August remembered the day exactly as it had happened. Twenty minutes had expired from the clock. None of them—not he or April or even Charlie—could think of any way to escape. They’d been sealed in a box, that box was going to explode, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. With only a few moments left, they heard the door being unlocked. At first, they thought it was one of the FBI agents coming to put them out of their mental anguish. The door opened. It was an FBI agent, but his aim wasn’t to kill, but to save. “Come with me, right now,” Meng said. The three of them resisted at first, despite Meng’s assurances that he was trying to help them. He had disabled the sensors injected into their bodies, he explained, but there was no way to deactivate the bomb, meaning that it was still about to go off. In the end, they had no choice but to follow him. Luckily, he was true to his word.

“We never would have gotten out of there if it wasn’t for him,” August said. “He disappeared a few days later. I still have no idea who he’s working for, but it sure isn’t the Order of the Dragon.”

“I should have killed him while I had the chance,” Xandria said. “He caused problems every step of the way, I just didn’t know it. Was it Meng who figured out that the treasure was hidden here?”

August smiled. “Actually, you figured it out for me.”

The gun dropped to Xandria’s side.

“I couldn’t help thinking that it was strange for the Order of the Dragon to have a male leader, when it acknowledged the existence of a monotheistic female deity.”

Xandria didn’t speak.

“Cornelius was a fraud, wasn’t he?”

“As are most male leaders. How did you know?”

“I had to go back to the illuminations to figure it out. I’d seen them long enough to recall them clearly. I sketched them out and looked for any clues that I might have missed before, using the new set of criteria. At first, I didn’t see anything, until—and it sounds so silly to me now—I got rid of the illuminations.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The illuminations were there to distract from the truth,” August said. “It made sense. Gutenberg was a man of letters and words; he would never hide a secret in pictures. The initials. That was the key. I wrote them down in the order the journal listed them: S, M, S, A, N, A, E, L, I. Nonsense, right? I looked up each of the occurrences in the Vulgate and discovered that the initials used for some of the illuminations were incorrect. I knew better than to assume it was a printing mistake: this was the message Gutenberg was trying to get to us.”