The Venetian Betrayal (35 page)

Thorvaldsen said, "This was found with the bones of St. Mark when they were removed from the crypt, in 18

5, and brought up to the altar. St. Mark was martyred in Alexandria and mummified, so it was thought this amulet was simply part of that process. But since it has pagan overtones, the Church fathers decided not to include it with the remains. They recognized its historical value, though, and placed it here, in the treasury. When the Church learned of Zovastina's interest in St. Mark, the amulet took on a greater importance. But when Daniels told me about it, I recalled what Ptolemy said."

So did he.

Touch the innermost being of the golden illusion.

Pieces clicked into place. "The golden illusion was the body itself in Memphis, since it was wrapped in gold. The innermost being? The heart." He held up the amulet. "This."

"Which means," Davis said, "that the remains out there in the basilica are not St. Mark."

Malone nodded. "They're something else entirely. Something that has nothing to do with Christianity."

Thorvaldsen pointed to the bottom side. "That's the Egyptian hieroglyph for the phoenix, the symbol of rebirth."

More of the riddle flashed through his brain.

Divide the phoenix.

And he knew exactly what to do.

CASSIOPEIA REALIZED SHE WAS BEING PLAYED BY ZOVASTINA'S question. What if Ely isn't dead? So she controlled her emotions and calmly said, "But he is dead, and has been for months."

"You're sure?"

Cassiopeia had many times wondered--how could she not?--but she fought the pain of wishing and declared, "Ely's dead."

Zovastina reached for a phone and pushed one of the keys. A few seconds passed, then she said into the unit, "Viktor, I need you to tell someone about what happened the night Ely Lund died."

Zovastina offered her the phone.

Cassiopeia did not move. She recalled what he'd said on the boat. Which was nothing.

"Can you afford not to listen to what he has to say?" Zovastina asked, a nauseating look of satisfaction in her dark eyes.

This woman knew her weakness, and somehow that realization frightened Cassiopeia more than what Viktor might say. She wanted to know. The past few months had been torment. Yet...

"Shove that phone up your ass."

Zovastina hesitated, then smiled. Finally, she said into the unit, "Maybe later, Viktor. You can let the priest go now."

She clicked off.

The plane continued to climb into the clouds, heading east for Asia.

"Viktor was watching Ely's house. On my orders."

Cassiopeia didn't want to listen.

"He entered from the rear. Ely was bound to a chair and the assassin was preparing to shoot him. Viktor shot the assassin first, then brought Ely to me and burned the house with the killer inside."

"You can't expect me to believe that."

"There are people within my government who would like to see me gone. Unfortunately, treachery is part of our political way. They fear me and knew Ely was assisting me. So they ordered him killed, just as they'd ordered others, who were my allies, eliminated."

Cassiopeia remained skeptical.

"Ely is HIV positive."

That truth arrested Cassiopeia's attention. "How do you know?"

"He told me. I've been supplying him with his medications these past two months. Unlike you, he trusts me."

Cassiopeia knew that Ely would have never told anyone that he was infected. Only Henrik and Ely knew about her malady.

Now she was confused.

But she wondered.

Had that been the whole idea?

MALONE CARESSED THE SMOOTH PATINA OF THE HEART AMULET, his fingers tracing the outline of the bird that represented the Egyptian phoenix. "Ptolemy said to divide the phoenix."

He shook the artifact, listening.

Nothing moved inside.

Thorvaldsen seemed to understand what he was about to do. "That thing is over two thousand years old."

Malone could not care less. Cassiopeia was in trouble and the world may soon be experiencing a biological war. Ptolemy had penned a riddle that obviously led to where Alexander the Great had wanted to be entombed. The Greek warrior-turned-pharaoh apparently had been privy to good information. And if he said divide the phoenix, then Malone was damn well going to do it.

He pounded the amulet, bottom-side first, into the marble floor.

It recoiled and about a third of the scarab broke away, like a nut cracking. He settled the pieces on the floor and examined them.

Something spilled out from the sides.

The others knelt with him.

He pointed and said, "The inside was cleaved, ready to split, and packed with sand."

He lifted the larger chunk and emptied the granules.

Edwin Davis pointed. "Look."

Malone saw it, too. He gently brushed the sand aside and spotted a cylindrical object, maybe a half inch in diameter. Then he noticed that it wasn't a cylinder at all.

A strip of gold.

Coiled.

He carefully tipped the tiny bundle onto its side and spotted random letters etched into one side.

"Greek," he said.

Stephanie bent down closer. "And look how thin that foil is. Like leaf."

"What is it?" Davis asked.

Malone's mind starting clicking the final pieces into place. The next part of Ptolemy's riddle now became important. Life provides the measure of the grave. Be wary, for there is but one chance of success. He reached into his pocket and found the medallion Stephanie had shown him. "Concealed on this are microletters. ZH. And we know Ptolemy minted these medallions, when he created the riddle."

He noticed a tiny symbol--

--on one side and instantly knew the connection. "That same symbol was on the manuscript you showed me. At the bottom, below the riddle." He saw the wording clearly in his mind. Life provides the measure of the true grave.

"How do the elephant medallions and that strip of gold connect to each other?" Davis asked.

"To know that," Malone said, "you have to know what that strip is."

He saw that Stephanie was reading him.

"And you do?" she asked.

He nodded. "I know exactly what this is."

