Chapter 11: "Just something Vincent taught me once."
Maggie sat with her eyes close to the binocular microscope, her attention fully enthralled by the items below her gaze. She didn't hear the lab door slide open. She didn't hear it close. She was completely unaware of the feet that padded softly from one side of the room to the other, only stopping right behind her. When the hand fell on her shoulder, she spun round so fast her elbow connected sharply with the gut of the newcomer.
"A little jumpy are we?" Professor Zond wheezed. "I am getting too old to be sneak attacked by friends and colleagues!"
"Who exactly are you calling sneaky, Solomon Zond?" Maggie retaliated, smiling, and trying not to laugh as the intrepid adventurer dropped into a chair, still groaning.
"You snuck up on me and you deserve everything you got for it!"
"Mea culpa, mea culpa," Solomon surrendered. "I take it there's something of interest down that eyepiece? I got a variety of soil minerals native to quite a few places, from Scotland, to Nova Scotia, to France, to Peru, to China! The list goes on!"
Maggie, who had been watching the professor's free hand describing a zig-zag pattern back and forth across an imaginary globe, picked one word from the crowd.
"What part of France?" she asked, "Was it a wine growing region?"
"Would have been," Solomon nodded, "all the way back to Roman times at least! Why?"
"See for yourself," said Maggie, indicating her recently vacated chair with a flourish.
Solomon seated himself before the microscope like a diligent pupil, and bent his eye to the eyepiece. There was some necessary adjusting of focus, then the careful, quiet, detailed examination of the true scientist.
"That looks to me like some kind of pollen," he said at last. He was rewarded with an affirmative murmur from his colleague. He looked up. "I'm not the expert you are here, but I'm guessing it's grape vine pollen."
"You guess correctly," Maggie nodded, putting the emphasis on the word 'guess'. "I've been studying it for most of the afternoon, comparing it to catalogued modern and historical examples until I have narrowed it down first to it's genus, then to it's species. Closer than that I cannot get, but, if I had to guess, I would say it's at least as old as the box."
"Any particular reason?"
"The sample came from the inside of the box. Under the tablet to be precise. There's more of the pollen on the tablet itself, on both sides. We can't be certain until the radio-isotope data comes back, but we can say that at some point in its history this box was opened in a wine growing region and the tablet was placed inside."
"It may have been removed and replaced for some reason," Solomon mused. "It wouldn't be the first item we've come across to fall into the wrong hands and then be retrieved."
"True," Maggie nodded. "But we've followed leads with a lot fewer clues behind them. The isotope data should give us a rough date and a few hints at location, though, that I'm betting match up with your wine-growing region of Roman occupied France."
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Vincent was not a small man, but he was deceptively good at hiding in shadows. He had followed Anthony to his apartment, observed him pass by a window on the second floor some three or four times, one hand to his head and visibly talking. Calling in to report his findings, Vincent had mused. He had waited there some hours, but the window had not been approached again. Numerous men and women had approached, entered and left the building by the main door, but they had not included Anthony. Eventually, he had been forced to retire his position in favour of strengthening his employer's. Certain details had already been taken care of before Vincent had even left the Veritas building, but others needed his personal care and attention, not to mention experience, trickery and deviousness.
He had attended to the most pressing of those wants as soon as his arrival at the building allowed. Small details of security that had been breached were already being dealt with and the virtual wall around his charges, human and artefact alike, was being rebuilt and tested. He checked their progress, made some alterations to the computerised section of their defences, then spent the next hour dealing with some of the more solid security traps. It was during this hour that he had passed his training room, stopped, stepped silently backwards, and watched his erstwhile pupil sitting cross-legged in the centre of the room, staring at a stone. For a moment he almost passed by, leaving Nikko to his meditation as silently as he had discovered him. In the split second as he moved to go, he saw something that made him freeze and seriously reconsider his opinion.
He saw the stone move.
