The Alchemist’s Code (33 page)

A normal taser would usually shoot two darts, which would release a low-intensity high-voltage charge, but this one looked far more dangerous. Anna didn't waste time trying to understand what the hell the weapon was: a moment after seeing the darts strike the wall she had already shot the attacker, who found himself with a hole in his shoulder and without his gun. Appearing from behind him, another man was about to fire a similar weapon, but Anna didn't give him the chance. She shot him dead using the Beretta she had taken from the man she'd knocked down a few moments earlier, then ran into another room and quickly closed the door behind her, realising with immense relief that she was in the villa's entrance hall. She was about to open the front door when two men appeared from another doorway, Woland and Camille behind them.

“Catch that whore!” shouted the president of Nanotech.

Anna dived towards the door, shooting with both of the guns she had taken and hitting both the men in the chest as their shots went wide.

The body count stopped at nine.

A moment before leaving the villa, Anna and Camille's eyes met. The French woman stood there, at once petrified and fascinated. Anna sensed Camille's admiration and gave her a defiant smile.

“Who the hell is
she
?” murmured Camille, without moving a muscle.

Events reconstructed by Lorenzo Aragona

Vatican, January 2013

Before beginning, Father Luigi Palminteri looked over all the people there: Oscar, young Josè, Captain Barucci and me.

“Of course captain Barucci already knows already what I'm about to tell you regarding our missionary order. However, he too is still unaware of what our most delicate mission in the past hundred years has been.”

We hung on his every word, despite our frequent glances at on our watches.

“As you all know, in 1314 the order of The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, also known as the Knights Templar, officially disappeared, after the execution of the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, following the attack ordered by the King of France with the tacit approval of the Pope.

Not all our brothers in the various European kingdoms, however, suffered the same fate, and some of them were given more lenient treatment, so to speak. To cut a long story short, in some European kingdoms, the ex-Knights Templar were left relatively in peace and were allowed to join other orders and continue serving Christ and the Church, while still nurturing their own interests. But this is not all. A large group of knights who took refuge in Scotland continued to follow the order's principles, to respect the Rule that Bernard of Clairvaux had given them, and to guard the codes and papers they had managed to take with them. Among their documents there were two which were very important. An original patent, a licence, written by the Grand Master de Molay, in which those brothers were named the only legitimate heirs of the Order, and the Chronica Gondemarensis, a text from the twelfth century containing the story of how the Baphomet, was re-discovered. Thus, thanks to those Templars, the brotherhood was never actually extinguished.

Let us take a leap forward in time. At the end of the nineteenth century, a Scottish catholic priest, Sean Bruce, was granted authority to found a missionary order by Pope Leo XIII, and to call it the Missionaries of the Temple of Jerusalem. Bruce came from a noble family which was linked to the Templars and was an ancestor of old Sean, whom you met this morning. Thanks to that, the Templars were able to partially emerge from secrecy and return, wearing a different habit.”

“Are you saying that you are Templars?” I asked in astonishment.

“Yes, Doctor Aragona, that's exactly what I am saying,” admitted Father Luigi innocently. “I am the Grand Preceptor of the Italian province, which has its offices in Rome, in Villa Gondemar, but I am also the provincial Father of the Missionaries of the Temple of Jerusalem – the 'public' face of the Order, if you will. Of course both as missionaries and as Templars we deal with works of charity, theology, archaeology and—”

“And—?”

“…and we also study the esoteric sciences.”

“I see. And is the Pope aware of that?” I asked, a hint of sarcasm creeping into my voice.

Father Luigi didn't seem to be rattled in the slightest and answered coldly, “The Holy Father knows everything, Doctor Aragona.”

The Templars, Scotland, the Freemasons. All these coincidences fitting together as perfectly as the pieces of a jigsaw.

“But now let's proceed with the part very few know,” Father Palminteri continued. “When you came to the mission this morning, I knew the moment your grandfather had so long awaited had finally arrived.”

