CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Vatican City, Italy

September 7

Morning

The journey across the Spanish frontier from Madrid, through France, and down the Italian coast to Rome was beautiful. Probably beautiful. Wade didn’t see much of it except as it receded in the minivan’s tinted rear window. He was alone in the back; Darrell and Lily were in the middle. His father was driving, the passenger seat empty. They’d dropped his stepmother off outside Bologna. Sara had made plans to meet Isabella in secret and would drive to the Vatican by another route.

“Taking no chances,” she had told them.

“See you soon,” his father said, just before the inevitable parting and the necessary switching of cars.

Still off the grid, they’d stopped at several Thomas Cook agencies along the way, made sure they weren’t being tracked, got nothing new from Silva or Simon Tingle, then sent a message to Terence. He and Julian would head to Rome to meet them.

Soon, they would all be together, except for Becca, who Wade couldn’t keep out of his mind. She’d been under since they’d heard from Silva in Olsztyn days ago. Did it mean that the longer Becca was in a coma, the longer she would be in it?

He didn’t know, and if the answer was yes, he didn’t want to know.

When they hit central Rome, the bustling capital seemed to envelop them into its chaotic streets. They parked in a garage two miles from the Vatican and waited. Forty minutes later, Wade spotted a sporty white minivan drive into the garage. A slender middle-aged woman with dark hair was at the wheel.

“Isabella,” he said. “And Sara. We’re here. Now we can start.”

The moment they entered the Vatican walls, the metropolis outside seemed to fly a thousand miles and many centuries away. Vatican City was a tiny patch of history and hushed calm, its buildings sparkling and old, its vast basilica—designed in part by Michelangelo himself—a giant cross-shaped footprint of faith in the center of a modern teeming city.

They purchased tickets for the tour of the Vatican rooms, including the Sistine Chapel, and were soon wading with the throng of tourists into the first rooms. That went smoothly enough at first, but the huge number of people bogged them down. The line stopped. It was the first time since entering the Vatican that they’d had a chance to think. First, Lily showed Isabella the drawing they’d found in the Copernicus Room.

“So many signs point to Michelangelo,” Isabella told them. “Scholars have long known that the imagery of the giant fresco contains references to Copernicus and his theories. How the artist incorporated these theories a decade before Copernicus’s monumental treatise was published is still debated. Perhaps more than this, I had just cracked the code on Michelangelo’s poem as Sara arrived to meet me, and revised my translation. Listen.”

“My friend, I see you suffer from a wound

And offer you my lustrous southern cloak.

You say your life and future were marooned

Until a kindly soul sighted a barque.

“You say the art of numbers hides a fact:

That one binds others to its power alone.

And so the Master must as master act,

And over all the others bear the crown.

“I set these riddles down, and this again:

You say the blessing and the frightening curse

Scientiam temporis casts is plain—

“That when Charon unfolds his calloused hand

And drops our payment deep into his purse,

He cannot make us touch the hellish land.”

Listening to it, Wade felt the enormous crowd of tourists seem to hush and go away, if just for an instant, before returning, louder than before.

“It’s so beautiful,” said Lily. “Haunting. The word you used—barque—what does it mean?”

“I translated from barca a remi, meaning ‘small boat.’”

“Small boat. Rowboat. Everything means something,” Wade said. “We need to see the fresco up close, and go over the poem line by line. If only Becca . . . she’s so great at this. Her brain would put these things together. We need to try to talk to her. Read her the poem.”

“We will,” Sara said, putting her hand on his arm. “As soon as we get to the next Thomas Cook office.”

“There’s one a few streets away,” his father said. “I have a list of their locations. We’ll go to one and call Becca. Terence and Julian should be here anytime.”

“Good,” said Lily. “Becca needs to know what we’ve found out. She can help us, even if she’s not here.”

Even if she’s not here.

Wade said nothing as the line shifted, and bit by bit they inched up to the door of the chapel. He could glimpse the deep blue of the fresco on the far wall ahead of him. The masterpiece was huge and awe inspiring, but like much in Guardian riddles, it would be a challenge to decipher. Having the poem and fresco side by side might be the only way to understand its secrets.

Finally, they passed through the opening.

The Sistine Chapel was smaller than Wade had imagined it would be, and though the room was tall, the air in it was stifling and smelled of far too many people. At least half the sightseers were staring straight up at the more famous chapel ceiling. Pilgrims, tourists, families, and art students standing and sketching on small pads bumped shoulders with crowded group tours. Innumerable guides talked over one another in every language conceivable.

Wade’s ears rang as he tried to understand the enormity of The Last Judgment. Its many writhing figures, men and women, all seemed in agony, tortured in one way or another. If Michelangelo was a Guardian, then this might be his secret prophecy—a prophecy unknown to most viewers—of what would happen if the time-traveling Eternity Machine was ever used by the Teutonic Order. Michelangelo wouldn’t have known about Galina’s plan to create a nuclear event in the Mediterranean, no. But there was a body of water depicted at the bottom of the fresco—a sea, perhaps.

And once again there was a rowboat. A barque.

