Cotton dozed in and out, trying to catch a quick nap as the Department of Justice jet lifted off from Rome’s Fiumicino–Leonardo da Vinci airport. He, Stephanie, and Gallo had used the helicopter for a short hop west from the obelisk and found the DOJ jet waiting, the same one that had brought Stephanie across the Atlantic. Only he and Gallo were making the ninety-minute flight south to Malta. Stephanie had been flown on to Rome in the chopper, deposited back at the Palazzo di Malta downtown, exactly where Cotton had started a few hours ago. She’d received a phone call on the trip to the airport and said that there were matters requiring her personal attention. She offered no details and, knowing better, he hadn’t asked. Disturbingly, James Grant had dropped off the radar. London had no idea of his whereabouts, and the contact number Cotton possessed went to voice mail. Stephanie had told him she would monitor that situation from the U.S. embassy and asked to be kept informed as to what happened once they were on the ground.
Gallo himself had developed a case of lockjaw, sitting in his seat with his eyes closed, apparently trying to grab a little rest, too.
Actually, that was fine.
He needed time to think.
Where oil meets stone, death is the end of a dark prison. Pride crowned, another shielded. Three blushes bloomed to ranks and file.
What an odd assortment of phrases. Not random, for sure. But not coherent, either.
Then there were the letters.
H Z P D R S Q X
“What did you mean that the message points to Malta,” he asked Gallo. “Where oil meets stone. You knew exactly what that meant.”
Gallo roused from his rest, looking annoyed.
“The first part simply requests that it be delivered to von Hempesch. Clearly, the cathedral’s prior created the message for his grand master. He also created it before being captured by Napoleon. Every piece of evidence indicates that only the prior was involved in the hiding. There is no record of him leaving the island in the forty-eight hours between the time Napoleon arrived and the prior died. It’s doubtful he involved others, so whatever he hid away has to be on Malta. Then there is Mattia Preti. What do you know of him?”
“Never heard of him.”
“He was like so many others who came to Malta in the 17th century. Men looking for a purpose, a place where they could live a full life and excel. He was an Italian artist who stayed the rest of his life, ultimately transforming the cathedral in Valletta into a wonder. The barrel vault of the church became his masterpiece. It took him six years to complete. When finished it depicted eighteen episodes from the life of St. John the Baptist. Normally murals like those were done with watercolors. But Preti broke with tradition and applied oil paint directly to stone.”
He saw the connection. Where oil meets stone. “So everything points to the cathedral on Malta.”
Gallo nodded. “It seems that way, and it makes sense. The French appeared in 1798 with no warning. The fight for the island took little more than a day before a full surrender. Sadly, only a small part of our treasures and records made it out of the city. Most were seized by the French during their plunder, lost forever when the ship where they had been stored on sank in Egypt.”
Gallo went silent for a moment, then continued.
“It was a sad era in our existence. By the time Napoleon arrived the knights had lost all sense of purpose. The Protestant Reformation had reduced our ranks. Then, during the 16th and 17th centuries, revenues from European sponsors dwindled to nothing. Malta itself was a barren island with little to no export potential. To raise money we started policing the Mediterranean, protecting Christian ships from Ottoman corsairs. We became so good at it we evolved into privateers, capturing and looting Muslim ships, becoming corsairs ourselves. We made a lot of money from that but, as you might expect, such lawlessness leads to a moral decline, one that began to seep through the entire order. Eventually, we thought ourselves above kings and queens, exempt from the law, which made us even more enemies. So no one cared when the French took Malta and vanquished us.” Gallo paused a moment. “By the mid-18th century we rediscovered our original purpose—aiding the sick. Thankfully, that tortured prior never faltered in his duty and denied Napoleon the Nostra Trinità. Our Trinity stayed hidden, and now we know that even Mussolini failed to find it.”
Cotton pointed at the metal tube lying on another of the seats. “How can you be sure that the message is the same one from that prior? As you noted before, Mussolini prepared that typed sheet.”
