The Florentine Deception (23 page)

“They're underground now, Pop—that hallway is ten or fifteen feet belowground. That's why it's a little static-y.”

“Okay, now we're going to round the corner,” said Steven, “and … and there's the door to the vault.” Hillary walked next to the steel door and waved to the cam.

Papa waved innocently back at my laptop screen.

“Okay, Alex, we're ready for the unveiling,” said Steven. “You ready up there?”

I gazed over at Papa: still awake, and focused on the screen. “We're all set.”

“Okay, what's the code?” Steven handed the baby cam to Hillary. She stepped back a few steps and centered Steven, the keypad, and Richard's dinner-plate-sized mirror smartly in the middle of the frame. Steven's right hand remained poised over the keypad in anticipation. I pulled out my overstuffed wallet and extracted the green ViruTrax business card I'd jotted the code on after my escape from the hospital.

“Okay, here we go.” I flipped the card and held it in front of Papa so he could see the numbers, then clicked on the walkie-talkie. “Seven, six, nine,” Steven repeated each digit as he keyed it into the pad, and I continued, “five, four, and—everyone cross your fingers—two.”

“I just heard the bolt click!” exclaimed Hillary.

“Here goes nothing.” Steven grabbed the foot-long steel handle, rotated it counterclockwise, and then gave a tug. The door resisted stubbornly. Visibly aggravated, he squared his feet and redoubled his efforts, his biceps now clearly bulging from the effort. “It's stuck.”

“Are you sure you turned the handle all the way?” asked Hillary from behind the camera. Steven shrugged, then gave the handle a hard shove with his palm, rotating it counterclockwise a few more degrees.

“All right, one more try,” he said, grabbing the handle.

This time the five-inch-thick steel door capitulated and groaned as it rotated on its three massive hinges.

Chapter 36

Steven stepped tentatively over the inch-high steel threshold followed closely by Hillary and her twin cameras. The baby cam's cheap, charge-coupled sensor, unable to adjust to the room's relative darkness, momentarily transmitted undulating, indistinct shapes to the laptop's screen, each briefly materializing then fading back into the pixilated, mottled blackness.

“Lights,” I croaked into the talkie.

“Working on it,” responded Steven.

The laptop's LCD screen momentarily flared as the vault's overhead lights flickered to life. What filled the screen, amidst an almost intolerable degree of static, amazed me. Ten archaic gold coins rested on a dark, ruffled velvet matting beneath the pane of a curio cabinet. Papa whistled.

“What kind are they, Alex?” Hillary asked. “Roman? Greek?”

“It's hard to tell, but I'd guess they're Roman.” The rich yellow glint of the ancient coins transported me back fifteen years to my coin-collecting adolescence and days of combing through numismatic catalogs. “If I'm not mistaken, those are the emperors: Alexander Severus, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius. The one in the upper left is Julius Caesar.”

Hillary panned closer in on the lustrous gold coin.

“You hit the jackpot,” said Papa, in awe. My heart pounded as if I'd just cracked open the lid of a musty treasure chest and discovered a mountain of doubloons. What was all this?

“Could the Florentine be these gold coins?” asked Hillary. “Priceless Roman gold coins from Florence, Italy? Makes sense, right?”

“It's as good a guess as any,” I said into the walkie-talkie. “Let's see what else is in there.”

Hillary panned the cam over to the right side of the cabinet and onto a cache of silver coins, these more primitive looking—many had uneven borders and crudely stamped profiles. A particularly impressive example, separated from the others, featured an emperor on his throne, an eagle perched on the palm of his outstretched right hand.

“Wow, I wonder where those are from,” said Steven.

Papa leaned inward toward the LCD screen to inspect the shining coin and raised his bushy eyebrows.

“There anything in this for me?” he asked.

“I don't see why not,” I said, then, into the walkie, “Papa wants a cut of the booty. I hope there's enough.”

“Oh, there's enough,” said Hillary. She lifted her camera up, briefly exposing the bare steel walls of the vault, and walked over to another tall curio cabinet in front of Steven. “I think we're all rich.”

