The Lost Testament

1

‘Stop! I heard something.’

Instantly both figures froze into immobility beside the wall. They could almost have been twins, though they were unrelated, both slimly built men of a little below average height, wearing black close-fitting clothing and dark-coloured climbing shoes. Even their hair was black, and they had the typically swarthy complexion of people who live around the Mediterranean.

Neither man had begun his working life as a professional thief. They had both worked as members of an acrobatic troupe in a travelling circus, honing their climbing skills to a high degree of perfection. But after retiring they’d quickly acquired a reputation in certain circles in Italy: these men could be relied upon to get into the most heavily protected of buildings, complete the job they had been hired to do, and keep their mouths shut afterwards.

And that was precisely why they were then in the midst of the Vatican City, carrying out perhaps the most dangerous commission they had ever been given.

For a minute, the men remained immobile, two dark and silent shadows against the light-coloured stone of the wall, listening intently. Then Stefan took a half step closer to his companion and murmured in his ear.

‘What did you hear?’

‘It sounded like a stone falling, something like that. Are you sure there are only two guards on duty tonight?’

‘That’s what we’ve been told: one two-man patrol, nothing more; and they should be a long way from where we are right now. I’ve checked the patrol route, and the gardens are not a high priority.’

‘I hope you’re right. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. Let’s go.’

Dragan grinned at him, his teeth a white slash in the darkness. Then he opened the black fabric rucksack at his feet, extracted a metal grappling hook, the points and shaft coated in thick rubber to muffle any noise, and seized the rope about two feet from the end where it was attached to the hook. He whirled the hook in a circle half a dozen times, then released it. Both men watched critically as the hook sailed up into the air and then vanished over the top of the wall. There was a muffled clunk as the hook came to rest somewhere out of sight.

Cautiously, Dragan reeled it in, pulling the rope towards him and down the wall hand over fist. Suddenly the rope went taut, and he took a step backwards and peered up towards the top of the wall.

‘I think I can see it,’ he whispered. ‘Just check it out, will you?’

Stefan reached into his pocket and took out a small but powerful torch, black tape placed in a criss-cross pattern over the lens to cut down the amount of light that would be emitted. When he switched it on the narrow beam clearly showed two of the four hooks jutting out over the top of the wall.

‘That looks secure to me,’ he said quietly. ‘Do you want to go first?’

‘Yes.’

Dragan picked up his rucksack, closed the flap and slung it over his shoulders. Then he seized the rope with both hands and climbed up it with as little difficulty as if he’d been ascending a flight of stairs. At the top of the wall, he paused for a moment to check the positioning of the grappling hook, then gestured for his companion to join him.

Moments later, both men were in position, sitting astride the wall as they repositioned the hook so that they could descend into the gardens that stretched out before them. Once they were down at ground level again, this time on the inside, Dragan flicked the rope expertly to dislodge it. The rope represented their escape route, and they dare not leave it in position in case the roving patrol passed by the wall and noticed it dangling there. As soon as the hook fell to the ground, he picked it up, coiled the rope and replaced it in his rucksack.

‘That was the easy bit,’ he said. ‘Now we have to do a bit of proper climbing.’

Neither man had set foot inside the Vatican before, but they moved with unerring certainty. Both of them had spent the previous two weeks studying detailed plans of the Holy See, and they now knew their way around with as much familiarity as if they’d been regular visitors.

Their objective was the Apostolic Library, located off the Belvedere Courtyard underneath the Apostolic Palace, the Pope’s official residence. The library had been founded in 1420 by Pope Nicholas V with an initial endowment of some nine thousand books, but was later incorporated into the Vatican Museum and by 1965 it contained more than a quarter of a million volumes.

The two men couldn’t enter the building at ground level — that would be impossible to do undetected — so they would be taking a very different route to get inside. The Stradone dei Giardini runs along the side of the Belvedere Courtyard, between the line of linked buildings and the gardens to the west, and that would be where they would make their entrance. A couple of minutes later the two men stopped near the Fountain of the Sacrament to make absolutely sure they were unobserved before they crossed over to the side of the building.

‘I don’t see or hear anything.’

‘Neither do I. Let’s go.’

The two dark shapes, deeper black shadows in the blackness of the night, flitted silently across the roadway, then crouched down beside the wall of the building, again checking in all directions. The next few minutes would be the most crucial of the entire operation, and if they were spotted neither man was in any doubt about what would happen to them.

‘Still clear,’ Stefan said.

