descended easily and then triggered an audible click when about one inch deep. For a few seconds, there was silence.

A grating sound erupted from the front of Baphomet’s pedestal, and the front panel fell forward. In the compartment below the sitting Baphomet, was something that looked like a book.

“Get it out,” she barked.

John squatted down and shined his LED flashlight around the inside of the compartment.

“What are you waiting for?” Amy asked.

“Before I stick my hands in there, I’d like to make sure I’m going to keep them,” he said, checking the surfaces one last time.

“You’re so smart. That’s why I’ve kept you alive this long,” she chuckled. “Now, get the thing out before I change my mind.”

In the flickering light of Amy’s candle, John slowly slipped his hands into the compartment.

“I don’t know what you are so worked up about,” he said. “After a couple of hundred years down here, this book is probably rotted out.”

He started to tug at the book, and found it not only chillingly cold from sitting in the basement all these years, but also remarkably heavy. He lay on his side, reached across the top of the book, and heaved. Once the book cleared the compartment, he picked up his flashlight and gave another look.

The front cover of the tome seemed to be made of a thin layer of mica, and bore tally marks. The tallies were base-seven, unlike the base-five tallies that John was used to seeing. There were three groups of six vertical marks, each crossed with a horizontal bar; the total was twenty-one, but it appeared to be three bound groups of sixes.

Leather thongs formed the binding, but they simply crumbled when John opened the book.

Each of the pages, just like the cover, was a thin sheet of mica bearing etched symbols. The symbols were stained with something dark—almost rust-colored. Though rigid, the mica pages were thin enough that they were translucent. John strained to sort the confusing mess of glyphs on the top page, from those on the page below.

“What language is this?” John asked.

“Let’s go, let’s get out of here,” Amy whispered, seeming suddenly nervous.

The longer they stayed down here, John knew, the more likely it was that something foul would occur. She was probably afraid that some old fail-safe mechanism would go off, and she was undoubtedly right that leaving was the best option. He scooped up the loose stack of mica sheets and made for the door. As he exited, he debated whether the bas-relief figures seemed to smile a little more than when he entered, or if it was just fatigue that caused him to think so.

John limped down the hallway, with Amy occasionally jabbing the gun in his back. As he carefully traversed the tripwires, and stepped over Father Lamb’s corpse, he realized Amy was dropping back so that he could not spring the traps on her. Her cautiousness mattered little; there was always the ladder at the end of the hall. When she was crawling up the ladder, John planned to grab her ankle and pull her off, thereby breaking her neck and ending this whole game.

When he reached the ladder, and was beginning to have some hope this would end, the familiar voice of Sophia Mezzalura echoed down the hole, “Why don’t you come up and join me, Detective McDonough?”

John looked up to see her smirking face.

Without direction, he tied the rope around the book and watched Sophia haul it upward. John then climbed the ladder.

“So, let me get this straight,” he said, finally topping the ladder and moving to lean against a church pew, “you want to free this remarkable pantheon of freakish gods from some weird prison so they can destroy the world?”

Mezzalura laughed. “I think you may have been breathing some foul air down in the Mithraeum. You really bought into the tale? I should have figured; you seemed to bite readily on the little damsel in distress played by Miss Amy. She was so good at playing it too.”

Amy chuckled as she topped the ladder and got to her feet. “Really, John?” she asked. “Now what would we have to gain from ending the world. We just want some cash, just like the Brethren.”

“Cash?” John raised an eyebrow. “This is all about blackmail? Who the hell are you blackmailing with an old stone book?”

“Probably best you didn’t know,” Mezzalura replied. “Let us move along—”

“You see, Johnny,” Amy interrupted, “Father Lamb down there was, along with the rest of his group, getting a stipend for
not
sharing the codex with the outside world. Whether or not the thing is real, the church doesn’t need this kind of thing out there, so now, we get the checks.”

“So releasing this information brings about a questioning of faith, a new atheism that is as cataclysmic for the church as releasing a world of demons?” he sighed. “I find that hard to believe.”

Amy laughed and shook her head. “I don’t think it’s that dramatic, but we don’t need you to believe it, John. You don’t have the money.” She got close to him, close enough to kiss him, and spoke softly while she stared into his eyes. “You know what? While you were looking at my little ass last night, and thinking about fucking it, I was thinking about fucking you, but not in the same way. You killed someone who meant the world to me last night, and I am going to end you. I am going to make everyone who even thinks about your name cringe with embarrassment, and block you out of their mind.”

“Do I have a gay lover too?” A smirk broke across John’s lips. “You would think that after three hundred years, you people would have come up with something more original than the embarrassing tryst to keep others from looking into things too deeply.”

John felt a searing pain rip through his pelvis as Amy’s knee smashed into his crotch. He gasped for air and fell to his knees. After sucking wind for few more seconds, he finally caught his breath. He then glared up at her; he would enjoy killing her as soon as he had the chance.

“Sometimes, the old tried and true methods work best,” Amy lilted with a shrug and a smile. “No need to invent anything new.”

John’s legs were weak. He reached out and used the side of the pew to steady himself while he got back on his feet.

Amy walked away from him, now growling loud enough for her voice to echo through the marble cavern of the church, “You really should have just fucked me after dinner last night. Then I would have just slipped away with Hallman’s notes and no one would have been the wiser, but no, you had to keep your little dick to yourself. You had to fuck up the routine.” She turned, smiled at him, and asked, “Now who wants their routine back?” As she gyrated her hips, she seethed, “Ready to go back to the old grind now, John?”

