Remi’s entire body went cold. All she could do was stare at the knife poised inches from her face. She still held the gun, but her hand was imprisoned by a strong grip. She couldn’t even move her wrist to angle the gun at him.
“Drop it,” he ordered.
“You’ll never get away. You’ll—”
“Drop it.” His grip tightened, making Remi hiss in pain.
A light shone on them. “What the hell!”
They both turned to see a startled American tourist standing nearby, a real one this time.
They were just as startled as he was.
For a moment the three of them stared at one another, frozen.
The Daniel burst in on the scene, gun drawn, and elbowed the American tourist out of the way.
“Freeze!” he ordered. “Drop the knife and let her go!”
“We need to know the time!” the killer shouted, then crouched, putting the counter and Remi between him and Daniel’s line of fire.
At the same time, he smacked Remi’s wrist against the counter, making the gun go off. Remi cried out, both in pain and in fear. The gun had been pointing roughly at Daniel.
The killer smacked her wrist a second time and the pistol fell on the opposite side of the counter. Then the man, still wielding his knife, leapt over the counter at Daniel.
There was a loud report as Daniel’s gun went off, then the thud of two bodies hitting each other.
Remi tried to see what was going on in the half light. The Italian couple still stood at the glass door as if hypnotized. The American tourist had fled. The killer and Daniel rolled around on the floor. The killer got on top and started pounding Daniel with his fist.
She had to get that gun. Remi vaulted over the counter.
At least that was her intention. A lifetime of historical research hadn’t made her particularly good at vaulting over counters.
She stumbled, fell hard on her knees, losing a moment as pain spiked through her legs.
When she looked up, the killer was already advancing, knife in hand, Daniel lying motionless on the floor behind him.
Remi saw the gun lying just out of reach to her left. She ducked for it.
The killer was quicker. Just as her fingers touched the grip, he placed his foot on it.
Remi looked up at the man towering over her. He glared down at her, fire in his eyes. Blood trickled down the side of his head. Daniel had shot part of his ear off.
Swallowing with a throat suddenly gone dry, she slowly stood.
“You said you needed to know the time,” she croaked. “You mean the time of the Apocalypse?”
The killer smiled, the most frightening expression he could have possibly made in that situation.
“Oh yes. We’ll know when humanity will be wiped from the face of the Earth. Won’t it be glorious?”
“But what if it’s not now?”
His free hand whipped out like lightning and grasped her throat. He did not press, did not choke. He merely kept her immobile.
“Then I’ll just have to speed things up.”
Remi knew he was about to kill her, so she did the only thing she could do, even if it meant her death. She would not go down without a fight, and she would not go down without hurting this maniac and perhaps aiding his capture.
She reached for the pepper spray in her pocket. The killer, sensing the movement, turned his head to see what she was doing.
No time to pull the little bottle from her pocket. All she could do was aim it up, screw her eyes shut, and spray.
Her face immediately began to burn, followed a moment later by her chest as the spray leaked through her blouse.
She heard the killer gag. The grip on her wrist loosened for a moment. She brought the gun around and fired.
At the last second, he jerked her hand away.
Then the grip released. Had she hit him?
A moment later she got slapped upside the head, making her stumble to the side. By instinct she opened her eyes.
Immediately she felt a searing pain. Her sight wavered as tears welled up in them. The light vanished as the tourist stopped shining his phone on them, probably busy running away.
Remi didn’t have time to check. The killer stood not two yards away, stumbling around and wiping his eyes, trying to focus on her, a maniacal rage keeping him on his feet.
She had to stop him now. She’d be blind in a few seconds.
Remi crouched, grabbed the gun, and fired just as she took a bad lungful of pepper spray and let out a spasmodic cough. Her gun bucked as it went off.
The last she saw was a vague shadow falling.
* * *
Remi sat in the back of an ambulance as an EMT poured saline solution on her eyes. They were as red and swollen as that hippie student in her Medieval Folklore class, but at least she could see again.
Daniel had arrived a few moments after she shot the killer. He had subdued him, turned the on the fuses—which of course hadn’t been destroyed—, found the plainclothes officer lying unconscious and out of sight in the storage closet, and called for backup. Now he stood by her, a worried expression on his face.
At least she thought he had a worried expression. She still had trouble focusing. He certainly sounded worried.
“How are you feeling?” he asked for the tenth time.
“Slightly less miserable than I felt a minute ago. Thank you for asking again.”
“The other ambulances just left,” he told her. “The manager and the two cops will be just fine, although they’re all going to need stitches. The killer knocked him them out instead of stabbed them. I guess he didn’t want to make noise.”
“I’m glad they’ll be OK. And the killer?”
She found her heart start beating faster. Daniel hadn’t mentioned anything about him. All she knew was that he was alive and in custody.
“You shot him in the leg.”
Remi let out breath of relief. She did not want someone’s death on her hands, not even someone like that.
“Nice shooting for someone who was blinded by her own pepper spray,” Daniel added.
“Thanks. God, this stuff burns. My skin feels like it’s on fire.”
“Maybe that’ll keep you from pepper spraying everyone you meet,” Daniel said with a chuckle.
“Maybe I should meet nicer people.”
