Sia Amieri sat on one of the two chairs in his hotel room, a small plastic case on the bed in front of him. He held the towel against the crease where the bullet had torn through his side, goring through the fatty flesh of his waist and taking some of the muscle beneath with it. The wound was painful, but hardly life-threatening. He’d been through far worse.
Amieri unscrewed a tiny, single serving bottle of
Finlandia
vodka he’d found in the mini bar and poured it on the wound, wincing as the alcohol burned the bacteria away. He’d threaded the needle of the hotel sewing kit with dental floss, an old trick from his operational days. It was far stronger than thread and wouldn’t bio-degrade, making for perfect stitching material. Fishing line would have been better, but he didn’t have any, so he’d make do with floss.
The bleeding had slowed to an ooze. Steeling himself for the ordeal to come, he put a washrag in his mouth to bite on and started sewing the wound shut. It had been a while since he’d had to do so, but it all came back to him as the needle punctured the ragged edge of the tear. Like riding a bicycle. His eyes streamed from the pain as he pulled the floss through and began closing the wound, but he continued on, machine-like. There was no point in delaying the inevitable, and the sooner he was done, the sooner he could get back out and deal with the girl.
Five minutes later he spat the rag onto the floor and moved to the bathroom to rinse the blood from his hands. He’d need to change his shirt and pants and get some water and fruit juice to replenish his fluids. He’d lost a fair amount of blood, but was no worse for wear. Which was lucky. Two inches to the left and it would have been a different story.
The attack on Amieri had come as a shock. He’d lost his local contact in the shooting, all of which had been with silenced weapons, telling him he was dealing with professional adversaries. Which could only mean one of two things – either the girl had pulled in some sort of pro help via unknown channels, or the Order was on the ground and willing to engage in a lethal manner. In the end, it wouldn’t make any difference – Sia Amieri was an unstoppable force of nature. And he wouldn’t be surprised again.
He powered up his cell phone and called Dr. Frank.
“Speak,” Frank’s distinctive voice answered.
“I lost my associate here to gunfire, but eliminated the driver,” Amieri said dispassionately.
“And the girl?”
“I was ambushed by unknown assailants. I took a bullet and had to take evasive action,” Amieri explained.
“I see. And I repeat my question. What about the girl?”
“I lost her. For now.”
Silence on the line radiated disapproval more than any scolding could have. He’d failed his master yet again.
“What will you do to find her?” Frank demanded.
“It’s a given that as soon as Cross contacts his office, we’ll hear about it. That’s just a matter of time. He had to run without any time to take precautions, so he’ll need to stay in touch with them. I’ll await the inevitable,” Amieri said.
“I’m not so sure.” Frank shifted gears. “Do we know if they found anything in the church?” he asked.
“We have to presume it’s the clue that Cross’s decrypted document pointed to.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. We don’t know if he’s seen the Scroll, but if he has, and this parchment is related, which we have to assume it is, then we now have no idea if he’s cracked the code or not. We need to do better than we’ve been doing.”
Frank had his own cryptologist on call in Russia who had made short work of the data the office had sent to Cross, which Frank had gotten shortly after Cross had received it. The Russian had tried Latin as one of the possible languages right off the bat because of the age of the document, and from there he’d come to the same conclusions Cross had – although in addition to immediately putting the Basilica of Saint Clemente under twenty-four hour surveillance, Frank had also dispatched a team to a second possible location in France, just in case.
But now they knew Rome was the right call, and they’d have to stay on top of Cross to keep track of Twain’s daughter’s whereabouts. If Frank had ever had any doubt about Cross’s involvement with the girl, this ended it; he had to assume that there was only one reason she’d sought him out – to decrypt the Scroll. Frank silently cursed his luck so far. If he’d been just an hour or two earlier, he could have been ahead of this instead of reacting to events.
