The line buzzed, clicked, and a firm, no-nonsense voice answered.
“Good afternoon. You’ve reached Sigma command.”
8
CRYPTOGRAPHY
JULY 25, 6:23 P.M.
ROME, ITALY
I NEED pen and paper,” Gray said, his satellite phone in hand.
The group waited at a sidewalk trattoria across from Rome’s central train station. Upon arriving, Rachel had called for a pair of Carabinieri vehicles to collect and escort the team to Vatican City. While they waited, Gray had decided it was time to break his silence with central command. He’d been passed immediately to Director Crowe.
After a short debriefing of events in Cologne and Milan, the director had his own surprising bit of news.
“Why would she call you?” Gray asked the director as Monk fished in his pack for pad and pen.
Painter answered, “Seichan is playing our two groups off one another to further her own end. She is not even trying to hide it. The intel she passed to us was stolen from the Dragon Court’s field operative, a man named Raoul.”
Gray scowled, remembering the man’s handiwork back in Milan.
“I don’t think she can decipher the intel on her own,” Painter continued. “So she passed it to us—both to solve it for her and to keep you on the tail of the Court. She’s no fool. Her skill at manipulation must be masterful to be picked by the Guild to oversee this assignment…plus you two have a past. Despite her help in Cologne and Milan, don’t trust her. She will eventually turn on you and attempt to even the score.”
Gray felt the weight of the metal coin in his pocket. He didn’t need the warning. The woman was ice and steel.
“Okay,” Gray said as he had pen and paper in hand, holding the phone with his shoulder. “I’m ready.”
As Painter passed on the message, Gray wrote it down.
“And it’s broken into stanzas, like a poem?” Gray asked.
“Exactly.” The director continued reciting as Gray jotted each line.
Once finished, Painter said, “I have codebreakers working on it here and at the NSA.”
Gray frowned at the pad. “I’ll see what I can make of it. Perhaps using some of the resources at the Vatican, we can make some headway here.”
“In the meantime, keep on your toes,” Painter warned. “This Seichan character may be more dangerous than the entire Court.”
Gray didn’t argue with this last statement. With a few final clarifications, he signed off and stored the phone away. The others looked on expectantly.
“What was that all about?” Monk asked.
“The Dragon Lady called Sigma. She passed on a mystery for us to solve. It seems she has no idea what the Court is going to do next, and while they prepare, she wants us to be nipping at their heels. So she leaked some archaic passage, something discovered two months ago by the Dragon Court in Egypt. Whatever its content, she says it initiated the current operation.”
Vigor stood up from one of the trattoria’s outdoor tables. With a tiny espresso cup balanced in one hand, he leaned over to read the passage along with the others.
When the full moon mates with the sun,
It is born eldest.
What is it?
Where it drowns,
It floats in darkness and stares to the lost king.
What is it?
The Twin waits for water,
But will be burned to bone by bone upon the altar.
What is it?
“Oh, that helps,” Monk grumbled.
Kat shook her head. “What does any of this have to do with the Dragon Court, high-spin metals, and some lost society of alchemists?”
Rachel glanced along the street. “The scholars at the Vatican may be able to help. Cardinal Spera has promised his full support.”
Gray noted Vigor had only glanced once at the sheet of paper, then turned away. He sipped his espresso.
Gray had had enough of the man’s silences. He was done with polite respect of each other’s boundaries. If Vigor wanted to be on this team, it was high time he acted like it.
“You know something,” Gray accused.
The others turned to them.
“So should you,” Vigor answered.
“What do you mean?”
“I already described this back on the train.” Vigor turned and tapped a finger on the pad. “The cadence of this passage should be familiar. I described a book with a similar pattern of text. The repetition of the phrase ‘what is it.’”
Kat remembered first. “From the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”
“The Papyrus of Ani, to be exact,” Vigor continued. “It is broken into lines of cryptic description followed by the one line repeated over and over again: ‘what is it.’”
