No Escape by Julie Moffett

 

Chapter Thirty-Six

 

Gio

 

Good. I was done with all the talking and ready to get to the action.

We could do this. An important part of the rigorous and difficult training for the Italian special operations unit involved the mental game. Each soldier had to be confident, truly confident, in his or her own capabilities and the abilities of all team members to perform in order to succeed.

The tougher the challenge, the better.

Although my team didn’t have Romeo or his brilliant wife, there was no way I was going to be the weak link and give him the pleasure of needling me for the rest of my life if I lost my luxury honeymoon. He’d do it, too—I knew it. Plus, my buddies back at the unit would invariably find out, probably from my brothers, if I didn’t relieve a billionaire of some of his money when I had the chance.

Nope. No way was I going to fail.

Vittoria must have known what I was thinking, because she sidled up to me, slipping her hand in mine. “You don’t want to be ‘little Gio’ for the rest of your life, right?” she murmured softly. “You’re just as capable as them, so prove it.”

I set my jaw and squeezed her hand. “I will.”

We followed the gamemaster down a corridor to a large room with huge double doors inset with stained glass windows. Peering through the glass, I could see the room was a large library. The gamemaster unlocked the room with an old-fashioned key and ushered us in.

“Wow,” Alessa uttered as we looked around. “What a gorgeous library.”

The room was two stories high, but windowless. Dark wooden bookshelves stretched to the ceiling along the wall to the left of the door, on the left and back walls, and along the right wall, running about a third of the way from the back. Several tall, wheeled ladders mounted on rails provided access to the upper-level books on each wall.

A book lover’s dream.

An interesting glass-front display case containing two dozen World War II-era model airplanes stood along the right wall where the bookcases ended. Next to that was a small library card catalog cabinet. A gigantic map of the Mediterranean region set into a thick wooden frame hung to the right of the cabinet. A smattering of sofas, armchairs, end tables, and lamps filled out the room.

A waist-high bookcase, holding a magnificent antique scale and flanked by two taller bookshelves, took up much of the center of the room. The scale was clearly meant to be the focal point of the room, so I walked closer to get a better look. Upon closer inspection, I discovered it was made of bronze and had a balance point in the center. A metal arm extended approximately two feet to each side, and, as of this moment, the right arm was raised and ended in a single metal post pointing upward. The left side had an identical post, but four round weights of different sizes and colors were sitting on the post. The scale was clearly unbalanced, so the left bar touched the top of the bookcase.

The gamemaster gathered the rest of our group around the scale. “I want you to know that it’s quite impressive you’ve successfully completed the first four challenges,” he said. “I warn you, this one will be more difficult than the previous ones, as will the escape room your companions will attempt concurrently. I’ve been authorized to tell you that no group has ever been as successful as you have been to date. Given your success, I doubt you need further motivation. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how you adapt to the increased difficulty and random team assignments. If you can continue your success, it might force us to reconsider our approach. Good luck. I am eagerly awaiting your performance.”

“Now, a few words of advice,” Brando continued. “This challenge appears simple on the surface. All you must do is use round weights to balance the scale. Once you do so, you must push the red button by the door, and I’ll come verify you’ve completed the challenge. There are few rules. You may not leave the library once the challenge has begun, and you will have only two hours to complete the task.”

He started to leave and then stopped. “Oh, and one more thing. When you balance the weights, you must have at least four weights on the left post. No fewer. Are there any questions?”

Oh sure, I had a million questions. I just didn’t know what they were yet.

“Well, good luck,” Brando said when no one spoke up. “The clock will start as soon as I close the door.”

As soon as he left, we gave each other an uneasy glance and continued to study the scale. The weights on the post were colored—from bottom to top—red, orange, yellow, and green.

Stefan took the top one off the post and held it. “It’s metal.” He tapped the other weights, confirming that they, too, were metal.

I ran my finger over the green weight. Embossed in it was the number two. The yellow weight had a five on it, the orange one a seven, and the red one a nine.

“Could the number equal the weight?” I asked.

