The testament, p.45
The Testament, page 45
He disconnected, called his eldest son and told him what was required. Then, because he was approaching his destination, he put away his cell phone.
Midway down a small, disordered side street stood an old but structurally sound building he had purchased many years ago. It looked no different than its slope-shouldered neighbors; it bore no sign on its peeling front, was surely mistaken by almost everyone for a private residence. Inside, however, it housed the Church of the Nine Martyred Children.
Kartli had named this tiny outpost of his Georgian Orthodox religion for the young pagan children of Kola who, of their own free will, had embraced Jesus Christ. They were baptized by the local priest and left their families to be brought up by Christian families, according to the ways of the Savior. Their parents came after them and dragged them back home, but when their children would not eat pagan food or drink pagan drink, when they instead spoke the words of Jesus Christ, their parents were so enraged that they mercilessly beat the village priest, drove him from Kola. One last time they asked their sons and daughters, many not more than seven years of age, to return to their pagan ways. When the children refused, the parents took up stones and beat their own children to death, as a lesson to the other children of Kola.
Mikhail Kartli paused to take in the holy surroundings. He was immensely proud of this church, glad of the name he had chosen for it, because it was a reminder of how the world really worked, of the terrible prejudices that ran like poison through the bedrock of mankind. Not that he needed such a reminder even here in Trabzon so far from home, but everyone else-including his children, especially wild Irema-did.
Nothing looked as it did in daylight. Shadows distorted all the shapes. Illumination came from two sources: a Byzantine oil lamp and a naked lightbulb. Like everything in the city the light was an uncomfortable juxtaposition of old and new-elements that should have been allies seemed to be enemies. The interior was sparsely furnished, appropriately bare save for the large portrait of the Virgin Mary, the iconostasis, the pulpit, a scattering of scarred wooden benches and, of course, the confessional. It was to this dark wooden structure that Mikhail Kartli came twice a week like clockwork to give his confession. Since the priests of the Church of the Nine Martyred Children were housed by Kartli at his expense, they were only too happy to oblige his habit, especially since the habit so eloquently expressed his devoutness.
At seven minutes after midnight, he opened the door to the confessional, settled himself on the narrow seat.s Through the latticework of the carved wooden screen the profile of the priest was visible. He recognized Father Shota, one of his favorites. This pleased him. He and Father Shota had spent many hours talking of the history of their religion.
The Apostle Andrew, the brother of St. Peter, had come to Georgia to preach the Gospel, bringing with him the Holy Mother's Uncreated Icon-not created by the hand of man, an icon of divine origins. From that time forward, Mary became Georgia's protector. Over the intervening centuries the Georgian Orthodox religion had been heavily influenced by the Christians of the Byzantine Empire, so it was fitting to Mikhail Kartli, an ardent student of history, that he had brought the religion back home, completing the circle, the end returned to the beginning.
"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," he began.
And Father Shota replied, "Behold, my child, Christ stands here invisibly receiving your confession. Do not be ashamed and do not fear, and do not withhold anything from me; but without doubt tell all you have done and receive forgiveness from the Lord Jesus Christ. Lo, His holy image is before us-"
Without warning, the latticework screen shattered inward. Kartli, struck in the face by shards of wood, raised his arms defensively, and so received the priest into his hands as the man crashed through the aperture.
"Father Shota!" he cried.
Eyelids fluttering spastically, the priest tried to answer, but pink bubbles foamed in his open mouth. Kartli felt the slow creep of blood, warm and viscid, smelled the nauseating sweet-coppery odor. Cradling the priest's head and shoulders, searching desperately for the strength of vital signs, he was unprepared as the door to his side of the confessional flew open.
With barely a chance to turn his head, Kartli had a momentary impression, blurred and imprecise, of a grinning face. With a swift and vicious thrust, his maimed right hand was pinned to the back of the confessional by a spike impaled through the center of his palm. Oblivious to the pain, he tried to use his left hand to strike out at his attacker, but burdened with Father Shota's weight, he was essentially helpless.
Damon Cornadoro produced his push-dagger and grabbed a fistful of Father Shota's hair.
