Silvio Vitale, a slim man with a pencil mustache and dressed in a black suit, the head of the organization, was sitting in the leather swivel chair behind the desk, a number of sheets of paper in front of him. As Toscanelli entered the room he stood up and shook hands in a perfunctory manner and then gestured to the chair that stood to one side of the desk.

Toscanelli took a step over to it and sat down, then pointed at the heavy wooden upright armchair standing in the center of a square of rubber matting that had been placed on top of the office carpet. On one side of the chair was a body bag, unrolled and open, ready to receive a corpse.

"Who?" he asked simply. "And why?"

"Silvrini," Vitale replied. "You do not need to know the reason."

"I think I do," Toscanelli said, chancing his arm. Vitale's short temper and capricious mood swings were legendary. "He was one of my team on the last job, in Venice. As far as I was aware he's a good operative."

"He was, certainly," Vitale agreed, emphasizing the tense of the word, then paused for a moment before nodding. "Very well. With knowledge comes responsibility, so you can perform the duty. He was detected arranging a meeting with a senior member of the Carabinieri here in Rome, apparently intending to provide information about those two eliminations that took place in Ostia last year. The two men that you executed, in fact, so his intended betrayal was very personal to you, Marco."

Toscanelli's male model face-he had elegant, regular features, high cheekbones, a wide mouth, brown eyes, and thick, curly black hair-hardened immediately. "You have proof?"

Vitale nodded and handed him a slim folder.

Toscanelli opened it and scanned the contents, the result of a short surveillance operation that had been performed on Silvrini after suspicions were raised about some of his actions.

"He was stupid," Vitale commented. "He used a disposable mobile phone to make the call, but he used it inside the apartment that we provided for him. He should have known it was bugged."

"Yes, he should," Toscanelli agreed. "He certainly should. Does he know yet?"

"No, but he's waiting outside."

Vitale bent forward across his desk and depressed the button on the intercom system.

"Bring him in now," he ordered.

A few moments later the door opened and a man wearing a light gray suit stepped inside the room. He took one look at the chair, the body bag, and the rubber mat and immediately turned away, trying to leave.

But two other men had entered the room behind him. They, too, were smartly dressed, but they were built like nightclub bouncers, and Silvrini had no chance of getting past them. They grabbed his arms and half dragged, half carried him to the chair and forced him down onto the seat. One man held him in position while the other secured his wrists and ankles to the arms and legs of the chair using plastic cable ties that were easy to use and as near unbreakable as made no difference, pulling them tight with pliers. Then both men stepped back and stood with their backs to the door, waiting impassively.

Silvrini was whimpering in terror, an incoherent muttering that was more babbling than recognizable speech. A dark stain suddenly appeared on the front of his trousers, a clear indication that he had lost control of his bladder and, in Toscanelli's eyes, probably an equally clear confirmation of his guilt.

Vitale waited without speaking, his hostile gaze fixed on the bound man in front of him, until Silvrini finally fell silent.

"You know why you are here, why this is happening to you," Vitale said at last, a statement rather than a question.

Silvrini shook his head violently, and his voice, when he spoke, was pleading, almost whining.

"No, no. I have no idea. You must believe me. This has to be a mistake. Please, Silvio. You know me."

"I do," Vitale agreed, "and it was a mistake."

For the briefest of instants the expression on the bound man's face showed relief, but Vitale's next words clearly dashed any hopes he might still have harbored.

"It was a mistake, and you made it. When you decided to betray the organization that employs you, it was the act of an idiot to make the call to the Carabinieri from the living room of an apartment owned by that organization."

"But I didn't, Silvio. I promise you, I didn't. The brotherhood is my life, you know that. I would never-"

Vitale said nothing, but simply held up his finger for silence. Then he depressed a button on the console in front of him, and suddenly Silvrini's unmistakable voice filled the room, the surveillance tape playing through the hidden speakers of a stereo system. The recording was short but utterly conclusive, the Italian telling the unidentified police officer that he had information about the two unsolved murders, and arranging a meeting in central Rome for the following afternoon-that very day, in fact.

"I wonder how long he'll sit there in that cafe, waiting for you," Vitale said quietly. "Because you won't be at the rendezvous, obviously. But I expect you already guessed that."