Dragan nodded, and then both men took a step back and stared upwards at the vertical wall that formed one side of the building. Ten feet away from where they were standing, a water pipe ran all the way down the wall from the gutters at the edge of the roof high above them. The pipe was in excellent condition — the Vatican, as one of the richest organizations in the world, didn’t stint on the maintenance costs of its buildings — and within seconds the dark shape of one of the two men, a coil of rope looped around his shoulders, was already a dozen feet off the ground and climbing swiftly up towards the roof.

They didn’t need to climb all the way up. Near the top of the building, a balcony beckoned, though it was a few metres from where the water pipe ran down the wall. But just below the balcony was a narrow ledge, barely wide enough for a human foot, and that would provide the means of access they needed.

When he got almost opposite the balcony, about thirty feet above the ground, Dragan stopped to catch his breath — he wasn’t as young, or as fit, as he used to be — locking his hands around the back of the water pipe while his climbing shoes rested on one of the junctions. Then he stretched out his right foot, the thin sole allowing him to test his foothold on the ledge before he trusted it with his full weight.

It felt solid, and after a couple of seconds he released his grip on the pipe and flattened himself against the wall as he began edging his way along the ledge. When he neared the balcony, he reached up, stretching as high as he could go, until his hand closed around the carved stone that formed the top of the wall around it. He took a firm grip, then pulled himself up and onto the balcony itself.

Moments later, he lowered the climbing rope he’d been carrying and waited while his companion attached their two rucksacks to the end of it. Then he hauled it up to the balcony and waited a couple of minutes for Stefan to follow in his footsteps and climb up the pipe.

At the back of the balcony was a set of double doors flanked by two windows, all of which were locked, a fact that surprised neither man. They had expected no less, but glass is fragile, and once they were satisfied that the roving patrol they’d been told about was nowhere in sight, the curved end of a crowbar swiftly disposed of one of the panes of glass in the door, and within a minute both men were standing inside the building, the door closed again behind them.

‘This way.’

They walked cautiously out of the chamber accessed by the balcony and stood for a moment in the passageway outside, where a single dim light was burning. It provided just enough illumination for them both to study the plan they had been given. Then they moved on, heading for one very specific part of the building.

‘The Sistine Hall,’ Dragan murmured a few minutes later, pointing at the sign beside the doorway. ‘That’s it.’

None of the interior doors in the building appeared to be locked, the staff presumably believing that the external doors offered sufficient deterrent to thieves, and as soon as both men were inside the room, they split up and began their search.

By any standards, they were surrounded by treasures: glass cases containing ancient manuscripts and other relics, intermittently illuminated by the narrow beams of their torches. In one case lay an enormously valuable fifth-century New Testament written in Greek. In another, documents signed by Martin Luther. In yet others were a collection of love letters sent by King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, an essay written by Galileo to the Cardinal who later became Pope Urban VIII, a letter from the painter Raphaello, and another letter, this one sent by Michelangelo to the Superintendent of St Peter’s. But they barely glanced at any of these priceless exhibits. They were looking for two very specific objects, and in a couple of minutes they had found them both.

‘Over here.’

The two men stood side by side looking down at one particular case.

‘That’s it?’ Stefan said, comparing what was written on the sheet of paper in his hand with what they were looking at inside the glass case.

‘Yes,’ his companion agreed. ‘In fact, that’s both of them.’

The glass on the locked display case wasn’t armoured in any way and offered no more resistance to the crowbar than the pane of glass on the balcony door.

‘These other old books and stuff have got to be worth something.’

‘More than you or I could ever earn in a dozen lifetimes,’ Dragan said, ‘but you know the way we work. We do what we’re paid to do and nothing else.’ He opened up the neck of his rucksack while his companion lifted out the two objects they had been told to steal, and laid them carefully inside it.

As they walked down the corridor between the Hall and the Borgia Apartment the younger thief grabbed the other’s sleeve and gestured towards a glass case.

‘Look at this,’ he whispered. ‘It’s gold, a crown of gold.’

‘Yes, but—’

Before he could finish his sentence, Stefan had already lifted his crowbar and cracked the glass that covered the ancient relic.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Look, I know what you said, and you’re right. But this is gold. We can have it melted down, so it’ll be untraceable. We’re only ever going to get an opportunity like this once.’

Without waiting for a reply, Stefan plucked the gold crown out of the shattered display case and placed it in his rucksack. Almost as an afterthought, he also picked up a small and highly decorated copper and enamel box and took that as well.

‘Put those on now, and don’t take them off until I tell you.’

