“How?”
“First I had to stage a spectacular, and apparently botched, robbery.”
Glinn nodded.
“I went on the final Sunday, when I knew the East Room would be packed. I set off a weak flash-bang with smoke, to scare and temporarily blind the room. Then I went to the case and attached a device that detonated a small shaped charge, which in turn split the bulletproof cube containing the book — not unlike cleaving a diamond.”
“A shaped charge designed by you, no doubt, given your work at Los Alamos with implosion bombs.” Glinn waved a withered hand. “Go on.”
“After splitting the case, I took out the Book of Kells, cut out the Chi Rho page, and gave it a very brief chemical treatment. Then I left the book on the floor and hid the page elsewhere in the room. It all took less than sixty seconds. The room cleared of smoke, and then things proceeded like clockwork. They discovered the book was missing a page; they searched for the page; they found it. At this point, the job had all the hallmarks of a botched robbery. They questioned and searched everyone who had been in the room — one of them had to be the thief — but found nothing, not on me or anyone else. They didn’t look as hard as they might have if the page had remained missing. They thought they had the entire book.”
Gideon smiled. He was coming to the good part. “But I knew that, at some point, they would have an expert conservator examine the cut page. Just to make sure it wasn’t damaged or in need of special attention. They might have even decided to test it to see if it was real or not. At any rate, the Chi Rho page I’d cut out immediately failed a UV examination, indicating it was a forgery.”
“How did you know they would do this?” Garza asked.
“Because I bought a real illuminated manuscript page in London, gave it my special chemical treatment, and brought it into Sotheby’s. There it was pronounced a fake by one of the world’s greatest experts on illuminated manuscripts.”
“Very good.”
“So — as soon as they found the page was a fake — they realized they weren’t dealing with a botched robbery, but a successful one. Clearly, they concluded, the thief had brought a fake page into the room to substitute for the real one and hid it in the room, to make everyone think it was a botched robbery and that nothing had been stolen. You see, I had to make them think the real page was actually a fake. It had to fail the standard UV test.”
“Clever,” said Glinn. “So what was this ‘special chemical treatment’ of yours?”
Gideon reached into his pocket and removed a small spray can. “La Spiaggia Scent-Free Ultra Sunblock, SPF 70.”
Everyone in the room stared at the small canister.
“The ingredients are titanium oxide, zinc oxide, and octyl methoxycinnamate — all broad-spectrum UV blockers. All it took was a quick spritz on both sides of the page and the deed was done. And when I was searched and the guards found the canister of sunblock — which of course they did — they thought nothing of it.”
Glinn nodded his approval.
“So when the page — covered in sunblock — was subjected to the standard UV tests, nothing happened. None of these glorious medieval mineral pigments fluoresced as they should have if the page was real. The page was therefore assumed to be a fake, made with aniline dyes! And now the powers that be realized — or so they thought — the thief had gotten away with the real page, leaving behind this substitute.”
“Brilliant,” murmured Glinn.
“Thus, the ‘fake’ page became evidence in a criminal investigation. As such, it was sent to the evidence vaults underneath One Police Plaza. And this morning, Eli, thanks to your phony credentials and your scheduling data from the FBI database, I was able to get into the vault and switch the fake real page with a real fake page. It was just a matter of prestidigitation, at which I excel, done under the table, out of sight of the video cameras. Now they have the fake that they always thought they had, and we’ve got the real page. And no one is the wiser — save for the fact that two Agent Morrisons visited the evidence labs today.”
Glinn clasped his withered hands together, almost as if he were praying. “This is amazing. Amazing.”
“Thank you. And now, I’d like to know why this page is so important.”
“And so you shall.” Glinn turned. “Dr. Stanislavsky?”
“Vee are ready, Dr. Glinn,” said the Munster-like technician, picking up the tray with the page and bringing it over to a series of other, shallow trays filled with liquids, akin to developing trays, each with its own thermometer. He took the manuscript page, laid it on a screen with a handle, and immersed it in the first liquid.
“What, exactly, are you doing to it?” Gideon asked, alarmed.
“You shall see,” Glinn replied.
After timing the bath, Dr. Stanislavsky raised the screen and placed it in a second bath, again timing it.
The bath became cloudy.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Gideon asked, staring at the clouding water. It looked to him like the ink on the page was dissolving.
The technician raised the screen. The colors of the intricate Chi Rho image were now running all over the place, along with a heavy white underpainting.
“What the fuck?” Gideon yelled, taking a step forward.
Garza laid a firm, restraining hand on his arm.
The page went into the third tray, a laminar flow bath. Gideon could see, through the shimmering surface of the moving liquid, that the Chi Rho image was vanishing, dissolving…and then it was gone. With a deft motion the technician plucked the page from the bath with rubber-nose tweezers and held it up, dripping fluid.
It was blank.
11
You son of a bitch!” Gideon cried as Garza tightened his grip. “I can’t believe you just destroyed — you fucking destroyed—that priceless work of art!” He jerked his arm away from Garza, took another step toward Glinn.
Unperturbed, Glinn held up a hand. “Wait. Please reserve judgment until the end.”
Breathing hard, Gideon fought to get himself under control. He couldn’t believe it. He had been conned into participating in a horrible act of destruction. This was unbelievable, despicable. He would go to the cops, tell them all about Glinn and the theft. What did he have to lose? He was going to be dead in ten months anyway.
Still using the tweezers, the technician laid the now blank sheet under blotters to absorb the excess moisture, and then put it on a glass stage, part of a large machine.
“That,” said Glinn calmly, nodding at the machine, “is an XRF analyzer. X-ray fluorescence.”
As the technician busied himself with the machine, Glinn continued. “Are you familiar with the term palimpsest?”
“No.”
“In the Middle Ages, manuscript vellum was a very costly material. Only the finest skins could be used — sheep, calf, or goat. The best came from fetal animals. The skin had to be prepared by skilled experts — split, soaked, limed, scudded, and stretched. Because it was so expensive, monks often reused vellum from old books. They’d scrape off the old text, resoak and wash the vellum, and use it again.”
“Get to the point.”
“A palimpsest is the ghostly shadow of that earlier, original text. Some of the most important and famous Greek and Latin texts are today known only as palimpsests, having later been scraped off and written or painted over for other purposes. That’s what we’re looking for here.”
“There’s an older text underneath the Chi Rho painting?”
“There’s something under there, but it’s not a text.”
“For God’s sake, did you have to destroy it to see it?”
“Unfortunately, yes. The Chi Rho page had an ultra-heavy underpainting of white flake, a medieval paint made with lead. We had to remove that to see what was underneath.”
“What could possibly be more important than what was there?” Gideon asked angrily. “You yourself said the Book of Kells is the finest illuminated manuscript in existence!”
“We have reason to believe what’s underneath is more important.” Glinn turned back to the technician. “Ready?”
Stanislavsky nodded.
“Run it.”
The technician raised the stage on the analyzer, adjusted some dials, and punched a command into a digital keyboard. A faint, blurry drawing sprang to life on the embedded screen. Slowly, like a master, Stanislavsky adjusted various dials and controls, fine-tuning the image. At first it looked like a random series of dots, lines, and squiggles, but slowly it came into sharper view.
“What the hell is that?” Gideon asked, peering more closely.
“A map.”
“A map? To a treasure?”
“A map to something better than a treasure. Something absolutely, utterly, and completely extraordinary. Something that will change the world.” Glinn’s gray eye fixed itself on Gideon. “And your next assignment is to go get it.”