"It's not-" Silvrini began.

"It's not what, exactly? Not an attempt to betray this most holy of orders? Not a direct attack upon the brotherhood?"

Sivrini shook his head again. "Not-"

"Enough," Vitale snapped, and gestured to the two men standing in front of the door. "We'll finish this right now."

Both men strode forward. One held Silvrini's head still while the other wrapped a length of broad adhesive tape over his mouth, silencing the man.

Vitale nodded in satisfaction, then stood up. "Let us pray for absolution for our brother before punishment is administered," he said.

Toscanelli stood up as well, and the four men bowed their heads. Vitale made the sign of the cross and then led them in a short prayer, humbly asking God to accept the soul of their soon-to-be-departed brother, Alberto Silvrini.

The bound man clearly knew what awaited him, and was thrashing from side to side in the chair in a frantic attempt to escape, but the plastic bonds held him firmly in place and the chair was too heavy to be toppled over by his actions: it had been used for similar purposes on numerous occasions in the past, and had been designed to be very stable. All his violent action achieved was to open up cuts on his wrists where the plastic bonds dug into his skin.

As the prayer finished, Vitale made the sign of the cross again and resumed his seat behind the desk. He bent down, opened one of the drawers, and took out a digital video camera and a tripod. He spread the legs of the tripod, attached the camera to the platform at the top, and then adjusted its position until the figure of the helpless man, who was still writhing and struggling to get free, filled the viewfinder. Then he switched on the camera, and waited until he was sure it was recording before he spoke again, the tone of his voice almost regretful, his words measured and carefully considered, after the manner of a judge. Which was, after all, what he was in this case, essentially a triumvirate in the person of a single individual: judge, jury, and executioner.

"Alberto Silvrini. You have been condemned out of your own mouth and by your own words and actions. You have attempted to betray the brotherhood in the most diabolical and underhand way, and for that the sentence is death. But because of the nature of your offense, that mercy will not be granted immediately. You are to suffer before you die, but in accordance with that most ancient of all the tenets that we hold dear, not a drop of your blood will be spilled. Rest assured that you will die whole. Your suffering and death will be recorded for posterity and for our archives, and will serve as a warning to any other members of this brotherhood who might ever contemplate following the unfortunate example you have set."

Hearing his sentence of death pronounced in such a cold and dispassionate manner had the effect of making Silvrini redouble his efforts to escape, but to no purpose.

Vitale glanced at the two men now standing beside the wooden chair and nodded to them. "You may begin. On my count. One every minute."

What followed was clinical in its brutal efficiency.

The man standing on Silvrini's left reached down, seized the bound man's little finger, and pulled it steadily backward, bracing his thumb just above the knuckle joint as a fulcrum. Silvrini went rigid, his face reddening and flushing as the pain began to bite. There was a sudden dull crack as the bone snapped, and even through the rudimentary gag Silvrini's howl of anguish could be heard. His body slumped against his bonds, his head dropping forward and tears springing from his eyes.

Precisely sixty seconds later, the man standing on Silvrini's right performed exactly the same operation on the bound man's right hand. And so it continued until every one of his fingers was broken and swollen. The thumbs were more difficult because the bones were thicker and stronger, but the two men had come prepared and used pliers to shatter those digits as well.

By the time they'd finished, Silvrini was virtually unconscious from the incredible pain he was suffering, and Vitale ordered Toscanelli to wait until he had recovered slightly before completing the procedure.

"It would be a mercy to kill him now," Vitale said quietly, staring at the bound figure slumped in the chair in front of him, "before he's fully conscious, but we're not really in the mercy business."

A few minutes later Silvrini lifted his head to stare at Vitale. His whole face was red, his cheeks streaked with tears and the agony in his bloodshot eyes clear for all to see.

"Good," Vitale said, "he's awake again. You may begin, Marco."

Toscanelli nodded and stepped forward. He paused for a moment beside the prisoner and stared down at him.

"You've been a real disappointment to me, Alberto," he said. "So this won't be quick, and certainly not as quick as you'd like."

Silvrini looked up and shook his head.

Toscanelli flashed him a brilliant smile and stepped around behind the chair, where he was handed a loop of rope and a short length of wood by one of the men standing there. The chair had a high back, and in the center of the top rail a hole had been bored. Toscanelli fed the loop of rope through the hole and dropped it over Silvrini's head, then slid the length of wood into the smaller loop remaining at the other end.

