The Templar Concordat (30 page)

At 10:00 pm he went back and she handed him a page. “Here’s my best recollection of what the treaty says. That was easiest. And it’s not an exact translation, but I guarantee the meaning is accurate.” She passed another three pages.  “And here are the elaborations on the thoughts of great thinkers, what you call the forgeries. I’m working on the Hammid stuff.”

 “Hungry?” he asked.

“Starved,” she replied.

He left and returned with half of a cold pizza. “You get to eat the same stuff we eat.” She grabbed a piece and inhaled it.

“Finish the Hammid stuff and that’s all for today.”

When he turned to leave, she asked, “I’m cooperating. What do I get in return?”

“What do you get? You got it. We saved your life last night.”

*     *     *

“Give me that.” Marie grabbed the list of forgeries and scanned it. “Miserable bitch,” she mumbled. Then she set the list down next to her computer and started searching the Internet.

 “She has eleven listed here, and it looks like we can get a look at five of them. At least five, maybe seven. These others I can’t find on the net. I’ll send the whole list back to the Archivist and see what he can do.”

“How long?” he asked.

“I’ll do these two in London myself,” she said. “Tomorrow. I’ll leave tonight. And the Archivist can get his people on these others. We should be able to examine all the ones in the public collections tomorrow and the next day. If she really did them, we can see how good she is. Then we can test her.”

“Why not just test her now?”

“The Archivist wants to see her best work first, not something she knocks out in a cell.” She jerked a thumb toward Jean’s room.  “And we can also have her duplicate one of the things she already did. They should be very close in style and content. It’s sort of another test.”

“Does she have the stuff she needs to do a duplicate of anything? I mean all those pens and special inks?”

“No. I’ll be bringing all that back with me from London tomorrow night.”

Salisbury, UK - Tuesday, April 7

Marie returned from London around 6:00 pm with several long, wooden boxes of pens, a stack of different types of paper, a tilting desktop, and fifty different bottles of ink. Then she hauled out erasers, blotters, wipers, magnifying eyeglasses, high intensity lamps, mirrors, and anything else the aspiring forger could hope for.

“What did all this stuff cost?” Callahan watched her unload the supplies.

“A little over five thousand pounds.”

“For pens and paper? Five thousand?”

“You’re still an ass. This is the best. And believe me, if she did those manuscripts I saw in the London collections today, she really is the best, and she uses the best. I have a hard time believing those were fakes. Nobody would question their authenticity.”

“Well, you saw her flat. She didn’t have all this stuff.”

Marie shrugged. “Yeah. She had her favorite tools. I can’t say what they were, so I just got everything. She can pick what she needs.”

“What did the Archivist say?”

“His people looked at three manuscripts and had the same reaction I did. They would never have suspected a thing. Now he wants to test her on the Kepler letter. Have her to do it again. If she can do it, great. If not, then we have to figure out what to do with her. She’s already under Templar death sentence, so I suppose…”

“Ok. Tell me what to say and I’ll bring these things in and give her the assignment.” He picked up the Xacto knife set, and hefted scissors. “You know we’ll be arming the prisoner?”

“Can’t be helped. She can’t use chalk for this.”

*     *     *

Jean stood up when Callahan entered the room. She hadn’t seen him since the previous evening, and her meals had been brought by Ted, who didn’t say a word.

“You said you forged a letter from Johannes Kepler.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to recreate that letter right here.”

“I can’t. I don’t have any equipment or supplies.”

He left and returned with the tilting desktop and boxes full of the supplies Marie had brought from London. A very strange smile crossed her face when she saw the supplies. So, here was yet another side of Jean Randolph.

She began to open boxes and order items on the long table. “I can’t do it exactly, but I can come close.  I have an idea this is a test, anyway. I don’t have it memorized, so it won’t be exactly the same words, and a line by line comparison won’t match. And the ink won’t match because I have to make it from scratch using the same ingredients they used in Kepler’s time.” She waved a hand at the bottles of ink. “These are very nice, but all modern. There’s no oven for heat treatments, either. But I think I can convince you I did the manuscript in the Rothham collection. I presume you have seen it by now?”

Now he was out of his depth. Don’t answer when you don’t know. “Remember earlier when I said you shouldn’t cross us?”

She hesitated. “Yes.”

“You do or do not remember?”

“I remember.”

“Good. Hiding any of these sharp things is considered crossing us. Trying to stick anyone is crossing us.” He picked up a rubber band. “Hiding this is crossing us.”

“Yes, I understand. Now can I get to work?”

*     *     *

She selected pens and inks, laid out wet rags, little cups of water and alcohol, angled the desk, and hollered for an extension cord for the high intensity lamps. Then she spent fifteen minutes drawing different sized circles on scratch paper with the different pens. That was followed by boxes, alphabets, lightning bolts, and a long series of swirling fishhooks.

“What the hell is she doing?” Callahan asked Marie.

“She’s warming up. Watch this. That’s the master forger limbering and stretching before the big game. Just like any athlete. Like each instrument in an orchestra practicing the scales before the performance.”

By then Jean had tied her hair back, and bent over the desk wearing the magnifying eyeglasses, carefully drawing the letters on the page. She threw away pages, started over, tore some in two, but finally settled down into an even flow, and eventually laid three pages next to each other on the table. She stood up, stretched, did some deep knee bends, and shook her hands out.

She looked up at the camera and said, “Give them about five minutes to dry, then you can have them. I’m done for the day.” She spun around and held her hands out. “And look. No sharp pointy things hidden up my sleeves.” She pointed back at the three pages. “The script matches the Kepler in the Rothham. Size, point, style, and pitch should be the same.”

