The man put the machine pistol’s barrel to Leslie’s head. “Sit back down, Professor Lourds, or this pretty young woman dies.”
Lourds sat, but the fact that the man knew his name unnerved him.
“Very good,” the man said. “Put your hands on your head.”
Lourds complied. His stomach turned sour. Even as wild as it had sometimes gotten while he’d been in unsettled lands studying languages, he’d never had a gun pointed at him.
“Down,” the man ordered, dragging Leslie to the ground. When she was down, the man looked at the items on the desk. Without hesitation, he took the bell.
And that’s when the man made his first mistake. He and his men took their eyes off Leslie.
Before Lourds fully realized what was happening, she pushed herself to her feet and flung herself at one of the men. She knocked him over and took his gun, then dived beneath the heavy desk at the back of the set in a single fluid motion.
Her move took the thieves by surprise. Clearly they weren’t expecting a mere woman to put up much of a fight.
They had underestimated her, but they were clearly professional because it didn’t take long for them to catch up.
The sounds of gunfire filled the room as that desk took punishment it was never intended for. Bullets filled the air with wooden splinters.
Leslie fired back. Her shots were much louder than their attackers’, and she clearly knew what she was doing. Bullet holes tracked the walls behind their attackers, coughing out puffs of plaster dust that looked surreal to Lourds.
Meanwhile, the crew scrambled for cover.
So did the thieves.
No! Lourds thought. No artifact is worth the deaths of all these people.
Then he heard the familiar ping of Leslie’s sat-phone.
He could call for help.
In the middle of the chaos, Lourds rolled across the floor and ducked behind the desk with Leslie.
“I’ll talk. You shoot. Or we’ll both die.”
“Good point,” she said.
She handed over the phone, already keyed to an emergency number. More gunfire. And then a scream. Lourds hoped it was one of the robbers who had been hit, not one of the crew.
When a burst of startled Arabic came across the line of the phone in his hand, Lourds started talking.
Before he’d finished his second sentence, the sound of sirens outside intensified.
Help was on the way.
And the robbers could hear it, too.
They took off, one of them leaving a blood trail.
Leslie took off after them, holding her fire until she could get a clear shot.
Lourds followed, just in time to pull her out of the way as a final volley from the thieves splintered the office door.
On the floor, terrified but still whole, Lourds wrapped his arms around Leslie. He felt the sweet press of female flesh against his body and decided if he had to die in that instant, there were worse ways to go.
He held on to the woman, trapping her body under his.
“What do you think you were doing?” Lourds demanded of the woman. “Do you want to get killed?”
“They’re getting away!” Leslie tried to pull free from his grasp.
“Yes, and they should. They should get far away. They have automatic weapons, they outnumber us, and the police are coming—most of the force, if the sound is any indication. You’ve already saved our necks. It’s enough. Put that gun down and let the professionals take over.”
Leslie relaxed in his arms. For a moment he thought this was the point she was going to remonstrate with him and call him a coward. He’d discovered in the heat of the moment that good sense was often confused with cowardice by those watching from the sidelines.
Two of the young men from the production crew poked their heads up from where they were hiding. When they weren’t shot on the spot, Lourds deemed it safe enough to stand. He did so, helping Leslie to her feet.
Walking out to the hall, Lourds stared at the bullet holes that marred the hallway’s end as well as the walls, ceiling, and floor. The bad guys hadn’t been sharpshooters, but they’d certainly sprayed enough bullets into the general vicinity to make a statement.
“Call the police,” Lourds told one of the young Arabic men. “Tell them that the thieves have gone, and the only ones left here are us. We want them aware of that when they get here, or things could get exciting again.”
One of the crew, already pale, turned white and reached for the phone.
Leslie pulled away from Lourds and ran to a window. She looked out over the city.
Lourds joined her, but he saw nothing.
“We lost the bell,” she said, “before we even knew what it was.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Lourds told her. “I took copies of the inscription on the rubbing as well as taking a full set of photos of the bell with the digital camera. We may have lost the bell itself, but not the secrets it contains. Whatever they are, they aren’t totally beyond our grasp.”
But he had to wonder if pursuing the puzzle wasn’t going to put them back in front of someone’s guns. Somebody had wanted that bell enough to kill him and the entire crew for it. Would they kill to squash research about it as well? That wasn’t what being a professor of linguistics was about.
Nor was talking to a hundred revved-up Egyptian cops.
But judging from the sounds of the footsteps in the hall, it looked like he was about to learn all sorts of new things today.
CHAPTER
3
PIAZZA SAN PIETRO
STATUS CIVITATIS VATICANAE
AUGUST 17, 2009
F
ewer than a thousand people lived inside the walls of Vatican City, but millions of tourists and faithful visited from all around the world every year. Consequently, the smallest nation in Europe also had the highest per capita crime rate on the planet. Every year, along with the tourists and faithful, the purse snatchers and pickpockets turned out in droves.
