by James Becker
Dante had driven the Ford hire car down virtually every road in Exeter, using the location of the last camera that had detected the Porsche Cayman as the starting point for the search, and they had seen not the slightest sign of the vehicle. There had been one false alarm when Mario spotted a black Porsche in a side street, but when they’d driven along the street to investigate, the car had proved to be a 911, not a Cayman, and the registration number was completely different.
They’d grabbed a late lunch, just soft drinks and sandwiches bought from a garage when they filled the tank on the Ford, and eaten their inadequate meal parked by the side of the road, all three men keeping a sharp lookout just in case the Porsche suddenly appeared.
“He must have parked the car off the road,” Mario suggested, stating what was now obvious to all of them.
“We know that,” Toscanelli snapped, not in the best of tempers.
“Well, shouldn’t we be taking a look in the car parks?”
“We will,” Toscanelli promised, “but that’s really the last resort. The trouble is that if Jessop did leave the car in a parking lot, we have no guarantee at all that he would be coming back to it, so even if we found it, we might be no further forward. I was hoping we could find the car outside a hotel, something like that, somewhere we could be sure that the vehicle would help us find the two of them.”
Toscanelli’s phone rang again at that moment, and he answered it immediately.
“Sì?”
Then he switched to English, and when he finished the call he was once again energized.
“Get moving,” he said to Dante, looking at the map of Exeter. “Keep straight along this road for about a hundred meters, then turn right. As quick as you can.”
“What’s happened?” Mario asked.
“That was our lay brother again,” Toscanelli replied. “Two things. First, Robin Jessop is now officially a person of interest, not quite a suspect but the next best thing, in the multiple murders that took place in Dartmouth last night. That isn’t going to help us, obviously, because it means that the British police will now be looking for him. But the good thing is that because his status has changed, we should learn, through our brother, about every sighting and trace of the man.”
“So where are we going?”
“Just to the north of the city center here,” Toscanelli said. “Less than fifteen minutes ago Jessop made a telephone call to his shop in Dartmouth from right here in Exeter. I’ve got the location of the public telephone he used, so that gives us another confirmed position to resume our search.”
He paused and glanced at his two colleagues.
“They’re still here and we’re closing in on them,” he said, a wolfish smile on his face.
28
Rome, Italy
“Is that it?” Silvio Vitale asked eagerly. “Is it what we’ve been looking for?”
The elderly man standing in front of his desk was dressed in a black suit, exactly like Vitale himself and every other person in that part of the building. It was more than a convention: it was essentially both a uniform and a silent statement reflecting not only their history but also their core beliefs. In the centuries that had passed since the order had been formed, the color of their garb had never altered, although the type of garments they wore had of necessity changed over the years.
“We were obviously hampered by not knowing what the document looked like. If you recall, from the very start of our search, there has been doubt about both the fate of the parchment and the contents of the text. Our brothers who were responsible for the investigation in the first instance were only able to establish that the leader of the heretics had been aware of the moves being made against him and had made his own plans accordingly. But at no point were we ever certain precisely what he had done, only that it was very obvious when our searches were carried out that the objects we sought had been removed and presumably concealed elsewhere. The only other thing we believed to have been established was that a document, an original piece of parchment, had been created, and was generally known within the Order as the Ipse Dixit manuscript.”
Livio Fabrini paused in his explanation for a moment and looked down at the sheets of paper in his hand.
“I’m quite sure that you have looked at these just as carefully as I have, Brother Vitale, and you will have seen that the title Ipse Dixit does not occur anywhere on either the transcription of the encrypted text or the scanned images of the original parchment. However, the folder on the computer from which this data was obtained did bear that name, and that suggests to me that the parchment had been secreted or concealed within an object of some description as a means of concealment. Logically speaking, if the parchment hadn’t been protected in this way, it is extremely unlikely that it would have survived to the present day, and I think we can assume that the book or whatever was chosen as a hiding place probably did bear the name Ipse Dixit because otherwise it is difficult to see any reason why this person in England should have used that expression.”
Vitale contained his impatience with some difficulty. Fabrini was one of the oldest members of the order still working, and his knowledge of its history, and in particular the details of the quest that had consumed so much of its combined energy for most of the previous millennium, was unrivaled. But his speech tended to be pedantic rather than rapid, and he had always been incapable of providing the short version of any piece of information. There were times when Vitale longed for a simple yes or no, but he knew that with Fabrini that was unlikely ever to happen.
“So?” Vitale asked, because the old professor appeared to have come to a stop without actually answering the question he had been asked, although he had provided answers to a number of questions which he had not been asked. “Do you think it is the lost parchment?”
Fabrini hesitated for a moment, then nodded almost reluctantly.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, I believe that it is, though to be absolutely certain I would need to examine the original and conduct a number of tests.”
