The Alchemist’s Code (27 page)

“I'm in Naples, but you must promise me two things.”

“What?”

“First of all, that you'll believe me, even though what I'm going to tell you will sound crazy.”

“Lorenzo, I've given up expecting logical explanations from you, so, yes, I'll believe you. What's the second thing?”

“That you'll help me to chase down another legend that might save my wife.”

Oscar sighed. “All right, we'll be expecting you.”

We arrived at the San Ferdinando police station in about twenty minutes, bringing with us all my grandfather's correspondence from Antonio's collection. I quickly told Oscar about my trip to Kiev with Anna and how we were found by the people who had held me captive and had, presumably, killed Bruno. I introduced him to Navarro, telling Oscar that he had saved me, I told him about the Lodge of the Nine, the Baphomet and what my grandfather had done, staging his death to protect his family.

Oscar followed the whole story very carefully, and when I'd finished he nodded and handed me a dossier. “This fills in the blanks in your story. We now have a clearer picture. Your grandfather, François David, Aram Nazariantz, Lev Nemiroff and Kirk McCourt were part of this Group 9, which was nothing more than a cover for what you know as the Lodge of the Nine. Obviously, although the intelligence about him is still top secret, Vladimir Glyz, the grandfather of your elusive Russian friend, was a member of the same gang.”

“That seems obvious.”

“And that makes six. Shall we assume that Bruno had ties with this Lodge of the Nine as well, perhaps through a relative, although you didn't know it?”

I shook my head. “No, I think Bruno was killed to send a message to me or to my grandfather.”

Oscar raised an eyebrow.

“You did promise to believe me, didn't you?”

Oscar narrowed his eyes, rubbed his forehead with the gesture typical of someone who is trying to force their thoughts into order, then he smoothed down his white quiff. “All right, go ahead.”

I handed him the postcard of Rome that was among Navarro's papers.

“Both Antonio and I received this postcard at almost the same time last summer. It's identical, and signed by the same person – the owner of a tavern in Rome. A person that I've never seen in my life.”

“'You must come immediately, it's a beautiful place, where time has stopped'. I don't understand, what's strange about it?”

“On the surface, nothing, except that the picture of this villa was hidden by a view of Anguillara, behind which there is a message signed by a certain Giovanni.”

I gave him the photo that was super-imposed on the postcard.

“I don't know any Giovanni in Rome, Chief,” Navarro confirmed.

“The way I see it, this is a request for help from my grandfather. I've called this Villa Gondemar. It's the headquarters of some group of missionaries. They know my grandfather, or at least they knew him by the fictitious name he allegedly used until his death, Anastasio Elpìda.”

Oscar stared at the postcard for a few moments then looked back at me.

“It may seem hard to believe, but I'm sure my grandfather was still alive this summer and sent this postcard in an attempt to make contact with us.”

“Well, if he did, he chose a rather complicated way of going about it if you only realised it today,” said Oscar.

Meanwhile, he had started typing on his laptop keyboard. He waited for a second and, after reading what appeared on the screen, turned to look at us. “Villa Gondemar, belonging the order of the Missionaries of the Temple of Jerusalem. What a name—” Then his attention lingered on the symbol of the congregation.

A simple red cross pattée.

“The unmistakable symbol of the Templars.”

I nodded. “It's absurd, but the very same thing occurred to me.”

Oscar raised an eloquent eyebrow. “Well, if it's the Baphomet you're looking for and the Baphomet your grandfather and the Lodge of the Nine were guarding, then it's not impossible that Lorenzo senior took refuge in a place run by people who seem to have a strange familiarity with the Templars. And if the people who killed Bruno were after the same thing, then perhaps finding that object will help me find the murderer, which is my job in all of this. Which means, in a nutshell, that I'll help you.”

Reconstruction based on the statement of Dr Brad Höffnunger

Rome, January, 2013

Camille Ferri was sitting on a couch in the living room on the ground floor of the Villa of Chimeras. Furnished with fine Mackintosh style furniture and with a huge, white fireplace in the centre, the living room was immersed in deep silence, the only sound that of the clicking of the keyboard of the laptop Camille was working on.

Despite being an unscrupulous woman little prone to emotion, Camille felt some fear of Raymond Severus Woland that she couldn't explain.

Fear mixed with attraction and gratitude. If it hadn't been for him, in fact, nothing and no one would have prevented her from spending at least twenty years of her life within the four walls of a cell. The granddaughter of an Italian-French party official working for the Vichy collaborationist government and a militant archaeologist who was a member of several far-right French groups, she had tried to re-establish the occult Nazi group known as the Thule Society, completely unaware of the fact that it had never actually disappeared. After a dramatic attempt to steal some archaeological finds stolen by the Nazis and kept in a museum in Vichy – a criminal act which injured several museum guards and police – she had been found guilty of attempted multiple murder, theft and damage to French historical and cultural heritage. She was sentenced to twenty years, to be served at the Santé, the historic prison in Paris.

Camille would never forget the day when a warder had given her a slip of paper with some instructions and a little blue pill. She immediately thought it must be a trick to get rid of her, but the note bore an unmistakeable signature: the symbol of the Thule Society. The instructions were short and disturbing:

By then, she didn't care even if she did die. She considered her life over anyway. Further reassured by the symbol of the Thule society, she did what the message told her. After dinner she swallowed the pill and then, a few moments later, she felt first a strange warmth in her face and then heard a slight noise, like the sizzle of butter in a pan. She touched her face and realised that it was covered in growths that kept on swelling. Terrified, she called the warders, and they arrived instantly. At the sight of that horrible scene, they put her on a stretcher to take her immediately to the hospital, since it was evident that the prison nurse could do nothing for her.

