“You want something to eat?” Hilts asked. He had taken the aisle seat, giving Finn the window.
“No, thanks.”
“Drink?”
“No, I’m not thirsty,” said Finn, shaking her head. “Maybe later.”
“Yeah, maybe later,” said Hilts awkwardly. Another moment passed.
“What do you really know about this man Simpson?” he asked finally.
“Not much,” she responded. “He came to my room in Cairo. He said he knew my father. He warned me about Adamson.” She paused. “He says he knew Vergadora back in the old days.” She paused again. The train began to sway and vibrate slightly as they hit the open countryside and continued to gain speed. “I know he got us out of a lot of trouble last night. He’s arranged for passports today. Stuff we couldn’t have done ourselves.”
“Like some kind of guardian angel, is that it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You ever wonder what’s in it for him?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I can’t give you an answer because I don’t know. I only know what he’s done for us so far.”
Hilts was silent for a moment. He stared at the striped fabric and the pull-down table on the seat ahead.
“You ever watch a TV show or read a book and come to a place where you stop and ask yourself, why don’t they just go to the cops?”
“Sure,” Finn said. “It’s like in a horror movie when the girl goes down into the dark basement and everybody but her knows she should turn and run.”
“But if she did, the movie would end right there,” agreed Hilts. “That’s where we are. We’re at the place where the movie should just end, because if we had any brains we’d run to the cops.”
“But we can’t. They want us for killing Vergadora.”
“And our guardian angel, your friend Mr. Simpson, who keeps on turning up, is helping us to get away from the cops.”
“What are you getting at?”
“He’s keeping the movie going.”
“So?”
“Why?” Hilts asked. “Unless he wants us to keep on looking for DeVaux.” He paused. “Or unless we’re being led into some kind of trap.”
“That thought had crossed my mind,” Finn said abjectly. “But what are we supposed to do about it now?”
“That story he told us today, out in Liam Pyx’s garden, about DeVaux.”
“What about it?”
“Do you believe it?”
“I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out.”
26
While they’d waited for Pyx to create their new identities, Simpson had told them about his relationship with the vanished monk and with the man who’d been after him for years, Abramo Vergadora. According to Simpson, Hilts was correct; not only was Vergadora now a sayan for Israeli Intelligence-the Mossad-he had once been an active member, back before it, or Israel itself, had even existed. In the late thirties Simpson had met the Italian Jew at Cambridge, where Vergadora was reading anthropology and archaeology under Louis Clarke and T. C. Lethbridge, who was curator of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Cambridge Archaeological Museum. With the war Vergadora chose to join British Intelligence in Switzerland rather than return to Italy and face persecutions under Mussolini. He eventually joined the so-called Jewish Brigade, which infiltrated German-speaking Jews into Germany toward the end of the war as resistance fighters and spies. Through his work he discovered DeVaux’s history with his own archenemy Pedrazzi, and also learned that after Pedrazzi’s disappearance in the Libyan Desert, DeVaux had briefly reappeared in Venosa to dig in the old catacombs, and then fled again, this time to America. Somewhere along the line, perhaps with the help of old friends at the Vatican, he managed to change his name to Peter Devereaux and resurfaced as an assistant curator at the Wilcox Classical Museum at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
“Pretty obscure,” Hilts had commented.
“Obscure perhaps, but fitting,” replied Simpson, nibbling on a small piece of baguette slathered with fresh churned butter and goose liver pate. “The Wilcox is entirely given over to Greek and Roman antiquities, including one of the world’s best collections of Roman coins and medallions. Just like the one you found on Pedrazzi.”
DeVaux-Devereaux had kept a low profile at the university for years, but according to Vergadora he had continued his researches and also his connections with the school in Jerusalem. According to Vergadora, and confirmed by Simpson, the school was more than simply an institute for biblical archaeology; it was also a Vatican listening post in a chronically troubled part of the world and always had been.
