The Machiavelli Covenant (40 page)

•
12:35 P.M.

Demi waited alone in the dim light and silence; the door they had entered through closed behind her; the one at the far end where Reverend Beck and Luciana had gone out, shut too. Whether they had left to find Dr. Foxx or to do something else entirely she didn't know.

Once more she looked around the darkened chamber. The high-arched ceiling, the high wooden chairs against either wall, the great wooden desk at the end, the stone walls, the worn stone floor. There was history here. Much of it old. All of it Christian. She wondered if her mother had come here so many years earlier. Wondered if she had once stood where Demi did now. In this room, in this dim light.

Waiting.

For what?

For whom?

•
12:40 P.M.

Again she heard her father's warning. With it came something else, the memory of a person she had long tried to keep from thinking about: a bald, armless octogenarian scholar she had met six years earlier at the beginning of her professional career when she worked for the Associated Press in Rome.

A photo assignment had taken her north into Umbria and Tuscany. A free day in Florence had given her the
opportunity to explore used-book stores—the same as she did everywhere she traveled in Italy—searching for material on Italian witchcraft and looking for anything that might reveal a
boschetto
or coven, past or present, that took as its marker the sign of Aldebaran. It was a search that until that day had turned up nothing. Then, in a tiny bookshop near the Ponte Vecchio, she came upon a slim, tattered fifty-year-old book on Florentine witchcraft. Skimming it, she stopped abruptly at its fourth chapter. Its yellowed title page all but took her breath away. The chapter's title was
"Aradia"
and beneath the printed word was an unmistakable illustration—the
balled cross of Aldebaran
. Heart pounding, she bought the book immediately and took it back to her hotel room. The chapter, like the book itself, was slight, but in reading it she learned of an ancient and secretive
boschetto
of Italian female witches, the
strega
she had told Nicholas Marten about. Called
Aradia
after a fourteenth-century wise woman who brought back La Vecchia Religione, the Old Religion, the
boschetto
revived a number of ancient traditions—an unwritten body of laws, rites and doctrines—and put them into practice in northern and central Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There the chapter ended. The significance of the sign of Aldebaran was never mentioned, nor was word
Aradia
used again anywhere in the book.

Desperate to know more, Demi went to bookstores and museums and visited occult societies and scholars in the Tuscan cities of Siena and Arezzo. From there she went to Bologna and then Milan and finally back to Rome. In all she found nothing more than a brief note that in 1866 an American writer and historian traveling in Italy had learned that a manuscript containing the
name
Aradia
and describing "the ancient secrets of Italian witchcraft" existed somewhere in Tuscany. He searched for months trying to find it but without success. He did, however, come upon an Italian witch named Raffaella who allegedly had seen it and told him of its contents. His conclusion was that the secrets of
Aradia,
or at least Raffaella's interpretation of it, were little more than a mixture of sorcery, medieval heresy, and political radicalism. His analysis ended there, with no mention whatsoever of the sign of Aldebaran.

After that Demi found nothing. Even among the most committed academics further knowledge of the
Aradia
coven that used the sign of Aldebaran seemed nonexistent. Internet searches turned up nothing. Museum queries and phone interviews with practicing witches and witchcraft historians around the world ended the same way.

Then, nearly a year later, and now working for Agence France-Presse, she learned of a reclusive scholar named Giacomo Gela. A bald, emaciated octogenarian and former soldier who had lost both arms in the Second World War, Gela lived in a tiny room in a small village near Pisa and had made the study of Italian witchcraft his life's work. Contacting him, she heard the pause in his voice when she mentioned
Aradia
. When she asked if she might visit and told him of the reason behind her request, he agreed to see her immediately.

In Gela she found a man of immense intellect who not only knew about the enigmatic
Aradia
but about a more secretive order hidden within it. Called
Aradia Minor,
it was referred to in writing simply as the letter
A
followed by the letter
M
but written in a combination of Hebrew and Greek alphabets as "
μ" which made it look more like a vague and innocuous symbol that would be of little
more than passing interest to almost anyone. Even to Gela, the true origin of
Aradia Minor
remained a mystery. What he did know was that for most of the latter half of the sixteenth century it had been centered on the Italian island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, the birthplace and home, Demi would later discover, of Luciana. In the early seventeenth century, and probably in the interests of security,
Aradia Minor
was decentralized and moved back to the mainland, its
boschetti
scattered clandestinely throughout countryside, largely in the region between Rome and Florence.

Aradia Minor's
caution was not without reason, for among its traditions were annual rites that celebrated ancient and often brutal pagan ceremonies that involved blood oaths, sacrifices of living creatures, and human torture, and were performed before several hundred members of a powerful order called the Unknowns. What the purpose of these ceremonies was or who this group of unknowns was remained a mystery. What was acknowledged was that the celebration of these rites began in the late 1530s; that they were held at various temples secreted throughout Europe; and that they were performed annually and for years at a time throughout the centuries, only to go suddenly and inexplicably dormant, sometimes for decades or more, before beginning once again.

Chillingly, Giacomo Gela believed this was one of
Aradia Minor's
active periods; its identifying marker, the sign of Aldebaran; its singular traditions still practiced. Where it was centered, or why it existed, or for what reason, remained as unclear now as it had in the past, yet he was certain there had to be a strong rationale behind it, one that was highly focused and required not just great secrecy but considerable funding because too many people were involved and the pageant was too regular, too
guarded, and too extreme for the expense not be substantial.

