The Templar Salvation (2010) Read Online Free PDF Page A

join them. He shook the man’s hand with a cordial half smile, accepting that he should have expected it, given his urgent request for an audience—and given the bureau for which he worked.
    “What can we do for you, Agent Reilly?” the cardinal asked, ushering them into the plush armchairs by the fireplace. “You said you’d explain when you got here.”
    Reilly hadn’t had much time to think about how he would play this, but the one thing he did know was that he couldn’t tell them everything. Not if he wanted to make sure they’d agree to his request.
    “Before I say anything else, I need you to know I’m not here in any professional capacity. This isn’t the FBI sending me out here. It’s a personal request. I need to be sure you’re okay with that.” He’d asked to take a couple of days of personal leave after Tess’s call. No one back at Federal Plaza—not Aparo, his partner, or Jansson, their boss—knew he was in Rome. Which, he thought, may have been a mistake, but that was how he’d decided to play it.
    Brugnone brushed his caveat away. “What can we do for you , Agent Reilly?” he repeated, this time emphasizing the “you.”
    Reilly nodded gratefully. “I’m in the middle of a delicate situation,” he told his host. “I need your help. There’s no way around that. But I also need your indulgence in not asking me for more information than I can give you at this moment. All I can tell you is that lives are at stake.”
    Brugnone exchanged an unsettled look with his Vatican colleagues. “Tell us what you need.”
    “Professor Sharafi here needs some information. Information that, he believes, he can only find in your records.”
    The Iranian adjusted his glasses, and nodded.
    The cardinal studied Reilly, clearly discomfited by his words. “What kind of information?”
    Reilly leaned forward. “We need to consult a specific fond in the archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”
    The men shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Reilly’s request for help was looking less benign by the second. Contrary to popular belief, there was nothing particularly secretive about the Vatican Secret Archives; the word “secret” was only meant in the context of the archives being part of the pope’s personal “secretariat,” his private papers. The archive Reilly needed access to, however, the Archivio Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei —the Archive of the Inquisition—was something else altogether. It held the Vatican archives’ most sensitive documents, including all the files related to heresy trials and book bannings. Access to its shelves was carefully restricted, to keep scandalmongers at bay. The events its fondi covered—a fond being a body of records that dealt with a specific issue—were hardly the papacy’s finest hour.
    “Which fond would that be?” the cardinal asked.
    “The Fondo Scandella ,” Reilly answered flatly.
    His hosts seemed momentarily baffled, then relaxed at the mention. Domenico Scandella was a relatively insignificant sixteenth-century miller who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. His ideas about the origins of the universe were deemed heretical, and he was burned at the stake. What Reilly and the Iranian professor could want from the transcripts of his trial didn’t raise any alarms. It was a harmless request.
    The cardinal studied him, a perplexed expression lining his face. “That’s all you need?”
    Reilly nodded. “That’s it.”
    The cardinal glanced at the other two Vatican officials. They shrugged with indifference.
    Reilly knew they were in.
    Now came the hard part.

    BESCONDI AND DELPIERO ACCOMPANIED REILLY and his Iranian companion across the Belvedere Courtyard to the entrance of the Apostolic Library, where the archives were housed.
    “I have to admit,” the prefect of the archives confessed with a nervous chortle, “I feared you were after something that would be more difficult to … honor .”
    “Like what?” Reilly asked,