"No!" Kartli cried. "For the love of God, spare him!"
"Spare him? Why? He was the one who betrayed you. He told me where you'd be tonight." With the sickening precision of a surgeon Cornadoro slashed the edge of the push-dagger across the priest's throat. Putting his knee into the small of the corpse's back, he used Shota to pin the Georgian firmly in place. The priest's head lolled at an unnatural angle, his expression was one of terrified astonishment.
"How easily lies come to you, Georgian." Cornadoro leaned in. "Did you think I wouldn't find out?"
Kartli stared at him, stony, utterly silent. The initial shock was over: the barbarism could not affect him-he'd seen worse in his day-but the loss, he knew, would stay with him a long time.
"Don't you want to know how I found out?"
Kartli spat into the hateful face. He knew how to handle death-lovers, God knew he'd had enough experience. Show them fear and they lapped it up like cream. Cornadoro's mouth twitched in a parody of a smile.
There was something distinctly unsavory about the grin; with a repellent shock Kartli recognized the taint of lechery.
"It was Irema. Yes, yes. Your lovely daughter, your jewel." Cornadoro's head was inches from Kartli's face; his intimate tone brought home as nothing else could the stark horror of his words. "Her small breasts high on her chest, the dark nipples…"
Kartli convulsed, struggling against the pressure exerted against him. "You lying piece of filth!"
"The oval birthmark just over her left hipbone-like a tattoo, better even-very sexy, if you think like I do."
Kartli erupted, his eyes standing out, his face flushed with blood. "I'll kill you!"
"And the best part, Georgian, is how she fucks."
Cornadoro did everything but lick his chops. Dizzied, Kartli could feel the other's lust, the unequivocal affirmation, the lethal power of his words.
"Like an animal, wrapping her legs around me, begging for it over and over again. I swear she could drain a warhorse."
Kartli shouted as his ancient ancestors had surely shouted on the bloody fields of battle. With his left hand, he grabbed the end of the spike protruding from his palm and wrenched it free. Blood spurted, but he was beyond caring, beyond feeling anything. An animal himself, he was taken by blind rage. Somewhere in the back of his mind a voice of warning, of prudence sounded like an echo from another age, but it was quickly drowned out by the martial drumbeat of his blood.
"That's right," Cornadoro half sang in counterpoint to the threat of the spike. "That's right, come on."
The point of the spike pierced the muscle of Cornadoro's shoulder. The Georgian was powerful, stronger than Cornadoro had expected. Kartli tried to twist the spike, to sink it deeper, to open the meat of Cornadoro's shoulder. Cornadoro struck the Georgian's ear so hard his head bounced. Even in the strongest of constitutions such a concussive blow stopped thought and action in its tracks. Cornadoro tried to rip the spike away while Kartli's eyes showed white and he fought to stay conscious.
Running on instinct, on the need for survival, the Georgian lifted his knee from between the corpse's legs, buried it in Cornadoro's groin.
The Georgian drove the spike downward. Taking the brunt of it on his biceps, Cornadoro chopped down with the heavy, callused edge of his hand against the side of Kartli's neck, into the carotid artery. He applied pressure that ran all the way up from his feet, wrenching away the spike, reversing it, driving it into the Georgian's chest just beneath the breastbone. Kartli's eyes opened wide. He did not utter a sound, though Cornadoro knew he must have been in excruciating pain. His will to live was, even in Cornadoro's experience, extraordinary. A last gift was in order, a lifting of a mystery.
"I know what you're thinking, Georgian," Cornadoro said. "But it isn't religion or politics or nationalism that drives me."
"You're nothing, less than nothing because you have no belief, no faith, no soul." Mikhail Kartli's voice was a hoarse whisper. "With you it's all about commerce."
Cornadoro laughed, suddenly delighted. "On the contrary, as I told you when we first met, it's about the information. Secrets, the unknowable made known; everyone becomes vulnerable."
