The Cathar Secret: A Lang Reilly Thriller (31 page)

     "The federal grand jury has indicted your pal, Felony Phil, King Con."

     That was hardly more surprising than the weather.

     "Let me take a wild guess: he somehow has managed to come up with the cash to pay me."

     "Says he has. He called from jail. They arrested him last night."

     The therapeutic effect of incarceration on the pocketbooks of accused felons was axiomatic among the criminal bar.

     "The bond hearing set?"

     "Day after tomorrow."

     "Be sure he understands he has to deliver cash or certified funds
before
I show up for any hearings, bond or otherwise. I . . ."

     Lang had been simply staring ahead as he talked, watching his shadow glide across the snow beside the otherwise empty platform. Suddenly, his silhouette was no longer alone. Someone had joined him on the wooden planks, someone with a raised arm.

     It was more reflex than thought that made Lang quickly sidestep as a large stick of wood whistled through the space occupied by his head an instant before. He spun and his feet nearly went out from under him, slipping on the icy residue that sheeted the boards. He used his cane for balance much as a circus high-wire artist uses a pole.

     He was facing a big man, easily six feet six inches tall. The part of his face Lang could see had a pattern of purple blotches, the burst capillaries of a longtime heavy drinker. The collar of an overcoat was turned up, shielding the bottom of his face from both the weather and recognition. One gloved hand held a chunk of what appeared to be firewood from one of the stoves he had seen. He raised it for another attempt as he extended his other hand.

     "The notes you took, give them."

     An accent Lang couldn't quite place, although it was tauntingly familiar.

     "And why would you want them?"

     The man took a step closer, his hand still reaching. "Not matter. Give them."

     Lang took another step back with a hasty glance over his shoulder. Even if the Mercedes driver happened to see what was going on, he was too far away to be of any help. Nor was anyone else in sight. Lang was going to have to handle this himself.

     "I'm not handing them over unless I know why you want them."

     Another step back, as the big man came forward.

     Lang repeated the series of exchanging steps, like some sort of strange dance, until he was fairly certain of the time it took the other man to react.

     Just as his adversary lifted a foot to move forward, Lang made one final backwards step and then lunged forward. In a blur of motion, Lang jammed the walking stick between the man's front and rear foot, using it as a lever. Aided by the sudden and unexpected pressure, the man's back foot slipped on the ice at the exact second his front foot was coming down.

     The man hit the wooden planks with a jarring thump.

     Careful that his own feet did not betray him on the slippery surface, Lang used the toe of a shoe to nudge the chunk of firewood out of reach before he stood over his former assailant. With the same shoe, he rolled him over.

     He placed the tip of the cane on the man's throat. "Okay, now it's my turn: who the hell are you and who sent you?"

     The man glared up at him, saying nothing.

     Lang gave him a kick in the torso, hard enough to bruise, if not break, a rib. There was a grunt of pain.

     "We can do this the hard way if you like. I've got all day and you have lots of ribs. Who are you and who sent you?"

     The man moved faster than Lang would have thought his bulk would permit. With one meaty hand he grabbed the cane's tip. With the other, he produced a switchblade from somewhere in his clothing. The blade snicked into place.

     The instant Lang felt the hand on his walking stick, he pressed a tiny button in the handle. With a step backwards, the man climbing to his feet was holding an empty wooden cylinder. Lang was now holding about
forty inches of double-edged steel with a very sharp point inches from the man's throat.

     "I can skewer you faster than you can reach me with that pig sticker," Lang observed coolly. "I'd suggest you drop it before I demonstrate."

     His opponent needed no further convincing. He dropped the switchblade, which Lang kicked out of reach. "Smart move. Now, for the last time, who sent you?"

     Instead of an answer, the man turned and ran back toward the main building as fast as the icy surface would allow.

     Lang watched him go, squelching the urge to give chase. There was the possibility the man had pals waiting to back him up. If not, dashing into the museum with a blade in his hand was certain to attract the attention of the guards or police. Lang stooped over to retrieve the sword-cane's sheath and clicked it into place.

     Before standing erect, he heard a voice. He looked around the empty space before he realized Sara was still on the iPhone he had dropped. He picked that up, too.

     "Sara, excuse the interruption."

     Distance did nothing to diminish the concern in her voice. "Lang, what happened?"

     "Oh, I was just asking some questions of one of the people here."

The Vatican

At the Same Time

T
HE PAPAL LIBRARY WAS CLOSED TO
the public for repairs, but there was one section just off the Vatican's Campo Santa Teutonico that had never been open to the public, or, for that matter, accessible to ninety-nine percent of the population of Vatican City. It was referred to, if at all, as the Secret Archives. In recent years, "qualified scholars," that is, those deemed loyal to the Church, had permission to access a portion of these archives, but the area Father Steinmann was approaching was as secret as ever.

     It contained documents of incredible historic value, such as letters to Anne Boleyn from Henry VIII of England. They were stolen by a papal spy to prove the monarch's adulterous conduct as grounds for denying the divorce from Catherine of Aragon he so desperately wanted. There were also letters from several previous and subsequent popes to their mistresses, admissions of papal fathering of innumerable bastards, as well as Vatican complicity in less-than-saintly diplomatic maneuvers, including Pius XII's almost adulatory correspondence with one Joseph Ribbentrop, foreign minister for the Third Reich. Most of these super-secret archives, though, consisted of papal decrees, ecumenical rulings, encyclicals, edicts, and the like. Part of the archives had resided in Avignon, France, during the so-called Babylonian Captivity. Centuries later, Napoleon had hauled off what had existed at the time to Paris to
be eventually returned. During all this time, there had been repeated efforts to index the more than thirty miles' worth of files, but none had been completed.

