An older woman, under five feet, gray hair up in a bun, her face weathered and brown from too much time in the sun, appeared at the door to her inner office. She was scowling.
“Who are you?” she demanded in Spanish.
Al-Rashid understood her. “In English, please,” he said. “My name is Paul Harris, I’m a writer of historical fiction mostly, but I’ve come across an incredible story that I think a number of people have lost their lives over. At least that’s what I was told.”
“By whom?”
“A Frenchman who came to see me at my home in Greenwich. Claimed he was from an organization called the Voltaire Society, and he was in a fight for his life with some Americans. Maybe from the CIA.”
The tour guide, her mouth open, had not yet dialed a number.
“It’s all right, Louisa,” the woman in the doorway said.
“Dr. Vergilio, I presume?” al-Rashid said.
“Yes. And I have been expecting you or someone like you to be showing up.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
McGarvey and Rencke drove to the Georgetown University Dahlgren Chapel, parking in back and walking around front. The church was empty, but they found the office where McGarvey had seen a priest in civilian clothes coming out with the man in a wheelchair.
They knocked once and went in, finding themselves in a small ante-room, the receptionist’s desk empty. The door to the inner office was open and the same priest in civilian clothes looked up from his desk.
“Father Carl Unger?” McGarvey asked.
“Yes, may I help you?”
“It’s about the priest whose confession you heard yesterday. He’s dead.”
“Dear God in Heaven,” Fr. Unger said softly, but he didn’t seem surprised. “May I be told how it happened?”
“He came to a hospital here in Georgetown where he murdered four men in their beds, a nurse, several security officers, and would have killed another woman, herself a patient, except that she managed to hide herself.”
The priest turned away, gathering his wits, and when he looked back his eyes were filled with a very great sadness. “I didn’t know.”
“I think you knew something. In fact I think he told you who and what he was when he confessed.”
“You were here in the chapel?”
“Yes, but I didn’t recognize him because he was in a wheelchair. What did he tell you in the confessional?”
Fr. Unger shook his head. “I can’t reveal that. Not to you, not to anyone, even to the police if that’s who you are.”
“But you must if the confessor tells you about a crime he’s going to commit,” Otto said.
“Are you a Catholic?”
“I was. Did he tell you that he had come here to kill people?”
“No.”
“But he was troubled,” McGarvey said.
“You met him?”
“Three times. He said that he’d been sent here to protect me.”
“He told me that, though he didn’t say who it was or why,” Fr. Unger said. “May I ask who you gentlemen are, and what your business with Father Dorestos was?”
“I think he worked for the Hospitallers. The Sacred Military Order of Malta. He came here to convince me to help find something that belonged to the Church. And last night he committed suicide in order to make me believe that he was telling the truth.”
It was almost too much for the priest and he started to rise, but McGarvey motioned him back.
“We work for the Central intelligence Agency, and you won’t believe the problems that your Father Dorestos has stirred up coming here, except that seven people lost their lives in Florida—two of them innocent young students who were not involved. That’s in addition to the others last night, and the priest himself, and most likely six more in Paris including the vice mayor and his mistress, and a mother and her son.”
“The butcher’s bill has always been high for the Mother Church,” Otto said bitterly. He’d walked away from the Church years ago under bad circumstances—of his own doing—but he’d been left with a scar. “And what the Vatican doesn’t need right now is another scandal. Pederasty is terrible, but murder is worse.”
“I don’t know what you want from me. Why have you come here?”
“For your help, Father,” McGarvey said “We want to prevent any further bloodshed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Father Dorestos was a Hospitaller. Someone sent him here with orders to direct me to search for something.”
“Search for what?”
“A diary that was stolen from a bank vault in Bern. The point is none of what happened over the past days need never to have happened. I’m ready to help—we’re ready to help—but my government doesn’t want us to get involved.”
The priest was at a loss. “What can I do?”
“Contact the Hospitallers—the SMOM, and find out who directed Father Dorestos. Tell them their man is dead, and that we would like to come to Europe to discuss what needs to be done.”
Fr. Unger shook his head. “I’m just a college chaplain and a scholar. I’m not involved in things like this. And in the first place even if I thought I could help, I would have no idea who to call.”
“We need to be flown out of here on a private jet as American priests,” McGarvey said. He laid two passports on the desk—one for him and one for Otto—under the work names of Rupert Mann and Michael Rosenberg. “Whoever you contact in Malta will know how to check these to make certain there are no holds or queries.”
Fr. Unger made no move to touch the passports. “I’ll have to ask you to leave,” he said.
“We’ll wait just outside by the confessionals.”
“We want to help the Church,” Otto said, and he and McGarvey got up and left.
Back out in the nave they sat down in one of the pews about halfway to the entrance.
“You lied,” McGarvey said.
Otto got out his iPad and accessed one of his search engines on a CIA mainframe at Langley. “The Church has been doing it for a couple of thousand years, it’s used to hearing lies.” He nodded toward the confessionals. “It’s all about redemption. Raise hell all week, but come Saturday you can confess your sins, do a penance, and on Sunday go to mass with a clear conscience because the slate has been wiped clean, so on Monday you can start all over again.”
