Near Brussels

Three police cars raced down the road towards the warehouse. They didn’t see the black Lexus parked down a side alley in the shadow of an industrial gasses unit. Nick waited until they were well past, then pulled out cautiously.

‘How did they find us?’ asked Emily. Her voice sounded small and lost. ‘We didn’t even know we were going there until a few hours ago.’

Nick gripped the steering wheel tighter. Ice-cold air was blasting through the shattered window; the dashboard readout said the temperature outside was ten below. He turned the heater up as far as it would go and aimed the vents towards his body.

‘What happened to Atheldene?’

‘He stayed behind. He wanted to wait for the police.’

‘Great,’ said Nick. ‘At least he can tell them that I didn’t do it this time.’

An ambulance blazed past them in the opposite direction and he glanced down, trying to shield his face.

‘So where are we going?’

‘Somewhere we can examine that book. Do we need any special equipment or anything?’

‘Books are robust. If it survived the defrosting, it should be OK to touch. Obviously a temperature-controlled, stable-humidity environment would be better than a moving car with the heating on full and an arctic gale coming through the window.’

Nick saw a gas station ahead. The lights were out, the pumps like standing stones in the darkness. He pulled into the forecourt and parked behind the kiosk, out of sight of the road. Emily came forward into the passenger seat.

‘Let’s find out.’

He was too nervous to touch the book himself: he gave it to Emily. She laid it on her lap and peeled open the cover. Nick stared at the creamy vellum, cast yellow by the car’s map light.

The manuscript began on the first page.

‘“Et si contigerit ut queratur a venatoribus, venit ad eum odor venatorum, et cum cauda sua tetigit posttergum vestigia sua…”’ read Emily. ‘ “And if it happens that the lion is pursued by hunters, he smells their scent and erases his tracks behind him with his tail. Then the hunters cannot trace him.” ’

She frowned. ‘That’s not how the bestiaries begin.’

But Nick was hardly listening. Halfway down the page a small illustration intruded on the text. Damp had smudged it so that the picture seemed to melt out into the writing, but it was still distinct. A lion sitting up on its haunches, one paw lifted in the air, staring across the page with teeth bared in an imperious glare.

‘It’s the same as the card,’ he breathed.

Nick watched as Emily turned the pages, through the fabulous menagerie of beasts that inhabited the book. Not every page was illustrated, and some had been damaged worse than others – by the damp, or by other ordeals in their long history. Many of the animals were creatures Nick had never imagined: birds that hatched from trees; a beast with a bull’s head, a ram’s horns and a horse’s body; griffins, basilisks and unicorns. But not all were so fantastical. Two cats, a black and a tabby, chased a mouse across a kitchen floor while a buxom cook slurped wine by the fire. An ox pulled a plough across an autumnal field. A stag stood on a knoll in the forest, while a bear grubbed in the dirt.

Nick tried not to show his excitement. He knew the bear – and he was pretty sure he recognised the stag from one of the deer suit cards.

‘What does it say about the bear?’ he asked.

‘ “Bear cubs appear from the womb without form, as tiny white lumps of flesh without eyes, which their mothers lick into shape.” ’ Emily read the Latin effortlessly. ‘ “They crave nothing more than honey. If ever they attack bulls, they know the best areas to strike are the nose or the horns – usually the nose, for the pain is worst in the most sensitive place.”’

Nick sat back in the driver’s seat. With the engine off, the car had become icy cold again. ‘I think the lion was closer to the mark, obliterating its traces so hunters can’t track it. That’s Gillian. We’ve got her book, we’ve got her card – and we’ve still got no idea what she found in them. And people keep trying to kill us.’

Emily went quiet. Nick gave her a sideways glance. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘There is someone who could help us. Someone who could analyse this book to see what Gillian might have found. Where it took her.’

‘Who?’

Emily drummed her fingers on the door handle. ‘His name’s Brother Jerome. He’s a Jesuit – or used to be. He’s an expert in medieval books. He was… He taught me at the Sorbonne. He’s retired now.’

‘Does he live near here? Is he trustworthy?’

‘Near the German border. Probably about an hour’s drive from here. As for trustworthy… You can trust him, I suppose.’

Nick craned around and stared at her. ‘If there’s something you need to tell me, then tell me. If this guy’s not above board, I’m not going anywhere near him.’

‘You can trust him,’ Emily repeated. She sounded close to tears. ‘It’s just… awkward. I was his student, once. He made a pass at me; I reported him. He lost his job.’

Now it was Nick’s turn to stare at the dashboard in embarrassment. ‘If you think-’

‘No. He’s the only man who can help us.’

Before they left, Nick found a tyre lever under the back seat and smashed out the remained shards of broken glass from the window. From a distance it made the car look a bit more reputable. Then he started the engine and pulled out of the gas station. He could see the highway ahead: trucks thundering across a bridge in the night. Blue signs pointed left and right. Nick slowed the car.

‘Which way?’

Italy

Cesare Gemato sat behind his desk and stared through the windows of his eighth-floor office. Rain beaded on the bulletproof glass; beyond, the ships crossing the Bay of Naples were mere smears of grey against a grey sea.

‘Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma!’

Pavarotti burst into life on his phone. Gemato saw the number flashing on the screen and grabbed it. He listened for a minute and said nothing, though his knuckles went white.

‘OK,’ he said, and hung up.

He spent five minutes delaying what he had to do next. There weren’t many people he was afraid to call, but Nevado was one. Perhaps the only one.

He picked up the black phone on his desk – the secure line – and dialled the number from memory.

The voice was there at once. ‘What happened?’

‘My men followed them to the warehouse you told them. They…’ He swallowed. ‘They were caught by some security device. Two died; one managed to get away. The man and the woman escaped.’

He waited for a tirade of abuse. Instead, all he heard was a soft voice rasping, ‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘They stole a vehicle belonging to my men. Like all our vehicles, it is fitted with a tracking system. We have traced it to a suburb of Liège near the German border.’

‘Did the American take the book?’

‘The police came too soon for us to find out.’

Gemato waited. ‘I will go myself,’ said the voice. ‘Have one of your men meet me there.’

One hundred miles to the north-west, the old man put down the phone and stared at the office wall. There were rooms in this building decorated by Raphael and Michelangelo; others that housed marvels from an art collection built up over almost two thousand years. Nevado could have had any of them to decorate his office. Yet he had chosen a small, spare room overlooking an obscure courtyard, and the only decoration on the wall was an ivory crucifix. He contemplated it for a moment.

There were records he could have consulted, books and files – he did not trust his secrets to computers – but he did not need to. Somewhere in the Vatican’s vast archive was an index card with Emily Sutherland’s name on it. He had studied it only yesterday. It had referenced another file in another basement, this one much fatter. He had read that too. He knew who Emily Sutherland wanted to see near Liège.