by Brett King
That troubled her, knowing the Borgias were near. She tried to dismiss the thought.
Holding her breath, she opened the metal box. Wurm leaned in for a closer look. Cori brought out an old book. The worn leather cover featured a cross growing out of a tree. Embossed in gold, the words Die heilige Schrift appeared above the treelike cross.
“It’s an old German Bible.” He raised a metal clasp on the cover and opened the book, turning to the first page. “It’s in good condition. Look at the signature.”
In flowing blackletter script, “Prof. Carl Gustav Jung” appeared below “25 Juli 1858.”
“Jung wasn’t born until July 1875,” she said. “This belonged to his grandfather.”
They scanned the old book, finding page after yellowed page filled with Fraktur script and woodcut illustrations of biblical dramas. The book was free of any notation, except the last page. At the back of the Bible, obscure symbols spelled out three separate messages. The characters were printed with the same careful handwriting as the signature on the title page.
“How curious,” he observed. “The elder Jung wrote in cryptorunes.”
“The Scintilla.” She shot out a breath. “It has to be. Can you decipher it?”
He interlaced his fingers, then cracked his knuckles. “I’ll give it a shot.”
Cori felt the buzz of nervous anticipation as Wurm translated the runes. After a couple minutes, he gave her a look, as if she were distracting him. Unable to stand still, she stepped into the courtyard outside Jung’s tower. Drying wet hair with her hands, she wandered to a loggia. Pulling back striped curtains, she found that the open-sided room featured a fireplace and small lake-view windows. She raised her headlamp, sweeping light across the ceiling. Divided into squares, the ceiling displayed paintings of different family crests. In one panel, Jung had painted a bearded man wielding a large green plant. She wondered if the plant represented the Radix.
When she returned to the maternal tower, Wurm was hunched over the table, translating runes by candlelight. He looked up from the Jung family Bible. “The elder Jung printed each message in a different runic script. The first is written in an early Teutonic form used in Northern Europe before eight hundred CE. The second is a Nordic version from Iceland around the thirteenth century. The last is an Anglo-Saxon rune from the eleven hundreds.”
“Is it the Scintilla?”
He shook his head. He translated Jung’s first message as
Where upon the pagan ground of Jupiter,
Our Lady transformed into the goddess of reason
The Great Secret hides within
“Any idea what it means?” she wondered.
“It means the Scintilla is not here. This message directs us to a new destination.”
Before two in the morning, Cori drove the MINI Cooper on the Bellerivestrasse toward Zurich Airport. Wurm had crammed into the seat beside her. He mumbled while translating Jung’s final two messages. She gave a quick glance at the mirror, checking if the Borgias were following them. Relieved, she slumped in her seat. She didn’t want to face them again.
“Got it,” he announced. Taking a breath, he recited the translation. Jung’s second message was as cryptic as the first.
Where once dragons rained down,
God with us towers above the zero of paradise
“I know part of it,” she said. “I used to date a guy named Emmanuel. The name means ‘God with us.’ We need to find an Emmanuel towering ‘above the zero of paradise.’”
“That should be easy,” he said sarcastically. He read the third message.
When one is in doubt, turn away
And the truth shall be revealed
“Know what it means?” she asked.
“Not a clue. But I know the answer lies in Paris.”
“In Notre-Dame.” She added, “I’m not religious or anything, but I know notre dame means ‘our lady.’”
“Ah, but Europe has several cathedrals named Notre-Dame. We need the one in Paris. Know why?”
“Bet you’re gonna tell me.”
“Remember Jung’s first clue?” Wurm asked, scratching at his beard. “It said, ‘Where upon the pagan ground of Jupiter, Our Lady transformed into the goddess of reason. ’ Notre-Dame of Paris resides on the same site where centuries before a Roman temple had been built. Long before Notre-Dame, the Romans dedicated their temple to their chief god, Jupiter.”
“Notre-Dame was built on pagan ground. That explains the first part. What about the part about transforming ‘Our Lady into the goddess of reason’?”
