The Fiat screeched to a halt on the corner of Piazza San Carlo, and Gabriele Ficino lurched out of the tiny car, unfolding his six-foot-two frame and running a large hand across his sleepy face, before launching into a sprint down Via Accademia delle Scienze.
Two days after flying home from a much-needed holiday in Marrakech, he could really have done without the frantic call that had come through to his cell phone ten minutes earlier.
Another museum theft. In the middle of the night, of course. And this time an eight foot statue weighing close on half a ton. How in hell's name had they even done it? And perhaps more importantly, why?
Whatever this latest theft was, Gabriele felt sure it was connected to the events of three weeks ago, when someone had broken into the archival store of the museum on the other side of the city, a building affiliated to the Museo Egizio, but holding its less visitor-friendly exhibits, mostly a huge archive of ancient and largely untranslated papyri. When one of the students noticed that their latest piece of translation was missing, and nothing of any greater value had been taken, the carabinieri had written off the break-in as some kind of student prank.
Gabriele Ficino had been unconvinced then that it would prove to be that simple, and he was even more certain now. A snatching of random papyrus was one thing, but this had clearly required enormous planning on somebody's part. Quite a few somebodies, in fact.
Two carabinieri were on guard outside the entrance to the Museo Egizio, standing with weapons drawn amidst a glittering carpet of broken glass, and Gabriele flashed them his identity tag, being waved inside the ravaged entryway to his domain.
More shattered glass littered the vestibule floor, and the typical silence of the museum at night was punctured by the sound of voices crackling over two-way radios as the carabinieri noisily worked their way through the debris.
A wiry man with iron-grey hair broke away from the closest group of carabinieri and marched towards Gabriele, his hand outstretched in a warm greeting. "Gabriele, thank God you're here."
Gabriele pumped his friend's hand and glanced around the vestibule with a look of dismay. "Nice welcome back," he commented sarcastically. "What's been taken, Tomaso?" He already knew it was one of the statues the message he'd got was clear enough about that but he hadn't waited for details before jumping in his car, late as it was.
Tomaso Dandolo's face became even more hang-dog. "You're not going to like it, my friend," he said sadly.
Gabriele knew what that must mean, though his heart tried to will his brain not to believe it. All the museum staff knew that Gabriele Ficino's passion, his most tenderly conserved and cared-for part of the museum's vast and impressive collection, were the eighteen colossal statues of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet housed in the upper gallery.
She had been a source of endless fascination for him since the day when, as a twenty-year-old undergrad, hed first come face to face with that impassive, yet strangely emotive, leonine expression during the excavation of his first mass grave outside Thebes. The site director had concluded the site was a war burial, the fiery, bloodthirsty myth of Sekhmet being an obvious token to bury with the slaughtered dead of battle.
Violent she might be in the stories told about her, but Gabriele had always been awed by her solemn presence, and there had grown in him from that day a fierce protectiveness towards the goddess' image that bordered on infatuation in some eyes. His ex-wife had certainly complained often enough about the other woman who caused their marriage to fail, and how that woman had the face of a lion.
Gabriele was already halfway up the great staircase when Tomaso Dandolo caught up to him. He followed the staccato crackle of the carabinieri's radios to the first hall of colossal statues, paused for a split second to bow his head before the pair of standing Sekhmets who flanked the enormous statue of Ramses II, and thank God that neither of them had been taken, and ran on into the second hall of statues.
Before tonight there had been fifteen Sekhmet statues here, in varying states of decay but each of them beautiful to Gabriele Ficino, who had personally collected most of them. He made his way down the hall, saying a silent prayer for every one that was still safely where it should be, and bracing himself for the moment of horrible discovery.
For tonight, one of the pedestals was empty of its goddess, and as Gabriele realised which one had gone his heart sank even further than it had already. It would be, he thought bitterly, reflecting that whoever had gone to the trouble of breaking into the museum well-equipped enough to overcome the considerable security and make a clean get-away with a priceless and immensely heavy statue, would obviously have done their homework first, and chosen the best specimen in the place.