Amieri winced as he splashed more alcohol on the sutured gunshot wound. “I won’t disappoint you again. Just tell me where to go, and I’ll get them.”
“I know you will, my son, I know you will. Leave your phone on. I’ll be in touch as soon as we have more information,” Frank said soothingly before disconnecting.
Frank reclined in his leather executive chair and glared through the window of his home-based office at the London night skyline. Thank God he’d had the presence of mind to get some assets moving in Florence when he’d figured out that Twain’s daughter had flown the coop in the States. It had been a reasonable assumption that she might seek Cross out, given the obvious respect her father had for his progress on the Voynich – the letter and a few notes Amieri had photographed made clear that the Professor believed he was a significant new talent. Cross had been a question mark until Frank’s men in Florence had placed him with the girl in the internet café. It could only mean one thing.
Frank had been late to that party, but because of the steps he’d taken, he would know whenever Cross contacted his staff back in Florence, which he’d have to do sooner or later, following his abrupt departure. There had been no signs of anything at his apartment, leading Frank to conclude that the contact with the girl was recently established.
Frank had the sensation of events accelerating. Perhaps it wasn’t terrible that Cross was in the picture. His parchment had likely provided a missing puzzle piece they’d never suspected, and it would hopefully save them time once Frank got his hands on the Scroll. He suspected that, even without it, he could eventually decode the Scroll if he put a team on just that and spent whatever it cost to have them do nothing else, but if he could save the expense and effort…
So much the better.
He glanced around his richly appointed suite and spotted the bottle of eighteen-year-old scotch on the marble bar. Why not? He’d never been closer to solving the ultimate ecclesiastic mystery. It was now almost a foregone conclusion, as the noose tightened on Cross and the girl. They were now running, alone, their driver dead, with Amieri and presumably the Order in hot pursuit. Besides which, it would help him sleep. Maybe a double just to be safe.
Frank poured three fingers into a crystal tumbler and sipped the amber spirit, savoring the rich smoky taste as it burned its way down his throat. He felt a quickening and smiled to himself. Years of research were about to pay huge dividends.
It was just a matter of time until the trap was sprung and he had the Scroll’s secret in his possession. Which would make him the most powerful man in the world if the whispered rumors were even close to being true.
Steven slowed the pace once he and Natalie were two blocks away from the church. Other than a few random drunken pedestrians they were the only ones on the long streets, lined with four and five story centuries-old residential buildings. They hadn’t spoken a word since they’d bolted. After walking one more block, they hailed a taxi and told him to take them to the Roma Termini – the main train station. Even at two in the morning it was sure to have plenty of traffic, and Steven hoped it would be easy to find someplace to sit and collect themselves and digest what had just happened.
He’d expected Natalie to be in shock, but she remained calm and was barely winded from the sprint. Once in the back of the taxi, she adjusted her wig and, in a hushed whisper, asked Steven what had happened. Steven told her that Frederick had been murdered – stabbed to death, with his presumed assailant dead only feet from where he’d fallen. She nodded, no change in her expression.
“What do you think happened?” she asked in a monotone.
He regarded her cautiously. “Obviously, somehow, we were tracked. But I have no idea how. Regardless, you have me officially convinced that we’re in deep shit.”
“Glad it finally dawned on you.”
“After this, I’m a believer,” Steven observed.
Natalie stared without focus through the taxi window as they rolled along the late-night downtown streets. She frowned. “I’d say we have a real problem now. Rome’s a big place, but not big enough.”
“I know.”
Natalie went silent, obviously upset over Frederick, and Steven let her be. She needed to deal with it in her own way, and his mind was racing over the ramifications of the attack, as well as on the ancient message they’d found. They sat quietly, lost in their respective thoughts for the duration of the trip. Even at the late hour, traffic was stop and go, thanks to the late night party crowd, exacerbated by an accident that brought their thoroughfare to a standstill.
