Gabriel's Horn (18 page)

“They’re getting away,” Roux shouted above the chatter of the machine gun.

“I’m not the only one lying here with my face on the carpet,” Garin replied. The vibrations caused by the bullets penetrating the walls echoed in the floor. “Feel free to run out there and stop them.”

Roux cursed.

“They’re not getting away with anything,” Jennifer stated. “They thought they had the painting. They didn’t.”

“I know,” Garin replied. “But killing that woman would have given me immense pleasure. Sooner or later, it’s going to have to be done.”

The machine gun kept firing and the angle of the bullets altered, but the sound drew farther away. Garin pushed himself up and checked outside.

As he watched, the helicopter sped away and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it.

26

“Hey. Are you there?”

Annja stared at the instant-message window that floated to the top of her computer screen. It took a moment for her to recognize the name of the sender and associate it with the information she was looking for regarding the painting of the Nephilim.

Hey, Annja typed back. Good to hear from you.

Is this a good time?

It’s fine, Annja wrote. She took a sip of her hot chocolate. Graham had replenished it from time to time. She glanced at the time.

Forty-three minutes had elapsed since she’d talked to Bart. There had been no news about Luigi or Charlie. The Internet news services had only stated that gunfire had broken out at the restaurant but there weren’t any reported casualties. She chose to take that as a good sign.

You in the states? Her contact asked.

Annja hesitated over the question. She still wasn’t certain how Saladin’s men had found her at Luigi’s.

Hey, it’s cool. You don’t have to tell me.

I’m in the States. Sorry. Was working. Clearing my head, Annja quickly typed.

Cool. You wanted to know about the Medici story and the Nephilim painting.

Excitement warred with wariness in Annja. Things didn’t come easily in her field. She was prepared for disappointment.

Yes, she typed.

I heard the painting was sold in the Hague yesterday.

Annja’s heart raced. Is that where Roux and Garin are? In the Hague? While I’m here dodging bullets and getting my friend’s restaurant shot up?

I didn’t hear that, she replied.

This whole thing seems kind of hush-hush.

Why all the secrecy? Annja asked.

Not really secrecy. Just nobody believes it.

What? Annja asked.

That the painting’s got the power to destroy the world. I mean, the kind of crap you see in B movies. LOL.

I thought it was kind of intriguing someone had painted a portrait of a Nephilim and a Medici family member wanted it, Annja typed.

Cosimo, Yeah. He was an odd guy. But he was head of the family when Constantinople fell. He had a difficult job managing the family fortunes. Lots of stress.

Annja waited, willing the person to tell the story.

Cosimo was interested in the painting because of the power it was supposed to contain, her contact wrote. Back then, you gotta remember they felt like the fate of the whole world was being decided in Constantinople. Real Old Testament stuff. Everybody back then swore that God and demons took part in the battles.

Annja knew that was true.

Constantinople was the crossroads between the Eastern and Western cultures, Annja typed. It was an important place. A lot of people and ideas passed through there.

Are you a teacher?

Annja thought about that. Sometimes, she wrote.

Cool. So am I.

Where?

Naples.

Italy?

LOL. Florida.

How did you know about this painting? Annja wrote.

Got a double major. History and Art. A lot of people don’t realize how much those two fields overlap these days.

I do.

What field are you in? the contact asked.

Archaeology.

Awesome. I thought about getting into archaeology. I still might. I want to take a doctorate before I’m through. Maybe then.

Annja didn’t want to sound impatient, but she also didn’t want to spend the night comparing degrees. How did you find out about the painting? she asked again.

I studied with a brilliant man named Dr. Anton Krieger. Ever hear of him?

Annja had. There had even been a Discovery Channel special on the man after his recent death. I have. Smart man. It was a shame to lose him.