The one that had been taken was not only one of the best preserved statues belonging to the museum; it was also of the rare uncrowned type. Most statues of Sekhmet had the solar disk crown between her lion's ears, or at least the remainder of one, but Gabriele had managed to acquire one of the rarer ones which had apparently never been decorated in the same way. Nobody knew why some so few were uncrowned, but to Gabriele that had always only increased his desire to have one in the Museo Egizio.
Gabriele Ficino didn't often lose control of his impeccable manners, but when he drew level with the empty pedestal that had once been home to his most prized acquisition, he temporarily forget himself and swore like a trooper.
Chapter 2
The atmosphere in the Duomo was hushed, reverent almost, and well it might be. At the far end of the great central nave, the only clearly-lit object in the whole building hung in its bullet-proof glass case over the high altar. The low murmur of voices praying in a dozen different tongues and the endless shuffle of pilgrims' feet on the flagstones of the Duomo's triple nave, as much as the awed, near-silence and the almost total darkness, told Yelena Komarova she had at last reached her goal. This was one of the holiest and certainly the most famous relic in the entire Christian world, and she had waited half her adult life to see it. This was the Turin Shroud.
Despite her exotic name, and her even more exotic good looks, Yelena Komarova was as English as they came, and despite her Russian father's fatalism and her Italian mother's sense of the dramatic or perhaps in rebellion against them both she was surprisingly unemotional most of the time.
But this icon, this object, had been her father's special mania, and he had never lived to see it unveiled, so this was personal, and as she moved slowly up the aisle, she felt suddenly rather tearful.
She tried to shake off the desire to cross herself, but it took possession of her and she found herself genuflecting self-consciously before taking a seat in one of the crowded pews, her eyes transfixed on the ancient piece of linen hanging above the altar rail.
She hadn't intended to become an iconographer, at least not one of Christian symbols. She'd gone to Oxford initially to study Egyptology, and though her father had been palpably disappointed that she had chosen a field other than his own, he had told her often enough that nothing was too good for his girl that he had eventually seemed reconciled to it. But when he'd dropped dead of a massive heart attack just weeks before she'd graduated, Yelena had always felt she owed him something for all the times they'd disagreed on her path.
Her subsequent Masters in Early Christian and Byzantine icons had been done in honour of him, as had her PhD on the Turin Shroud and the Edessa Mandylion, which many believed were one and the same thing. She liked to hope he would have approved of her being here today, moved to tears by a relic of a faith she did not espouse, simply because it reminded her of the family she had lost.
The doors to the central nave banged open suddenly, and the sound so intrusive on so still and respectful a silence made several people turn around angrily to berate the newcomers. Yelena turned with them, wondering who would have the discourtesy to slam open the doors of this building on such a day, and soon realised that to the incomers, causing offence was hardly an issue.
The light outside was dazzling but it quickly became apparent to all the pilgrims inside the Duomo that the newest entrants to the church were not here to pray. A single warning shot spat out of a raised handgun, and a spatter of plaster dust arced down through the hushed air, the collective intake of breath quelling the screams before they even quite began.
Yelena dropped to her knees, lowering her head below the height of the pew back. She'd been in Luxor several years earlier when terrorists opened fire on the tourists there, and though her heart was thumping in her chest she knew the ones who kept their heads down were those best placed to survive.
The gang filed in behind their leader, spreading out to cover the three exits at the front of the Duomo, the automatic weapons they held halting any attempt at bravado.
In the tense silence that followed the ringing of the single shot, their leader walked slowly, confidently, to the front of the Duomo and gazed for a moment up at the icon. "If you give us what we want," he said, turning round to face the panicked congregation, "nobody will be harmed."
Yelena noticed the accent and was puzzled to recognise it as Egyptian, Nubian maybe. The man's face was shadowed in a hood, which in the almost stygian darkness made seeing him clearly enough to describe him later impossible, but she could make out the sharp angle of his nose as he turned his head, looking at those closest to him.
"What do you want?" shouted a brave, anonymous voice from somewhere off to Yelena's left.
The hooded man turned again to look at the glass case hanging above the altar. "We want the Sacra Sindone," he said quietly.
