Page 92 of Skotos
So, we descended.
The second door—the one with arcane religious symbols that led into the basement chamber—stood open, the work of our beefy friend. Despite his assurance that we were safe and alone, Icouldn’t help but step slowly and carefully into the Order’s inner sanctum, half expecting ghosts of the past to leap out and screech at our intrusion.
There were no ghosts.
Or people.
A part of me had wondered if the place would be cleaned out, all evidence of the Order’s presence wiped from existence, but we found the place, like the rest of the chapel, undisturbed. Maps and newspaper clippings still clung to the walls, wedged between swords, shields, and other relics of a distant past. The chairs surrounding the table appeared unmoved, as the dust around their legs showed no new scuffs.
“All they did was toss up a chain and a couple of padlocks?” Thomas muttered.
“Looks like it,” I replied, scanning the room with my flashlight, using a mental grid to take each section in turn. “I can’t see any evidence that . . .”
“Will, what is it?”
“The cardinal’s cassock is gone,” I said, staring into the far corner.
Thomas stepped around the table and examined the hook on the wall where he’d found the priest’s garments. “You see anything else different?” he asked after a moment.
I completed my search and shook my head. “Not a thing. I can’t even see footprints in the dust on thefloor. Whoever came down here was either light on their feet or ridiculously careful.”
Thomas turned and eyed me. “All right. Let’s take this room apart, see if we can find anything useful. You take the maps and clippings while I search the rest. Check for loose stones in the walls, anything that sounds hollow, some kind of hidden chamber or passage.”
I gave him a mock salute. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
“That’s Lieutenant, thank you very much. You dragged me into . . . this work . . . before I could earn those bars.” His smirk made me smile and turn away. I refused to let him see me amused while we searched for clues to an international assassination plot. Never mind the fact that he’d been recruited into the OSS before I even knew it existed.
Thelastthing Thomas Jacobs needed was encouragement.
I moved to the wall where the newspaper clippings and papers hung, taking a brief moment to admire the ancient swords and shields that apparently had nothing to do with our present crisis but were seriously fascinating to anyone who loved history—or medieval knights, or giant cutlery.
Before I could spiral too far down an Arthurian rabbit hole, I turned toward the papers. Some were yellowed with age, others appeared crisp and recent. I scanned the headlines—most were after-the-fact reports of the assassinations wealready knew about. They contained images of leaders from across Europe, as well as public statements and obituaries, but no new names or new warnings.
I was about to turn away when something caught my eye.
One clipping, seemingly unremarkable, showed the Pope standing on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica waving to a sea of people. It wasn’t marked or altered, but something about it drew me in.
“Why are you here?” I muttered.
Then I realized what was so different about the Pope’s clipping: It was the only one stuck to the wall with others attached behind it. All the other clippings were single articles affixed individually. The Pope’s image sat atop at least five other articles. I reached up and flipped to the second clipping, then the third, and so on. Each showed a different image of the Piazza San Pietro. The camera angles varied: from the dome of St. Peter’s to a high window of an adjacent building to another from street level to one from behind a colonnade, and even one from what looked like the roof of a nearby hotel, if I remembered the area’s layout correctly.
While the individual clippings didn’t amount to much, the collection taken as a whole made my skin pimple. Together, they formed a panoramic tapestry—almost as if someone had been studying the space.
But something else niggled the back of my mind.
Some of the images were annotated with faint red ink in the margins, angles drawn from rooftops, and notations in Latin and Cyrillic. My stomach sank as realization dawned.
“Thomas,” I called. “Come look at this.”
He crossed the room and peered at the wall.
“What am I looking at?”
I pointed and flipped through the pages behind the one featuring the Catholic Church’s leader. “These aren’t just clippings; they’re vantage points and sightlines.”
His eyes narrowed as he reached up and began flipping as I’d done a moment earlier. “This is a tactical layout using photos taken by newsmen.”
“No need to stake the place out when the media will do it for you.”
