Read The Machiavelli Covenant Page 29


  Marten bought his ticket first, round trip from the lower terminal to the top and then back down again. A moment later the president did the same and then followed Marten out to the platform to wait with a handful of tourists for the car above to come down. It arrived in minutes. Its doors opened and a dozen passengers got out. Then those waiting entered, a uniformed worker closed the door, and the green-and-yellow car began its ascent. The entire time there had not been so much as a glance or a word between them. It hadn't been necessary. They already knew what was next. It had been worked through at the crumbling stone building by the stream in the minutes after Miguel had most willingly, respectfully, and enthusiastically "been brought into the family."

  "The restaurant is called Abat Cisneros and is part of the Hotel Abat Cisneros. The service door to outside is down a corridor and directly past the restrooms. Once through it there is a pathway directly outside," Miguel said definitively, then picked up a sharp piece of rock to draw a rough diagram of the monastery complex on the old building's dirt floor, carefully scratching in the details of what he was talking about.

  "This way leads down to the area where they bring in the supplies; the other way goes up and around a sharp turn hidden by trees. About thirty yards farther are the ruins of the chapel I was telling you about," He drew an X on the floor to mark the ruins. "It's overgrown and hard to see even from the path. But it's there and if you can get Foxx to it, it will serve your purposes quite well."

  "Good," Marten said, then looked to the president. "Assuming Demi was telling the truth, she, Beck, and Luciana should be at the monastery with Foxx when we get there. We can expect their first step will be to try and find me and deliver me to Foxx. That is unless Demi's told them about you. If she did, they'll be looking for you as well, and that changes things altogether."

  "It doesn't change anything." President Harris was resolute. "If Foxx is there we have to find out what he knows. If he's alerted my 'friends,' we'll deal with that when it happens. There is no other choice."

  "Alright," Marten accepted the president's tenacity, "but at least we can make it a little more difficult for them. We go to the cable car terminal separately. Buy our tickets singly. Tourists who don't know each other. From what Miguel says the gondola is small, people are crowded together. If for some reason you're recognized and a fuss is made I'm still free to get to Foxx on my own, while you're left to your—" Marten let go a half-grin—" 'political wiles' to get out of it. If nothing happens and we reach the upper terminal, we still go off individually." Immediately he looked to Miguel, "Once I get to the monastery, where would the most logical place be for someone to find me?"

  "The plaza in front of the basilica."

  "Okay," Marten turned back to the president. "Most likely it's Beck who will do it. If Demi did tell them about you and he's looking for both of us he'll be disappointed and wonder if she told him the truth or if you simply chose not to come. In either case he will be confronting me alone.

  "He might mention Demi, he might not, but he'll break the ice with small talk, then bring up Foxx, say that he's there and suggest the two of us meet to talk over the discord still lingering from what happened in Malta. Just what that will entail and where we don't know, but the certainty is they'll be trying to run the show, which is something we don't want. My response should be that if the good doctor wants to talk to me it should be in a public place. I'll suggest the restaurant. For lunch, a drink, whatever. In the meantime—"

  "I will have gone directly there, made certain where the men's restroom is and the exit door to the outside beyond it that Miguel described." Now it was the president's turn to smile. They had been together for less than a day and already they were finishing each other's thoughts and sentences. "With luck I will have found the pathway and the ruined chapel, then come back and taken a table near the door and, head down, a beverage in hand, be reading a newspaper or tour guide when you and Dr. Foxx enter."

  "You will also have purchased the appropriate items from the menu."

  "Of course."

  "You're a good student, Cousin," Marten said, then looked to Miguel. "Once we're done with Foxx we're going to have to get out and fast, before he's found. The cable car is too slow and confining, and besides, we might have to wait for it. What we need is for you to be waiting at the monastery to drive us out. The trouble is the limo. At some point, if they haven't already, the police will have its description. Right now it's pretty well hidden, but bringing it out in the open and up the long road to the monastery is too risky."

  "I will get us another vehicle, Cousin Harold."

  "How?"

  Miguel smiled, "As I said, I have been to the monastery many times. I have friends who work there, I also have relatives who live nearby. Whatever it is, I will have something waiting." Again he picked up the rock and squatted down next to his sketch of the monastery's layout. "This is where you will come out," he said, scratching a large X into the dirt, "this is where I will be," he scratched a second X, then looked up. "Any questions?"

  "No. Thank you, cousin," the president said genuinely.

  "You're welcome, sir," he said. At that moment a great and magnificent grin burst across Miguel's face like a dazzling ray of sunshine. In that moment he knew he had just become a liftetime member of their exclusive and very tiny, "cousins' club."

  Marten glanced across the gondola as it climbed rapidly toward the upper terminal. Demi's floppy hat tilted to one side, President Harris stood alone on the far side of the car, gazing out the window. A somewhat eccentric everyday tourist riding up with a half dozen other everyday tourists, most all of whom had their faces pressed to the glass as he did, watching the terminal below quickly become little more than a dot in the distance.

  86

  • 12:20 P.M.

