Chapter 16: "Well, fancy that!"

Wissembourg was a small town centred at the mouth of a winding valley, starting with a narrow trail of houses then broadening where the steeper, heavily forested hills gave way to rolling farmland and vineyards. The irregular town plan, so common in communities with so long and diverse a history, clearly centred on the abbey, whose western church tower – a relic of the earlier, eleventh century building – was almost hidden from view by its newer, more recent, counterpart at the eastern end of the church as the team drove up the nearly straight road through the centre of town to the abbey. Maggie turned left at the junction, then right, following the road over a small bridge and past a tower that looked almost as old as the elder part of the church. The first house over the bridge did not appear to have an entrance onto the street. Just before it, Maggie took a sharp left, turning down a shaded lane to turn into a small car park completely hidden from view of the main road. The main entrance of the house opened onto it and there was only one other car visible.

"I got us all rooms here," she explained, "but there's a catch. It's holiday season and most places are booked up, so I was surprised to find this place had space for us: it only has three rooms. Apparently there's been some renovations going on, though and the owner had only just re-opened the online booking this morning. I booked a week, just in case, and it's bed and breakfast so the most important meal of the day is sorted at least."

"Three rooms," echoed Nikko. "So we're all sharing with someone. I have dibs on the bed nearest the window, Cal!"

"Ah, well, now therein lies the catch," admitted Maggie. "They're not twin rooms."

"What?" Nikko blinked in the sudden silence.

"Each room is a double, with a large double bed," Maggie continued. "Two of them have sofa beds."

"Dibs!" Nikko and Calvin called at once.

Maggie rolled her eyes and looked at Juliet, who shrugged with a smile, then at Solomon. "Okay, boys get the rooms with the sofa beds. The adults will take the one without. You are lucky to have beds at all: you have no idea how hard it is to find space for 6 people in a holiday town in France in the height of the holiday season on six hours notice!"

"What did I say?" Solomon protested, picking up on Maggie's amused grin. "I didn't say a word! Not a word!"

Maggie laughed and got out of the car. Unloading the bags and boxes took some time, but the hotel staff were happy to help and soon the team were meeting again on the terrace.

"It certainly is a beautiful view," breathed Solomon, almost apologetically.

"Uh-huh," agreed Maggie, suspiciously. She glanced at the man standing by her side and wondered if he realised just how much his son was like him. "Solomon Zond, I have known you since you and Haley met and there has never been an accommodation booked for you that you didn't find some fault with, unless you booked it yourself. Don't think she didn't tell me!"

"There were fewer of us to book rooms for then," mused Solomon, looking round for his son. "Did make it easy to keep tabs on everyone though."

"They'll be down soon, Solomon," Vincent assured his friend. He leant back in the garden chair by the table. "Probably arguing over who gets the bed and who gets the sofa."

"And who won that argument in your room?" Maggie enquired with a lopsided smile.

Vincent held up both hands in surrender and laughed. "I know my place."

"He offered, I didn't say no," shrugged Solomon. "Where's your roomie?"

Maggie waved a hand at the garden before them. "We were first down. She said she was going for a walk."

Footsteps on the wooden decking heralded Nikko's arrival. Solomon and Maggie turned as one, then looked expectantly at the space behind the youngest member of their team.

"What?" Nikko shrugged.

"Where's Calvin?" Solomon asked his son. "Did you two fall out already?"

"Cal?" Nikko blinked. "Cal dumped his gear on the sofa bed and headed out. Said he was going for a walk in the garden."

Solomon looked at Maggie, his barely suppressed grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. "A walk you say?"

Maggie grinned back. "In the garden? Well, fancy that."

Nikko looked from one to the other, then glanced at Vincent, who was studiously avoiding everyone's gaze, his face as imperturbable as ever. "I'm just gonna go grab a glass of water."

The footsteps receded. Solomon let loose the smile he'd been hiding.

"It's you and Haley all over again," murmured Maggie.

"Here's hoping it ends better for them than for us," replied Solomon.

XXXX

Juliet leant back against the broad trunk of an evergreen tree. She wasn't sure of the species – botany had never been her strongpoint – but the resinous scent and the sound of water bubbling away nearby in the warm evening air calmed her and helped her focus. She needed time to think. She had slept most of the journey, surrounded by the familiar sounds of her friends and colleagues mixed with the drone of the jet's engines. Now at least, if she hadn't had time to think then, she was alert enough to do so clearly.