Vitale exhaled. At last it seemed as if the end of their quest might be in sight. But there were still several obvious matters that needed to be addressed, the first of which was exactly what the text on the parchment said.
“The Latin is encrypted,” he said. “How long before it is deciphered?”
“Two of my assistants are working on it as we speak. The first part is very clearly enciphered using a slightly unusual variant of the Atbash cipher, but the second section has so far failed to yield to this technique. But I’m quite sure that it won’t take too long to crack the code. At the moment we are still applying different keywords to the Latin alphabet and using shifted and reversed Atbash, but if this fails to generate the outcome we need, we have sufficient computing power here to attempt a brute-force assault on the cipher.”
“Do you think that will be necessary?” Vitale asked. “As I understand it, a brute-force attack could take weeks or months.”
“It could,” Fabrini agreed, “depending on the complexity of the cipher, and that’s why for the moment we are trying the present approach, using different keywords related to the creator of the manuscript and the order he represented. I personally believe that will be the fastest method of obtaining the solution. We are,” he reminded Vitale, “dealing with a cunning and heretical mind, but more important a cunning and heretical medieval mind, and that means there will be a limit to the degree of complexity he could possibly have employed in the encryption of the document.”
Vitale nodded. “You’ve shown me the translation of the first part, which doesn’t seem to be particularly helpful apart from establishing the probable identity of the author, and you will of course let me have the rest as soon as you have succeeded in deciphering it. But have you any idea what this is? And if it’s important?”
Vitale pointed at one of the sheets of paper on the desk in fr
ont of him, and rested his finger on a symbol at the top of the scanned image of the parchment.
Fabrini leaned forward across the desk, his thin frame, scraggy neck, and long bladelike nose momentarily giving him the appearance of a predatory bird, and looked at the object Vitale was indicating.
“It looks like a rune,” Vitale said, “but it obviously isn’t.”
“You’re quite right,” Fabrini agreed. “We’ve looked at that as well, just in case it was in some way important, and it isn’t. It provides a hint, if you like, to assist somebody trying to decipher the document, but that’s all.”
And before Vitale could end the interview or even change the subject, Fabrini switched back into lecture mode and began a long and complex explanation of the origin, use, and derivation of the symbol.
29
Exeter, Devon
“Now that the police obviously know we were here in Exeter this afternoon,” Robin said, “don’t you think we should leave and go somewhere else?”
“We will be moving,” Mallory replied, “but not right now. I’m quite sure that there’ll be a large police presence in the city by now, and that will probably be the case for about the next twenty-four hours, but unless there are any other signs that we’re still here somewhere, it’ll gradually be relaxed. Manpower, cost, other priorities, all the usual reasons. It’ll be far safer for us if we just slip away quietly sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening.”
“Tricky in that Porsche to do anything quietly, I would have thought.”
“You’re absolutely right. But just because we arrived here in the Porsche doesn’t mean we have to leave in it. In fact, I hadn’t planned to. I’m going to slip out later today and hire a dull and boring box on wheels from a local car hire firm, and then stick the Cayman in an anonymous multistory car park for a week or so. Don’t forget that the bad guys, these Italian thugs, have never seen either of us close up, so what they have to be following is the car. Remove the car, and we should remove that specific threat. And with that wig on, you don’t look anything like Robin Jessop, so even if the police go public and display copies of your photograph on TV and in the newspapers, nobody’s likely to recognize you. I barely did when you walked out of that loo.”
Robin looked crestfallen.
“Do you really think they’ll do that?” she asked.
Mallory nodded. “Almost certainly. They now have three dead men, all murdered execution-style if what Betty told you is correct, and the only common factor in their murders is that the deaths occurred in your apartment. The corporate police mind is a simple structure, fully able to put two and two together and make six or any other number it wants. The men died in your property, so clearly you must be involved. In fact, you’ll be their number-one suspect, and if they can’t find anyone else, they’ll happily try and pin the murders on you.”
Robin’s eyes misted and she shook her head.
Mallory mistook her emotion, and rested his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. “I’m sorry to put it like that and upset you, but you have to be aware of the reality of the situation we’re in.”
She shook her head again.
“I’m not upset,” she snapped. “Well, I am, I suppose, but more than anything else I’m angry. Two days ago I had a quiet and more or less satisfying life, buying and selling books—which I love—and slowly building up my own business. Now, in just a matter of hours, I’m on the run with a man I barely know, trying to get away from both the British police because they’re trying to arrest me for mass murder, and a gang of Italian killers who just want to see me dead. And none of it’s my fault.”
“You’re not dead yet,” Mallory said. “We’ll work our way through this somehow.”
Robin stood up and walked across to the window, pulled back the curtains, and stared out. Then she turned round and looked at Mallory.
“You’re the only bit of luck I’ve had so far,” she said, almost bitterly. “If you hadn’t driven down to Dartmouth and been right beside me when those Italians turned up, I’d probably have been killed last night.”