Kartli's fingers squeezed Cornadoro's neck, the last, desperate struggle, the terminal fight for survival, and with an almost superhuman effort he nearly managed to drive Cornadoro into unconsciousness. But the pressure on his carotid had weakened him past a vital threshold, cutting off blood and oxygen to his brain long enough to impair his coordination and reaction time. With a grunt, Cornadoro reasserted control, a control that, for Mikhail Kartli, would never cease.
"I have made you vulnerable, Georgian." Cornadoro clamped one hand at the nape of the other's neck. "I have defiled your daughter. You were dead two hours ago."
With his usual surgeon's precision, he swiped the push-dagger in a shallow arc that opened the Georgian's throat. Cornadoro studied Kartli's face as if he could in some way absorb the spark of life as it went out of the eyes. Then he wiped the push-dagger on Kartli's trousers and turned away. By the time he removed himself from the confessional, he had already forgotten both his victims.
Chapter 28
As the pope breathed shallowly in his holy sickbed, as Cardinal Canesi paced the Vatican hospital corridor, continued to burn up the cell airwaves with threats and false promises to every Turkish priest he could track down, Bravo and Adem Khalif set out for the Sumela Monastery. Dawn, once a promising broken-shell pink on the eastern horizon, had been swallowed whole by Black Sea clouds, hanging like a dank curtain, obscuring the mountaintops. The air was as heavy as grease, stirred fitfully by a reluctant breeze. The sea, as they ascended, looked less and less real, appeared creased, solid, like a sheet of aluminum foil.
Once, they would have risen toward the Zigana Pass on the backs of sure-footed horses or stout donkeys laden with goods bound for the interior of Anatolia or, if they were enterprising enough, beyond, following the long and treacherous camel route all the way to Tabriz, in northern Persia. In their case, Khalif's rattletrap car would have to do, spewing sulphur-dioxide particulates every time he changed gears. The car was full: in the backseat, the Glimmer Twins, heavily armed, consulted their cell phones as if they were the Delphic Oracle. The phones, wirelessly connected by satellite to the Global Positioning System, gave them a god's-eye view of the trip. They were in contact with their brethren, Kartli's people, deployed in strategic positions, monitoring the traffic along the car's route through high-powered field glasses.
Bravo's cell phone gave a stuttering burr, but when he answered it, the signal was gone, with no record of who had called. He thought, then, of Emma, dutifully cross-referencing the London intel Dexter had assigned to her. He found he very much wanted to talk with her, as if hearing her voice would restore a semblance of the equilibrium he had lost with each betrayal, each death.
He held the slip of paper his father had interred beneath the tile of oltu tasi at the Zigana Mosque, along with his father's notebook. The cipher was a long one, a veritable bitch, and Bravo was having great difficulty decrypting it. Part of the problem was that the cipher seemed as if it was incomplete, but he knew that couldn't be.
Beside him, Khalif kept up a steady stream of stories from the Order's past, mostly about Fra Leoni. "Fra Leoni was both a genius and a saint, and here is why. Have you heard of Leon Alberti?"
Bravo glanced at him briefly. "Of course. He was the father of the Vigene`re cipher, the greatest cryptologic breakthrough in more than a thousand years. He was also a philosopher, painter, composer, poet and architect. He designed Rome's first Trevi Fountain, and it was his book, the first ever published on architecture, that sparked the transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance style."
"And who do you suppose ensured that his book was published?" Khalif said.
"I have no idea." Part of his mind was still working on the perplexing cipher.
"His good friend and confidant, the man from whom he learned the philosophy of cryptography on which the Vigene`re cipher is based. Fra Leoni."
His interest sparked. "So Fra Leoni was the cipher's godfather."
"Exactly so." Khalif nodded. "Shortly after taking over as Magister Regens, Fra Leoni discovered that a number of the Order's secret ciphers had been intercepted and decoded by the Knights. He knew it was essential that he invent an unbreakable cipher system, and he had the basis of an idea. Instead of a substitution cipher, he wanted to work on the notion of using two cipher alphabets simultaneously-the first letter of the message would be encoded using the first alphabet, the second letter encoded with the second alphabet, the third letter encoded with the first, and so on. He reasoned, quite rightly, that employing two alphabets instead of the traditional one would thoroughly confuse anyone attempting to break the cipher. To this end he recruited Alberti to aid him in his quest.
