“You can’t have acted alone,” Jack said. “Someone else shot Reksnys.”
“Once I was in the Vatican, I brought a small group of trusted companions into my confidence. One is here in the abbey today. You may have seen him in the church. Jeremy was to be another. We came close to assembling enough evidence against Reksnys, but not close enough. We were determined that he should experience horror before death.”
“You reawakened the cycle of blood feud,” Maria murmured.
“Sometimes justice is best served by the old ways.”
“And the felag know who you are.”
“Earlier I told you that the Vatican had been penetrated by the felag in their heyday in the twelfth century. Today there is one again, one among my superiors who knows about the menorah, who has found out about your quest.”
“How?” Costas said.
“It could only have been an insider.”
Jack felt a sudden chill at the thought that one of the trusted members of their team might have betrayed them, but he put his shock aside as O’Connor shrugged bleakly and continued. “I knew the Holy See would do all in its power to prevent the location of the menorah from being revealed, but then I realized that there was more to it than that. The felag will do anything to know what we know, to thwart and destroy us and carry on the search themselves. And there is one we should fear most.”
“Who?” Jack asked.
“The grandson. Andrius Reksnys is dead and his son, Pieter, is holed up somewhere in Central America. But the grandson is still at large. I believe he is now a sworn member of the felag. He’s a thug. He inherited the family genes.”
“Like grandfather, like grandson,” Jack said quietly.
“The father, Pieter, is no better,” O’Connor said. “Remember his early education on the Russian front. But he seems to be fully preoccupied running his criminal organisation in Central America. The grandson’s the one to worry most about. He’s the warrior of the felag, the point man. He grew up steeped in all the rituals, and it has become his creed. He bought into what I rejected. He’s used many aliases, most recently Poellner, Anton Poellner. Among the felag he calls himself Loki, the name of a particularly nasty Norse god. His absurd warrior creed led him to train as a mercenary, and he gouged a trail of blood through the Balkan conflicts. He honed his skills at a terrorist training camp on the eastern Black Sea, in Abkhazia.”
“I think we can guess where that was,” Costas said.
“When his grandfather was assassinated he went on a particularly murderous rampage in Kosovo and let his guard down. He was arrested by the British SAS and convicted in The Hague as a war criminal. Five years ago he was sent to jail for life in Lithuania, the country he claimed as his homeland. They opened up a mothballed jail from the Gulag specially for him, a place where captured SS officers had been held for years after the war before being executed. Then about a month ago a new judge decided the evidence against him was insufficient, and he was released.” O’Connor’s lip quivered in disgust. “He was only a child when I left the felag, but I can still remember his face. His father had refused to cut his palm until the time was right, so Loki flew into a rage and slashed his own face with an axe. He would taunt me with it, pulling his finger hard down the scar until I cried. It used to give me nightmares. And now he’s back. He knows I’m the one who hunted down his grandfather. It’s the blood feud that drives him on. We have precious little time.”
Jack looked at O’Connor. “What will you do now?”
“I’m staying here. Rome is too risky.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something else has happened.” O’Connor looked grim, his eyes downcast. “I wanted to fill you in on the background before telling you. There’s been another murder. A modern one this time.”
“Where?”
“In the Vatican. Two days ago. The police think it was a mafia hit, because the victim was in the forefront of the battle against the antiquities black market.”
“Who was it?”
“The chief conservator.”
“You mean the man who saw the secret chamber in the Arch of Titus with you?”
“Alberto Bellini. One of the great modern scholars of Roman sculpture. A huge loss. And the only other man in the Holy See I could confide in.”
“Do you think…”
“I don’t think, I know. Alberto was a man who would put himself on the line again and again in the public war against the mafia, who needed armed guards every time he stepped outside the Vatican, but who had no inner strength when he was locked in a room with those who confronted him. He confessed to me the evening before his murder that they had forced it out of him, our midnight discovery at the arch and our interest in the menorah. That puts me in the firing line. And it means you too, I’m afraid.”
“Do you know who is behind all this in the Vatican?”
“There’s a kind of internal inquisition, run by one of the cardinals. It’s always been there. But this is more sinister, as bad as it can get. I’m not certain who it is, but I have a pretty good idea. The felag has changed since I left it more than forty years ago. I know who some of them are. The war crimes judge who released Loki, for one.” O’Connor again gripped his chair in anger. “All I can say now is he’s shockingly powerful within the Vatican. He could squash me on a whim. I’ve got nothing to pin on him for certain but enough to put his activities in the spotlight when I go public about this. What I am sure about is that the hit on Alberto was not the mafia. You can probably guess who I think it was, and he won’t be stopping there.”
“Is there anything you can do now?”
“I believe I’m safe here for the time being. The holy isle still has some sanctity, even among the new felag. But this has become too big for us to deal with alone. Blood feuds must be a thing of the past. We’re talking murder here, plain and simple. And if they somehow get their hands on the menorah, if it still exists, then the odd murder will seem a trivial matter. The Middle East would ignite like it never has before if the greatest symbol of the Jewish faith was thrown into it. Nobody would come out unscathed-Jews, Arabs, the Catholic Church.”
“Have you got any documentation?”
“It’s all here.” O’Connor patted the briefcase by his chair. “Hard copy. I can’t trust it to a computer. Loki is the key. He works alone, with horrifying speed. His masters are the great and the good, judges, senior churchmen, politicians. The days when the felag could all don helmets and wield battle-axes are long gone, however much they fantasise about it. There are no others like Loki. If we can stop him, then we buy the time we need.”
“Interpol?”
O’Connor nodded. “I can pull strings. We have some friends in higher places. An international arrest warrant, a global security alert. But I need time, two days at least to assemble a dossier. It would backfire horribly if the application were rejected but the story of the search for the menorah still leaked out.”
“That gives us a deadline,” Jack said pensively. “Two days or all hell breaks loose. It’s a pretty tall order.”
“Something gives me faith in you.”
“Let me help you, Patrick.” Maria leaned forward on her chair, looking at O’Connor and then at Jack. “I think I’ve done all I can for you on Seaquest II, Jack. I was thinking of staying here anyway and having another go at that runestone, to see if there’s anything we missed. But this is way more important. Father O’Connor needs all the help he can get.”