VIKTOR CUT THE THROTTLE AND ALLOWED THE BOAT TO DRIFT back toward the quay at San Marco. He'd taken Michener from the basilica, straight to where he'd docked, thinking the safest place to wait for Zovastina's departure was on water. There he'd stayed, staring at the floodlit domes and pinnacles, the pink-and-white doge's palace, the campanile, and rows of antique buildings, solid and high, dotted with balconies and windows, all matted by the black yawn of night. He'd be glad when he was gone from Italy.

Nothing here had gone right.

"It's time you and I had a talk," Michener said.

He'd kept the priest in the boat's forward cabin, alone, while he waited for Zovastina's call, and Michener had sat casually and stayed silent.

"What could we have to talk about?"

"Perhaps the fact that you're an American spy."

Chapter
SIXTY

CENTRAL ASIAN FEDERATION

VINCENTI ALLOWED KARYN WALDE TIME TO DIGEST WHAT HE'D said. He remembered the moment when he first realized that he'd discovered the cure for HIV.

"I told you about the old man in the mountains--"

"Is that where you found it?" she asked, anticipation in her voice.

"I think refound would be more accurate."

He'd never spoken of this to anyone. How could he have? So he found himself eager to explain. "It's ironic how the simplest things can solve the most complex problems. In the early 1900s, beriberi flourished all over China, killing hundreds of thousands. You know why? To make the rice more marketable, merchants started polishing the kernels, which removed thiamine--vitamin B1--from the hull. Without thiamine in their diet, beriberi passed unchecked through the population. When the polishing stopped, the thiamine took care of the disease.

"The bark from the Pacific yew tree is an effective cancer treatment. It's no cure, but it can slow down the disease. Simple bread mold led to highly effective antibiotics that kill bacterial infections. And something as basic as a high-fat, ketogenic diet can actually arrest epilepsy in some children. Simple stuff. I found that same principle true for AIDS."

"What was it in that plant you chewed that worked?" she asked.

"Not it. They."

He saw her fear subside, as what might have been a threat was rapidly changing into salvation.

"Thirty years ago, we spotted a virus in the bloodstream of green monkeys. Our knowledge of viruses at the time was rudimentary, considering what we know now. We actually thought it a form of rabies, but the shape, size, and biology of the organism was different.

"It eventually was labeled simian immunodeficiency virus--SIV. We now know SIV can live in monkeys indefinitely without harming the animal. We first thought the monkeys had some kind of resistance, but we later learned the resistance came from the virus, which chemically realized that it couldn't ravage every biological organism it contacted. The virus learned to exist within the monkeys, without the monkeys knowing they even carried it."

"I've heard this," she said. "And the AIDS epidemic started with a monkey bite."

He shrugged. "Who knows? Could have been a bite or a scratch, could have been ingested. Monkeys are a regular part of many diets. No matter how it happened, the virus left monkeys and found humans. I saw this firsthand with a man named Charlie Easton, where the virus changed inside him from SIV to HIV."

He told her more about what happened decades ago, not all that far from where he stood, when Easton died.

"HIV harbored no parental instinct for humans, the way SIV did for monkeys. It went to work, quickly cloning cells in lymph nodes into duplicates of itself. Charlie was dead in a matter of weeks.

"But he wasn't the first. The first case that can be definitively diagnosed was a man from England. In 1959. A frozen serum sample tested in the early nineteen-nineties showed HIV in his blood, and medical records confirmed the symptoms of AIDS. Most likely SIV and HIV have both been around for centuries. People dying in isolated villages, nobody noticing. Secondary infections like pneumonia actually killed the people, so doctors routinely mistook AIDS for other things. Originally, in the United States, it was labeled 'the gay pneumonia.' The best guess now is that in the nineteen-fifties and-sixties, when Africa started to modernize and people began congregating in cities, the disease spread. Eventually, an outsider carried the virus off the continent. By the nineteen-eighties, HIV had made it across the globe."

"One of your natural biological weapons made good."

"We actually thought it lousy for that purpose. Too hard to contract, too long to kill. Which isn't bad. Any easier and we'd have a modern-day black death."

"We do," she said. "It's just not killing the right people yet."

He knew what she meant. Presently, there were two main strains. HIV-1, prevalent in Africa, while HIV-2 remained strong within intravenous drug users and homosexuals. Lately, new variant strains had started appearing, like a nasty one in Southeast Asia, recently acquiring the label of number three.

"Easton," she said. "Did you think you'd been infected by him?"

"We knew so little about how the virus passed back then. Remember, any offensive biological weapon is useless without a cure. So when that old healer offered to take me up into the mountains, I went. He showed me the plant and told me the juice from its leaves could stop what he called the fever-disease. So I ate some."

"And didn't give Easton any? You let him die?"

"I gave him the juice from the plant. But it did nothing for him."

She looked puzzled and he allowed her question to hang.

"Once Charlie died, I cataloged the virus as an unacceptable specimen. The Iraqis only wanted to know about successes. We were told to leave the failures in the field. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, when HIV was finally isolated in France and the United States, I recognized the biology. Initially, I didn't give it much thought. Hell, nobody outside the gay community was all that concerned. But by 1985 I heard the talk among the pharmaceutical community. Whoever found the cure was going to make a lot of money. So I decided to start looking. By then I knew a lot more. So I went back to central Asia, hired a guide to take me up to the high ground, and found the plant again. I brought back samples and tested it and, sure enough, the damn thing wiped HIV out almost on contact."

"You said it didn't work on Easton."

"The plant's useless. By the time I gave it to Charlie, the leaves were dry. It's not the leaves. It's the water. That's where I found them."

He held up the syringe.

"Bacteria."

Chapter
SIXTY-ONE

VENICE

"EVER HEARD OF A SCYTALE?" MALONE ASKED.