The Overseer (19 page)

“
Saint Augustine?
”

“Book twelve, section twenty-four, I think.” He was back, and at full throttle. “It’s the chapter where he explains the vitality of interpretation. It’s actually a very eloquent, and quite forward-thinking bit of writing on the freedom of thought.” As he spoke, he continued to look about the room. “It’s all about Moses, and how no one really knows the word of God, and how we’re not allowed to insist on one reading because of our ignorance, and so forth.” Sarah watched him pace the length of the wall, his head tilted to one side so as to read each binding. “Rather ironic for the man who set down all those strict rules of Catholic dogma.” Xander might have been giving a lesson in theological history, but his eyes and fingers were now lost in the shelves by the door. “Basically, it’s a diatribe against dogmatism. ‘
Don’t
tell me what to believe’—that sort of thing. Carlo always thought it was one of the more important statements Augustine made. Talked about it all the time. It’s
exactly
the sort of thing he felt he confronted every day of his life—the struggle against narrowmindedness. Everyone dismissing what he was doing with Eisenreich.” Looking up to Sarah, he added, “Well, evidently they were wrong.” He turned his focus again to the books and added, “my guess is that he would have put the manuscript in his copy of
Confessions
. Where
his
interpretation would get the respect it deserved.” Finishing with the books by the door, Xander moved out into the middle of the office. “Look for something big, and dense. A good fourteen or fifteen inches long, maybe two and a half inches thick, with the word
Confessiones
in Latin on the spine.” He knelt down.

Joining him on the floor, Sarah began to sort through the stacks in her corner. Within a half minute, her eyes caught the faded gold inlay on the spine, the large
C
almost entirely lost. She picked up the book.

“Is this it?”

Xander looked over his shoulder and immediately sprang to his feet; he took the book from her as he moved back to the desk. “Bingo. Now, let’s see if I know him as well as I think I do.”

Clearing a wide-enough space on the desktop, Xander laid the tome down and slowly opened its cover. A long dedication by someone named Teggermann was scrawled in almost unintelligible handwriting. Xander lifted the thick yellowed page, expecting to find the small manuscript staring back at him. All he saw was the table of contents.

“Dead end?” asked Sarah as she watched from the side of the desk.

Not bothering to acknowledge her, Xander flipped to about three-quarters the way through the book. Scanning the tops of each page, he flipped farther and farther back. About forty pages from the end, he stopped.

Sarah looked down and saw the small leather-bound volume placed neatly in the center of the page.

“Book twelve, section twenty-
five
. I was off by one.” He did little to hide his pleasure. As he picked up the manuscript, however, his expression of triumph quickly turned to one of utter disbelief; the front and back covers came together in his fingers. There seemed to be nothing in between. Tearing open the small volume, he could do nothing but stare at the centimeterwide edges still clinging to the spine, the only remnants of pages razored out. The discovery was too much.
“Jesus Christ!
It’s not as if they haven’t done enough. They have to
destroy
this as well?”

“I doubt they destroyed it,” said Sarah, her own disappointment less apparent. “They probably didn’t want some customs official asking questions about a book with that crest on it. That’s why they left it here.”

“Then why put the binding back in the Augustine?”

“So as not to draw attention. I don’t know.”

Xander tossed the leather casing onto the desk. “So now what do we do?” She saw the determination begin to fade from his eyes, the recollection of Pescatore’s death slowly return.

“What about files? Anything that might give us something on the contents of the book.” She was trying to draw him back in.

“Files … right.” Another task. Another distraction. “Knowing Carlo, he would have been very careful. They wouldn’t just be lying around.” Again, Xander glanced around the room, lighting on a section of the floor directly behind the desk. “They’d be in
there
,” he said, pointing to the large computer wedged into the corner of the room, a thick link chain locking it to a steel hasp extending from the wall. “The problem is,” he added as he knelt by the keyboard, “how do we get inside it?” Sarah reached over his shoulder and flicked on a switch at the back of the console. The screen lit up, casting a pulsating glow about the room.

