The Alchemist’s Code (39 page)

“What was that you shot at us, you piece of shit?”

The man didn't answer, and simply rolled on the ground in pain, writhing and uttering unintelligible grunts.

Volta took out his walkie-talkie and called one of his men. “De Rossi, the entrance is free but there might be a camera somewhere. We've got a wounded man here, call for an ambulance and reinforcements, immediately.”

“Ok, Commissioner,” croaked the voice of the agent from the walkie-talkie.

Oscar and Volta dragged the injured man to the pavement and picked up the weapon he had used. “Don't move, there'll be an ambulance here soon,” said Volta.

“He was lucky to meet a cop with as good an aim as you, congratulations,” said Oscar as the two ran towards the entrance of the shrine.

“Thank you, Franchi. All those hours at the shooting range have evidently borne fruit. Let's be careful, they've probably got cameras inside too.”

They stopped for a moment at the sides of the gate and peered inside the shrine. Oscar took advantage of the pause to quickly study the weapon he had taken from Raymond's man. “The Russian girl mentioned a gun like this – she said it was a kind of taser, and she wasn't far off the mark.”

Volta cast a worried look at the large gun and shook his head. “God knows, but I'd rather not get hit by one of them – did you see what it did to the wall? You go to the base of the statue, I'll cover you.”

Oscar ran through the gate and toward the statue. About three metres high and depicting three bound men, it sat on a base made of the same irregular stone as the outer wall. As soon as Oscar was flattened against it, he heard the same dull sound that had preceded the appearance of the electric darts a moment before. Without thinking twice, he leaned out from his cover and fired with the same weapon. Darts arriving from opposite directions collided, and the square in front of the entrance to the caves where the massacre had occurred lit up with sparks and lightning. Some of the darts stuck in the ground a few centimetres from where Oscar was hiding, immediately eroding the soil. Then all was silent again. Oscar, however, did not wait for a second shot, and fired again. This time his special bullet flew unhindered and found its target.

There was first a brief, muffled gasp, the dull sound of electric shocks, then two or three intense screams followed by a sinister noise: a sizzle.

In the meantime Volta had joined his colleague who, horrified, stared at one of the minions of Thule, laying motionless in a pool of blood with his limbs partially stripped of flesh.

Events reconstructed by Lorenzo Aragona

Fosse Ardeatine Memorial Cemetery, Rome, January, 2013 – 18:45

Inside the mausoleum, all hell had broken loose. Antonio, slipping between the rows of tombs, was firing wildly in an attempt to hit Herzog, who had appeared immediately upon hearing the first shots and was now squatting between the first row of sarcophagi. Anna, who seemed to have the best shot in the dark, was assisting him, but she was also busy holding off Camille, who was not too far from her.

Woland, his back to the sarcophagus that had contained the Baphomet, looked at me with a smile, and said loudly so that everyone could hear him, “Poor Lorenzo, strung along by all and sundry. Your grandfather, your parents, your Russian friend. By the way, did you know that she is a fucking Russian spy? She has been deceiving you from the beginning.”

“Shut up, Woland!” shouted Anna from somewhere among the tombs to my right.

“Shut up? Why? Am I not telling the truth?”

Herzog stood up to shoot in the direction he had heard the girl's voice come from, but Anna was faster, and picked him off with a single shot, despite the lack of light.

“Good God, she's a sniper!” I thought.

Seeing his minion fall, Woland grabbed the Baphomet and crawled away. I tried to chase him, but a bullet which grazed my temple before it hit the wall dissuaded me from moving. In any case, without me, it was useless to Woland.

“They trained you well, agent Vova,” said Camille, looking at me with pity. “But you didn't do much of a job of hiding your identity. It didn't take me long to find out who you were. Your friend is a secret agent of the SVR, Lorenzo – the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. An agent who betrayed her country and now wants to get their hands on the Baphomet, perhaps to sell it. Poor Lorenzo, you seem always to meet such dangerous, untrustworthy women.”

“You're wrong, Camille – I had the good fortune to meet an extraordinary one, and I married her.”