An uproar of indignant voices swelled up to echo around the high ceilings of the great church, the mass courage of numbers against a single, blasphemous, voice.
The hooded man raised his hand and another shot rang out, cutting through the hubbub of voices. "We want the Sacra Sindone," he said again, "and if you do not wish, here and now, to meet your maker, you will give it to us."
Yelena stared more closely at the intruder, and as he pocketed the handgun and reached for the top button of his long coat she felt her stomach tighten into a knot. She knew, before he even got the coat open, what it would reveal.
The congregation of pilgrims at the front of the church tried to surge backwards against the mass of bodies in the nave as they saw the unnatural waistcoat the coat had concealed, and the sound erupted into a cacophony of terror as those behind were crushed, not even knowing what those in front had seen to make them try to run.
Yelena slid silently under the pew, knowing that if the crowd succeeded in moving, she would likely be crushed in the panic, and listened to the pandemonium as several hundred people tried to surge in first one direction and then another to get away from the horror unveiled by the hooded man. The solid pew shielded her from the movement but she wondered how long she could stay there if the mass evacuation succeeded, for it would leave her exposed to the terrorists' eyes.
"Perhaps now," roared the hooded man above the chaos, "you will give us what we want." He gently caressed the bubbling rows of Semtex stitched in bands across his chest. He was prepared to sacrifice himself, and the Shroud, if absolutely necessary, but he didn't think it would come to that. The religion of peace and love would hardly resist such a threat, he thought cynically.
More gunmen filed down the outer naves, breaking a path easily with drawn weapons and merely the threat of using them. They crossed the final barrier between the crowd and the glass case and laid their hands on the corners as though they intended to lift the case right off its display stand.
One of the priests who had been celebrating the perpetual mass before the sacred icon stepped forward, outrage momentarily outweighing his fear. "Signore, please," he began, but was cut short by a single look from the terrorists. His hands waveringly traced a benediction across his chest but he said nothing more.
While some of the gang trained their weapons on the crowd, others manipulated the heavy case off the hooks that suspended it from the ceiling and away from the protective stand that supported its weight.
Yelena heard the case slip momentarily, the collective intake of breath sweep through the Duomo again as the sacred icon was manhandled with such carelessness, and the dull thud as the men laid it down on the altar. A whining started up as of a high-powered drill and at once an outraged cry erupted again and the sound of the drill was silenced.
Yelena crawled out from under the pew in time to see the same aged priest step forward again, his hands trembling as he faced down the terrorists, knowing he could not stop this blasphemous theft, perhaps hoping that if he stalled them the carabinieri might arrive, and in the meantime only thinking to protect his sacred charge from as much damage as he could.
"Signore," the old man said quietly, though his voice was audible throughout the Duomo in the sudden hush, "if you insist on committing this sacrilege, at least do not destroy the Sindone."
The hooded man smiled grimly. "I have no wish to destroy it, Padre," he said. "It is sacred also to me, though for reasons you could not begin to imagine."
The old priest recognised the moment of opportunity and grasped it firmly. "Signore, if you consider the Sindone sacred, why would you wish to desecrate it in this way, by denying the comfort of its presence to the pilgrims who have come to see it?"
"Your pilgrims," growled the terrorist derisively, flicking his hand towards the congregation, "come to stare and wonder and pray. This thing, this icon," he continued, turning to look at the glass case and resting one hand gently on its surface, "was designed for a purpose more... dynamic."
"Designed?" echoed the priest, his face wrinkled in puzzlement.
The hooded man bent closer to the priest until his nose almost met that of the old man. "The blood is the life, Padre," he said, his accented voice holding an unmistakeable note of menace despite his innocuous words.
"What do you want of it?" asked the terrified priest.
The terrorist's large hands closed around the priest's face. "You wouldn't believe me, Padre, even if I told you." He flicked a glance at the man holding the drill, and another shrill whine echoed around the Duomo.
"Signore, please," interrupted the priest, desperate to see the peril in which his sacred charge once again lay. With one trembling hand he reached into his robes and withdrew a key fob with one simple key on it. "If I must witness this sacrilegious theft, at least spare me the pain of seeing the icon damaged by your rough tools."