“How about that?”

Xander didn’t bother to look around. “Yes, thank you. You know that’s not what I meant. He’s going to have some sort of code to get in.” A small flashing key appeared in the top-left-hand corner of the screen.

“If it’s like the ones at State, it’s probably nothing more than a simple software block,” suggested Sarah. “You get three shots at the password before the entire system shuts down.”

“Or worse, before it sends out a signal to the main frame and calls in the local security. I have that feature on mine as well.”

“And your friend Pescatore didn’t happen to mention the password to you at any point, did he?”

“
Carlo
? You’ve got to be kidding. To be honest, I’m amazed that the Augustine panned out. That was blind luck. Not that it got us anywhere.” The two of them stared at the screen for a minute.

“What’s your password?” she asked.

“Niccolò. Why?”

“Why Niccolò?”

“Machiavelli. Are we going someplace with this?”

“Well, who was Pescatore’s favorite? Augustine.”

Xander peered at her over his shoulder, a skeptical look in his eyes. “Isn’t that a little obvious?”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

He turned to the screen and typed the word
Augustine
into the keyboard. He pressed the enter button. A small x appeared on the next line, followed by another flashing key.

“One down. Two to go. Any other suggestions?”

Sarah thought for a moment. “What about his first name. What was Augustine’s first name?”

“
Saint
.” Xander glared over his shoulder, an even more incredulous look in his eyes. “I don’t think he
had
a first name.”

“You’re not being very helpful.”

“Sorry. It’s just—” His eyes suddenly froze, an expression Sarah had seen before, an instant of recognition struggling to find expression. She watched as a grin began to creep up his cheeks.

“What? What?”

“No. That would be crazy.” He paused. “What the hell.” Turning to the computer, he typed in a few letters, pressed enter, and watched as the system engaged, the software beginning to boot itself up on the screen. A guttural laugh emerged from his throat, the grin now a broad smile.

“Well, what was it?”

Continuing to watch the system come on-line, Xander grinned. “Monica. Augustine’s mom. Freud would have had a heyday with that.”

The screen transformed several times—meaningless instructions and patent warnings flying by in quick succession—before a small cursor appeared to initiate the word processing. Xander typed in a few more commands, and a long list of files began to race by. “The software’s familiar enough. I just hope my technical Italian is up to snuff.” Sarah looked on as her new partner typed furiously, every so often stopping to read the screen—list after list of files—before moving on. He tried to explain to her as he bolted along. “He’s evidently placed the files deep within the system, and I would very much doubt that he’s given them friendly names like Eisenreich One and Two. He might have been clever again.” Xander shifted his weight, the strain on his knees beginning to take its toll.

Three minutes later, his eyes lit up as a new group of files slid by. A list of about twenty names stood in a neat line across the top of the screen, for some reason worthy of special attention. “The right size and the right time frame,” he said, and pulled his hands away from the keyboard. “The question is, Which are the important ones? Knowing Carlo, any number of these, if not all of them, could be meaningless. Or worse, he might have set a few of them up as booby traps, triggered to shut the system down and bring in security if they get called up. Carlo is famous for these things.”

“Wonderful.” Sarah nodded, pondering the man who had gone to such lengths to safeguard a few files. Xander, hands resting in his lap, eyed the screen with caution; a moment later, his head tilted back and his eyes squinted closed. He began to clench his fingers in slow intervals. “What are you—”

