Only a few more hours remain. Stay anonymous and above the fray. Let your new friend handle the dirty work.
The advice he’d been given just a short while ago on the phone.
Still, the clockmaker’s house seemed the safest route.
He turned the tiller east.
* * *
Luke drove the Volvo coupe and followed the directions provided on the cell phone. It helped that Laura knew the island and recalled a series of shops near St. Thomas Bay, just beyond the village of Marsaskala, one of them a longtime clockmaker. Neither of them had spoken of Spagna, their focus centered on getting out of Valletta.
“How deep is your boss involved in this?” he asked.
“He told me to work with Spagna. For once I decided not to argue and to do as I was told.”
“Where did this conversation take place?”
“In the apartment Spagna was tossed from.”
“You were gone awhile.”
She was being stingy with the information and the tone of his question signaled irritation.
“Look,” she said. “They didn’t tell me their life story. Spagna said he needed us both to help him out. His more immediate concern was that he was having trouble making contact with Chatterjee. He wanted the two of us to check it out. He told me that he left a car, the keys, a cell phone, and directions with you. If you were there, then both of us should head out. If you were gone, then you’d decided to opt out and I was to do it on my own.”
Exactly what the archbishop had told him, too.
“I headed back and found you were having a party without me.”
“I appreciate you crashin’ it. Any idea who those people were?”
She shook her head. “Probably with the same ones who found Spagna. They knew both locations.”
“The Entity has a helluva leak.”
“To say the least. But right now we need to find Cardinal Gallo.”
The farther from Valletta they drove, the less it rained. She’d used the cell phone to confirm her own navigation, but she easily led them to the correct site. Ahead, he caught the strobe of blue lights off into the night before he saw the police and emergency vehicles.
“That’s not good,” he said. Then he spotted the burned-out hulk of a car illuminated by headlights and added, “Neither is that.”
Apparently Spagna’s fears were justified.
“Pull off somewhere,” Laura said. “We don’t need to be seen.”
He veered from the road and into the first drive he saw.
They both exited the car.
* * *
Kastor retraced the path across the water he and Chatterjee had taken earlier. He was still shaken by everything that had happened. He felt out of control, in a spiral someone else had created and manipulated. People were dying around him with no explanation. Yet he was buoyed by the hope that the flash drive in his pocket might offer salvation. Even better, he would not have to deal with Danjel Spagna on terms of the other man’s making.
He had leverage to use on the Lord’s Own.
The sea had calmed, but the water remained stirred from the storm. The dghajsa’s outboard worked hard, and he struggled to keep the bow pointed toward shore. The feisty little boats could be finicky. They were built for durability, not ease or comfort. He rounded a dark point jutting from the shore and reentered the bay behind the clockmaker’s shop.
He hoped his assessment would prove correct.
And that the trouble from earlier was long gone.
* * *
Luke approached the clockmaker’s shop.
He and Laura had crossed the road and made their way toward it from behind the scattered houses in the space between the buildings and the bay. They’d climbed a couple of fences, but nothing had impeded them except a few dogs who showed little interest. Back home in Tennessee he would have already been revealed by a pack of inquisitive, noisy hounds.
No police patrolled the rear of the clockmaker’s shop. He examined the building and noticed the cracked stone, chipped paint on the windows, and vines creeping up one side. He spotted no back door, but one of the windows hung open with its iron grille gone. They rushed over and climbed into some sort of storage room. A doorway on the far side opened to what was surely the street side where all of the activity was still happening. Lights burned beyond a thin curtain. He signaled for quiet and they approached the barrier. Peering past the jamb he saw that the shop was empty, all of the windows shattered, fresh bloodstains on the wood floor. Outside, near the burned-out vehicle, stood four policemen.
“Somebody was shot,” Laura whispered.
“Not to mention the extra-crispy car.”
No body was evident. It must have been removed already.
Was it Gallo?
“I assume you know where the morgue is?” he asked.
She nodded.
Making contact with the locals could be problematic, especially after what had happened earlier when Spagna first appeared.
“You know what we have to do,” he said.
She nodded her assent.
They retreated to the window and climbed out into the humid night. Before they could turn and head toward the car, an engine out on the water grew louder. He focused on a dock that jutted into the bay, lit by a small incandescent fixture. One of the colorful local boats appeared from the night and eased to a stop.
“You see that,” he said to Laura, pointing.
Kastor Cardinal Gallo.
He shook his head. “Finally. A break.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Cotton dozed in and out, trying to catch a quick nap as the Department of Justice jet lifted off from Rome’s Fiumicino–Leonardo da Vinci airport. He, Stephanie, and Gallo had used the helicopter for a short hop west from the obelisk and found the DOJ jet waiting, the same one that had brought Stephanie across the Atlantic. Only he and Gallo were making the ninety-minute flight south to Malta. Stephanie had been flown on to Rome in the chopper, deposited back at the Palazzo di Malta downtown, exactly where Cotton had started a few hours ago. She’d received a phone call on the trip to the airport and said that there were matters requiring her personal attention. She offered no details and, knowing better, he hadn’t asked. Disturbingly, James Grant had dropped off the radar. London had no idea of his whereabouts, and the contact number Cotton possessed went to voice mail. Stephanie had told him she would monitor that situation from the U.S. embassy and asked to be kept informed as to what happened once they were on the ground.
Gallo himself had developed a case of lockjaw, sitting in his seat with his eyes closed, apparently trying to grab a little rest, too.
Actually, that was fine.
He needed time to think.
Where oil meets stone, death is the end of a dark prison. Pride crowned, another shielded. Three blushes bloomed to ranks and file.
What an odd assortment of phrases. Not random, for sure. But not coherent, either.
Then there were the letters.
H Z P D R S Q X
“What did you mean that the message points to Malta,” he asked Gallo. “Where oil meets stone. You knew exactly what that meant.”
Gallo roused from his rest, looking annoyed.
“The first part simply requests that it be delivered to von Hempesch. Clearly, the cathedral’s prior created the message for his grand master. He also created it before being captured by Napoleon. Every piece of evidence indicates that only the prior was involved in the hiding. There is no record of him leaving the island in the forty-eight hours between the time Napoleon arrived and the prior died. It’s doubtful he involved others, so whatever he hid away has to be on Malta. Then there is Mattia Preti. What do you know of him?”