Cardinal Stefano Murani was one of the year-round dwellers in the Holy City, and—for the most part—he loved living there. He was treated well, and was given immediate respect whether he wore his robe of office or an Armani suit, which was what he often donned when he wasn’t in his vestments. He wasn’t in them today, because he was on personal business and didn’t care to be remembered afterwards as an agent of the Roman Catholic Church.
At six feet two inches tall, he was a good-looking man. He knew that, and he always took care to make certain he looked his best. His dark brown hair, cut once a week by his personal stylist, who came to Murani’s private suite to groom him, lay smooth. A thin line of beard traced his jawline and flared briefly at his chin to join the razored mustache. Black eyes dominated his face, and those were the things most people remembered when they met Murani. He’d been told by some that they were cold and pitiless. Others, who were not so experienced in the worst the world could offer, thought his eyes were merely direct and unwavering, a sure sign of his faith in God.
His faith in God, like his faith in himself, was perfect. He knew that.
His work was God’s work, too.
At the moment, the ten-year-old boy struggling in Murani’s grip was convinced that the devil himself had hold of him. Or so the boy had said, before Murani silenced him. Now terror widened the boy’s eyes and drew plaintive mewling sounds from him. He was a thin whisper of a boy, no more than bones and rags.
Murani felt the boy should not have been allowed entrance to Vatican City. He should have been stopped and turned away at once. Anyone could see he was a thief, a pickpocket only now beginning to learn his trade. But there were those who believed that it only took a visit to Vatican City to forever alter the lives of men. So even the vermin from the street, like this specimen, were allowed in. Perhaps, those believers in mercy and access said, they would find God here.
Murani didn’t count himself among the fools who thought that.
“Do you know who
I am?” he demanded.
“No,” the boy said.
“You should learn the name of a man whose pocket you’re about to pick,” Murani went on. “It might direct you in your choice of targets. Since you don’t know me and I don’t know you, your punishment will be swift and light. I’ll break only one of your fingers.”
Frantic, the boy tried to kick Murani.
The cardinal dodged to one side so the ragged tennis shoe missed him by inches. And he snapped the boy’s forefinger like a breadstick.
The boy dropped to the ground and started howling.
“Don’t ever let me see you again,” Murani told the boy. “If I do, I’ll break more than a finger next time. Do you understand me?” It wasn’t a threat. It was fact, and they both knew it.
“Yes.”
“Now get up and get out of here.”
Without a word, the boy struggled to his feet and lurched through the crowd, cradling his injured hand.
Murani stood and dusted off his knees, taking his time till he was sure the dark fabric was once more clean. He gazed around at Vatican City, ignoring the stares of the tourists. Those people were nothing, not much more worthy than the young thief he’d released. Gawkers and sheep, they lived in awe and fear of true power. And he was part of that power.
One day, he believed, he would be all of that power.
He walked across Saint Peter’s Piazza, his physical presence dwarfed by the massive bulk of Sistine Chapel to the left and the Palace of the Governership behind him. The Excavations Office and the Sacristy and Treasury stood ahead on the right, flanked by the Vatican Post Office and the information booth at the entrance. Michelangelo’s Pietà stood before him.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini had created the overall effect of the plaza in the 1660s, laying the area out in a trapezoid. The fountain designed by Carlo Maderno became a primary focus as people walked through the area, but the huge Doric colonnades stacked four deep seized everyone’s attention immediately. The colonnades created an imperial look, laying out areas for everything, especially the Barberini Gardens. At the very center of the open area, an Egyptian obelisk stood nearly 135 feet tall. The obelisk had been crafted thirteen hundred years before the Blessed Birth, had spent time in the Circus of Nero, and then Domenico Fontana had moved it to the square in 1586.
Over the centuries, the square had been added to and changed. The cobblestone pathway had been moved. Lines of travertine broke up the look. Circular stones added in 1817 were scattered around the pavement surrounding the obelisk, creating a towering sundial. Even Benito Mussolini had been impressed with the piazza and had torn down buildings to provide a new entrance to the area, the Via della Conciliazione.
Murani had first come to Vatican City as a small boy with his mother and father. He’d been filled with a wonderment that never left him. When he told his father that he was going to live in the palace someday, his father had only laughed.
As his father’s son, Murani could have had his pick of mansions and villas scattered around the world. His father was a wealthy man several times over. As a boy, Murani had been impressed with his father’s millions. People treated his father well and with respect wherever he went, and many of them even feared him. But his father had his own fears as well. Those fears included other men as ruthless as he was, and policemen.
Only one man walked through Vatican City fearless, and Murani hoped to one day be that man. He wanted to be the pope. The pope had money. Vatican City yielded over a quarter billion dollars annually through its various tithes, collections, and commercial enterprises. The money wasn’t what Murani wanted, though. He wanted the pope’s power. Even when the position of pope had been filled by men bent by age, illness, and infirmity, the respect for the office had been there. They were mighty.
The people—the believers and the world at large—thought the pope’s word was law. That was without a show of force, without any attempt to demonstrate the power the pope wielded.
