EIGHT

Zurich, Switzerland

“So if it’s called the Council of Rome,” Greg Johns asked, “why are we in Switzerland?”

Avery grinned, surprised that it had taken so long for either of her traveling companions to ask the obvious question. She supposed it had something to do with the fact that, Greg—Tam Broderick’s second-in-command—and Kasey Kim had been more concerned with travel arrangements, and probably also the fact that Avery herself had spent most of the nearly ten-hour flight either buried in her research or sleeping. It was only now that they were on the ground in Zurich, heading by taxi to the address listed on the Council of Rome’s official website, that the question seemed particularly relevant.

“The group got its start after a discussion at a cocktail party in Rome,” she explained. “One of the people suggested they form an advisory council, and the name stuck. That’s the official history anyway, but there are some conspiracy nuts who claim that they chose the name to symbolize opposition to Christianity because Rome represents the Catholic Church. Which is weird because most of these people think the Church is evil, too. Conspiracy theories have their own unique logic.”

“That explains the name,” Greg retorted, “but it doesn’t explain Switzerland.”

“That’s easy,” put in Kasey. “They came here for the chocolate.”

Despite her Korean heritage, Kasey Kim was a California girl, born and raised, with a sarcastic—or as Kasey put it, “bitchy”—sense of humor. Greg was less complicated in every respect. He had the athletic build and refined features of a Hollywood actor—in fact, Stone had given him the nickname “Captain Handsome”—but in most respects, he was a generic middle-America white guy. He and Billy Sievers got along famously.

“Not the watches?” Greg asked, playing along. “Or army knives?”

“Zurich is the financial capital of Europe,” Avery said. “The Council of Rome is, predominantly, an organization of businessmen. And Switzerland is politically neutral, which is why so many international groups like the Red Cross and the World Health Organization are based here.”

“I still say it’s the chocolate,” Kasey insisted, playfully.

“I didn’t think Asians liked chocolate,” Greg said.

“All women like chocolate, Greg.”

Avery stared out the window and tried to tune out the banter. Under any other circumstances, she would have been excited about visiting the historic city, which had been settled in pre-Roman times, and was strongly associated with the reign of Charlemagne, but instead, she was anxious about the impending meeting with Maxim Loew, the secretary general of the Council of Rome. She was worried that she had made the wrong call.

Maybe Stone was right; maybe this was a red herring, a distraction.

She hated how he was always so sure of himself almost as much as she hated the fact that he was always right. But he hadn’t really given a valid reason for rejecting what she had discovered. It had seemed to Avery like he was dismissing it because it had been her idea, and not his.

Despite that, she was acutely aware of his absence. She felt like she was out on a ledge without a safety net.

The taxi navigated through streets crowded with late afternoon traffic and stopped in front of a surprisingly modern-looking building perched on the eastern bank of the Limmat River, with a commanding view of the Lindenhof—the green hill which had once been the site of both a Roman castle and the Carolingian royal palace, and was generally considered to be the center of Zurich. Avery got out and looked around for a sign with the Council of Rome’s logo, or some other indication that they were in the right place, but the concrete building was utterly unremarkable.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Avery asked the driver, using French, one of the official languages of both Switzerland and her native Canada.

The driver repeated back the address she had given him and then assured her that was where they were. She turned to Greg and Kasey. “This is it.”

Greg nodded. “Lead the way.”

“Me?”

“It’s your show, Avery. We’re just here to keep you safe.”

Avery suddenly felt a little light-headed. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Do what you always do,” Kasey said. “Ask questions and figure it out.”

“Ask questions,” she murmured. “Right.”

She headed over to the front door and entered a tastefully decorated lobby. A directory mounted to the wall near the elevator listed the names of tenants in both German and French. There was only one occupant listed for the third floor: Conseil de Rome.

Swallowing down her nerves, Avery reached for the button to summon the elevator, but Kasey stopped her. “Avery, you know better.” She pointed to the stairs at the end of the hall.

Avery did know better. The CIA officers preferred to avoid taking elevators whenever possible. Something about losing situational awareness. She nodded and turned toward the stairs. “I guess we’re walking.”

