The Eye of Moses - Vatican Knights Series 22 (2020) by Rick Jones (best novels to read for students .txt) 📕

“I know you will.”

The man was so calm and so contained with a skinny range of emotions, Somerset had come to realize that this stranger was more than capable of committing murder without a conscionable pang of guilt.

“What do you want?” Somerset asked him. “Why are you here?”

After a moment of dramatic pause, the stranger finally said, “I want to know where the key is.”

“The key? What key? I have no idea what you’re talking—”

The man turned the Glock on Somerset’s wife and pulled the trigger, the dampened sound no louder than a spit. A moment before she fell back with the force of the round’s impact, a bullet hole magically appeared in the center of her forehead as a bloodless wound.

As Somerset’s daughter cried out, the assassin cupped a hand around her mouth to shush her. With his other hand, he directed the weapon at Somerset. “This could have been avoided,” he said. “You could have saved her life if you had told me what I needed to know, Mr. Copernicus. Her death is on you.”

Somerset’s vision began to turn purple along the edges before darkness started to inch inward. Then his legs appeared to take on a boneless wobble to them and threatened to buckle.

“Perhaps you should sit down, Mr. Copernicus.”

Appearing adrift with his wife on the floor and her eyes at half-mast, Somerset fell into a chair and cradled his head within his hands, the man finally breaking.

“Come-come, Mr. Copernicus. You still have a lovely daughter, yes?”

Thick strands of hair bled through the gaps between Somerset’s fingers, as he clenched his pompadour mane. “Please don’t hurt my baby.” The man sounded so lost and empty; all he could cling to was marginal hope that everything would work itself out in the end. “I’m begging you.”

The assassin turned to Somerset’s daughter. “What’s your name sweetheart?”

Through hitches and sobs, she answered, “Amy.”

“Amy.” He nodded at this as though he approved. Then: “That’s a pretty name for a pretty girl. How old are you, Amy?”

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen. A teenager. How about that?” Then he returned his focus on Somerset, who was watching every move of the assassin from eyes that had a hot and rheumy thickness to them. “A very pretty girl for thirteen, Mr. Copernicus. For sure. Can you even begin to imagine how beautiful she would be at twenty-one?” After a beat, the stranger added, “That is, of course, if she lives to reach that momentous time of her life, which is completely up to you.”

“Do I have your word on that?”

“My word is as good as my bond, Mr. Copernicus. All I ask is that you give me what I want. It’s that simple.”

Somerset began to size up the situation and saw nothing but dead ends. His only option was to concede and hope for the best.

“Are you ready, Mr. Copernicus?” When the stranger pressed the point of his weapon harder against Amy’s temple, she arched her back and gave off a mewling sound. In turn, the man with the Glock spoke softly into her ear, his voice calming and soothing. “As your father promised, my dear, everything will be fine once he tells me what I need to know.” Then he turned to Somerset and with a slight edge to his tone, he asked, “Where’s the key?”

After committing the sin of hesitating, which caused the assassin to flex his trigger finger, Wendall J. Somerset told the man everything about the key, its location, and how to resurrect it from its grave.

Moments later, the assassin left Somerset’s flat in Mayfair untrue to his word.

He made sure that there were no loose ends.

CHAPTER TWO

Collégiale Saint-Laurent

Salon-de-Provence, France

Early Morning Hours, Eighteen days Ago

Close to the Collégiale Saint-Laurent in Salon-de-Provence in France, a man dressed entirely in black walked along the streets during the early hours of the morning carrying a weighted satchel. As he walked beneath the sodium-vapor lamps, his shadow waxed and waned as he moved from one cone of light and into another. The air was damp and chilly, at least enough for him to hike the collar of his coat around his neck. At so early an hour when the streets were vacant, the clicks from his footfalls echoed.

When he reached the door to the Collégiale Saint-Laurent, the man removed a lock pick Snap Gun from the inner pocket of his coat, inserted the points into the lock, and engaged the device. Multiple muted clicks sounded off as the trigger-powered needles maneuvered through the locking mechanism to strike all the pins at once, unlocking it. Once the Snap Gun did what it was invented to do, the man returned the unit to his pocket, grabbed his satchel, and entered the ossuary.

Walking down a cramped hallway, he could see the aura of burning candles peeking out from a doorway at the end. The moment he entered the chamber—which was heavy with the scent of melted wax—he noted the number of candles that burned close to a tomb.

Against the far wall was a memorializing plaque in French in regard to Michel de Nostredame, who died in 1566, and his wonders of foresight. Here were the remains of Nostradamus who had been reinterred inside this tomb in Salon-de-Provence, after having been transferred from a Franciscan chapel.

Moving away from the honorary plaque and toward an ornately designed tomb, the man searched for the seams between the tomb’s body and its lid. But he quickly discovered that the stone cover was tight-fitting as if hermetically sealed.

Opening his satchel, he removed a crowbar, a hammer, a chisel, then laid them aside. First, he attempted to soften the lid’s grip by jamming the crowbar between the crack where the lid and body met, then working the crowbar as if he were cranking the handle of a well. Seeing that he was getting nowhere, he grabbed the hammer and chisel and began to break away the cement that held the lid firm.

With the echoes of his hammering sounding off louder than he wanted,