“Who says that your justice system is the right one? I recall that one of your presidents almost set fire to the whole world with it. With a single sentence.”
“Adam, I don’t need any lessons in penal law.”
“He said: ‘We’re waging a crusade against evil.’ And what exactly are we doing?”
“But that’s—”
Deborah walked between them. “Really, Adam, don’t you see the differences anymore? On one side you have the path of the Church fathers, using a written tradition to open the doors to rigidity, dogma, and quiet manipulation. And they did this so efficiently that the Vatican is scared shitless to admit even a hint of it. On the other side you have the Druids, who tried to prevent precisely this manipulation by using an oral tradition. All we’re trying to do is bring things back into balance again!”
“Yes, but it’s precisely because of this inflexibility that the Vatican’s time was over a long time ago. It’s just that no one noticed. My God, Jennifer, the facts of our find are enough. They can’t escape it anymore. We don’t need this huge showdown!”
“That may be, but stop accusing me of thirsting for revenge. I have nothing but sympathy for the victims of this church. I want to get rid of their control. That’s the only way we can even begin to turn this almost two-thousand-year-old curse into a blessing.”
“That may be, I have to admit, but it would be more healing for all of us if the pope made this step himself without our having to force him into it with this verdict. And what about Ronald? Are you going to tell me he doesn’t have any desire for revenge? Who murdered his father and why? Do you know the true motive? Was the culprit only a victim of his own mistaken beliefs? This world will never change if we don’t learn to forgive! Criminals, victims...how else do you want to divide it up?”
“Adam, that’s enough already. If you mean what you’re saying, then it’s better for everyone if you fly back to Austria now. There’s nothing else for you to do here,” Jennifer said, despairing and hopeless. Then she turned around and left the room.
“Whew.” Deborah clasped her hands behind her head and looked at Shane critically. “You expect a lot, my friend. Every revolution has its victims, of one kind or another.”
“But I don’t want a revolution. And it isn’t even about what I want as an individual. It’s about change. We don’t have any more time for this petty reckoning.”
“But maybe we do need a transition, Adam,” Deborah said, the argument clearly upsetting her. “You know, the teachings of the Druids also talk about truthfulness. And that’s what’s going on here in this court. It comes down to clever discourse and truthfulness.” Both of them could hear the sobs coming from Jennifer’s room. “And this isn’t the solution either, if one of us is suffering,” Deborah said, looking at him reproachfully. Then she sat down and buried her head in her laptop, not deigning to look at him again.
Shane walked over to Jennifer’s door, where he knocked cautiously.
“Come in already,” Jennifer said with a last sob as she blew her nose.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine, Adam. I overreacted. It’s strange, but I’d just been thinking about this myself, what we’re doing and where it’s headed. I—”
“Well, how do I know what role my identity is playing here?” Shane smiled. “Again, I’m sorry.”
“If you’re looking for an answer to the question about your identity, I can tell you where you’ll find it, my wise Druid.”
“Hmm?”
“Within yourself,” Jennifer said gently.
Deborah knocked and stuck her head in the room without waiting for an answer. “Hey, the president just announced that she’ll be giving a speech about the Supreme Court hearing tomorrow morning at eleven,” she said in excitement.
“I think we’re not all that interested in that right now, Deborah.”
Deborah stared at the two of them and then went red in the face. “Oh, um, sorry.” She left the room as quickly as she had entered it.
Shane felt helpless. The tension between them was almost palpable. He stood in the room a bit lost and looked at Jennifer questioningly.
“Get over here already.” Jennifer scooted over to make room. When he got over to the bed, she took his hand and pulled him to her side. “I’d like to find out what it feels like.”
Bowled over by Jennifer’s directness, he lay down next to her and pulled her to him. He could feel her warmth, her firm thighs, and the softness of her curves, and he felt like he was holding something infinitely precious.
He laid his large hand protectively on her head and could feel for the first time the tenderness of this woman who was so tough in her job. Ms. Iron Heart, Thomas Ryan had called her once. How many light-years ago was that?
“Forgive me,” Shane said.
Something seemed to fall away from Jennifer. The pressure to always be strong had become almost unbearable in the last few days and hours. She nestled closely against him. Right now his chest offered her a feeling of being at home, and she felt safe. It was something new for her, that a man wasn’t just trying to have sex with her. It was a deeper intimacy. Two people in love, two hearts almost terrifyingly open to each other. Her senses opened up, her energy sank into his body, and she was one with him, even before their bodies joined.
Adam could sense an almost unbearable tension. This woman had fascinated him from the first moment he met her and had drawn him to her like a magnet. It was only the excitement of the last several days that had made him hold himself back. Now, when he let himself go, a passion broke out of him that extinguished everything else.
* * *
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC – NIGHT
Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.