The atmosphere grew expectant.

“I know perfectly well who you are, gentlemen. As you said, Mr Aragona, I know everything,” Father Luigi continued, “because in the past our Templar brothers worked together with the Lodge of the Nine to keep the Baphomet safe. And the Lodge of the Nine was created by the Templars themselves. The Baphomet was discovered by the first knights in 1118, in the depths of Solomon's Temple, in Jerusalem. It is a relic of Chaldean origins which is able to evoke the entity known as Guardian of the Threshold. To maintain this secret, a restricted circle of nine brothers was formed inside the Order, with the aim of keeping the Baphomet a secret but also of using it when necessary. With time, these nine members began to be considered a corps unto itself, free from the obligations the Rule imposes but still controlled by the Order. It is funny, but the accusations made against the Templars – that they worshipped an idol – did contain a grain of truth. Only they did not worship it – they safeguarded it.

In any case, the idol was moved many times over the centuries. The last safe refuge, an abbey in the heart of the Languedoc, was abandoned in 1790, when the French Revolution caused many places of worship to be destroyed. The members of the Lodge of the Nine were all killed by the revolutionaries, except for one, who managed to escape after confiding the secrets of the Lodge to a Templar brother he had contacted. Thanks to him, the Lodge was founded a second time with new members and from that moment its principal goal became that of retrieving the idol, which seemed forever lost. In 1944 it was finally located in the abbey of Montecassino. The Lodge of the Nine attempted to retrieve it, but the relic was stolen during the allied bombing thanks to a traitor among the nine who was in fact a Nazi spy.

In 1945 we managed to locate the Baphomet again. We discovered it had been moved to the heart of the Third Reich, in Berlin, which had already been decimated by bombing. We could have waited for the imminent end of the war, but the risk of losing it again was too great so we organized an operation together with secret service teams from several countries. These teams specialized in dealing with extraordinary phenomena and artefacts. It was an act of genuine white magic, carried out thanks to the grace of God, against the forces of evil. It was also a suicide mission, though, because amidst the bombing, our men had to secretly penetrate the heart of Berlin, the Third Reich's last bastion of defence.”

“Your men?” I interrupted. “You mean the Lodge of the Nine, right? You sent them, didn't you?”

“Nine minus one, the traitor. Those eight were the only ones able to manipulate the power of the Guardian of the Threshold – nobody else could have gone. There was one grave casualty: the captain of the mission himself, an American of Navaho origins, the one called the Elect by the Lodge of the Nine, because if he has all the others' keys, he can activate the sequence by himself and evoke the Guardian—”

I noticed Captain Barucci shaking his head impatiently until, at a certain point, he could hold back no longer.

“Father, what are you talking about? Chaldean relics? Rituals?
The
elect
? I can't believe what I'm hearing!”

Father Luigi remained calm.

“I understand your scepticism, captain, but I am telling you the truth. Believe me, we know of things the existence of which you cannot even imagine.”

“The Church burned the witch but kept the book—” I mumbled.

Father Luigi looked at me and nodded, his face serious. “We are not here to discuss the morality of the Church, we are here because you know something about the Baphomet – something which could potentially put us all in danger.”

“Right,” interjected Oscar, “let's put the theology, magic and conspiracy theories aside for a minute. I know perfectly well that this is outside my jurisdiction, but I'm here because a serial killer, who committed a series of murders in the seventies, started killing again in Naples a few months ago. Apparently this same killer is somehow involved with the Baphomet, has kidnapped a girl we know, and is planning to set off a bomb tomorrow in Rome. This will happen unless we tell him how to find this damned Baphomet. We have no way of determining whether this man, Raymond, or the organisation behind him, is real – we only have Lorenzo Aragona's testimony, one phone call and this.”

Oscar handed Barucci the mobile phone containing the video of the torture inflicted upon Anna, and as he watched it, the captain's face hardened.