She strode across to the small desk, pulled out the chair and turned it, and sat down to face Mallory.
“And that wasn’t just a throwaway line,” she said, a determined expression on her face. “I really don’t know anything about you. I mean, I’m sure you’re on the side of the angels, because any one of those bullets could have killed you just as easily as it would have killed me, but apart from your name and the fact that you know about computers and encryption techniques, and seem to be very well informed about the world of intelligence and the way the British police force operates, you’re still a bit of an enigma.”
There was an implied challenge in her gaze, and Mallory nodded.
“Okay,” he replied. “What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with the scar,” Robin said.
“That’s why I know about the police,” he replied, “because I was a police officer for a while. I enjoyed the job, but I was asked, or rather forced, to leave.”
“What happened?”
“As a young beat constable I was stationed in Bristol, and one night I was sent to investigate a domestic disturbance reported by a neighbor at an address on the fringes of a known red-light district. I was the first on the scene. The door was standing ajar, and I could hear a woman screaming inside the house, so I ran inside. There was a grubby bedroom on the ground floor at the back of the house, and in there I found two people. One was a heavily built middle-aged white man wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He was raining punches at a half-naked young black woman he’d driven into one corner of the room.
“At the time, I fondly believed the police were supposed to protect the innocent, a naive view, of course, and not politically correct today, so I ran over to the man and pulled him away from the girl, who I guessed was a hooker. That was a mistake. As he turned round to face me, the man grabbed a beer glass from a table, smashed the end against the wall, and rammed the broken glass into my cheek. That knocked me backward.”
“Dear God,” Robin whispered.
“Hence the scar,” Mallory said, “but that wasn’t the end of it. Then this thug swung the glass again, but this time he was aiming at the woman’s face. She ducked and he missed, but then he drew back his arm again for a second go, this time aiming at her stomach. I forgot about my handcuffs, pulled out my baton, and smashed it down on his forearm. I could hear the crack as the bones broke even over the woman’s screams. That made him drop the glass, obviously, but he swung his left fist at me. So I used the baton again, and broke his other arm. And I really felt pretty good about that, so I gave him a couple more on his ribs and then dropped him with a crack to the side of his head.”
Mallory shrugged.
“Blood was streaming down my face, covering the front of my uniform, and my whole cheek was numb. I had no idea how badly I’d been hurt, but I’d done my job, as I saw it, stopped a serious assault, possibly even a murder. I thought I might even get a commendation out of it. Anyway, five minutes later the room was full of cops, and I was whisked off to a hospital to get sewn up.”
He smiled somewhat bleakly.
“I didn’t get a commendation. In fact, I was arrested in my hospital bed for assault and causing actual bodily harm. When the man who’d attacked the girl came down after his drink or drugs or whatever he’d been on, he found a lawyer and decided to press charges against me for police brutality, for an unprovoked assault, claiming that I had burst into the property and attacked both him and his girlfriend—who of course supported his story—and he’d been forced to use the glass on me to stop the attack. And the senior officers at the station, my bosses, claimed they believed the man’s story. But the problem was the call I’d received from the dispatcher, telling me to go to that address, which was the only reason I’d been in the property, and they knew it. They tried to make that go aw
ay, but they couldn’t because it was logged and on the record. So in the end the assault charges were dropped, on the condition I resigned from the force and agreed not to talk to the media about the incident.”
“Thank you,” Robin said. “Now I see why you have such a low opinion of the boys in blue and also why you know so much about the way they work.”
“It was quite a long time ago now,” he said, “but the scar is a daily reminder. Now, that’s enough about me. We need to work on this blasted parchment. The only way we’re going to make any sense of what’s happened is if we crack the code and read the full text of the manuscript, so let’s make a start right now. Unless you’ve any other questions for me?”
“I’ve got lots,” Robin said, “but they can all wait. Let’s get on with it.”
30
Exeter, Devon
Dante had stopped the Ford Focus right at the end of the shopping arcade where the public telephones were located less than five minutes after Toscanelli received the call, and had waited by the curb while the other two men climbed out of the vehicle to begin their search. Then he’d found a parking place, locked the car, and rejoined them.
They were hampered by not knowing precisely what their quarry looked like. The only one of the three who’d actually seen them was Mario, and the circumstances in which his sighting had occurred had been far from ideal. The girl, he’d told them, was pretty and dark-haired, which was hardly helpful, while the man Jessop was tall, solidly built with fair hair, and seemed to have a kind of faint mark, like a jagged line, on his cheek.
As far as Toscanelli was concerned, the girl was almost irrelevant. Their main target was Jessop himself, and they needed him alive because they still had to recover the parchment. If he had the ancient document with him, they could kill him immediately, but if he had secreted it elsewhere, then Jessop would have to be persuaded to hand it over. Toscanelli was actually hoping that the bookseller would need to be persuaded, because he was looking forward to doing that himself.