“No chance on this job. You wouldn’t believe what I found on him.”
“What?”
“Handcuffs, a needle and thread, and a straw.”
Remi’s brow furrowed. That caused odd horizontal lines of pain across her brow, so she unfurrowed it. “The handcuffs I understand if he wanted to capture Peeters, but what was he doing with the other things?”
“Famine,” Daniel whispered. “He was going to handcuff Italo Peeters somewhere isolated and sew his lips shut so he couldn’t eat. The straw was so he could give Peeters water. To fit the pattern, he needed to starve to death, not die of thirst. And he would have had to stay there watching, for the better part of a month, before Peeters finally succumbed.”
The EMT treating Remi showed her knowledge of English by gasping.
“Famine,” Remi said, and shuddered. “What a horrible fate.”
“If anyone deserves it, it would be Peeters. Still, it’s our job to protect the public, even if the public includes slime balls.”
“Hitting his wife deserves a prison sentence, not a death sentence.”
“I wasn’t referring to the wife,” Daniel said, his voice growing distant.
“Well, it’s all over now,” she reassured him, although she wasn’t quite sure what he was reassuring him about.
“It’s never over,” he grumbled. “At least this case is closed. After some debriefings and a mountain of paperwork, we should be able to fly home by the end of the week.”
“I think I’ll stay in Italy for a few more days.”
Daniel turned to her, surprised. “Why?”
Remi felt herself flush. She still hadn’t told him of her continuing research into the cryptex.
“After all that’s happened, I need a bit of a vacation.” That at least, was true enough.
“I can imagine. I’m sure my boss will understand. I think she likes you. I’ll tell her you need to let off some stress here. You won’t be on FBI expenses, though.”
Remi smiled. “Good. I can stay in a decent hotel them.”
Daniel laughed. “Just for that I’ll fix things with your dean. All I have to do is not tell him you’re done with the case. He’s got people covering your classes?”
“Yes.”
“It’s all set then. Enjoy your vacation.”
It won’t be a vacation, but I will enjoy it.
* * *
The next morning, Remi sat, fascinated, in the archive in Florence. The archaeological report was there just like she knew it would be, and it told her so much.
For here, in detailed description and a large map, was the entire layout of the Church of Saint Pantaleon of Nicomedia.
The archaeologists had performed an excavation in 2007 as part of a provincial project across Tuscany delving into the foundations of lesser-known churches. While most of the famous churches of the region had been thoroughly examined over the years, Tuscany had so many medieval and Renaissance churches that many had never been properly studied by archaeologists, even though architects and art historians had examined every inch of every church. Archaeological investigations were expensive and intrusive.
So the regional government of Tuscany got some money from UNESCO to perform test excavations into each church to determine when they were founded. While many records existed for the churches, often with detailed accounts of their funding and initial construction, other records were missing; and often the records that did exist didn’t mention earlier buildings on the site. The idea of the project was to see the pattern of church building from the earliest days of legal Christianity in the late Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Early Modern period.
In the case of the Church of Saint Pantaleon of Nicomedia, the archaeologists found something quite interesting.
The church was supposedly built in the 13th century, shortly before the cryptex itself had been constructed. Test excavations in the nave and apse, however, uncovered the foundations of a smaller 8th century church, and below that a tiny chapel from the fourth century that could have been any sort of building except that, on the last day of the excavation, the archaeologists found a portion of wall tile showing a fish, the symbol of Jesus.
A little prickle ran up Remi’s spine as she looked at the photo. The artifact itself wasn’t much to look at, a chipped ceramic tile with an incised fish made of two simple lines, much like the symbols American Christians put on the rear bumpers of their cars. But that little design proved the Late Roman building to be a chapel, and that there had been an unbroken chain of Christian worship at the Church of Saint Pantaleon of Nicomedia for at least 1,700 years.
This is what hooked her into historical research, these sorts of discoveries. She suspected the archaeologists had felt the same way.
Then why not publish their findings? She had done an extensive Internet search of the church and had found no mention of the excavation except a brief article in a local paper about the commencement of the project. Nothing about its findings. This was a big enough discovery that it should have made at least regional, if not national, news.
After having made a general overview of the report, she focused on the section where the archaeologists described their findings in the nave.
The map hidden inside the cryptex had an X marking a spot halfway down the nave. Remi had worried the excavators might have already found what she sought.
She could breathe easy on that score. Since their first test pit, just outside the church walls on the west end of the building, had discovered the foundations of the 8th century church, they had focused their excavations on that side. Inside the church they had sunk a test pit in the apse and in the nave close to the apse, but not halfway down the nave at the spot she was interested in.
These excavations had revealed parts of the two earlier churches. To be thorough, the team had also sunk a test pit at the eastern end of the apse but had found no earlier structures.
Her spot had not been disturbed.
They had also made a general survey of the building itself and noted that the nave had been “all but unchanged since the 14th century except for the addition of a pair of side chapels in the 16th century.”
Remi took in a sharp inhalation of breath. “All but unchanged.” Perfect. There was a chance that whatever the cryptex map had marked might still be there.
Only one way to find out. Remi pulled out her phone and called a car rental agency. She’d go to the church right away.