The terrorist smiled grimly again. "Well said, Padre." He took the key fob from the priest and threw it to one of his lackeys.
Yelena, along with several hundred other pilgrims, watched as the glass case was unlocked, barely able to believe what she was seeing. There was an audible hiss as the regulated air inside the case escaped, like a museum exhibit kept at an ambient temperature to protect it. Knowing the history of the Shroud, she knew it was probably too little too late to store it like that. After centuries of being exhibited in public, out in the street, shown from balconies, held in who knew how many hands and breathed on and kissed by who knew how many mouths, and having survived both fire and flood already, it was unlikely that an ambient case was really necessary; though it would certainly slow the rate of decay, it couldn't halt it entirely, or reverse the damage already done to the cloth.
"Signore," cried the priest as he saw the case open and eager hands reach in to touch the cloth.
The hooded man had also seen his men reach in thoughtlessly and already barked something in Arabic to stop them. The men reached into their pockets and donned what to Yelena looked like museum exhibit gloves, before lifting the Shroud from its setting and folding it slowly, carefully into a more manageable size, before slipping it inside what looked like an artist's portfolio case.
"Signore," pleaded the priest, still playing for time though he feared that even the carabinieri would be powerless to prevent this devastating theft now, "what will you do with the Sindone? What can you do with it? You cannot sell it, and the Vatican will never negotiate a ransom for it."
"Sell it?" The terrorist laughed and his large hands cupped the priest's head again as though he were going to kiss him. "I'm going to use it for the purpose for which it was created," he said, echoing his earlier cryptic pronouncement. "What did your Christ die for?" he asked the astonished priest, momentarily distracted from his act of desecration by the desire to confound his victim.
The priest met his tormentor's gaze levelly. "To atone for the sins of others, to bring salvation and eternal life to his people, to the faithful who follow his teaching."
"Eternal life," mused the terrorist thoughtfully. "My people have some beliefs about eternity that would rather surprise you, Padre, but for us it is no mere theory, no mere hope for the future. This icon," his eyes flicked gloatingly towards the portfolio case, "we believe we know can raise the dead."
The priest trembled but did not flinch from the challenging gaze of his tormentor. "And that's what you want it for?" he asked in a tone of undisguised cynicism. "Even if you were right, which I profoundly doubt, what good would that serve? Is the world not overburdened enough supporting the living?"
"You mistake me, Padre. I have no interest in raising the human dead. Indeed, through this icon, I intend to add significantly to their number," he continued coldly, his eyes taking on the manic gleam of the fanatic for the first time since his calm, controlled arrival in the Duomo. "Doomsday is coming, Padre," he said, leaning into the priest's face, and then he lapsed into Arabic, which became increasingly frenzied as he warmed to his theme, to the bewilderment of his victim.
Before anyone in the Duomo had entirely regained their senses after the shocking events of the last few minutes, the entire gang with their prize safely stowed away in its innocuous looking case had dispersed, sending a shower of bullets ricocheting around the Duomo to cover their departure and prevent anyone reckless or foolhardy enough following them. They disappeared through a rear access point, installed for the purposes of crowd control during the Shroud's exhibition, and nobody had the courage or the strength to even try and stop them.
Yelena Komarova, surrounded by the chaos and noise of the distraught pilgrims, sank heavily to her knees, her face white with tension. She, perhaps alone of the hundreds of people who had witnessed the impossible theft, had understood the wild words declaimed in Arabic just before the gang's abrupt departure. And though she understood the words, the meaning that rose to her mind was too horrible even to contemplate.
Chapter 3
Turin was in chaos. The erupting crowd pouring out of the Duomo screaming, whimpering, sobbing in some cases, the story of what they had just witnessed, had ensured the news spread like wildfire and soon the whole city was in uproar.
Traffic backed up around the streets as the carabinieri poured in, too late, to find out what on earth had happened. People milled about, stunned to incomprehension at the audacity of such a theft. Frantic calls were made across the city, closing the two airports and securing as best as was possible the roads out of the city. River patrols were sent out to scour both the Po and the Dora for unfamiliar vessels. Trains and trams were halted where they stood and their occupants searched before being disembarked and left stranded midway to their destinations.
