15

AN HOUR PASSED AS THEY SAT in near darkness, hoping an untimely entrance by a staff member or groundskeeper wouldn’t undo what they had accomplished, secreting themselves within the cathedral.

Jack looked at his watch. It was almost nine in the evening and he hadn’t seen or heard anyone in at least forty-five minutes.

“Ready?” he asked his wife.

“If I stay here a minute longer, I’m not sure I’ll be able to straighten again,” Espy said.

Jack pushed himself up and peered down to ground level. When he didn’t see anything moving, he worked himself into a sitting position and swung his legs over the lower portion of one of the twin frames of the iconostasis. They had waited until as late as possible before going into hiding, and it had been a gamble choosing to do so atop the iconostasis. Had anyone looked down at the right angle from the upper level, they would have been spotted.

They lowered themselves to the floor and then proceeded to the front entrance, to the stairs leading up to the bell tower. Before long, they had climbed the steps and were once again looking up at the carillon.

“We started with four numbers,” Espy said. “We’ve used two of them. That leaves the seven and the ten.”

“If I didn’t miss anything,” Jack said to himself.

Mindful that security could do a walk-through at any time, Jack headed to the wall and began to climb, the metal cold under his hands. Espy followed, and once he’d reached the platform, he gave her a hand up. From there, he could see the narrow walkways between the rows of bells, allowing the staff access to each of them. He looked down, surprised at the distance to the floor below.

Three levels of bells spread out in front of them. Now that he could see all of them, he counted two hundred forty, with three levels of eighty, in eight rows of ten. He was puzzling over how to figure the two remaining numbers to their best advantage when Espy stepped past him and onto one of the walkways.

Jack didn’t follow her. Instead he viewed the arrangement as a whole, trying to understand what Chambers had wanted them to find. As he pondered the riddle, Espy reached the other side. She ran a hand along one of the bells, careful to keep it from sounding. Then she turned around, facing Jack across the chasm.

“It’s a grid,” he said.

“Congratulations,” Espy said. “I figured that out before we climbed up here.”

Jack smirked. “The grid is ten by eight. The numbers Chambers built into his book are ten and seven.” He paused and looked at the lines of bells. “But where’s the starting point?”

With no obvious answer, he stepped closer to the nearest bell. The one he was studying hung in the middle level, its rigging directly in front of his face. The bronze bell wasn’t large, maybe six inches. There was a molded ridge around it, an ornate line that looked like leaves and ribbon.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Espy doing the same thing. “Anything?” he asked.

“Nothing. It’s a plain bell. The ornamentation seems purely decorative.”

That was Jack’s take as well. He stepped back and looked around at the more than two hundred like bells. Then he stopped himself. The best way to approach a difficult task was to break it into more manageable pieces. The first piece he had to deal with involved finding their starting point.

The only way up to the bells was the ladder behind him. Logically, the starting point would be either of the two bells on the ends of the first row. The more likely candidate was the one to Jack’s left, which better simulated a genuine grid. And if that was the case, then counting ten bells down and seven across put the target on Espy’s side.

“Take a look at the second to last bell on your left,” he told her. “The first row.”

Espy made her way across the walkway, holding on to the bell rigging as she went. Her steps were careful, her hand light on the rigging. When she got to the right place, she studied the bell in question. After several moments, she shook her head. “Nothing.”

Jack frowned, even though her answer wasn’t unexpected. Had she said anything else, he would have thought it too easy. He headed back to the ladder and leaned on the wall, pondering the next step. While he did, Espy reached a hand under the bell, grasping the clapper. Then, with no danger of sounding the bell, she used her other hand to tip the bell up.

Jack was lost in thought, trying to make sense of Chambers’s clues, when he noticed a change in the way Espy was looking at the bell. He was intrigued enough to want to get a better view of what had attracted her attention. He started across the walkway but didn’t make it halfway before Espy lowered the bell. There was no mistaking the excitement on her face. When he reached her, she tipped up the bell again. Jack leaned in close, but there was little light, not enough for him to see anything of the bell’s underside. Espy shifted the bell then so that it caught the light. Even so, it was hard to see the engraving along the inner wall. It looked like Russian script.