Situated on the second shelf of the cabinet was a miniature Egyptian treasure trove. This time it was Steven's turn to whistle.

“Howard Carter would have been jealous,” I said, my anxiety still quelled by the excitement.

“Who's Howard Carter?” asked Hillary.

“He's the archeologist who discovered King Tut's tomb,” I replied.

At the center of the shelf rested a strikingly beautiful golden burial mask encrusted with gems. The mask's eyes, formed of what appeared to be inlaid obsidian and quartz surrounded by strips of deep blue lapis lazuli, stared off into the afterlife. To the left of the mask sat a collection of funerary jewelry, including a striking golden ankh, and a threesome of golden scarabs embedded within a golden frame, their wings inlaid turquoise. Right of the mask stood a ten-inch-high statue, sculpted from obsidian and inlaid with gold and silver, bearing the head of a bird and the body of a muscular man. Delicate gold and silver earrings, rings and bracelets, all decorated with gems, were scattered decadently across the shelf amongst the three larger antiquities.

“I think that's Thoth,” I said of the statue. “Egyptian god of … I forget.”

“The god of ‘worth a lot of money,'” said Steven from outside the frame.

Hillary panned the camera clockwise and onto the opposing wall. A video surveillance recording unit, small CRT monitor, and a stack of VHS tapes like those we'd found outside in the subterranean hallway sat on a small wooden table in the corner. To their left, several paintings had been hung on the wall. Hillary approached the painting on the left and gasped.

“What is that?” I asked.

“If I'm not mistaken from my UCLA art history classes, it's an early Van Gogh,” said Hillary from behind the camera. The painting depicted a group of parishioners in front of a dreary, three-windowed church amidst a series of dormant, leafless trees; drab oranges, olives and dirty blue hues gave the painting a profoundly depressing feeling. Hillary leaned forward and centered the cam squarely on the lower right corner of the painting, the signature, “Vincent,” clearly visible. “That's how he signed. It could be a forgery, of course.”

“Where's the diamond, already?” asked Papa impatiently, now seemingly bored by the procession of rare artifacts.

“Guys, Papa wants to know where the Florentine is.”
That makes two of us
. “Anyone see it?”

“Let's see, Papa.” Hillary swept the cam around the room past not-yet-scrutinized displays of medieval weapons, ancient pottery, and yellowing Renaissance manuscripts; the place was a museum.

“Could the Florentine be a manuscript?” she asked, focusing our static-filled ten-inch screen on a trio of vellum-bound volumes.

“I don't think so,” I responded. One volume had been opened for display, depicting a bald friar, deep in prayer within a small windowless chamber; even given the cam's low image quality, the painting's vibrant colors popped from the laptop.

“I think I found it,” yelled Steven.

“And whatever it is,” Hillary abandoned the fifteenth-century manuscripts and darted over, “it's not a diamond.”

Steven stood in front of an old writing desk, in his hand a thick manila envelope with the word “Florentine” written in black permanent marker on its side.

Chapter 37

“All right, open it already,” kvetched Papa.

“One second, Pop,” I said, examining the padded manila envelope in my hand.

“I wonder what it is,” said Hillary. “Obviously not a diamond. Maybe a priceless document? Like an original copy of the Declaration of Independence?”

“I think Nicholas Cage already found that in
National Treasure
,” snickered Steven. Hillary just shook her head.

“Perhaps something incriminating,” I offered. “A damaging photograph of a politician?”

“Oh just open the damn thing already.” Papa's arthritic hand shot out in an attempted grab. I yanked the envelope back reflexively.

“All right, all right.” All four pairs of eyes focused on the tan envelope as I unwound the red drawstring and unfastened the stiff metal clasps.

“Thumb drives,” I said, withdrawing a pair of gray, two-inch-long USB drives from inside.
The flash drives the Russian was after
. Each had the words “Florentine Controller” written in indelible marker on its side.

“That ain't no diamond,” whined Papa. “What are they, suppositories?”

“They're thumb drives, Papa. They hold data for the computer.”

Papa shook his head.

