Rachel picked up the airline bag and took it to a spot a few feet down the hill from the hostages.

“No. Farther away,” Travis said.

She slung the bag over her shoulder and took it another twenty yards down the hill, then turned to Travis for approval.

“What is this about?” Catch asked.

Travis, afraid to push his luck, nodded to Rachel and she set the bag down. Now the candlesticks were twenty yards closer to the road that ran around the back of the hill—the road that Augustus Brine would drive when the shit hit the fan.

Rachel returned to the hilltop.

“I’ll need that pencil and paper now,” he said.

“It’s in the bag.” Rachel went back toward the bag.

While she was retrieving the pencil and paper from the airline bag, Travis held the parchments out before him, one at a time, counting to six before he put the first one down and picked up the next. He hoped he had the angle to Robert’s camera right and that his body was not in the way of the lens.

“Here.” Rachel handed him a pencil and a steno pad.

Travis sat down cross-legged with the parchments out in front of him. “Sit down and relax, this is going to take some time.”

He started on the parchment from the second candlestick, hoping to buy some time. He translated the Greek letter by letter, searching his memory first for each letter, then for the meaning of the words. By the time he finished the first line, he had fallen into a rhythm and had to make an effort to slow down.

“Read what he has written,” Catch said.

“But he’s just done one line—” Rachel said.

“Read it.”

Rachel took the steno pad from Travis and read, “Being in possession of the Power of Solomon I call upon the race that walked before man…” She stopped. “That’s all there is.”

“It’s the wrong paper,” Catch said. “Travis, translate the other one. If it’s not right this time, the girl dies.”

“That’s the last time I buy you a Cookie Monster comic book, you scaly fucker.”

Reluctantly Travis shuffled the parchments and began to translate the invocation he had spoken in Saint Anthony’s chapel seventy years before.

Howard Phillips had two Polaroid prints out on the ground before him. He was writing a translation out on a notepad while Augustus Brine and Gian Hen Gian looked over his shoulder. Robert was looking through the camera.

“They’ve made him change parchments. He must have been translating the wrong one.”

Brine said, “Howard, are you translating the one we need?”

“I am not sure yet. I’ve only translated a few lines of the Greek. This Latin passage at the top appears to be a message rather than an invocation.”

“Can’t you just scan it? We don’t have time for mistakes.”