"Oh, you're leaving!"
"Yes, and I can see you're happy I am."
"Please, Miss Jimenez!"
"Professor, I know I'm being a pain in the neck and keeping you from your work."
McFadden allowed himself a smile. "I'll try to have the documents tomorrow. Are you going back to Spain?"
"No, to Paris."
"Ah, Paris. Very well, then. Come tomorrow, first thing."
Ana Jimenez left the mansion early the following evening. She had hoped to talk again to Anthony McGilles, but he seemed to have disappeared into thin air after their first meeting.
She was tired. She'd spent the entire day reading about the Temple's last months. The cold facts, the dates, the anonymous recountings of events-it was mind-numbing.
But she'd been blessed-or cursed, as her brother constantly contended-with a wonderful imagination, so every time she'd read, "Grand Master Jacques de Molay sent a letter to the chapter house in Maguncia with the knight de Lacey, who departed on the morning of July 15 accompanied by two squires," she tried to imagine what this de Lacey's face was like, whether he was riding a black horse or a white one, whether it had been hot that day, whether the squires were in a bad mood. But she knew that her imagination could never provide her with the truth about those men and that she would never know anything of importance that Jacques de Molay wrote in his letters to the Templar masters. The copies she had been given dealt with dry administrative matters, nothing more.
There was a detailed list of the knights who had been sent with letters just before the Temple's fall, and contrary to what she had thought, a few of them were said to have returned. One of them, Geoffroy de Charney, precept of Normandy, had burned at the stake alongside his master. All trace of the others had been lost forever, at least so far as she could glean from the archives.
She was leaving for Paris the next morning, for an appointment with a history professor at the Sorbonne. Professor Elianne Marchais, a worthy lady of sixty-something who had written several books of the kind read only by scholars like Marchais herself, was the biggest academic name for the fourteenth century, or so Ana's contacts had told her.
Ana went straight back to her hotel. It was costing her more than she ought to be spending, but she was giving herself the very sweet pleasure of sleeping in the Dorchester like a princess. Plus, she figured she'd be safer in a luxury hotel. She had begun to have the distinct feeling she was being followed. She'd told herself that was stupid-who was going to follow her? And then she'd decided it might be agents from the Art Crimes Department, trying to find out what she knew, and that eased her mind. Or maybe it was just all the double-dealing and death she had been delving into. The fourteenth century was finally getting to her. It had certainly taken over her life otherwise, waking and sleeping. She thought of nothing else.
She called room service for a sandwich and salad, eager to crawl into bed as soon as possible. The people in the Art Crimes Department could think whatever they wanted, but she was more convinced than ever that it was the Templars who'd bought the shroud from poor Balduino. What didn't make sense was that after that, the shroud turned up in Lirey, in France. How had it gotten there? Why, when the Templars seemed to have spirited away everything of value as far from Philippe's clutches as possible, would they have left so valuable a treasure in France?
She hoped that Professor Marchais could explain to her what good Professor McFadden apparently hadn't wanted to. Because every time she approached the subject of whether the Templars had bought the shroud in Constantinople, he snapped at her to stick to the facts. He couldn't, or wouldn't, see past the "fact" that there was no document, no source, that confirmed her theory-her mad theory, as he styled it-and he made it very clear that he found the mysteries people attributed to the Templars tiresome at best.
So Professor McFadden and his institute, an institute purportedly dedicated to the study of the Temple, denied even the possibility that the Templars had ever had possession of the shroud. He had also taken pains to remind her that the relic worshipped in Turin had been dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, not the first, so it was a moot point, anyway. He could understand superstition among the common run of people, he told her, but it held no interest for him, nor should it for her.
Ana knew she was missing something. Something right in front of her. The feeling had been driving her crazy all day. She took out her appointment book and began thumbing through it and the notes she'd made, retracing her steps. And suddenly it hit her. There it was. How had she missed it?
Flames shot up before her eyes, climbing to the heavens. Within them writhed the figures of men. Were they screaming? She couldn't tell; she was overcome by the heat and the roar of the conflagration that consumed everything. Then, brighter than the fire, more searing than the tendrils that seemed to scorch her own skin, a pair of eyes stared at her from the depths of the pyre and a voice rose above all else.
"Go, search no more, or upon you will fall the judgment of God." Once more she bolted awake, terrified, drenched with sweat. She would die if she went on, she was sure of it.
For the rest of the night Ana couldn't sleep. In fact, she rarely got through a night now without being assailed by nightmares. She had tracked grisly stories before, plenty of them, but she had never experienced anything like this. It was as though some external force were dragging her step by step through bloody scenes from the past and making her-a tough twenty-first-century reporter-face true horror, and transcendence.
She knew she'd been there, somehow, that nineteenth of March, 1314, in the parvis before the Cathedral of Notre Dame, only feet from the pyre on which Jacques de Molay and his knights were executed, and that he had begged-ordered-her not to go on. Not to search for the truth behind the shroud.
But her fate, she told herself, was cast-she wouldn't stop no matter how much she feared Jacques de Molay, no matter that the truth was forbidden to her. She was not going to turn back. Not now that she saw the link so clearly.
46
BAKKALBASI, THE PASTOR TO ISMET, NEPHEW of Francesco Turgut, the cathedral porter, had traveled with the young man from Istanbul to Turin. Other men of the community would be arriving via different routes-from Germany, from other places in Italy, even from Urfa itself. Each man carried several cell phones, although Addaio's orders were that they not use them too much and that they try to communicate with one another over public phones, to remain as untraceable as possible.
Bakkalbasi suspected that Addaio would be arriving too. No one would know where he was, but he would be watching them, controlling their movements, directing the overall operation. Mendib had to die, and Turgut had to be brought under control or he, too, would die. There was no alternative.
The Turkish police had been hanging around their houses in Urfa, a sure sign that the Art Crimes Department already knew more than the community would have liked to admit. Bakkalbasi had been tipped to the surveillance by a cousin in the Urfa police headquarters, a good member of the community who had informed them of Interpol's sudden interest in any Turks who had emigrated from Urfa to Italy. Interpol hadn't told them what they were looking for, but it had asked for complete reports on certain families, all belonging to the community.