Library Of Gold

It was a reasonable response, but Annja found herself pushing him just a bit further. “Right after you pocket a hefty finder’s fee, right?”

Charles laughed outright. “Look around you, Annja,” he said, indicating with a sweep of his hands the house, the grounds, his entire business empire by extension, she supposed. “The media claims I have more money than God and you know what? That’s probably the only time I’ve ever agreed with them. I set a record last year for the most consecutive appearances on Forbes magazine’s Top Ten Wealthiest People list. What on earth would I do with more money?”

It was the response she was looking for. The library was part of the world’s cultural heritage, a glimpse into the beliefs and practices of the past. It belonged to the Russian people and shouldn’t be locked away in some private collector’s vault.

“Good,” she said, “at least that’s settled. But we’re still faced with the issue of finding the map Fioravanti was talking about in his journal. You said you think you know where it is?”

Charles looked over at Gianni, who had been sitting patiently listening to their exchange. “Tell her,” he said to the younger man.

Annja saw the flash of excitement in Gianni’s eyes as he turned to face her. “According to what I’ve been able to discover, Ridolfo’s brother gave the map to Kasmir Nabutov, their cousin by marriage and an Orthodox priest assigned to the Cathedral of the Annunciation. Everything I’ve found on the topic suggests that Nabutov secreted the map inside the Gospel of Gold, though how or exactly where I don’t know.”

She knew that Ivan the Terrible had gifted the Gospel to the cathedral in 1571, right about the same time the library had gone missing. Legend claimed the Gospel had once been a part of the library and that it contained a clue to the library’s whereabouts, but it had been stored in the cathedral for hundreds of years with restricted access. Nobody had verified if the legend was true.

Given that they weren’t getting in to see the Gospel, Annja didn’t see how this was going to help them and said as much to the other two.

“As it turns out,” Charles replied, “I have a colleague on the staff of the cathedral. I’ve made arrangements for the two of you to privately examine the Gospel the day after tomorrow.”

The chance to see and touch the Gospel of Gold would have been enough to get her to agree to the trip. That she would be doing so as part of an expedition to find the lost library of Ivan the Terrible was icing on the cake.

Really good icing.

Now it was her turn to smile.

“So when do we get started?” she asked.

Chapter 5

Gianni was waiting for her, two first-class Aeroflot tickets in his hand, when she arrived at the airport the next afternoon. The flight from JFK in New York to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport was nine and a half hours, which would give them plenty of time to discuss how they intended to approach the Gospel of Gold and the ways Nabutov might have hidden information in its pages. First, however, Annja wanted to get to know her new companion better.

He, apparently, had the same idea.

“So,” Gianni said as they settled into their seats, “what do you do when you’re not traveling around the world searching for ancient artifacts and lost civilizations?”

“Oh, you know, the usual, I guess.”

The usual? Ri-i-ight.

Somehow she didn’t think protecting the innocent while bearing a medieval mystical sword that was once carried by Joan of Arc fit into most people’s definition of “the usual.” It wasn’t as if she could tell him the truth, and even if she did, he’d never believe it. Sometimes she almost didn’t believe it herself.

The day she’d stumbled upon the last remaining fragment of Joan’s shattered sword and, with her new friend Roux’s help, brought it together with the other fragments he had spent hundreds of years collecting was etched indelibly in her mind. It had, quite literally, been a turning point, not just for her but for Roux and Garin Braden, as well. None of their lives had been the same since.

The sword had chosen her; she knew that now. It had reforged itself right before her very eyes and in doing so had selected her to be its next bearer. The role came with its own unique set of responsibilities, she’d discovered. Her own sense of justice seemed amplified when she carried the sword and several times she’d found herself unable to walk away from a situation as a result. Numbers and odds didn’t matter, only that she acted to defend those who couldn’t defend themselves when the opportunity presented itself.

Which seemed to be happening more and more frequently.

Annja didn’t know how it all worked—at least, not yet. But she’d vowed that one day she would, because the mystery of it was like a constant irritation in the back of her logical, scientific brain.

Gianni, it seemed, wasn’t going to settle for such a trite answer, though.

“Come on,” he said, “you’ve got to give me more than that. Where’d you grow up?”

“New Orleans,” she replied, intentionally not mentioning the orphanage she’d lived in or the nuns who’d been the only adult influences in her life throughout her childhood. He didn’t need to know about that.

“What did you major in at school?”

“Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in archaeology, with a concentration in the medieval and Renaissance periods.”

“And now you work for a cable television show. How do you like that?”

While it was an interesting question, it wasn’t one that necessarily had an easy answer. She didn’t particularly care for the show’s sensationalism, but she appreciated that it allowed her to travel throughout the world investigating ancient civilizations and the legends surrounding them. It was a means to an end and right now one that came in very handy when she considered the sword’s influence on her life.

She explained how she felt about the show as best she could, then said, “Enough with the twenty questions. What about you?”

“Me? Not much to tell, really. Born and raised outside of Milan with my two brothers. One became a doctor, the other an architect. The pride of my parents’ eyes.”

“And you?”

He grinned. “A painter. Annoyed them even more than I thought it would.”

Annja laughed, but it was more from a sense that it was the kind of response he was expecting. She’d worked hard and done what the nuns had expected of her so that she could get out of there at the earliest opportunity. Why anyone would intentionally choose a path that wasn’t what they wanted to do just to annoy another person, especially their parents, was beyond her.

“What do you paint?”

Gianni shrugged. “This and that. Landscapes, mostly. A few portraits now and then.” He studied her, a mischievous gleam in his eye. “You should let me paint you. You would look beautiful in the light of an Italian sunset.”

An image flashed through Annja’s mind, the two of them in a Tuscan farmhouse, the orange-red light of the setting sun streaming in through a nearby window, splashing across her supine form, warming her bare skin as Gianni looked on from a painter’s stool a few feet away, close enough to reach out and touch…

Down, girl. It had been too long since she’d spent any time with the opposite sex.

Not wanting him to guess at her line of thought, Annja assumed an indignant expression. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked archly. “I need Italian sunlight to bring me up to your standards?”

For a moment, he just gaped at her. “Wait…that’s not what I meant,” he stammered, trying to recover. “I mean, of course you’re beautiful, but the sunlight—”

Gianni sat and stared at her. “Very funny,” he finally said. Their laughter served to bring them out of that awkward get-to-know-you stage and they spent the rest of the time before dinner chatting comfortably on topics ranging from the art of the Italian Renaissance to the Yankees’ chance at another World Series. Once the flight attendant had cleared the dinner dishes, Annja decided to catch some sleep to help her adjust to the time change once they arrived in Moscow. Wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, she curled up with a pillow against the window and drifted off to sleep with the hum of the engines in her ears.

* * *

THE REST OF THE FLIGHT passed without difficulty and the pilot brought them in for a bumpy but otherwise uneventful landing just before midnight local time. Neither of them had checked their bags, so they were able to bypass baggage claim and reached the immigration processing area ahead of most of the other passengers. Annja handed their passports to a blonde woman in the blue uniform of the Federal Migration Service.

“What is the reason for your visit?” the officer asked, looking up at them as she compared their faces to their photos.

“Vacation.”

It wasn’t exactly true, but telling the officer that they were here to hunt for the long-lost library of Ivan the Terrible, one of Mother Russia’s most feared despots, didn’t seem the wisest move.

The officer scanned Annja’s passport and then waited for her computer to process the information. Once it had, she picked up a rubber entry stamp and raised it over an open page of the passport only to hesitate at the last moment after glancing at what came up on her computer screen.

She lowered her hand without using the stamp.