“What does it say?”

“Ducal four,” Espy said.

Jack raised an eyebrow. While he didn’t know a great deal about the Fortress beyond the little he’d picked up over the last day or two, he knew that Ducal had to refer to the Grand Ducal burial vault on the Fortress’s grounds.

He reached for the bell adjoining the one Espy was holding. Securing the clapper, he tipped it up and peered in. When he saw nothing along the inside, his excitement began to grow. Quickly he checked two more bells, neither of which turned up anything. He was about to give in to a genuine feeling of accomplishment when, almost as an afterthought, he reached for the bell just above the one Espy was still holding. When the light caught the interior of the bell, he was almost dismayed to see something inside.

“What about this one?”

Espy leaned close and peered in. “Trubetskoy seven.”

Jack frowned. He knew he’d heard that word before, but where? Releasing the bell, he pulled the map of the Fortress from his pocket, unfolding it while Espy looked on. He located the bastion, an old prison, on the map. He sighed and checked the bell at the bottom of the sequence.

“Naryshkin five,” Espy said when he showed it to her.

Jack went through the motions of checking a number of other bells, both around the three with confirmed writing and at other points around the carillon. As he worked, he was mindful of how much time they were spending, knowing they couldn’t count on lax security forever. So after a while, he returned to Espy.

“We have three other places to check,” he said. He knew there was a hint of irritation in his voice that shouldn’t have been there. They had, after all, successfully followed clues written by a man more than 150 years ago—clues they’d discovered buried in a cemetery more than a thousand miles away. He should have been giddy. Instead he understood the amount of work three additional clues represented.

Espy didn’t seem to share his feelings. In fact, she was smiling. “How many couplets were there in the notebook?” she asked.

“Three.”

“And on a three-dimensional grid, where we’ve already accounted for the first two dimensions . . .”

Before she finished, Jack’s smile matched her own. According to that logic, the one they wanted had to be the top one: Trubetskoy seven.

“Have I told you today that I love you?” he said.

“Nowhere near as often as you should,” she answered with a grin.

Trubetskoy Bastion, a part of the Peter and Paul Fortress, had a notorious history. At one time, it was the premier political prison in Russia, housing prisoners considered to be the most serious threats to the social and political order. Now it was a museum. The interior was built to resemble a tunnel, to limit the light, and from the cells he’d seen, to create a feeling of supreme isolation. Trubetskoy had more than sixty prison cells, but Jack was only interested in one of them—number seven.

He’d found it on the lower level. It was a corner cell with solid stone walls. He could almost feel the loneliness and despair a prisoner must have felt in the cramped space. However, the fact that it was small worked to his advantage, as it didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for.

Inch by inch, he and Espy began going over the stark cell number seven. Jack found two gaps in the stone at floor level—holes barely wide enough to fit a finger. He found the one in the corner of the window wall with relative ease. The other, though, had taken a while, causing him to mentally tip his cap to whoever thought to sink it vertically into the ridge of stone running just above the cement floor. It was the separation that made it an ingenious tripping mechanism, because it took two people to make it work.

Espy balked about being asked to slip a finger into a hole that, after the passage of so many years, could have been home to all sorts of different creatures. But she did it, and when Jack did the same with the second hole, they were rewarded with a click and a movement of a portion of the wall.

Standing, Jack investigated what they had uncovered, finding that a small part of the wall slid out, revealing what looked like a door handle. Grasping it, he gave it a turn and then took a step back as a much larger section of the wall began to move. As he watched, a seam came into view along what appeared to be a natural line in the rock, and a door of stone swung slowly open. The free edge had been shaved at an angle to ease the opening and shutting motion. When the door opened, it revealed a short tunnel about four feet long, and at the end of it was a second door.

