Robert Browne - The Paradise Prophecy

The guard in the doorway turned. “What is it?”

“Someone’s been in the archive room where Director Ozan was found. They took away the tape.”

Hakki gestured to the other guard. “Come on.”

The guard by the desk nodded and crossed the room, then shut off the light and closed and locked the door behind him.

Callahan let out a shaky breath. “That was pleasant.”

“I thought your chest was gonna explode. Do you always get so worked up, or is it this little bear hug we’ve got going?”

“Just for the record, Professor, I know twenty different ways to kill a man with one hand. You want to try me?”

“I think I’ll pass.”

“Smart move.”

She was about to push the wardrobe open, when LaLaurie held her back. “Wait a minute.”

“Look, buster, you’ve already copped your feel, so if-”

“No,” he said, “I’m getting something in here. A feeling. We aren’t the only ones who’ve been in this wardrobe in the last few days.”

“What are the odds? It is a closet after all.”

LaLaurie threw the doors open and gestured for her to get out. Callahan didn’t hesitate. As she squeezed past him, however, he immediately turned, shoved the coats aside and began to inspect the wardrobe’s back wall, running his hand along it.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Ozan was once a smuggler, remember? And old habits die hard. What do you bet he had more than one way into the tunnels, in case he had to disappear in a hurry?”

She gestured. “And you think this is it?”

“There’s a definite energy here.” His hand stopped moving. “And it looks like Gabriela wasn’t the only one who had a thing for hidden doors.”

Callahan heard a faint snick, then LaLaurie shifted slightly and pulled, sliding the entire back panel of the wardrobe to one side, revealing another set of steps.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Callahan said.

The steps led to a part of the tunnel that had been sealed off from the rest of the archives-smaller and narrower, curving sharply to the left. After waiting for Callahan to retrieve her purse, Batty took the lead, moving along the curve until he came to an arched doorway that opened onto a brightly lit, cavelike chamber with a vaulted ceiling.

He stopped in his tracks, taken aback by what he saw. “This sure as hell isn’t Narnia.”

“Another book lover,” Callahan murmured, but her words were inadequate, giving short shrift to what lay before them.

It was a small library, with ten or more rows of bookshelves, each filled with exquisitely bound books. And if Batty was correct, not one of them was less than two hundred years old.

Ozan was not merely a book lover, but a bibliophile-in the grandest, most traditional sense of the word.

Batty stepped forward cautiously, as if his mere presence here might do damage to these treasures. The sight of this room electrified him, and he was suddenly alive, the most alive he’d felt since he’d lost Rebecca. More alive than that night with the mysterious redhead.

And that was saying something.

Crossing to the nearest shelf, he moved down the first row of books, gently running his fingers along the spines, feeling their age, their gravity. He began removing and examining them, one after another.

Demonomanie des Sorciers by Jean Bodin. A Compleat History of Magick, Sorcery and Witchcraft by Richard Boulton. Basilica Chymica by Oswald Croll. Disquisitionum magicarum by Martino Del Rio. Manuale Exorcismorum by Maximiliani ab Eynatten.

First editions all. Each one pristine. Priceless.

And this was only a small sampling of Ozan’s collection. Batty had never seen so many volumes on the paranormal and the occult gathered in one place.

“Check this out,” Callahan said.

He turned and found her standing next to a cluttered worktable at the center of the room. On one corner of the table sat a small stone figurine of a winged Saint Michael, his sword held high.

“I’m sensing a shared obsession,” she said, then gestured to the mess on the table. “Looks like he was trying to decipher code. Just like Gabriela.”

Batty joined her there and she pointed to a spiral notebook with several lines of verse written on it in English, some of the words and letters crossed out, others circled-

– all of them from the eleventh chapter of Paradise Lost .

Sitting open next to the notebook was another pristine first edition, nearly five centuries old.

Batty picked it up. “ Steganographia ,” he said, carefully leafing through it. Its pages held lists of spirit names, tables full of numbers, zodiac signs, planetary symbols. “He must have been using this as his guide.”

“What is it?”

“A three-volume treatise on conjuring up spirits to send secret messages.”

“Come again?”

“It was written by a fifteenth-century abbot named Johannes Trithemius. Kind of a how-to book on communicating with your colleagues through the use of angelic messengers. But when his friends found out what he was working on, it caused such a commotion he decided not to publish it. He even destroyed the parts he thought were particularly incendiary.”

“What kind of commotion?”

“He was accused of dealing in the black arts and consorting with demons.”

“There seems to be a lot of that going around.”

“But here’s the thing,” Batty told her. “It’s not really a book of magic at all. The stuff about spirits is all coded writing, and Trithemius clearly says in the preface that it’s just an exercise in cryptology and steganography. But nobody believed him, and his reputation as an occultist was sealed.”

“And it looks like someone published it anyway.”

“Nearly a hundred years after he died,” Batty said. He closed the book and returned it to the table. “The first two volumes were deciphered almost immediately, pretty much proving that the incantations were exactly what Trithemius had said they were-harmless encryption exercises. But the key for the third volume wasn’t cracked until the seventeenth century by a guy named Heidel, and he hid his solution in his own coded message. So it effectively wasn’t deciphered until about a decade ago.”

Callahan gestured to the notepad. “And you think Ozan was using the same encryption keys to hunt for secret messages in these verses?”

“That’s the way it looks.”

“But why? What does he know that you don’t?”

Batty shrugged. “Milton was a controversial figure in his day, who got into a lot of trouble for speaking his mind. Maybe Ozan was working on the assumption that he used Trithemius’s encryption methods to conceal his later work-although you’d think, if anything, the material in Polygraphiae is a better choice.”

“Polygraphiae?”

“Another one of Trithemius’s books. His true masterpiece on cryptology.”

Callahan sighed. “My head’s starting to hurt.”

“Welcome to my world. Whatever the case, Ozan or Gabriela strike me as naive amateurs more than anything else, yet they both seemed convinced that there’s something in Milton’s poetry that the rest of us haven’t . . .”

Batty paused, his gaze now drawn to the stone figurine of Saint Michael at the corner of the table. He studied it a moment, suddenly aware that there was something off about it.

It was a familiar-looking piece, one he recognized from the Garanti catalogue, but the depth and pattern of the chisel marks didn’t look right, and he’d bet his last dollar that it wasn’t an original. In fact, it wasn’t even that great of a reproduction.

“What’s wrong?” Callahan asked.

“Probably nothing. It just seems odd to me that someone with Ozan’s taste would have such an obvious fake on his worktable. Especially in a room like this. And especially of Saint Michael.”