The Florentine Deception Page 18

  “Are you sure you turned the handle all the way?” asked Hillary from behind the camera. Steven shrugged, then gave the handle a hard shove with his palm, rotating it counterclockwise a few more degrees.

  “All right, one more try,” he said, grabbing the handle.

  This time the five-inch-thick steel door capitulated and groaned as it rotated on its three massive hinges.

  Chapter 36

  Steven stepped tentatively over the inch-high steel threshold followed closely by Hillary and her twin cameras. The baby cam’s cheap, charge-coupled sensor, unable to adjust to the room’s relative darkness, momentarily transmitted undulating, indistinct shapes to the laptop’s screen, each briefly materializing then fading back into the pixilated, mottled blackness.

  “Lights,” I croaked into the talkie.

  “Working on it,” responded Steven.

  The laptop’s LCD screen momentarily flared as the vault’s overhead lights flickered to life. What filled the screen, amidst an almost intolerable degree of static, amazed me. Ten archaic gold coins rested on a dark, ruffled velvet matting beneath the pane of a curio cabinet. Papa whistled.

  “What kind are they, Alex?” Hillary asked. “Roman? Greek?”

  “It’s hard to tell, but I’d guess they’re Roman.” The rich yellow glint of the ancient coins transported me back fifteen years to my coin-collecting adolescence and days of combing through numismatic catalogs. “If I’m not mistaken, those are the emperors: Alexander Severus, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius. The one in the upper left is Julius Caesar.”

  Hillary panned closer in on the lustrous gold coin.

  “You hit the jackpot,” said Papa, in awe. My heart pounded as if I’d just cracked open the lid of a musty treasure chest and discovered a mountain of doubloons. What was all this?

  “Could the Florentine be these gold coins?” asked Hillary. “Priceless Roman gold coins from Florence, Italy? Makes sense, right?”

  “It’s as good a guess as any,” I said into the walkie-talkie. “Let’s see what else is in there.”

  Hillary panned the cam over to the right side of the cabinet and onto a cache of silver coins, these more primitive looking—many had uneven borders and crudely stamped profiles. A particularly impressive example, separated from the others, featured an emperor on his throne, an eagle perched on the palm of his outstretched right hand.

  “Wow, I wonder where those are from,” said Steven.

  Papa leaned inward toward the LCD screen to inspect the shining coin and raised his bushy eyebrows.

  “There anything in this for me?” he asked.

  “I don’t see why not,” I said, then, into the walkie, “Papa wants a cut of the booty. I hope there’s enough.”

  “Oh, there’s enough,” said Hillary. She lifted her camera up, briefly exposing the bare steel walls of the vault, and walked over to another tall curio cabinet in front of Steven. “I think we’re all rich.”

  Situated on the second shelf of the cabinet was a miniature Egyptian treasure trove. This time it was Steven’s turn to whistle.

  “Howard Carter would have been jealous,” I said, my anxiety still quelled by the excitement.

  “Who’s Howard Carter?” asked Hillary.

  “He’s the archeologist who discovered King Tut’s tomb,” I replied.

  At the center of the shelf rested a strikingly beautiful golden burial mask encrusted with gems. The mask’s eyes, formed of what appeared to be inlaid obsidian and quartz surrounded by strips of deep blue lapis lazuli, stared off into the afterlife. To the left of the mask sat a collection of funerary jewelry, including a striking golden ankh, and a threesome of golden scarabs embedded within a golden frame, their wings inlaid turquoise. Right of the mask stood a ten-inch-high statue, sculpted from obsidian and inlaid with gold and silver, bearing the head of a bird and the body of a muscular man. Delicate gold and silver earrings, rings and bracelets, all decorated with gems, were scattered decadently across the shelf amongst the three larger antiquities.

  “I think that’s Thoth,” I said of the statue. “Egyptian god of … I forget.”

  “The god of ‘worth a lot of money,’” said Steven from outside the frame.

