The Last Templar

Chapter 83

Gripping the leathery skin that held the codex, Tess walked back slowly, along the beach.

The sun was setting, the last glimmer of light poking through the gray wall of cloud that lingered on the horizon.

She had decided against carrying the chest back, choosing to hide it behind a large rock instead, in order not to attract unwanted attention. She would come back for it later. Her mind was still floundering with the implications of what she believed she held in her hands. This wasn't a shard of pottery, it wasn't Troy or Tutankhamen. This was something that could change the world. It had to be handled, to say the least, with extreme care.

As she approached the small cluster of houses at Marathounda, she took off her cardigan and wrapped it around the small pouch. The two fishermen had already left the taverna, but she got one of the men there who recognized her from earlier that day to drive her back to the doctor's house.

As she stepped inside, Mavromaras greeted her with a big smile. "Where have you been? We've been looking for you." Before she could rattle off some lie, he was herding her deeper into the house, toward the bedrooms. "Come, quickly. Someone wants to see you."

***

Reilly was looking at her, his breathing mask gone, a valiant attempt at a smile on his dried lips. He was sitting up at a slight angle, propped up against three large pillows. She felt something shift inside her.

"Hey," Reilly said, weakly.

"Hey yourself," she answered, relief breaking across her face. She felt uplifted in a way she'd never experienced before. She turned and, trying not to attract Eleni or the doctor's attention to it, laid the 201

bundled cardigan casually on a small cabinet facing the bed, before approaching Reilly and stroking his forehead softly. Her eyes moved over his bruised face and she caught her lower lip with her teeth, feeling some tears welling up.

"It's great to have you back," she managed in a small voice.

He shrugged, his face brightening slowly. "From now on, I choose where we go on vacation, all right?"

Her face lit up, and she was unable to stop a tear from trickling down. "You got it." She turned, her moist eyes beaming at the doctor and his wife. "Thank you," she mouthed. They just smiled and nodded. "I—we both owe you our lives. How can I ever repay you?"

"Nonsense," Mavromaras replied. "We have a saying in Greek. Den hriazete euhnristo, kathikon mou. It means there's no thanks necessary for what is a duty." He glanced at Eleni, exchanging an unspoken signal. "We'll leave you," he said softly. "I'm sure you have a lot to talk about."

Tess watched them turn to leave, then hurried up to the doctor and gave him a hug, kissing him on both cheeks. Blushing through his tan, Mavromaras smiled modestly and stepped out of the room, leaving them alone.

As she turned to move back to Reilly's bedside, she spotted the bundled cardigan that sat there on the cabinet like an unexploded bomb. She felt awful at being deceitful, both to the generous couple who had saved her life and to Reilly. She desperately wanted to tell him about it, but she knew the timing wasn't right.

Soon,though.

With a heavy heart, she summoned up a smile and joined him at his bedside.

***

Reilly felt like he'd been away for weeks. He felt an odd, stinging numbness in his muscles, and there was a dizziness in his head that just hung there. One of his eyelids was still partially shut, and the uneven depth perception wasn't helping either.

He didn't remember much, beyond shooting De Angelis and hurling himself into the sea. He'd asked Mavromaras how he'd gotten there, and the doctor could only give him the sketchy details he had heard from Tess. Still, waking up and finding out that she was there, and in one piece, was a huge relief.

He tried raising himself carefully into a sitting position, and it brought a slight wince of pain onto his face. He settled back against the pillows.

"So how did we end up here?" he asked.

He listened as Tess told him what she remembered. She also had a black hole in her memory from the freak wave to waking up on the beach. She told him about the hit he took to the head, how she'd strapped their life jackets together, and about the wave. She told him about the hatch cover and showed him the deep cut on her arm. She wanted to know why the Coast Guard vessel fired on them, and Reilly told her about his journey from the moment De Angelis had stepped out of the helicopter in Turkey.

"I'm sorry," she said contritely, when it finally came up. "I don't know what came over me. I don't know, it was just—I must have been out of my mind, leaving you there like that. This whole mess, it's just ..." She couldn't find the words to express her remorse.

"It's okay," he countered, a faint smile crossing his cracked lips. "Let's not talk about it now. We both made it, and that's the main thing, isn't it?"