     Father Steinmann used a special key to unlock a rather ordinary door and enter a long hallway. At the end, an arch dating back to the rebuilding of the Vatican in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was filled with clear polycarbonate material that the priest knew was bulletproof, fireproof, and probably impervious to anything short of a nuclear blast. Although he couldn't see them, he knew several video cameras were recording him as he stepped up to a retina recognition device. A door in the arch's plastic, previously near invisible, hissed open, hinting at the equipment that kept pressure, temperature, and humidity constant. Modern technology notwithstanding, an elderly priest sat behind a table, maintaining a log to record the visitors and the time and date.

     Steinmann scribbled his name, knowing he would have to repeat the process upon his departure as well as open the briefcase he carried. With cameras recording his every move, these precautions seemed redundant, but change was a breeze that rarely blew through the Vatican.

     As always, he was impressed by a line of cabinets so long it seemed to come to a point in the distance. Several years ago, he had been looking through some manuscripts describing the punishment of priests celebrating black masses, and had come across descriptions of the Cathar heresies. Although most people believed the Holy Inquisition (and Father Steinmann's present office) had originated in Spain, the first such tribunal had convened in southwestern France in the early thirteenth century to combat these apostates, whose beliefs were closer to Eastern religion than to Catholicism.

     At the time, he had noted the Cathar material's location, for without an index, finding things here was difficult. Now he needed to refresh his memory.

     He pulled a heavy leather volume down from a shelf and stood back as the eruption of dust settled to the floor. Sitting cross-legged on the marble floor, he began to turn the vellum pages carefully. The ink had long ago faded into a reddish brown, but the Latin was still quite legible.

     On August 15, 1209, a certain Veloix of Carcassonne, one of the few survivors of the city's surrender, had cheerfully confessed that he remembered
a previous life. He had been drawn and quartered and his mutilated body buried at an unmarked crossroad. No reason was given why he had not been consigned to the flames prescribed for heretics. Steinmann read the transcript of his brief trial.

     Fire had claimed Leigh of Rennes after she admitted before a conclave of priests presided over by a bishop that she had previously died as a child in a famine a hundred years earlier. She had had the nerve to specify the town nearby the farm on which she had lived, and named her parents. The transcribing priest had left an aside noting that, of course, as the poor peasant girl she claimed to have been, there would be no record of her birth or death and only those without faith in the Resurrection of all souls would seek verification anyway.

     After an hour of sitting on the cold marble, Father Steinmann's back began to throb, yet he stood only to take down another volume. An hour after that, he had seen enough. Transcript after transcript was replete with recitations of heathen tenets and superstition, particularly on the certainty of reincarnation. According to Cathar belief, a soul went not to heaven, hell, or purgatory but sought another host in an effort to live a life more perfect than the last. With each death, the soul was given an opportunity to continue improvement until, at last, perfection was achieved. Then and only then did that soul become one with God.

     But then, Steinmann thought to himself, these people also believed Mary, pregnant with the daughter of Our Savior, had escaped Jerusalem shortly after the crucifixion and come to the southwest of France where she lived out her days. These Cathars believed themselves to be the descendants of that child. They believed that they carried the blood of Christ Himself.

     The hubris of those people had been as great as their theological errors.

     As far as Steinmann knew, the Cathars had been the first Christian sect to believe openly in the recycling, rather than the Resurrection, of souls. First or last, it was a pernicious belief in itself, but its origin was even worse, one that the Church in general and his office in particular could not allow to become known.

     At any price.

     That was Steinmann's problem: beliefs spread like some virulent disease. If that child from Atlanta resurfaced and appeared on one or more of those television shows that produced entertainment under the guise of
current events, some program like
60 Minutes
or even one of the late-night shows . . . or was featured in one of those monosyllabic magazines read by people who didn't read,
People
and the like . . . the matter could simply get out of hand.

     Particularly if reported in conjunction with what was discovered in one of the archives' more recent . . . acquisitions.

     His Holiness could take no overt action to prevent such a calamity, but Steinmann's office could and would take action—both overt and covert.

     The problem was that the devil-spawned little boy seemed to have disappeared, possibly kidnapped, and this man Reilly seemed to be the only one making any sort of effort to find him.

     Reilly.

     The two men, supposedly professionals, sent to Cracow by The Office of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith had failed miserably. Not only had they not gotten a shred of information from Reilly, but one of them had to be taken to a hospital with severe burns. And Reilly had been alerted.

     He sighed as he stood up, feeling his age in his hips and knees. The familiar tightness was squeezing his chest like bands of steel. He knew the pain would follow shortly. His hand closed around the small pill bottle in the pocket of his robe. No, not now. He would have to leave, go to a place where there were no security cameras.

     God's will be done. He could only hope the Divine intent was manifested by . . . how? For starters, didn't kidnappers dispose of their victims more often than not? He had read somewhere that the odds of recovery of the kidnapped plummeted after the first few days.

     In the meantime, he had to deal with Lang Reilly.

     Deal with him before a scourge far more damaging than reincarnation was released upon the Church.

     He shuddered to think about it.

     It took all of his willpower not to race from the Secret Archives and the relief of the pills.

Gasthaus Schelling

Rothenburg ob den Tauber

That Evening

W
YNN-THREE WOKE UP AND WAS
cold. He had been cold for what he thought were days, although he wasn't sure. Since he had been taken from Mommy and Daddy, days and nights seemed to come together in such a way that he could not tell one from the other.

     He remembered being lifted off his feet and carried away while Mommy screamed. He had screamed, too, until someone gave him a shot. And then he remembered nothing until he was in the back seat of a car with two men he didn't know in the front. Mommy and Daddy had told him over and over to never get into a car with someone you don't know, but he was already in the car so it wasn't really his fault. Still, he hoped Mommy and Daddy wouldn't be mad if they found out.