Alessa took the weight from Stefan and held it in her palm. Then she removed the green weight. “Well, it feels like the five weight is at least twice the weight of the green one, so I think that’s a good assessment, Gio.”

“Well, if that’s correct, it should make it much easier to calculate the weights we need on each post to balance them,” I said.

“True, but if we must have four weights on the left post, there must be some additional weights somewhere in the library,” Winston pointed out. “There are no weights on the right side.”

Good point. I tried to remember what Romeo had told me Lexi’s father did for a living. Doctor? Lawyer? Something impressive like that.

“I think that’s a good assumption,” I said. “We have to assume there are additional weights hidden somewhere in this room.” I looked around at the thousands of books on the shelves and sighed. “Unfortunately, they could be hidden anywhere.”

“Well, we obviously don’t have time to check every book, so there must be clues that will direct us to weights,” Lexi’s mother, Clarissa, said. “I think we should start going over the room, looking for any clues that might help get us started.”

That sounded like as good a plan as any to me, so we split up the room into sections and started to investigate. Winston and I ended up exploring adjacent areas in the back of the room. I hadn’t been looking long when he called out to me.

“Gio, come look at this,” he said, waving a hand.

I obliged and saw a beautifully finished wooden cone about two feet high with a wide base and a narrow top sitting on an end table between two stuffed chairs. The cone had a small hole in the center.

“What is it?” I asked, touching the cone. The sides contained a spiraling ridge that ran from the top of the cone to the bottom, looping around multiple times. To me it looked like a small road without guardrails spiraling down a steep mountain.

A single marble sat next to the cone in a small indentation in the table. I picked up the marble and studied it. “Do you think this goes down the ridge?”

Winston had been trying to open the end table’s drawer, but it was locked. He looked at the marble and shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

I carefully placed the marble on the spiral ridge at the top, but it quickly fell off the track as it spiraled down, picking up speed. I leaned over and picked up the marble off the floor. “We need a guardrail or another way to make the marble stay on the road.”

Winston studied the cone. “What would be the point? Even if the marble rode the ridges, once it gets to the bottom, it would just roll off across the table and onto the floor again.”

He had a point. “Would the marble fit in the hole at the top?”

“I think it would. But do we risk inserting it without knowing it is the right time? It is the obvious move. If we are wrong, we would lose the marble and perhaps the challenge.”

He was right again. We couldn’t risk it just yet.

I walked around to the back side of the table to get a better look at the other side of the cone. “Hey, there’s something written on this side.”

Winston joined me, peering at the inscription. “It looks like two words. The word near the bottom reads libidine. Over here is the word haeresis. Is that Italian?”

“It is not,” I confirmed.

“Latin?” Winston mused. “I can’t be certain, as my Latin language skills are limited to legal terms.”

Lawyer. That was it. Lexi’s father was a lawyer.

I straightened and looked across the room at Father Armando. “Emilio, can you come here for a moment? We have need of your expertise.”

The priest walked across the room, joining Winston and me. “Can you tell me what these two words say? We think they are in Latin.”

Father Armando studied the inscriptions. “The bottom word is Latin for lust and the top one is Latin for heresy.”

“Now we’re talking my language,” I joked, and I heard Vittoria laugh from across the room.

“Save the exciting commentary for the honeymoon, love,” Vittoria teased.

Winston grinned and studied the words again. “These are two strange words to write in Latin on the back of a cone. What do you think it means?”

“It sounds like a religious reference,” I offered. “Like the seven deadly sins.”

“Heresy wasn’t a deadly sin, Gio,” Stefan called out.

“I bet Father Armando thinks it should be,” I replied. “Right, Father?”

“Right,” Father Armando confirmed. “But Stefan is right. Heresy is not a deadly sin. However, looking at the cone from the side, I’ve noted there are nine spirals on it, which, combined with the words heresy and lust in Latin, bring to mind a particular book.”

When we all looked at the priest blankly, he sighed. “The Italian master Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. Anyone heard of it?”