“Or in Hebrew, manna,” Gray said, remembering.
Monk rubbed a hand over the stubble poking from his shaved scalp. “But if this passage is from some well-known Egyptian book, why would it light a fire under the Court now?”
“The passages aren’t from the Book of the Dead,” Vigor answered. “I’m familiar enough with the Papyrus of Ani to know these passages are not found among the others.”
“Then where did they come from?” Rachel asked.
Vigor turned to Gray. “You said the Dragon Court discovered this in Egypt…only months ago.”
“Exactly.”
Vigor turned to Rachel. “I’m sure as a part of the Carabinieri TPC that you were informed of the recent chaos at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The museum sent out an alert through Interpol.”
Rachel nodded and explained to the others. “Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities began a painstaking process in 2004 of emptying the basement to the Egyptian Museum, prior to renovation. But upon opening the basement, they discovered over a hundred thousand pharaonic and other artifacts among its maze of corridors, an archaeological dumping ground that was all but forgotten.”
“They estimate it will take five years to catalogue it all,” Vigor said. “But as a professor of archaeology, I’ve heard tidbits of discoveries. There was an entire room of crumbling parchments that scholars suspect may have come from the lost Library of Alexandria, a major bastion of Gnostic study.”
Gray recalled Vigor’s discussion about Gnosticism and the pursuit of secret knowledge. “Such a discovery would surely attract the Dragon Court.”
“Like moths to flame,” Rachel said.
Vigor continued, “One of the items catalogued came from a collection of Abd el-Latif, an esteemed fifteenth-century Egyptian physician and explorer who lived in Cairo. In his collection, preserved in a bronze chest, was a fourteenth-century illuminated copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a complete rendering of the Papyrus of Ani.” Vigor stared hard at Gray. “It was stolen four months ago.”
Gray felt his pulse quicken. “By the Dragon Court.”
“Or someone in their employ. They have fingers everywhere.”
“But if the book is just a bootleg of the original,” Monk said, “what’s the significance?”
“The Papyrus of Ani has hundreds of stanzas. I wager someone forged this copy and hid these specific stanzas”—Vigor tapped Gray’s pad—“among the more ancient ones.”
“Our lost alchemists,” Kat said.
“Hiding needles in a haystack,” Monk said.
Gray nodded. “Until some scholar in the Dragon Court was wise enough to pick them out, decipher the clues, and act on it. But where does that leave us?”
Vigor turned to the street. “You mentioned on the train a desire to catch up and pass the Dragon Court. Now is our chance.”
“How so?”
“We decipher the riddle.”
“But that could take days.”
Vigor glanced over his shoulder. “Not if I’ve already solved it.”
He waved for the pad of paper and flipped to a new blank page. “Let me show you.”
Then he did the oddest thing. He wet his finger in his espresso and dampened the
bottom of his tiny cup. He pressed the cup upon the paper, leaving a perfect ring of coffee stain on the blank page. He repeated it again, applying a second ring, this one overlapping the first, forming roughly a snowman shape.
“The full moon mating with the sun.”
“What does this prove?” Gray asked.
“Vesica Pisces,” Rachel said, her face dawning with understanding.
Vigor grinned at her. “Did I ever tell you how proud I am of my niece?”
7:02 P.M.
RACHEL DIDN’T like abandoning their Carabinieri escort, but she understood Uncle Vigor’s excitement. Her uncle had insisted they take alternate transportation to investigate the new lead.
So she had called in to the station and recalled the patrol cars. She had left a cryptic message with General Rende that they all had an errand to run. This last was upon Gray’s suggestion. He thought it best not to broadcast their destination. Not until they could investigate further.
The fewer people who knew of their discovery, the better.
So they sought alternate transportation.
Rachel followed Gray’s broad back down to the rear of the public bus. Kat and Monk held a row of seats open. The air conditioning clanked, and the engine rattled the floorboards as the bus left the curb and shouldered into traffic.