Yeah. He was one of those rarities—a really good guy. But he was eighty-nine when he died. He’d lived a full life. The funny thing is, he’d never gotten to figure out the truth about the Nephilim Medici was trying to find. Dr. Krieger told me he had papers Cosimo de’ Medici left behind. He felt certain the secret location of the Holy Grail was hidden in that painting.

Annja didn’t believe that. If a code had been embedded in the painting it would have been figured out long before now. There were a lot of legends about paintings hiding secrets.

That’s pretty hard to believe, she typed.

I know. I don’t think I bought into it, either. But it was weird when you started asking questions about the painting.

Did Cosimo de’ Medici find the painting?

Maybe. There’s a rumor that he did. One of his men supposedly located it in Constantinople as the city fell to the Ottomans. He was supposed to have gotten out of the city with the painting, but something happened to him on the way back to Venice.

What? Annja asked.

According to the story Dr. Krieger ultimately got, this guy was killed by a jealous husband in an inn. Nobody said what happened to the painting.

What did Dr. Krieger think happened to it?

He thought there was every possibility that the killer or killers saved the painting and sold it. Or they might have destroyed it on the spot.

Or the innkeeper threw it out the next morning because the dead man bled all over it, Annja typed. Or because he thought it might have been cursed. The painting was incredibly suggestive from what I’ve read.

Right. There was even some conjecture that Cosimo had the man killed to prevent anyone from connecting him to the painting.

Do you know who the artist was? Annja asked.

The original artist was a man named Josef Tsoklis.

Annja took a moment and opened up another window. She Googled the name quickly but didn’t get any hits.

Doesn’t appear to be much on Tsoklis, she typed.

Except for this one painting, he was pretty much a nonevent. He died soon after he did the painting.

Then why did Krieger get interested? Annja asked.

Because of the Grail story. Dr. Krieger was interested in the aspects of the story that equated it to the horn the archangel Gabriel was supposed to blow that would bring about the end of days.

That was something Annja hadn’t heard before. How did Krieger arrive at that conclusion?

There have been other papers written about that possibility. Dr. Krieger was just covering his bases when he did the work on this project sixty years ago. But it was interesting enough that it stuck with him. Shortly before he died a few months ago, we had a breakthrough.

What happened?

Dr. Krieger had discovered some sketches in Cosimo de’ Medici’s personal effects. They showed what Cosimo had been told the Nephilim painting looked liked.

That bothered Annja at once. If sketches existed, there was every possibility that the work had been copied more than once. If so, finding the original painting would be infinitely harder.

While I was working with him, her contact wrote, I noticed that some of the sketches were a lot like another painter with moderate success at the time. I was preparing a paper on Venetian artists.

The cursor sat blinking for a moment.

Anyway, I found some notes in Dr. Krieger’s collection that he got from the Medicis’ records. There’s a possibility that this second artist was in Constantinople and did some touch-up work on the Nephilim painting before the city was sacked.

Define ‘touch-up,’ Annja wrote.

Bringing the color back into line. Smoothing out some of the texture. Back in those days, artists had a tendency to glop the paint onto the canvas.

Who was the other artist? Annja asked. She waited, wondering if she’d scared him off.

27

If Dr. Krieger was alive, her contact wrote, I wouldn’t give you this. It was his story. And in a way, because I worked so long with him on this, maybe it’s mine.

I understand how you feel. Mentally Annja crossed her fingers as she typed. I’d be protective, too. But that’s not the story I’m after.

The problem is, I’m not going to be able to do anything with the information I’ve got. The funding for Dr. Krieger’s research was cut almost the day he died. With what I’m getting paid, I can’t continue.

Annja assured her contact she’d give him full credit in her research.

The artist’s name was Jannis Thomopoulos. He was born and raised in Venice, but he traveled extensively. Some of those travels were to Constantinople.

What did he do there? Annja typed.

Found clients and did portrait sittings. He did several watercolors and sketched a lot. Pretty much lived a hand-to-mouth existence till the end of his days.