Jack fumbled for the pitted metal latch, feeling the resistance of untold years. It wouldn’t move, so he shifted his hold and tried again. This time he was rewarded with the barest hint of movement—a millimeter of something shifting. He glanced at Espy. She seemed hopeful, if not buoyed by the marginal success.

Releasing the latch, Jack adjusted his grip and tried a third time, putting as much of his weight into it as he could. Even so, it didn’t move right away. It took several seconds of straining before he felt a repeat of the motion that marked this part of the wall as something separate from the rest of it.

Less than sixty seconds later he’d moved the second wall some eighteen inches to his right. In reviewing his work, as well as the seam that showed up much clearer with separation, he guessed the door was three feet at its widest, before disuse and weathering had mangled the mechanism that at one time probably allowed it to slide with ease.

Jack and Espy stood in the hall, staring into the darkness. A moldy smell emerged from the opening, and there was no way to know if it was the odor of age or of death. Jack hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight and didn’t know how comfortable he was entering a tunnel that may not have seen human steps in more than a century.

“We need some light,” he said.

They stood in the hallway and thought about it for a while, until Espy got a look that told Jack she’d thought of something he hadn’t.

“Wait here,” she said before disappearing back up the hallway.

Jack waited for maybe two minutes before prudence told him to close the outer access lest a security guard surprise him. But as he moved to do that, Espy returned. She was carrying one of the torches from the audience chamber.

She offered it to him, and he couldn’t help but smile, despite the probability that any fuel the torch had once held was either spent or ruined. That was when his wife proved that her resourcefulness extended past the mere finding of the torch. Around the top of it she’d wrapped some white fabric, and as he studied it, he saw it was one of the shirts they were selling in the gift shop. Espy held out her hand, showing him more of the shirts.

“I got five of them,” she said. “I’m guessing you’ve got a way to light them?”

Jack fished around for the lighter in his pocket. With it in hand, he started back into the tunnel. The stagnant smell strengthened the farther they went. He paused and lit the fabric wrapped around the torch. It went up quickly, letting him know they didn’t have a great deal of time, regardless of the extra shirts. So, making use of the light they had available, they stepped through the second door and into another world.

The first thing Jack noticed was the slope of the ground. It headed downward, at an angle that told him it wasn’t simply following the natural grade of the land.

Before going any farther, he handed the torch to Espy and, turning back, retraced his steps to the other door. He examined it until he made certain that he could open it again from this side. Satisfied, he shut it. As stone contacted stone, the hall was plunged into a darkness that would have been absolute but for the burning of the I Love St. Petersburg T-shirt wrapped around the medieval torch. Jack did the same for the second door and then turned to venture forward.

He ran a hand along the rock as he walked, feeling the cold beneath his fingers. Because the tunnel was narrow, the light did a passable job illuminating their way, showing perhaps a dozen feet before them with clarity. They descended for a long while. The first shirt burned down to cinders, until it was casting only the barest light on the walls. Once it had gone out entirely, Jack and Espy went on walking in darkness, trusting the path to continue along the same lines. It wasn’t until he noticed the slope begin to lessen, to return them to what felt like a horizontal path, that Jack lit the second shirt.

The tunnel had widened as they walked, and the walls, once smooth stone, were now rough-cut and irregular. It was as if they were entering a true subterranean cavern rather than anything made by human hands. It made Jack wonder if Peter the Great chose this location for the Fortress for reasons lost to the history books. It made him wonder how many more secret tunnels existed beneath the place.

The torch burned lower, and Jack was considering using another shirt while also calculating how much light they’d need for the walk back when his hand touched something that felt different from the rough wall. It was a peculiar enough sensation to make him stop and backtrack a couple of steps. He ran his hand over the wall again and found it—the smooth spot surrounded by rough. He brought the torch in closer. But while he could pick out something pale in the rock, he couldn’t see it in any detail. So he took out another shirt and wrapped it around the torch.