  Demi felt the rise of her pulse as the Monasterio Benedictino Montserrat van reached the top of the long mountain road and made a sharp turn into the monastery's restricted parking area. Through the windows she could now see up close the grouping of sand-colored stone buildings she had glimpsed from far below. No longer in miniature, it still looked like an isolated fortress-city, untouchable against the half-mile-high limestone cliffs and encompassing among other things its famed basilica, a museum, restaurant, hotel, and private apartments.

  Abruptly the van's passenger door slid open. A young priest stood outside in the bright sun.

  "Welcome to Montserrat," he said in English.

  Moments later he was leading them across a plaza filled with tourists and then up a series of steps toward the basilica. Beck carried a small overnight bag; the witch, Luciana, her large black purse; Demi, a small equipment bag with photographic supplies and a smaller bag inside it holding personal toiletries, and two professional cameras thrown over one shoulder; one, a 35mm Nikon, the other, a Canon digital.

  The priest led them under a stone arch and into the basilica's inner courtyard, which was packed with more tourists. A clock high on the basilica's tower read 12:25. They were precisely on time. Immediately Demi thought of Cousin Jack and Cousin Harold. She wondered where they were—if they were still with the limousine driver and on their way here, or—she felt her stomach clench in a knot. What if they'd been stopped at one of the roadblocks? What then? What would she do? What would Beck?

  "This way, please," the priest led them down a long porticoed corridor and past a series of arched stone panels inset with heraldic symbols and what appeared to be religious inscriptions written in Latin. Then she saw it, and her heart caught in her throat. Encased in one of the last panels was the stone sculpture of an early Christian Crusader. Chain mail covering his head and neck, he rested an arm on a triangular shield. Carved into the shield was the balled cross of the Aldebaran. This was the first time she had seen it anywhere outside of books or drawings or the tattoos on the left thumbs of members of the coven. She wondered how long the piece had been there and who else over the years or even centuries had seen it and recognized the sign and knew
its meaning.

  "Through here," the priest turned them down another corridor, this one narrower than the first and lined with row after row of flickering votive candles. Where before there had been numbers of tourists, now there were few. With every step they were getting farther and farther from the center of activity.

  Demi heard her cameras click together as they touched. At the same time she felt an icy chill touch the nape of her neck and then creep across her shoulders. With it came the sound of her father's voice whispering the warning he had written to her about her mother so many years earlier—Do not, under any circumstances try to learn her fate.

  Fearfully she looked back. Except for the rows of flickering candles the walkway behind them was empty.

  Five more steps and the priest stopped at a heavy wooden door cut into a stone archway. Immediately he turned to a wooden panel set into the stonework next to the door and slid it back. Inside was an electronic keypad. He punched in four numbers, pressed the pound key, then slid the panel closed and turned an iron knob on the door. It opened easily, and he gestured for them to enter. They did and he left, closing the door behind him.

  Compared to the noonday brightness outside, the place seemed inordinately dark. Slowly their eyes became accustomed to it. They were in an office of some kind with a number of ornate high-backed wooden chairs lining one wall and a massive bookcase against the wall opposite. An enormous wooden desk and large leather chair behind it sat near a closed door at the far end. The ceiling was high and arched, while the walls themselves appeared to be of the same aged stone as the monastery's complex of buildings. The floor was the same, worn shiny in places by the foot traffic of people and time.

  "Wait here please, Demi," Beck said quietly, and then led Luciana toward the door at the end of the room. Reaching it, he knocked, and then they entered and Beck closed the door behind them.

  87

  • 12:35 P.M.

  Demi waited alone in the dim light and silence; the door they had entered through closed behind her; the one at the far end where Reverend Beck and Luciana had gone out, shut too. Whether they had left to find Dr. Foxx or to do something else entirely she didn't know.

  Once more she looked around the darkened chamber. The high-arched ceiling, the high wooden chairs against either wall, the great wooden desk at the end, the stone walls, the worn stone floor. There was history here. Much of it old. All of it Christian. She wondered if her mother had come here so many years earlier. Wondered if she had once stood where Demi did now. In this room, in this dim light.

  Waiting.

  For what?

  For whom?

  • 12:40 P.M.

  Again she heard her father's warning. With it came something else, the memory of a person she had long tried to keep from thinking about: a bald, armless octogenarian scholar she had met six years earlier at the beginning of her professional career when she worked for the Associated Press in Rome.

  A photo assignment had taken her north into Umbria and Tuscany. A free day in Florence had given her the opportunity to explore used-book stores—the same as she did everywhere she traveled in Italy—searching for material on Italian witchcraft and looking for anything that might reveal a boschetto or coven, past or present, that took as its marker the sign of Aldebaran. It was a search that until that day had turned up nothing. Then, in a tiny bookshop near the Ponte Vecchio, she came upon a slim, tattered fifty-year-old book on Florentine witchcraft. Skimming it, she stopped abruptly at its fourth chapter. Its yellowed title page all but took her breath away. The chapter's title was "Aradia" and beneath the printed word was an unmistakable illustration—the balled cross of Aldebaran. Heart pounding, she bought the book immediately and took it back to her hotel room. The chapter, like the book itself, was slight, but in reading it she learned of an ancient and secretive boschetto of Italian female witches, the strega she had told Nicholas Marten about. Called Aradia after a fourteenth-century wise woman who brought back La Vecchia Religione, the Old Religion, the boschetto revived a number of ancient traditions—an unwritten body of laws, rites and doctrines—and put them into practice in northern and central Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There the chapter ended. The significance of the sign of Aldebaran was never mentioned, nor was word Aradia used again anywhere in the book.