Darrell nudged him. “Okay, look. Helmut Bern had said ‘rowboat’ to Becca when he was shot, right? We thought it was because she’d told him to take the boat and get to the Netherlands, where Kronos would take him back to the future. But now Michelangelo’s got a rowboat in his fresco, and the drawing that Bern hid in the Copernicus Room shows this boat and because of the paper could have been sketched in the Netherlands. Does that mean Helmut Bern was the ragged man in Michelangelo’s poem? Did Michelangelo meet him there?”

Wade didn’t know if it fit together that way. “Maybe.”

Isabella sidled over to them. “I heard what you said, but you must know that the boat is in the old story, too. The ferryman Charon brings the dead across the River Styx. In the legends, the dead must pay Charon a coin before they land in Hades to be judged. The last stanza of the poem is about this, too.”

Wade did what he normally did when trying to understand a difficult scientific concept. He cleared away as many mental distractions as possible and focused on a small part of the problem. First of all, lost souls were falling from the boat into the sea. In the far lower right stood a grim-looking guy with a thick serpent coiled around his body. Those were easy enough to see.

But he couldn’t make out any Copernican references. He turned to see his father staring at the fresco. “Dad—”

Someone clapped twice loudly. “Attenzione, per favore!”

An older man dressed in a simple white surplice and small cap stood in the doorway to the chapel. He held his hands high. “Per favore! Attenzione!”

The room hushed as if a Silence switch had been thrown.

It was the pope.

“Oh . . . whoa!” Darrell whispered. “People, it’s . . . him. Him!”

Wade felt momentarily dizzy, as if he were in the presence of a huge celebrity, but a thousand times more than a mere celebrity. His father and Sara gaped openmouthed as the pope smiled broadly to the crowd, almost like a happy uncle.

“Grazie mille!” he said, then added first in Italian, then in German, French, Spanish, and finally English, “These children and their parents are special visitors—as you yourselves, all of you, shall be two hours from now, as my personal guests. For now, however, I must ask you to leave the chapel to ourselves for this short while. Grazie mille!”

The pontiff blessed them with a cross-like wave of his right hand, then flicked his fingers gently toward the exit doors, very much like Rosemary Billingham did when shooing people from her office at the Morgan. The throng, still hushed, many of them craning their necks backward, filed out of the chapel.

Wade was just then aware that his feet were frozen to the floor.

The pope! He and his family were personal guests! Of the pope!

“Welcome to our humble little room of prayer,” the pontiff said when they were finally alone. “Terence Ackroyd and his son are great friends of mine. And of course, I have kept Triangulum and your other relics safe. They are quite mysterious, after all, and beautiful beyond imagining. Young Julian has told me a little of why you are here. Let us study the fresco together, shall we?”

“Yes, please!” said Lily, beaming. “Please!”

Examining the fresco in silence and comfort—side by side with the head of the Roman Catholic Church—was an extraordinary experience. Wade dearly wished Becca were there to be a part of it. She would have flipped. Reverently, of course. His heart ached to think about her so far away from them, and far away from this stunning moment.

Maybe it was the pope’s presence there, but as Wade trained his eyes on the multiple figures, trying to ferret out clues wherever he could find them, he understood something.

Though the wall’s grand scale dwarfed the tiny Deluge drawings of Leonardo and even da Vinci’s larger painting in the central chamber in the catacombs in Malta, Wade realized that this fresco depicted the same event. Leonardo had drawn the end of the physical world, while Michelangelo was depicting what happened to its souls in the afterlife.

“Excuse me, sir, but what about Copernicus?” Darrell asked. “I don’t see him here.”

“No,” said the pontiff, “perhaps not directly. But in fifteen thirty-three, Pope Clement had been instructed in the teachings of the Polish astronomer—the Magister, as we call Nicolaus here. Clement convened a conference of astronomers to detail what they knew of Nicolaus’s teachings. In September of that year, Clement met with Michelangelo to discuss his commission to paint the wall. Copernicus’s theories were to be included, certainly. After Clement died, Pope Paul took up the great idea. It was under him that the artist finally fashioned his great work.”

“There’s a lot of movement,” Wade’s father said. “All swirling around the figure of Christ in the center. Is that meant to be like the solar system?”

“Very good, yes it is,” said the pope. “You see the gold light behind him? This represents the sun. Christ himself is therefore seen as the sun—the ‘Sun of Righteousness,’ the hymn says—and all the souls gravitate to him and move like planets about him as he makes his judgment over them. Over us. Here you see the Copernican system. The sun is the center.”

And it suddenly became clear. Wade moved up to study the lower part of the fresco. The rowboat was jammed with bodies—or souls—of the damned.

Lily sidled up next to him. “The rowboat is important,” she whispered. “But how? It’s a key to something but . . . but . . . O . . . M . . . G!” She gasped. “Oh! I apologize, Your Holiness, but look, everybody!”

She pointed to a face near the front of the rowboat. “It’s him! Helmut Bern. That face! It’s Helmut Bern! That’s what he meant when he said it to Becca! ‘The rowboat, remember’! It wasn’t the boat he escaped London in. It was this boat. This boat!”

Wade stared at the small boat.

Lily was right.

The man in the rowboat of The Last Judgment bore the unmistakable face of Helmut Bern.