The Second Messiah (50 page)

“Let there be light. There you go. I guess the circuit wasn’t shorted after all. Maybe Fonzi was right and the main breaker simply popped.” Jack took a step back and dusted his hands.

Lela frowned. “Why was the switch room door ajar? And why didn’t the alarm switch over to the battery circuit, like Fonzi said?”

Jack studied the security alarm panel, then gestured to a key inserted into a lock in the panel’s side. “There’s your reason. The alarm key’s in the off position. Someone’s totally disabled it.”

A frightening scream erupted from behind them, and it stopped a split second later. Jack directed the powerful flashlight down the hall. “Fonzi!”

He raced back down the corridor, Lela following him.

THEY REACHED THE
basement. A blaze of light radiated from inside the door. Lela aimed her Sig as she moved cautiously into the room. She beckoned Jack and he joined her.

The room appeared empty. No sign of Fonzi.

The projector screen was on, the screen lit up and glowing. Fear pounding in his chest, Jack found a light switch by the door and flicked it on. A fluorescent light sprang on overhead. A darkened hallway was exposed at the far end of the basement. Beyond the hallway, an open exit door led to a short flight of gray metal stairs that rose up to ground level.

A breeze wafted in, the sound of heavy rain drumming beyond. When Jack looked back across the room he noticed Fonzi lying sprawled on the floor beside his upturned wheelchair. A horrific slash stained his neck, his throat cut from ear to ear, a growing pool of blood oozing onto the carpet.

“Jesus, no.” Jack was ashen as he went to kneel beside the body.

Lela joined him. A gurgling sound erupted from Fonzi’s lips. It sounded like a strangled cry and then he fell still. Jack felt for a pulse. “He—he’s gone. What callous brute would kill—”

“Sssh.” Lela put a finger to her lips, then aimed her Sig toward the exit hallway, just as a bulky figure dressed in dark clothes started to move up the stairs.

“Halt!” Lela shouted.

A muzzle flashed in reply and two gunshots cracked.

Lela threw herself to the floor. “Get down!”

Jack crouched low as another two shots exploded, the rounds
zinging
above his head like crazed hornets and thudding into the wall. As the figure moved awkwardly up the stairs, pointing the weapon back at them, Lela aimed and fired twice from a prone position. The figure grunted, spun round, and collapsed back into the hallway.

Lela got to her feet, still aiming at the man sprawled on his back on the floor. Jack joined her and flicked on a light. They stared down at the man.

He was dressed in dark pants and a jacket and black leather gloves and wore a black ski mask. An automatic pistol was clutched in one hand and blood oozed from wounds in his upper shoulder and in the back of his head. Jack knelt and felt the man’s neck through the bloodstained mask. “He’s dead. You did the right thing. He could have killed us both.”

Lela was gray with shock. “It’s the first time I’ve shot anyone.”

Jack leaned across and yanked up the dead man’s ski mask. “Well, what do you know.”

It was the Syrian, Pasha, his dark eyes glassy in death. As if to confirm it, Jack tore off the man’s left leather glove to reveal the withered hand. He was about to tell Lela when she tensed. “You hear that? Someone’s moving outside.”

She shifted toward the exit door just as Jack heard a rush of footsteps. He wrenched the automatic from Pasha’s fingers and hurried up the stairs after Lela.

They came out in a lit courtyard at the side of the villa. It was decorated with flower beds, tall palm trees, and fountains. Fifty yards away a black metal railing protected the villa’s perimeter and beyond it was a public street, the rain spilling down. A gate set in the middle of the railings yawned open. Jack spotted a figure climbing into a white van and tearing off a black ski mask.

He recognized the Syrian’s companion, Botwan. The van roared away with a squeal of tires. Botwan fired out the window, making Lela dive for the cover of some bushes. The van screeched round a corner and disappeared.

Jack reached Lela and helped her to her feet. “You could have got yourself killed.”

“I was going to try to shoot out their tires. Whoever they are, they came prepared.”

“What do you mean?”

Lela walked back toward the gate. A box of tools lay scattered on the grass, a selection of pliers and screwdrivers and an electronic digital meter. She kicked at the meter with the tip of her foot. “They probably used this stuff to disable the alarm.”

Lights sprang on in windows along the street. Raised Italian voices sounded irritated; people’s sleep had been disturbed by gunfire and squealing tires.

“Let’s get out of sight.” Jack led the way as they descended the steps into the basement.

Lela stared down at the dead Syrian. “Who is he?”

“The killer named Pasha I told you about.”

“What about the guy in the van?”

Jack looked down at Fonzi’s corpse and felt sickened. “His accomplice.” He moved over to the desk, held up a bundle of ripped-out wires, and said bitterly, “He grabbed the laptop, for whatever good it’ll do him.”

