“Okay. Now we need a plan,” August said. “Charlie, since you’re the only one without handcuffs, you’re going to be in charge of the laptop.”

“All right!”

“Also, you’re going to have to help us flip pages. Put that red book in front of your mom.”

Charlie slid the book over to her.

“What is it?” April asked.

“Gutenberg’s journal.” August explained the connection between it and the illuminated pages.

“So it’s real after all?”

“The binding is right. The foxing seems consistent for the age. It could easily be a contemporary with some of the incunabula I’ve picked up over the years.”

“Incu-what?” Charlie asked.

“It’s an old book,” April said.

“You’re the best German reader here,” August said to April, which he hoped she’d take as the compliment he intended, considering that his own German wasn’t too shabby. “I don’t have the big picture on all this yet. We’ll need to study the journal a bit more.”

“I know some German!” Charlie chimed in.

“You know how to count in German,” August said. “That’s not going to help us much.”

“You should be more encouraging!” April said. “He knows more than you think he does.”

“I know French too!”

April seemed surprised. “Who taught you French?”

“Mrs. Laroche.”

“Who is Mrs. Laroche?”

“She plays poker with Grandma Rose on Thursday afternoons.”

August smiled. “This just gets better and better.”

“We’ll talk more about this later,” April said to her son. She turned to August. “Which entries did you want me to look at?”

“Any that mention the books of the Bible linked to the illuminations,” August said. He gave her the list of books in the same order Xandria had on the plane: 1 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Romans, Judges, John, Daniel, Maccabees, Luke, and Genesis.

Charlie flipped through the pages as April scanned them. His hand slipped, and the book fell open to the last page.

“What’s this?” April asked, staring at a list of names scrawled there. “Twenty-one names. Original members of the Order of the Dragon.” She read the list aloud.

“I’m guessing that each of those people commissioned Gutenberg to create a copy of his Bible for them,” August said.

“And that’s where he hid the illuminations.”

“Right in their hands. But three separate copies of his Bible were needed to understand the secret meaning.” August pointed to the nine illuminated pages on the table, which were laid out in a three-by-three matrix. “The pages on my right came from the copy owned by the Morgan Library. The pages in the middle came from my copy. And the pages to my left came from—”

“The Library of Congress,” April said. “It’s remarkable that these pages all came from Bibles originally owned by members of the Order of the Dragon.”