“It’s better than Islamic fundamentalists killing people and expecting to go straight to paradise as martyrs.”
Otto looked up. “Even murder can be forgiven by Jesus through a priest in the confessional.”
An image of Fr. Unger seated at his desk came up on the iPad. It looked as if he was typing on a keyboard just below the frame of view, and he was agitated.
“He’s found a number on Skype and he’s calling it now,” Otto said. “It’s European.” He brought up another program on a split screen. “Three-five-six. It’s the dialing code for Malta.”
“Hello, this is Father Unger, I’m the senior chaplain at Georgetown University in the United States. I need to talk to someone about Father Dominigue Dorestos.”
“Of course, Father,” a man with a heavily accented Italian voice replied in English. “Please wait.”
Otto split the screen again so that they were seeing Fr. Unger on one side, and on the other a man in a monk’s robes with a tonsured haircut. The monk was seated in what appeared to be a small office.
The screen froze for several seconds, until the monk’s face was replaced by the image of another man, this one much older, with a broad forehead and wide serious eyes beneath a normally cut head of hair. Nothing other than his image from the shoulders up was visible.
The man spoke, his English nearly without accent. “You have news of our son, Father Dorestos?”
“I’m afraid that I have bad news for you, I have been informed that Father Dorestos is dead. He may have committed suicide.”
The man on the split screen had no reaction. “Who told you this?”
“Two men are w
aiting outside in the nave at this moment, waiting for me to call someone to say that they are willing to help with the mission Father Dorestos came here to accomplish.”
“Did they say how they meant to help?”
“They’ve given me passports, in different names. The CIA has forbidden them to become involved, so they want us—your order—to provide them with a jet out of the country.”
“To where?”
“They didn’t say.”
“We have a jet standing by at Reagan National Airport. I will alert the crew. Tell them that they may come to the airport at any time within the next two hours. If you give me the names and numbers off their passports, I will also alert the airport authorities.”
“I will tell them.”
“One more thing, Father, ask them to bring Father Dorestos’s body with them if at all possible. Even as a suicide he is our son.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
The day was bright, the sun streaming through the windows, and yet Dr. Vergilio’s inner office seemed stuffy because it was crammed with books, manuscripts, papers, scientific journals, and many maps showing current archaeological projects around the globe. But the woman was anything but stuffy.
“Be brief, Señor Harris, I am a busy woman,” she said.
“Would you like to check my background?” al-Rashid asked.
“No, because I think that everything you’ve come to tell me, and everything else about you, is almost certainly an elaborate lie. So let’s just get on with it. You said that a Voltaire came to see you in England.”
“Yes, about two weeks ago. He identified himself as Giscarde Petain and wanted to hire me for a job of research. His organization had lost a very rare diary that was a record of a Spanish military expedition from Mexico City to what is now New Mexico in the United States.”
“Señor Petain was murdered a few days ago, and his wife and child were killed just two days ago in Paris.”
“Yes, I saw both stories in the news. It’s why I decided to come here.”
“For what?”
“Answers.”
Dr. Vergilio gave him an appraising look. She was irritated. “Do not play games with me, Señor Harris. As I’ve said, I have expected you or someone like you to come here asking damn fool questions about caches of Spanish treasure, the locations of which are supposedly pinpointed in this diary you were told about. But it’s not true. It is a lie.” She waved a hand at the books and maps in her office. “Millions upon millions of words and maps and reports—detailed reports. Mind-numbing bureaucratic documents. And nowhere have I ever found direct evidence of Spanish treasure in the United States except at the bottom of the ocean mostly around the coasts of Florida. The Nuestra Señora de Atocha being the most famous, of course. One of its salvaged and restored cannons is downstairs.”
“I’m not familiar with the story,” al-Rashid said, though he was. He wanted to keep the woman talking, betting that she would make a mistake. A hint, even the slightest of references to a cipher key was all he needed.
“I thought that you were an historical writer.”
“Of fiction. But my expertise is in research, including the Spanish Thirty Years’ War. Mention was made of financial losses that forced the crown to borrow money, but I pursued the war more than its financing. I told that to Monsieur Petain.”
“The Atocha sank in sixteen sixty-two off the Florida Keys in a storm, and she was carrying so much gold, silver, and other treasure that it took two months to load it aboard. And that, Señor Harris, is no urban legend. It is a fact that an American treasure hunter by the name of Mel Fisher managed to find the ship and recover the gold and silver, and a few of the cannons.”
Al-Rashid held his silence. The woman was worked up.
“In fact the contents of that ship belonged to Spain, if for nothing else than its historical value. Yet we got nothing.”
“Except for the cannon.”
“You came looking for answers.”
“Yes,” al-Rashid said. “Petain told me that the diary had been stolen but that it would be of no use to anyone because it was in code.”
Dr. Vergilio was suddenly very interested though she tried to hide it. “Did you find the diary?”