—Thomas Jefferson
The entire day the president had refrained from saying a single word in public concerning the worldwide protests about the hearing. That afternoon, she found out that the Irish Parliament had decided to call a special session of the United Nations. In light of the dramatic turn of events and the accumulation of internationally relevant crimes committed by the Vatican and the members of the Catholic Church, eighty-six nations had come out in favor of the special General Assembly within hours of its announcement. Even the Security Council was going to meet to discuss the worldwide clashes between those opposing and those supporting the imminent trial after radical Christians had thrown incendiary devices at many of the US embassies and numerous deaths had been reported throughout the world as a result of the unrest.
The president looked out onto the street from her bedroom window in the Executive Residence of the White House. The last demonstrators were still in front of the White House fence and had lit candles. She knew that her political fate hung on the speech she would be giving the next morning. She lifted the receiver of the telephone on the small, antique table next to her.
“Bill, could you please bring me the draft for the ‘Butterfly’ project. I want to work on it again.”
“But Madam President—”
“Bill, please, no discussions now.”
A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door.
“Come in, Bill.”
“Madam President, I must inform you that neither the Cabinet nor the Senate wants an open debate on this project at this time.”
“Thank you, Bill, that’s all.”
“Very well. Good night, Madam President.”
Project Butterfly was one of the many possible strategic plans economists had been working on after the last financial crisis. It was radical—too radical.
When will people be ready for this? she thought, suddenly too tired to read through the material. With a sigh she put the document on the table, stood up, and went over to her bed. She lay down on the bedspread and pulled out a pillow. She just wanted a couple of minutes to think.
Instead, she slipped into a state where she was hovering between sleep and consciousness, like a space betwee
n realities.
She could see herself standing in front of all the cameras the next day in the White House Press Office looking into perplexed faces. Suddenly Lisa, her five-year-old daughter, came in holding a parchment from the library of the Druids in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other. Lisa gave her both of the documents and asked if it was true that the earth was a living creature and that it was sick and would soon die.
Behind her came Adam Shane carrying a stack of papers on which an enormous, beautiful butterfly was sitting. She looked into the eyes of the butterfly, and then it flew away from the stack of papers and through the room. Little Lisa cheered it on, crying, “Fly, fly, butterfly. You’ll make the earth well again!”
Slowly the president awoke. To her surprise it was five in the morning. At some point, she must have fallen asleep.
She let herself sink back down into the pillow. She remembered that her daughter had asked her this question a couple of weeks earlier. As far as the parchment of the Druids was concerned, it had developed the notion of mankind’s freedom and self-determination to a much deeper level than even the Constitution of the United States. Though a landmark document, the Constitution came at a point after people had long since oppressed those cultures that were able to live in harmony with nature.
The decline of the aboriginal people had certainly not been a natural phenomenon. For centuries it had been politically motivated with the support and justification of a faith that had been nothing but a lie from the very beginning.
The president heard Adam Shane’s words: What does it mean to develop a spiritual consciousness for the original culture of the Celts if you also just stood by and watched as the last tribes of the world perished?
“That is the truth, uncomfortable as it may be,” the president said to herself decisively. “And I always thought you would be the first one to retire, Ronald MacClary.”
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 30, MORNING
Jennifer turned up the volume on the television as Adam and Deborah took their seats in front of the screen. The president’s speech was about to begin.
“Good morning, ladies and gentleman of the press, my fellow Americans. I would like to use the opportunity of the current events in Washington to discuss several questions of faith. My daughter asked me a couple of days ago if the earth was so sick that it was going to die. Lisa is, as most of you know, five years old.
“How should I answer her? Should I lie to her?
“Because we really have arrived at an historic turning point. We are headed down a descending path of social, ecological, political, and economic crises in a period of global power struggles that threaten our survival. We have to reorganize our lives into lives that are peaceful and that will allow our children a world with a future. The choice is still ours to make, but it all depends on our values, our convictions, our visions, and our communal planetary ethics.
“You will perhaps be surprised when I maintain that these communal ethics have existed before. They were known to the original inhabitants of this country as they were to all other indigenous peoples. ‘Take nothing more than you need’ was the guiding principle of these cultures. The reverence for the actual wonder of creation, of our earth, was a given for the indigenous peoples. This is also the message we can glean from the recently unearthed trove from the Celts and Druids, the original inhabitants of Europe, which is now being argued about in the Supreme Court. The resulting unrest in Rome points to fears that I will not touch on today. There is only one thing I know for certain: our current consciousness will be determined by the assessment of this trove and by the assessment of Church history, the consequences of which I can only briefly outline. It will determine whether the unity of humankind can now become concretely known to us or if we will degenerate further.
“Ladies and gentlemen, none of us in this world can do anything without it affecting everyone else. Many things that we have assumed to be reversible are no longer so. The hierarchies of our societal order have disenfranchised people. We need people with self-determination and a sense of personal responsibility. Our highly lauded efficiency and material growth is misguided. Technology is no longer the answer to our problems, and the next new thing is not always better than the tried and true. We cannot continue to live as if the future is irrelevant to our present.