She cast her mind back over the year so far, all the way back to the party where she and Anthony met. It was a Christmas party hosted by an old high school friend, and he introduced himself to her as a friend of that friend. They had danced and talked. Had she told him then that she worked for Professor Zond? She didn't think so. The topic of work had barely come up at all. He had asked if she liked museums, then asked her to accompany him to the new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. It was only once they were there in the midst of ostraca and papyri that she had mentioned how they had absorbed her attention as a child, making her determined to work out what they said. She had only been mildly daunted when, years later, her father had admitted that the many hieroglyphs and hieratic characters had already been decoded. From then on, they had talked about her studies and later her work in almost every conversation she could remember, sometimes rambling on for hours about this or that new paper or puzzling parchment that had made its way across her desk.

Had she discussed their work on the Ring of Truth? She didn't think so. That was one topic she had always been careful to steer the conversation away from. She had sometimes used other, smaller, less secretive projects to do so though. Projects that she and Cal had worked on together, or that she had worked on alone, like her doctorate work. She had used the latter as an excuse for the long trip to Jerusalem with the team, just a week after meeting Anthony. He had assured her he would still be there when she got back and, well, he had been. Her return had been so much delayed, however, that some explanation was owing, even if much of it could be herded under the heading of the non-disclosure agreement she and the others had signed when taking up their post at the Veritas Foundation. She had told him some of what happened in Syria; certainly not everything. Had she told him about the room they found? The scrolls they'd had to leave behind, perhaps, but not how they found the room, surely. Whether from the perspective of Dorna chasing them or of Cal finding her after their kiss, it would not have been a wise topic to discuss with the man she had been on a handful of dates with at that point. A rustle of branches broke the thread of her thought and she turned.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Cal murmured, leaning back against the tree trunk next to her.

"Just thinking about Anthony," sighed Juliet, wrapping her hands around her elbows.

"Ouch," commented Calvin.

"Not like that," replied Juliet, laughing despite herself.

"Like what then?"

Juliet shrugged. "Thinking about the conversations we've had: how one-sided they've been, at least in terms of work. He never liked to talk much about his job. Always found a way to steer the conversation back to what I was working on."

"You're worried you let something slip about the Ring?"

"Yes… No… Maybe?" Juliet shrugged.

"That certainly covers your options," quipped Cal.

Juliet turned to face him. "I haven't told him anything about any work we did that was directly linked to the Ring."

Cal, hands in his jacket pockets, turned to face her. "But you're worried you've told him… What? Something that links indirectly to the Ring?"

"Something that maybe we haven't spotted the link in yet," clarified Juliet. "Something we haven't even looked at yet."

Calvin looked down at Juliet, eyes narrowed in confusion. Suddenly his brow cleared. "The parchment."

"We've been so busy working through the rest of the finds from that trip, the things we actually went there looking for, that we ignored the find we weren't expecting. Sure we processed the records we took of the catacombs and the frescoes there, but that was just to try and get the place some protection and we didn't even mention any of the hidden stuff. Then there were the Jerusalem finds and where they took us, and where we ended up after that and so on, and then Alaska happened and now this!" Juliet waved a hand at their surroundings. Her other hand came to rest on the trunk of the tree.

"Hey, it's okay, it's okay," Cal soothed, his hands lifting automatically towards Juliet's shoulders then stopping. One hand dropped back down to his pocket; the other drifted over to the trunk of the tree. "Look, if he's Dorna, he knows anything you willingly tell him will be stuff that has nothing to do with the Ring. It'll be everything round about that that he'll be watching."

"Yes, unless he knows something we don't!" Juliet pointed out, her hand slipping a fraction forwards on the tree bark. "We never were sure how Dorna found us in Syria, or why they turned up when they did. What if we were never a part of the plan? What if they turned up there looking for something else, not us?"

Calvin was silent, searching Juliet's face for an answer he knew he was going to hate. "It's the Nabatean link, isn't it?"

Juliet nodded. "Ever since I spotted the script was similar to the Elm Island tablet, I've been wondering, though."

"Did you tell him?"

"No."

Cal nodded. There was no need to ask if she was sure. Not about that. His shoulders relaxed and fell, and the hand on the tree fell forward with them. "What does he know about it?"

"That we brought it and a couple of other things back from the ruins we discovered. That it's a scroll with writing we haven't identified," shrugged Juliet. The motion of her shoulders pushed the hand on the tree trunk upwards. When her shoulders fell, her hand did not. "That I said I would wait for you…" Juliet's voice trailed off. Suddenly she was very aware of a hand resting very close to hers. She swallowed. "That I would wait until we could work on it together."