It took a few seconds to catch, and then for the flame to build, to bring the hidden thing into the light. Espy gasped. Jack’s reaction was only silence as he looked at the skull staring back at him.

There was no way to tell for sure how many years it had been there, but Jack guessed it to be a long while. He reached out and touched the place where it met the wall; the stone had been hollowed out to fit the skull.

“Jack,” Espy said. It was the way she’d said his name that made him turn away from the skull and look back at her. She’d taken a step back away from the wall, but her eyes were on it, staring past Jack, around him. When he looked back to the wall, he held the torch up higher. And in the light, the rock wall resolved into a thousand or more black eyes. The torchlight didn’t reach far, but as he peered at the edges, as he followed the upward run of the wall, the skulls seemed to go on forever.

Jack took a step back, regarding the macabre spectacle with awe, revulsion and . . . wonder. The shirt wrapped around the torch had started to unravel, a section of it falling off. He grabbed for it and wound it around the torch’s weak flame. As it rekindled, as the light reached into the distance, Espy gasped again.

The wall of death facing them went up at least a hundred feet, with the evidence of brutality disappearing into the darkness with it. There was a part of Jack’s brain that was having a difficult time processing what he was seeing, and it took several seconds before he could grasp the reason. It was because there was nothing in the culture of the area to suggest this sort of thing, nothing in the history that spoke of this kind of cruelty. What he saw in front of him was an ancient evil, something that came from some other place and found a home here.

“What is this place?” Espy asked.

Jack didn’t have an answer for her, especially because, as he forced himself to turn away from the wall, he saw the impossibility of it. They had entered an enormous chamber, a cavern large enough to swallow the torchlight before it could strike the far wall. But as he followed the curve of the wall with his eyes, he saw no break in the lines of skulls. There were thousands of them. Maybe more than that.

He advanced along the wall, his steps slow, wanting to take it all in and yet rebelling against the idea. The level of mass murder here was nothing he’d ever seen, not even in sites from ancient civilizations where emperors would take their soldiers with them to protect them in the afterlife. No, this was something closer to Mayan practices, although Jack thought that even the Mayan might have blanched at this level of human slaughter.

The torch was fading again. Jack knew that only two shirts remained with which to keep the flame going, and seeing what was around them, there was no way he was going to get stuck here in the dark. Thus motivated, he shifted his attention to the rest of the cavern.

He and Espy moved along the wall, not looking at it, until after a while Jack began to see a shadow up ahead—an object that stood out from the wall. He stopped and held the torch aloft, but the flame was low enough that he couldn’t see the object clearly. He debated putting a new shirt to the flame, but held off, choosing instead to approach the object.

They were still yards away when he thought he knew what it was. He stopped, taking hold of Espy’s hand.

“I have to go take a look,” he said, “but you don’t have to.”

“If you think I’m going to stand here in the dark with all those skulls looking at me while you walk away with the only light we have, you’re out of your mind.”

“Good point,” Jack said, taking her hand in his.

They closed the distance to the object, an expanse of stone maybe seven feet by five feet. It was entirely flat, and as Jack leaned in closer, he understood that his original thought was wrong. With the multitude of silent witnesses around them, his initial thought had been that the stone was an altar, a sacrificial slab. Now he didn’t believe that to be the case, if for no other reason than the fact that he could find no discoloration on the surface, no stains of dried blood. Instead, the colors he saw on the slab were vivid. And intentional.

“Please tell me they didn’t perform sacrifices here,” Espy said.

“They didn’t,” he assured her.

He turned his attention back to the slab. The entire top surface of the stone was covered with crude-looking images—pictographs really. Jack tried to make sense of them. They seemed to be organized in rows, four of them across the stone. In the low light, it was almost impossible to make sense of the images, but his experience told him he was looking at a story, a progression of ideas and events.

“This is very old,” he said. When Espy didn’t answer, he looked up. “Too old for this place.”

