The Aztec Prophecy

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Ah… the City of Lights,” Lea said, giving Hawke a sideways glance before kissing him on the cheek. Ryan pretended to be sick when he saw the kiss but Maria slapped him on the back of the head and told him to grow up.

“That’s Paris,” Hawke said. “This is the Eternal City.”

Lea turned away and pretended to follow the progress of a man on his bicycle. “I knew that, Joe Hawke.”

“Of course you did,” Ryan said with a smirk.

“You’re not so damned smart, Ryan Bale. When we first met you thought an areola was a chocolate biscuit.”

Hawke burst out laughing, but Maria was less amused.

“I know what a sodding Oreo is,” Ryan said, pushing his hands into his jeans pockets.

They were walking across the Viale Vaticano and heading toward the entrance to the museum. Ahead of them the sun was shining above the ancient walls of the Vatican. Lea looked up and saw a line of umbrella pines along the top of the wall, almost yellow in the late afternoon sunshine.

They walked across the cobblestones, passing beneath the famous archway. The words MVSEI VATICANI now welcomed them inside one of the grandest museums anywhere in the world. Here were vast collections of some of the finest art and sculptures on earth, amassed by the desires of hundreds of popes over countless centuries. Ryan was mesmerized.

Inside, the general throng drifted on autopilot toward the Sistine Chapel, but Hawke and the others went in a different direction. Being one of the biggest museums in the world, they had a long walk until they reached their destination, passing on their way many of the greatest classical and Renaissance treasures known to man.

“This place is incredible,” Lea said, drinking in the treasures around her as she walked.

“You’ve never been here before?” Hawke asked.

“No, never.”

“Then maybe we should come back when we have more time?”

Lea looked up at him and smiled, but a dash of suspicion narrowed her eyes. “You mean that?”

Hawke shrugged his shoulders. “Sure, why not?”

“Because,” Ryan said. “You don’t seem like the museum type.”

“That’s not fair,” Hawke said. “And I’ll prove it by bringing Lea back here on a romantic weekend for two.”

She liked the sound of that. It had been a long time since she’d just kicked back and taken life as she found it, rather than riding it like a raft on a white water river.

“Sounds good. And if you’re good I might even let you buy me an ice cream.”

Hawke snorted with amusement. “When am I anything but good?”

They continued on their journey through the museum until they finally reached their destination.

They entered the Vatican Apostolic Library and approached the reception area. A woman with thick, black hair in a bun and chunky glasses on her nose stared up and looked as if one of them had just placed a whoopee cushion under her seat.

“Si?”

Her attitude seemed to undergo a Damascene conversion when Lea Donovan told her they were at the library on behalf of Sir Richard Eden MP and had a pre-arranged meeting with Francesca Pavoni, the direttore of the entire Vatican Museum.

Suddenly she couldn’t do enough, and asked them if they wanted coffee while they waited for Professore Pavoni.

“No thanks,” Hawke said. “We need to speak with Professor Pavoni before we get shot at again.”

The woman looked confused, obviously unsure she had translated the English correctly, and made an urgent phone call. After several high-speed Italian conversations a man in a slim-cut Prussian blue suit emerged from a panelled door behind the woman and smiled warmly as he extended his hand.

“I am Paolo Brunetti, Professor Pavoni’s assistant. Please, let me welcome you to the Vatican Museum. If you please follow me I will take you to the Director — she is waiting for you.”

The ECHO team exchanged glances and followed Brunetti from the reception area, Hawke pausing for the slightest of moments to wink at the woman on the front desk. She dropped her coffee in response and knelt to clean the carpet, cursing in quiet Italian.

Moments later Brunetti showed them into a large, plush corner office flooded with warm Roman sunlight. Professor Pavoni was sitting behind her desk but stood up to greet them as her young assistant left the room and quietly closed the heavy wooden door behind him.

Pavoni glanced at her watch and raised an eyebrow. “You’re nearly half an hour late.”

“Pleased to meet you too,” Hawke said.

Pavoni stared at him for a moment before replying. “An hour ago I received a telephone call from the Culture Minister who seemed to be of the opinion that I should give you any assistance you require.” She raised another unconvinced eyebrow before continuing. “Apparently you need to see a codex stored here at the Vatican.”