Calvin knew, from his high school sciences, that there were many forces in this universe, but at that particular moment he couldn't think of a single one strong enough to pull his eyes from Juliet's. He felt a gentle thumb brush over his. "Does he know where it's kept?"

"No," Juliet breathed. Slowly, as slow as ice melting from view on a car windscreen, she felt tentative fingers intertwine with hers. She let her free hand tangle in the fabric of his open jacket.

Calvin let his head drop until his forehead rested on Juliet's. "I know you want to do this right…"

"I want to try," corrected Juliet. "If Tony turns out to be Dorna, I am perfectly okay with trying and failing, but if he's not…"

"You'd rather know you did things right?"

"I was going to say: if he's not, he's still a jerk and I'd rather not give him ammunition; but I guess that works too."

XXXX

6 ½ Months Ago – 6 days after the fall

Calvin and Juliet looked down at the array of boxes laid out on the desk in the order and position of removal. There were gaps where there had been an empty space in the cabinet. Sometimes the gap was filled with a note if the contents had been deemed too delicate to move. Juliet photographed everything as they uncovered it. Each box, its contents inside it, and especially its contents once moved outside the box, had just about as many photographs taken as one of the vainest Prom Queens on the night of the dance. There were several items of note: a gold ring, a seal, a jewelled necklace, a brooch. Each treasure was accompanied by a neat note identifying the item and the illustrious client it belonged to, along with the debt said item was apparently security for.

"So this was some kind of safety deposit box system," murmured Cal, after reading out the third such receipt. "Well, the Templars were into banking."

"Not all of it," replied Juliet, putting their camera to one side. "This one doesn't have a note. Help me take it out."

Cal held the box steady as Juliet carefully dislodged its contents. It was a solid cylinder, a brown so dark it was almost black, and had been wedged into the locked box diagonally.

"One scroll case," dictated Juliet. "Unknown origin and date. Feels like wood covered in embossed leather. Pattern on the leather is a stripe of geometrical decoration at the base, the top, and just below where the cylinder opens."

Cal put down the dictaphone. "Can you open it?"

"It's stuck," frowned Juliet. She held out a hand to Calvin. "Give me a knife. Small and sharp will do. I think it's just the oils out of the leather." She took the proffered knife and carefully scored a neat line around the join of base and lid. "Here we are. Look at this."

Calvin stepped closer, shining his flashlight down over her shoulder. He watched Juliet ease up the lid of the case, holding his breath when the inner scroll became visible. When he let out that breath, when the lid finally came free and Juliet placed it carefully on the desk, he saw a shiver run through her.

"Hey, you okay?" Cal's free hand reached out to steady Juliet's as it returned to the scroll case, his fingers sliding through hers.

Juliet flexed her fingers automatically, interweaving them with his, then slid her hand out of his grasp and up to the scroll peeking tantalisingly out of the top of the case. "I'm fine," she lied. "This feels like parchment, fairly stable but I don't know how it will stand up to being removed from the case. Pass me my gloves, please?"

Cal grabbed the pair of white cotton gloves Juliet had used to handle all the notes they had found thus far and handed them to their owner. With the cautious attention of a bomb defusal expert, Juliet edged the scroll out of its case. The dry, reasonably stable atmosphere of being inside a case that was inside a box that was inside a cabinet inside a secret room in a lost catacomb of the Knights Templar had done much to preserve the integrity of the parchment: it slid out of the wooden cylinder with ease. Juliet passed the case to Cal, who sat it on a free area of the desk and came back to Juliet with the flashlight, shining it over her shoulder onto the parchment. It unrolled right to left, and Juliet eased the roll open as far as one block of text.

"Can you read it?" Cal asked her. "I can't."

"There's something familiar about the characters," Juliet admitted, "but no, I can't read it. Maybe once we're back in the lab with some reference materials. Even with the flashlight, the light in here isn't the greatest."

"D'you want to try the UV light?"

"Maybe once we're back in the lab and can open it fully," she agreed, aware that the tremor in her hands had resumed as soon as Cal returned with the light, but equally aware that this time he had not reached out to steady her.

That was how it was then. She had pulled away from him the first time, and he had noticed. He wasn't quite so close now either: not quite so much in her little bubble of personal space that had suddenly made an appearance just yesterday. Invisible boundaries had been drawn between them now, and a part of her was glad that he had spotted them without her having to spell it out. How could she explain that the mild attraction she had felt before now tied her to him like the ocean to the moon. If she were not with Anthony things might be different now, but right now her boyfriend was as sure a block between them as the vacuum of space between moon and planet. A block she intended to remove as soon as they got home, certainly, but a block nonetheless.