The Templar Salvation (2010)

transcripts of his trial didn’t raise any alarms. It was a harmless request.

The cardinal studied him, a perplexed expression lining his face. “That’s all you need?”

Reilly nodded. “That’s it.”

The cardinal glanced at the other two Vatican officials. They shrugged with indifference.

Reilly knew they were in.

Now came the hard part.

BESCONDI AND DELPIERO ACCOMPANIED REILLY and his Iranian companion across the Belvedere Courtyard to the entrance of the Apostolic Library, where the archives were housed.

“I have to admit,” the prefect of the archives confessed with a nervous chortle, “I feared you were after something that would be more difficult to … honor.”

“Like what?” Reilly asked, playing along.

Bescondi’s face clouded as he searched for the least compromising answer. “Lucia Dos Santos’s prophecies, for instance. You’re familiar with her, yes? The seer of Fatima?”

“Actually, now that you mention it …” Reilly let the words drift, then flashed him a slight grin.

The priest let out a small chuckle and nodded with relief. “Cardinal Brugnone told me you were to be trusted. I don’t know what I was worried about.”

The words bounced uncomfortably inside Reilly’s conscience as they stopped at the entrance of the building. Delpiero, the inspector general, excused himself, given that he didn’t seem to be needed.

“Anything I can do to help, Agent Reilly,” the cop offered, “just let me know.” Reilly thanked him, and Delpiero walked off.

The three halls of the library, resplendent with ornate inlaid paneling and vividly colored frescoes that depicted the donations to the Vatican by various European sovereigns, were unnervingly quiet. Scholars, priests from various nations, and other academics with impeccable credentials glided across its marble floors on their way to or from the tranquillity of its reading rooms. Bescondi led the two outsiders to a grand spiral staircase that burrowed down to the basement level. It was cooler down there, the air-conditioning straining less than aboveground to keep the summer heat at bay. They ambled past a couple of junior archivists, who gave the prefect small, respectful bows, and reached an airy reception area where a Swiss Guard in a sober dark blue uniform and black beret sat behind a counter-type desk and a bank of discreet CCTV monitors. The man signed them in, and five taps into the security keypad later, the inner sliding door of the air lock was whishing shut behind them and they were in the archive’s inner sanctum.

“The fondi are arranged alphabetically,” Bescondi said as he pointed out the small, elegantly scripted nameplates on the shelves and got his bearings. “Let’s see, Scandella should be down this way.”

Reilly and the Iranian followed him deeper into the large, low-ceilinged crypt. Apart from the sharp clicks of their heels against the stone floor, the only noise in there was the constant, low hum of the air-management system that regulated the room’s oxygen level and kept harmful bacteria at bay. The long rows of shelves were packed tight with scrolls and leather-bound codices interspersed with more recent books and cardboard box files. Entire rows of ancient manuscripts were suffocating under blankets of dust, as, in some cases, no one had touched or consulted them for decades—if not centuries.

“Here we are,” their host said as he pointed out a box file on a low shelf.

Reilly glanced back, toward the archive’s entrance. They were alone. He nodded his appreciation at the priest, then said, “Actually, we really need to see another fond.”

Bescondi blinked at him, confused. “Another fond? I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry, Father, but—I couldn’t risk you and the cardinal not allowing us down here. And it’s imperative that we get access to the information we need.”

“But,” the archivist stammered, “you didn’t mention this before, and … I’d need His Eminence to authorize showing you any other—”

“Father, please,” Reilly interrupted him. “We need to see it.”

Bescondi swallowed hard. “Which fond is it?”

“The Fondo Templari.”

The archivist’s eyes widened and did a quick dart to the left, farther down the aisle they were standing in, and back. He raised his hands in objection and stumbled back. “I’m sorry, that’s not possible, not without getting His Eminence’s approval—”

“Father—”

“No, it’s not possible, I can’t allow it, not before discussing it with—”

He took another step back and edged sideways, in the direction of the entrance.

Reilly had to act.

He reached out, blocking the priest with one arm—

“I’m sorry, Father.”

—while the other dove into Reilly’s jacket’s side pocket and pulled out a small canister of mouth freshener, swung it right up to the archivist’s startled face, and pumped a cloud of spray right at him. The man stared at Reilly with wide, terrified eyes as the mist swirled around his head—then he coughed twice before his legs just collapsed under him. Reilly caught him as he fell and set him down gently on the hard floor.

The colorless, odorless liquid wasn’t mouth freshener.

And if the archivist wasn’t going to die from it, Reilly needed to do something else—fast.

He reached into another pocket and pulled out a small ceramic syringe, yanked its cap off, and plunged it into a throbbing vein in the man’s forearm. He checked his pulse and waited till he was sure the opioid antagonist had done its job. Without it, the Fentanyl—a fast-acting, incapacitating opiate that was part of the Bureau’s small and unpublicized arsenal of non-lethal weapons—could send the prefect into a coma, or as in the tragic case of more than a hundred hostages in a Moscow theater a few years back, it could kill him. A quick chaser of Naloxone was crucial to make sure the archivist kept breathing—which he now was.

Reilly stayed with him long enough to confirm the drug’s effect, countering the caustic discomfort he felt at what he had just done to their unsuspecting host by thinking of Tess and what Sharafi had told him her abductor had done to the schoolteacher. Feeling that the archivist’s breathing had stabilized, he nodded. “We’re clear.”

The Iranian pointed down the aisle. “He looked that way when you mentioned the fond. Which fits. ‘T’ is the next letter.”

“We’ve got around twenty minutes before he wakes up, maybe less,” Reilly told him as he stalked down the aisle. “Let’s make them count.”

Chapter 3

Tess Chaykin’s lungs hurt. So did her eyes. And her back. In fact, there wasn’t much of her that didn’t hurt.

How much longer are they going to keep me like this?

She’d lost all sense of time—all sense of anything, for that matter. She knew her eyes were taped shut. As was her mouth. Her wrists too, behind her back. And her knees and ankles. A twenty-first-century mummy of shiny silver duct tape and—something else too. A soft, thick, padded cocoon, wrapped around her. Like a sleeping bag. She felt it with her fingers. Yes, that’s what it was. A sleeping bag. Which explained why she was drenched in sweat.

That was just about all she was sure of.

She didn’t know where she was. Not exactly, anyway. She felt like she was in a cramped space. A hot, cramped space. She thought she might be in the back of a van, or in the trunk of a car. She wasn’t sure of it, but she could hear the distorted, muffled sounds coming in through the tape around her ears. From outside. The sounds of a busy street. Cars, motorcycles, scooters, rumbling and buzzing past. But something about the sounds jarred her. Something felt out of place, wrong—but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

She concentrated, trying to ignore the heaviness in her head and break through the fog that was clouding her