The Templar Salvation (2010)

he held up for Behrouz without the merest trace of hesitation or discomfort.

Behrouz felt the contents of his stomach shoot into his throat as he recognized the severed head the stranger was holding up.

Miss Deborah. His daughter’s favorite teacher.

Or what was left of her.

Behrouz lost hold of his body, retching violently as his knees buckled. He collapsed to the ground, gagging and spewing and gasping for air, unable to breathe, one hand clamped across his eyes to block out the horror of it.

The stranger didn’t allow him any respite. He bent down to his level, grabbed the professor by the hair and yanked his head up so he couldn’t avoid being face-to-face with the hideous, bloody lump.

“Find it,” he ordered him. “Find this trove. Do whatever you have to do, but find it. Or you, your wife, your daughter, your parents back in Tehran, your sister and her family …”

And he left it at that, comfortably certain that the professor had gotten the message.

Chapter 2

VATICAN CITY

TWO MONTHS LATER

As he strode across the San Damaso courtyard, Sean Reilly cast a weary glance at the clusters of wide-eyed tourists exploring the Holy See and wondered if he’d ever get to visit the place with their casual abandon.

This was anything but casual.

He wasn’t there to admire the magnificent architecture or the exquisite works of art, nor was he there on any spiritual pilgrimage.

He was there to try to save Tess Chaykin’s life.

And if he was in any way wide-eyed, it was an attempt to keep his jet lag and his lack of sleep at bay and stay clearheaded enough to try to make sense of a frantic crisis that had been thrust upon him less than twenty- four hours earlier. A crisis he didn’t fully understand—but needed to.

Reilly didn’t trust the man walking alongside him—Behrouz Sharafi—but he didn’t have much choice. Right now, all he could do was run through yet another mental grind of the information he had, from Tess’s desperate phone call to the Iranian professor’s harrowing firsthand account during the cab ride in from Fiumicino Airport. He had to make sure he wasn’t missing anything—not that he had that much to go on. Some jerkweed was forcing Sharafi to find something for him. He’d chopped off some woman’s head to show him how serious he was. And that same psycho was now holding Tess hostage to get Reilly to play ball. Reilly hated being in that position—reactive, not proactive—though as the FBI special agent in charge heading up the New York City field office’s Domestic Terrorism Unit, he had ample training and experience in reacting to crises.

Problem was, they usually didn’t involve someone he loved.

Outside the porticoed building, a young priest in a black cassock was waiting for them, sweating under the heat of the mid-summer sun. He led them inside, and as they walked down the cool, stone-flagged corridors and climbed up the grand marble staircases, Reilly found it hard to chase away the uncomfortable memories of his previous visit to this hallowed ground, three years earlier, and the disturbing sound bites of a conversation that had never left his consciousness. Those memories came flooding back even more viscerally as the priest pushed through the oversized, intricately carved oak door and brought the two visitors into the presence of his boss, Cardinal Mauro Brugnone, the Vatican’s secretary of state. A broad-shouldered man whose imposing physique was more suited to a Calabrian farmer than to a man of the cloth, the pope’s second-in-command was Reilly’s Vatican connection and, it seemed, the reason behind Tess’s abduction.

The cardinal—despite being in his late sixties, he was still as husky and vigorous as Reilly remembered him from his previous visit there—came forward to greet him with outstretched arms.

“I’ve been looking forward to hearing from you again, Agent Reilly,” he said with a bittersweet expression clouding his face. “Though I was hoping it would be under happier circumstances.”

Reilly set his hastily packed overnight bag down and shook the cardinal’s hand. “Same here, Your Eminence. And thank you for seeing us at such short notice.”

Reilly introduced the Iranian professor, and the cardinal did the same for the two other men in the room: Monsignor Francesco Bescondi, the prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives—a slight man with thinning fair hair and a tightly cropped goatee—and Gianni Delpiero, the inspector general of the Corpo della Gendarmeria, the Vatican’s police force—a taller, more substantial man with a solid brush of black hair and hard, angular features. Reilly tried not to show any discomfort at the fact that the Vatican’s head cop had been asked to join them. He shook the man’s hand with a cordial half smile, accepting that he should have expected it, given his urgent request for an audience—and given the bureau for which he worked.

“What can we do for you, Agent Reilly?” the cardinal asked, ushering them into the plush armchairs by the fireplace. “You said you’d explain when you got here.”

Reilly hadn’t had much time to think about how he would play this, but the one thing he did know was that he couldn’t tell them everything. Not if he wanted to make sure they’d agree to his request.

“Before I say anything else, I need you to know I’m not here in any professional capacity. This isn’t the FBI sending me out here. It’s a personal request. I need to be sure you’re okay with that.” He’d asked to take a couple of days of personal leave after Tess’s call. No one back at Federal Plaza—not Aparo, his partner, or Jansson, their boss—knew he was in Rome. Which, he thought, may have been a mistake, but that was how he’d decided to play it.

Brugnone brushed his caveat away. “What can we do for you, Agent Reilly?” he repeated, this time emphasizing the “you.”

Reilly nodded gratefully. “I’m in the middle of a delicate situation,” he told his host. “I need your help. There’s no way around that. But I also need your indulgence in not asking me for more information than I can give you at this moment. All I can tell you is that lives are at stake.”

Brugnone exchanged an unsettled look with his Vatican colleagues. “Tell us what you need.”

“Professor Sharafi here needs some information. Information that, he believes, he can only find in your records.”

The Iranian adjusted his glasses, and nodded.

The cardinal studied Reilly, clearly discomfited by his words. “What kind of information?”

Reilly leaned forward. “We need to consult a specific fond in the archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

The men shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Reilly’s request for help was looking less benign by the second. Contrary to popular belief, there was nothing particularly secretive about the Vatican Secret Archives; the word “secret” was only meant in the context of the archives being part of the pope’s personal “secretariat,” his private papers. The archive Reilly needed access to, however, the Archivio Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei—the Archive of the Inquisition—was something else altogether. It held the Vatican archives’ most sensitive documents, including all the files related to heresy trials and book bannings. Access to its shelves was carefully restricted, to keep scandalmongers at bay. The events its fondi covered—a fond being a body of records that dealt with a specific issue—were hardly the papacy’s finest hour.

“Which fond would that be?” the cardinal asked.

“The Fondo Scandella,” Reilly answered flatly.

His hosts seemed momentarily baffled, then relaxed at the mention. Domenico Scandella was a relatively insignificant sixteenth-century miller who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. His ideas about the origins of the universe were deemed heretical, and he was burned at the stake. What Reilly and the Iranian professor could want from the