Impressed with her fighting spirit, Benito stared at Maria. ‘Who would have guessed it? Of all my children, the one with the biggest balls happened to be the girl.’
72
Maria regained consciousness, tied to a chair. Blood trickled from her nose and mouth. Gashes covered her. Shards of glass stuck out of her flesh like porcupine quills. The room was spinning.
She blinked a few times and tried to focus on the blurred figure in front of her. Fog blanketed everything. Her vision. Her memory. Her hearing. The muffled sound of her name filled her head like an echo. Someone was speaking to her. She blinked again, trying to figure out who it was.
‘Maria?’ her father repeated. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘What?’ she slurred. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re home, Maria. After all these years, you’re finally home… I think that calls for a celebration.’ One of the guards handed a bottle of vodka to Benito, who preceded to dump it over Maria’s head. The fiery liquid seeped into her wounds, causing a thunderbolt of pain to surge through her body. He laughed at her screams of agony. ‘Makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?’
Suddenly the details of her situation hit her like an avalanche. She knew where she was and what was happening. Worst of all, she knew who was taunting her. In an instant her longtime nightmares had become a reality. She was sitting in front of her father.
Benito said, ‘I knew I’d see you again someday. Though I never imagined it’d be like this.’
‘Me, either,’ she spat. ‘I was hoping it was at your deathbed.’
He shook his head. ‘Instead, it’s taking place at yours.’
Maria glanced around the room, searching for hope. A weapon. An escape route. Anything helpful. That’s when she noticed Dr Boyd tied up next to her. His chin was slumped against his chest. His shirt was drenched in blood. His eyes and cheeks were swollen from repeated blows to his face. ‘Oh my God! What did you do to him?’
‘I didn’t do anything. My men did quite a bit, though. They got angry when my questions went unanswered.’ He studied the horror in her dark brown eyes. He had seen the same look many years ago during a similar situation, one that had happened in the same room. ‘Hopefully, you’ll be more cooperative than he was.’
‘Don’t count on it.’
He shrugged. ‘Too bad. Then I guess you’ll suffer the same fate as your mother.’
‘My mother? What do you mean? What are you talking about?’
He smiled. He knew she would take the bait. How could she possibly avoid it? ‘Come now, Maria. You don’t really think that she killed herself, do you?
You knew her better than anyone. Did she seem like the suicidal type?’
The room started spinning again, this time from all the questions that were swirling in her head. She’d always had doubts about her mother’s death. Suddenly everything started rushing to the surface. How did her mother die? What really happened? Was she killed? Was it an accident? There were so many things that she wanted to ask, she was unable to speak at all.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Benito offered. ‘I’ll trade you for information. You answer one of my questions and I’ll answer one of yours… How does that sound?’
She nodded, accepting the devil’s terms without hesitation.
He pulled up a chair and sat across from her, hoping to read the truth in her eyes. ‘Who knows about the Catacombs?’
‘Half of Europe,’ she groaned, still feeling the burning in her skin. ‘People have been talking about them for years.’
Benito smirked at her insolence. Then he showed how he really felt by pushing a chunk of glass that jutted out of her thigh. Her scream filled the room, turning his smirk into a smile. ‘This doesn’t have to be difficult. All I’m looking for is the truth. If you give that to me, I’ll give you what you’re looking for… But if you lie, you will suffer… Understood?’
She nodded in understanding.
‘Who knows about the Catacombs?’
‘Just us… Boyd and me… We didn’t trust anyone else… so we kept it to ourselves.’
‘And what of the others? Petr Ulster? Payne and Jones? What do they know?’
‘Nothing,’ she insisted, still catching her breath. ‘They know we were looking for them. They didn’t know we found them.’
Benito nodded. Unbeknownst to Maria, Dr Boyd had blurted the same thing during his interrogation, leaving Benito little choice but to believe them. At least for now. Later he’d let his men take a crack at them with slightly more persuasive methods.
‘My turn,’ she grunted. ‘What happened to my mother?’
‘You don’t waste any time, do you? So I won’t either. Your mother was killed.’
‘Killed? By who?’
‘Sorry, Maria. It’s my turn now. You just used your question.’
‘But -’
‘But nothing!’ He tapped his finger on the shard of glass, just to let her know he was in charge. ‘What did you take from the Catacombs?’
‘A scroll. We took a scroll. Nothing else.’
‘Be more specific,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me about the scroll.’
‘No, that’s another question.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s not a question. It’s an order. Tell me about the scroll.’ He emphasized his point by putting more weight on the shard. ‘Your original answer was incomplete.’
‘Fine,’ she grunted, hating him more by the minute. ‘We found it in a bronze cylinder. In the basement.’
‘In the documents room. Inside a stone chest with his picture on it.’ He pointed to the painting behind the desk. ‘Am I right?’
She nodded, confused. ‘How did you know that?’
‘How? Because that’s where I left it. You don’t actually think that you were the first explorers inside the Catacombs?… That’s amazing. Women can be so naive.’
‘What? Wait a second! You mean you’ve been inside?’
‘Of course I’ve been inside. I discovered them. Or should I say rediscovered them. The Church has known about the Catacombs for years.’
‘But the scroll? If they knew about the scroll, why did they leave it there?’
Benito flashed a patronizing smile. How could she be so dumb? ‘The Church didn’t know about the scroll or the lower level. The Romans sealed the entrance to the staircase two thousand years ago. It stayed closed until I ran tests on the plateau and discovered the basement.’
He grinned at the irony of the scroll’s resting place. Pope Urban VI had selected Orvieto as the perfect spot to protect the Vatican during the Great Schism. Meanwhile an even bigger threat – a document that could shatter Christianity and everything that the Church stood for – sat unnoticed the entire time he used the Catacombs. Benito realized if any of the pope’s men had found the hidden entrance to the staircase, the evidence of Pilate’s plot would’ve been destroyed by the Church in the 1300s. Thankfully, that never happened.