Andrea read a passage. Then he read it again. Something was not right. He looked about him through the glass entry wall of the booth. The bishop was busy speaking to a pair of priests, and not watching through the observation-glass.
Andrea removed a magnifying glass from his jacket pocket. It was equipped with LED lights, and he held it close above the vellum. Direct light of any kind was forbidden in these booths, but Andrea had to confirm what he saw. He turned his back on the bishop and concealed the light with his body.
To his eye, he could see no alterations to the text. He switched the light on the glass to UV and bent back to the scroll. No signs of erasure or overwriting. It could not be. The text was different from the last time he had read this piece. It was substantially altered, from what he could recall. Andrea took out a notepad and copied by hand the passages concerning the events on the tiny island and the voyage from there to the boat’s next destination.
He signaled to the bishop that he was done for the day.
“Is there a problem, Signor Spara?” the bishop asked with concern.
“A bit of queasiness. Something I ate, perhaps. Or the flu.” He departed the room without helping the old bishop restore the vellum to its protective case; something he had never done before.
On the main floor of the library, he hurried to the wing off the Sala di Consultazione where the computer stations were set up. Row after row of sheltered stations where one could explore every document in the public section of the library’s collection. Andrea called up an Italian language translation of the Profectus Praxus and scrolled to the section in question.
In this edition, the pirate bireme anchored in the hidden harbor and buried the chest of coins, then departed the same day for Rhodes. It was the same as every other time he had read this text. Until today.
Andrea called up the scans of the original manuscript and slid the cursor to the same section. It was the same. The boat arrived at the island, hid the treasure, then departed on the evening tide.
The scan made several years before differed from the original he had just read down in the archives.
But how could that be? Was his memory failing? Was this Alzheimers? He’d seen a professor at university turned into a blithering idiot, quick to anger one moment and catatonic the next. Was that happening to him? But he was only forty-eight. Wasn’t that too soon?
Or was this precisely why his benefactor endowed him to do nothing with his life but read ancient texts in the original? Was he supposed to be reading Herodotus and Tacitus, looking for changes no one else had seen or noted? What could explain this? He was not a man of faith. He did not believe in miracles. But had he just witnessed one?
Later, in his apartment, he sat in his favorite chair with his cell phone clutched in his hand. A bottle of red wine sat open on the table by him. He was normally a sipper, perhaps a half glass before bed. This time he drank from the bottle, and it did little to still his nerves. Was he a fool, or was this what was expected of him?
At last, he dialed.
A voice answered first in English and switched to Italian when Andrea identified himself. He was politely asked to hold. The music on hold was a pleasant arrangement of a Verdi overture, and he wondered if even the hold music was custom chosen for each caller.
Inside of ten minutes, a voice came on the phone speaking in rich, fluent Neapolitan-accented Italian.
“Andrea, so nice of you to call. I trust you have something for me?”
“Yes, it is an alteration to—” Andrea began, but the voice on the other end gently cut him off.
“I wish to hear of your finding in every detail. But not over the phone. Pack a bag, Andrea. Bring enough for three days. The morning after tomorrow, a car will come to collect you.”
“Um, yes?” Andrea had so many questions, but the line was dead.
His bell rang the morning after the next day, and he was met at the door by a smiling man in a fine suit who held a hand out for his bag.
“My name is Augustus Martin. You were expecting me, yes?” the man said in Italian free of any accent.
The Rolls limousine took him out of the city beyond the Grande Raccordo to an executive airport in Ara Nova, where a sleek Gulfstream sat on the hardstand along the main runway. Signor Martin took Andrea’s bag and walked him to the steps that led up into the plane.
Sir Neal Harnesh was waiting in the main salon of the plane and offered Andrea a glass of sparkling wine.
“I prefer this so much to a traditional breakfast,” Sir Neal said. He was dressed as though for a golf game in a short-sleeved shirt, slacks, and loafers. But each garment was of such quality that, even though he wore the best suit he could afford, Andrea felt underdressed.
His benefactor kept the conversation light and inconsequential until they were airborne and high over the Adriatic.
“What have you found, Signor Spara?” Sir Neal said.
“An anomaly, my lord,” Andrea said.
He handed a Xerox copy he’d made from his own paperback edition of the Codex Profectus Praxus to Sir Neal. The relevant passages were highlighted. Sir Neal read them then took
