“One night, three hooligans attack him and threaten to kill him if he does not reveal to them the secret passwords of the guild. With these passwords, they can demand more money from the guild. Hiram refuses and the men stab him to death.”
Emotion glistened in Paolo’s eyes and he paused momentarily. “It is a story we tell to remember the importance of keeping faith, even unto death. Death comes to all men of course and the brave man does not fear it, but when we come face to face with death, even the bravest man may try to explain to God why it should not be his time. Hiram Abiff was the keeper of the secrets of stone craft. Some say he was not merely a craftsman, but the king of Egypt, and keeper of the secret knowledge of the builders of the pyramids. Who can say if this is true? If he died, much knowledge would be lost forever. He could have said, ‘I am too important to die,’ but he did not. He kept faith, and was struck down. The traditions of our fraternity honor the sacrifice of Hiram Abiff, and cherish his secrets.”
Jade wondered if Professor would have been able to make sense of the story. She certainly could not. “Paolo, I don’t understand. Even if that story is true, it would have taken place hundreds of years before Archimedes lived. What does this have to do with the vault?”
“I told you. Archimedes did not build the vault.”
“You’re saying this Hiram built it? Centuries before Archimedes?”
Paolo’s cryptic smile told Jade that he was not about to give her a straight answer. “Archimedes was a genius, si, but even a genius must learn from a master. Sir Isaac Newton, another of our great heroes, he say, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Archimedes traveled to Alexandria to study mathematics and philosophy from the giants of the ancient world. Alexandria,” he repeated. “In Egypt.”
“And Hiram was the king of Egypt.”
Paolo nodded. “Si. Just so.”
Jade turned this over in her head, trying to find the connection. “Are you saying that…” No, he couldn’t be saying that. “Archimedes was a Freemason?”
She expected Paolo to shake his head, but instead he seemed almost gleeful. “The Masonic lodges as we know them today were created only three hundred years ago, but the Masonic tradition goes back much further. We trace our ancestry back thousands of years. The Knights of Malta and the Templars. The Library of Alexandria. Archimedes.”
“Hiram and Solomon’s Temple.”
“Si, but even Hiram was not the first.”
Jade stared at him for a moment. “The pyramids?”
“And before that, the Tower.”
“The Tower…you mean the Tower of Babel?”
“These are just stories. Allegories. Most do not believe them, even among the brotherhood.” He paused then leaned forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Everything that I have told you is known outside the brotherhood. There are many things I cannot tell you. I have sworn an oath. But, you already know more than most, and if you keep looking, you will find what you seek.”
Jade let out a growl of frustration. “Damn it, Paolo. You said you had answers.”
“And I have told you much. The rest, you will find for yourself.” He rose from his chair. “I can hire a car to take you to Pozzallo. You can catch a ferry there to Malta.”
“Malta? Why should we go there?”
Paolo smiled. “If you keep looking, you will find what you seek.”
SEVENTEEN
Even before making landfall on the tiny windswept island, a mere half-hour ferry ride from the Sicilian port city of Pozzallo, Jade grasped that Paolo’s hint was not nearly as obtuse as it had first seemed. She needed only to see the place as Archimedes might have seen it 2,200 years before. Or if Roche was correct, 1,900 years.
Malta, despite its size, had a remarkable history that stretched back well beyond the time of the Greeks or Romans. The megalithic Ggjantija temple — the word literally translated to “Giant’s Tower”—which dated back to 3,600 BCE, was just one of several scattered all over Malta and the neighboring island, Gozo. The Stone Age temples, built to honor an unnamed Mother goddess, were some of the oldest man-made structures on earth, older even than the pyramids of Egypt, a fact which had not escaped Jade’s notice. Only the ruins of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey were believed to pre-date the temples of Malta, and those had been buried and lost to history thousands of years before the emergence of the Neolithic culture that had settled Malta. The temples to the Mother goddess on the other hand, had still been extant in the time of Archimedes. One of these, Jade felt certain, concealed the entrance of the vault. By the time they debarked, she had a list of sites to visit, but one site in particular stood apart from the others.
“This place,” she told Kellogg, showing him the entry in the local tourist guidebook. “The Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni.”
“What makes it so special?”
“For starters, it’s underground. Exactly where you would expect to find a hidden Vault. It was discovered in 1902 by workmen digging cisterns for a housing development. An entire temple complex carved into the limestone at least five thousand years ago. Three levels have been discovered, though there could be more. They haven’t explored all the rooms on the third level yet. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“The complex was used as a burial chamber later on, but it was originally a temple to the Mother goddess — Astarte, or the local variation on that. The upper levels are decorated with the usual symbols of fertility you would expect, but there are also dozens of strange spirals and other geometric shapes.”
“Just the sort of thing that Archimedes would have noticed.”
“Yup. And there’s a room on the second level called the Oracle Room, which has unique and not completely understood acoustic properties. Supposedly, if you stand in it, you can feel an unusual vibration. People report feeling energized, more creative. Some claim to have visions, which might explain the name.”
She paused, thinking about her experience in the spherical chamber in Peru. Was it possible that a similar effect had been at work there? She made a mental note to look into that.
“And some people,” she went on, “believe the Hypogeum is a doorway to another dimension.”
“Just like the fogous,” Kellogg said.
“Maybe. But maybe that ‘other dimension’ is the vault. Maybe if you go to the Oracle Room on the right day, when the timelock expires, the vault opens and you can go in.”
Kellogg frowned. “That doesn’t help us much.”
“Archimedes figured out a way to get in,” was Jade’s confident reply. “We will, too.”
“Maybe he timed his visit better. No matter how you do the math, we’re at least several decades away from the next chance to get inside. Maybe several centuries.”
“There are other ways into a locked room.”
Jade was less confident about that statement however, but there was no actual proof that Roche was actually correct about the existence of a timelock. He had wrongly attributed the vault’s creation to Archimedes; maybe he was wrong about the thousand year waiting limit, too. She did not share this information with Kellogg. That conversation could wait until after they found the vault door.
As interesting as the Oracle Room was, there were other features of the Hypogeum that made it, if not a likely candidate for concealing the entrance to the vault, then at least worth further exploration.
The remains of more than 7,000 individuals had been discovered in the Hypogeum, which was not in itself that unusual. Many religions, even in modern times, placed great importance on inhuming the dead on sacred ground. What was unusual about the skeletons found in the Hypogeum was that many of them showed evidence of artificial cranial deformation, just like the Paracas skulls.