Surprised by my words, her eyes softened for a moment and she lowered the gun. The shadow of a doubt appeared in her eyes, and an instant later she gestured in the direction in which Woland had fled.

“Then you should do everything possible to get back to her.”

In the meantime, the other two Thule men had come into the mausoleum and started shooting blindly into the darkness. Anna returned fire, then a gunshot followed hers, I heard a strangled gasp, and for a moment I was afraid that she had been hit. Camille and I, however, saw a shadow on the other side of the mausoleum stagger and fall to the ground. Two more shots and both of the Thule men were taken out. I glanced toward the entrance and saw two figures. One was certainly Oscar. They ducked behind the rows of graves and disappeared from view.

“Lorenzo—” said Anna, who was still hidden, “let me be honest with you. It's true, I was working for one of the Russian intelligence agencies that came after the dissolution of the KGB. I told you a part of the truth so that you might believe me. It was a lie that I was drugged like you by Woland. The task that I was given was to recover the Baphomet before anyone else. But when I began to reconstruct the story, I decided to turn renegade and discover the truth about my grandfather. When the Lodge of the Nine recovered the idol in Berlin, in 1945, they tested its power and became scared that whoever possessed it would be corrupted. They made up a convincing story and declared that the idol had been lost. In any case, there were no witnesses who could reveal the truth and the fact that the leader of the expedition had died in an attempt to retrieve it made their version of events sound even more credible.

A few years after the war, though, a former Nazi officer who had fled to South America contacted the US Secret Service and the Soviets and sold them some very valuable information: the Baphomet was not lost as everyone had thought, and he knew how to retrieve it. The Americans didn't believe him, and so the deal was concluded with the Russians. The Nazi said that torturing and killing your grandfather was not the proper strategy for obtaining the idol, because it was necessary to retrieve the keys and also the sequence. So, again at the suggestion of this individual, the KGB began to monitor your grandfather. There was an entire section of the bureau whose sole mission was to dig into his life and never lose sight of him.

Then, in just one week in the summer of 1970, a series of murders occurred which made the KGB extremely suspicious: someone else was on the trail of the Baphomet. It could be only one man – the former Nazi officer who apparently was double – if not triple – crossing them. He was highly intelligent, and neither the KGB nor the SVR ever discovered the true face nor the identity of the respectable citizen with whom they did business around the world. But I have worked it out in the last few hours. That man is Raymond Severus Woland, or rather Henri Theodor von Tschoudy, the traitor of the Lodge of the Nine – the man who in 1944 stole the Baphomet and took it to Germany. The same one that your grandfather and his companions thought they had killed in the synagogue in Berlin. The same man who killed the other members of the Lodge of the Nine and tried to manipulate your mind to steal the secrets it contained.”

Anna stopped and silence fell in the mausoleum. I couldn't speak, and even Camille, crouched in front of me, sat there immobile.

“I'm sorry, Lorenzo, but you grew up surrounded by lies, like me,” continued Anna, whose voice had grown suddenly sad. “My grandfather was Vladimir Glyz, you must believe me. He was one of the members of the Lodge of the Nine and he was a friend of your grandfather, but I only discovered that later, after I had joined the SVR. Isn't it terrible? It was the SVR who tortured him to death, without even getting the information they wanted: the place where the keys were hidden and the Baphomet. The SVR had recruited me as an agent and kept me in the dark, thinking that it could use me to get to the truth that my grandfather had taken to the grave. But I've beaten them all, the bastards.”

“This is what you believe, you silly deluded girl.” Woland's voice echoed through the tombs. We all remained silent, motionless, listening.

“Instead, it is I that have beaten all of you, and thanks to the Baphomet I will bring the Third Reich back to life. I beat the KGB, the CIA, the Vatican and all you pathetic descendants and survivors of the Lodge of the Nine.”

“Woland, don't be stupid, there's no way out!” shouted Oscar from somewhere to my left. “You'll never get away, not this time – the city is completely locked down.”

Woland burst out laughing. “You're absolutely right, Commissioner – and that's why in a few minutes you will have another, and perhaps more convincing, demonstration of our resources.”