Chapter 42:
The Problem at the Front

In front of the church, Jake Moore was looking at the parking permit sticker on the rear-view mirror of a blue BMW 325i. After taking as long as possible to look at the sticker, he moved to the license plate and pretended that he was checking the permit number against the plate number. He then slowly turned to a silver VW Passat and repeated the false ritual.

As he feigned the motions of parking enforcement, Moore was trying to figure out how to get close to the goon at the church door. During the radio call, Fanelli had given him the word to apprehend the guy at the front, if he could do so quietly. He was then to wait there until he heard word from Fanelli that the dark-haired woman was under arrest, or he heard gunfire.

The problem was that, if he—a uniformed officer—approached directly up the walkway, the guy would certainly get nervous. If the guy opened fire, the woman in the church would know the police had arrived, and any hope to get the drop on her would be lost.

If Moore could quietly remove the threat at the front of the church, however, he and Fanelli could have the dark-haired woman caught in their crossfire. If not, the advantage would be lost; he would have to shoot his way through the sentry when Fanelli and Mulgrew made a move on the inside.

In the current parking enforcement charade, Moore was close enough to kill the goon at the door in a shootout if he had to, but he could not think of a way to get any closer and quietly disable the man. He figured that he had best prep himself for the inevitable.

When the shootout came, he would need to be accurate and make the shots count; he carried a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver, so he would only have six shots before he needed to pause and reload. Ordinarily, he found the revolver a smart choice; he had never fired more than two rounds at any one incident. Moreover, the fact that it was a revolver meant it was not going to jam. Still, he thought about how much he would welcome the few extra rounds the Glock would give him in this situation.

The strain of a car engine cut through the still air. Moore looked up to see something quite out of place for the neighborhood; an old Nissan Sentra was speeding hastily toward the church. He caught a glimpse of the driver, and knew that Kim Wohlford would get out of her Sentra and blow the whole situation if he did not act fast.

Kim screeched to a halt in the closest vacant area—a yellow zone that kept cars from parking in front of a fire hydrant. When she exited the car, she saw Jake Moore about twenty feet away.

Moore waved his arms and yelled, “Hey! Hey, lady! You can’t park there!”

Kim twisted her face, shot him a look, and replied, “What—”

“Hey, I don’t want to hear it,” Moore cut her off. “Do you think the rules don’t apply to you?” Reaching her, he positioned himself with his back to the sentry and continued under his breath, “Tell me in a firm voice that your brother is getting married here and you will only be a few minutes.”

Kim looked at him and whispered, “What?”

“Tell me now,” Moore said, as he looked her in the eye. “You have an audience. Use a conversational tone that is loud so he can hear you, but not too loud. Say, ‘My brother is getting married here next week, and I will only be a few minutes.’”

Placing a hand on her hip in frustration, Kim growled, “My brother is getting married here next week, Officer. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

“Good,” Moore said under his breath. “The hand on the hip is a nice touch, but don’t get snooty. Can you flirt with this guy behind me?”

“What?” she snapped. Realizing her mistake, Kim added to the flub, “Really, I mean two minutes, Officer!”

“Nice save,” Moore muttered. “Can you flirt or not? If you can, I need you to distract him. If not, just get back in your car and drive away.”

“Of course I can flirt. What woman can’t?”

“A lot of women can’t, especially when they don’t really mean it. Can you keep him occupied for ten seconds or not? If you can’t, you’ll end up dead.”

Kim nodded and whispered, “Yeah.”

“Good, I’ll make him think I’m on my way back—to check that you left. That way, he’ll try to talk you into leaving rather take the chance of just capping you right away. That should give me enough time.” He started toward the right side of the church, and after a few steps, yelled back over his shoulder, “Two minutes, ma’am. I will be back.”

As Kim started toward the church doors, she tried to figure out just how much she should swing her hips to look alluring but not make the man think that she was physically or mentally handicapped. She pretended to look down at the sidewalk, though she was really watching Moore out of the corner of her eye. He was moving around the church at a casual pace, so casual that it made her nervous.

When she was about ten feet from the sentry, she looked up at him, tilted her head, and cracked a smile. “Hi,” she said.

The sentry raised an eyebrow and smiled back. Placing his hands on his hips, he asked, “How can I help you, miss?”

Kim closed slowly until she was just past the point of what felt like a comfortable personal space. After glancing at his pectoral muscles, she pried, “I haven’t seen you here before. Do you work here?”

“I just help out from time to time,” he replied, as he kept his stare fixed on her eyes. “They’re doing some work inside, so the church is closed right now. I’m just out here until our custodial staff can run to the hardware store for some signs. It’s been a while since we’ve had to post any signs that we were closed.” He shrugged, and went on, “You will, unfortunately, need to come back later.”

“Oh, a little hard work doesn’t bother me.” Kim smiled, and preened her hair. “I like things a little messy.”

The sentry’s face twisted slightly, and after he scanned the street for a second, he replied, “Well, we’re closed, miss. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“Really?” Kim glanced at his biceps, and broadened her smile as she returned to his eyes. “I was hoping to drop off a deposit for my brother’s wedding.”

The sentry again scanned the neighborhood behind her. Upon seeing no sign of anyone on the sidewalk, he smiled back at her and replied, “Well, we might be able to arrange that.”