Lea nodded. “Apparently so — the Codex Borgia.”

Pavoni nodded with appreciation at the pronunciation. “What you seek is not generally available to the public, you understand. It is quite priceless and has been stored in the library archives here in the Vatican Museum since we acquired it from Cardinal Borgia himself.”

“We understand, but we’re not the public,” Hawke said.

The professor slipped a pair of Gucci eyeglasses on and peered through the butterfly-shaped lenses as she scrolled through the online internal telephone directory. “Ah — here it is.”

She picked up her phone and dialled a short number. Seconds later she was speaking into the handset in swift Italian before setting it down softly into the phone’s cradle and turning to them. “Okay, fine. We can go down to the archives now. I must ask you not to touch anything there.”

They followed the Director out of her office and along a carpeted corridor, at the end of which was a plush elevator with brushed chrome doors. Professor Pavoni keyed in a code and the doors swept open.

“Security here is paramount, naturally.”

When the doors opened, they found themselves in another corridor, but this was tiled and the pleasant atmosphere of Pavoni’s office was replaced by the harsh blue glow of surgical strip-lights.

“If you’ll follow me,” she said curtly. “We access the archives just here.”

She indicated the end of the corridor and moments later she was pushing open a heavy steel door and showing them into the archives.

Lea drank in the view with amazement. For some reason — probably the movies — she had been expecting something similar in scale and size to an aircraft hangar, but while the area was vast, the ceiling was a very low, wooden state of affairs, reinforced here and there with iron support struts. Old-fashioned lights were bolted to the ceiling beams, and they looked like they might have been the originals, installed when the Vatican converted from candle-light to electricity.

Ahead of them was an almost endless corridor formed by the ends of two enormous metal bookshelves, stacked on which were literally tens of thousands of books, journals and manuscripts. It smelled musty, but the desiccant dehumidification system used to keep the ancient documents preserved gave the room a welcoming ambience and she thought that it was the kind of place her father would have liked to visit — or maybe even work in as he did his research.

“Please, this way.”

Professor Pavoni led them along one of the many long aisles lined with bookshelves until they reached a low archway in the far wall. Stepping through the arch they found themselves in a small antechamber at the end of which was another door.

“It’s through here.”

The Director typed in another keycode and the door clicked open. Seconds later they were at their final destination — a small room that reminded Lea of the safety deposit box rooms in Swiss banks she had seen in the movies. Dozens of secured containers were locked in place along the far wall, each numbered by hand.

Pavoni took a slip of paper from her pocket and after retrieving the reference number she walked across to the relevant container. She pushed a wooden chair against the wall of drawers and standing on it to gain some extra height, she gently pulled one of them open. Then she slipped on a pair of neon-blue nitrile gloves from her pocket before slowly extracting the codex from the drawer and laying it down on the viewing cabinet.

“This is the Codex Borgia,” she said with pride.

“It’s amazing,” Lea said.

“It’s made from animal skins,” Pavoni said. “Of course it’s very delicate and only authorized people are permitted to touch it… but even after all these years I am astonished whenever I lay my eyes upon it. Simply to think this was created by Aztec priests before the Spanish arrived in Mexico — it’s because of treasures like this I wanted to devote my life to museum work.”

“It’s certainly very impressive,” Hawke said glancing at his watch.

“It’s astonishing…” Ryan said, his eyes glazing over with amazement. “Hold me back, Agent Snowcat, or I might steal it!”

Maria laughed and play-slapped Ryan’s shoulder. “дурачить!” she said.

“What does that mean?” he asked, looking worried. “Is it good or bad?”

She gave him a sideways glance and kissed his cheek. “Shut up.”

“How old is it?” Lea asked, interrupting the moment.

“We’re not sure. All we can say is that this codex was a Mesoamerican manuscript predating the arrival of the Spanish in Mexico — so at least five hundred years old. As a divinatory manuscript its value is beyond measure. It is quite literally priceless.”

Hawke stepped forward. “What connects this codex with the keystone fragment in the British Museum?”

“The Codex Borgia is famous for its many beguiling astronomical references. In fact, it’s these references that many contemporary archaeoastronomy researchers have focussed upon. Also, there are many references in the codex to Huitzilopochtli — and the sun wheel features his image very prominently.”

