揟his man is your father,?Fuentes said. 揧ou went to a lot of trouble to garner his attention.?
揑 still have Tallard抯 confession and a video of the archbishop leaving the priest抯 house.?
揘ot anymore,?the shorter friar said.
揊riar Rice,?Fuentes noted, 搃s an expert with computers. The Dominicans have fully embraced modern technology. Tell us what you were able to accomplish.?
揑 erased the video and text messages sent to the archbishop from Monsieur de Foix抯 computer and phone. I then accessed his cloud server and deleted them from there too. I also deleted a second video of the archbishop leaving the dead priest抯 house. Then I altered the registries to eliminate all references to them. They no longer exist. Anywhere.?
揘o password??Fuentes asked.
揟here was. A complicated series of letters and numbers, but Monsieur de Foix kept them written down on a piece of paper taped under his desk drawer. Not all that imaginative.?
Bernat抯 mind raced. The video of Vilamur at Tallard抯 house, which Andre had captured. He抎 told the younger man to delete it once sent. Maybe he抎 not done so, and a copy still existed.
揝eems you抳e been quite the busy man,?Fuentes said to him.
Bernat motioned with his head toward Vilamur. 揌e抯 a sexual predator, as dangerous as Tallard. You criminally violated every one of those women, including my mother.?
Vilamur started to speak, but Fuentes held up a hand. 揟his is no longer about the archbishop.?
揑t is entirely about that bastard,?he spit out.
揟his is about the Vultures.?
揟hen you抮e wasting your time. I know nothing of them. I was told they would get your attention, and that information proved correct.?
揑 agree,?Fuentes said. 揧ou absolutely have my attention.?
Chapter 53
Kelsey continued to study the twelve panels for the altarpiece. Thanks to computer imaging she was able to lay them out flat on the screen, side by side, in perfect proportion, as Jan van Eyck initially created them. But since 1934 the work had not been complete. Here, on her screen, for the first time anywhere, was the actual, cleaned, restored Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in all its glory. What a sight. And by comparing the original Just Judges from the fifteenth century with the 1945 reproduction she抎 noticed something.
Small. Relatively insignificant.
Or was it?
The Just Judges displayed ten men on horseback. Who were they? Art historians had debated that for centuries. Were they burghers from van Eyck抯 time? Other princes? Dukes? The only thing experts seemed to agree upon was that two of them were the van Eyck brothers. The one most prominent, in the center, wearing a blue cloak and ermine hat, striding on a white horse was Hubert van Eyck. Right behind him in a brown robe and another fur-trimmed hat was Jan. No reliable images of the van Eycks actually existed, though many historians think Jan added his face to several of his private commissions. Still, the general consensus was that the van Eyck brothers were there, part of the Just Judges.
What she抎 noticed on the original, under high resolution, was that two of the ten faces were identical. Which was not the case in the reproduction. All ten faces were clearly different. From what she抎 read about the reproduction, Jef Van der Veken changed some of the faces, adding in contemporary public figures from his time, including Belgian抯 then king Leopold. From a close look at the reproduction she saw that was indeed the case. The ten faces were all different. But on the original, eight were different, and two were the same. When Van der Veken created his reproduction, it would have been hard to determine much detail in the faces, given the amount of dirt and grime that had invaded the panels by the 1930s. So when Van der Veken painted over he just fashioned the faces as he pleased. It was, after all, intended as a mere reproduction.
The car kept speeding down the highway, Sisters Ellen and Isabel in the front seat, not bothering her.
No way existed to contact anyone. No email accounts were associated with the laptop. Same with text. No icon led to any texting platform. But she did not feel the need. She was no longer afraid or angry. Instead, she was interested and engaged.
She focused on the two identical faces from the original Just Judges.
Both were clean-shaven, and one wore a green robe with a silver-and-blue fur hat. He was facing ninety degrees to the right, his gaze across, straight toward the center panel. Both hands were visible, the left empty, the right holding a short stick balanced atop the index finger, held in place by the thumb. It pointed in the direction the face was looking.
To the right.
The face was the same as the image behind Hubert van Eyck. The one generally believed to be Jan van Eyck.