Eric Lustbader - The Testament

"Do you know the names of those buried here?" Bravo said.

"Of course," Father Damaskinos replied. "These are all Venetians who secretly helped us in centuries past. Their names are engraved on my memory, which is, of course, the only place they exist."

Bravo asked him to recite the names. When he was finished, Bravo said, "Please lead me to the sarcophagus of Lorenzo Fornarini."

"Of course." Father Damaskinos led them two-thirds of the way down the crypt, pointing to a sarcophagus on the left.

The Fornarini were, like Zorzi, one of the Case Vecchie, the so-called old houses, the elite families that had founded Venice: the twenty-four. This was the meaning of the twenty-four strands of red thread wound around the Greek cross. The three ciphers taken together read: in the Church of San Georgio dei Greci is a sarcophagus of a member of the twenty-four.

"As your father knew very well, Lorenzo Fornarini lived at the end of the fourteen hundreds and was a Knight Templar," Father Damaskinos said. "He was at Trebizond when it fell to the Sultan Mehmed II. In Trebizond, however, he secretly renounced his allegiance to Venice and became a member of the Greek Orthodox church, which was why he was secretly brought here. Members of the clergy there declared him a hero. But he was denounced by Andrea Cornadoro, another member of the Case Vecchie and a knight with an exceedingly evil reputation.

"He and Lorenzo Fornarini fought each other over three years and two islands before Cornadoro finally killed Fornarini. The priests preserved his body, wrapped it like a mummy and brought it back to be interred here. Like Fra Leoni, Lorenzo Fornarini was a hero to Dexter."

"Help me," Bravo said to Rule.

Together, they moved aside the stone lid just enough for Bravo to peer inside. He stared for a long moment at the skeleton of Lorenzo Fornarini. In the flickering light from the torch all time and space seemed obliterated, and he saw again the knight who had fought so valiantly against the Ottoman horde.

Then the spell was broken and, leaning over, he reached in. Between the ribs of the skeleton, he found a PDA, which was lying on something long and narrow. He removed both items. With the PDA was Lorenzo Fornarini's dagger, beautifully preserved in a chased steel sheath.

Bravo examined it, then turned on the PDA. Up came a long series of letters and numbers. His father had turned the PDA into a one-time pad-or Vernam cipher. Gilbert Sandford Vernam was an American cryptographer. In 1917, while working for AT&T, he invented the one-time pad cipher system, still the only cipher so secure that it had never been broken. The keystream of the Vernam cipher was the same length as the plaintext message and consisted of a series of bits generated completely at random, hence its invulnerability even to modern-day supercomputers.

They went back up into the church, noted the women's stalls above the entrance were empty, and sat there.

The problem Bravo needed to solve was where his father had secreted the one-time pad he would use to decode the cipher into plaintext. His first thought was that it was somewhere in his father's notebook, but after a quick perusal, he realized that the keypad would be too obvious there. He looked at the enamel American flag lapel pin, to no avail. Then he took out the pack of unopened cigarettes he'd found with the other objects. On its bottom was stamped a sell-by date and a lot number. However, the lot number contained symbols as well as letters and numbers. With mounting excitement, he counted the string-it was precisely as long as the keystream on the PDA.

He entered the lot number on the PDA's keypad and pressed the calculate key. The resulting decoded cipher was a riddle in ancient Greek.

"What can run but never walk? Has a mouth but never talks? Has a head but never weeps? Has a bed but never sleeps?" Rule read over his shoulder. "What does that mean?"

"It's a river." Bravo laughed. "When I was a child, there was an epic poem I loved that my father used to read me. It began, 'By the waters of Degirmen did King David lose his life/When he was betrayed and the Conqueror took all that was his…'

"David was the last of the Comneni, the storied family that for centuries ruled Trebizond, the wealthiest of the Black Sea trading cities. Degirmen is the name of the river that flows through Trabzon, as it's now known."

Father Damaskinos was nodding. "The Comneni were Greek Orthodox. David, the last of the line, was betrayed by one of his ministers, and Trebizond, long thought impregnable, fell in 1461 to the army of Mehmed II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, known as the Conqueror."

Bravo looked at Rule. "The Testament isn't in Venice, as I had thought. I have to go to Turkey, to Trabzon."

"So the journey continues," Rule said with an obscure kind of weariness.

Bravo scarcely heard him. For the first time, he was struck full force by the sense of his father's unfinished life, and he touched a sorrow inside himself so intimate and painful he'd never suspected it was there.

The Church of San Georgio dei Greci stood in the glare and musty heat of the Venetian morning. Paolo Zorzi and his Guardians had gathered in the blue shadows that were slowly being eroded by the brilliant sunlight. Someone, in a nearby campo, was singing an aria in a fine, untrained voice. The notes floated across the canal like soap bubbles, making the air glisten.

The Guardians were wide-eyed, their lips half parted with the forces of their breath. Jenny could see on their faces that curious mixture of anticipation, tension and anxiety as they geared themselves up for war.

She burned to walk up to her mentor and offer her services, but she knew better. The frame-up had worked this well: he no longer trusted her, and no matter what he might say to the contrary she had the evidence in his eyes to remind her that she could no longer trust him. He had lied to her about Bravo, and once the lies began they became a torrent and then, simply, the way things were. She had her own example to go by.

No, she realized, she was on her own now, cut off from the Order that had betrayed her. She'd never been a valuable asset to them, merely an accommodation between friends. In her current state, she could even work up a hatred for Dex for interfering, for treating her like a thing instead of a human being. He had sold her into slavery in much the same way Arcangela's parents had sold her. The Order or the nunnery, what did it matter? She and Arcangela were both imprisoned in cages carefully and ingeniously manufactured by men. The difference between them was that Arcangela had figured out a way to escape hers.

She started. Zorzi and his Guardians were on the move, approaching the church in a concerted and controlled wave, all entrances and exits covered, blocked and, finally, used. She waited until the last possible instant, until just one Guardian was left to go through the front door, and then she stepped up behind him, punched him hard in the kidney and as he reacted, slammed his head against the church's stone facade. She climbed into his robe, took his gun, and then, like quicksilver, she slipped into the church.

Bravo saw movement out of the corner of his eye and Rule, with an animal's keen defense mechanism, felt the imminent peril.

"He's here," Rule said. "Zorzi."

Bravo pushed Father Damaskinos down behind the dark wood of the women's stalls and said quietly but firmly in Trapazuntine Greek, "Don't move, not for anything, do you understand?"

The priest nodded and then, as they were about to turn away, saw the SIG Sauer in Bravo's hand. Reaching beneath his black cassock, he pulled out a gun, handing it to Rule butt first.

"Even here, there are times when one needs protection," he whispered.

Rule nodded curtly, a gesture that reminded Bravo of a military salute, a coded recognition one soldier gives to another.