“We can’t. But finding it is consistent with what I told you about Mussolini and his statements to our grand master in 1936 at their one and only meeting. He said he altered the memory to preserve it. Then he hid it where no one could get it. We have to believe that he changed nothing. Why would he? He might have had to really find it himself one day.”
“It’s interesting that Mussolini didn’t go after it.”
“He didn’t have to. All he had to do was convince the pope that he could.”
“But by hiding the message away, it’s almost like he was placating the pope.”
“He was. Definitely. For all his bravado, Mussolini was intimidated by popes. He pursued a policy of wooing both Piuses, and to a degree it worked.”
“I wonder what it takes to blackmail a pope?”
Gallo stirred in his seat. “I’ve asked myself that for years. Of the three parts of the Nostra Trinità, only the Constitutum Constantini could pose a threat. The other two are known documents, with copies in the Vatican. But that Gift of Constantine has to be unique. We’ve always believed that Mussolini used the threat of its public release as private blackmail. But did he really? We’ll never know. What we do know is that neither Pius XI nor Pius XII ever openly defied the fascist government.”
“Still, the church has been around for two thousand years. There’s not much that could strike a deep blow. It would have to be something that goes to its core. Cutting its legs right out from under it.”
Gallo nodded. “Even more important, it has to be something that would have resonated in the 1930s and 1940s. Something that still carried a virulent punch, one the church thought it couldn’t endure. That was a difficult time. The world was disintegrating into war. People were focused on merely surviving. Religion was not an important aspect of their lives. We’ve long speculated on what that document might have contained, but that’s all it is, speculation.”
“How long had you possessed it?”
“The best we can determine is it came to us sometime in the 13th century. How? We have no idea. That’s been lost to time. But we know that it stayed with us until 1798.”
“No one ever read it? No oral tradition is associated with it?”
“Not that has survived. It was closely held by the Secreti. Now, at least, we have clues as to where it might be.”
“There’s still the matter of the Secreti,” Cotton pointed out.
“I realize that, and we should stay alert. They’ll be aware of the cathedral’s importance, too. And I assume they’ll know that I’ve come to Malta. We cannot underestimate their reach.”
He agreed with that assessment. “What about your brother?”
Though Stephanie had said precious little before leaving for Rome, she had revealed that Archbishop Danjel Spagna had been killed, along with another Entity field operative. Cardinal Gallo, while initially missing, had been located by Luke, who had the situation on the ground under control.
“My brother and I will speak,” Gallo said, the voice trailing off. “He’s caused so much turmoil. It will take a long time to repair that damage.”
Cotton was an only child. His father died when he was ten, lost in a navy submarine disaster, so he’d come to rely on his mother. A good woman. She still lived in middle Georgia, running the onion farm her family had owned for generations. She, too, had been an only child, so there were no more Malones. Not by blood, at least. His own son, Gary, an only child, was his in every way save for genes, the result of an affair his ex-wife had seventeen years ago. They’d all laid those demons to rest, part of the past, but he’d be a liar if he said that the prospect of the Malone bloodline ending didn’t bother him.
“My brother and I shared a womb,” Gallo said. “We’re identical physically, though I’ve tried hard to alter my look so as not to be so readily identified with him. But mentally we are night and day. I’ve always strived to live a different life, to stay out of the spotlight, away from trouble. To make myself useful and not a nuisance. As I told you, I didn’t ask for my current position. I took it out of necessity to try to minimize an already bad situation. Once there’s a new pope, the brothers will meet and a new grand master will be chosen.”
“You?”
Gallo shook his head. “That job will belong to someone else. I made that clear when I accepted this temporary post.”
“I still don’t see your brother’s purpose in disrupting the Hospitallers. He seemed to go out of his way to create trouble.”
“He thrives in conflict. He’s after the Nostra Trinità, somehow thinking it will make him pope.”
“Will it?”
“I can’t see how, but he’s convinced—as he always seems to be.”
Gallo closed his eyes again and tilted his head back on the seat. The jet’s windows were dark to the outside, the cabin lights dim. The drone of the engines cast a monotonous tone that seemed to only add weight to his own eyelids.
They’d be on the ground in a little over an hour.
Some rest would be good.
But answers would be better.