The Florentine Cypher: Kate Benedict Paranormal Mystery #3 (The Kate Benedict Series) (31 page)

“I think you do. Claire said that you’d worked on deciphering the code with your brother. I checked into him. He’s a brilliant mathematician and he’s worked on cyphers. I am quite sure he solved the puzzle. And I’m equally sure that you lied to me when you claimed you hadn’t done it.”

He stared at me with the gaze of a scientist examining a sample in a lab, curious but detached. “You don’t lie well. Your neck flushed red when you told me you hadn’t finished working on the code.”

“We don’t know anything.”

“That’s a shame.” He gestured to the nurse to come to him. “It would be too bad if Ethan were to die of an accidental overdose of opioids. Sadly, it happens all the time. People in acute pain swallow down the medication their doctor has provided and then take a little more to hurry things up, looking for relief.”

The nurse looked at him with no expression on her face.

“Ofelia, I think your patient needs something to ease the pain in his knee.”

Without answering, she went into the bathroom.

“Ok, stop,” I said. “We have the code. We’ll help you.”

I realized that Santini hadn’t taken the time to look at our mobiles. If he had, he’d have found the decoded instructions in the text from Leo.

“You were the one who stole the
Della Pittura
?” I asked. “You have it?”

“Yes. However, without the provenance list, I didn’t have what I needed to decode the instructions. But you have the answer to that. My brother has the key, and I have the schematic. Between us, we can gain access to the vault. Santini and I will put aside our differences, for now at least. There’s a fortune at stake, which makes the effort worthwhile.”

“How did you know about it?” Claire asked. “About the
Della Pittura
?”

“Your father was an intelligent man. Not long after he found the book in your grandmother’s attic, he discovered the underlined keyword in the book and the cypher text on the provenance document. About four months ago, he came to Florence, asking questions. He was discreet but, still, information has a way of coming to me. That’s how I run my business, by listening. Who’s buying what, who’s selling. And so I heard about a reporter sniffing around for a story about a hidden vault.”

“And you started seeing Claire after you heard about Simon’s investigation?” I asked. “All that crap about love and destiny was a complete fabrication?”

He shrugged. Claire’s cheeks flamed red. “You’re disgusting,” she said.

Dante shook his head. “I liked you, Claire. It wasn’t just about the vault.” His eyes rested on her, his lips pursed. He had a pained look on his face. Perhaps there was a beating heart behind that stony facade. But I wouldn’t count on it.

When the nurse reappeared with a small brown bottle in her hand, Dante shook his head, so she put the bottle in her tunic pocket and went back to her place by the armoire. What kind of nurse would deliberately overdose a patient? But then, I reflected, what kind of cardinal would have gunslingers and kidnappers on his staff? We’d got mixed up with a very dangerous family.

Claire had been in a kind of trance, but now she seemed to come out of it. She took a few steps towards Dante.

“Did you kill my father?” she asked.

“Not personally.”

“But you had him killed. By Rocco or another of your hooligans. How did you manage it, Dante? On English soil, you managed to do something convincing enough to be written off as a tragic car accident?”

Dante looked at his watch again, not hiding his impatience. “My men adjusted the brake cables so that they would fail gradually. Once he was driving at speed on the motorway, an accident was inevitable. The first time he had to decelerate behind a slower-moving vehicle…”

“A slower-moving lorry,” Claire corrected him. Ethan’s hand squeezed mine hard.

“A lorry, yes,” agreed Dante. “When he tried to slow down, the brakes failed and his car ran under the lorry.”

“And he was decapitated,” finished Claire. “Do you know what it’s like to hear that from a policeman? You’re despicable, Dante.”

She lashed out and slapped him on the face, leaving a vivid red imprint. He pushed her away, rubbing the inflamed skin on his cheek.

“How could you?” she asked.

Dante threw his hands up as though he’d had no choice but to kill Simon Hamilton, kidnap Ethan, and take Claire and me captive, too.

Claire’s anger seemed to evaporate after she hit Dante, replaced by violent sobs that shook her body. She groped her way towards the bed and sat on the edge, her head down on her knees.

“I assume your men also killed Ben?” I said.