“After I learned of Petain’s death, I backed off. But when his wife and child were murdered my curiosity began to get the better of me. So I came here to find out if you could tell me anything about the diary or about its code. I thought that perhaps with my investigative journalism background and your archaeological resources here at the Archives we might make a good partnership.”
“And you would share the treasure with Spain?”
“Urban legend,” al-Rashid reminded her. “In fact I’m not a treasure hunter, I’m looking for a good story to tell.”
“I’m sorry that you came all this way, Señor Harris,” Dr. Vergilio said, getting to her feet. “There were journals from many Spanish military expeditions to the New World, of course. Most of them are here in the Archives. But none of them were ever written in a cipher or any sort—most of them were written in Spanish, and some written by priests or monks in Latin. Of those many of the originals are in the Vatican’s library.”
Al-Rashid remained seated. “I’m sure that what I have come looking for is in the Vatican’s archives, but those collections are closed to someone like me. From what I understand a priest managed to join an expedition to New Mexico, and the diary he kept—in code—was stolen by the Voltaires before he could return to Rome.”
“And you came to tell me that it was stolen from the Voltaires?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Vergilio held out her hand. “Give me your passport.”
Al-Rashid handed it over, and the woman went to the door and gave it to the tour guide. “Find out who this man is, please, before you return to your group,” she said, and she came back to her desk. “Are you an intelligence officer with New Scotland Yard or MI6?”
“Just a writer onto what I think might become a good story. Murders, intrigue between the Vatican, the Spanish government, almost certainly the U.S. government, and some sort of secret society that I’m assuming was either began by or at least named after the philosopher Voltaire.” Al-Rashid shrugged depreciatingly. “And throw in a secret diary written in a mysterious code and an ancient treasure buried somewhere, and I can’t miss.”
“The treasure is a myth.”
“One that someone is willing to kill for.”
“People have been killed for a lot less.”
The tour guide was back in under a minute. “One hundred twenty thousand hits on Google,” she said, handing the passport back to al-Rashid. “Mr. Harris shows up on the third page in a Wikipedia article, which describes him as a minor British novelist, six books to his credit, most notably one published three years ago under the title Trouble in Paradise. Formerly a journalist with the BBC, and before that with Reuters. Oxford. Parents deceased, no wife or children.”
“Thanks, Louisa, but no more strays, please.”
“I’ll try.”
When the young woman was gone, Dr. Vergilio gave al-Rashid an appraising look. Her attitude had changed. “You have my attention, Señor Harris, what exactly is it that you want?”
“The diary, for starts.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea where it is.”
“Petain told me that it had been in a bank vault in Bern. He suggested that I start there.”
“And did you?”
“No, I wanted to talk to you first. If the diary is in a code, I suspect that the cipher may be somewhere here, but hidden.”
“It’s not here, I’ve already told you.”
Al-Rashid suppressed a smile. She believed enough in the treasure stories and the diary that she had already searched the archives. “Maybe it’s in some of the documents from that military expedition. Could be in plain sight, unrecognizable for what it was without the diary in hand.”
“Or it could be in the Vatican’s archives, which is
more likely.”
Al-Rashid shrugged. “In which case I’d have to try Rome. But for now I’m betting that if I can come up with the diary, we’ll find the cipher key here.”
Dr. Vergilio’s eyes widened. “Do you already have it?” She was excited.
“No. But I have the name of a man in Bern. I think he might be a good lead, but as I said I wanted to come here first to see if we could make a deal. You and I working together.” He laughed. “You can have the gold—I’d take a finder’s fee—but what I’m after is the story.”
Dr. Vergilio laughed too. “I don’t believe a word you’ve said, but in actuality I have nothing to lose. Bring the diary here, and we’ll see if we can find the cipher key if one exists.”
FIFTY-NINE
As soon as the Gulfstream had taken off from Washington National Airport and reached its cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic, Otto powered up his laptop and connected via a National Reconnaissance Office satellite to his mainframe at the CIA. He’d worked through the night and when McGarvey woke from a couple of hours of sleep he was grinning.
“I think I came up with a lead on the guy who may have swiped the diary from the bank in Bern, and then did his thing in Paris just a few days ago. But it gets even better, and you’re not going to believe how.”
The attendant brought McGarvey a cup of coffee. “I’m told that you wanted a little brandy in it, sir,” she said.
“You needed a pick-me-up,” Otto said after the attendant went forward. “This guy—if it’s our man—goes by the name of Bernard Montessier and lives somewhere in Marseilles. He runs a small international legal affairs consulting firm with only a secretary.”
“How in the hell did you come up with that?”
“Tedious but simple. It’s what my little darlings back home are so good at,” Otto said.
His little darlings, as he called them, were his specially designed search engines that piggybacked on thousands of computers—most of them government or university mainframes—without leaving any traces. Multiplexing to vastly increase the speed and scope of his search algorithms, he could scan millions of terabytes per second of information, from nearly an unlimited number of sources simultaneously.
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