The Lucifer Gospel Page 16

  “No,” said Hilts.

  “Me neither,” agreed Finn.

  “Okay, you’ll be uh . . . Norman Page, and Miss Ryan will be Allison Mackenzie, how’s that?”

  “Whatever.” Hilts shrugged.

  “Fine,” said Finn.

  “Good Lord,” Simpson said and laughed. “Do I detect a literary allusion?”

  “Hardly literary,” Pyx said with a smile.

  “I don’t get it,” said Finn.

  “Of course not, dear, you’re far too young.”

  Pyx went back to the keyboard and started typing again. “Place of birth, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, date . . . 1981 or so, mother’s maiden name . . . father . . . documents provided . . . guarantor.” He typed on, humming under his breath, and finished the online form a few moments later. “Next thing is the routing, so it doesn’t come back to me here,” he explained. “First I grab an appropriate Canadian consulate . . . Albania, say, and put in their address as a point of origin.” He read it off the screen, “Rruga, Dervish Hima, Kulla, number two, apartment twenty-two, Tirana, Albania, telephone number 355 (4) 257274/ 257275, fax number 355 (4) 257273, and finally the packet switching code.” He finished typing with a flourish.

  “What does all this accomplish?” Hilts asked.

  “This will tell the Passport Office computer in Ottawa that Mr. Norman Page and Miss Allison Mackenzie, both presently in Paris, France, which is the closest actual passport-issuing office in the area, are renewing their passports, and have in fact already done so. It is telling the computer that the new passports are actually waiting at the embassy in Paris. Meanwhile a different set of instructions has been sent to new files along with a request for a JPEG digitization of two new passport pictures. Everything gets backdated by a few days, the passports get printed during today’s run, and they’ll be ready and waiting for you when you get to the embassy. Show them the birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and Social Insurance Numbers I’ll provide you with and they’ll provide you with two perfectly authentic Canadian passports, hot off the press, orchestrated by yours truly. If one of their forensics electronic people tried to reverse-analyze the transaction, it will dead-end at the Albanian consulate, which is probably located in a dirty little hole-in-the-wall office above whatever passes for a convenience store in Tirana. It’s a little convoluted, but it’s a perfect hole in the system. Bust into their own database, they assume that the instructions are their own and thus legitimate and authorized. Hasn’t failed me yet.”

  “Don’t you mean Social Security Numbers?” Hilts asked.

  “Don’t make that mistake at the embassy in Paris if anybody happens to question you, which they won’t. Social Security is American, Social Insurance is Canadian.”

  “But we’re not going to Paris,” Finn argued.

  “Oh yes you are,” said Arthur Simpson.

  “What about Lausanne?”

  “The man you’re looking for doesn’t live there anymore.” He paused. “In fact, the man you’re looking for has been dead since Thursday, September eight, 1960, at eleven twenty-two p.m.”

  “Awfully precise,” commented Hilts dryly.

  “That’s when the ship went down,” said Simpson. “Let’s finish up with Liam and then I’ll tell you all about it.” Which he did.

  25

  With the exception of their passports they had all the documents they needed by two in the afternoon. As a bonus Pyx had thrown in two perfectly valid Bank of Nova Scotia Visa cards in their new names, each with a ten-thousand-dollar limit that, according to Pyx, would somehow be skimmed from the huge Canadian bank’s vast stream of invisible wireless transfers that pinged off satellites around the world each day.

  They spent most of their day at Le Vieux Four in the sun-warmed garden behind the house drinking ice-cold Sangano Blonde beer, nibbling on cheese and pate, and listening to Arthur Simpson tell his tale. As the sun warmed her Finn could almost forget why they were in this beautiful place, with its buzzing bees and chirping birds scolding them from the branches of the old birch trees at the end of the garden. Almost.

  In the early afternoon, with documents in hand, they thanked Pyx for his hospitality and the speed and quality of his work, then climbed back into the Mercedes and headed down the mountain to the valley below. Finding the autoroute, they made the sixty-mile trip to Lyon in a little over an hour. Simpson dropped them off in front of the modern Part Dieu railway station.

  “There are fast trains all the time. The trip to Paris takes about two hours. You should be all right. You remember the name of the hotel I told you about?”

  “Hotel Normandie. Rue de la Huchette between rue de Petit Pont and the boulevard St. Michel on the Left Bank,” said Finn, repeating Simpson’s instructions.

  “Good girl.” The old man smiled.

  “We owe you for the passports,” said Hilts grudgingly. “I haven’t forgotten, you know. We’ll pay you back.”

  “Think nothing of it, Mr. Hilts.” Simpson looked fondly up at Finn through the open window of the car. “Repaying a favor to the memory of an old friend.”

  “We will pay you,” said Finn, her tone firm.

  “On your way,” Simpson ordered.

  “What about you?” Hilts asked.

  “I have some people to see back in Italy. But I’m sure we’ll meet again before this is over. Look for me.” He smiled again, rolled up the window, and drove off. Hilts and Finn turned, crossed the broad sidewalk, and went into the low-ceilinged modern terminus. They bought a pair of first-class tickets on the next high-speed train to Paris, a brand-new TGV double-decker Duplex with big airplane-style seats, lots of leg room, and a top speed of 186 miles per hour. They boarded the train, found their seats, and settled in for the relatively short journey. So far they had seen nothing suspicious, but without passports and only forged documents to identify themselves they both felt vulnerable. The train was packed, mostly with tourists of various nationalities on their way back to Paris, but they had seats together and no one paid them any attention. The train headed smoothly out of the station, right on time, and a few minutes later they were gathering speed as they raced through the suburbs of the big French city. Neither one of them had spoken since leaving Simpson at the entrance to the station.

  “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 all: 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 Café 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-Elysées 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.

  “Well, that was easy,” said Hilts, relieved. They turned down avenue Montaigne, heading back to the hotel.

  The takedown was professional, perfectly executed, and went without a hitch. There was a man in front, dressed casually in jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt, with a rottweiler on a leash, and two men behind, armed. A green Mercedes pulled up on the left, the rear door swinging open. One of the two men behind stepped forward, nudging something hard into the small of Finn’
s back, urging her into the car, the second man doing the same to Hilts, while the man with the rottweiler stood by, blocking the possibility of an intrusion from people on the sidewalk, the dog growling low in the back of its throat. One of the men behind climbed in after Finn and Hilts, the second slammed the door, and the car began to move. It had all taken less than twenty seconds. Finn managed to look out through the rear window. The man with the dog was moving off as though nothing at all had happened, and the second man went off in the opposite direction.

  Finn and Hilts were crushed together in the rear seat, a man on either side of them. A third man sat in the front seat beside the heavyset driver. The man beside the driver turned. His hair was dark and very short. He had a full beard and was wearing tinted glasses, and had a small leather folder in his hand with an ID card showing the famous sword-through-the-world-with-the-scales-of-justice logo of Interpol on it. He showed it first to Hilts and then to Finn without a word, glared at them, then snapped the folder shut and turned in his seat, facing forward.