There’s a monk waiting by the jetty. Rolan tenses, not wholly trusting what we may find even here, though Jester has assured him that she spoke with the monastery from a secure line. When the boat docks, however, he makes no move to follow me ashore.

“They would not welcome me here if they knew what or who I am,” he says. “I will wait here. Keep your phone on.”

I tell myself I should take it as reassurance that he is not with me only to kill me the moment I lay eyes on whatever I may find here. But as the monk meets me, I am full of nerves. The clock is ticking, each minute too brief. And we have a long road to take in the two days before us.

“I am Brother Daniel,” the monk says to me. “It is an honor. I have been expecting you, hoping you would arrive in my lifetime.”

But my attention has gone to the statue of Saint Francis in front of the monastery. He is taming a wolf. I instantly remember the picture I drew on the flight from Chicago—the German shepherd, which was not a dog at all but a wolf in the circle I recognize now as an island.

Somewhere, in the course of the letters written to myself, before, I had deciphered this location.

Why had I never come?

As we enter the monastery, I glance up at the crest over the door, note the crossed arms, the tao cross behind them. The banner over them both is Glagolitic.

“What does it say?” I ask Daniel as we pass beneath it.

“ ‘Peace and good,’ ” he says, as we enter the shade of the courtyard’s colonnade.

We pass down a locked corridor to the last of a series of storerooms. It is sealed with a biometric lock.

He actually trembles as he opens it, and I feel for him, this man with the responsibility of curating secrets like a collection of poisons.

“What I am about to show you has cost many lives,” Daniel says, bolting the door behind us as an industrial light flickers on overhead. “As of this week, I am the last living guardian of this information.”

My heart is drumming, and twice I think it may actually stop as he unlocks a series of drawers and begins to produce handwritten letters, testimonies, personal accounts, and news articles, some of them so old that they threaten to crumble, others printed as recently as months or weeks ago. Each of them goes on a long, broad table that can never accommodate the weight of so much corruption. A story of slow rise from peasant beginnings fueled by ambition and revenge.

I sit down to read.

It takes hours. Too many. And I actually shudder to think of Nikola at the monastery on Cres just days ago, so nearby.

And then I remember Rolan, waiting all this time.