The Sword of the Templars (25 page)

From the dark entrance to the alley they’d just come out of, Tattoo You appeared, a black polymer Jericho automatic pistol in his hands, the one they called a “Baby Eagle” back in the United States. He looked at Holliday and Peggy briefly, then holstered his weapon underneath his shirt again.

“Get out of here, quickly,” said Tattoo You. He turned and disappeared into the darkness of the alley.

Holliday stepped forward a few paces and knelt down beside the corpse of the priest. Blood was oozing beneath the left arm. Tattoo You had shot him through and through, perfect center of mass, the bullet blowing out the heart and lungs together.

He felt around in the inside pocket of the dead man’s jacket and found a wallet and a passport. The passport had a red cover with the miter and crossed key insignia of the Holy See stamped in gold. He flipped open the Vatican passport and checked the I.D. page.

The dead man’s name was Brendan Jameson, born October 22, 1951 in Mount Kisco, New York, presently a resident in Rome, Italy. His occupation was listed simply as “priest.” A priest with the Czech version of an Uzi? He slipped the passport back into the man’s inside pocket and checked the wallet. The I.D. in the wallet matched the passport. He replaced the wallet and climbed to his feet. In the distance Holliday could hear the approaching warble of sirens.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

“Shouldn’t we call the cops or something?” Peggy said.

“They’re on the way. Someone must have heard the shot.”

“Shouldn’t we stay and explain?”

“Explain what? Why we’re standing here with a dead priest? I can’t explain it to myself let alone the cops. I’ve killed people in England and Germany. In most countries they call that murder. And don’t give me the innocent until proven guilty stuff; justice only works on
Law and Order
.” He took Peggy by the arm, turning her away from the priest’s dead body. “Come on.”

Twenty minutes later, the Old City behind them, Holliday and Peggy reached the American Colony Hotel on the Nablus Road and stepped into the small, multi-arched lobby. A stout man with a horseshoe of curly dark hair and dressed in a wrinkled gray suit stood up from one of the old red brocade couches and approached them. As he walked Holliday could see that he was wearing a shoulder holster. He tensed. The fat man smiled pleasantly, extending his hand.

“Colonel Holliday? Miss Blackstock, yes?”

“Who wants to know?” Holliday asked.

The smile on the fat man’s face faltered just a little.

“I am Prakad . . . Chief Inspector Isidor Landsman of the Israeli Police Department.”

“Yes?” Holliday said.

“You are Colonel Holliday?”

“Yes.”

“There has been an accident. Your friend Dr. Wanounou of the university.”

“Accident?” Holliday asked.

“What happened?” Peggy asked. “Is he hurt?”

“Dr. Wanounou was very badly beaten. He is at the University Medical Center. I can take you to him if you wish.”

24

They didn’t actually get to see the professor until early the following morning. According to Wanounou’s doctor at the Hadassah University Medical Center, a middle-aged man named Menzer, the archaeologist had suffered a fractured skull, a broken nose, a broken arm, several broken ribs, and assorted cuts, bruises, and contusions. If the fracture had been any worse he would have died.

“In other words, they kicked the crap out of him,” said Menzer, eyeing them a little skeptically, wondering if they knew why this had happened to an innocent archaeology professor working late in his laboratory.

Isidor Landsman had looked at them the same way. On the drive up Cheil Handasa to Mount Scopus Hospital on the university campus, the police detective had asked Holliday and Peggy why, according to the security log in the Archaeology building, they had been the only names listed along with Wanounou’s. What was their relationship? Why were they with the professor in his lab? Where had they been before arriving at the university? Where did they go after they supposedly left the professor alive and well? And over and over again: did they know of anyone or any reason why professor Wanounou would wind up being beaten within an inch of his life and left to die alone on his laboratory floor?

Holliday and Peggy stuck to the same basic story: They’d come to Israel on the advice of Professor Steven Braintree of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. They wanted to consult with Wanounou regarding the provenance of an artifact that had been part of Henry Granger’s estate. The fact that Holliday was a decorated active soldier and a teacher at West Point seemed to mollify the chubby cop, but it didn’t stop him from continuing to ask questions. In the end he’d left them with the classic warning: don’t leave town.