“Out of respect for our judiciary, I will make no statement on the current hearing against the Vatican other than to say that we all have claim to historical truth, and we are duty bound to take note of this. We have built a culture on convictions, whose effects we are now beginning to feel and which could lead to our destruction. If we are not ready to create something that will produce an uncompromising balance between nature, technology, and faith, it will no longer be a question of faith on how long we will continue to survive. It is most likely no accident that the testimony of this ancient culture in particular is coming to us now.
“It is sometimes easier to return to a place where we have made a wrong turn than it is to hope that we will find another path to our goal. The laws that nature has provided us require every one of us to take responsibility for our own actions here and now. The older cultures can be a great help to us in this. Let us learn from everything they have left us and beg forgiveness for the results of our arrogance and ignorance. That applies to every person, regardless of his or her faith or nationality.
“I would like to introduce you to Project Butterfly. It was created through the vision of one of the best scientists in the world. The measures, which I will explain to you now, will become a great challenge for the United States in the coming years. But we can only implement them within a global context. I will devote myself to this in the time remaining to me in office. It is time for us to again have faith in ourselves and in our potential. Then I will be able to tell my daughter that together we will heal this earth.
“Now to the specific measures...”
Jennifer turned to Adam with a contented smile. “Well, you big Druid, are you happy?”
“I’m overwhelmed. Butterfly, what a beautiful name. And it promises so much.” Shane laid his cheek against Jennifer’s face. That he felt close enough to her to offer such casual affection gave her heart a thrill.
A second later, her cell phone broke the spell.
“Jennifer, it’s Thomas Ryan.”
“Oh, Thomas, it’s damned nice to hear from you.”
“Can you tell me why I was declared dead?”
Deborah stood up and took the cell phone from Jennifer, putting it on speaker at the same time.
“OK, so now you’ve been resurrected. Could you please get your legendary ass here sometime soon? I mean, you do actually understand what’s going on here, don’t you?”
Ryan laughed. “I’ll be in Washington soon, and I can’t wait either, so calm down. Give the phone back to Jennifer again.”
“Lazarus only wants to talk with you today,” Deborah said, turning off the speakerphone and handing it back with mock indignation. Jennifer could tell, though, that Deborah was hugely relieved.
“Thomas...”
“Make it fast. I can’t talk long.”
“OK. The FBI will pick you up at Reagan Airport and bring you to a hotel. When are you coming, exactly?”
“Not until the day after tomorrow. The plane lands at six in the evening.”
“Can’t you get here any sooner? The next hearing is tomorrow and I need you here now.”
“That’s not a possibility.”
“All right. I’ll see if we can manage to postpone it again. Take care of yourself, Ryan.”
She hung up and looked around the room.
“What now?” Adam asked.
“Nothing. We’ll have to stall the court. But I’ve already thought of something.”
Hopefully Ronald would keep his promise.
* * *
VATICAN CITY, ROME – MARCH 30, EVENING
The announcement of a special morning session of the United Natio
ns Security Council unleashed a firestorm in Rome. The security situations stemming from the increasing violence at the worldwide protests would be discussed. The pope could no longer accept the view of numerous diplomats that the Vatican had abused its status in the past to avoid criminal prosecution.
He called a member of the Swiss Guard.
“Yes, Holy Father?”
“Have Cardinal Catamo come here,” the pope said gently.
“Of course, Holy Father.”
Eduard Catamo was the head of the Vatican’s press office. Among his other responsibilities, the older gentleman had for some time made sure that a person looking for literature on the pope in a bookstore would have a far easier time finding a tribute to him than criticism of the sort that was now spread out on the pope’s desk.
After the draft of the European Constitution was written without any reference to God, John Paul III had intensified the offensive to turn Europe once again into a Christian continent. But then all of their efforts were nullified with a single blow. The involvement of the Vatican Bank in Mafia business and, above all, the worldwide explosion on discussions about abuse cases abruptly disarmed his new crusade against modernity.
“Holy Father?”
“Come in, Eduard. What do you know about Cardinal Lambert’s involvement in this insufferable story?”
“I cannot imagine that Padre Salvoni acted on his own, Holy Father.”
“Listen, I know that the cardinal is doing everything he can to succeed me on St. Peter’s chair, and I also know that he is your superior, but I am still this Church. If the cardinal bears more responsibility for this matter than I know, I want you to tell me about it now. You can see for yourself what damage he has already caused.”
“But Holy Father, when I see what is coming at us from the historians who analyzed the first scrolls, then—”
“Then what? Do you see these books? Everything, and I mean everything, is already known to the world if one wants to know it. This Church has seen emperors and kings, dictators and revolutionaries. They come and they go. We have survived the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the Revolution of the Moderns, and we will also survive the writings of a couple of Druids or pagan philosophers that have been completely misinterpreted.”
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