I glanced at Camille. She appeared to be paralysed.

“Woland, or von Tschoudy if you prefer, why don't you and I talk?” I said aloud. “After all, fundamentally we both want the same thing, and I have the code in my mind.”

“I do not know if you're bluffing, Lorenzo, but I want to give you a chance. You and Camille join me in the caves. The rest of you keep away. My men are waiting for my signal and, according to what I tell them, you can choose whether or not to have upon your conscience the death of at least ten thousand people, including your beloved Pope.”

We heard him walk off into the interior of the quarry, and at almost the same time we all got to our feet. To my right I saw Anna, while to the left there were Oscar and Volta.

Kneeling next to Antonio, who was lying on the ground.

“Commissioner, we're outside with an ambulance and three other cars,” said De Rossi's voice came on Volta's walkie-talkie.

“We got more men down here, De Rossi. Bring in three stretchers, but for God's sake, don't go anywhere near the caves – come straight to the left into the mausoleum.”

“Copy, sir.”

I ran across to the other side of the mausoleum. There was a blood stain on Antonio's chest. “Antonio, what were you trying to do?”

Antonio was fighting to remain lucid. He raised a hand, which was clutching a small book.

“Carry out my orders to the death. The Code… was split up to make it more difficult to recover. This book is the part that fell to me. Take it, you'll need it.”

I read the title.
The Baphomet Code, volume II,
then looked back at Antonio. Blood streaming from his mouth, he said, “
Non nobis, Domine, non nobis… sed… nomini tuo da gloriam
.”

Having breathed his last, his now empty eyes stared at the re-inforced concrete ceiling.

“The motto of the Templars—” I murmured before climbing to my feet with a groan, my face a mask of determination. I looked at Oscar and Volta and gave them a nod as I walked towards Camille, who was waiting for me at the exit of the mausoleum. Together we headed downwards into the caves.

A shiver ran down my spine as we covered the short distance that separated the mausoleum from the quarries. Camille, beside me, clutched my hand like a child who is afraid of the dark.

“Come on, hurry up!” shouted Woland from the bottom of the cave, in the exact place where the executions had taken place, enclosed by a low gate lit only by a dim spotlight.

The cold and damp penetrated to the bone.

Woland was at the gate and had placed the Baphomet on the ground. “Come, Lorenzo, let us evoke him.”

I looked at him for a moment, then knelt before the idol. Sean Bruce's words ran through my mind.

“When you are standing before it, the sequence will come into your mind.”

“I hope you're right, old man,” I muttered.

I closed my eyes and touched the Baphomet with both hands, and in that moment something invisible and powerful, like a flaming arrow, shot through my brain. I gasped and tipped my head back slightly so as not to be overwhelmed by the power of it, moaning in pain. Slowly, the feeling diminished and images began to form rapidly in my mind. I saw my grandfather, his eyes, his hands; I saw him busily writing something, and placing objects in places I did not know, I saw him talking to others, and at the end, in another sequence of fleeting images, I saw him approaching me with something like a pendulum for hypnosis and, while he swung it before my eyes, I saw a series of glowing symbols appear in a circle around his face.

The sequence.

Slowly, I opened my eyes and looked at the Baphomet. Mechanically, almost without thinking, I began to turn the outer disc to align the symbols that had formed in my mind. First one, then another, then another.

As the symbols lined up, the idol's eyes grew brighter and the air became colder. Almost in a trance, I continued positioning the symbols, but when I reached the eighth, I stopped and suddenly snapped out of it.

“What's the matter?” asked Woland impatiently, “don't you remember?”

I looked up, and my eyes were serene. “Oh yes, I know what the last symbol is, but before I enter it I want you to call your men and tell them to stop.”

“No! First the symbol! Don't play games with me!” yelled Woland, pulling out a gun.

“You cannot shoot me, Woland, otherwise you can say goodbye to the Guardian of the Threshold.”

Woland hesitated, then became again icily calm, and handed his gun to Camille.

“Cover him, my dear.”