In Europe, Avery had learned, the floor at street level was called the “ground” floor, and the floor above that was the “first,” so the Council of Rome was actually four stories up, not three, but it hardly made a difference. It wasn’t like they were trying to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building.

A pair of Herculite frameless glass doors opened into an elegant but understated lobby. There were only a few chairs, and no one at the reception desk, but as soon as the three of them were inside, a man came out to greet them. He was older, with a magnificent white beard. If he had been about forty pounds heavier, and traded in his business suit for red pajamas, he could easily have gotten work as a department store Santa Claus.

“You are the Americans who called earlier?” The man spoke English with only a trace of an accent—a nasally Bronx accent.

“Uh, yes... Are you... umm... Secretary...”

“Mister Loew is fine,” the man said. “If I decide I like you, I’ll let you call me Max.”

Avery managed a half-hearted smile and introduced herself and the others before cutting to the chase. “We’re here because you recently acquired an item—a brazen head—from the estate of Gerald Roche.”

Loew tilted his head forward to stare at her over the top of his spectacles. “What’s your interest in it?”

“I’m a historian...History professor, actually.”

“Is that a fact?” Loew’s gaze shifted to Greg and then Kasey. His frown deepened, and Avery could tell that she was going to need to come up with something better.

She decided honesty was probably the best policy. “I am a history professor,” she reiterated, “but the truth is, I’m consulting with a law enforcement agency. We’re following up a tip that indicates someone may try to...well, steal the Brazen Head.”

Loew brought his eyes back to her for a moment, then uttered a short, derisive laugh.

“You’re talking about the Immortal, right?”

Half a block away, four men watched the front of the building that housed the Council of Rome from the relative shelter of a parked silver Volkswagen Polo. The man in the passenger seat checked his watch—a sturdy stainless steel Rolex—and frowned. “This is taking too long.”

He did not intend the complaint as anything but a rhetorical conversation, but the man seated beside him responded nonetheless. “It’s your call, Luc. Say the word, and we go.”

Luc LeMans grunted. It wasn’t really his call. He had some latitude when it came to operational decisions, but they were well outside the original parameters of the mission.

This was supposed to have been simple—grab and go, in and out, with no residual footprint—but the unexpected arrival of after-hours visitors had put that plan on hold. The visitors had not been turned away at the door, as he had hoped, but had gone inside as if expected.

The timing of their arrival was suspicious enough to warrant a phone call to their employer. Had the old man sent in a second team? Were they from a rival faction? Competitors? Or was this merely a coincidence?

There were too many unknown variables here. Still, if the old man didn’t get back to him soon, he would have to make a decision. Call in an audible, as some of the Americans he had worked with in the past were fond of saying.

His phone buzzed with an incoming text message. He glanced at it hopefully, but it was not the guidance he needed. Just the opposite in fact.

One of the three visitors had been tentatively identified as an American FBI agent.

Definitely not a coincidence, he thought.

He put the phone away.

“We’re going in.”

You already know about that?” Avery said, unable to completely hide her surprise.

“What’s the good of having a demon-possessed talking automaton if it can’t warn you when enemies are lurking?” He maintained his stare a moment longer before breaking into a broad smile. “I’m kidding, of course. Dr. Halsey, we deal with threats like this on a daily basis. It goes with the territory, I’m afraid. Most are just the deluded rantings of paranoid Internet conspiracy theorists, but sometimes those people are the most unpredictable. I assure you, we take all threats very seriously.”

“We take them seriously, too,” Greg said. “That’s why we’re here.”

“I have a hired security specialist who actively monitors threats,” Loew said. “And I’ve taken measures to protect both our personnel and property. I’m grateful for your concern, but really, you could have saved yourself the trip and just sent me an email.”

Avery saw her opening. “Actually, in researching this, I became fascinated with the story of the Brazen Head. I was hoping to get a look at it. If that’s okay with you.”

Loew’s bushy eyebrows drew together in a frown, and he gave her another long appraising look. “You said you’re with a law enforcement agency. May I see your credentials?”

Greg and Kasey produced their cover creds—forged FBI badges and identification cards. Loew looked closely at them for several seconds, then straightened. “Very well. Right this way.” He gestured to the door through which he had arrived.

This surprised Avery. “You keep it here?”