It was then Gela's eyes had narrowed and his voice had become shrill with warning: "Do not take anything you have learned here further than the walls of this room."

The expense was not
Aradia Minor's
alone, he told her; history was littered with the corpses of those who had tried to know more. To make certain she fully understood, he bared a secret few people still living knew—that while it was true he had lost his arms in the Second World War, the butchering had not come in battle; instead it had happened when he had inadvertently come upon one of
Aradia Minor's
ceremonies in an alpine forest deep in the Italian Dolomites where he was on patrol. That he was alive today was only because those who cut off his arms purposely failed to finish him off.

"To kill me would have been easy. Instead they bound my wounds and carried me from the woods and left me by the roadside. The reason, I now know, was to leave behind a hideous living reminder, a warning for anyone else who might try to find out what happened and attempt to uncover the secrets of
Aradia Minor."

Abruptly his eyes had locked on hers and his voice had suddenly raged with fury: "How many hours of how many days of how many years have I sworn at God, damning him, wishing they had finished me. The life I have lived like this, and for as long as I have, has been far crueler than death could ever be."

The way Gela spoke, the sound of his voice, the rage in his eyes, the way he sat there armless and cross-legged in his tiny room, was horrifying. In combination with her father's letter it might well have been enough then for her to abandon her journey altogether. But she
hadn't; instead she had deliberately pushed it to the back of her memory, locked it away, and kept it there.

Until now. Waiting here, alone, in this room, in this corner of the monastery, he suddenly broke free of her memory. She saw his face in front of her. Again heard his sharp warning.
Do not take anything you have learned here further than the walls of this room
.

A sound near the back of the room made the vision fade and Demi looked up. The door had just been opened and Reverend Beck and Luciana were coming toward her. A third person she couldn't see clearly was with them. Then as they neared, she did.

"Welcome, Demi, I'm pleased you could join us," he said warmly. His face, his shock of white hair, his hands with their extraordinarily long fingers, unmistakable.

Merriman Foxx.

•
12:44 P.M.

The green-and-yellow cable car reached the upper terminal and stopped. A moment later an attendant opened the doors and the passengers began to file out. Marten glanced at the president, then followed an Italian couple out of the car and up the walkway toward the monastery.

Forty seconds later he reached the top of the walkway and stopped. The monastery complex was directly across from him. The buildings he could see all seemed to be
constructed of the same beige-colored sand or limestone. The edifice closest to him and on the far side of a paved roadway was seven stories high. One nearby was eight. Another near it was ten and had a huge kind of bell-tower on top. And these were only a part of the whole. The main attraction, the basilica, was across a wide plaza and up a broad stone staircase, both of which were filled with tourists.

•
12:50 P.M.

Marten walked leisurely across the plaza, making it relatively easy for Beck to find him. As he went, a man passed him from behind and kept on walking. President Harris.

•
12:52 P.M.

Marten kept walking. Ahead of him he saw the president veer left, pass a tour group, then disappear beyond them, following Miguel's directions, going toward the Hotel Abat Cisneros and the restaurant that was part of it.

Marten slowed his pace and looked around, playing the first-time visitor trying to get his bearings and decide where to go next. He wondered whether Demi had lied to them. That neither she nor Beck nor Luciana nor Merriman Foxx, for that matter, was anywhere near here. That she had sent them miles out of the way while she and the others met Foxx somewhere else entirely, maybe even in Barcelona itself.

"Mr. Marten," the deep, velvety voice of Reverend Rufus Beck suddenly called out. Marten looked up to see the congressional chaplain alone, walking toward him across the plaza from the direction of the basilica.

"Mr. Marten," Beck said again as he reached him. "How nice to see you. Ms. Picard told me you might be coming."

"She did?" Marten tried to sound surprised.

"Yes," Beck smiled warmly. "I was just coming from services; perhaps you would care to join us for a cup of coffee."

"By 'us' you mean you and Ms. Picard."

"There will be two others, Mr. Marten. A good friend of mine from Italy, a woman named Luciana, and a friend of yours, Dr. Foxx."

"Foxx?"

Again Beck smiled. "He asked me to find you. He wanted to resolve any 'misgivings' you might have had following your conversation in Malta. The restaurant in the hotel here has a small, private room where you and he can speak openly."

"Restaurant?"

"Yes, unless you'd prefer to meet somewhere else."

Marten grinned at the irony. Here they were trying to get Foxx to the restaurant, and now he was inviting him to the same place. The private room might be a problem, but with Beck and Demi and Luciana right there it would be all the easier to tell Foxx he preferred to talk to him alone and suggest they take a walk outside.

"The restaurant's fine, reverend," he said graciously. "I'd be more than happy to hear what Dr. Foxx has to say about my 'misgivings.' "

•
1:00 P.M

"Welcome to Montserrat, Mr. Marten," Merriman Foxx stood as they came in. Demi and the witch, Luciana, sat opposite Foxx at a round linen-covered table, coffee steaming from cups before them, a small plate of shortbread cookies or polvorones in the center of the table. There was a chair for Beck, and a waiter brought another for Marten. The room was as Beck had said, both small and private.