The Malta Exchange (Cotton Malone 14)

The knight tried to contain himself.

The story was one of long standing.

On October 13, 1307, the Knights Templar were rounded up en masse and arrested. They were tortured and many were killed, including their grand master, Jacques de Molay, who died a horrific death. Five years later the order was officially dissolved and most of its assets turned over to the Knights Hospitallers by the pope. No one ever questioned that move. No one ever challenged, or wondered, how that had been possible. Why would the pope do such a thing?

Simple.

Two hundred years earlier, sometime in the 12th century, during a raid in southern Turkey, a group of Hospitallers came across a cache of ancient documents. Mainly parchments. Religious texts. Most irrelevant and unimportant. One, though, seemed different.

The Constitutum Constantini.

Constantine’s Gift.

A one-of-a-kind document that survived to the Middle Ages, staying with the Hospitallers during their time in the Holy Land, then with them on Cyprus, Rhodes, and Malta. Popes were eventually made aware of its existence. One in particular, Clement V, who sat on the throne of St. Peter in 1312 and knew of the document, proclaimed his Ad Providam granting all of the Templar assets to the Hospitallers. Proof positive of its apparent force. Occasionally, through the centuries, popes had required further persuasion and always Constantine’s Gift would do its job.

Keeping the knights relevant.

But it ended in 1798.

Now, on this night, all that might change.

* * *

Cotton stood on the chair and maneuvered the shop vac’s nozzle across the layers of pulverized glass that filled the clock, slowly extracting them. The chamber measured about ten inches square and eighteen inches deep. He could not rush the removal as he had no idea what, if anything, had been left inside. He understood the advantage of glass as a packing material. It came with no mess, no dust. It also was dense, which made the clock extra heavy, further dissuading looters from carting it away. The shop vac was working perfectly, the granulations steadily rattling their way through the nozzle. He was concerned about Luke, but there was no way this task could be delegated to one of the men watching him intently.

He kept vacuuming. The top of something came into view. He maneuvered around the object and kept extracting. The outline of a bottle began to take shape. Wide mouth. Tall. Standing upright at about the halfway point. Sealed with wax. He kept going until over half of the container was visible.

“Shut it off,” he said.

The curator killed the motor.

He laid down the nozzle.

“What’s there?” the cardinal asked, impatient as ever.

He reached inside and gently wiggled the bottle free. Grains of glass rained off. He shook more away and held the container up for them to see. The opaque bottle carried a foggy, greenish hue. He saw the blurred image of something that filled the inside.

He stepped from the chair. “Any thoughts?”

Pollux examined the exterior. “Another message.”

He agreed and grabbed the chisel from the table, working on the wax seal. The dark crimson scraped away in dry, bitter chunks. The wax filled the entire mouth, and he angled the bottle downward, careful not to allow anything to damage what was inside. A pile of two-hundred-plus-year-old wax, melted by a desperate prior trying to preserve the last bits of heritage to a dying organization, collected on the tabletop. He used the chisel to scrape away the remaining bits of the seal. He tipped the bottle and a piece of rolled parchment, stained the color of tea, slid out.

He set the bottle down.

“It can be unrolled,” the curator said, seemingly reading his mind. “But carefully.”

“Do it,” the cardinal said.

Cotton laid the roll, about five inches tall, on the table. The curator used his index finger and thumb to hold down one edge. Cotton spread the roll out, slow and careful, the parchment’s natural resilience still there after two centuries. He held his end flat and they all studied the image, the black ink bloated by time.

“It’s Malta,” the curator said.

Cotton agreed. A crude drawing of its shores, but the shape was unmistakable. Letters and symbols ringed the shoreline, a few more inland.

“That’s the Latin alphabet,” Pollux said. “The square with a line through it on the far right is the letter H. The two circles, joined, that looks like an 8 is the letter F.”

“And their positions on the map could be watchtowers,” the curator said. “There were thirteen encircling the island. There are thirteen letters close to the coast. The M could be Mdina, the backward F is roughly where the old Inquisitor’s Palace lays. The O is near the Verdala palace.”

It all made sense. The prior had made the clues difficult, yet not insurmountable, provided the person studying them knew the lay of the land. He’d wondered what the letters in the message found in the obelisk had referred to. H Z P D R S Q X. Now he knew.

“Do you know the whole Latin alphabet?” he asked.

Pollux nodded.

Perfect.

“We need to make a copy of this parchment. I need one I can write on.”

* * *

Luke took in both the dark form of the man and the answer he’d supplied about Malone not being in danger, then asked, “Who are you?”

“Monsignor John Roy. I was Archbishop Spagna’s assistant. I’m now in temporary operational command of the Entity.”

“You sound American.”

“I am.”

“The Secreti are here, on Malta?”

The black head nodded. “In a manner of speaking.”

Odd answer.

“They killed Chatterjee and Spagna and tried to kill you,” Roy said. “They’re out there, right now. Waiting.”

“For what?”

“To see what happens inside the cathedral.”

Luke pointed at the rifle on the table before the window. “And who are you going to kill?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t pulled the trigger before?” Roy asked.

“I’m not an assassin.”

“Neither am I,” Laura said. “But I do my job.”

“I’m not going to allow either of you to kill anybody.”

“This doesn’t concern the United States,” Roy said. “It’s a Vatican problem, which the Vatican wants to handle itself.”

“By killing people?”

“Washington interjected itself into this matter,” Roy noted. “The Entity did not ask for your assistance. I’m asking you, as one professional to another, to walk away. I assure you, nothing will happen to Mr. Malone. At least not from us. The Secreti? That’s another matter. You and Malone will have to deal with that problem. They’re the enemy. Not me.”

“They’re after what Malone is locating right now? Inside the cathedral?”

“That’s correct. And they’re not going to stop until they get it. Archbishop Spagna was here to retrieve whatever might be found. He failed. Ms. Price and I will now finish that mission. You and Mr. Malone can go home.”

Which actually sounded appealing.

As a boy he and his brothers had tended the cows his parents owned. Lazy animals. They loved nothing more than to loiter in the pasture all day, chewing cud. The horseflies were relentless. Nasty little creatures that left whelps with their bites. Some of the cows would run to get away from them. But most just stood there, chewing grass, using their tails to swat the flies away. Oblivious to any assault. Those cows that didn’t run were bold suckers.

Like him.

“I can’t leave, and you know it.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Cotton held the parchment flat as the bright light scanned the image and produced a copy. They’d fled the oratory and returned to the curator’s office. The two Gallo brothers had stayed quiet, watching as he studied the prior’s puzzle. He rolled up the original and set it aside, then laid the copy on the curator’s desk, grabbed a pen, and wrote H Z P D R S

Q X on a pad.

“Give me the Latin alphabet letters for those.”

Pollux took the pen and wrote the corresponding Latin letters. Cotton immediately saw that he was right. All eight appeared on the drawing, scattered at intervals around the island.

He circled them on the map copy.

“They’re markers. Reference points,” he said.

But they were useless unless read together. So he studied them, arbitrarily deciding the ones closest together along the coast had to be connected by short lines.

“You don’t know that’s right,” the cardinal said.

“No. I don’t. It’s a guess, but it seems reasonable. We can try other combinations if this doesn’t work.”

Common sense demanded that the map had to lead to a single point on the island, and the only way that could be accomplished was by intersecting lines. In his mind he drew those lines, connecting differing points of the eight circles. Only one combination seemed to provide what he was after, the rest mere noise to confuse the searcher.