Emil was not going to be able to sleep tonight. Despite the darkness of the blackout, he’d recognised early on that emotion and anticipation meant rest wasn’t a realistic option, so hadn’t even bothered trying. For the past hour he’d been pacing the sitting room in his small house in Torre Maura, alternating between refreshing the email display on the laptop he’d connected to an extended battery pack and a satellite Internet connection, and compulsively checking his phone for messages from his various teams, all of whom had been equipped with satellite phones for this phase of the operation.
He paused long enough to pour himself a third tumbler of the finest Scotch he’d ever drunk. Emil wasn’t a man of vast wealth – not yet – and his tastes weren’t normally so exalted. But this was the dawn of . . . everything. He felt it ought to be seen in with nothing but the finest. Even in the darkness.
He didn’t have ice, so by the light of a battery-powered lantern Emil topped his glass up to a respectable level and took a sip, neat. The amber liquid glided over his tongue with a hot, buttery bite. It was, in his humble estimation, worth every penny.
At this very moment, Ridolfo and André would be taking care of the only leaks the tech team had discovered. This was, Emil recognised, the only thing that genuinely had him nervous. He was pulling strings that had put the whole city on edge, enacting a plan that involved deceit and risks far greater than any he’d ever undertaken in his life, but it was this one issue that churned his stomach. Everything else was going well. Everything except . . . them.
He couldn’t believe it could be so difficult to take out a pair of scholars. Emil had been a scholar himself, before his shunning by the establishment, and he would rank neither himself nor a single one of his former colleagues as particularly capable individuals in a violent situation. ‘Our weapons are the pen and the book,’ he remembered one of his bygone friends saying at a staff reception, years ago, ‘and they’re much mightier than guns.’ It was the kind of romantic drivel that felt laudable and believable right up to the moment someone pointed a gun barrel at your forehead. Pens were rarely effective in convincing someone not to pull the trigger.
The frustration he felt wasn’t really at the difficulty in killing them off, however, but at the fact that they were running, and that someone seemed to be helping them run. This was far, far more worrying.
Emil had been convinced his advance work was impeccable. The text was perfect. They’d brought on, used, and then ‘disposed of’ an Akkadian scholar abroad to ensure that. It had been checked and double-checked. It had been inscribed into a clay mixed with the powdered dust to which his men had reduced a thirteen-hundred-year-old clay urn they’d stolen at his direction, so that any rushed carbon dating would show signs of age enough to confuse interpreters. And the planting, the delivery, the discovery – all had gone exactly according to arrangement. Scrutiny would come upon the document, of course, and in due course it would be denounced. The ageing trick would eventually be discovered; the text would eventually be hyper-analysed. But those things took time. Everything Emil wanted rode on belief in its authenticity lasting just long enough to get the job done.
There were only two people who posed a threat to that. Two scholars who had come on to Emil’s radar when his tech crew had chased through their web histories or Net trailings or whatever-the-hell other records those geeks had access to, and announced that they were experts in this obscure field. Experts who could expose the fraud far faster. Discovery that two such scholars lived in his city had upset Emil, but at least this was a simple problem to deal with. Elaborate shows of prophecy-led death wouldn’t be needed here. A bullet to the head of each would accomplish what he needed.
But for reasons that baffled description, Emil’s men were struggling to kill them.
The acids in his stomach churned, and Emil set down the whisky, worried it was only compounding his discomfort. He commanded himself to calm down. The whole show only had to last another day and a half. After that, it wouldn’t matter who knew what.
He walked over to his small desk and swept a finger across his laptop’s trackpad to bring it to life. A few keystrokes later his email was refreshed. Nothing new.
Damn it. He wanted to hear something. Anything. He was the kind of man who’d grown to assume the worst of tense situations. He wanted a report from one of his teams, any of his teams, to reassure him things were moving forward as they should.
With little else to focus his worried mind, Emil scrolled down through the old emails still in his inbox. Hundreds of messages. He rarely deleted anything.
Yet he realised his scrolling wasn’t as aimless as it at first seemed, even to him. His attention was drawn like a magnet towards the lengthy message he’d received earlier in the day from Vico and his crew. It contained all the data the techie trio had gleaned on the two individuals who had attracted their attention. On the woman, they had all the pertinent details: name, address, financial portrait, locations. Everything Emil expected. And they had the same for the man – what was his name? Emil scrolled further down the message.
Dr Ben Verdyx.
A jingle of memory. Something tugging at his personal past.
He read the name again, aloud. ‘Dr Ben Verdyx.’
Then, for the first time, Emil felt weak at his knees. He knew the name, and, he gradually recalled, he had known the man. Ben Verdyx had been brought on to the staff of the Vatican Secret Archives towards the end of Emil’s tenure there – perhaps six or seven months before the scandal and shaming that had resulted in Emil’s dismissal. He remembered Ben as socially awkward, shy, like a bat craving the solitude of a cave.
So this was the ‘other Akkadian scholar’ in the duo his men were after. Emil could feel the acid work its way up his oesophagus, perilously close to reaching his throat and threatening to trigger his gag reflex.
The Calla woman was risk enough, but Verdyx had worked in the same environs as Emil himself. It was too close to home. It meant he could know . . .
And as Ben and the woman had been taken by others – Vico had concluded the black vans had belonged to the Swiss Guard – it meant he could have told them.
No, no, no, Emil’s thoughts raced. I can’t have them killed. Not until I know what they’ve said, and to whom.
He yanked his phone from his pocket and hit the speed dial for Ridolfo’s number. He had to modify his men’s instructions before they carried out the orders he’d barked at them when they’d spoken forty-five minutes ago.
But the line simply rang and rang.