Dante nodded. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, as they say. Refusing to let my man search the office and threatening to call the police.”

Ethan looked bewildered; he was probably still too sedated to fully understand what was happening.

“Look,” Dante said. “I’m not a monster. I only did what I had to do to stay one step ahead of my brother.”

I shivered, wondering what constituted a monster in Dante’s world.

A gust of wind rattled the window, throwing rain like pebbles against the glass. I clambered to my feet and walked towards the window, taking a couple of deep breaths on the way. Gradually, the shakiness in my legs subsided and my pulse rate settled. Claire was so emotionally tied up in this that she wouldn’t be able to think clearly. She’d just found out that her so-called boyfriend had killed her father, kidnapped her brother, and lied to her for months. Ethan was injured and sedated. I had to focus if we were to get out of this alive.

There was no way Dante would release us. But we had to go along, to stop him from killing Ethan right now. I leaned against the windowsill, running through our options. As they were so limited, my thinking time should have been short, but my mind was spinning, throwing out threads of ideas that broke as soon as I grasped at them.

Dante had no aura. The air over Claire and Ethan was moving fast. The message was clear enough. Dante was safe, Claire and Ethan weren’t.

I remembered that Santini had an aura too. I didn’t care whether he died or not, but I pondered what it might mean. Did Dante plan to kill his brother too, once he had access to the treasure? And if that were the case, could we change the outcome by aligning ourselves with Santini? If the three of us ganged up on Dante, would we all survive this? But how would I convince Santini that he was in mortal danger?

A bell tolled somewhere in the city. I turned around to see Dante looking at his watch. “Okay, enough,” he said. “It’s time. Kate and Claire will come with me. If you cooperate, you will all be released. If you don’t, Ethan will be killed. Are we clear? Ofelia, if you don’t hear from me by eight o clock, you know what to do.”

“What?” demanded Claire. “What will she do?”

“She’ll administer a lethal dose of sedatives to Ethan and she’ll disappear.”

“We’ll tell you what you need to know,” Claire said. “You go to the vault and we’ll stay here with Ethan.”

Dante smiled. “No,
cara
. I want you there, with Santini and me, to be sure you tell me the truth. How can I trust you not to give me the wrong code? No, you have to be present. You have to be vested in the successful opening of the vault. Once you’ve helped me achieve that, then you will be safe.”

I didn’t believe that for a second. I calculated my chances of taking him down and decided they were zero. And Rocco was standing in the doorway with a gun in his hand. If we were to have any chance of escaping, it would be by outwitting Dante, not overpowering him.

“There’s something I need to tell you before we go,” I said as he stood up and adjusted his blue silk tie.

Dante sighed. “Yes?”

“You’re going to die today.”

“Very funny. Start moving. You too, Claire.”

“No, really. I know when someone is going to die. An aura appears, which looks like air rippling over your head. You know how air trembles over hot sand, that sort of mirage effect? It’s like that. And when the aura moves fast, it means death is imminent. Your aura is racing. That’s a very bad sign.”

Claire lifted her head and twisted around on the bed. She looked at me with raised eyebrows. I moved my head very slightly to indicate that this aura story wasn’t true. Reflexively, she touched her hair, as if checking her own aura was still in place, which, sadly, it was.

She stood up. “You’d better take notice, Dante. It’s true that Kate can see these death-predicting auras, and she’s never been wrong yet.”

Dante narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re joking, right?”

“No, I’m not.”

“The good news is that you can change your own fate,” I said. “If you take a different path, you may be able to release yourself from whatever danger lies in wait for you. You won’t die and the aura will disappear. I’ve seen it happen, many times.”

That part, at least, was true.

Dante looked at Claire. “You believe all this rubbish? This
spazzatura
?”

She nodded. “Absolutely.” She shrugged. “But I see ghosts, so I’m more tuned in than most to other-worldly manifestations.”

“Ghosts!” Dante scoffed. “Good God.”

“Remember that time I took you for a walk along the Vasari Corridor one evening when everyone else had gone? You told me you felt cold, even though the air was warm. I knew why you were shivering. A gentleman from the fifteenth century was walking beside us. He seemed to find you quite fascinating.”

