‘It’s at maximum.’
The maximum wasn’t much, and, additionally, the cameras lacked the resolution of the satellite image. They were not made for surveillance but only to save money and dissuade theft.
‘They’re going toward the cafeteria,’ a voice over the radio alerted them. ‘They’re passing me.’
‘Okay, Travis,’ Aris said. ‘Keep your distance.’
There were two cafes next to each other at the extreme north end of the Great Court. They served hot and cold drinks, sandwiches for every taste. Jews, Arabs, and believers of other faiths, including those of the church, could find something to eat there. No one was left out. The two targets chose the cafeteria on the right that had a line of about five people.
Barry was impatient. Too much suspense and too little information. He needed more than he had.
‘Are they going to eat?’ he wondered.
‘Looks like it,’ Staughton confirmed.
Barry looked at the technician as if he’d just had an inspiration. ‘Can you see through the glass of the Great Court?’
Staughton sat down in his chair and began playing with the controls. ‘If it’s not reflecting too much sun.’
The image that showed the outside of the building focused over it until it met the glass. The reflection on the east part was too much and obscured the image, just a white brilliance, but when it passed the Reading Room, it cleared and captured movement below.
‘Good,’ Barry said. ‘Go to them next and focus the image.’
Staughton executed the order quickly, and in seconds the image displayed the two men. Jacopo in the front of the Court Cafe line, Rafael behind.
Something was wrong about the picture. Barry smelled something funny and shook his head.
‘What’s going on?’ Aris asked about the gesture.
‘Something’s not right,’ Barry said.
Aris looked at the image, just like all the others. He felt he was missing some detail the director had noticed. What? All those cameras and agents, and the director saw more than they did.
‘What’s the matter, David?’ Aris insisted.
Jacopo and Rafael stood in line. There were two people in front of them waiting to be helped.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Barry swore.
The others continued in their ignorance. Barry grabbed his cell phone and dialed a number, then engaged the speaker so the whole room could hear. A beep indicated the call was beginning. The agents still didn’t understand.
‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ Barry asked.
No one answered. They looked blankly at the director and the image.
‘Does anyone know?’ Barry demanded.
Aris was the first to see it. ‘The phone isn’t ringing there.’
‘Order your men to go in, Aris. Detain them, without making a scene,’ Barry emphasized.
Aris gave the order over the radio. From the various internal cameras in the museum, agents could be seen converging on the cafeteria on the right.
‘Without making a scene,’ Barry repeated.
‘What’s going on, David?’ Staughton insisted.
Barry raised his hand to ask for silence. His eyes never left the central monitor.
The two men saw the six agents coming from different sides with their eyes fixed on them. They wasted no time leaving the line and starting to run away.
‘There they go, making a scene,’ Barry criticized, and then turned to Staughton. ‘The taxi. Can you get it?’
Staughton looked at him without understanding.
Jacopo and Rafael were caught quickly and brought outside the building.
‘Check their identity,’ Barry ordered. ‘Quickly.’
The images showed one of the agents searching the men. ‘We have here a Jacopo Sebastiani, Italian, and a… Steve Foster, English… taxi driver.’
Staughton finally understood Barry’s question. ‘It’s going to take time to find him,’ he said apologetically.
‘That son of a bitch,’ Barry swore again.
‘Uh!’ Travis interrupted over the radio. ‘Rafael would like to give the director some information.’
‘What is it?’ Aris asked.
‘Eight o’clock, the Osteria de Memmo I Santori, number twenty-two, Via dei Soldati. Don’t be late.’
Barry was furious, but he tried not to show it to the team. Rafael had made fools of them.
Not everything is what it seems.
36
‘That story sounds like a cheap thriller written by a hack writer.’
‘It’s the pure truth, Jonas,’ Ursino said.
The scene could only be the Relic Room, which Ursino oversaw religiously every working day.
Jonas was seated comfortably in a chair, legs crossed, in a dark suit with a matching shirt and shoes of the same color, listening to his friend recount the events of the night before. There were no secrets between them, and their friendship transcended the difference in their age, despite Jonas’s being half as old as Ursino.
‘So they killed a priest in Jerusalem and kidnapped Ben Isaac’s son?’ Jonas summarized with his hands behind his head, in a relaxed pose.
Ursino gave Jonas’s upper leg a little kick in reproach. ‘And that’s just the half of it, kid. There was also a Turk and a German in France.’ He raised a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t repeat this to anyone.’
It was Jonas’s turn to look offended. ‘When did I ever repeat anything said in here? And you talk a lot.’
Ursino had to agree. Jonas visited him from time to time. They had met in the year of Jubilee at a fund- raising dinner and had hit it off. Another friend, Hans Schmidt, had introduced them. They talked all night and many nights afterward. Jonas was a missionary, always traveling, but on his regular visits to the Holy See he never neglected a visit to see his friend in the Relic Room. Then he returned to the jungles, to mosquitoes, hunger, illiteracy, wars, intolerance, encephalitis, and illness. For seven months he hadn’t heard from Jonas. When Ursino feared the worst and was about to ask the secretary, for the love of God, to bring him some news, good or bad, Jonas gave signs of life, ill, but with the same spirit of mission he was familiar with. Fever had kept him in bed in a hut in Angola for months, and only God managed to save him, since there was no medicine capable of doing so. Ursino enjoyed Jonas more than he did any other person, probably because he had nobody else to enjoy, except the Holy Father, the secretary, and God, but with them he couldn’t have a good laugh or tell stories, and months could pass without seeing them. That might have been why Ursino tended to talk too much with Jonas, and Jonas had given proof of his trustworthiness.
‘But whoever’s behind the murders is very well informed,’ Ursino continued, carefully carrying over a kneecap of Saint Thomas Aquinas to be sent to a church being built in Campinas, Brazil.
‘Why?’ Jonas asked, stealthily fiddling with some fragments in a linen cloth on top of the desk.
Ursino put down the kneecap less carefully than he liked, and slapped the other’s hand. ‘Leave Saint Theresa’s wrist bones in peace.’
‘That’s her scaphoid?’
‘What’s left of it,’ Ursino explained while he folded the fragments up in the linen to protect them from Jonas’s curiosity.
‘Why?’ the missionary repeated his question.
‘Because they know about Christ’s bones.’
‘What?’ Jonas was so astonished he got up. ‘How could they know about that?’
‘Don’t ask me. Fewer than ten people know, I thought. Three are dead. The others are me, the secretary, the