According to information gathered covertly by his friends in the Mossad, Vergadora found out where DeVaux had been hiding and what his new identity was. Following this information, at least according to Simpson’s story, Vergadora also found out that the onetime Vatican archaeologist had made a discovery of profound religious and historical significance: the so-called Lucifer Gospels, written by Christ himself-after the Crucifix-ion. The gospels, sometimes also known as Christ’s Confession, told the story of how Christ’s place was taken by his brother James in the Garden of Gethsemane and then “betrayed” by Judas to the Roman soldiers who came to arrest him, the soldiers having no idea of what Christ looked like. Christ, with the help of several recently converted Romans, was spirited away into the wilds of the Libyan Desert, where he lived a long life as a hermetic monk. His own mythology eventually became confused with that of the Lost Legions, Zerzura, and his so-called Aryan protectors, the blue-eyed fair-haired Knights of Saint Sebastian. All of this, of course, completely denied the entire foundation of the Catholic Church and of Christianity as a whole; a disaster of monumental proportions when even the most basic tenets of the Church were under attack. Even more bizarrely, it seemed that DeVaux-Devereaux had made this discovery in the United States. By his estimation the gospels had been transported by early Templar explorers deep into the central United States, perhaps along with the greatest treasure of alclass="underline" the bones of Jesus Christ himself. Myth or reality, either way it was a story with powerful implications for everyone.
DeVaux-Devereaux’s discovery eventually led to an agreement to meet, but on neutral ground. The onetime Vatican historian knew that his information, and his proof, were inherently both incredibly valuable and equally dangerous. The meeting was to take place in Nassau in the Bahamas, easy enough for both parties to reach, on board the French passenger liner the Ile de France, now renamed the Acosta Star. The man he was to meet with was a scholar named Bishop Augustus Principe from the Pontifical Institute of Biblical Studies in Rome. Unfortunately, soon after leaving the Bahamas, with DeVaux-Devereaux on board, the ship caught fire and sank. In the process the ex-priest and Bishop Principe were killed and the secret of the Lucifer Gospel lost. First Vergadora and then Simpson had managed to check the bare facts of the story and found them to be true: there had been a spate of three-way coded correspondence between the school in Jerusalem, the Vatican secretariat, and the man known as Peter Devereaux in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Acosta Star had in fact sunk somewhere in the Caribbean on Thursday, September 8, 1960, at 11:22 p.m. with a man named Peter Devereaux listed on the passenger manifest.
And that was that. The story that had begun in the hot sands of the Libyan Desert had its final chapter in the blue-green waters of the Caribbean, a journey of two thousand years and twice that many miles. A journey, like many involving the word and deeds of many gods, that had been drenched in the blood of the innocent and guilty alike.
The rest of the trip from Lyon to Paris was completely uneventful. The train pulled in to the Gare de Lyon exactly on time and a well-mannered Parisian taxi driver took them across the city to the Petit Pont, crossed Ile de la Cite to the Left Bank and deposited them in front of the five-story Hotel Normandie on the rue de la Huchette, a narrow, forgotten backwater off the Place St. Michel that looked as though it hadn’t changed much since Napoleon’s time, or at the very least since German soldiers wandered down its one long block looking for local color on furlough in the City of Light. There were butchers, bakers, a tobacconist, two other hotels of the same pension class as the Normandie, a place that sold orthopedic supplies, and an assortment of other small businesses of the kind found in any other neighborhood. The Cafй St. Michel on the corner fed them a decent meal and a bottle of vin ordinaire, and then they went to their separate beds, exhausted. The following morning, after they consulted first a telephone directory and then a map, they discovered that the Canadian embassy on avenue Montaigne was within reasonable walking distance. They set out in the bright morning sunlight, crossing the Seine at le pont des Invalides, then heading up toward the Champs-Elysйes and the upper end of the diplomatic district off the avenue Foch. The embassy turned out to be a discreet assembly of three Napoleon III buildings on a pleasant, tree-lined street and without a red-coated Mountie in sight. With some trepidation Finn and Hilts ventured inside. The interior had obviously seen some anti-Osama renovations, but in the end the whole process was a completely predictable affair of plastic chairs, number taking, and polite lines in bank lobby zigzags. An hour after entering the embassy they exited, the possessors of two blue-and-gold Canadian passports.