The Julian Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers) (25 page)

He called up three letters on the screen, punched, and waited, listening to the whisper and crackle of low-space orbit.

There were three clicks and then: “Lang Reilly! Goddamn if I thought I’d ever hear from you again!”

“ ‘Lo, George,” Lang said, a smile spreading across his face. “I figured if anyone had kept anything as outdated as an IACD, it’d be you.”

“Outdated my ass! Thing’s still very much in use, although I doubt yours has the updates, night or day picture-transmitting capability, GPS, all the bells and whistles.”

Lang thought of the BlackBerry-like device Eddie Reavers had given him. Didn’t it have GPS? “So, George, where they got you stationed now?”

Even the tinny quality of the sound of the receiver couldn’t take the jolly out of George’s voice. “Classified, Lang, you know that. I tell ya, I gotta kill ya. Besides, you didn’t call just to locate me on some map of the Agency’s unrelenting fight against terrorism, tyranny, injustice, overtime, and low salaries. What’s up?”

Lang’s grin widened. George Hemphill’s assignment
to Frankfurt had overlapped Lang’s. George had been only partially successful in concealing an uncanny linguistic ability with almost supernatural instincts behind the facade of a perpetual college sophomore. From mere inflections in languages Lang had barely heard of, let alone spoken, George had predicted coups and assassinations. It had been this ability that had saved him from the trouble caused by his love of whoopy cushions and electronics placed in inappropriate places.

Like wiring and amplifying the women’s restroom.

“I got a favor to ask, George.”

“If you want help crashing the next White House ball, forget it.”

Lang became serious. “Remember Don Huff?”

“Older guy. Was in Ops, wasn’t he? I seem to remember something about him saving your sorry ass at Checkpoint Charlie back in the bad old days.”

“He was murdered. So was Gurt Fuchs.”

There was a long pause. “Gurt, the Kraut goddess who looked like she might have stepped off a German travel poster?”

“The same.”

Another pause. “Lang,” he said, the exuberance gone from his tone, “talk around the water cooler was that Gurt left the Rome station to, er, well, she had taken a leave of absence to be with you. Your new
nom de guerre
was ‘the lucky bastard.’ Can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Thanks.”

“Any ideas?”

“That’s why I need a favor, George. Information, actually.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Lang told him what he wanted.

Still another pause. “That may take a while. I mean, shit, you want me to go back to the beginning of time,
maybe further. Hell, maybe even before everything was computerized.”

Lang had barely gotten the IACD back into its compartment when Sara came in with a stack of file folders. “Take a look and see what needs handling before you leave.”

Washington, D.C
.
National Archives (Pennsylvania Avenue)
That afternoon

Departing the United States from Washington had a double advantage: Once again, a familiar face on the Dulles–Rome leg would reveal any tail. Second, answerless questions buzzed around Lang’s mind like aimless bees in search of the hive. He might answer a few here before departing in the morning. A quick call to the office of one of Georgia’s senators and a reminder of the size of the nonprofit he headed produced the required documents allowing him into the nation’s record room.

Passing the line of tourists waiting to see the glass-encased Declaration of Independence and slipping around the line for the movie theater, he found the desk he was looking for. Behind it, a matronly woman, her steely hair tied in a bun, examined his nonacademic
credentials, her displeasure obvious. With the reluctance peculiar to a bureaucrat forced to do her job, she handed him a plastic visitor’s badge and directed him to the third floor. She seemed slightly mollified by giving him an admonition that the records he sought were largely unindexed.

He found shelves of boxes, each containing batches of randomly arranged documents stuffed into containers in no particular sequence. The authors of those documents, the Germans, would have been horrified at the total lack of order in which their handiwork was stored. The cargo manifest and schedule of each train, the requisition of each liter of petrol, all crammed together. At no time in history had such complete records of a nation fallen into enemy hands as had the minutiae of the Third Reich. And nowhere in history had such records simply been packed up, willy-nilly, their total disorder untouched for over sixty years.

