The Celtic Conspiracy (27 page)

“Ruth? Are you home?” MacClary was feeling guilty about not saying good-bye to Ruth before he left the last time and about not explaining to her why everything was in such a mess.

“Ronnie? Yes, I’m here. What in heaven’s name happened here?” she said, coming into the foyer. “Once a week I go to see my friends, and this time I come back to find the house filled with strange men. At least Deborah was still here to give me some idea of what was going on. Otherwise I would have been scared to death. But I still don’t understand why they had to check all the outlets just because the electricity went out. As if it didn’t happen all the time! They made a right mess of everything.”

“Oh, Ruth, I feel just awful. I had so much to do, and I had to rush off to Washington. I’m terribly sorry!”

Ruth looked at him kindly. “It’s all right. Everything is back to normal again. Deborah helped me put things back in place before she left.”

MacClary couldn’t continue to look at Ruth without thinking of the question that had been plaguing him. “Ruth, why didn’t you ever tell me about what happened to my father?”

Ruth looked past him and out the window. “So Jennifer told you. My God, Ronnie, is it really so hard to understand?”

MacClary sat down and looked around. “So many years, Ruth, so many years I’ve been trying to find a way to bring my father’s search to some kind of conclusion. Who knows if I would have done that if I had known that it had cost him his life?”

“Then you should take it as a warning now, Ronald. You really can’t understand why I did what I did? I couldn’t deny your mother her dying wish. You were all she had after Sean’s death. She prayed every night that nothing would happen to you and that you would be able to live your life in peace.”

MacClary laughed mirthlessly. “It’s too late for that now, and it’s just as well.”

He headed to the library, rubbing his left eye, which had begun to twitch. MacClary made himself comfortable there. It had become his custom to listen to one of his favorite Mozart symphonies after a trip. Today he put on a CD of the Prague Symphony and sat down in one of the old leather chairs. A few minutes later, he was so lost in the music that he didn’t hear the telephone ringing.

“Ronnie...Ronald...” Ruth had to shake him gently to get a reaction. “You have a call.”

“Oh, um, all right. Thank you, Ruth.”

MacClary stood up and turned the music down before he took the phone from Ms. Copendale.

“Ronald, it’s Jennifer. I did it! Louise Jackson filed the suit—expedited, no less—at the district court in Boston.”

MacClary’s focus returned instantly. “Fantastic, Jennifer, fantastic! That’s just what we need. We’ll proceed as planned. I’ll contact my friend Alan Montgomery today and ask him to arrange a press conference. If we can’t get any further in Boston, you can present everything to the experts in the field and make the findings of our consultants public. We can’t allow the media to scoop the story and take this out of our hands. Deborah has translated everything, and there are apparently still more surprises waiting for us in the scrolls. We’ll coordinate the timing tomorrow. When do you think Rome will receive the written indictment?”

“Judging by the speed that Louise displayed today, I’m sure they’ll have it by tomorrow. And if I know Rome, they’ll already have a policy in place for a response.”

“We just have to hope that Thomas keeps his promise and that our two brave treasure hunters don’t fall flat on their faces in Orvieto.”

“Yes, we do. We’ll see each other tomorrow in Washington?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

Jennifer hung up, and MacClary turned up the music again before he sat back down in his chair.

He closed his eyes, gave himself over to the music. Within a few minutes, he was sleeping soundly.

* * *

Deborah had spent the whole day with Adam investigating the dome. They’d been able to find some evidence that there had to be more underneath the structure than just old graves of priests or Etruscans, the original inhabitants of this ancient city.

“I’m wondering how Ronald knew about this archive,” Adam said suspiciously. “Even the most esoteric conspiracy theories on the Internet have never mentioned anything about it.”

“He knows what he’s doing. This dome isn’t just some random church, you know. The entire city was constructed by the Etruscans on this rocky plateau. It has a secret labyrinth of cellars, passageways, and cisterns running through it. There’s a reason they talk about a ‘city upon a city,’” Deborah said.

“You mean, the archive isn’t in the dome? It’s under the rock?”

“The construction of the dome is based on a legend, the same one from which the Feast of Corpus Christi stems. According to the legend, in 1263 in Bolsena, a little town near here, blood is supposed to have flowed from the Eucharistic bread. But there is another reason I
think we’re in the right place: in the Middle Ages, several popes were entrenched here, among them Clement VII. All the secret escape routes and cellars would make it an ideal hiding place.”

Deborah and Adam looked like a pair of backpackers looking for a hotel late at night. No one took any notice of them as it grew quieter and quieter in the streets around the dome.

“Wait!”

Deborah grabbed Adam by the arm. A car approached the dome. They hid behind a corner of the wall and watched as three priests went up to a side door and disappeared into the building.

“What are they doing here at this hour?”

“Better late than never.” Deborah grinned.

Adam pointed to the ventilation shaft they were standing on. “Do you see this exhaust grate? It’s not very old. I can see light down there.”

They looked at each other in silence, and then a childlike smile spread across Deborah’s face. “Bull’s-eye, Adam. I think this is it,” she whispered. “Now we have to figure out where our late-night supplicants were headed.”

A quarter of an hour passed as they stood in the dark watching the parked car. Then the priests came out again and drove away. At the same time, the light from the ventilation shaft went out and they stood in complete darkness.

“This is our only chance, I think,” Adam said as he started to use a crowbar to remove the grate from its frame.

“Stop! Are you crazy?”

Deborah took several instruments out of her bag and lit up the shaft. “There’s nothing there. We must not be in the right place. And if there’s no security here...wait a minute...there is something...”