The order was unsurprising. They had encountered their employer only twice before, and each time they had been blindfolded and driven some way outside Rome to a large and clearly expensive villa, and the entire time they’d been in the building the man himself had been out of sight behind a screen, so they had no idea who he was, except that he probably wasn’t Italian, because his instructions had been relayed through an interpreter.

This time, the journey to the villa took about forty minutes and, after removing their hoods, they were led through to the same room they had been in previously. There, an arrangement of screens had been placed at one end, and a table positioned more or less in the centre of the room, the man they believed to be an interpreter standing beside it.

‘Do you have them?’ the man asked.

By way of answer, Stefan opened his rucksack, lifted out the two objects they had been told to steal and placed them on the table.

The interpreter smiled for the first time since they had seen him.

‘Excellent,’ he purred. ‘You have done well. Now leave the room while my employer inspects these two relics.’

Stefan reached out his hand to pick up the rucksack, but the interpreter shook his head.

‘You can leave that here. My employer will not take long.’

The two men glanced at each other, then shrugged and left the room as they’d been told. They had no option but to comply: the presence of two tall and heavily built men standing by the door ensured that. They were ushered into a small anteroom by one of these two guards, who then took up a position in the open doorway.

But the interpreter had been right. Less than ten minutes after they’d been told to leave, the two men were called back inside the room. The scene appeared to be exactly as it had been when they’d left, albeit with three small changes: in addition to the two literary manuscripts they’d been told to steal, the golden crown and the enamel box were also placed on the table — their rucksacks had clearly been searched — as well as a single piece of brown parchment.

The interpreter stared at the two men in a disapproving fashion.

‘The instructions we gave you, the most specific instructions issued by my employer, were extremely simple. He wished you to steal these two manuscripts’ — he pointed at the two leather-bound objects on the table — ‘the work of the Italian poets Petrarch and Torquato Tasso, and nothing else. Yet you apparently saw fit to take this crown and box of mementos too. Why was that?’

For a moment, neither man replied. Then Dragan took a half step forward and pointed at the crown.

‘It was my decision,’ he said. ‘It was obvious that the theft would be discovered almost immediately, and I thought it might help to muddy the waters slightly if we picked up another couple of items from the library while we were there, to disguise the real objective of the robbery.’

That was nothing like what had actually happened, but as a spur-of-the-moment improvisation, he thought it was quite inventive, and almost believable.

The interpreter stared across the table, his eyes moving from one man to the other, then he nodded, turned and disappeared behind the screens at the far end of the room. The sound of muffled voices could be heard. After about half a minute, he returned.

‘We applaud your quick thinking, though my employer does not believe you for a moment. You took the other two objects, intending to keep them for yourselves. However, that is not important because you did recover what you were paid to find. Now we have one other question for you.’ The interpreter pointed at the single sheet of parchment lying by itself on the table. ‘What is that?’ he asked.

The two men stared at the object.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Dragan replied. ‘I’ve never seen it before. We picked up the two sets of manuscripts from the display case and took nothing else from that room.’

‘That was at the back of the Tasso collection, but it is obviously not a part of it.’

Dragan shrugged. ‘Sorry, I’ve no idea.’

‘Very well. You have already received half of the agreed fee, and later today we will pay you the remainder, once you have completed one further task for us.’

‘That was not a part of our arrangement,’ Dragan replied. ‘We were to carry out the theft, deliver the goods to you and then we were to be paid.’

‘But you’ve already broken your part of the agreement by stealing these two other items. My employer is a fair man, and he has agreed you may retain the enamel box and the additional sheet of parchment and try to sell them if you wish. Call it a bonus. And the additional task we want you to perform is very, very simple, but we will be watching you to make sure that you complete it exactly as we order. You are to take the crown and the two manuscripts, place them in a secure metal container we will provide and then throw them away at the precise time and place that we tell you.’

‘What? I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to. You just need to do what we ask.’

Five days later, the man who had organized and paid for the apparently pointless burglary in the Vatican left Italy in his chauffeur-driven car. Hidden in a secret pocket in one of his sets of matching suitcases were the two original manuscripts, handwritten by Petrarch and Tasso, which he would store securely in his extensive collection of ancient relics as soon as he got back home.

In the meantime, from what he’d been able to gather from the newspaper reports in Italy, Vatican officials appeared quite satisfied that the first-class forgeries he’d commissioned the previous year were actually the real thing, dumped by amateur burglars who got cold feet. All in all, and despite the somewhat unexpected greed of the two burglars he’d employed, it had been one of his most successful collecting expeditions.