‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ Morini instructed, in English. He and the men sitting in the house in Madrid had established that as their common language.
‘We were in a very strong position,’ the Spaniard — who was using the name Tobí — replied, his voice cold and bitter. ‘We had traced the two of them to their hotel, and very nearly ended the matter there, but they slipped away and we lost them in the city traffic. We’d already found and seized the third man who’d flown out from London, the specialist in ancient documents, and we were using him as bait to try to pin down the other two people in a location that we could control and where we could recover the relic. Unfortunately, this man Bronson is more resourceful than we expected, and somehow he managed to identify the building where we were holding the other man. He got inside, killed two of my men and knocked out two others, one of whom is still in hospital with severe concussion. The other one is here with me now, and listening to our conversation.’
‘Did he tell you what had happened?’
Morini barely even noticed that ‘Tobí’ was ignoring the rules about not giving names and other details in their conversation.
‘No,’ Tobí replied, ‘he was outside the building when he was attacked, and all he remembers is being knocked to the ground by this man, who then hit him on the head with a weapon, possibly a pistol. By the time he regained consciousness, Bronson was already in the building and the police were on their way. We had assumed that he had called them just before he entered, but I have a contact in the local Guardia Civil who told me that the call was actually made by a woman. Presumably Lewis was with him, outside and watching the building.’
‘And what about the third man, the man from London? What happened to him?’
‘He was still in the building when the police arrived, and he’s now in hospital too, recovering. Some of the methods we used to interrogate him were quite — what shall we say? — robust.’
‘I don’t need to know about that,’ Morini said quickly.
‘I will tell you one other thing: I will make this Bronson pay. One of the men he killed was my brother.’
‘I don’t want this turning into a personal vendetta. The most important thing is still the recovery of the relic.’
Tobí gave a short and entirely mirthless laugh.
‘What you want, monsignor, and what I now want are not necessarily the same thing,’ he said. ‘If there’s any possibility of us getting the relic back, then we will. But right now, this is personal. We are going to find Bronson and Lewis, and then I’m going to make sure that both of them wish they’d never been born.’
Even through the earpiece of his mobile phone, Morini could feel the ice-cold determination in the man’s voice.
Moments later, Tobí ended the call and looked across his desk at the two men who had been waiting silently there, listening to the conversation.
‘Do we have any idea where those two are now?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Santos, the man Bronson had tackled in the warehouse car park, replied. ‘We know Bronson hired a car at the airport here, and all of our watchers have been given details of the vehicle as well as the photographs and descriptions of Bronson and Lewis, but there has been no sighting of them so far. They might have gone to ground in Madrid, in some small hotel maybe, or they might have driven away from the city altogether. If they have left the city by car the net will have to be so big that they might easily slip through it. We simply don’t have the manpower to cover every road all the time.’
Tobí stood up and walked across to one wall of his study, where an old map of the Iberian Peninsula was displayed. For a few seconds, he just looked at it, trying to decide the best course of action. How would he get out of Madrid if he were in Bronson’s shoes, guessing at the forces that would be ranged against him?
He looked at the image of Madrid, and the surrounding areas, assessing whether or not the two fugitives would risk trying to board an aircraft or a train. If they purchased an airline ticket, one of his contacts in the immigration service would know. Their two passports had already been red-flagged, and he had positioned surveillance teams at the Madrid airports and train stations.
But somehow he doubted if they would use either route. From what little he knew about Bronson, he guessed that the man would want to keep his options open, and that suggested that there was only one possible way he would be considering getting out of Spain.
Tobí tapped the glass covering the map a couple of times, then turned back to face the two men sitting opposite him.
91
‘Listen to this,’ Bronson said. ‘I’ve just found something in a paper called the Lodi News-Sentinel.
‘There’s a pretty full report here of a robbery that took place in the Vatican. The publication date of the paper was 27 November 1965, and the robbery took place in the early hours of the previous Friday morning. And if I’m reading this correctly, it does look very much like a tailored robbery, because they could have taken a whole bunch of things but they didn’t, just four specific items.’
‘Which were …?’ Angela said.
‘They took two historic manuscripts and two important relics of the Roman Catholic Church. According to Vatican officials, the manuscripts were priceless, and the two relics were worth about half a million dollars, so we must be talking about several million dollars at today’s value.’
‘Typical of a newspaper to concentrate on the price of the objects, not what they were,’ Angela commented.
‘Actually, it does go on to explain what was taken, and also how the robbery was carried out,’ Bronson said. ‘First of all, the two relics. One of them was a facsimile of a crown that belonged to Hungary’s national hero, St Stephen, made of gold. This report said it was made in the early part of the twentieth century and was a gift from the Catholics of Hungary to Pope Pius X.’
Bronson paused for a moment as he read the next section of the article.
‘But it looks as if the original is still around,’ he went on. ‘According to this other website, the genuine crown was smuggled out of Hungary some time after the end of the Second World War to the United States, and it was secreted in America, in Fort Knox, no less, by a group of Hungarian exiles who wanted to protect it against any claims from the Communist government which had taken power in Hungary. It was only returned to that country in nineteen seventy-eight.’
‘So what was the other relic?’
‘That’s a wee bit gruesome,’ Bronson said. ‘It was a small box, decorated with copper and ceramics, which contained a message to Congress. It was being carried by the president of Ecuador, Garcia Moreno, when he was assassinated outside the cathedral in Quito in August 1875. Apparently the paper the message was written on was stained with Moreno’s blood. I think the Vatican was being a bit optimistic with its valuations if it reckoned that a piece of blood-stained paper and a fake crown were worth half a million dollars back in nineteen sixty-five.’
Bronson looked back at the scan of the newspaper article on the screen of his laptop.
‘The other stuff might be a bit more valuable, though whether it qualifies as being “priceless” is another matter altogether, and you know more about this kind of thing than I do. Anyway, the most valuable item stolen was an original copy of a thing called Canonziere by a fourteenth-century poet named Francesco Petrarch. According to this, it was his most outstanding work and contains several sonnets, madrigals and ballads, and was written on sheets of parchment, a lot of it by Petrarch himself.’
‘Now that would be worth a lot,’ Angela said, nodding, ‘but I don’t know about “priceless”. You said there were four items stolen, so what was the last one?’