She stumbled and fell. Darkness overtook her.
Ana shrieked as she felt fingers close on her arm.
"Ana?"
"My God!"
She didn't know where she was, but the absence of light was total, all-encompassing. Terrifying. Her head hurt and her body felt bruised all over, as though she'd been beaten. She knew that the hand grasping her arm belonged to Yves de Charny; he offered no resistance as she pulled away. She could no longer hear Marco's voice or the sound of shooting; the silence was absolute. What was happening? Where was she? She screamed, and screamed again, louder, and then sobbed.
"We're lost, Ana, we'll never get out of here."
Yves de Charny's voice broke, and Ana realized that he was hurt.
"I lost the flashlight following you," the priest said. "We're going to die in darkness."
"Shut up! Shut up!"
"I'm sorry, Ana, truly sorry. You didn't deserve to die, you didn't have to die."
"You people are killing me! You're killing us all! So just shut up!"
De Charny was silent. Ana groped in her purse, miraculously still strapped across her body, and pulled out the penlight and box of matches. She was overjoyed to find them, and then her fingers touched her cell phone. She turned on the small light and saw the handsome face of Padre Yves contorted in pain. He was badly injured.
Ana got up and inspected the cavity they were trapped in. It was not very big, and she could see not the smallest chink in the wall of rock that had buried them. She shouted, and her voice boomed back at her within the small space. Nothing else. It struck her then that indeed she might not get out of there alive.
She propped up the light and sat down beside the priest. Realizing that he had accepted his fate, she decided to play her last card as a reporter. In the shadows that surrounded them, Padre Yves didn't see her take her cell phone out of her purse. The last call she'd made had been to Sofia. God, she hoped she'd answer this time. And she hoped there was a signal that could take their voices out beyond the walls of this otherwise mortal cave they were in. All she had to do was hit the redial button……
With a kitchen towel she'd taken from Turgut's apartment, she pressed hard against a wound she saw just below Yves's rib cage. The priest grimaced and looked up at her with glassy eyes.
"I'm sorry, Ana."
"Yeah, so you said. Now tell me why-what's behind all this insanity?"
"What do you want me to tell you? What difference does it make, if we're both going to die?"
"I want to know why I'm going to die. You're a Templar, like those friends of yours."
"Yes, we are Templars."
'And who were the others, the ones that looked like Turks, the ones with the porter?"
"Men sent by Addaio."
"Who's Addaio?"
"The leader, the pastor of the Community of the Shroud. They want it…"
"Want the shroud?"
"Yes."
"Want to steal it?"
"They think it belongs to them. Jesus sent it to them."
Ana thought he was delirious. She brought the light to his face and could see the hint of a smile on his lips.
"No, I'm not crazy. In the first century a.d. there was a king in Edessa, King Abgar. He had leprosy, but he was cured by the shroud Jesus had been buried in. That is what the legend says. And that is what the descendants of that first community of Christians believe, the Christian community that came together in Edessa. They believe that someone brought the shroud to Edessa and that when Abgar wrapped himself in it he was cured."
"But who brought it?"
"One of Jesus' disciples, according to tradition."
"But the shroud has been through so much since then-it left Edessa hundreds and hundreds of years ago."
"Yes, but since the shroud was stolen from the Christians in Edessa by the troops of the emperor of Byzantium-"
"Romanus Lecapenus."
"Yes, Romanus Lecapenus-they swore they would not rest until they'd recovered it. The Christian community in Edessa was-is-one of the oldest in the world, and they have not spared one day in trying to recover their sacred legacy, as they see it, just as we have never stopped trying to prevent them from doing that. The shroud no longer belongs to them, and we are sworn to protect it for all the faithful."
'And these men without tongues-they're part of this community?"
"Yes, they are Addaio's soldiers, young men who consider it an honor to sacrifice themselves in order to recover the shroud. They have their tongues cut out so they can't talk if they're captured by the police."
"That's horrible!"
"They believe that was what their ancestors did, to protect the shroud in their time. They've been after it for centuries, and we've been there to stop them. It's funny-we could wipe them out overnight, but we never have…… They're Christians, too, devout in their way, and we ourselves know too well the evils of such persecution… and now our fates have become intertwined." De Charny's head was spinning, and he could barely see Ana's face in the darkness.
He sighed with pain and went on. "Marco Valoni was right. The fires, the accidents in the cathedral-all staged… mostly by the community to cause confusion when they go after the shroud, sometimes by us to attract the authorities before they can succeed. We've always stopped them, but we try to protect them too. They know too much about us now……"
Ana had propped the cell phone next to him. She didn't know whether Sofia had answered, whether someone was hearing their words. She didn't know anything. But she had to try-she couldn't let the truth die with her.
"What do the Templars have to do with the shroud and this community?" she pressed him. "Why do you care about it so much?"
"We bought it from Emperor Balduino-it's ours. Many of our brothers… many… died to protect it."
"But it's a fake! You know that carbon-fourteen dating has proven that the cloth dates only to the thirteenth or fourteenth century."
"The scientists are right, the cloth is from the late thirteenth century, to be exact. But what about the pollen grains stuck to the cloth-grains exactly like those found in two-thousand-year-old sediment in the area of Lake Genezaret? The blood is authentic too-both venous and arterial. Oh, and the cloth, the cloth is Eastern, and on it scientists have found traces of blood albumin around the outline of the marks where Jesus was scourged."