Deborah shook some fine ash from a small container into the shaft, making it possible to see two moving laser beams. She then lit up the shaft until she could see an electrical circuit behind a casing.

“Is that it?” Adam asked.

“Well, I don’t see anything else. It would be far too easy if it were, wouldn’t it? But I’ll test it anyhow.” She took a small netbook out of her bag and placed several firm clamps on the cord. “This is no big deal for Thomas’s program.”

“
Thomas’s
program?”

“Yes, of course. Did you think I wrote it during my free time while I was studying at the university? Still, the security seems flimsy to me. We should be careful.”

“No, I can see it. We have to go down here, I’m sure.”

Deborah closed her eyes for a moment and then nodded. The scene reminded her of that moment at MacClary’s when they were all standing in front of the vitrine. Without Adam’s uncanny intuition leading them to the coordinates of the cave, none of the events of the last few days would have been possible. They pushed an iron stake into the ground and tied a rope to it.

“I’ll go first,” she said, already letting herself down carefully. When she got to the bottom, she called, “Adam,
I think...I think we’ve really found it, but...oh, come down, and see for yourself.”

Adam wrapped the second rope around his chest, tying it with a climber’s knot. When he landed, he shone his flashlight through the bars of the grate. They could see bookshelves filled with old files and another entrance next to the door opposite them, just visible through a glass pane. There was a sign that said something about conservation and restoration, and it had the seal of the Vatican.

Deborah had already begun to loosen the bars with a chisel and a rubber hammer, finding it surprisingly easy to do so. “They must be awfully sure that no one will find this place,” she said. “Somehow I can’t imagine we’re really going to find what we’re looking for here. They should have all sorts of security devices here.”

“I’d be just as happy to do without any more hurdles.”

The last bar slipped out of her fingers and fell with a loud clang onto the floor. “Damn it,” she whispered into her turtleneck, and they both ducked down. However, after the clanging subsided, it was replaced with absolute quiet.

“Do I have to pray now, or what?” Adam joked.

“Did you hear something?”

“No, not a thing.”

“Good. Still, we don’t have much time. Someone must have heard that. I’ll go first.”

Deborah noticed that her hands were trembling. Adam must have noticed as well.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “Give me your hands.”

“What?”

“Give me your hands!”

She gave him a skeptical look but stretched her hands out obediently. Adam took them firmly into his own. Two little hands in his own enormous ones.

“Trust me, OK?”

To her surprise, Deborah could feel herself calming down in Adam’s warm grasp. “That helped. Thank you.”

“Now go.”

Deborah pushed her upper body through the opening and let herself down silently. The room was enormous. The walls were lined with shelves full of old documents. “I don’t believe it. This is a collection of the forbidden books of the Inquisition. Here, look...”

“We don’t have time for that,” Adam said sharply. He carefully opened the swinging door to the corridor. It was pitch black and deathly quiet. Was it really possible that no one had heard the bar fall? Could they really be that lucky?

Just as Adam started into the hall, the door slammed against him, hitting his forehead. He threw himself back against the door so hard that his assailant slammed against the opposite wall and slid to the floor.

Deborah ran into the hall, scanning up and down the corridor with her flashlight. She saw a dark figure running away, but he was too far gone to stop him. If he went to get help, they had at most a few seconds before they had to get back up the shaft if they were going to avoid being seen.

“Adam, we need to get out of here!”

“Not a chance! Let’s take your pictures.”

As if she were operating on remote control, Deborah got her camera out of her pocket and took all the pictures she could. She cursed softly as she realized that the flash was throwing light everywhere, even on the street in front of the ventilation shafts.

Adam gesticulated wildly with both hands. “Come in here!” Using a crowbar, he broke open the locked door to the conservation room and turned on the light.

“Are you insane? Turn out the light!”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.” He pointed to the back table, where several scrolls were spread open. “Quick, give me a box.”

With lightning speed Deborah took one of the boxes from her shoulder, just like the ones she had used in Austria for transporting parchment. Seemingly uncaring of the danger they were in, Adam rolled the scroll into the box. Deborah got a fleeting glance of the writing on it.

“Wait a minute, that’s...a scroll about Sopatros...he was...”

“We can get to all of that later,” Adam said, closing the box and running toward the ventilation shaft.

Both of them pulled themselves up the shaft as quickly as they could. They sprinted toward the narrow streets right next to the dome. Deborah saw an armed man coming out of the dome and running toward them. They hadn’t seen him before.

Suddenly there was a shot that just missed Deborah and hit a wall. As stone shards sprayed, she ran into a side street just in time to avoid the next shot. One street to the left, then again to the right. Both of them were running as fast as they could. They were lucky: the streets were too narrow for a car to follow. Somewhat relieved, but still frantically looking over their shoulders, they kept on until they reached the dark safety of one of the many labyrinthine back courtyards.

Deborah and Shane waited there until almost dawn before they slowly inched their way back to the rental car. There was no one around. The police and their pursuers from the dome must have given up at some point. Relieved, they fell into the car and drove to the airport.

The knock on the door was so loud that Salvoni jumped at the sound.

“Salvoni, where did you store the parchments?” Lambert barked as he entered.

“We had them brought to Orvieto after the Holy Father examined them. He was quite shocked.”

“Who arranged it?”

“Who arranged what, Cardinal?”

“The transport of the parchments to Orvieto. What else have we been talking about here?”

“Excuse me, I’m confused. Contas arranged it, Cardinal.”