The driver finally pulled up to the station; they paid him, tipped him and climbed out. A bank of lights bathed the entrance in a blinding glare at the front of the massive contemporary steel and glass terminal.
Inside, they headed for a fast food restaurant whose familiar golden arches twinkled in welcome. Once seated, two sodas before them, Steven breached the topic that was nagging at him.
“We need to get back to the hotel. Now.”
“That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard. We don’t know how much whoever killed Frederick knows, but we have to assume it’s a lot,” Natalie warned.
“True. But I need my passport and money, which is in the safe. And if we want to have any shot at decrypting our find, we’ll need the program I loaded on the laptop. We’re pretty much boned without those. We have no chance of traveling without my papers, or of figuring out what the basilica’s parchment says without the computer.”
“Steven…that’s a real problem. We can’t just traipse in there without attracting attention.”
“True. But I have a plan. Sort of.” Steven proceeded to fill her in on his thinking. She sat quietly, and then nodded.
“It could work. But a lot of things need to go right.”
“I know. But I don’t think we have any other options. And the longer we linger here, the more time our attackers have to regroup and stake out the hotel. I say we go in now and take our chances,” Steven pressed.
“Okay. I go in first, take the elevator to the third floor and wait for you by the fire exit at the end of the hall…”
“Right. We can check the street for any surveillance on our approach. If there isn’t any, we’re still ahead of them, and we grab our stuff and get out. If there is, we’ll need a plan B. Which I haven’t thought of yet. But having Frederick’s gun is a decent equalizer.”
“I don’t like it, but I guess there aren’t any other options. Why don’t I go in and clean out both our rooms, and you keep watch on the street?” Natalie asked.
“And what if someone’s waiting in one of the rooms?” Steven countered.
“I’ll take the gun,” Natalie offered.
Steven considered it. “Have you ever used one?” he asked.
Natalie shot him a scornful look. “Steven, there are a lot of things you don’t know about me. Maybe if you’re good I’ll tell you a few. One you might find interesting is that I graduated top of my class at Quantico,” Natalie said.
“Quantico? You were FBI?” Steven asked incredulously. Natalie looked like a lot of things, but a Fed wasn’t one of them.
“It was a while ago, but yes, I spent six years with the Bureau as a Special Agent. I know how to use a gun…and I’ve used one more times than I care to remember. Probably a lot more than you ever have.”
He looked at her with new appreciation. “You may well have. I suppose it sounds like I’m being a complete chauvinist if I insist we do this together…”
“Correct. Now that’s settled, let’s stop the back and forth and get to the hotel before they have a chance to stake it out. I just wish I knew how they tracked us to the church,” Natalie groused.
“There are only a few possibilities, and none of them are good. Either they followed the car somehow, or Danny tipped them off.”
“What about your office?” Natalie asked.
“Impossible. All they sent me was the decrypted parchment. But it hadn’t been translated from Latin or assembled into anything intelligible. That’s the weakest possibility. I’d put my money on either the car, or your friend’s Italian contact has a big mouth. Those are far more likely.”
“No point in speculating. We can worry about Danny later. Let’s go do what we have to do,” Natalie said, sliding out of the hard plastic booth. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to hit the ladies room. I don’t think I’ll need a toolkit in my boots, and I can move a lot faster without the drill cutting into my ankle…”
Upon her return, they exited the restaurant and approached the cab line. A sleepy man with an elaborate turban grunted a welcome as they slid into the back seat. Steven gave the driver instructions to drop them by the Spanish Steps, a block and a half from their hotel, and once they were underway, he surreptitiously handed Natalie the gun. She expertly flipped the safety off and then slipped it into her clutch purse, with a wary glance at the driver, who was engrossed with setting a new land speed record in the noisy little Fiat and had no interest in his passengers. They lurched around several corners and were at the large plaza within a few frantic minutes. Even at the late hour, pedestrians lingered in the area – drunks, lovers, vagrants, petty thieves and several police officers.