The Rosetta Key

one. The building itself dates to Byzantine times. We’ve found a tomb of a Templar knight, as Silano’s studies led him to expect, and in that tomb bones. Hidden in one femur was a medieval map.”

“You broke apart a dead man’s bones?”

“Silano found mention of the possibility while studying in Constantinople. Fleeing Templars came this way, Ethan, after their destruction in Europe. They hid something they’d found in Jerusalem in a strange city this map describes. Silano has discovered something else as well, something that may involve electricity and your Benjamin Franklin. Then we heard you’d been executed at Jaffa, but your body was missing. In desperation, I gave Monge the ring, wondering if he’d come across you. And now . . .”

“Were you ever in love with Alessandro Silano?” She hesitated only a moment before answering. “No.” t h e

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I stood there, hoping for more before I dared ask the next, most logical question.

“I’m not proud of that fact,” she said. “He loved me. He still does.

Men fall in love easily, but women must be careful. We were lovers, but it would be hard for me to love him.”

“Astiza, you didn’t need me here to carry two golden angels.”

“Do you still love me, Ethan, as you said along the Nile?” Of course I loved her. But I feared her, too. What had poor Talma called her, a witch? A sorceress? I feared the power she’d once more have over me when I admitted my attraction. And what of poor Miriam, still besieged in the walls of Acre?

Yet none of that mattered. All the old emotions were flooding back.

“I’ve loved you from the moment I pulled the wreckage off you in Alexandria,” I finally confirmed in a rush. “I loved you when we were riding in the chebek up the Nile, and I loved you in Enoch’s house, and I loved you even when I thought for a moment you’d betrayed me at Dendara Temple. And I loved you when I thought we were doomed in the Great Pyramid. I loved you enough to throw in with the damned British just in hopes of getting you back, and I loved you to throw in again, it seems, with the damned French. I loved even the hope of seeing you when I was in the valley down there, and all the long ride up the mountain, even when I had no idea what I’d say to you or what you’d look like or how you’d feel.” I was losing all discipline, wasn’t I?

Women can rob a man of sense faster than Appalachian jug whiskey.

And now, out of breath and hanging for hope, I waited for her to cut me dead with a word. I’d opened my chest to the muskets. I’d bent beneath the executioner’s blade.

She gave a sad smile. “It would be hard to love Alessandro, but it was not hard for me to fall in love with you.” I actually swayed slightly, dizzy with joy. “Then let’s leave now.

Tonight.”

She shook her head, her eyes wet. “No, Ethan. Silano knows too much. We can’t leave him to this quest. We have to see it through, and seize the book when the time is right. We have to work with him, 1 9 2

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and then betray him. It’s been my destiny since I met him in Cairo, and yours since you won the medallion in Paris. Everything has been leading up to this mountaintop, and the mountains beyond. We’ll find it and then we will leave.”

“What mountains beyond?”

“The City of Ghosts.”

“What?”

“It’s a sacred place, a mythical place. No European has been there, I think, since the Templars. Our journey isn’t done.” I groaned. “By the greed of Benedict Arnold.”

“So you and I must now be estranged, Ethan, to mislead him.

You’re angry I’ve partnered again with Alessandro, and we journey on as bitter ex-lovers. They must think us enemies until the very end.”

“Enemies?”

And then she swung and slapped me, as hard as she could.

It sounded like a rifle shot. I glanced back. The others were looking down the slope at us. Alessandro Silano, tall, his bearing aristocratic, was watching most intently.

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Silano was not the lithe swordsman I remembered. He walked with a limp, and pain had hardened his handsomeness, turning Pan-like charm into a darker satyr of frustrated ambition. He was more rigid from the injury he’d suffered in the balloon fall, and his gaze had no seduction this time, only purpose. There was darkness in his eye, and a hard set to his mouth. He winced as he came down a goat path from the ruined Byzantine chapel to meet us, and didn’t offer a hand or greeting. What would be the point? We were rivals, and my face still stung from Astiza’s slap. I suspected Monge or other physicians had given him drugs for the pain.

“Well?” Silano asked. “Does he have them?”

“He wouldn’t say,” she reported. “He’s not convinced he should help us.”

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