Dante’s expression would have been funny under any other circumstances. “Do you think I’m an idiot?” he demanded. “Let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time.”

“Time that you don’t have,” I said. “But it’s your choice. Just think about what you’re planning to do, and do something completely different. Chances are you’ll be alive at the end of today after all.”

“Ridiculous,” he muttered, turning towards the door. “Follow me.”

He stopped suddenly, as though remembering something, and swung around to look at Ethan. “To be clear,” he said. “If Claire or Kate do anything to impede me, I will kill you. Equally, if you try anything at all, I will kill them.”

Claire ran back to hug Ethan, while I gave him a little wave. My throat closed up and my eyes burned. He was my friend. We had to find some way to save him, whatever happened.

We filed out into the corridor and waited while Rocco locked the door behind us. Then we passed through the cozy living room and descended the stairs towards the gallery on the ground floor. We paused for a minute while Rocco went into the office to collect something. It was a satchel, which he slung over his shoulder. Then he led us along the landing to a staircase that descended into a well of darkness. Musty air, full of damp and decay, percolated upwards. As Rocco took the narrow steps downward, he switched on lights to illuminate the stone treads. The walls on each side of the staircase were built of bare brick, cold to the touch.

The stairs terminated in a corridor lined with electrical conduits and lit with bulbs that hung from brown wires. When Claire reached out and grabbed my hand, hers was as cold as a dead man’s. We walked in silence for some distance until we came to a closed door. When Rocco unlocked it, I recognized where we were. The lift in front of us led down to Dante’s warehouse. We’d used it this morning. So, his gallery and the warehouse were connected by this underground tunnel. But I’d thought we were heading to the vault. I raised my eyebrows at Claire, who shook her head, looking as confused as I felt.

Silently, we gathered in the lift cage for the descent to the basement, as we’d done earlier in the day. This time we didn’t loiter to admire works of art. Rocco strode ahead, with Dante bringing up the rear. We covered the length of the warehouse at a fast pace and came to the end, to an old rust-colored brick wall that I’d seen on our last visit.

What I hadn’t noticed before was a door, painted the same shade as the bricks and so well camouflaged that it was barely noticeable. Rocco unlocked it and shepherded us into another narrow passage, this one carved through the rock and angling downwards. When my feet slipped on the stone floor, I grabbed hold of a rope handrail looped between iron pegs driven into the walls.

“We are very close to the foundation of the cathedral.” Dante’s voice echoed in the tight space. “This tunnel runs parallel to the wall of Santa Reparata.”

Santa Reparata was the original cathedral of Florence, constructed in the fifth century, as I recalled from many visits to the cathedral museum. By the thirteenth century, it had become dilapidated and unable to serve the growing Florentine community, so the new cathedral was constructed on top of it. The dome, a true marvel of engineering, was its crowning glory.

I remembered reading that excavation work in the 1960s had uncovered what remained of the old church, together with ruins of the old Roman city of Florentia. Later, in the ’70s, the tomb of the great Brunelleschi, architect of the dome, was discovered down here.

The Prologue to Alberti’s
Della Pittura
was dedicated to Brunelleschi. So the choice of that particular book as the hiding place for the Custodians’ key and the code was perfect. A subtle clue that their vault was located very close to the cathedral.

Preoccupied, I bumped into Rocco when he stopped at a second door. He took out another key and swung the door open, reached inside and picked up an old-fashioned glass and bronze lantern. With a silver lighter from his satchel he lit the wick. As the lamp flickered into life, I saw a cavern with a low ceiling and rock walls on three sides. On the fourth side rose a wall of stone blocks, looking exactly like the diagram that had been stored in the old book. This was it. This was the vault.

Dante pointed to a place against the rock. “Stand there,” he said. I grabbed Claire’s arm, and we pressed ourselves against the wall, out of the circle of light cast by the lamp that Rocco had placed on the ground. I felt the chill of the ancient stone against my back.

“Now, Kate, why don’t you tell me the exact instructions that you deciphered from the code in the book?”

When I hesitated, Dante motioned to Rocco, who extracted his gun from inside his jacket. He pointed it at Claire.