“Unless you’ve got a gun to someone’s head.”

“True. But something’s wrong.” He motioned at the doorways. “With this type of safeguard, they could easily lead an intruder astray. And where is everybody? This place is deserted.”

He again read the letters above the doors. V S O V O D A.

And he knew.

“You used to get on me all the time, wondering what good an eidetic memory is.”

“No. I wondered why you couldn’t remember my birthday or our anniversary.”

He grinned. “This time it pays to have good recall. Remember the last part of the quest. Heed the letters. The arbor. At Bainbridge Hall. The Roman letters.”

He saw them perfectly in his mind.

D OVOSVAVV M.

“Remember, you asked why the D and the M were spaced apart from the other eight.” He pointed at the doorways. “Now we know. One gets you in. The other, I assume, gets you out. It’s the middle part I’m unsure of, but we’re about to find out.”

SEVENTY-SIX

VIENNA

THORVALDSEN ASSESSED HIS SITUATION. HE NEEDED TO BEST Hermann, and he’d brought the gun beneath his sweater for that precise purpose. He still held the letters of St. Augustine and St. Jerome. But Hermann held a weapon, too.

“Why did you kidnap Gary Malone?” he asked.

“I don’t have any intention of being questioned.”

“Why not humor me for a moment, since I’ll soon be leaving?”

“So his father would do what we needed done. And it worked. Malone led us straight to the library.”

He recalled what the vice president had surmised the night before and decided to press the point. “And you know that?”

“I always know, Henrik. That’s the difference between us. It’s why I head this organization.”

“The members have no idea what you’re planning. They only think they understand.” He was fishing to see if anything more might be offered. He’d sent Gary to hide for two reasons. One, so there would be no possibility that what they’d overheard last night would be revealed. That would place them both in absolute jeopardy. Two, he knew Hermann would come armed and he needed to deal with the threat alone.

“They place their trust in the Circle,” Hermann was saying. “And we have never disappointed them.”

He motioned with the sheets. “Are these what you planned to show me?”

Hermann nodded. “I was hoping that once you saw the fallacy of the Bible, its inherent flaws, you’d understand that we’re merely telling the world what it should have been told fifteen hundred years ago.”

“Is the world ready?”

“I don’t care to debate this, Henrik.” He thrust his arm forward and leveled the gun. “What I want to know is, how did you learn of those letters?”

“Like you, Alfred, I always know.”

The gun stayed aimed. “I will shoot you dead. This is my homeland and I know how to handle the matter once you’re gone. Since you already have my daughter, I can use that. Some sort of extortion plot you’d concocted that went bad. It won’t really matter. You won’t care.”

“I believe you’d actually prefer me dead.”

“No question. Much easier, in every way.”

Thorvaldsen heard the running steps at the same moment he spotted Gary bolt from the plants and tackle Alfred Hermann. The boy was tall, lanky, and solid. His momentum toppled the older man from his feet and caused Hermann to lose the gun.

Gary rolled off his opponent and snatched up the weapon.

Hermann seemed stunned by the attack and came to his knees, searching for breath.

Thorvaldsen stood and grabbed the gun from Gary. He wrapped his hand around the weapon and, not giving Hermann time to rise, slammed the butt into the side of his head.

The dazed Austrian crumpled to the dirt.

“That was foolish,” he said to Gary. “I would have handled it.”

“How? He was pointing the gun at you.”

He didn’t want to say that he was indeed running out of options, so he simply clasped the boy’s shoulder. “Good point, lad. But don’t do that again.”

“Sure, Henrik. No problem. Next time I’ll let whoever shoot you.”

He smiled. “You’re just like your father.”

“What now? There’s another guy outside.”

He led Gary near the exit and said in a soft voice, “Go out and tell him Herr Hermann needs him. Then let him enter first. I’ll take care of things.”

MALONE FOLLOWED THE TUNNEL MARKED BY THE LETTER D. The route was narrow, two people wide, and extended deep into the bowels of the rock. The path turned twice. Light came from more low-wattage sconces. The chilled, mysterious air carried an acrid quality that stung his eyes. After another few twists, they entered a chamber decorated with magnificent murals. He marveled at their brilliance. The Last Judgment, hell mouthing flames in the river, a Tree of Jesse. Cut into the wall from which they entered were seven doorways, above each of which was a single Roman letter. On the opposite wall seven more doorways, a solitary letter above each, too.

D M V S O A I.

“We take the O, right?” Pam said.

He smiled. “You catch on fast. That arbor is the way through this maze. There’s going to be seven more of these junctures. V O S V A V V. That’s what’s left. Thomas Bainbridge left an important clue-but one that makes no sense until you get here. That’s why the Guardians left it alone for three hundred years. It’s meaningless.”

“Unless you’re in this rat maze.”

They kept moving forward through the puzzle of passageways, misleading corridors, and dead ends. The time and energy required to construct the tunnels staggered Malone’s imagination. But the Guardians had been at their task for two-thousand-plus years-plenty of time to be both innovative and thorough.

Seven more junctions appeared and he was pleased to see that each time a letter from the arbor appeared above a door. He kept his gun ready but heard nothing ahead of them. Each juncture contained a different marvel of hieroglyphs, cartouches, alphabet engravings, and cuneiform symbols.

Past the seventh intersection and into another tunnel, he knew that the final path lay ahead.

They turned a corner, and the light from the exit ahead was clearly brighter than the other junctures. McCollum could be there waiting, so he positioned Pam behind him and crept forward.

At the end, he stayed in the shadows and peered inside.

The room was large, maybe forty feet square, with overhead chandeliers. The walls towered twenty feet and were covered in mosaic maps. Egypt. Palestine. Jerusalem. Mesopotamia. The Mediterranean. Detail was minimal, coastlines tapered off into the unknown, and the writing was in Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew. On the opposite wall were seven more doors. The one with the letter M above it surely opened into the library itself.

They stepped inside the chamber.

“Welcome, Mr. Malone,” a male voice said.

Two men took form from the darkness of one of the other doorways. One was the Guardian whom McCollum had earlier held at gunpoint, minus his straw hat. The other was Adam from Haddad’s apartment and the monastery in Lisbon.

Malone aimed his weapon.

Neither the Guardian nor Adam moved. Both men simply stared at him with concerned expressions.

“I’m not your enemy,” Adam said.

“How did you find us?” Pam asked.

“I didn’t. You found me.”

Malone thought about how the man standing across from him had gunned down George Haddad. Then he noticed that Adam was dressed similarly to the younger Guardian-baggy pants, cloak tucked into his waistband, rope belt, and sandals.

Neither man was armed.

He lowered his gun.

“You’re a Guardian?” he asked Adam.

“A faithful servant.”