Hawke sighed. “The common theme seems to be this reference to Huitzilopochtli.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” said Lea.

Hawke looked at her, but his reply was interrupted by the professor.

“Huitzilopochtli was the god of war and the sun, but he is particularly well-known because of the method of sacrifice that was employed when priests offered humans to him. If he is the connection and these thieves have an interest in him, then I dread to think what that might be… perhaps the sacred chants…”

Hawke turned to her. “The sacred chants?”

“There are sacred chants in the codex, sung to honor the various gods.”

Hawke frowned. “But you can download copies of the codex off the internet — why would they be after this original copy?”

Pavoni was silent for a moment.

“Professor?”

“What I tell you is not in the public realm — not yet anyway.”

Lea sighed. “Here we go…”

Ryan rubbed his hands together in excitement. “Here’s where things warm up.”

“Our researchers here at the Vatican recently discovered there was a little more to the Codex Borgia than we had previously thought. Using the same reflectography technique the Uffizi used recently on the Caravaggio, we were able to study the images in the Codex much more comprehensively.”

“Sorry, you’ve lost me,” Hawke said, feeling more than a little out of his depth. “What’s reflectography?”

“Multispectral reflectography is a technology that allows us to see through the various layers in a painted document with infrared. As I say, it’s been used to see under the top layer of paint in works of art by Caravaggio and Da Vinci among many others.”

“You mention sacred chants,” Hawke said abruptly, moving the professor back to the point.

“Yes — when we applied the technology to some of the large paintings in the Codex we found to our shock and surprise more sacred chants hidden beneath the layers of paint.”

Lea spoke up. “And what do these sacred chants do?”

“They’re used to summon the gods and worship them.”

“Wait,” Ryan said, looking more closely at the reflectographic image of the codex. “This here looks like a depiction of Mictlan — am I right?”

Pavoni nodded. “We think so, but it’s very early days.”

“I’m sure it is,” he continued. “Why would a map of Mictlan be hidden within the pages of the Codex Borgia, and right next to these weird chants?”

“Well, it’s hard to say, but…”

“And look here,” Ryan continued. “This image of a man in a canoe — I’ve seen this before.”

Pavoni shook her head. “No, not this you haven’t. This was only recently discovered by the reflectography. You’re thinking of a similar image in another codex — the famous drawing of Aztlán in the Codex Boturini.”

“Ah, right…”

The gunshot was violent but as quiet as a ghost. Pavoni slumped to the floor with a bullet hole through her left temple, and Hawke, Lea and the others jumped back a step, crouching instinctively for cover.

But it was too late.

Silvio Mendoza stepped through the door, flanked by goons and holding a Beretta 92FS in his hands. Smoke was still drifting from the muzzle of the suppressor. A humorless smile played on his lips as he waggled his finger at Hawke and tutted. “How could you kill such a clever and accomplished woman?”

As he spoke, one of the goons moved over to Pavoni and lifted the codex and the reflectographic images from her dead hands. He handed it to Mendoza who sighed.

“And you got blood on this beautiful manuscript. Shame on you.”

Hawke bristled and took a step toward Mendoza, but the cartel boss raised his gun and Lea grabbed his elbow and pulled him back.

“Leave it, Joe!”

“You should listen to her,” Mendoza said, before turning to his men. “Now kill them all.”

Hawke didn’t stop to think, but grabbed hold of the metal drawer that had contained the codex. He flung it like a Frisbee at the man with the gun and it struck him hard in the windpipe before he had a chance to react. He dropped the gun and fell to his knees, hands desperately clutching at his smashed Adam’s apple as he strained air into his lungs.

The second man fired at Hawke but the Englishman simultaneously dodged it and piled a tight fist into the gunman’s face knocking him out instantly. Mendoza’s eyes widened with fear, and he ordered the other men into the fray. They raced forward, snatching up the gun on the tiled floor as they hurried toward them with murder in their eyes.

Hawke searched for a weapon but saw only the wooden chair Pavoni had used to reach the drawer. He snatched it up and spun it around, yelling at the others to take cover. This wasn’t exactly going to be a fair fight.