MYSTERY PLOTTING
Steve Berry finally finds a way to build a story around the `world's most stolen painting'
Steve Berry hadn't planned to write “The Omega Factor” or create the new character of Nick Lee, an investigator for the United Nations office that protects the world's cultural artifacts.
But when he moved to a new publisher, Berry says, he was asked if he had something different before the company published the finished manuscript he'd arrived with, the latest in his Cotton Malone thriller series.
“They wanted to start off with a standalone,” he says. “They wanted something fresh and different. I said, `OK, no problem with that.' ”
That was easy, Berry says, laughing. Hard was coming up with a new character and story as quickly as the publisher hoped he could.
Lee, an investigator for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — or UNESCO, as it's commonly known — was a figure he'd been thinking about for years.
“Luckily, he was in my brain,” Berry says. “At least the nuts and bolts of him were there. I just began to flesh him out.”
Years earlier, on a European research trip for an earlier Cotton Malone book, Berry stopped in the Belgian city of Ghent to see the Ghent Altarpiece, a 15thcentury oil painting across 12 large panels by brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck.
“I've always wanted to see it,” Berry says. “It's just magnificent. And I wanted a novel out of that thing. I kept trying to figure out how to do a Cotton Malone book with the Ghent Altarpiece and I just couldn't figure it out.”
Now, though, the pieces slipped into place. Nick Lee, the Ghent Altarpiece, and a mystery crafted from the historical research that Berry readers expect of his work.
“When this standalone came available, it just hit me how to do it,” Berry says. “I was able to bring the altarpiece in and create my own secret from it, using actual pieces of it.”
Steve Berry's new thriller, “The Omega Factor,” is set in France and Belgium and involves a centuries-old secret about the Catholic Church and the real-life art masterpiece known as the Ghent Altarpiece, shown above in St. Bavo's Cathedral.
Thrilling research
In “The Omega Factor,” Lee travels to Ghent to visit his former fiancée Kelsey, who left him years earlier when she realized her true destiny was to become a nun.
She's been restoring a panel of the Ghent Altarpiece, which itself is a replacement for one that was stolen in 1934 and never recovered. (This is actually true; over the centuries, the altarpiece has been carried off at least seven times, earning it the title of the world's most stolen painting.)
When this panel is destroyed just as Lee arrives, the thriller takes off with plotlines that include ninja-like nuns willing to die to keep a centuries-old secret, a follower of the long-forgotten Cathar religious movement with a deadly grudge, and the shadowy plot of a Vatican cardinal and would-be pope, and his Dominican friar henchmen.
Add to that a mystery relating to the Virgin Mary, and “The Omega Factor” offered Berry plenty of roads to research.
He returned from Ghent with every book in English he could find about the altarpiece. Noah Charney's “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” — the formal title the Van Eycks gave their work — proved most valuable, and Charney later fact-checked Berry's manuscript.
There was just so much that fascinated him: the history of the Virgin Mary, the religious sect known as Catharism, and the landscapes and history of Ghent and southern France.
“It was just interesting to me, the whole thing,” Berry says. “I said, `Well, there's definitely a thriller in there if I can work it out.'
“Of course, I had to have some bad guys, so you always go to the Dominicans,” he says of the Catholic order. “The poor Dominicans always get blamed for everything. I even put that in the writer's note, an apology to them.”
Catholic questions
Berry grew up in the Catholic Church, and while he's no longer practicing, the religion of his youth hasn't left his imagination.
“I went to Catholic school, and nuns taught me the first seven years,” he says of his childhood in suburban Atlanta. “It was a great education and they taught me things that have served me well all my life.”
During that period of his childhood, he would have preferred to attend the neighborhood school with a friend as well as avoid the strict discipline he recalls the nuns laying down.
“As I say all the time, things they did back then you would go to jail for now,” Berry says, laughing.
“The good part is they were extremely good teachers,” he says, though what he sees as the unanswered questions still linger in his life and work.
“What I was always fascinated by the Catholic Church was they'll tell you the `whats,' ” Berry says, adding he had different questions he wanted answered. “The `whys' is what interested me. Why do we do this? Why do we believe this? Why is this important, and this is not important?”
Secrets in the art
When Berry first visited Ghent five or six years ago the altarpiece was undergoing restoration, with about 70% of the work finished, plenty to fascinate the writer and his imagination.
“Now, it's finished and you just stand there and look at it,” Berry says. “It's stunning; it really is.”
But some of the best of it is difficult to observe as one stands before the altarpiece in St. Bavo's Cathedral.
“The really cool stuff is impossible to see standing there and looking at it,” Berry says. “You have to have a magnifying glass to look at it at high resolution.”
The website ClosertoVanEyck. com does even more, capturing the masterpiece in 100 billion pixels and inviting all to explore the artwork in close-in detail.
“You can get down to the creases and the cracks in the patina of it,” Berry says. “That's an amazing site and it's amazing to see it in its own restored glory.”
It was important to Berry that the key to the mystery of “The Omega Factor” — the secret hidden within the Ghent Altarpiece on which all the other action revolves — be something within the artwork itself.
“I struggled with that art for several months, trying to figure out a secret on it,” he says. “There's a lot of symbolism in it. There's a lot of unexplained things on it. But I needed a grand secret and I finally found it.
“The secret that's in the book I conceived. But it's using actual things that are on the altarpiece itself.”