  Hillary panned the camera clockwise and onto the opposing wall. A video surveillance recording unit, small CRT monitor, and a stack of VHS tapes like those we’d found outside in the subterranean hallway sat on a small wooden table in the corner. To their left, several paintings had been hung on the wall. Hillary approached the painting on the left and gasped.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “If I’m not mistaken from my UCLA art history classes, it’s an early Van Gogh,” said Hillary from behind the camera. The painting depicted a group of parishioners in front of a dreary, three-windowed church amidst a series of dormant, leafless trees; drab oranges, olives and dirty blue hues gave the painting a profoundly depressing feeling. Hillary leaned forward and centered the cam squarely on the lower right corner of the painting, the signature, “Vincent,” clearly visible. “That’s how he signed. It could be a forgery, of course.”

  “Where’s the diamond, already?” asked Papa impatiently, now seemingly bored by the procession of rare artifacts.

  “Guys, Papa wants to know where the Florentine is.” That makes two of us. “Anyone see it?”

  “Let’s see, Papa.” Hillary swept the cam around the room past not-yet-scrutinized displays of medieval weapons, ancient pottery, and yellowing Renaissance manuscripts; the place was a museum.

  “Could the Florentine be a manuscript?” she asked, focusing our static-filled ten-inch screen on a trio of vellum-bound volumes.

  “I don’t think so,” I responded. One volume had been opened for display, depicting a bald friar, deep in prayer within a small windowless chamber; even given the cam’s low image quality, the painting’s vibrant colors popped from the laptop.

  “I think I found it,” yelled Steven.

  “And whatever it is,” Hillary abandoned the fifteenth-century manuscripts and darted over, “it’s not a diamond.”

  Steven stood in front of an old writing desk, in his hand a thick manila envelope with the word “Florentine” written in black permanent marker on its side.

  Chapter 37

  “All right, open it already,” kvetched Papa.

  “One second, Pop,” I said, examining the padded manila envelope in my hand.

  “I wonder what it is,” said Hillary. “Obviously not a diamond. Maybe a priceless document? Like an original copy of the Declaration of Independence?”

  “I think Nicholas Cage already found that in National Treasure,” snickered Steven. Hillary just shook her head.

  “Perhaps something incriminating,” I offered. “A damaging photograph of a politician?”

  “Oh just open the damn thing already.” Papa’s arthritic hand shot out in an attempted grab. I yanked the envelope back reflexively.

  “All right, all right.” All four pairs of eyes focused on the tan envelope as I unwound the red drawstring and unfastened the stiff metal clasps.

  “Thumb drives,” I said, withdrawing a pair of gray, two-inch-long USB drives from inside. The flash drives the Russian was after. Each had the words “Florentine Controller” written in indelible marker on its side.

  “That ain’t no diamond,” whined Papa. “What are they, suppositories?”

  “They’re thumb drives, Papa. They hold data for the computer.”

  Papa shook his head.

  “Florentine Controller?” said Hillary, puzzled, “What the heck is a Florentine Controller?”

  “God only knows,” I said, equally perplexed. Hopefully something we can hand over to the FBI and be rid of.

  “There’s no reason to speculate,” said Steven. “Stick one in your laptop and let’s see what’s on it.”

  “All right, here goes.”

  My hand shaking slightly, I inserted the first of the two drives into a USB slot on my laptop.

  “Now
what’s supposed to happen?” asked Papa.

  “Give it a second, Pop.” With a few clicks, I brought up a window listing the contents of the drive.

  “It’s a movie?” said Steven.

  Indeed, the only file on the drive was entitled “Florentine” and sported the ubiquitous triangular “play button” icon associated with video files.

  I double-clicked the movie icon and, after a few moments of deliberation, the Windows Media Player window dutifully filled the screen. According to the progress indicator at the bottom of the window, the movie itself was sixty-five minutes long. After a few seconds of inky blackness, the videographer removed the lens cap and switched on the camera’s lamp, barely illuminating the depths of a cave. Sans any narration, the videographer swept the camera in a horizontal arc past another hiker, clad in black, toward the cave’s entrance. The last rays of the twilight sun flooded the cave’s mouth, energizing a galaxy of fine dust particles and silhouetting what looked like the gnarled trunk of an oak just outside. The photographer pointed the camera back toward the cave’s depths.