At seven thirty in the morning they were finally allowed into Wanounou’s room. It looked like every other hospital room that Holliday had ever seen. The floors were dark vinyl tile, the walls were cream-colored, and the door was big enough to maneuver a gurney through.

There was an ominous blue panic button on the wall with white lettering that read simply CODE. There were two beds. The one nearest the door was empty but obviously in use. Wanounou was in the bed by the window, up five floors with a view of bright blue sky. The room smelled like rubbing alcohol and floor wax. People moved quietly up and down the halls carrying bouquets of flowers and peeping in doorways.

The professor looked like hell. Both eyes were black and swollen three-quarters shut. His lips were swollen and the color of eggplant. He had a plaster skullcap and a plaster bandage on his nose. He had a cast on his left arm and wires and tubes everywhere.

Machinery clicked and hummed all around the room. Things dripped into him, and things dripped out. The nurse, a skinny thin-faced man named Joseph with some kind of Slavic accent and a thick scar on his chin, told them they had exactly half an hour to visit. He looked like he meant it.

Wanounou was conscious and a little groggy from assorted medications he’d been given. He gave them a puffy-lipped smile as they stepped up to the bed. Two of his front teeth were broken, their ends jagged. He lisped a little when he talked.

“I’d kiss you, but it might be too painful,” said Peggy, pulling up one of the visitor’s chairs and sitting down. She extended her hand and let it rest on the professor’s sheet-covered leg. Wanounou’s smile broadened. It looked as though his lips were going to split open. Holliday winced.

“Feeling better now,” said the professor. “A bit hungry though.”

“That’s a good sign,” said Peggy.

“What happened?” Holliday asked.

“I was working on the scroll. It was about ten thirty or so. Three guys came into the lab. One of them had an attaché case. He took the sections of the scroll, and the other two started beating me. One of them had a piece of pipe with duct tape wrapped around it. The other one just used his fists.”

Peggy winced.

“What did they look like?” Holliday asked.

“Ordinary, but like they went to the gym a lot.”

“Military?”

“Maybe. They didn’t have particularly short hair, except the one with the attaché case. He was bald.”

“Tattoos?” Holliday was thinking about the sword and ribbon symbol he’d seen on the killer’s wrist at Carr-Harris’s summer house.

“Not that I saw.”

“Accents?”

“They didn’t talk much.”

“Anything?”

Wanounou thought for a moment. The machinery ticked, dripped, and wheezed.

“The one with the attaché case.”

“What about him?”

“He was a Christian.”

“How do you know?”

“He had a little crucifix on a chain around his neck. Gold.”

That really didn’t mean much these days.

“Anything else?”

Wanounou thought again.

“One thing. Silly.”

“What?”

“One of the guys kicking me. Before I passed out.”

“What?”

“His boots. Motorcycle boots, you know? The ones with a buckle.”

“Okay.”

“They were Rogani Bruno e Franco. I know the brand. Pricey. I’ve always wanted a pair. They make beautiful street shoes, too.”

“So?”

“They’re Italian. The only place you can get them is a town called Macerata, near the Adriatic Coast.”

“Now why would you know a thing like that?” Peggy asked.

“Fanum Voltumnae,” said Wanounou as though it would mean something to them.

“ ‘
Fanum
’ means ‘temple’ or ‘shrine,’ doesn’t it?” Holliday said, his mind skipping back to Mary-Lou Gemmill’s senior Latin class and her threats to deny prom tickets to anyone who couldn’t decline neuter i-stem nouns by the end of class.

“That’s right,” said Wanounou. “There’s a big archaeological site there. Etruscan. It’s not far from Orvieto, a big gathering center for crusaders shipping out to Jerusalem. I’ve visited the site a number of times.”

“How far along were you with the scroll before they got to you? Did you manage to read it?”

“I didn’t even get to clean the pieces.”

“How many slices?”

“Nine.”

“How long do you think the whole scroll was?”

“Thirty centimeters. I measured the pieces.”

“About twelve inches.”

“More or less.”

“And he took them all?”

“I guess so. My concentration was elsewhere,” answered Wanounou.

Peggy gave Holliday a sharp look.

“Would you like some water?” she said.

Wanounou nodded.

There was a carafe and a plastic cup with a flex straw in it on a rolling side table beside the bed. Peggy poured some water into the cup then held the flex straw to the professor’s lips. He drank and then his head dropped back against the crisp linen of the pillow as though even sipping a little bit of water had exhausted him.