He gave the rope a sharp tug, pulling Silvrini's head and neck against the chair back, then twisted the wood to start the garrote working. He increased the pressure on the wood, watching critically as the noose started to tighten around the man's neck. Silvrini began to choke, and he released the pressure a couple of turns, allowing the man to breathe again before once more twisting the rope tighter. He did that twice more, taking Silvrini to the point where he couldn't breathe and then easing the pressure, then stepped around to face his victim once more.

He lifted the doomed man's chin and stared into his face, and smiled again as Silvrini forced his eyes open for the last time.

"This is it, Alberto, so take your last breath."

Then he stepped back behind the chair and twisted the rope again, taking his time as he slowly and steadily increased the pressure. Silvrini struggled and choked as the rope began to bite, his body thrashing hopelessly, helplessly, from side to side.

Toscanelli increased the pressure, turning the wood in the loop until it would turn no more, and held it there, watching critically as the man in front of him slowly died. His struggles grew weaker and weaker until finally he stopped moving altogether, but still Toscanelli maintained the pressure, making sure he finished the job completely. He held the wood in place for a two full minutes after Silvrini's last convulsive shudder, just to make absolutely sure.

Only then did he release his grip and step back, away from the chair, before moving forward to stare down for a moment at the dead man's face, the skin an unpleasant mixture of shades of red and black, the eyes open and staring blindly ahead. Then he strode back across the room and again sat down in the chair beside Vitale's desk, to allow room for the two enforcers to complete their work.

"Sometimes," Vitale said, watching as the two men cut through the plastic ties and lifted Silvrini's body off the chair and lowered it none too gently into the body bag, "I think you enjoy that kind of thing just a little too much."

Toscanelli shook his head, reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket, took out an oblong packet, and opened one end. He extracted an unusually long and thin cigarette with a thin gold band around the filter, put it in his mouth, and lit it.

"Treachery is the only crime you can't forgive," he said, then drew deeply on the cigarette and narrowed his eyes against the smoke. "In fact, in my book, it's more than a crime. I believe it's a mortal sin. If the decision had been mine, I would have broken every bone in his body before finishing him off. What about his family? Had he any close relatives?"

"No wife, of course, just like the rest of us, but he had a sister and a brother as well, at least until about two hours ago. The sister lives in Modena, and he seems to have had no recent contact with her, but his brother was here in Rome. I sent out another team to take care of him as well, just in case he had let anything slip. We can't afford any loose ends, and particularly not at the moment."

"Why now especially?"

"Because we've had a definite hit," Silvio Vitale replied.

10.

Dartmouth, Devon "So you live above the shop, as they say?" Mallory asked.

"Yes. In fact, I bought this part of the building," Robin replied, leading the way up the metal spiral staircase. "I needed both a shop and somewhere to live, because I really didn't want to have to commute to work, and this seemed to fit the bill. It's pretty cramped, but it works for me."

"It must have been expensive, the commercial premises and accommodation. Selling books must pay well."

Robin glanced back at him over her shoulder.

"Not as well as I'd like," she replied. "But I had a small inheritance from an aunt, and that was enough to cover the deposit and start the business. For the rest of it, just like everyone else these days I've had to sell most of my soul and almost all my income to the bank on the corner of High Street. But I'm building up a customer base, mostly people like you who are interested in specific and unusual subjects, and so far I'm showing a reasonable profit."

She stopped on the metal landing at the top of the external staircase and took a set of keys out of her handbag. She selected a Yale, slid it into the lock, and opened the door.

"The loo's that door there, if you want it," she said, "and my office is the one where the door's open. I'll put the kettle on, but the coffee's only instant," she warned.

"That's fine with me," Mallory said, heading for the lavatory. "Frankly I can't tell the difference."

Five minutes later, they were sitting on opposite sides of the desk, two mugs of coffee steaming but largely forgotten beside them as they stared at the black leather book safe and its two rows of protruding spikes. Both of them were wearing white cotton gloves at Robin's insistence, just in case her suspicion about the spikes originally being poisoned was correct. The pair she'd found for Mallory was the biggest she had, but they were still an extremely tight fit.