Well, perhaps there was some order, after all. A faded placard at the end of each row bore a year, and some a location, Italy, France, and so on.

When had the German army supplanted the Fascists in defense of the Italian boot? Lang selected two boxes from the Italy 1943–44 shelf and carried them to the nearest table, where a small sign instructed him not to attempt to return boxes to shelves. That would be done by Archives staff.

The Archives’ very own public works program.

The smell of musty paper tickled his nose. Fortunately, most of the documents were typed rather than in the old German script Hitler had resurrected and decreed to be used in handwritten papers, one of several less-than-successful efforts to take Germany back to its glory days.

Like the eighteenth century under Frederick the Great.

For the first hour, Lang glanced through mind-numbing orders for train movements, distribution of food rations, and repairs to vehicles, the minutiae of Kesselring’s army. He was tempted to read the dispatches but abandoned the idea. If he was going to find anything related to what he wanted, he had no time for the blame shifting that is the correspondence of an army in retreat.

Shoving the boxes aside, he replaced them with two more. It was halfway through the last Italy 1944 that he found it: an aged copy of a letter on unique letterhead. Instead of the usual spread-winged eagle with a circled swastika in its claws, this bird was a two-thirds profile, also spread-winged. In one talon it held a pair of lighting bolts, the crooked cross in the other. A motto circled the figure:
Meine Ehre Ist Treu
. My truth is honor, slogan of the SS.

Lang pulled his chair closer to the lamp to read the faded ink of a teletype flimsy. It translated as:

Since he was looking at an order that had come by telegraph, there was no actual signature. Still, an order direct from Himmler was an order from Hitler himself, an order confirming that Skorzeny
had
been in Rome. It was a possibility, if not a good guess, that he had been searching the necropolis for Julian’s joke on the Christians. Whatever Skorzeny had been doing there, it wasn’t as important to Hitler in the late spring of ‘44 as having him somewhere else. But where?

According to Professor Blucher, Skorzeny had been in Montsegur soon after the fall of France in 1940. Shortly thereafter, he’d led a parachute attack on . . . Cyprus? He’d been around to rescue Mussolini in 1943, been in Rome in the spring of ‘44. When did Rome fall to the Allies? Same day as Normandy, June 6, 1944. That would explain one reason Skorzeny was ordered out. That must have been before he went to oust what government? Oh yeah, Hungary. No doubt the reassignment in Himmler’s order. By winter of 1944–45, he’d been at the Bulge in Belgium.

Otto Skorzeny, man about Europe.

Rescue a dictator here, take over a government there, no big secrets. Except what he might have found at Montsegur. And Blucher hadn’t mentioned what he was doing in Rome. Even so, how did the actions of a fervent Nazi sixty years ago relate to Don’s death? The only answer Lang could see was that Skorzeny had found
something, a long-buried secret that someone would kill to keep that way.

He looked at his watch. Ten till five. The archives would close in a few minutes. He had discovered all he was going to about Skorzeny and his secret today. He stood, stretched, and read again the sign forbidding return of boxes to shelves.

Tomorrow, he’d be on a flight for Italy. Tonight, he was headed to Kincade’s for some Chesapeake oysters and, hopefully, soft-shell crabs. Anticipation turned sour as he recalled he’d be dining alone. Gurt had loved soft-shells.

He remembered the first time. It had been, what, Chops, one of Atlanta’s more expensive steak and seafood houses? She had looked at the crab, including claws and shell, and then back at him.

“This is a
Vitzen
, joke, no?”

“The crab certainly doesn’t think so,” he’d replied.

She looked at him suspiciously. “It is a treat. You go first.”

“With pleasure.” He had severed a claw, the tastiest part, dipped it in heavy tartar sauce, and popped it into his mouth.

Gurt watched carefully, fully expecting him to try to spit it out. Or perhaps some sort of magic trick where he hadn’t really put it in his mouth at all.