Jack looked back at the stone. He could feel his heart beat faster as the importance of their discovery hit him. Running a hand along the stone, he felt the channels cut by ancient artisans.

“These are petroglyphs,” he said, unable to keep the excitement from his voice. He went to a knee, bringing the fading torch in closer. He could see that he was wrong. The slab wasn’t uniform; it was irregular. And the striated edges confirmed a fledgling thought. “This was brought here from somewhere else.”

The light continued to fade, and Jack knew they didn’t have enough fuel. Nowhere near enough to stave off the darkness for as long as it would take for him to examine the slab, to give it the study it deserved.

He looked at Espy. The dying flame of the torch gave his features a flushed appearance. “We need real light,” he said.

Jack was worried that it had taken them the better part of an hour to find another light source. The fact that they hadn’t yet been discovered—that some security guard hadn’t noticed the new seam in the cell wall and then the door—was the kind of luck he couldn’t count on continuing. The problem was, his need for haste was running headlong into his desire to go over every inch of the stone slab.

He and Espy each held a flashlight—large industrial ones taken from a utility closet near the bastion entrance. Both beams were focused on the slab, and the longer Jack looked at it, the more excited he became.

“It’s at least 700 BC,” he said. The carvings occupied four rows, and it was now apparent that they told a story. “These look like the Häljesta petroglyphs,” he added. Then he paused, spotting something in the top corner. “Except here they look more like the Ughtasar set.”

“And I assume there’s something peculiar about that?”

“Peculiar is a good word for it.” The longer Jack looked, the more influences he spotted on the slab—petroglyphs in a half-dozen styles. It was a remarkable discovery, but one that presented a real puzzle. “I’d bet my life these carvings were done more than twenty-five hundred years ago. But I’m finding at least six different regional influences—none of which I’d expect to find occupying the same stone.”

“You’re saying they all tell the same story?”

Jack shined the light over what he determined to be the start of the story, then worked his way along, following the progression of it. He was halfway through when he decided to move the light to bear on the first image. He hovered there for a few seconds before shifting the light slowly down the line. When he stopped, the portion of the slab bathed in light showed several lines, forming an image that Jack recognized.

“It’s . . . it’s Elisha’s story,” he said. He moved the light back to the start and progressed again, this time stopping at the end of the fourth row. He saw nothing to make him doubt his theory. “It’s telling a linear story, using petroglyphs from six different cultures. Incredible . . .”

Espy stepped closer to the stone, running her hand over it. “That doesn’t make sense. It was the Israelites who took possession of the bones. They’re the ones who formed the order. So why are there so many different cultures showing up here?”

“Except that I’m pretty sure the Israelites lost possession of the bones, or at least sole possession of them, not long after they reached Egypt,” Jack said. “Think about it. We’ve seen evidence of this organization’s influence across a number of cultures. Egyptian and Mayan for starters. How many more cultural or religious histories have stories that could be better understood by placing a global priesthood having magical bones in the midst of them? I think what we’re seeing on this stone is that the religion practiced by the Priests of Osiris is a set of philosophies and practices they’ve accumulated from other people groups over the centuries.”

“Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the cultures and religions were influenced by the ones who did this.” Espy gestured toward the slab.

He considered that and, in doing so, realized it was the sort of academic question that could send him into months of research—the sort of question that had been missing for so long at Evanston. The stone slab in front of him was a snapshot in time, a record of the order when it was still relatively young. To study it—to take it apart piece by intellectual piece—would give him the kind of insight into the organization that he’d been searching for.

Such a realization, though, reminded him that he didn’t have the time it would take to properly address the question. As fascinating as the slab was, it spoke of the Priests of Osiris as they were more than two thousand years ago. He had to believe that Chambers’s notebook had led them there for something else. Grudgingly he stepped away from the stone slab and he and Espy continued walking along the wall.