Holliday sighed. Maybe losing the scroll and whatever secret it possessed was an omen. The priest in the Old City alley brought the body count to an even half dozen. And those were the people he knew about. How many other people had died because of the sword and its hidden message? With the scroll gone there was no way to go on. They’d reached the end of the line. It was time to go home.

“Well, that’s it, I guess,” he said. “We’ve got nowhere else to go with this. We’d better pack up and go.”

“You’re going to leave it like this?” Wanounou said. “After everything you and Peggy have been through? After everything
I’ve
been through on your behalf?”

“You’d make a great Jewish mother,” said Holliday, smiling weakly.

“I
have
a Jewish mother; it rubs off,” said Wanounou, trying to smile back. It obviously hurt. He grimaced instead.

“Without knowing what’s on that scroll I’m stumped.” Holliday shrugged. “Unless a really suspicious customs guy at the airport finds your Italian thieves the scroll is gone forever.”

“The scroll may be gone,” said Wanounou, “but we might still have the message.”

“Explain.”

“X-ray fluorescence. Know anything about it?”

“Something to do with X-rays?” Peggy ventured.

“Fluorescent X-rays,” said Holliday.

“Never mind,” said Wanounou. “It’s a relatively new process they use for all sorts of analysis, including archaeological artifacts. They used it recently to uncover a hidden text under a painted over section of the Archimedes Palimpsest, a copy of some of Archimedes’s theories from about 300 B.C.”

“And?”

“The silver the scroll is made of is brittle and thin, extremely fragile. It occurred to me that even the cleaning process might harm whatever images or script was on the silver.” He paused, his voice croaking. Peggy gave him another sip of water. He went on. “So before I put them into the electrolyte bath I took them upstairs to the imaging department and ran the individual slices through the big Philips machine they have up there. I fed the imaging data back down to my computer in the lab. I was just about to check it when the goons came in.”

“So the data is still in your computer?”

“It should be,” said the professor.

Using Wanounou’s key and with the password to his computer written on a slip of paper, Peggy and Holliday let themselves in to the professor’s laboratory later that morning. Except for a dark stain on the floor there was no evidence that anything untoward had happened. There was nothing broken and nothing that looked out of place.

The vase that had originally contained the silver scroll had been placed on a photographic copy stand waiting to be documented. There was a scattering of rust-colored crumbs on a white plastic tray that had held the laser-sawn strips of the scroll, but the scroll itself was gone.

Peggy sat down at the computer terminal, booted it up, and entered Wanounou’s password. She entered the name he’d given to the data from the X-ray fluorescence scanner upstairs and then opened it. A screen full of brightly colored, slightly fuzzy images appeared.

“According to your friend Raffi the X-rays react to particles in the iron gall ink they used back in the Middle Ages,” said Holliday, peering over her shoulder.

“Why would they use ink on silver?” Peggy asked.

“As a guide for the engraving tool they used to scratch into the metal,” explained Holliday.

Peggy looked at the screen.

“It’s fuzzy,” she said. “Some of the words and letters are missing. And it’s in Latin.” She looked around at Holliday. “Can you read it?”

Holliday bent closer.

“ ‘Innocent III, Episcopus, Servus Servorum Dei. Sancti Apostoli Petrus et Paulus: de . . . potestate et auctoritate confidimus ipsi intercedant pro . . . ad Dominum. Precibus et meritis . . . Mariae semper Virgi . . . beati Michaelis Archangeli, beati Ioannis Bapti . . . et sanctorum Apostolorum Petri et Pauli et Sanctorum misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus; et dimissis omni . . . peccatis vestris, perducat vos Iesus Christus ad vitam aeternam.’ ”

“Easy for you to say,” snorted Peggy. “What does it mean?”

“It’s an apostolic blessing from Pope Innocent the Third,” replied Holliday. “I think it’s called the
Urbi et orbi
—blessings to the city and to the world. ‘May the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in whose power and authority we have’—uh, ‘confidence’ would be the best translation, I guess—‘intercede on our behalf to the Lord . . .’ Et cetera, et cetera. Innocent was Pope during the Crusades. He was the one who eventually ordered the Templars to be arrested and killed.”