All those who had not already fled the scene of the Duomo in terror at being held hostage at gunpoint were rounded up and closely questioned by the carabinieri as the morning progressed, but most of the men had been masked, and the one who had not had been hooded, and most eyes had been drawn away from his face to the waistcoat of Semtex and not taken in any details that might have been useful.
Yelena Komarova had stayed in the Duomo until the crowds had dispersed and been one of the last out of the building. As the lights came back on and the doors were flung wide, she had looked back sadly into the interior, her eyes ranging over the many bullet holes in the priceless paintings that covered the walls and ceiling. That was desecration enough, but what the gang intended to do next would put the rape of a cathedral's treasures to nothing if they were not stopped.
A young carabiniere laid his hand on her arm as she tried to walk away from the scene unobserved. "Signorina, a moment please." He hadn't been in the job long, and this was his first major assignment, and he was terrified, but he did his best to hide it.
Yelena glared down at his hand until he removed it, his young face sheepish and embarrassed. She knew the impact her fiery rage could have on those who did not know her, who did not realise how brief a flare it was, and felt instantly guilty for her reaction. She hadn't let anyone touch her for so long, not since... She shook herself, wondering why that memory should resurface now, years after she'd thought she'd dealt with it. Perhaps hearing an Arabic voice raised in a threat, perhaps a delayed wave of shock after the unexpected events of this morning.
"Did you see any of the men's faces?" asked the carabiniere, reminding himself of his duty after the momentary shock of the beautiful woman's flashing eyes pouring scorn upon him. "Anything that might enable us to identify them?"
Yelena shook her head. "They were all masked, balaclavas I suppose. It was so dark in there I can't be sure. The only one who wasn't masked wore a hood low over his face. I saw his nose and his mouth, that's all, and that from a distance. I couldn't identity him again certainly even if I was put in a room with him." Which I hope never to have to experience, she thought, remembering the fanatical gleam in the man's eyes while he delivered his coup de grace statement of intent.
"Anything in their voices that might help?" The young carabiniere had heard negatives answers so many times already this morning that he barely had the energy to keep asking the question.
Yelena shrugged. "Apart from their being Egyptian, nothing remarkable, sorry."
"Egyptian?" This was clearly news to the carabiniere.
"Certainly," said Yelena, pleased to give him something he seemed to consider helpful after all. "Nubian possibly, something in the accenting of his Ss."
The carabiniere's eyes widened. "You seem quite the expert," he remarked, wondering what his supervisor would make of this witness, and desperate not to let her slip through his fingers, "Signorina...?"
"Komarova, Yelena Komarova." She'd always wanted to say that, knowing when she accented her own name with her father's native pronunciation that it made her sound like a Russian spy, and she allowed herself a tiny smile. "I spent a lot of time in Egypt when I was studying," she explained. "I spent several months working closely with the diggers, many of whom were Nubian, and the way they speak is subtly different from in the rest of Egypt." She shrugged again. "I can't see how that helps you though," she admitted apologetically.
"It may not, but... excuse me one moment, Signorina."
"Professore," she said, not liking his assumption that despite her age she was evidently still single. It might be true, but it still rankled.
The carabiniere flushed a deep crimson. "Professore, mi dispiace."
Yelena shook her head, instantly regretting her flash of arrogance as surely as she had regretted her show of temper a moment earlier. "Non importa," she assured him, with a wide smile that warmed her eyes and softened the sharp angles of her face into friendliness.
The carabiniere depressed the button of his two-way radio and spoke rapidly into it. Even with her good grasp of Italian, a legacy of her mother's insistence of talking to her in her native tongue from an early age, Yelena struggled to keep up, but she heard her name, charmingly if a little inaccurately pronounced, and caught enough to realise he was summoning his supervisor, and referring to some previous event of the night before that he seemed to think was connected to the scandalous events that had unfolded inside the Duomo.
"Another theft?" she asked him while they waited for his supervisor to arrive.
The carabiniere lowered his eyes. "I cannot discuss that, Professore," he said softly.