  Desperate to know more, Demi went to bookstores and museums and visited occult societies and scholars in the Tuscan cities of Siena and Arezzo. From there she went to Bologna and then Milan and finally back to Rome. In all she found nothing more than a brief note that in 1866 an American writer and historian traveling in Italy had learned that a manuscript containing the name Aradia and describing "the ancient secrets of Italian witchcraft" existed somewhere in Tuscany. He searched for months trying to find it but without success. He did, however, come upon an Italian witch named Raffaella who allegedly had seen it and told him of its contents. His conclusion was that the secrets of Aradia, or at least Raffaella's interpretation of it, were little more than a mixture of sorcery, medieval heresy, and political radicalism. His analysis ended there, with no mention whatsoever of the sign of Aldebaran.

  After that Demi found nothing. Even among the most committed academics further knowledge of the Aradia coven that used the sign of Aldebaran seemed nonexistent. Internet searches turned up nothing. Museum queries and phone interviews with practicing witches and witchcraft historians around the world ended the same way.

  Then, nearly a year later, and now working for Agence France-Presse, she learned of a reclusive scholar named Giacomo Gela. A bald, emaciated octogenarian and former soldier who had lost both arms in the Second World War, Gela lived in a tiny room in a small village near Pisa and had made the study of Italian witchcraft his life's work. Contacting him, she heard the pause in his voice when she mentioned Aradia. When she asked if she might visit and told him of the reason behind her request, he agreed to see her immediately.

  In Gela she found a man of immense intellect who not only knew about the enigmatic Aradia but about a more secretive order hidden within it. Called Aradia Minor, it was referred to in writing simply as the letter A followed by the letter M but written in a combination of Hebrew and Greek alphabets as " μ" which made it look more like a vague and innocuous symbol that would be of little more than passing interest to almost anyone. Even to Gela, the true origin of Aradia Minor remained a mystery. What he did know was that for most of the latter half of the sixteenth century it had been centered on the Italian island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, the birthplace and home, Demi would later discover, of Luciana. In the early seventeenth century, and probably in the interests of security, Aradia Minor was decentralized and moved back to the mainland, its boschetti scattered clandestinely throughout countryside, largely in the region between Rome and Florence.

  Aradia Minor's caution was not without reason, for among its traditions were annual rites that celebrated ancient and often brutal pagan ceremonies that involved blood oaths, sacrifices of living creatures, and human torture, and were performed before several hundred members of a powerful order called the Unknowns. What the purpose of these ceremonies was or who this group of unknowns was remained a mystery. What was acknowledged was that the celebration of these rites began in the late 1530s; that they were held at various temples secreted throughout Europe; and that they were performed annually and for years at a time throughout the centuries, only to go suddenly and inexplicably dormant, sometimes for decades or more, before beginning once again.

  Chillingly, Giacomo Gela believed this was one of Aradia Minor's active periods; its identifying marker, the sign of Aldebaran; its singular traditions still practiced. Where it was centered, or why it existed, or for what reason, remained as unclear now as it had in the past, yet he was certain there had to be a strong rationale behind it, one that was highly focused and required not just great secrecy but considerable funding because too many people were involved and the pageant was too regular, too guarded, and too extreme for
the expense not be substantial.

  It was then Gela's eyes had narrowed and his voice had become shrill with warning: "Do not take anything you have learned here further than the walls of this room."

  The expense was not Aradia Minor's alone, he told her; history was littered with the corpses of those who had tried to know more. To make certain she fully understood, he bared a secret few people still living knew—that while it was true he had lost his arms in the Second World War, the butchering had not come in battle; instead it had happened when he had inadvertently come upon one of Aradia Minor's ceremonies in an alpine forest deep in the Italian Dolomites where he was on patrol. That he was alive today was only because those who cut off his arms purposely failed to finish him off.

  "To kill me would have been easy. Instead they bound my wounds and carried me from the woods and left me by the roadside. The reason, I now know, was to leave behind a hideous living reminder, a warning for anyone else who might try to find out what happened and attempt to uncover the secrets of Aradia Minor."

  Abruptly his eyes had locked on hers and his voice had suddenly raged with fury: "How many hours of how many days of how many years have I sworn at God, damning him, wishing they had finished me. The life I have lived like this, and for as long as I have, has been far crueler than death could ever be."

  The way Gela spoke, the sound of his voice, the rage in his eyes, the way he sat there armless and cross-legged in his tiny room, was horrifying. In combination with her father's letter it might well have been enough then for her to abandon her journey altogether. But she hadn't; instead she had deliberately pushed it to the back of her memory, locked it away, and kept it there.