“Shhh.” The strange ritual continued for about half a minute before he slowly opened his eyes. Sarah had moved to the window, her gaze again on the courtyard; it remained empty. “My guess,” continued Xander, “would be these two.” His finger landed by the words
Ternistato
A
and
Ternistato
B
. Again, his mysterious thought process left Sarah at a complete loss. She knew that whatever raced through his mind at those crucial moments had to spring from some logical source. What that might be, though, was beyond her. Still, it was keeping him occupied. He in his element, she in hers. Each with its own rules of engagement.
Hostile arena—know the surroundings. Anticipate the contingencies.
“If you recall,” he explained, “the name Eisenreich translates to ‘iron state.’ If I’m right, Carlo was very much aware of that.” He pointed to the first part of one of the words on the screen, Sarah more interested in the figure emerging from the eastern archway to the courtyard. She nodded distractedly. “Terni is one of the few remaining centers of Italian iron production. And I think—now I could be wrong—that it was also one of the main targets of Allied bombing during World War Two for that very reason.” She had heard the last bit and wondered if all academics had access to such trivial information. “You know … Laurence Olivier on PBS …
World at War?
‘The furnaces of Terni’?” He was off in his little own world. Again she nodded. “
Stato
simply means ‘state.’
Ternistato
—‘iron state.’ Eisenreich.”

She turned to him. “That’s incredibly far-fetched.”

“I know, but that’s exactly the way Carlo’s mind works. Plus, I can’t for the life of me think what he would have been working on that would have had anything to do with the town of Terni. I mean, it really is obscure.”

“And yet you seem to be familiar with it.”

“True. But I happen to be as nutty as Carlo.”

With that, Xander called up the first of the files. Sarah waited for the screen to go black, or for a siren to go off, or for some deadly gas to pour from the console. Instead, Italian filled the page, densely packed notes on what she assumed was the manuscript. The smile on Xander’s face, his eyes racing through each line, told her that his logic—based on a television show—had maneuvered expertly through Pescatore’s defenses. Evidently, this was the stuff of academic insight. Not terribly inspiring.

As he continued to read, she again peered through the cracks in the drapery so as to get a better view of the courtyard behind the building. Her lone figure was now seated on one of several benches perhaps twenty yards away. The man, in a heavy dark overcoat, seemed well protected from the cold, his gloved hands peeling back the pages of his newspaper, cigarette smoke cascading through the air from under his wide-brimmed fedora. Sarah maintained her gaze, making sure to keep far enough from the curtains so as not to draw unwanted attention. From this distance, she found it difficult to make out any distinct features. Save for the beard. She inched closer. Xander had mentioned a beard.

One minute later, a second man appeared. He was exceptionally tall, his broad shoulders and thick arms squeezed mercilessly into the sleeves of the straining coat. He wore no hat, the sun reflecting off of his shaven scalp, a pair of thick hands menacing at his sides as he strode toward the bench. Within half a minute, the first man was on his feet, making his way slowly, casually, toward one of the building’s side entrances. The second remained at the bench, and, for the first time, Sarah realized that his gaze was fixed on Pescatore’s office window. She stepped back.

“Have you gotten everything?” she asked. At first, Xander did not reply.

“This is absolutely incredible.” He was transfixed by the screen. “I mean incredible.”

“We should get going.”

“Why? We—”

“We’ve been here long enough. No reason to press our luck.”

He was too wrapped up in the notes to offer much of an argument. “All right, but I’m going to have to copy these. That might take a minute or two.”

“Do it.” Sarah now moved to the door as Xander reached for his case and pulled out a disc. She watched him slide it into Pescatore’s computer and type in the appropriate commands; the computer began to hum and click while he sat back and waited. Leaning against the hard wood and listening for any noise in the hall, Sarah asked—more to keep him preoccupied than anything else—“so what’s so incredible?”

“It’s really mind-boggling.” His eyes remained on the screen. “Remember I thought there were two original versions of the manuscript. One Eisenreich sent to Clement, and one for himself. Well, when we found the pages ripped out of the binding, I thought that was it.” He stopped and looked at Sarah. “According to Carlo’s notes, however, there are three versions.
Three
. One in Latin, one in Italian, and one in
German
. For various reasons—”He suddenly noticed her odd position at the door. “Is something the matter?”

Sarah’s hand shot up in the air to silence him, the sound of footsteps in the hall prompting the reaction. Both waited the uncomfortable half minute until the pitter-pat moved beyond the office. Still holding his breath, Xander flinched at the sound of the computer clicking a final sequence of copying. Two seconds later, he retrieved the disc and placed it in his case.