Lela knelt, searched in the Syrian’s pockets, and removed a cell phone and wallet. “We can check these out later, to see if they tell us anything.”

“I think I’d feel safer if I kept this.” Jack slipped Pasha’s firearm into his own pocket. Then he knelt, and using his finger and thumb he closed Fonzi’s eyes before he stood and stared down at the body. “May he rest in peace. I should never have got him involved.”

Police sirens shrieked in the distance. Lela put a hand on Jack’s arm. “We have to leave. What’s wrong?”

Jack stared at the blank projector screen, the empty whiteness blazing out at him. The black indelible marks that Lela had drawn on the side of the whiteboard were clearly illuminated.

Jack stared at the cruciform shapes as if the wheels of his mind were turning furiously. The sirens wailed closer.

“Jack, we better go,
fast
. Are you listening? What’s wrong?”

He turned from the screen and met her stare. “I know who robbed the scroll and killed Green.”

DEAD SEA,

NEAR THE JORDANIAN-ISRAELI BORDER

DAWN LICKED THE
horizon as Hassan sat grim-faced in the back of the black Mercedes S600. He stared out of the limo’s smoked glass windows. His insides felt hollow as the car drove through a ragged sprawl of whitewashed mud brick houses that passed for a village.

Not a soul stirred, the occupants still sleeping, the only sound a barking dog. As the cortege of three black Mercedes drove toward the burial ground, Hassan Malik’s eyes were fixed on the hearse in front of him. It carried Nidal’s body, wrapped inside a simple white cotton burial cloth. The hearse bumped and settled as it hit a rut.

The image of his brother’s body being tossed around made Hassan’s heart stutter and he wiped his eyes.
We are all dust and to dust we will return
.

He reflected on the last five hours. After the doctor had falsely signed the death certificate, Hassan had laid out his brother in the private prayer room at the back of the villa. There he had respectfully washed Nidal’s body with scented water before wrapping him in the simple white
kafan
shroud.

Then Hassan sat alone, praying over the body, grief like a dagger in his heart, his mind tormented, and then it came time to leave for Rome’s airport and the two-hour flight to Amman.

The Lear landed at 2
A.M.
but it took another hour for Jordanian customs to clear the paperwork for Nidal’s remains, stored in aircraft’s hold, before the cortege drove to the Bedu graveyard near the Dead Sea, opposite the Israeli border. Now Hassan emitted an
anguished
sigh as the cortege turned into the burial ground and slid past granite tombs.

He had dreaded the finality of this moment as the cortege came to a halt near a bank of olive trees. A fresh grave was opened, uprooted earth piled by the plot. An imam appeared out of the first limo, and two gravediggers wearing white Arab gowns and carrying shovels materialized like ghosts in the twilight.

The Serb stepped out of the Mercedes and eased open the rear door. Hassan climbed out, choking back his tears.

It was time to bury his beloved Nidal.

The ceremony was brief. The gravediggers helped carry Nidal’s body from the hearse and Hassan touched the cloth that held his brother, kissed it, let it go.

Then, in accordance with Muslim custom, the gravediggers placed the body in the open grave, lying on its right side, the eyes closed, the shroud removed from the face, the head facing Mecca.

The imam recited his prayers for the dead, and then each man present took a turn to pour three handfuls of soil into the grave while reciting from the Quran. “
We created you from clay and return you into it
.”

Prayers over, the gravediggers and the others withdrew out of respect, the red taillights of the remaining two limos disappearing into the darkness.

Hassan went to kneel in front of the grave. He touched the earth, felt its coldness seep into his fingers, and he exhaled. Tonight and forever Nidal would be as cold as the soil. Hassan said his anguished prayers and when he finished, a violent crack of thunder sounded and he looked up. Storm clouds drifted, the Mediterranean sky the color of dark chocolate.

A thunderbolt sizzled and rain spattered the parched soil. Hassan looked back at his brother’s resting place and his mind boiled with a rage so powerful it made his hands tremble.

He wiped his eyes. It was time to finish what he came to do.

“WHO DID IT,
Jack? Who stole the scroll and killed Green?”

They sat in the back of the taxi that Jack had flagged down. As it drove through the Sunday morning streets toward their hotel, Rome was no longer a traffic asylum.

Jack said, “My gut feeling tells me the Vatican. I still can’t figure out exactly what Father Novara’s twin cross symbols mean but I have my suspicions.”

“Go on.”

“Novara was an expert in old Aramaic, sure, but he could have simply meant to suggest that there was more than one messiah. I also think maybe he was trying to convey by implication that the Catholic Church had a hand in his death. That’s what my instinct tells me. Novara was dying, his life ebbing away. He used the twin cross symbols as a kind of desperate shorthand, a clue. It’s about all that makes sense.”