  “Ready?” asked the darkly dressed companion from the lens’s periphery. The voice was husky, thirties, African American.

  “Yes, ready,” answered the man behind the camera. His voice was deeper, late thirties, maybe forties, European accent. French, maybe. Not Russian. Too young to be Richard or Ronald at any rate.

  “Who are they?” asked Hillary.

  “More importantly, where are they?” added Steven.

  “I can’t tell,” I whispered over the video. I paused the movie and dragged the progress indicator back with my mouse until the black-clad companion stood center-frame. The man’s profile was a blur of darkly tinted flesh tones.

  “The camera’s moving too fast,” said Hillary, “and it’s too dark.”

  I hit the play button again. Papa began snoring softly.

  The two walked a dozen steps deeper into the cave, then stopped.

  “How’s the picture?” asked the companion.

  “I don’t know. One second.” The image instantly cut to black, then returned a millisecond later, far brighter. “Better.”

  The two followed the tunnel another thirty or so feet, then cut right; here, the cave had dead-ended. The videographer panned down to a three-and-a-half-foot-diameter hole at the base of the wall.

  “Down there?” asked the videographer.

  “Down there.”

  The companion moved into the frame, dropped onto hands and knees, then onto his stomach, and began writhing into the narrow channel, his pack almost instantly wedging against the edge of the aperture. He cursed, and with a tug, dislodged the pack and disappeared down the hole. Hillary shuddered.

  “Claustrophobic?” I asked.

  “Big time,” she responded.

  The videographer waited, camera aimed at the hole in anticipation. A few minutes later, the nearly inaudible voice of the companion whispered from the laptop’s speaker.

  “Okay, coming,” responded the videographer. The man approached the hole, aimed the camera down the now-empty shaft, and cursed. The image cut to black.

  “They’re documenting where they hid the Florentine Controller,” said Steven. “This is a video-graphic treasure map.”

  “You think so?” asked Hillary.

  “What else could it be?”

  “Let’s keep watching,” I suggested, “we’ll know soon enough.”

  “… second,” muttered the European. The image returned. “There we go.” A series of nearby stalactites sparkled in the pair’s pivoting headlamp beams; however, the inky expanse of the room evaded the camera’s reach.

  “The next descent is left and up about thirty yards,” said the companion, almost certainly a mountaineering or caving guide.

  The two picked their way through a forest of person-height limestone stalagmites, some several feet in diameter and glistening with moisture. The guide, upon reaching a pair of particularly large specimens, held his hand up in caution, said, “Park it here,” then threw his pack onto the ground and began extracting gear. Within a few minutes, a net of nylon slings had been affixed around the two limestone growths and a knotted rope dangled into the darkness from a gleaming pair of carabiners.

  “Down there?” asked the European.

  “Yes. You’ve rappelled before, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You first, then. You want me to film this?”

  “No—I’ll take the camera.”

  Again, the image cut, the tangle of webbing now replaced by a pair of undulating Day-Glo orange ropes that danced across the glistening, opalescent wall. The videographer panned the frame up just in time to catch the guide slithering smoothly down the rope and onto the ground.

  “Pretty scary,” commented Steven. “How do they get back up?”

  I clicked the pause button. “They’re probably going to use ascenders.”

  Steven stared blankly at me.

  “I’ll explain later. Let’s keep watching, I want to see where they go.”

  Steven nodded and I resumed the video.

  After a brief exchange, the videographer surveyed their position with the camera; the two had rappelled into a pocked, bowl-shaped depression, perhaps twenty-five feet wide. Its center was filled with a completely still, brackish pool of water.

  “That way,” said the guide from off-camera. The videographer walked along the edge toward the far end of the bowl. “And now, up.” The camera panned up the slope, capturing a series of hand-sized depressions in the smooth rock, then cut to black.