“Florentine Controller?” said Hillary, puzzled, “What the heck is a Florentine Controller?”

“God only knows,” I said, equally perplexed.
Hopefully something we can hand over to the FBI and be rid of
.

“There's no reason to speculate,” said Steven. “Stick one in your laptop and let's see what's on it.”

“All right, here goes.”

My hand shaking slightly, I inserted the first of the two drives into a USB slot on my laptop.

“Now what's supposed to happen?” asked Papa.

“Give it a second, Pop.” With a few clicks, I brought up a window listing the contents of the drive.

“It's a movie?” said Steven.

Indeed, the only file on the drive was entitled “Florentine” and sported the ubiquitous triangular “play button” icon associated with video files.

I double-clicked the movie icon and, after a few moments of deliberation, the Windows Media Player window dutifully filled the screen. According to the progress indicator at the bottom of the window, the movie itself was sixty-five minutes long. After a few seconds of inky blackness, the videographer removed the lens cap and switched on the camera's lamp, barely illuminating the depths of a cave. Sans any narration, the videographer swept the camera in a horizontal arc past another hiker, clad in black, toward the cave's entrance. The last rays of the twilight sun flooded the cave's mouth, energizing a galaxy of fine dust particles and silhouetting what looked like the gnarled trunk of an oak just outside. The photographer pointed the camera back toward the cave's depths.

“Ready?” asked the darkly dressed companion from the lens's periphery. The voice was husky, thirties, African American.

“Yes, ready,” answered the man behind the camera. His voice was deeper, late thirties, maybe forties, European accent. French, maybe. Not Russian. Too young to be Richard or Ronald at any rate.

“Who are they?” asked Hillary.

“More importantly, where are they?” added Steven.

“I can't tell,” I whispered over the video. I paused the movie and dragged the progress indicator back with my mouse until the black-clad companion stood center-frame. The man's profile was a blur of darkly tinted flesh tones.

“The camera's moving too fast,” said Hillary, “and it's too dark.”

I hit the play button again. Papa began snoring softly.

The two walked a dozen steps deeper into the cave, then stopped.

“How's the picture?” asked the companion.

“I don't know. One second.” The image instantly cut to black, then returned a millisecond later, far brighter. “Better.”

The two followed the tunnel another thirty or so feet, then cut right; here, the cave had dead-ended. The videographer panned down to a three-and-a-half-foot-diameter hole at the base of the wall.

“Down there?” asked the videographer.

“Down there.”

The companion moved into the frame, dropped onto hands and knees, then onto his stomach, and began writhing into the narrow channel, his pack almost instantly wedging against the edge of the aperture. He cursed, and with a tug, dislodged the pack and disappeared down the hole. Hillary shuddered.

“Claustrophobic?” I asked.

“Big time,” she responded.

The videographer waited, camera aimed at the hole in anticipation. A few minutes later, the nearly inaudible voice of the companion whispered from the laptop's speaker.

“Okay, coming,” responded the videographer. The man approached the hole, aimed the camera down the now-empty shaft, and cursed. The image cut to black.

“They're documenting where they hid the Florentine Controller,” said Steven. “This is a video-graphic treasure map.”

“You think so?” asked Hillary.

“What else could it be?”

“Let's keep watching,” I suggested, “we'll know soon enough.”

“… second,” muttered the European. The image returned. “There we go.” A series of nearby stalactites sparkled in the pair's pivoting headlamp beams; however, the inky expanse of the room evaded the camera's reach.

“The next descent is left and up about thirty yards,” said the companion, almost certainly a mountaineering or caving guide.

The two picked their way through a forest of person-height limestone stalagmites, some several feet in diameter and glistening with moisture. The guide, upon reaching a pair of particularly large specimens, held his hand up in caution, said, “Park it here,” then threw his pack onto the ground and began extracting gear. Within a few minutes, a net of nylon slings had been affixed around the two limestone growths and a knotted rope dangled into the darkness from a gleaming pair of carabiners.

“Down there?” asked the European.

“Yes. You've rappelled before, right?”

“Yes.”

“You first, then. You want me to film this?”