The Judas Strain - James Rollins [8]
The surfaces were no longer blank. Lines of script glowed in blue-white sigils down all four sides.
It was not hieroglyphics. It was a language that predated the ancient Egyptians.
Stefano could not keep the awe from his voice. “Could it truly be the writing of the—”
Behind him, whispered words echoed down from the floor above. A skitter of loose rock trickled down the back stairs.
He swung around, fearful, his blood icing.
He recognized the calm, clipped cadence of the whisper in the dark.
The Egyptian.
They’d been discovered.
Perhaps sensing the same, the woman clicked off her lamp, dousing the violet light. Darkness collapsed around them.
Stefano lifted his penlight, seeking some hope in the face of this dark Madonna. Instead, he discovered a black pistol, elongated with a silencer, aimed at his face, held in the woman’s other hand. He understood and despaired. Fooled yet again.
“Grazie, Stefano.”
Between the sharp cough and the spat of muzzle flash, only one thought squeezed through the fatal gap.
Maria, forgive me.
JULY 3, 1:16 P.M.
Vatican City
MONSIGNOR VIGOR VERONA climbed the stairs with great reluctance, haunted by memories of flame and smoke. His heart was too heavy for such a long climb. He felt a decade older than his sixty years. Stopping at a landing, he craned upward, one hand supporting his lower back.
Above, the circular stairwell was a choked maze of scaffolding, crisscrossed with platforms. Knowing it was bad luck, Vigor ducked under a painter’s ladder and continued higher up the dark stairs that climbed the Torre dei Venti, the Tower of Winds.
Fumes of fresh paint threatened to burn tears from his eyes. But other smells also intruded, phantoms from a past he preferred to forget.
Charred flesh, acrid smoke, burning ash.
Two years ago an explosion and fire had ignited the tower into a blazing torch within the heart of the Vatican. But after much work, the tower was returning to its former glory. Vigor had looked forward to next month, when the tower would be reopened, the ribbon cut by His Eminence himself.
But mostly he looked forward to finally putting the past to rest.
Even the famous Meridian Room at the very top of the tower, where Galileo had sought to prove that the earth revolved around the sun, was almost fully restored. It had taken eighteen months, under the care and expertise of a score of artisans and art historians, to painstakingly reclaim the room’s frescoes from soot and ash.
Would that all could be so recovered with brush and paint.
As the new prefect of the Archivio Segretto Vaticano, Vigor knew how much of the Vatican’s Secret Archives had been lost forever to flame, smoke, and water. Thousands of ancient books, illuminated texts, and archival regestra—leather-bound packets of parchments and papers. Over the past century, the rooms of the tower had served as overflow from the carbonile, the main bunker of the archives far below.
Now sadly, the library had much more room.
“Prefetto Verona!”
Vigor startled back to the present, almost wincing, hearing an echo of another’s voice. But it was only his assistant, a young seminary student named Claudio, calling down from the top of the stairs. He awaited Vigor in the Meridian Room, having reached the destination well ahead of his older superior. The young man held back a drape of clear plastic tarp that separated the stair from the upper room.
An hour ago Vigor had been summoned to the tower by the head of the restoration team. The man’s message had been as urgent as it was cryptic. Come quickly. A most horrible and wonderful discovery has been made.
So Vigor had left his offices for the long trek to the top of the freshly painted tower. He had not even changed out of his black cassock, donned for an earlier meeting with the Vatican’s secretary of state. He regretted his choice of garment, too heavy and warm for the arduous climb. But finally he reached his assistant and wiped his damp forehead with a handkerchief.