She nodded reluctantly, beaming her appreciation, and he continued, explaining how it had been the monsignor all along, killing the horsemen in New York, even manning the gun himself on board the Karadeniz. He told her how he had shot De Angelis.

And then he told her about Cardinal Brugnone's revelations.

****

Tess felt a huge pang of guilt when Reilly took her through what had been revealed to him at the Vatican. The monumental truth about what she had found on the beach, confirmed to him by the very people it stood to harm the most, had electrified every pore on her body, but she couldn't show it. She did her best to appear stunned, asking questions, hating herself more and more with every fake reaction. She wanted to whip out the codex and share it with him right there and then. But she couldn't do it. A deep-set unease was etched across his face, and she knew that what Brugnone had told him, the lie at the heart of the Church, was a wound that had to be hurting. There was no way she was going to inflict the finality of its physical proof on him this soon. Right now, she wasn't even sure if or when she could ever do it. He needed time. She needed time, too, to think things through.

"Are you gonna be okay?" she asked hesitantly.

He stared into the distance for a moment, his face clouding as he obviously struggled to put his feelings into words.

"It's weird, but this whole thing, Turkey, the Vatican, the storm . . . it just feels like a bad dream.

Maybe I'm too drugged up or something, but . . . I'm sure it'll hit home at some point. Right now, I'm so tired, I just feel completely drained, but I don't know how much of it is physical and how much of it is something else."

Tess scrutinized his weary face. No, now was definitely not the right time to tell him about it.

"Vance and De Angelis got what they deserved," she said instead, brightening, "and you're alive.

There's cause for faith in that, isn't there?"

"Maybe," he half-smiled, unconvincingly.

* * *

Reilly's eyes moved over her face, and, although nodding off to sleep, he found himself thinking about the future. It wasn't something he had ever really thought about, and it surprised him to have it cross his mind now, here, barely alive on this distant shore.

For a fleeting moment, he questioned whether or not he wanted to go on being an FBI agent. He had always liked being with the Bureau, but this case had cut deep. For the first time ever, he felt tired of the life he had chosen, tired of spending his days thrashing around inside the heads of demented lowlifes, tired of experiencing the worst the planet had to offer. He wondered idly if a career change might help restore his appreciation for life—maybe even his faith in mankind.

He felt his eyelids drooping.

"Sorry," he barely managed, "I think we'll have to save this till later."

****

Tess watched Reilly sink into a deep sleep and felt exhausted herself.

She thought about what he had joked about, about choosing vacations. It brought a smile to her face, and she shook her head lightly. She mused that a vacation was just what she needed, and she knew exactly where she would take it. All at once, Arizona seemed like heaven. She decided she would go straight there. She couldn't even conceive of going back to the office. Just change planes in New York and go see her daughter. And if Guiragossian and anyone else at the Institute didn't like it, then to hell with them.

It suddenly occurred to her that there were lots of interesting things for an archaeologist to do in the southwestern states, and she remembered that Phoenix had a world-class museum. Then she glanced at Reilly. Chicago born and raised, New Yorker by adoption, obviously addicted to being right in the thick of it. She wondered if he could ever give it all up and trade it in for a quiet life in a desert state. And somehow, quite suddenly, that seemed to matter. A lot. Maybe more than anything else.

Stepping out onto the balcony of his room, Tess looked up at the stars in the sky, remembering the night that she and Reilly had been alone at the campsite on the way to the lake. The island was quiet even during the daytime, but at night it became ethereally peaceful. She was acutely aware of the stillness and quiet. There might be nights like this in Arizona, but not in New York. She thought about Reilly, wondering what he would say and do if she did quit the Manoukian Institute and moved to Arizona. Maybe she would ask him sometime.

Looking out over the glimmering sea, she considered what to do about the codex. It was undoubtedly one of the most important archaeological and religious finds of all time and one with staggering ramifications for hundreds of millions of people. To announce the find would make her the most famous member of her profession since the discoveries at the Great Pyramids in Egypt almost eighty years ago. But what would it do to the rest of the world?

She wanted to talk to someone about it.

She needed to talk to Reilly about it.

She frowned inwardly, realizing that she had to do it, and soon. But right now, he needed rest, and so did she. She thought of going to her own bed but went back inside and curled up beside Reilly.

She closed her eyes and very soon, she too was drifting off to sleep.