“Of course you did,” Ryan said with a smirk.
“You’re not so damned smart, Ryan Bale. When we first met you thought an areola was a chocolate biscuit.”
Hawke burst out laughing, but Maria was less amused.
“I know what a sodding Oreo is,” Ryan said, pushing his hands into his jeans pockets.
They were walking across the Viale Vaticano and heading toward the entrance to the museum. Ahead of them the sun was shining above the ancient walls of the Vatican. Lea looked up and saw a line of umbrella pines along the top of the wall, almost yellow in the late afternoon sunshine.
They walked across the cobblestones, passing beneath the famous archway. The words MVSEI VATICANI now welcomed them inside one of the grandest museums anywhere in the world. Here were vast collections of some of the finest art and sculptures on earth, amassed by the desires of hundreds of popes over countless centuries. Ryan was mesmerized.
Inside, the general throng drifted on autopilot toward the Sistine Chapel, but Hawke and the others went in a different direction. Being one of the biggest museums in the world, they had a long walk until they reached their destination, passing on their way many of the greatest classical and Renaissance treasures known to man.
“This place is incredible,” Lea said, drinking in the treasures around her as she walked.
“You’ve never been here before?” Hawke asked.
“No, never.”
“Then maybe we should come back when we have more time?”
Lea looked up at him and smiled, but a dash of suspicion narrowed her eyes. “You mean that?”
Hawke shrugged his shoulders. “Sure, why not?”
“Because,” Ryan said. “You don’t seem like the museum type.”
“That’s not fair,” Hawke said. “And I’ll prove it by bringing Lea back here on a romantic weekend for two.”
She liked the sound of that. It had been a long time since she’d just kicked back and taken life as she found it, rather than riding it like a raft on a white water river.
“Sounds good. And if you’re good I might even let you buy me an ice cream.”
Hawke snorted with amusement. “When am I anything but good?”
They continued on their journey through the museum until they finally reached their destination.
They entered the Vatican Apostolic Library and approached the reception area. A woman with thick, black hair in a bun and chunky glasses on her nose stared up and looked as if one of them had just placed a whoopee cushion under her seat.
“Si?”
Her attitude seemed to undergo a Damascene conversion when Lea Donovan told her they were at the library on behalf of Sir Richard Eden MP and had a pre-arranged meeting with Francesca Pavoni, the direttore of the entire Vatican Museum.
Suddenly she couldn’t do enough, and asked them if they wanted coffee while they waited for Professore Pavoni.
“No thanks,” Hawke said. “We need to speak with Professor Pavoni before we get shot at again.”
The woman looked confused, obviously unsure she had translated the English correctly, and made an urgent phone call. After several high-speed Italian conversations a man in a slim-cut Prussian blue suit emerged from a panelled door behind the woman and smiled warmly as he extended his hand.
“I am Paolo Brunetti, Professor Pavoni’s assistant. Please, let me welcome you to the Vatican Museum. If you please follow me I will take you to the Director — she is waiting for you.”
The ECHO team exchanged glances and followed Brunetti from the reception area, Hawke pausing for the slightest of moments to wink at the woman on the front desk. She dropped her coffee in response and knelt to clean the carpet, cursing in quiet Italian.
Moments later Brunetti showed them into a large, plush corner office flooded with warm Roman sunlight. Professor Pavoni was sitting behind her desk but stood up to greet them as her young assistant left the room and quietly closed the heavy wooden door behind him.
Pavoni glanced at her watch and raised an eyebrow. “You’re nearly half an hour late.”
“Pleased to meet you too,” Hawke said.
Pavoni stared at him for a moment before replying. “An hour ago I received a telephone call from the Culture Minister who seemed to be of the opinion that I should give you any assistance you require.” She raised another unconvinced eyebrow before continuing. “Apparently you need to see a codex stored here at the Vatican.”
Lea nodded. “Apparently so — the Codex Borgia.”
Pavoni nodded with appreciation at the pronunciation. “What you seek is not generally available to the public, you understand. It is quite priceless and has been stored in the library archives here in the Vatican Museum since we acquired it from Cardinal Borgia himself.”
“We understand, but we’re not the public,” Hawke said.
The professor slipped a pair of Gucci eyeglasses on and peered through the butterfly-shaped lenses as she scrolled through the online internal telephone directory. “Ah — here it is.”
She picked up her phone and dialled a short number. Seconds later she was speaking into the handset in swift Italian before setting it down softly into the phone’s cradle and turning to them. “Okay, fine. We can go down to the archives now. I must ask you not to touch anything there.”
They followed the Director out of her office and along a carpeted corridor, at the end of which was a plush elevator with brushed chrome doors. Professor Pavoni keyed in a code and the doors swept open.
“Security here is paramount, naturally.”
When the doors opened, they found themselves in another corridor, but this was tiled and the pleasant atmosphere of Pavoni’s office was replaced by the harsh blue glow of surgical strip-lights.
“If you’ll follow me,” she said curtly. “We access the archives just here.”
She indicated the end of the corridor and moments later she was pushing open a heavy steel door and showing them into the archives.
Lea drank in the view with amazement. For some reason — probably the movies — she had been expecting something similar in scale and size to an aircraft hangar, but while the area was vast, the ceiling was a very low, wooden state of affairs, reinforced here and there with iron support struts. Old-fashioned lights were bolted to the ceiling beams, and they looked like they might have been the originals, installed when the Vatican converted from candle-light to electricity.
Ahead of them was an almost endless corridor formed by the ends of two enormous metal bookshelves, stacked on which were literally tens of thousands of books, journals and manuscripts. It smelled musty, but the desiccant dehumidification system used to keep the ancient documents preserved gave the room a welcoming ambience and she thought that it was the kind of place her father would have liked to visit — or maybe even work in as he did his research.
“Please, this way.”
Professor Pavoni led them along one of the many long aisles lined with bookshelves until they reached a low archway in the far wall. Stepping through the arch they found themselves in a small antechamber at the end of which was another door.
“It’s through here.”
The Director typed in another keycode and the door clicked open. Seconds later they were at their final destination — a small room that reminded Lea of the safety deposit box rooms in Swiss banks she had seen in the movies. Dozens of secured containers were locked in place along the far wall, each numbered by hand.
Pavoni took a slip of paper from her pocket and after retrieving the reference number she walked across to the relevant container. She pushed a wooden chair against the wall of drawers and standing on it to gain some extra height, she gently pulled one of them open. Then she slipped on a pair of neon-blue nitrile gloves from her pocket before slowly extracting the codex from the drawer and laying it down on the viewing cabinet.