“Okay, Mister Mysterious. What’s your story? Really? I’d sleep with you to get you to tell me, but it’s a little late for that…” Natalie rubbed his shoulder muscles, and he closed his eyes.
“I had the Russian and Italian mobs hunting me for exposing one of their money laundering operations. It started off as something benign, but pretty soon everyone around me was getting killed and I had to run. New identity, new start, and even then, it took years for me to rest easy. I took a bullet at one point, and so did my wife. It was a terrible time, but in the end I was able to create a new existence. Antonia, my spouse, wound up selling her magazine in order to disappear, and I walked away from my entire life with five minutes’ notice. It can be done, but it’s not easy,” Steven explained.
“She gave up everything to be with you? Sounds like true love,” Natalie said, no trace of mockery in her voice.
“It was. Then the accident took her from me, and I’ve spent almost three years sleepwalking.” He left out the ‘until now’ he’d been contemplating. “What about you? What’s your story? Besides the FBI?”
“Where do I start? What do you want to know?”
“Just the important stuff. Save the minutiae for later,” he said, opening his eyes and leaning his head back to look up at her face.
Her hands lifted from his shoulders and she walked to the kitchen, where she pulled one of the bottles of wine from the rack by the refrigerator and popped the cork, after finding the corkscrew in the drawer below. She rooted through the cabinets and found a couple of wine glasses, then poured them both generous helpings before moving to the couch, beckoning with his glass for him to join her there. Steven complied. The work for the evening was over. He took a sip of the wine and was pleasantly surprised.
“Pretty good,” he said.
“It is, isn’t it?” Natalie leaned against him. “Hmm…the story of me? Let’s see. Only child. My father was the center of my universe, and the smartest, best man ever made. I was a straight A student through high school and college, valedictorian and head of the gymnastics team, and always the good girl trying to please him, impress him. I know he was shocked when I joined the FBI, but he never chastised me or questioned the decision, although I know he was worried about me all the time and didn’t understand why I wanted to do it. I think the happiest day in his life was when I quit.”
“A couple of years ago.”
“Correct. I’d had an ass-full of conformity and being conservative by that point, so the pendulum swung the other direction, and I guess you could say I rebelled in a big way. I wound up working in a no-brainer job near my father, waiting tables in a bar, dating a tattoo artist, just living for the moment with no real direction. Everyone should try it once in their life,” she said, sipping some wine. “I dumped the boyfriend after a year and started helping my father with his affairs, which had us in contact almost every day. I eventually made peace with the idea I didn’t need to earn his approval and got way happier. Then he got involved with Morbius Frank. You know the rest.”
“Not really. Why are you so convinced that Frank did your father in?” Steven asked. That had always been a niggling detail he’d been curious about.
“My father was a stereotype in some ways — the absent-minded professor. But since he hooked up with Frank, he got very withdrawn and sullen and began insisting I make copies of all his work. I’d ask why, and he would say that you never knew when lightning would strike. In the end, he was actively frightened of something, and I intuited it was Frank. I insisted on being part of his scheme, if only as a silent partner, so someone besides my father would know all the details. He never said it, but I know he struggled with his conscience towards the end. As he got closer to attaining his dream, which was to decrypt the Voynich, it’s like it ate away at him. In the last week, once he had possession of the Scroll, after the first forty-eight hours, he insisted I take it and put it somewhere nobody could find it. He was worried, and it wasn’t about the weather.” She took another swallow of wine. “He taped some of his conversations with Frank and let me hear them, and I can tell you the guy is creepy. I had five kills while an agent, which is high, but also a reflection of the work I was doing with the mob, and I can tell you I’ve seen creepy. Serial killers, psychos, you name it, but just hearing the man’s voice sent shivers up my spine.”
“Okay, but being creepy is different than being a killer,” Steven observed.
“When my father gave me the Scroll, he said that if anything happened to him, to expect the worst and to get out immediately. He wouldn’t have said that lightly. He’d gone from sure of himself, to frightened. Over Easter, he’d had too much to drink, and he told me that Frank was evil — that was the word he used. This was not a man accustomed to hyperbole. He thought his partner was evil, but he’d gone too far to back out. In the end, though, I think it’s the real reason he decided that Frank should never get his hands on the Scroll.”
“At this point, it’s moot. We know someone’s willing to kill. That’s been demonstrated,” Steven confirmed, finishing his glass.
Natalie took it from him and went into the kitchen to refill both of their glasses with the remainder of the bottle.
She returned to the couch and handed him his wine. Steven took a big sip, and then asked another question that had been nagging at him. “Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems like you know a lot more about your father’s dealings with Frank and their getting their hands on the Scroll than you’d know from your father warning you that Frank was a bad man. What am I not getting?” he asked.
“I was instrumental in planning the liberation of the Scroll from the Abbey. My father didn’t have the operational know-how, so he turned to me, hoping that I might have a contact who could carry off the caper without screwing it up. He figured that given my history, I’d know where to look for a specialty contractor to deal with it. He gave me all the details and had me handle the logistics. And he was right. I didn’t let him down. I knew probably the only person in the world who could pull this off without opening their big mouth or blowing it.” Natalie downed half her wine in a gulp.
“I did it myself.”
CHAPTER 29
“You stole the Scroll?”
“Liberated. I liberated the Scroll, which no more belonged to the Order than it did to anyone else. But yes, it was me,” Natalie replied with a shrug.
Steven studied her with disbelief. What other surprises was she hiding?
“That’s how you know so much about it…”
“Yes. I helped my father once he’d been given Frank’s contact within the Order. I never talked to the man myself, but we got a lot of background information. The Scroll was written in 1450 or so. What nobody knows is that the entire Voynich was created as an elaborate shell around the hidden text in quire 18. But the secret predates the Voynich. After studying everything Frank provided him, my father believed that the Voynich was a copy of an original document, which he thought was written by Roger Bacon in the 1200s. As you know, Bacon is considered to be one of the fathers of the scientific method, but he was also a deeply devout friar who actually spent time at the Abbey. Small world.”
Natalie finished her second glass of wine and placed it on the coffee table. “Anyway, during Bacon’s reading of the many forbidden and ancient documents that came his way due to his reputation and network of contacts, he discovered a secret that was so sacrilegious that he not only feared for his own life, but also for the continued existence of his order. Back then the Church greeted most new information with death sentences and persecution.”