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“That’s not good,” he said. Then he spotted the burned-out hulk of a car illuminated by headlights and added, “Neither is that.”
Apparently Spagna’s fears were justified.
“Pull off somewhere,” Laura said. “We don’t need to be seen.”
He veered from the road and into the first drive he saw.
They both exited the car.
* * *
Kastor retraced the path across the water he and Chatterjee had taken earlier. He was still shaken by everything that had happened. He felt out of control, in a spiral someone else had created and manipulated. People were dying around him with no explanation. Yet he was buoyed by the hope that the flash drive in his pocket might offer salvation. Even better, he would not have to deal with Danjel Spagna on terms of the other man’s making.
He had leverage to use on the Lord’s Own.
The sea had calmed, but the water remained stirred from the storm. The dghajsa’s outboard worked hard, and he struggled to keep the bow pointed toward shore. The feisty little boats could be finicky. They were built for durability, not ease or comfort. He rounded a dark point jutting from the shore and reentered the bay behind the clockmaker’s shop.
He hoped his assessment would prove correct.
And that the trouble from earlier was long gone.
* * *
Luke approached the clockmaker’s shop.
He and Laura had crossed the road and made their way toward it from behind the scattered houses in the space between the buildings and the bay. They’d climbed a couple of fences, but nothing had impeded them except a few dogs who showed little interest. Back home in Tennessee he would have already been revealed by a pack of inquisitive, noisy hounds.
No police patrolled the rear of the clockmaker’s shop. He examined the building and noticed the cracked stone, chipped paint on the windows, and vines creeping up one side. He spotted no back door, but one of the windows hung open with its iron grille gone. They rushed over and climbed into some sort of storage room. A doorway on the far side opened to what was surely the street side where all of the activity was still happening. Lights burned beyond a thin curtain. He signaled for quiet and they approached the barrier. Peering past the jamb he saw that the shop was empty, all of the windows shattered, fresh bloodstains on the wood floor. Outside, near the burned-out vehicle, stood four policemen.
“Somebody was shot,” Laura whispered.
“Not to mention the extra-crispy car.”
No body was evident. It must have been removed already.
Was it Gallo?
“I assume you know where the morgue is?” he asked.
She nodded.
Making contact with the locals could be problematic, especially after what had happened earlier when Spagna first appeared.
“You know what we have to do,” he said.
She nodded her assent.
They retreated to the window and climbed out into the humid night. Before they could turn and head toward the car, an engine out on the water grew louder. He focused on a dock that jutted into the bay, lit by a small incandescent fixture. One of the colorful local boats appeared from the night and eased to a stop.
“You see that,” he said to Laura, pointing.
Kastor Cardinal Gallo.
He shook his head. “Finally. A break.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Cotton dozed in and out, trying to catch a quick nap as the Department of Justice jet lifted off from Rome’s Fiumicino–Leonardo da Vinci airport. He, Stephanie, and Gallo had used the helicopter for a short hop west from the obelisk and found the DOJ jet waiting, the same one that had brought Stephanie across the Atlantic. Only he and Gallo were making the ninety-minute flight south to Malta. Stephanie had been flown on to Rome in the chopper, deposited back at the Palazzo di Malta downtown, exactly where Cotton had started a few hours ago. She’d received a phone call on the trip to the airport and said that there were matters requiring her personal attention. She offered no details and, knowing better, he hadn’t asked. Disturbingly, James Grant had dropped off the radar. London had no idea of his whereabouts, and the contact number Cotton possessed went to voice mail. Stephanie had told him she would monitor that situation from the U.S. embassy and asked to be kept informed as to what happened once they were on the ground.
Gallo himself had developed a case of lockjaw, sitting in his seat with his eyes closed, apparently trying to grab a little rest, too.
Actually, that was fine.
He needed time to think.
Where oil meets stone, death is the end of a dark prison. Pride crowned, another shielded. Three blushes bloomed to ranks and file.
What an odd assortment of phrases. Not random, for sure. But not coherent, either.
Then there were the letters.
H Z P D R S Q X
“What did you mean that the message points to Malta,” he asked Gallo. “Where oil meets stone. You knew exactly what that meant.”
Gallo roused from his rest, looking annoyed.
“The first part simply requests that it be delivered to von Hempesch. Clearly, the cathedral’s prior created the message for his grand master. He also created it before being captured by Napoleon. Every piece of evidence indicates that only the prior was involved in the hiding. There is no record of him leaving the island in the forty-eight hours between the time Napoleon arrived and the prior died. It’s doubtful he involved others, so whatever he hid away has to be on Malta. Then there is Mattia Preti. What do you know of him?”
“Never heard of him.”
“He was like so many others who came to Malta in the 17th century. Men looking for a purpose, a place where they could live a full life and excel. He was an Italian artist who stayed the rest of his life, ultimately transforming the cathedral in Valletta into a wonder. The barrel vault of the church became his masterpiece. It took him six years to complete. When finished it depicted eighteen episodes from the life of St. John the Baptist. Normally murals like those were done with watercolors. But Preti broke with tradition and applied oil paint directly to stone.”
He saw the connection. Where oil meets stone. “So everything points to the cathedral on Malta.”
Gallo nodded. “It seems that way, and it makes sense. The French appeared in 1798 with no warning. The fight for the island took little more than a day before a full surrender. Sadly, only a small part of our treasures and records made it out of the city. Most were seized by the French during their plunder, lost forever when the ship where they had been stored on sank in Egypt.”
Gallo went silent for a moment, then continued.
“It was a sad era in our existence. By the time Napoleon arrived the knights had lost all sense of purpose. The Protestant Reformation had reduced our ranks. Then, during the 16th and 17th centuries, revenues from European sponsors dwindled to nothing. Malta itself was a barren island with little to no export potential. To raise money we started policing the Mediterranean, protecting Christian ships from Ottoman corsairs. We became so good at it we evolved into privateers, capturing and looting Muslim ships, becoming corsairs ourselves. We made a lot of money from that but, as you might expect, such lawlessness leads to a moral decline, one that began to seep through the entire order. Eventually, we thought ourselves above kings and queens, exempt from the law, which made us even more enemies. So no one cared when the French took Malta and vanquished us.” Gallo paused a moment. “By the mid-18th century we rediscovered our original purpose—aiding the sick. Thankfully, that tortured prior never faltered in his duty and denied Napoleon the Nostra Trinità. Our Trinity stayed hidden, and now we know that even Mussolini failed to find it.”
Cotton pointed at the metal tube lying on another of the seats. “How can you be sure that the message is the same one from that prior? As you noted before, Mussolini prepared that typed sheet.”
“We can’t. But finding it is consistent with what I told you about Mussolini and his statements to our grand mas
ter in 1936 at their one and only meeting. He said he altered the memory to preserve it. Then he hid it where no one could get it. We have to believe that he changed nothing. Why would he? He might have had to really find it himself one day.”
“It’s interesting that Mussolini didn’t go after it.”
“He didn’t have to. All he had to do was convince the pope that he could.”
“But by hiding the message away, it’s almost like he was placating the pope.”
“He was. Definitely. For all his bravado, Mussolini was intimidated by popes. He pursued a policy of wooing both Piuses, and to a degree it worked.”
