Paul Christopher - The Sword of the Templars

“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.”

“That’s it?” Peggy said. “A blessing?”

“There’s more,” said Holliday, scanning the text. “Is there any way you can print this out?”

“Probably,” answered Peggy. She fumbled around with the keyboard and the mouse, then finally found the right command. Somewhere nearby a photo printer began to hum and whirr.

“Yada, yada, yada… ‘May Jesus Christ lead you into everlasting life…’ Yada, yada… ‘Descend on you and remain with you always…’ Here we go. ‘I hereby give you, Rutger von Blum, also known as Roger de Flor, Admiral of Naples and the Holy Order of the Temple, full license and authority to remove these treasures to a place of safety across the sea and out of the hands of the infidel Saladin…’ ”

“Does it say where this place of safety is?” Peggy asked.

“Not really. All it says is… ‘fanum cavernam petrosus quies.’ ”

“Which means?”

“Roughly translated: ‘a rocky, holy cave-place of peace and quiet.’ Something like that.”

“We need to talk to Raffi again.”

When they returned to the hospital on the far side of the campus, Raffi was sitting up in his bed and half of the tubes and wires were gone. He was eating green Jell-O, sucking it carefully through his bruised and battered lips. They showed him the photo prints of the scroll sections, holding each one of them up in front of his swollen eyes. Holliday gave him the rough Latin translations.