"This was around 1425, but Alberti died before he had completed his task of a fully formed method of encryption. Over the years, Fra Leoni turned to others in the Order: a German abbot, an Italian scientist and, finally, a French diplomat, Blaise de Vigene`re, who Fra Leoni contrived to have assigned to Rome. This was in 1529. Fra Leoni showed him Alberti's original treatise, along with the notations of the other members of the Order. It took Vigene`re and Fra Leoni another ten years before the cipher was engineered to perfection."
"And for the next two hundred years or more it was unbreakable, so it must have served the Order well," Bravo said. "The British cryptographer Charles Babbage broke the Vigene`re cipher in 1854."
"Ah, but his discovery was never published in his lifetime." Khalif rumbled off the road briefly to bypass a herd of goats, who looked at them with slitted demon's eyes. "It wasn't until the 1970s that-"
"Wait a minute," Bravo said, "you're not telling me that the Order had something to do with the suppression of Babbage's breakthrough."
"Charles Babbage was a member of the Order."
"What? Explain this to me."
"Under no circumstances." In a death-defying maneuver, Khalif pulled out into the oncoming traffic lane to surge past a truck whose diesel engine seemed on the verge of issuing a death rattle. "In this I must be your father's advocate. You have enough information to work out the solution for yourself."
The rearview mirror revealed that the Glimmer Twins were knee-deep in their own excited conversations. It was going well, then. Bravo tried not to be inordinately pleased, but he couldn't help himself. At last things were turning his way. Except for this damnable cipher his father had left him, whose key still eluded him.
Redirecting his thoughts to the problem Khalif had proposed, he said, "If I were Fra Leoni and had spent so much time and mental energy on creating this polyalphabetic cipher, if I was going to depend on it for the Order's secret communication, I'd want to make damn sure it couldn't be broken."
"How would you do that?"
"I'd use the same method I'd used to create it-put a team together to work on breaking it."
The twinkle in Adem Khalif's eye heartened Bravo; he was on the right track.
"And once they had broken it?"
"I'd make damn sure no one knew about it until I could come up with another, even more secure cipher. Which the Order must have accomplished in 1970."
"Quite right."
Bravo shook his head in awe. "And shortly thereafter, Babbage's discovery was made public."
"That was your father's doing." Khalif gave him a brief glance. "You know it was your father who invented the new cipher-the Angel String. Fra Leoni having died some decades before, it was your father who took up his torch. It seemed to me that he had an almost mystical bond with Fra Leoni." He shrugged. "Perhaps-I don't know this for a fact, you understand-your father managed to meet Fra Leoni. Don't give me that look, it's altogether possible, you know. When your father put his mind to something, he almost always succeeded."
The Angel String was his father's creation-he should have known that because his father had talked to him about how the Vigene`re code was broken: a method was devised to determine the length of the keyword. The cipher was then broken down into sections corresponding to that number of letters. These manageable chunks were then analyzed for letter frequency. The whole idea of the next-level cipher, his father had told him, was to do away with the keyword. But then the encoder would be mired in a jungle of multiple alphabets without a place to start his encryption.
Then something clicked in his mind. Drawing out the lighter his father had left him, he opened it, slid out the photo of Junior. Odd that his father had chosen a black and white shot that had been hand-colored: red, blue, green… In fact, now that he looked at it closely, Junior's face was yellow, not flesh-colored.
Turning to a blank page of his father's notebook, he jotted down the colors of the visible spectrum. It started with red and ended with purple. Assigning a number to each color brought him to 1543. So he was to use the first, fifth, fourth and third alphabets in that order. Referring back to the Vigene`re grid he had used before, he began his decrypting.
Behind him, the conversation of the Glimmer Twins became more intense. He ignored it for as long as he could, until their excited chatter filled the interior of the car. By that time, he was halfway through turning the cipher into plaintext and was already deeply troubled by what he'd read.
Tearing himself away from his work, he turned halfway around in his seat.