"Of course." She looked at him, seeing for the first time how young he was, and realising how unprepared he must have been for something so unthinkable as this day's events.
She wondered what might have happened in the night. There had been nothing in the papers that morning to suggest a theft of any significance had occurred in the city, though perhaps it was too early yet for details to have been published. Perhaps the story had been suppressed in an attempt to lure the thieves out, to inflame their vanity by ignoring them. Perhaps this fresh theft this audacious and almost unbelievable theft of the greatest relic in Christendom was believed to be the work of the same people.
It had been her mention of the gang leader being Egyptian that had ignited the carabiniere's attention, and she could hardly have failed to know with her past studies in Egyptology and her recent planning of the trip to come to the city that Turin boasted one of the largest Egyptian museums in the world, second only, so they claimed, to Cairo itself. She had intended to visit there tomorrow, when the weather report looked decidedly iffy. She thought now she ought to get there this afternoon, just as soon as the carabinieri were finished with her.
"Signorina, I am Captain Brazzi." A tall, wiry man with a shock of suspiciously black hair stood to attention in front of her, clicking his heels as though saluting his own superior.
"Professore," muttered his young subordinate, flashing an apologetic look at Yelena.
"Professore," he corrected, "forgive me. You say the men who committed this atrocious theft were Egyptian. What makes you think this?"
She disliked him on sight, partly from the military precision of his bearing that made her think of old Russia and what it had done to her father, but mostly because his obviously dyed hair reminded her of an old tutor of hers from Oxford who had clumsily made a pass at her once, a man old enough to be her grandfather. "I actually said Nubian," she corrected coldly, drawing herself up so that she could look him squarely in the eye. "And I think it because I've worked with Nubians and they have a quite distinct way of pronouncing certain consonantal sounds."
Brazzi gritted his teeth, recognising the kind of strong-willed, opinionated women who had always irritated him, but knowing that if what she said was true, he would not be rid of her just yet and would have to find a way to work with her. "You are a professor of languages?" he hazarded.
Yelena forcibly restrained the withering look she longed to give him. "I'm an iconographer. I work with ancient images of divine subjects," she explained. "But I also speak several languages, and worked in Egypt for some time."
"And have a sharp ear for the nuances, if you can be certain this gang was Nubian, rather than Egyptian," remarked the elder carabiniere acidly. "Most people here today could be no more specific than Arabic or Middle Eastern. What makes you certain?"
"I told you," she said as patiently as she could. "I have spent time in Nubia; their accent is quite distinct. To me, the distinction is as pronounced as I'm sure a man from Rome or Venice would be to you by his accent, as distinct from a local Piedmontese," she suggested, appealing to the man's evident need to feel superior to his subject.
"You speak Arabic perhaps?"
She hesitated, long enough she knew for her hesitation to be meaningful. "Yes, I do," she confessed eventually. "And yes, I did hear him speak something in Arabic, though I fear it won't be very helpful to you in catching him."
"Permit me to be the judge of that, Professore." Brazzi's eyes had narrowed when she faltered in her reply. She, who up until that point had been so assured in her replies, would not hesitate unless it was significant, even if she didn't understand how.
Yelena shrugged. "It won't help," she assured him, hesitating again just long enough to irritate him. "It was just ranting about the supremacy of his people, and how he would bring Doomsday to the western world. Standard terrorist braggadocio, I thought."
"Precisely what did he say?" pressed the carabiniere, knowing that if the two thefts of the past twelve hours were connected, this was no standard terrorist threat.
"I believe his exact words, as far as I could translate them, were: 'She who is the Sacred Heart of Ra will arise, and when She is reborn, She will engulf the world in flames of blood'," she stated baldly, knowing it would mean precisely nothing to Brazzi, and only annoy him further.
The younger carabiniere blanched, recognising the rhetoric of the terrorist's threat but marvelling at the unexpected poetry of it.
"And does this mean anything to you, Professore, with your extensive knowledge of Egyptian and of icons?" asked Brazzi in a bitterly sarcastic tone. "Ra is an Egyptian god, I believe."