XXXX
The room had fallen silent after the departure of a jubilant Professor Zond, an amused Nikko, a thoughtful Maggie and, of course, the silent force of intimidation that was Vincent, shepherding Anthony before him. The former three had remained a little while after the departure of their unwelcome guest, listening to theories as they unfolded, and taking samples for various machines and microscopes, but now that the room contained just two people, it seemed so much smaller. In reality, the lab was easily big enough for all six of them to work on different projects without bumping into each other. Now it seemed too small for the two of them to even walk to the central table without crossing paths or bumping into one another. They had settled at either side of the table, each with a printed copy of the inscriptions, each with a stack of books beside them, and a shared pile in the middle. The box and its contents, now closed again and sealed in a controlled environment chamber, looked down on them from its position on a shelf. Had it eyes, it might have observed the occasional clash of sentences, as both began at the same moment, the occasional crashing of fingertips, as both reached for the same book from the central pile, but never the accidental meeting of eyes, for all the want of trying!
Cal's gaze came up again from the printed page and rested on Juliet's bent head. His eyes were soft, his brow wrinkled and his face filled with regret. He blamed himself for their falling out as much now as he had at the time. He had moved too fast, presumed too much, and forgotten that feature of Juliet's personality that had put a necessary wall between them: her honesty.
They had been in the crypt, for such it had turned out to be, for five days. His sight had returned, his wounds were healing, and they had explored enough of the underground maze of tunnels and chambers to find a source of clean, fresh water, and some fascinating frescos. They had spent a day photographing and cataloguing the intricately painted walls. Time and damp had done some damage, but in the places where the pictures were still clear, they looked as if they could have been painted weeks ago, not centuries. They had agreed upon a date somewhere in the thirteenth century. The representations of Templar characters among the saints and angels displayed was some modicum of proof.
They had followed the labyrinthine tunnels to a vaulted chamber, lower, smaller and better preserved than the one they had left. Gilt vines spiralled around the columns and up to the capitols, glittering wearily in the torch light. The capitols themselves sported gilt leaves, each one curving protectively over the carved symbol at their centres. One revealed a tent, another an eye, another a scroll. The three capitols opposite were less revealing: the carved centre having been hacked away by someone in the chamber's dim and distant past.
Juliet was standing in the centre of the room, pointing her torch down at faint, time eroded marks on the floor, delineating the shape of a small altar.
"What do you think was here?" Juliet had asked, pointing out the shape with the beam of her flashlight. She had turned the beam upward before Cal could answer her, and almost immediately dropped it with a startled gasp. The flashlight went out. In the darkness, Cal had heard Juliet swear. He had turned back to the feature he had been looking at and smiled, then reached up and placed his own flashlight on the ledge of the capitol, pointing outwards. Stepping into the centre of the room, he had raised Juliet to her feet.
"I don't think we need it," he remembered saying, his long arm reaching out to the side of the small room and moving his flashlight an inch to one side. Light had filled the tiny chamber, shimmering with a golden hue as their presence stirred up the dust of ages past.
Juliet had laughed then, looking around her at the golden mirrors between the tops of each column. She had turned back to face him with such a look of joy and wonder on her face that he had mentally noted every curve and line, every hue and shadow, and had promised himself that he would remember it to the end of his days.
"How did you..." She had started.
"Just something Vincent taught me once," he had replied, cutting her off with a shrug.
She had looked upwards, back to the item that had first startled her, and this time he had followed her gaze. The vaulted ceiling above them sparkled, not with gold like the columns, but with tiny, twinkling pinpricks of white light in a sea of blue paint so dark it was almost black.
"They're stars!" Juliet had exclaimed in awe. "Look, you can see the constellations. There's Orion!"
She had turned another circle, this time with her gaze fixed on the ceiling, before she spoke again.
"I've never seen anything so beautiful," she had murmured, and he had agreed without even looking up once. Something in his voice must have betrayed him then, for her gaze had shot straight from the celestial ceiling to his face. Their eyes had locked, silence had descended, and what else could he have done then but kiss her.
The kiss had been gentle at first, but as she had returned it, with interest, it grew deeper. He didn't know how long they had remained there, locked in each others arms, until a stumble brought them out of the centre of the room, and back into the world around them.
She had backed away then, her hand raised to her mouth, her eyes downcast, searching the ground for answers. He had stepped towards her but she raised her other hand and stopped him.
"I'm with Anthony," she had said, picking up her torch and stumbling out of the chamber.
Those three words, not the three he had hoped for, had turned everything between them from then on sour. They had worked through the tunnels in different directions, slept at opposite sides of their small camp, spoken little and only when necessary. The kiss had never been mentioned by either of them then or since. It had only been alluded to between them once: when he confronted her in the archives with his suspicions of their own personal stumbling block.