Blood of the Lamb (44 page)

Thomas stepped over the threshold and onto the marble floor under the Tempietto, into one of Christendom’s most sacred sites. Across the room, at a small altar, an eternal flame steadily burned, fed by a reservoir of oil. The only light beyond that came through the open door behind him where Livia now stood and faintly through the grate in the floor above. This late in the day, no one but he and Livia had been in the upper chapel, and they were alone here in the lower one, too. He paused, breathing the quiet air. Saint Peter had not died here, may never have even set foot here; but relics and churches, paintings and sculptures and holy places, were all just tools, all serving the same purpose: to bring a seeking soul into awareness of the divine. Despite his knowledge, despite the new truths lately learned and old lies newly revealed, Thomas, standing here, couldn’t help but feel a deep, cool comfort, a calm and quiet joy.

He understood: faith had created this joy. Not his faith alone; the true belief of pilgrims over centuries that this place was sacred had sanctified it. Faith had brought holiness into being.

Thomas had rarely felt so strongly the desire to fall to his knees in grateful prayer. But this thought came to him also: belief of a different kind could work to equally powerful, and disastrous, ends. Lorenzo, and countless churchmen before him, believed the Noantri to be evil, knew them as Satan’s creatures. Had acted upon this belief, had hunted and annihilated them—and in the process, set itself as the enemy of men and women of every kind whom the Church, lost in an overgrowth of fear whose roots were its fear of the Noantri, had also considered
other
. Had done great evil in the name of eradicating evil.

Thomas himself had held to this belief just a few hours earlier. Yet Livia, and Ellen Bird, even Spencer George—and Mario Damiani, and Saint Cecilia herself!—all you had to do was look with open and clear eyes to see the truth.

And the Noantri who had abducted Lorenzo? Without whose demands Thomas would not be here on this holy ground? Yes, they were evil. Proving only that there were malevolent forces at work in the world, in the hearts of Noantri as well as the hearts of churchmen. In the hearts of all people—his, and Livia’s. People.

These thoughts were well worth serious reflection, deep contemplation. Not here, though, and not now.

Thomas knelt, but not in prayer. He bent over the thick glass disk, scrabbling for a fingerhold around its edges. He was prepared to work it, to heft it loose. It surprised him by giving without much difficulty, though at two inches thick and three feet wide it made him work to lift it out. Livia could have done it easily, but if anything today had been Thomas’s job, it was this. He rolled the glass cover aside, laid it carefully down. The cistern below appeared not as deep as he was tall. Its diameter was the same as the glass cover, perhaps three feet, and its dirt floor was rough in the dim light. With a glance back at Livia, Thomas dropped inside it.

86

Forcing himself calm, Jonah Richter watched from behind a column in the cloister as Livia and Father Kelly entered the Tempietto’s lower chapel. Things were unfolding beautifully. When Livia and Kelly exploded out of Santa Cecilia and started doubling back, Jonah knew at once the hunt had entered a new phase. Though he’d been observing them all day, he’d never gotten close enough to learn what their search was based on; still, it was clear the geographical pattern they were following had radically changed. Closer and closer they’d crept to the river, and then suddenly they were running back through Trastevere and up the Janiculum Hill.

Whoever had stolen the Concordat had hidden it well. All of Rome would be demolished and rebuilt, urban-renewed and modernized, before a stone of the Tempietto was ever changed. Silently, Jonah thanked the brave Noantri who’d done it, who’d made possible the coming Unveiling. He had no idea who that had been. That the Concordat was missing at all he’d only learned when like-minded Noantri working in and around the Vatican had begun to whisper to him of odd, esoteric inquiries and recondite trail-following initiated by the new Librarian, Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa. Jonah was the first to grasp the meaning of the Cardinal’s research, the only one to arrive at a plan for turning the situation to their use.

This had all taken time, but time was something Jonah had in abundance. He did acknowledge the irony of impatience such as his in someone for whom time unrolled endlessly, world without end, amen. Impetuosity was a trait from his Unchanged days. It had caused him to leave engineering studies for art history, led him to act on his attraction to his dark-haired thesis adviser, though she was clearly at least a decade older. (Such a breathtaking understatement!) It drove him, once he knew, to ask, beg, plead with her to make him Noantri: the world was so huge, so much to be seen, tasted, lived—far more than one meager human lifetime would allow. She’d been reluctant, but once his Change had been accomplished, she’d taken almost as much pleasure in it as he. In their lovemaking, their studies, their play, she was always the more measured, considered, he the more eager and rash. She’d known much better how to choose the routes and byways, metaphorical and real; but once started along them, he could always outrun her.

And he was impatient now: impatient to Unveil, impatient to live freely in the world as the man he was, to stop pretending, stop lying. Impatient to feel Livia’s arms around him once again; because she would certainly recognize, once his plans had succeeded—as she always had in all the unorthodox paths he’d taken them down—that the only thing that had been holding her back was an old and burdensome fear.