Okay, that’s great. Annja felt her cell phone vibrate. She glanced at the caller ID and saw that it was Bart. Can I get in touch with you again if I need more information? she typed.

Definitely. And if you find anything out, please let me know.

Annja assured him that she would. Then she took Bart’s phone call.

“Nobody got hurt,” Bart said.

Annja heard the sounds of traffic passing over the telephone connection and knew that Bart was probably on his way to pick her up. Still, the news was good. She let out a sigh of relief and started packing her computer into her backpack.

“Luigi’s all right?” Annja stood and stretched.

“Once you bolted,” Bart said, “the guys chasing you vanished.”

“Luigi has cameras inside the restaurant.”

“We got the storage drives from the cameras. I looked at the images myself. That’s one of the reasons I’m calling back so late. We’ve got a chance at identifying the men who came after you. If they’ve got records.”

“What about Charlie?” Annja asked.

That was clearly a sore subject with Bart. “There was no sign of him. I tell you, Annja, you may feel softhearted toward that old man, but the possibility that he set you up has to have entered your mind.”

It had, but for whatever reason Annja couldn’t believe that was really what had happened. She slung her backpack over her shoulder, then took another glance at the street below the cybercafé. A few pedestrians moved along the sidewalk. New York never ground to a complete halt in any of the five boroughs. None of the pedestrians appeared to be Saladin’s men.

“Where are you headed?” she asked.

“I’m coming to pick you up,” Bart growled. “I’m thinking that may be the only way I’m going to get any sleep tonight.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Annja said, meaning that she didn’t want him to do that.

“Hey, we’re talking about
my
peace of mind here.” And that meant that Bart wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “You’re at the cybercafé a few blocks down, right?”

Annja thought about lying. She had her own life and her own agenda. She really didn’t need her friends butting into it. Except that what was going on these past few days had left her owing those people.

“Yes,” she replied. “I’ll be out front.”

“Not out front,” Bart said quickly. “Stay hidden. I take it you’ve looked around.”

“Two of them passed by right after I got here, but I haven’t seen them again.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re not there hanging around to see if you’re going to show.”

“I know.”

“I don’t get the impression that these guys are going to go away easily. Not if they’ve followed you from Prague.”

Annja waved at Graham and Helen, who were in the process of turning the evening shift over to the night manager and night cook. They waved back. A few of the gamers called out halfhearted goodbyes, still wrapped up in the imaginary worlds on their screens.

She told Bart she’d see him in a few minutes, then folded the phone and put it away. She went down the steps quickly and waited just inside the doorway. Her mind spun as she tried to process the new information.

Okay, the news about the other artist is good, she told herself. That gives you an avenue no one else who’s been looking for this thing has explored. Maybe Roux and Garin don’t even know about Thomopoulos. Just focus on that for the moment.

As she stood in the foyer, she felt the night’s chill soak into her bones. Her eyes burned with fatigue. She hadn’t slept well in two nights and it was catching up with her.

A moment later Bart’s unmarked car slid to a stop at the curb. She pushed through the door as Bart got out of the vehicle and looked around. His hand rested on the pistol holstered at his hip.

Sliding into the car was almost anticlimactic. Annja sat back in the seat and cranked the heater as Bart slipped back into the car.

“Did you just offer to take the homeless guy out for dinner?” Bart asked irritably. He pulled the transmission into Drive and pulled away from the curb.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t even have to give you a sob story about being hungry.”

“I could see that he was hungry. He looked like he hadn’t eaten well in days,” Annja said.

“Terrific. You and I need to compare notes on your idea of keeping a low profile.”

“I didn’t expect those men to show up here.”

“You also said you thought they were after this guy, Garin Braden.”

“I think they were.”

“Well, where’s he?”

Annja refused to look in Bart’s direction, but she watched his reflection in the windshield. He clearly wasn’t happy.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “How did those men find me?”

“I told you, the old man—”

“He didn’t have anything to do with those men showing up at Luigi’s,” Annja protested.