He put down his fork.

She was still staring.

“You ate it,” she finally said.

In response, he cut into the body and took another bite.

She needed no further coaxing. They ordered an extra serving, to eat between the two of them.

Lang’s eyes were wet as he exited the building.

Rome
The Vatican
April 1944

Pope Pius XII faced a problem unique to both him and his two hundred and sixty-one predecessors.

He sighed as he sat behind his desk, the one in the office with a view of St. Peter’s Square. Bernini’s gently curving colonnades usually gave him a sense of serenity. Today the view was marred by armed German soldiers standing in a crescent exactly one step outside the border of the Holy City. According to Kesselring, the German commander of Italy, they were there for the Pope’s protection. Pius knew better; they were his jailers. Worse, they demanded the papers of every person leaving or entering the Vatican. And things got no better. General Wolff, SS commandant of Rome, had let slip, intentionally or not, the fact that kidnapping the Pope for the Vatican’s riches was an option being considered in Berlin.

Pius cared little for his own safety, but the secret that had been unearthed below the Vatican was his responsibility. If the inscription was correct, its existence presented a painful dilemma. On one hand, it proved Jesus Christ had walked this earth, potentially silencing two thousand years of skeptics. On the other, the picture of Christ it painted was far different from the humble carpenter’s son from Galilee.

He could perhaps eradicate the inscription and remove the relics that both validated the Gospels and made them liars. But where would he put such documents? Certainly not in the secret papal library that was anything but secret to the inner core of church scholarship. He would have to pray for guidance from above.

In the meantime, he must do nothing to force the Germans to act, do nothing although future generations could well revile his failure to condemn Hitler, the Nazis, and the barbarism Europe had not seen in a thousand years. The history of his papacy, even what would be perceived as his legacy, was irrelevant. The Church would survive him. It might not survive what was below the Vatican.

He had hoped he would be revered as the Pope who found the first contemporaneous documentation of Christ’s existence. Now he was faced with being seen as collaborator with the Germans.

He had prayed such proof might be found by excavation, that Constantine had left some evidence, some relic of Our Lord, and those prayers had been cruelly answered. What was he to do? Did the Germans know exactly what had been found? If so, Pius despaired of the Church being able to keep the find, let alone its secret.

There was nothing he could do, really, other than pray for guidance from above. Pray and do nothing to provoke the Germans into action.

An ornate Louis XVI clock beside the window indicated that there were a few minutes left before the scheduled meeting. The Pope picked up a stack of papers and began to refresh his memory with a chronology that would not have been conceivable even a year ago.

The Allies had landed in Sicily last July. A few days later, the first bombs had fallen on Rome, damaging a rail staging area in the St. Lorenzo District as well as a medical school and a church. Pius, the first Roman Pope in over two hundred years, had reacted with shock and anger, as had his fellow Romans.

He had proposed that Rome be made an open city, one neither defended nor attacked. After all, the Eternal City should be spared the destruction bombs had created in London and Berlin. It was the last time he had spoken out.

There was a gentle knock at the door. Without waiting for a reply, Fra Sebastiani, Pius’s personal assistant, appeared with a tray bearing espresso and four small cups. He set the tray on a table in front of the desk and withdrew. Years of service had acquainted him with His Holiness’s moods, and one look at the pontiff’s face told him conversation was neither wanted nor needed.

Getting up, Pius filled a cup and returned to his desk and the dismal scenario in front of him.

After the bombing, Pius had spent hours of the night in the lower levels of the Vatican, praying for peace, for Rome. And he had prayed for . . . He closed his eyes. God had seen fit to grant the latter prayer, the cause of Pius’s present distress.

Within days of the air raid, Mussolini had been arrested at his weekly visit with the king. Six weeks later, Eisenhower, the Allied Commander, had announced the capitulation of the Fascist government, and two days after that, the Allies landed on the Italian peninsula.