Jean waved, stripped off her clothes, and stepped into the shower.

“Why Callahan, I do think the lady is inviting you to her chambers,” leered Marie.

“She’s a weird one. Yesterday she was curled up in the fetal position. Now she’s dancing around naked as a jaybird.”

He waited for her to climb into the futon, then brought the three pages out and laid them on the table for Marie. She took some large photos of the Kepler letter at the Rothham from her briefcase and laid them next to Jean’s pages, then went through them line by line.

“I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. She’s truly gifted.” She took her glasses off and pushed back from the table. “I think those old men in Zurich were right about her.”

Marie went to the computer and typed a short email to the Archivist. “Kepler done to perfection.”

Zurich - Thursday, April 9

“Ah, the woman’s a witch, a witch is what she is. A witch, I tell you.” The Templar Archivist tapped the table next to him. “But what a wonderful witch she is, yes, indeed. She’s a rare talent, and if we handle this right, she’s our rare talent.”

The Master peered from the other side of the table at the pages neatly spread before them. “Are these forgeries really that good, Patrick?”

“If he says they’re that good, then they’re that good.” The Marshall sat at the end of the table. “What the hell do you or I know about this stuff? We can look at these papers all day and hardly tell if they’re up or down.”

The Master dismissed the Marshall. “I know you don’t know anything. Surprise. That’s why I’m asking Patrick.”

The Archivist stood up and brushed a hand across the pages. “Let me take you through these,” he said, almost to himself.

“These two pictures on top are pictures of the forgeries she told Callahan and Marie she made. We went and looked at them in the collections that bought them from her.”

“This one is supposed to be a letter from Kepler, and this one is supposed to be a letter from Voltaire. Now these are on exhibit, and are accepted as genuine. I would never have doubted them until the last few days.”

Now he pointed to the pages below each picture. “Now here’s what she did in that safe house in England. Look. The handwriting exactly matches the writing in the public exhibits.”

He pulled a briefcase from behind his chair. “Now here is an actual letter from Kepler in our very own collection. We’ve had it since way before Jean Randolph was born. Look at the handwriting.” The Archivist glanced from the Master to the Marshall and sighed.

“Ok. I’ll spell it out. She wrote just like Kepler did. Same style of letters, pitch, strokes… everything. It’s like she’s channeling him.”

“You mean she writes just like Kepler did?” asked the Marshall.

The Archivist hung his head and mumbled to himself. “Yes. Very good. You get a gold star.” He stood up again. “And it’s not just a fluke, because she also can write just like Voltaire.” He pulled another manuscript from his briefcase and placed it on the table. “This is ours. Again, it’s been ours for a long time. The writing’s the same.”

The Master scanned the pages and nodded slowly. “Do we have anyone who can do this?”

“Not on your life. We have good people, but it’s mainly passports and that stuff. Nothing is handwritten anymore. More’s the pity in some ways.” He pointed to the third set of pages. “But here is the best. The top is a picture of the Treaty of Tuscany that Jean took from the Vatican Library. It’s a damn good picture, too. Below is the copy she made from the picture.”

The Marshall came down and bent over the pages. They did look the same. “Can’t read that stuff, but they look the same.”

 “Exactly. The point here is that she precisely mimicked Kepler, Voltaire, and some unknown copier at the Vatican in the Twelfth Century. I bet she can do anyone’s writing better than they can themselves.”

The Master looked at the Marshall, who shrugged, then back at the Archivist. “Do you think she can do it, Patrick?”

“I do indeed. I do indeed.”

The Master rubbed the scar on his forehead. “Do it. Your mission, Patrick.”

He looked from one to the other. “Something else to remember. There’s a new Pope, this Mexican guy. From everything I have read he seems pretty good. I think we can work with him. Under the Concordat, someone has to approach him.”

Marshall and Archivist both looked at their shoes. The Master pointed at the Marshall. “You know all there is to know about the Concordat and what we face. You do it. As soon as you can.”  The Archivist grinned.

Salisbury, UK - Thursday, April 9

Callahan picked up a TV in town, and Marie made a trip to the local bookstore, so Jean spent her time reading, watching TV, and exercising. She hadn’t heard anything more about forgeries since they had asked her to duplicate the Treaty of Tuscany.  The man she dealt with simply refused to address anything beyond her food and immediate physical needs.

She really had boxed herself into a corner, she thought, and all her dreams were now part of a dead woman’s tragically lost future.  These people knew everything she had done. They even showed her the Web page the university history department had created in her honor. They had posthumously made her a distinguished professor. Would they revoke it if she walked back into the faculty lounge and was promptly shackled for mass murder?

But these people wanted something, too, and her talent with pen and ink just might give her a bargaining position. She looked around. Some bargaining position, trapped with a TV, a stack of paperback books, cold pizza, and Cokes.

Think like a survivor. All she really did was filch that treaty. She didn’t know about the bomb. She wouldn’t have gone within a thousand miles of the Vatican if she had. Yeah, and who’d believe that?

Callahan knocked, and she obediently retreated from the futon to the corner. These were not trusting people.

He took the only chair. “You have an opportunity,” he said. “We can use your skills as a forger and a historian. We can also protect you.” She silently laid her book aside and focused her attention on him. He was an attractive man, very attractive, she thought. And he wore no wedding ring. But how many kidnappers wore rings? She didn’t know.

“To put it as simple as I can, you have the choice between working with us and death. We won’t even have to kill you. You can walk out that door and see how far you get. The London medical examiner will find an urgent need to reexamine the body found in your apartment, MI6 will get a packet detailing your recent adventures, and the tabloids will go wild. We won’t even have to call Al Qaeda. They’ll know.”