  The video, and their descent, continued for another fifty minutes. By the seventy-third minute of the recording, the two had traversed perhaps an eighth of a mile into the earth, with virtually every phase of their journey captured in exquisite detail, and if I’d had any clue where the cave was, I was certain I could retrace their steps.

  At sixty-four minutes in, the guide, now seemingly soaked with water, stood impatiently, waiting for his orders. A five-foot-high tube-shaped tunnel ran off into the darkness behind him.

  “Please wait for me here, I’ll only be a minute,” said the companion.

  The video ended abruptly.

  “Interesting,” said Steven contemplatively. He removed the first thumb drive from my laptop, laid it on the envelope, and replaced it with the second. A few seconds were enough to verify that its video was likely a duplicate, but he fast-forwarded several minutes just in case. The second copy was identical. He clicked the pause button and stood up.

  “It’s got to be a video-graphic treasure map,” he said, looking to me for confirmation.

  “Maybe,” I mumbled.

  “What do you mean, maybe?” he pressed. “What other possibility is there?”

  None, I thought despondently. We were back to square one. No Florentine. No closure. Only a map showing a descent into a cave that could be anywhere. And worse, with nothing tangible to hand over to the feds, I still had two psychopaths potentially gunning for me with no discernable way out.

  “The bigger question is this,” Steven continued, “what is a Florentine Controller?”

  I shrugged, too anxious to think clearly.

  “Are you okay, Alex?” asked Hillary.

  “Yeah, I’m just thinking,” I stammered.

  “C’mon Alex,” Steven prodded, “just speculate. What could it be? What’s a controller?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s got to be small enough to fit in a backpack or they couldn’t have dragged it down into the cave.” I ruminated. “Maybe a microcontroller of some sort,” I suggested.

  “A microcontroller?” asked Hillary.

  “A kind of microchip used to control electronics—they’re used in consumer electronics but also in cars, planes, military systems, those kinds of things.”

  “That sounds feasible,” said Steven, nodding. “Maybe someone’s trying to hawk a prototype or the schematics for an advanced new chip? That could explain the five-million-dol
lar price tag. Any other ideas?”

  “You know what I think?” said Hillary. “I think that it doesn’t matter what it is. Look, whatever a Florentine Controller is, we know what it isn’t, and that’s a priceless diamond. Plus that cave could be literally anywhere—for all you know, it’s in Pakistan.” She drew a deep breath. “You guys have just found a fortune’s worth of antiquities downstairs, so why not quit while you’re ahead and put this whole thing to rest.”

  Steven opened his mouth to say something but I kicked him in the shin. He swallowed the word with a grimace.

  She continued. “The last thing we need is for the two of you to get lost in some cave in God knows where. For heaven’s sake, count your blessings and quit while you’re ahead.” She sighed. “Just let it go.”

  The room went silent save for Papa’s soft snoring.

  “You’re right,” I stammered a few seconds later. “At this point, there’s no reason to go any further.”

  Hillary nodded and turned to Steven. “Agreed?”

  Steven stared at my face a long second, then said, “Yeah. It’s enough.”

  “Good.” Hillary sighed. “I’m glad this whole thing is finally over.”

  Papa stirred, then opened his eyes and looked around the table.

  “I want to go home,” he moaned, “my elbow hurts.”

  “We should get going too.” Hillary rose and motioned to Steven, who said, “I’m going to hang with Alex a while.”

  “Be my guest,” said Hillary. “Alex, you mind dropping him off later?”

  “Yeah, no problem. Can you take Papa back on your way home?”

  “Sure. Papa, ready to go?”

  “Yes.” Papa reached for his cane, shuffled over, and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m proud of you, kid. That was a hell of an adventure.”

  And then he whispered softly in my ear. “And whatever you decide to do, just be safe. I love you.”

  Chapter 38

  “I’m fucked.” I walked over to the curio cabinet and picked up a mottled gold coin from the purple velvet matting. “That cave could be anywhere. And without the Florentine, I’ve got no options—I’m basically a sitting duck.”