“We entertain visitors from time to time, many of whom share your fascination,” Loew explained. “They are quite the conversation piece.”

“They?”

Loew led them into a brightly lit gallery. The room was long and narrow, the walls adorned with an eclectic collection of framed paintings. The works were unfamiliar to Avery, who had a passing interest in art history, but she recognized the styles present in several of them. She gave the paintings only a passing glance though. Her attention was immediately drawn to the objects displayed on pedestals arrayed down the length of the room—not one, but four metallic human busts.

“There’s more than one?”

Loew gave a good-natured laugh. “In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, automatons were all the rage. I didn’t set out to become a collector. It sort of just happened. They’re really just simple mechanical toys. Puppets. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy. This one...” He indicated a tarnished and dented statue head with the flowing curls of a Roman god. “Was probably used as a prop in an Elizabethan era stage play.”

“Which one is the...?”

“The real Brazen Head of Albert Magnus?” He walked to the far end of the gallery and gestured to the head resting atop the last decorative column.

The head was bald, with round lidded eyes that bulged out slightly and a truncated nose with deep nostril holes. Lines ran down from the corners of the mouth to the chin, suggesting the possibility of articulated movement to simulate speech. Shapeless protrusions jutted out where the ears would have been, and below them, a thick cylindrical neck column that disappeared into a round block of what looked like corkwood. Unlike the first head Loew had pointed out, this was not cast metal, but appeared instead to have been assembled, with numerous riveted and welded seams showing where the pieces met and overlapped. Avery’s first thought was that the Brazen Head looked like a Steampunk version of C-3PO from the Star Wars films.

“Does it work?”

Loew laughed again. “Do you mean, does it answer questions and foretell the future? Sadly, no.”

Avery laughed as well, realizing how silly the question had been. “I thought Albert’s Brazen Head was smashed by Thomas Aquinas.”

“That’s the story. That’s all we have really. Stories told and retold until it’s impossible to separate fact from fancy. Many of the stories about brazen heads were never meant to be taken seriously. Medieval science fiction. But those stories have a way of coloring our reality. And, over the centuries, attaching to real physical objects.”

Avery nodded. The caveat had taken some of the wind out of her sails. What reason was there, really, to believe that story of the Brazen Head of Albert Magnus was true, or that the object resting on the pedestal in front of her was, in fact, an actual medieval artifact, and not a forgery?

“If the story is true, however,” Loew went on, a mischievous gleam shining from his eyes, “if this actually is the same head that Albert Magnus created, and that Thomas Aquinas smashed, well then we would have to conclude that someone put it back together. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Who?”

“An interesting question, and one that I hope to explore in my twilight years.”

“So do you believe it’s the real deal?”

Loew placed a hand atop the Brazen Head. “I don’t know if this is actually Albert Magnus’ creation, or if there was any truth to that story at all, but I do know a thing or two about the history of this piece. It’s the reason I became interested in medieval automata in the first place. You see, this piece has been in my family for several generations.”

That was a surprise to Avery. “Are we talking about the same bronze head? I thought you only just acquired it at auction.”

Loew’s smile slipped a little. “Better to say, ‘reacquired.’”

Just as he was about to elaborate, a door at the back of the gallery flew open and a middle-aged but fit looking Caucasian man stepped briskly into the gallery. He had close-cropped light brown hair and wore a loose-fitting business suit. Avery jumped and let out a startled yelp. From the corner of her eye, she saw Kasey and Greg shift instantly to a ready posture.

Loew seemed surprised as well, but immediately addressed the man in what Avery assumed was German. “Hans? Was ist los?”

“Es besteht Gefahr,” the man—Hans—replied in the same tongue. “Du musst in den sicheren Raum gehen.”

“What’s wrong?” Greg asked, stepping forward, putting himself between Avery and the newcomer.

Behind his spectacles, Loew’s eyes were wide with something like real fear. His jaw worked for a moment as if he was having trouble switching back to English. “This is my security expert, Hans. He says there’s trouble. We need to get to the safe room.”

“Safe room? Where’s that?”

But before Loew could answer, Kasey cried out in alarm. “Get down!”

An eruption of light and noise, and Avery’s world turned sideways.