Rachel climbed into a seat with Gray. Their row of seats faced Monk, Kat, and Uncle Vigor. Kat looked especially stern. She had argued for proceeding to the Vatican and securing an escort first. Gray had overruled her. She looked unsettled by this decision.
Rachel eyed Gray beside her. Some new resolve seemed to have hardened in him. It reminded her of his attitude atop the fiery spire in Cologne, a certainty of manner. His eyes shone with a determination that had disappeared after the first attack. It was back now…and it scared her slightly, made her heart beat faster.
The bus rumbled into traffic.
“Okay,” Gray said, “I’ve taken you at your word that this side excursion is necessary. Now how about a bit of elaboration?”
Uncle Vigor raised a palm, conceding. “If I had gone into detail, we would’ve missed our bus.”
He opened the pad again. “This shape of overlapping circles can be seen throughout Christendom. In churches, cathedrals, and basilicas around the world. From this one shape, all of geometry flows. For example.” He turned the picture horizontal and shaded the lower half with the edge of his palm. He then pointed to the intersection of the two circles. “Here you can see the geometric shape of the pointed arch. Almost all Gothic windows and archways bear this shape.”
Rachel had been given the same lecture as a child. One couldn’t be related to a Vatican archaeologist without knowing the importance of those two joined circles.
“It still looks like a couple of doughnuts smashed together to me,” Monk said.
Vigor righted the picture back around.
“Or like a full moon mating with the sun,” her uncle said, bringing up the stanza from the cryptic text. “The more I consider those lines, the more layers I keep coming across, like peeling an onion.”
“What do you mean?” Gray asked.
“They buried this clue within the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The very first book to refer to manna. Later Egyptian texts begin to refer to it as ‘white bread’ and such. It’s as if to find whatever the alchemists hid, you had to start at the beginning. Yet the very answer to this first clue also traces back to the first era of Christianity. Multiple beginnings. Even the answer itself implies multiplication. The one becoming many.”
Rachel understood what her uncle meant. “The multiplication of the fishes.”
Vigor nodded.
“Is anyone going to explain it to us novices?” Monk asked.
“This conjoining of circles is called Vesica Pisces, or Vessel of the Fishes.” Vigor leaned down and shaded the intersection to reveal the fishlike shape rested between the two circles.
Gray peered closer. “It’s the fish symbol that represents Christianity.”
“It is the first symbol,” Vigor said. “‘When the full moon mates with the sun, it is born.’” Her uncle tapped the fish. “Some scholars believe the fish symbol was used because the Greek for fish, ICHTHYS, was an acronym for Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, or Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior. But the truth lies here, between these circles, locked in sacred geometry. You’ll often find these locked circles in early paintings with the Christ child resting in the center junction. If you turn the form over on its side, the fish becomes a representation of female genitalia and a woman’s womb, where the baby Jesus is painted.
“It is for this reason that the fish represents fertility. To be fruitful and multiply.” Vigor glanced around the group. “As I said, there are layers upon layers of meaning here.”
Gray leaned back. “But how does this lead us anywhere?”
Rachel was curious, too. “There are fish symbols all over Rome.”
Vigor nodded. “But the second line that reads, ‘It is born eldest.’ Plainly it’s directing us to the oldest representation of the fish symbol. That would be found in the Crypt of Lucina in the Catacombs of Saint Callistus.”
“That’s where we’re heading?” Monk asked.
Vigor nodded.
Rachel noted Gray was not satisfied. “What if you’re wrong?” he asked.
“I’m not. The other stanzas in the text hint at it, too…once you solve the Vesica Pisces riddle. Look at the next line. ‘Where it drowns, it floats in darkness.’ A fish can’t drown, not in water, but it can in earth. And the mention of darkness. It all points to a crypt.”
“But there are many crypts and catacombs throughout Rome.”