He held his hand horizontally over one of the rows of spikes, comparing the thickness of his palm to their length, and whistled softly.

"My hand is a lot bigger than yours," he said, "but I think that if I'd been holding the book safe when it was triggered, those spikes would have gone straight through my palm and come out the other side. They must be nearly two inches long."

"According to my ruler, they measure just over one inch and three quarters."

Mallory nodded, then bent to look even more closely at the two separate mechanisms that were built into the relic: the catches that held the lid closed and the triggering mechanism that was designed to fire the spikes. Then he stared at the slim hole cut into the side of the book safe opposite to the spine, where lengths of paper had been attached to look like the pages of a book.

"That opening," he said after a few moments, "doesn't look to me like it was intended to accept any kind of key that I've ever seen. But that shape is very familiar to me."

"It is? What is it?"

"It looks like the top of a sheath for a sword, or maybe a dagger. It's like a flattened oval, thicker in the middle and then tapering on both sides to where the sharpened edges of the blade would be. And there's something else as well."

He reached over to the pen rest on the edge of Robin's desk and picked up a pencil. He used its sharpened end to point to two small raised areas in the metal on the inside of the book safe, one above and the other below the center of the flattened oval.

"I don't know how much you know about stabbing weapons," he said, "but the blades of most knives and swords intended for stabbing rather than hacking include a grooved channel that's commonly known as the blood gutter, though it should properly be called a fuller, after the blacksmithing tool used to make it. Most people think it's intended to allow a blade to be pulled out of a body more easily, but actually it allows the weight of the blade to be reduced without affecting its strength. I think those two bits of metal were probably intended to fit inside the fullers on a double-edged blade. A particular blade, I mean, so the keyhole, that narrow oval slot, has been designed to prevent the wrong knife blade from being inserted. If that isn't the case, then I've got no idea why they're there."

"You're right," Robin said. "What you say does make sense. And I suppose the mere fact that the 'key,' if you like, was a dagger-a weapon that most men in medieval times wore around their waist every day as a matter of course, just as a part of their normal dress-would have added another layer of protection for the book safe. One dagger, I assume, looks very much like any other dagger, and somebody trying to crack the secret of the book safe wouldn't have any idea there was anything special about one particular weapon. They'd have been able to hide the key in plain sight, if you like."

Mallory was still bending forward over the desk, closely examining the mechanism inside the object.

"I think I see how this works now," he said.

He gestured again with the point of the pencil. "Look here, on both sides of the slot where the blade of the dagger would be inserted. There are two metal bars, one on each side. As the correct blade was slid inside, its edges would have pressed against these two bars, which are hinged. If you move them outward, then the opposite ends would have fitted into these two slots, here"-he pointed at two rectangular cutouts on the pair of metal levers that were attached to the rows of spikes-"and that would have locked the mechanism and prevented it from being triggered. It's really quite sophisticated. Whoever made this had both time and talent, and was also pretty good at metalwork."

Mallory put both hands inside the book safe, rested his thumbs against one of the bars carrying the spikes, and his fingers around the one on the opposite side, and then squeezed them together. The springs were strong, but so were his fingers, and in a few moments his efforts were rewarded by a distinct double click as he reset the booby trap.

"Pardon me for asking," Robin said, "but why have you just done that?"

"For safety," Mallory replied. "If you're right about the age and the history of that thing, the booby trap wasn't triggered for several hundred years, and in all that time the spikes stayed safely inside the book safe. Leaving them sticking out like that is pretty much an invitation for somebody to hurt themselves, so I think it's actually safer if the trap is reset. I don't suppose you'll be sticking a screwdriver in it again."

Robin thought about that for a moment and then nodded.

"You're probably right," she agreed, "and it'll certainly be easier to store it in my safe like that."

Mallory stretched out his hand to the rolled parchment, but Robin stopped him.

"Don't touch it," she snapped, and Mallory drew his hand back as if he'd been burned.

"I can't do much if you won't let me see the manuscript," he said, sounding hurt.

"Sorry. It's just that it's very fragile and you need experience to know how to handle something like that."

"I'm not an idiot. I've been studying old documents in churches and libraries for the last year or so, tracing my family history. I do know something about this."

Robin shook her head.