“It refers to the French Revolution. In 1793, the guillotine claimed the heads of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. That November, the French revolutionary government outlawed religion. Christianity was overthrown. Bibles were burned. Notre-Dame was renamed the ‘Temple of Reason.’ A festival was staged to celebrate the victory of philosophy over religion. The Paris Opéra redecorated the cathedral for the occasion. The Opéra sent singers to celebrate the rechristening. Mademoiselle Aubry, a young star at the time, dressed in a Roman stola, think the Statue of Liberty, but in tricolor. She wore a long white robe and blue mantle with a red Phrygian bonnet.”
“A what bonnet?” Cori asked.
“A liberty cap.” He sketched it. “The French wore them as a symbol of freedom during the revolution.” He showed his drawing of a Phrygian bonnet.
She glanced over. “Looks like a Smurf hat.”
“Anyway, at the ceremony,” he continued, “the corps de ballet escorted Mademoiselle Aubry into the sanctuary. The crowd cheered her as the goddess of reason. After that, over two thousand French churches were renamed ‘Temple of Reason.’ But Mademoiselle Aubry, as the goddess of reason, graced one temple.”
“So, Our Lady transformed into the goddess of reason at the Paris cathedral.”
“Feel free to speed, Cori. We need to catch a flight to France.”
Chapter Forty-two
Los Angeles
5:05 P.M.
John Brynstone passed rows of palm trees lining La Cienega Boulevard as he drove the team to the Armstrong private jet at LAX’s Mercury terminal. He couldn’t wait to get to Vegas to find his family and settle things with Metzger. Beside him, Jordan had called to check in with Cori. When she hung up, he asked, “Did I hear you say they’re headed to Paris?”
“Notre-Dame.”
He hadn’t connected the Scintilla with the famed cathedral. “Are they safe?”
“So far. They found Lucrezia Borgia at Jung’s tower. She’s dead. Can you believe it?”
He shook his head. After Wurm killed her mother years ago, Lucrezia had become the reigning matriarch of the House of Borgia. She had been a powerhouse, pushing her family to find the Radix. The stakes were raised now for Adriana and her clan. As he pulled into the FBO hangar, Brynstone said, “I just hope the Borgias don’t track Cori and Wurm to Paris.”
Washington, D.C.
8:32 P.M.
Alexander Armstrong saw Isaac Starr walking toward him. “Secret Service cleared you to join me at the hospital?”
Starr nodded. “You wanted an update on Brynstone. He’s being treated as a potential threat to national security. Delgado mobilized a DevGroup team to bring him in.”
“Big mistake. Brynstone’s not a threat.”
“With all due respect,” Starr responded, “DIRNSA is on the right side of this issue. We need to bring in Brynstone.”
“I trust him. The man knows what he’s doing.”
“It’s clear you have faith in Brynstone. Mind telling me why?”
“Our first summer in the White House,” he began, “I learned about a plot to kidnap my son while he was on vacation with Helena in Punta Cana.”
“I’ll never forget that, Alex. Everything turned out fine. The Service stormed into a building in Bávaro and apprehended the kidnappers. I slept a lot better that night.”
“Me too. And for that, we can thank John Brynstone. He took point on a clandest
ine op involving surveillance and penetration of a target facility in Haiti. He helped coordinate the Secret Service operation and the kidnappers were arrested before initiating their mission.”
“Brynstone did that?”
Armstrong nodded. “See why I’m willing to give the guy a second chance?”
Airborne over Europe
3:36 A.M.
At the conference table, Cori rested her chin on her hand as Wurm spoke broken French into the phone. Barely twenty-four hours ago, he had dragged her into his book maze. Now she was flying to Paris with him. He fascinated and frightened her, but she sensed a connection.
As the Airbus soared over Zurich, she closed the German Bible, then fastened the leather strap on the cover. He had convinced her to bring the book with them. She pushed aside the aging book, then opened her mother’s journals, looking for information on Jung’s grandfather. Ariel Cassidy had recorded a visit with a European baroness about a conversation she had had with Jung. At his invitation, the baroness had attended an October 1959 taping as the BBC television program Face to Face interviewed Jung at his Swiss home.