They didn’t have to go far. Perhaps twenty yards past the slab was a door that opened into the wall. For a subterranean door in the middle of a cavern of horrors, it was surprisingly nondescript. It looked to be made of a single piece of wood set on simple hinges. The handle was a lever, and there was no lock. Jack looked at Espy, who returned a shrug. He turned back to the door and tried the handle.

The door opened easily, although the action produced a squeal as hinges that had not seen use in a very long time were awakened. When Jack crossed the threshold, he frowned because, while he wasn’t sure what he was expecting, what he saw wasn’t it.

The place had the look of a small lecture hall. The room was twenty feet square at the largest and was filled with chairs. There were six rows of six, all facing toward a point in the room where a podium stood. Jack couldn’t pinpoint the date of the chairs with the accuracy Romero might have, but he thought they were of the Shaker style, which would place them around 1850.

Espy came in and stopped next to him. “It’s like hell’s conference room,” she remarked.

Jack smiled, yet he couldn’t dismiss the comparison. It was precisely what the place felt like.

He walked deeper into the room, heading for the podium. It was large, about the same time period as the chairs. He couldn’t help but wonder who in the past had stood at this podium. What was discussed here?

It wasn’t until he walked around to the front of it that he felt his breath catch in his throat. The top of the podium was bare, its surface scratched and pitted. But there was a shelf on this side, a slot from which a book protruded. He bent down and carefully pulled the book out. Straightening, he set it on the podium. He could tell right away it was very old. The leather cover was cracked and worn, the pages yellowed. As he opened it, the spine creased.

Espy was at his side in seconds.

There was no cover page, but he wouldn’t have expected one. Neither was there any preliminary information—no date, publisher, edition. The reason for that became clear as he saw the print. “This is Gutenberg type,” he said.

Espy leaned in close. “I can hardly read it.”

“I wouldn’t have expected you to be able to. Even in English, some of those early typefaces are almost impossible to read. This looks German to me, and really old. Maybe the mid 1400s.”

Espy whistled.

Jack couldn’t read German, so he moved a half step to the left, allowing Espy to view the book.

In the conference room of an ancient organization, adjoining an enormous underground cavern with a horde of muted witnesses, Espy read from a book that was likely more than five hundred years old, a book that could well contain secrets about what might be the oldest and most influential group of men and women defined by a particular ideology.

Jack moved away from the podium, giving his wife the time she needed to decipher old German in Gutenberg type on aged paper. He walked the perimeter of the room, not really looking for anything but keeping an eye out should something strike him. He didn’t know how long he waited. At some point he took a seat on one of the old chairs, absently wondering who might have sat in the same seat. He watched Espy. She was bent over the work, oblivious to all else.

Jack rose and went to the door, looking out into the darkness. He took a deep breath, the air of centuries come and gone filling his lungs. In the silence, he pondered the existence of a benevolent God who might have ignored whatever evil happened in this place. A God who would allow powerful men to alter the course of history and exploit others was a God whose worth some people might call into question. Yet Jack couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d seen enough to understand that the evil that men did was theirs alone, and that God acted as the redemptive force in the midst of evil.

Even after all these years, after adopting the faith and trying to raise his children in it as best he could, it was still a difficult position to take. But he didn’t see how he could do otherwise. The best that humanity had to offer—the love, the willingness to help others, the push to reach for things that seemed unattainable—was evidence that the human condition was more than just self-preservation, more than kill or be killed. There was a spiritual aspect to existence that mandated the existence of God. It was the same thing that allowed Jack to look out on the evidences of human depravity, the silent witnesses in the walls, and imagine a people who could be saved from all of it.

He snorted at his own musings and reached into his breast pocket, pulling out a cigar. He lit it and then stood in the doorway for several minutes, until Espy called for him. When he joined her again at the podium, her face was flushed, even in the limited light. It appeared that she was about halfway through the book. He didn’t bother looking at the place her finger was pointing; he wouldn’t have been able to read it anyway. Instead he looked to his wife, whose face glowed with satisfaction.

Jack raised an expectant eyebrow.

“We’re going to Paris,” Espy said.