An escorted ambulance left immediately, but would never arrive at its destination. The Hôpital Cochin, the nearest to the Santé, was just a kilometre away, but that was far enough for the Thule men to organize the break out. The little procession, two police cars as escorts and an ambulance in the middle, came quickly to the Boulevard de Port-Royal, where the market vendors were dismantling the stalls. A large refrigerated van and an ambulance, identical to the one Camille was inside, which were parked at the kerb suddenly set off. In a daring manoeuvre, the van squeezed between the ambulance containing Camille and the car following her and the other vehicle, the ambulance, pulled right behind the prison car at the front, so that there were two identical ambulances for a brief moment, one behind the other. Within seconds, the van and the ambulance carrying Camille broke away from the group, leaving the two escort cars disorientated and thus giving the Thule society time to disappear.

After about half an hour, her face was back to normal, to her great relief, and the men involved in her escape ditched the ambulance and the van, before getting her into a large black car with tinted windows and taking her to a luxurious villa fifty kilometres from Paris, where, with a process similar to what had caused the fake skin rash, they quickly – and temporarily – altered her features. From there, she was taken to a small airport where a powerful private jet bound for Los Angeles was awaiting her.

In the Californian city, she finally met the mastermind behind it all – Raymond Severus Woland, honorary rector of Woland University and founder of Woland Nanotech, a pioneering company in the field of nanotechnology as applied to mankind. Its official goal was the treatment of various types of disease through the use of micro-machines as small as human cells, but it didn't take Camille long to discover the real purpose of its research. And she liked it, because Woland offered her a part in his most ambitious project.

“I appreciated your attempt to re-establish the Thule Society,” he said welcoming her into his luxurious mansion in Beverly Hills, “although, actually, there was no need. The original, genuine brotherhood had never disappeared. But you couldn't know that. You see, I'm one of the few original members left – I guard the archives and everything the Führer didn't manage to commandeer after the dissolution of the society. A dissolution that never actually happened.”

That first conversation was enough for Camille to become completely fascinated by Woland, in whom she recognized the master she had long been seeking.

Now she was there, in that eccentric villa on the Aventine, ready to go into action once again and play her part in Woland's ambitious plan. She knew there would be deaths, but she didn't care. The goal was well worth a few miserable lives. The power of the Baphomet was beyond her wildest imagination.

“Good morning, Camille.”

Lost in thought, she hadn't noticed anyone enter. She spun round, and recognised the elegant figure of Caesar Valentin Vorjas.

“Oh, Caesar, welcome – I didn't hear you come in.”

The man approached her and kissed her hand. “I apologize if I scared you.”

His small, bewitching eyes, his thin, controlled lips which could open into disarming smiles, his neat goatee and the grey hair that hung long down his neck made him look like a nobleman of the past. Had it not been for the robes he was wearing, he would have had hundreds of women at his feet.

Caesar was a high priest of the Catholic Church, one of the most powerful, and a great friend of Woland. His real business was obviously kept secret from everyone. To the public, Woland was a generous funder of the charity work of the Holy Roman Church both in the United States and in South America, and thus was very much to the liking of the Vatican. And of the Pope himself.

“Is Raymond inside?”

Camille nodded. “Yes, with the doctor. So, what news do you have? We're all on tenterhooks.”

Caesar took off his coat and placed it on the couch. He was dressed in black, but had no distinguishing marks that would identify his high ecclesiastical office. He smiled and poured himself a drink. “The information was correct, the girl
was
precious. Well, we obviously had to use some unorthodox means to get her to talk, but she eventually led us to the right place.”

Camille understood instantly what he was implying, and felt a thrill of sadistic pleasure at the thought of how Bastian must have enjoyed himself. “Isn't it incredible how stupidly they behaved, hiding it, if you can even call it 'hiding', in such an unsafe place?”

Caesar drank up his glass and looked at her seriously. “Quite the contrary. In fact, they must have been brilliant if it has taken us all this time to find it. But now comes the hard part – gathering all the pieces which are scattered.”

“And we shall do it with all the means at our disposal, stopping at nothing.”

The voice was that of Woland, which now, however, possessed a vigour it had lacked just an hour before. The ailing old man had disappeared and now, in front of Camille and Caesar, there was a man who looked no more than seventy, with eyes of fire that could turn a forest to ashes.

He walked over to the Spanish prelate and embraced him.

“Bring me to him, Caesar – bring me to the Baphomet.”

Events reconstructed by Lorenzo Aragona

Rome, January 2013

Half an hour later, Navarro, Oscar and I were in the car. Given the time, we had discussed whether we should leave that night or the following day and in the end, had opted for an immediate departure.

I had promised Father Palminteri that I would be there early the next morning, but deep down I was convinced that every wasted second might be fatal for Àrt. Before leaving I had called her and I was heartened by her cheerful voice.

“Hello darling, you sound well. How are you?”

“Good enough. The doctor is happy with my condition and I'm feeling fitter. I also took a stroll down the hallway… and I didn't even fall down!”

Her love of life touched me. “I'm glad. I love you, Àrt, stay strong.”

I avoided telling her about my grandfather. In the light of what Herzog and his friends had done to me, I feared that whoever was behind these dramatic events might be monitoring every aspect of my life, so it was better to be cautious. I would have time to talk to her about everything, I was certain.

Before leaving, Oscar had made an important phone call as well.

He called an American friend who worked in the NATO military police, a certain Benjamin Grazer, who, having been in the archives of the US Department of Defence for a long time, knew plenty about the unofficial history of the Second World War.

Oscar had mentioned Group 9, sensing that Benjamin must know something about it, and asked him if it was possible to trace its members. His friend's reaction was curious, but perhaps not unexpected.