CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Cotton had never seen anything like the macabre underground chapel, which, thanks to all of the life-sized images, made him feel like he was standing in a crowd. Thankfully, no disturbing feelings of claustrophobia had grabbed hold of him as the room, though cluttered, loomed airy and spacious.

“Is there climate control?” he asked, noticing the lack of humidity and the breeze.

“We have dehumidifiers,” Pollux said. “We installed them when we changed out the door mechanism. The air-conditioning is natural. We’ve learned that you have to be careful with something like this. Touching with bare fingertips leaves oil that degrades the limestone. Artificial lights encourage bacterial growth. Lots of warm bodies exhaling carbon dioxide change the airflow, temperature, and humidity. It’s important this place survives, so we took measures to ensure that it did.”

“Is this where the Secreti worshiped?” Cotton asked.

Pollux nodded. “This is also where new members were inducted. The Secreti were quite peculiar about who they asked to join their ranks. They kept no written records, so it’s impossible to know who was a member. Unless you wore the ring.”

“I guess there were no jewelry stores copying them back then,” he said with a touch of sarcasm.

Pollux seemed perplexed.

He told them what the fake Pollux Gallo had explained.

“There actually is truth to the statement,” Pollux said. “I’ve seen a few of those copies over the years—”

“But since the Secreti are gone, what did it matter?”

He couldn’t resist.

“Something like that,” Pollux said.

Cotton had been thinking about the answer to the cardinal’s question of what now. There’d been nothing in the outer chapel to draw his interest, which was surely the whole idea of keeping things simple there. Here, though, there were a multitude of potential hiding places represented by the numerous figures carved in stone. He turned to Pollux. “How far are you willing to go to find what you’re looking for?”

“If you mean defacing any of this, that depends,” Pollux said. “Let’s see how certain you are of a result once when we reach that point.”

His mind sorted through the possibilities. So far the dead prior’s actions had been wholly practical. But nothing in any of the clues pointed to anything inside this statuary. Only to the chapel in general. Both Pollux and the curator had made it clear back at the cathedral that there were no other chapels or sacred sites near where the lines on the map had intersected.

So this had to be the place.

“No telling what godforsaken things happened here,” the cardinal said.

“The Secreti were only a danger to those who threatened the knights.”

“And today? Now? What’s threatening the knights? Why are the Secreti killing people?”

Pollux faced his brother. “No one says they are.”

“You did,” Cotton said. “The urgency to get here was because the Secreti were on the move. Three men died at that villa. Two more here on Malta. You said the likely suspect in all five killings is the Secreti.”

“It seems logical,” Pollux said. “But I will deal with that possibility after we locate the Nostra Trinità.”

Cotton’s gaze had been raking the room and he’d settled on the only spot that made sense. At the far end, up three short steps, an altar had been carved from the wall. It jutted out and faced away from the worshipers, as would have been common five hundred years ago. Above it was a Madonna and child etched from the stone. Two winged angels flanked either side. But it was the altar’s base that drew his attention. Five words that could be read the same from any direction. The palindrome from the ring.

The sign of Constantine.

He pointed. “It has to be there.”

They approached the altar.

“Constantine’s sign was carved there when the church was built,” Pollux said. “It’s always been here.”

Cotton set the shovels on the floor and knelt down to inspect the altar. The letters sprang from a recessed panel at the altar’s center, right where a priest would have stood while saying mass. Four fluted columns carved from the limestone flanked left and right. With his finger he traced a mortar joint in the recessed panel—dry, brittle, and gray, like everything else.

“I say we bust this open.”

He gave Pollux a moment to consider the ramifications. This wasn’t a broken clock. It was a piece of something that had survived five hundred years. Something men had dedicated their lives to preserve. Thousands of knights and Maltese had died fighting to keep all of this inviolate.

And they’d succeeded.

Only to have it destroyed now by an outsider, with permission from one of their own.

Pollux handed over the sledgehammer, signaling his assent. Cotton gripped the wooden handle and decided there was no delicate way to do it, so he gave the center of the panel, right above the word TENET, a hard rap with the business end. The stone held, but there was a noticeable give, as at the obelisk.

“It’s hollow behind it,” he said.

He swung again.

Two more times and the stone broke into pieces, exposing a cavity beyond.

The two brothers watched as he cleared away the fragments, holding in his hand bits and pieces of the palindrome. He removed enough to see an object inside the chamber beyond. A horizontal glass cylinder resting on golden legs with animal paws as feet. About twenty-four inches long and eight inches high. Both ends were enclosed by gold mounts sealed with wax. Through the thick glass he could see the out-of-focus images of three scrolls, each loosely rolled.

Pollux made the sign of the cross and whispered, “Our Trinity.”

Cotton reached in and lifted out the reliquary.

Heavy.

The three parchments appeared intact and in reasonably good shape. He laid the container on the altar where they could examine every aspect of it.

“This is where I must insist we part ways,” Pollux said. “We’ve located the Nostra Trinità. It belongs to the Knights of Malta—”

“Or the Roman Catholic Church,” the cardinal said.

“Precisely,” Pollux finished. “This is a dispute we have to resolve among ourselves. It does not involve the American government in any way. We apologize for all that you’ve endured and appreciate your efforts. But the mystery is now solved and we have to deal with what happens next.” Pollux paused. “Kastor and I. We have much to discuss.”

Of that Cotton had no doubt.

“A lot of damage has occurred over the past day,” Pollux said. “People have been hurt and killed. My brother and I have to deal with that. Patron of the Holy See to lieutenant ad interim. It’s our problem. Not yours.”

He was used to the rough-and-tumble of the intelligence business, willing to be banged up. God knows he’d had his share of injuries.

But the brush-off?

That kind of hurt.

But he’d done all Stephanie had asked of him. And though he would love to know what was inside the reliquary, Pollux Gallo was right. It really was none of his, or Washington’s, business.

“All right,” he said. “I’m out of here. But you feel this is a safe place for you to linger?”

“We’re perfectly fine here,” Pollux said, extending a hand to shake.

He accepted the offer.

“Thank you, Mr. Malone, for all your assistance. I never asked, but are you Catholic?”

“I was baptized that way, but religion is not my thing.”

“A shame. You would have made a good knight.”

Cardinal Gallo offered no hand to shake and his dour expression never changed. He shook his head and glanced back toward Pollux.

“Good luck.”

And he left.