“But not many with two fishes, twins to each other,” Vigor said.
Gray’s eyes brightened with understanding. “Another clue, from the last stanza. ‘The Twin waits for water.’”
Vigor nodded. “All three stanzas point to one place. The Catacombs of Saint Callistus.”
Monk settled back to his seat. “At least it’s not a church this time. I’m tired of getting shot at.”
7:32 P.M.
VIGOR SENSED they were on the right track.
Finally.
He guided the others through Porta San Sebastiano, one of the city wall’s most striking gates. It also served as the gateway to the parklands that surrounded the Appian Way, a preserved section of the famous ancient Roman road. Immediately past the gates, however, stood a series of dilapidated mechanics’ workshops.
Vigor dismissed the ugliness of these junkyards by directing attention ahead. At a fork in the road rose a small church. “The Chapel of Domine Quo Vadis,” he said.
His only real audience was Kat Bryant. She strode alongside him. Kat and Gray seemed to have had a falling-out. The others followed behind. It was good to have this moment with Kat. It had been three years since they had shared a role in cataloguing evidence against a Nazi war criminal, living in rural New York. The target had been trading in stolen artwork in Brussels. It was a long, convoluted investigation, requiring subterfuge on both their parts. Vigor had been most impressed with the young woman’s ability to slide into any role as easily as changing shoes.
He also knew the pain she had experienced recently. Though she was a good actress, hiding her feelings well, Vigor had spent enough time serving his flock as priest, confessor, and counselor to recognize someone still grieving. Kat had lost someone close to her heart and had not healed yet.
He pointed to the stone church, knowing there was a message for Kat within those walls. “The chapel here was built at the site where Saint Peter, fleeing the persecution of Nero, beheld a vision of Jesus. Christ was heading into Rome, while Peter was running out. He asked those famous words, Domine, quo vadis. ‘Lord, where are you going?’ Christ replied he was heading back into Rome to be crucified again. Peter then turned back to face his own execution.”
“Ghost stories,” Kat said without malice. “He should’ve run.”
/> “Ever the pragmatist, Kat. But you of all people should know that sometimes one’s own life is less important than the cause. We all have a terminal disease. We can’t escape death. But as the good works in our life celebrate our time here, so too can our deaths. To lay one’s life down in sacrifice should be honored and remembered.”
Kat glanced to him. She was sharp enough to understand the tack of the conversation.
“Sacrifice is a final gift we mortals can give in life. We should not squander such a generous gift with misery, but with respectful appreciation, even joy for a life fully lived to its end.”
Kat took a deep breath. They crossed before the small chapel. Her eyes studied it—though Vigor suspected she looked just as intently inward.
“There can be lessons even in ghost stories,” Vigor finished, and guided the group down the fork to the left.
Here the road turned to cobbles of volcanic stone. Though the stones were not original to the Roman road that once led out from the gates of the city all the way to Greece, it was a romantic approximation. Slowly the way opened around them. Green swards of hillsides opened in parklands, dotted with occasional sheep and shaded by umbrella pines. Crumbling lines of walls crisscrossed the landscape, along with the occasional tomb.
At this hour, with most of the attractions closed and the sun near to setting, they had the Appian Way to themselves. An occasional stroller or bicyclist nodded to him, noting his collar. “Padre,” they would mumble and continue past, glancing back at the road-weary group of backpackers he led.
Vigor also noted a few scantily clad women lounging at roadside spots, along with some seemlier-looking figures. After dark, the Appian Way became a roost to prostitutes and their ilk, and often proved dangerous to the average tourist. Brigands and robbers still prowled the ancient road, as they had the original Appian Way.
“It’s not much farther,” Vigor promised.
He headed through an area of vineyards, green vines tied to wood and wire, that traversed the gently sloping hills. Ahead appeared the courtyard entrance to their destination: the Catacombs of Saint Callistus.