“It's terrible. But what are we supposed we do? Take the chance of believing an attention seeker and cancelling one of the most important international meetings in history? I've already told you… Have you any idea how many bomb threats we've received over the last few weeks, Commissioner? Hundreds! If they were all real, tomorrow would be the apocalypse. This video and the search for this serial killer should be handed over to the Italian police.”

I was about to answer when Father Luigi, shaking his head in disapproval, said in a gloomy voice, “Captain, you don't know what that object is capable of. Believe me, there are people who, if they were aware of the least of its powers, would quite happily commit a massacre to obtain it. And what better occasion than tomorrow's summit for a show of strength?”

“Father, if all I have to go on is a phone call and a video showing a woman being beaten up, the best I can do is ask my Italian colleagues to deal with it and carry on with the security plan the Vatican has put in place together with the Italian secret services, the CIA, the FBI, the Russian SVR and all the others. Tomorrow, the best trained men in the world will all be here. Nothing and nobody will be able to enter the red zone without my authorisation, I can guarantee you that.”

Palminteri sighed, then looked at us again. “Ok, let's try and stay calm. What exactly did the man ask for?”

“He asked me… Well, he wants all the information I have about the Baphomet,” I answered. “He seems to think I know more than I told him. I admitted to having the keys, but I also said I didn't have a clue where the idol could be. He didn't believe me and he's sure I'm hiding something from him.”

“And are you?”

“Are you kidding?! The whole reason we came here was that we thought you would know where the damn thing was!”

Father Luigi's face grew sad. “Unfortunately I do not. Your grandfather told me almost everything, but the secret of the Baphomet's last hiding place was buried with him. I begged him to unload himself of that burden, but he would not.”

He took my head in his hands. “It's impossible. There must be some other way of finding its location.”

I casually put my hand in my jacket pocket and took out the Cardan grille I had found in Sean Bruce's box.

“Look at this. I found it where Sean used to hide his stuff, together with four keys from the Lodge of the Nine. When I was in Kiev with Anna, the girl who's now in the hands of that lunatic, we managed to decode another message thanks to one like it, but then we were kidnapped before Anna could tell me what it meant.”

Barucci, totally exasperated, suddenly stood up.

“Ok, that's enough now. I am sorry but I need to get back to work. Father Palminteri, I had no idea you were involved with such… nonsense. I'm shocked.”

The priest also stood up, his face suddenly red.

“Captain, please moderate your tone. As I have already told you, you have no idea what you're talking about!”

“Ok, Ok – listen,” I broke in, trying to calm the others down. “This Raymond is going to call back before long. Unfortunately I have nothing to tell him, I have no news for him, but we could come up with something. Why don't we try to at least put a tap on Commissioner Franchi's phone, since he's going to be receiving the call? There's a chance we could locate the caller.”

Oscar nodded.

“When's he supposed to be calling?” asked Barucci abruptly.

“In half an hour.”

The captain hesitated for a moment, then set off with long strides towards the door. “Come with me, quickly.”

We reached the headquarters of the secret services and Civil Defence, which were inside the Vatican gendarmerie's offices, and entered a soundproofed room filled with hi-tech devices where four operators wearing bulky headphones were hard at work. Surprised by our little invasion, the four tuned their faces to us almost simultaneously.

Barucci handed Oscar's phone to one of the men. “Alfano, you have two minutes to connect this phone to your systems and get ready to locate a caller.”

“Yes, Captain,” replied the technician, and set to work immediately. “It's done,” he announced a few seconds later.

“Good work. And now we wait. It won't be long.”

The room was silent, apart from the noise of the machines. When there were only a couple of minutes left to three o'clock, the deadline Woland had insisted on, a phone rang.

“Here we go!” Barucci said.

“No, wait – that's mine,” I said in surprise.

“We should have tapped yours as well, then!”

“Raymond said he was going to call Oscar,” I replied, while the phone kept ringing.