The Omega Factor(81)
“Monsieur de Foix,” the other man said. “I am Hector Cardinal Fuentes. I’ve come from Rome to deal with you.”
Friar Dwight ripped the tape from his mouth.
“This is outrageous,” he blurted out.
“I agree,” Fuentes said. “The murder of Father Tallard, though perhaps deserved, is outrageous. The extortion you have attempted relative to Archbishop Vilamur is, without question, outrageous. Your chosen religion is most definitely outrageous.”
What had Raymond warned? Careful, the barrel has been jostled, and you have no idea what will now spill out.
No kidding.
“What are you doing here?” he asked the cardinal.
“Why did you mention les Vautours?”
“Is that what this is about?”
“Please answer the question.”
“I was told to use the reference in order to get Vilamur’s attention. Beyond that, I know nothing.”
“By who?”
He hesitated. No way he was going to involve Raymond Barbe. One Perfecti never implicated another. Not eight hundred years ago. Not now. Not ever.
“How about you go—”
Fuentes held up his hand. “No need to resort to the profane. I understand. You do not wish to say. I can only assume it was one of your Cathar companions. Possibly another Perfectus.”
He said nothing.
“The Cathars knew les Vautours,” Fuentes said. “They were…kindred spirits. Rome wanted them both destroyed. It sent a crusade to accomplish just that. It seems the church failed in both endeavors.” Fuentes paused. “But all that failure has brought us here.”
He wanted to know, “Is the archbishop allowed to speak? Or does he just do as told?”
“This man is your father,” Fuentes said. “You went to a lot of trouble to garner his attention.”
“I still have Tallard’s confession and a video of the archbishop leaving the priest’s house.”
“Not anymore,” the shorter friar said.
“Friar Rice,” Fuentes noted, “is an expert with computers. The Dominicans have fully embraced modern technology. Tell us what you were able to accomplish.”
“I erased the video and text messages sent to the archbishop from Monsieur de Foix’s computer and phone. I then accessed his cloud server and deleted them from there too. I also deleted a second video of the archbishop leaving the dead priest’s house. Then I altered the registries to eliminate all references to them. They no longer exist. Anywhere.”
“No password?” Fuentes asked.
“There was. A complicated series of letters and numbers, but Monsieur de Foix kept them written down on a piece of paper taped under his desk drawer. Not all that imaginative.”
Bernat’s mind raced. The video of Vilamur at Tallard’s house, which Andre had captured. He’d told the younger man to delete it once sent. Maybe he’d not done so, and a copy still existed.
“Seems you’ve been quite the busy man,” Fuentes said to him.
Bernat motioned with his head toward Vilamur. “He’s a sexual predator, as dangerous as Tallard. You criminally violated every one of those women, including my mother.”
Vilamur started to speak, but Fuentes held up a hand. “This is no longer about the archbishop.”
“It is entirely about that bastard,” he spit out.
“This is about the Vultures.”
“Then you’re wasting your time. I know nothing of them. I was told they would get your attention, and that information proved correct.”
“I agree,” Fuentes said. “You absolutely have my attention.”
Chapter 53
Kelsey continued to study the twelve panels for the altarpiece. Thanks to computer imaging she was able to lay them out flat on the screen, side by side, in perfect proportion, as Jan van Eyck initially created them. But since 1934 the work had not been complete. Here, on her screen, for the first time anywhere, was the actual, cleaned, restored Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in all its glory. What a sight. And by comparing the original Just Judges from the fifteenth century with the 1945 reproduction she’d noticed something.
Small. Relatively insignificant.
Or was it?
The Just Judges displayed ten men on horseback. Who were they? Art historians had debated that for centuries. Were they burghers from van Eyck’s time? Other princes? Dukes? The only thing experts seemed to agree upon was that two of them were the van Eyck brothers. The one most prominent, in the center, wearing a blue cloak and ermine hat, striding on a white horse was Hubert van Eyck. Right behind him in a brown robe and another fur-trimmed hat was Jan. No reliable images of the van Eycks actually existed, though many historians think Jan added his face to several of his private commissions. Still, the general consensus was that the van Eyck brothers were there, part of the Just Judges.
What she’d noticed on the original, under high resolution, was that two of the ten faces were identical. Which was not the case in the reproduction. All ten faces were clearly different. From what she’d read about the reproduction, Jef Van der Veken changed some of the faces, adding in contemporary public figures from his time, including Belgian’s then king Leopold. From a close look at the reproduction she saw that was indeed the case. The ten faces were all different. But on the original, eight were different, and two were the same. When Van der Veken created his reproduction, it would have been hard to determine much detail in the faces, given the amount of dirt and grime that had invaded the panels by the 1930s. So when Van der Veken painted over he just fashioned the faces as he pleased. It was, after all, intended as a mere reproduction.