Yelena inclined her head. "Bravo," she said equally sarcastically. "Yes, Ra is an Egyptian god. And yes, I recognised his words as a quote from an ancient hymn to Ra, invoking his daughter, who was universally known as Ra's Sacred Heart because she carried out his will on earth. She came to Earth to punish the people who offended Ra, because Ra himself the divine sun could not leave the sky without causing the end of the world."
Brazzi was momentarily nonplussed by the woman's sudden history lesson. "And this means what, exactly? That these terrorists stole the Shroud as a punishment for some perceived wrong they have endured? That they want to destroy the world?"
"In a manner of speaking, I think that's precisely what they intend," said Yelena grimly, recollecting the fiery glow of fanaticism in the hooded terrorist's eyes as he spoke those prophetic words. "But you'd never believe me if I told you how I think they plan to achieve it."
"Try me," suggested the carabiniere in a sullen tone.
Yelena shrugged. "I think these men are devotees of the cult of the Sacred Heart of Ra, and I think they are mad enough to believe they can resurrect the ancient gods of Egypt using the symbol of the ancient God of the West. The Shroud?" she suggested as she saw the blank looks on both carabinieri's faces. "Don't ask me why they'd want to raise the power of the Sacred Heart if they knew her myths properly they'd probably never dare but I imagine they've stolen the Shroud to prove how powerful their gods are over our own."
"Ridiculous!" exploded the older man. "Devotees of a cult of Egypt? In this day and age? It's absurd. It's impossible."
"About as impossible, one might say, as someone having the audacity to steal the Holy Shroud right from its case under the eyes of hundreds of onlookers?" retaliated Yelena. "Maybe they just wanted to prove they could do it, maybe it bolsters their belief in their gods. Maybe they want it for some particular reason, I don't know. He said something about it being created for a purpose, when he was taunting the priest. Maybe all they want is to create a panic in a built-up area flooded with tourists, so that they can enjoy the chaos. If they are devotees of the Sacred Heart of Ra, that would be right up their street, so to speak."
"Meaning what?"
"All ancient cultures, religions, have war gods, sometimes war goddesses," explained Yelena. "If these people believe as fervently as they seem to in the Sacred Heart of Ra, they are probably not the kind of people you want in your city. Whatever else they want, they won't stop at theft. Did anyone mention the waistcoat of high explosives?" she asked sarcastically, knowing that most of the witnesses to today's shocking events would have mentioned nothing else.
"But why steal the Shroud if they had already threatened to blow it up?" asked the young carabiniere, who had been wondering that for quite some time.
"A bluff," said Brazzi and Yelena at the same time. They eyed each other with something approaching respect for the first time.
"I don't know what exactly these men believe the Shroud is," said Yelena, "but I believe they respect its power as a symbol of life beyond death. What they intend to do with it, I have no idea, but I think somewhere in their belief system if you could discover it you would find something connecting what the Shroud supposedly is and their war goddess."
"What it supposedly is?" asked Brazzi sharply.
Yelena spread her hands pacifically. "I'm afraid this jury's out on that one for now, and it doesn't really matter what I think it is, does it?"
"Ok," said Brazzi testily, "let's leave for a moment what it is, and even why they've taken it. I assume if they're followers of this war goddess you keep mentioning, their next step will be something more direct than theft."
Yelena had already considered that. "They made no direct threat, except for the stuff in Arabic that barely anyone would have understood. Taking the Shroud was high-profile, daring beyond words, and must be the last stage before they unleash whatever they're planning to do next. Given what I know of Ra's vengeful daughter, it won't be pretty."
"Professore," interrupted the younger carabiniere, with a meaningful look at his superior, "you keep saying Ra's daughter, and a war goddess. Would you mean Sekhmet, by any chance?"
Brazzi swore under his breath and glared at the younger man but it was already spoken and could not be taken back.
Yelena felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle. "Yes, I do mean Sekhmet, and if these men believe they're her chosen ones, you don't want to mess with them, believe me," she said ominously.
She saw the look that Brazzi gave his junior officer and the apologetic smile that crossed the lad's face. "I think it's time you told me what's really going on here, don't you?"
section only; the rest must wait for publication!
[June 2010]
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