Lea saw the indecision on Mazzarro’s face as he wrestled with what he should tell this man — the man who had kidnapped him by force, blasted the Doge’s Palace and now had three innocent people held against their will on his private jet.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said at last, immediately dropping his eyes into his whisky glass.
Vetrov nodded and smiled again, but colder this time. “I expected a little resistance, Dario. You are your father’s son after all. Not that I would know, of course — I never knew your father.” He sipped his whisky. “But my father knew him.”
Mazzarro’s eyes widened and he looked up from the Scotch. Kosma took a step forward and stood immediately behind the Italian.
Vetrov continued. “My father spent a great deal of time researching the elixir — like so many others, including Otto Zaugg, his great rival so many years ago. But Zaugg wasn’t up to the fight. Zaugg never knew about the work your father did on the Phaistos Disc — but my father did. My father knew all about it, and worked with your father for many months in his pursuit of the elixir.”
“You are a liar! My father never worked with any Russian named Vetrov in all his life.”
Vetrov laughed. “No, no he did not. But if I say the name Wojciech Kowalski to you, then…”
Mazzarro’s eyes grew yet wider as the name hung in the air between them.
“I can tell from your stunned silence that you recognize the name as the young Polish assistant who worked on your father’s Egyptian expeditions for many months — a long time ago now, of course. This was my father.”
“But Kowalski was a verified academic — a real person.”
“Yes, he was a real person, right up to the moment my father killed him and assumed his identity.”
“This cannot be true…”
“Why? Must the truth always be good?”
“My father would never have worked with him if he’d known the truth!”
“Your father was a fool who would not cooperate, which is why my father killed him too.”
Mazzarro’s mouth opened when he heard the words, almost hissed from Vetrov’s mouth. He dropped the whisky tumbler to the ground and began sobbing. “No…no… my father disappeared on an expedition of the Upper Nile. His body was never found.”
“I should think not. My father gave it to the crocodiles of the Upper Nile…”
“No… no! Brutto figlio di puttana bastardo!” Mazzarro leaped from his chair to attack Vetrov but Kosma gripped his shoulders and forced him back into it, where he collapsed, sobbing once again.
“Please, remain calm, Dr Mazzarro, or my man here will be forced to restrain you much more robustly next time.”
Lea watched Mazzarro break down and cover his face with his hands. There was in his mannerisms something that reminded her of her father — something about the shape of his shoulders and the way he moved. Her father’s death was a catastrophe to her, happening when she was still a young teenager. For a long time she was sure Dr Henry Donovan was murdered, but her theories were dismissed as the ramblings of a teenager scarred by the premature and tragic death of her beloved dad.
But it took a long time for her to see it that way, because she was there the day it happened. She was walking with him on the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. It was a cool, fresh day, with no wind to speak of, and a bright sun in the sky. The two of them were walking along the path — Dr Donovan was hoping to take some pictures of the sea.
Then he realized he’d left one of his lenses in the car, and Lea ran back to fetch it for him. She had told him that when she grew up she didn’t want to be a doctor like he was — she didn’t like blood and guts, as she put it — but a photographer. She got the lens from the back seat and ran back to give it to him, but he was gone. They found his body an hour later on the rocks. A terrible accident, they told her. But she remembered the man in black running along the coast path afterwards, the man everyone told her she’d imagined.
Lea was shocked back to reality by the sound of Vetrov slamming his glass down on the desk. “It was a mistake, killing your father, of course,” he continued. “My father believed he’d already ascertained the location of the elixir and all that remained was to eliminate any competition or other annoyances, such as your father’s insistence on giving the United Nations the location so it could be protected for all mankind. Sadly, he had underestimated your father and was fooled. He died a broken man and I vowed to continue his struggle. I did much better, no?”
“You are a psychotic!” Mazzarro finally managed, his voice breaking from the horror of his father’s unimaginably terrible death.
“Wrong, I am a genius, and now you will translate this map with the knowledge your father and you accumulated from your research into the Phaistos Disc, or I will kill you.”
Lea listened carefully — that was the second reference to this mysterious Phaistos Disc. She had never heard of it before but it could come in useful if she ever got out of here and back to Hawke and the others.
As Vetrov spoke, he opened a drawer in the desk and extracted a neatly rolled parchment. He stared at it lovingly for a few moments and then carefully rolled it out on his desk.
Mazzarro’s sobs receded as he beheld the Map of Immortality for the first time.
“This… this is amazing!” he said, reaching out with trembling fingers to touch it like a drowning man reaching for a rope. “This cannot be real… the myths were real — the disc was real! The map exists…”
Lea saw the amateur Egyptologist was immediately intoxicated by the strange papyrus before him, but then he sank back into his chair and began to shake his head, torn apart by cognitive dissonance — he could finally translate the map he had spent his life searching for, but it meant helping the man whose father killed his own beloved babbo. “No… non voglio aiutare. I will not help. Your father murdered my father. You will kill me as well — I know it. If I help you, you will kill me, if I don’t help you, you will kill me. Either way I die.”
“Your logic is sound, Dr Mazzarro, but perhaps you will be more helpful if it is not your life depending on the translation?”
Mazzarro turned his sweating face up to Vetrov. “I don’t understand.”
Vetrov clicked his fingers and Kosma padded over to the couch.
“Come now, Dario. There has been enough killing and my plane cannot stay up here forever. Tell me where we need to go and we will fly there — you can help me discover the elixir.”
“Never!”
“In that case, I will kill Miss Donovan. If you still do not tell me, I will kill the American, and then I will have my people in Italy track down your family. Believe me when I tell you — you will translate this map.”
Kosma heaved Lea up out of the couch and slung her over his shoulder.
“Tell the pilot to descend below pressurization altitude.” Vetrov glanced out of his window. “The Adriatic Sea is beautiful today, Miss Donovan, and you will soon be flying toward it at terminal velocity.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ryan increased the air-conditioning in the Cairo hotel room and moaned all the way back to his desk. They’d been working on the translation since first getting their hands on the notebooks back in Venice but were still getting nowhere fast.
From looking at the complex notes, Alex was beginning to realize just how little information Mazzarro had given her when they had worked together over the past few weeks. Now she was able to see the full extent of his and his father’s research, she could see that the Italian had remained guarded and suspicious of her, and the information he had given her was very limited in its nature. Now, she and Ryan were side by side with their laptop screens flickering as they desperately sought anything that might point them in the right direction.