That night, they stayed up drinking wine and Jung told a story about his grandfather. In 1845, the elder Jung had welcomed a guest from Paris. The man was a Freemason and the head of the Office of Historic Monuments. He described finding a weathered document while restoring an old building. Hearing the description, Grand Master Jung identified the document as the Scintilla. He offered to buy it on the spot.
The young Freemason told him it was too late.
While restoring the Parisian building, the Freemason had created a new hiding place for the document. “Under different circumstances, my grandfather might have owned the Scintilla on that night,” Jung had told the European baroness. “We were that close, my dear. That close.”
Was it possible that the old building was Notre-Dame? In her interview with Ariel Cassidy, the baroness didn’t mention the cathedral. Cori was digging into another journal when Wurm ended his call. He ambled toward her, shoving his hands inside his pockets.
“It’s past three in the morning,” she said, standing to stretch. “Who were you calling?”
“Nicolette Bettencourt. I’m her godfather. Nicolette is the concierge at Notre-Dame. It took some arm twisting, but she agreed to unlock the cathedral for us.” He noticed Cori’s long-sleeve T-shirt and black yoga pants. “You changed clothes.”
“I found them here on the jet. My jeans were soaked after Bollingen.” She glanced at her watch. “I just realized it’s December twenty-sixth. Christmas is over.”
“Good,” Wurm grumbled.
“Feel like I missed it.”
“We’re heading to Paris on a luxury jet owned by the president and his billionaire brother. Beats celebrating the holiday in a mental hospital.”
“Good point.”
“You called someone before I talked to Nicolette.”
“My roommate. She’s in the hospital. Tessa didn’t answer. I left a message. Since I’m not family, the nurse wouldn’t give me a report.” She studied him. “Forgive me for getting personal, but you seemed to know that woman we found beneath Wurm’s Tower.”
“Lucrezia Borgia?” He looked down. “Maybe Brynstone told you I’m a cryptanalyst. Twenty-eight years ago, I attended a cryptology symposium in Tokyo. I met Lucrezia in the hotel bar. She started flirting with me over drinks.”
“Did you know she was a Borgia?”
“Not at the time. Lucrezia fueled my interest in the Radix. I thought our meeting was a chance encounter. Turns out, she’d been tracking me for months. The Borgias are a ranting bunch of psychopaths, and I fell into a race to find the Radix before them. When I checked into Amherst, I gave it my full attention.” He noticed Ariel Cassidy’s journal. “Find anything interesting?”
Cori explained how a Parisian Freemason had visited Jung’s grandfather thirty years before Carl Jung’s birth. The man stashed the Scintilla in the same building in which he had discovered it.
“You think the Freemason meant Notre-Dame?”
“It’s quite possible.” Wurm tapped his chin. “I discovered something about della Rovere in the Voynich manuscript. I was working on decoding it before we met at Amherst yesterday. We know the priest smuggled the Radix and Scintilla out of the Vatican. He rode on horseback to the Italian village of Navelli. A friend at the Church of San Sebastiano warned that Cesare Borgia and his militia were hunting for della Rovere. The desperate priest concealed the Radix inside the Zanchetti mummy, then fled the village before the Holy Guard captured him. History records that Borgia marched back to Cesena with della Rovere’s head on a pike.”
“Where did Borgia find him?”
“It’s unclear. Borgia reported to his father, the Pope, that della Rovere didn’t have the Radix or the Scintilla. I concluded from the Voynich manuscript that della Rovere fled Italy with the Scintilla and planned to stash it in a separate country. Now we learn that a Freemason found the Scintilla in an old Parisian building during the 1840s. Perhaps it was Notre-Dame.”
“He told Grand Master Jung the location. Jung’s grandfather recorded it in cryptorunes in the back of his Bible.” She looked down. “Maybe Cesare Borgia tracked della Rovere to Notre-Dame. Before Borgia arrived, the priest concealed the Scintilla inside the Paris cathedral.”