Cardinal Stefano Murani was one of the few that truly knew the amount of power the pope could raise if he so chose. Unfortunately the current pope, Innocent XIV, didn’t believe in flexing the power of the office. He was trying to preach about peace despite the constant terrorist attacks and economic devastation that troubled the world.
The old fool.
At an early age, Murani had been drawn to the Catholic Church. He’d served as an altar boy in the church he’d grown up around in Naples and loved the organized way the priests performed. He wasn’t supposed to become a priest. His father had had other ideas for Murani. But when he became a young man and had explored his father’s business interests and found them lacking, he turned to the cloth.
His father had gotten angry at that announcement, and had even tried to beat such a notion from his son’s head. For the first time in all his twenty-five years, Murani discovered that his willpower was stronger than his father’s: he could take all the abuse his father handed out and still not waver. But he did find his father’s training of some use in his new career. When he was ordained, he continued his studies in the field of computers and excelled. He was fast-tracked to Vatican City and soon made his way to the top of the computer division where he now served. He’d eventually been made a cardinal, one of the men capable of electing a pope. He’d barely missed out on the last papal convocation, but he been part of the gathering of cardinals that placed Innocent XIV into power.
During the last three years, just days before his forty-first birthday, he’d been brought into the Society of Quirinus, the clandestine group of the Church’s most powerful, men who held the most closely guarded secrets within the Church.
Most of those secrets were minor matters—instances of papal mistakes or children born out of wedlock to cardinals and archbishops, or high-ranking priests who paid too much attention to the altar boys. Those were things that could be quietly dealt with, although even that was getting harder to do in this day of instant media attention. Tales of sexual misconduct dogged the Church these days, bringing her down into the gutter and making her appear weak. In 2006, a priest had even been convicted of a particularly abhorrent murder.
The scars to his beloved church troubled Murani.
For the last three years, Murani had become convinced that the popes before him—and he did think of himself as papal, for he knew that he would one day be among them, without a doubt—had squandered their power, constantly backing away from securing what was rightfully theirs. People needed faith. Without faith, they couldn’t understand all the confusing things that were a part of simply being alive. The great masses had an animalistic panic about them today. But being truly faithful meant being truly penitent, truly fearful.
Perfect fear was a beautiful thing.
He loved to inflict it.
Murani intended to bring that fear of the papacy back into the world.
As a child, he’d sat on his mother’s knee and listened to the old stories of the Church. In those days, the pope’s blessing could make kings more powerful, wars last longer or end abruptly, and trigger conquests and shatter empires. The world had been better organized and operated during those years when the papacy had ruled supreme.
Murani craved that kind of power. His father had turned from him, but his mother was wealthy in her own right, having inherited from her father. What Murani’s father would not give him, his mother would.
One day, when he was pope—and Murani was certain that day would not be long in coming—he would break his father and make him acknowledge the fact that his chosen course—no, his destiny—had delivered more power than had all his father’s ill-gotten gains.
Concentrating on his goal, Murani stepped from Vatican City and spotted Gallardo’s dark blue Hummer waiting at the curb.
Gallardo reached across the passenger seat and opened the door. Murani stepped onto the running board and slid into the passenger seat.
“Did you have any further trouble in Alexandria?” Murani asked.
G
allardo checked back over his shoulder, found a lull in the traffic, and pulled smoothly out into it. He shook his head and frowned. “No. We got away clean. We left nothing behind that leads to us. The TV personnel will move on to the next big story. They always do. And Lourds is a university professor. A mere flea in the grand scale of things that matter. How much trouble could he possibly be?”
“He’s also one of the most erudite men on the face of the planet when it comes to languages.”
“So he knows how to say, ‘Please don’t shoot me!’ in several languages.” Gallardo smiled. “I can’t say that I’m impressed. The woman with him is worth ten professors. She alone prevented us from killing the witnesses. But she is merely a woman. Admittedly, she found something that you want.”
“Where is it?”
“There’s a hidden compartment.” Gallardo pointed a beefy finger toward the passenger-side floorboard.
“In the car?” Murani peered hard at the detailed carpet.
“Yes. Just push down. Hard. And twist to the right.”
Murani did and a section of the floorboard popped up almost imperceptibly. If he hadn’t been looking for it, with precise instructions to locate it, he didn’t think he would have found it.
The cardinal’s hands shook a little as he reached inside the hiding space for the box. The trembling in his fingers surprised him. He wasn’t given to physical weakness of any sort. Growing up with a hard taskmaster like his father, he didn’t let his emotions show unless he wanted to.
Gallardo gave him the code to the locked box.
Murani punched in the sequence of numbers and heard the lock whir within. Only days ago, he’d found the bell while searching through Web sites dedicated to archeological discussions. He’d been searching for the musical instruments since he’d heard of them from the other members of the Society of Quirinus. No one among them had thought to search the Internet, believing the instruments to be either myth or destroyed.
The Atlantis Code Page 4