Impatience, though, could sink him now. He could barely stay still, lurking ridiculously behind this column, but he had to. He’d known that once he made his threat, the Conclave would set Livia on his trail, his and the Concordat’s, and that she’d start by searching for it, not him. He knew her that well. He hadn’t counted on Father Kelly being of any real use, though he’d admittedly gone to some lengths to keep him around. What he had counted on, and he’d apparently been right, was that if anyone could find the Concordat—the Cardinal Librarian having failed—his Livia could.

87

Livia watched Thomas sit on the edge of the cistern for a moment, and then slip down. The pit appeared to be about five feet deep; the chapel floor was level with his shoulders. He crouched, disappearing. She waited until impatience got the better of her. She stepped forward and, looking down, said, “What can you see?”

“Nothing. You’re in my light.”

She rummaged in her bag, stooped, and handed him her new cell phone. It didn’t have the flashlight app but the screen was bright. He took his out, too, and trained them together on the cistern floor. No spot stood out from another, but it had been a century and a half since Damiani had hidden the Concordat. Livia was already working out various schemes for digging into the packed earth when Thomas turned the beams to the brick walls. They were five feet high, making a circle three feet in diameter. Livia searched her geometry training, itself from a century back. If she was right, something over two hundred bricks would need to be painstakingly examined, pulled and prodded to see if any were loose.

But suddenly Thomas stopped the back-and-forth movement of the light, stood for a moment in thought, and then swung the light to a line of bricks in a chosen direction.

“What are you doing?” Livia asked.

“Southeast. Toward Jerusalem. Look!”

How like Damiani. The sacred dimension of Peter’s journey might have eluded him, but not its geographical one. There, on a brick exactly halfway down the wall in the row facing Jerusalem, was scratched a small, upside-down cross.

88

Thomas handed Livia both phones. Without a word she sat and held the light steady on the marked brick. He crouched, felt around the mortar joint, found a tiny protruding angle. The brick put up no objection as he wriggled it back and forth. It slid forward until he could get a real grip on it, then eased out into his waiting hand. He slipped his other hand into the crevice its absence created.

A curved wall like this, Thomas knew, would be three or four bricks deep; his hand should have had no more than a three-inch cavity to search before bumping into the next brick. But the two bricks behind the marked one had been removed, leaving a miniature cavern. He felt around and found it immediately: a metal tube. He examined it as he drew it out. Lead, from the dullness of it, six inches long, two inches in diameter, sealed in red wax around its cap.

He looked wordlessly up at Livia. She nodded.

With his thumbnail he pried the wax from the seam. A little wriggling and the cap came loose. Inside the tube was a rolled and folded parchment. Thomas slid it out.

“It may be brittle,” Livia warned.

Afraid she was right, he loosened its tight spiral but didn’t try to flatten it out. Instead he pulled the outside edge away just enough to see two florid, flowing signatures in ink.

“Martinus V, Pontifex Maximus,”
he said. “And here—
Pontifex Aliorum
? The Pope of the Others? Who—”

“‘The Pope of the Others,’” Livia repeated calmly. “Our Pontifex. He leads the Noantri, and always has. We—” Without warning, she leapt to her feet and spun around. “Stay down!” she shouted.

Of course Thomas didn’t. He stood up just in time to see a man trotting down the steps from the Tempietto’s upper level. He knew him: the blond Noantri from San Francesco a Ripa. Jonah Richter, the man who’d started all this.

Richter stepped over the threshold into the small room. The eternal flame flickered shadows across his features. He gazed at Livia with a smile brash but also surprisingly tender. “Hello, Livia.”

“Jonah.” In that one word Thomas heard anguish: love, fear, longing, loss.

“It’ll be all right now,” Richter said, with gentle reassurance. “Give it to me.”

That voice. Thomas realized he knew it. Before he could stop himself he blurted, “You’re the man on the phone! You kidnapped Lorenzo!”

Richter looked down at Thomas, standing in the cistern, and laughed. “Father Kelly, we meet at last. An odd situation, but it’s a pleasure.”

“It’s certainly not! Where’s the Cardinal? If you’ve— If he’s—” He wasn’t sure how to put it. Before he found the words, Livia spoke.

“Jonah. How did you know we were here? And in the church, before?”

Richter nodded, confirming. “I’ve been following you.”

“The Concordat.” Her voice held marvel, not accusation. “You never had it. You never knew where it was.”

“No.” Richter’s smile softened. “But I knew you could find it.”

Sparks flew from her words: “I was trying to save
you
!”

“Proving I was right. You’ve never stopped loving me. Or I you. Give it to me, Livia, and we’ll be together again. Together, and free. To live as we please. That’s all I ever wanted.”

“That’s why . . . all this? The threat to reveal it, everything? You suddenly thought, Oh, I know, I’ll get the Conclave to scare Livia to death and she’ll go out and find the lost Concordat, and I’ll steal it from her and make us all Unveil?”