“I hope we’re right about this.” He moved behind a computer on the jet’s conference table. He stared at the monitor. “Come here, Cori. I want you to see something remarkable.”
She pulled up a chair beside him. The computer screen showed a medieval mansion flanked by an octagonal tower. “This is the National Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris,” he explained. “Formerly the Cluny Museum.”
“My mom visited this place.”
“It houses ancient relics taken from the site where Notre-Dame was built. I found something interesting on the virtual tour.” Navigating an online room, he zoomed in on square column fragments. “These tablets are the oldest man-made things in Paris. They were discovered beneath Notre-Dame in 1711.”
“From the Temple of Jupiter?”
“Exactly,” he whispered, before reciting the rune he’d translated. “ ‘Where upon the pagan ground of Jupiter, Our Lady transformed into the goddess of reason.’” He brought up an image of a stone block. “Look at this.”
Known as the Pillar of the Nautes, it was a four-foot altar dedicated to the boatmen who sailed the River Seine a century after Jesus. Wurm rotated the virtual image, showing Jupiter. The Roman god Vulcan and his hammer appeared on another side. On the next, she saw Taurus the bull, an icon to early Gauls. The pillar’s fourth side shocked her. Carved in bas-relief, a muscular man wielded a hatchet in his raised hand. In a show of determination, he cleaved a bush with leafy branches. Above his head, the Druid god’s name was carved in Roman letters: ESVS. The altar carving resembled the bearded man with the plant on Jung’s loggia ceiling.
“Esus,” she said. “The woodland god.”
“In all his glory. This relic belonged to the Parisii, the Celtic tribe who worshipped Esus and gave their name to the city of Paris. Take a look at the branch he’s chopping,” Wurm said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “The museum hired paleobotanists to examine the stalk. Scientists can’t identify it because they’ve never seen a plant like it.”
“We’ve seen it,” Cori whispered. “It’s the Radix.”
Chapter Forty-three
Airborne over California
6:51 P.M.
The Gulfstream jetliner cut across darkened western skies. Clouds assembled like clumps of torn feather pillows, concealing sparse city lights below.
Consumed with thoughts about his family, Brynstone was lousy company on the flight to Vegas. Before leaving the house, he’d grabbed a change of clothes and his favorite photograph of his daughter. He stared at the picture now, of the delicate child curled on Kaylyn’s lap. A straw hat shaded her eyes. Shay’s lips puffed on a dandelion. A mist of downy seeds scat
tered around her bright face. A small moment of happiness. He slumped in his chair, thinking about his lost family. To find them, he had to find Metzger. He had to gamble.
As Spencer Tilton and Steve Cloud snoozed in the front row, he moved behind a computer. He worked for a few minutes, when Jordan Rayne came up behind him.
“You monitoring DIRNSA again?” she asked, staring at the grid of small windows on his computer’s desktop.
“I’m going to call him. I accessed CCTV surveillance to see if Delgado’s at home.”
“He has cameras everywhere. And his house is huge.”
“He came into a big inheritance. His sister died a year before his father. Everything went to Delgado.”
She squinted at several windows open on the computer monitor. “Where is he now?”
“The billiard room.” He pointed to a window on the screen showing Delgado behind his bar, pouring a drink.
She pointed to a blackened window. “Why is that dark?”
“The camera in that room has been disabled, so I haven’t been able to access it. I’m working on a way to override the master control. It’ll take some time, but I’m pretty sure I can activate that surveillance cam.”
“When are you calling Delgado?”
“Now.” He grabbed the phone, then walked to the back of the jet. He kept his cool as he waited for Delgado to pick up.
“John, how nice of you to call.”
“You’ve pushed it too far,” he said. “It’s one thing to attack me. But you crossed the line when you ordered the kidnapping of Kaylyn and Shay.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, John,” he said in his tranquil monotone. “Enlighten me.”
“Leave my wife and child alone,” he demanded. “Call off Metzger.”