Secret of the Thorns: Political Thriller (Donavan Chronicles Book 1)

by Tom Haase

  Puglisi tried now to contain his resentment for the reigning Pope but failed. He believed the sitting pontiff was leading the church to ruin. He needed to keep his opinions to himself on the doddering old man for the present. That aside, he had to act to save the church. He loathed the Pope because of his failure to be a strong enforcer of canon law that had been the legacy of the church since the beginning. He was concerned the Pope was loosening strict Catholic conventions and losing control.

  The current Pope had also championed acceptance of discoveries in the fields of science and medicine, declaring they could not be in opposition with the teachings of the church. He eased the restrictions on divorce, toned down the statements from the Vatican on stem cell research and other positions Puglisi believed with all his soul betrayed the foundations of Christianity.

  Puglisi wanted to establish the old order of strict enforcement of the commandments and the absolute rule of the pontiff, as holder of the keys of the kingdom of heaven and the keys to the powers of the earth. As the head of the Agnus Dei, he would use every asset he controlled to ensure his success in attaining the chair of St. Peter. With the possession of this gospel, he believed he could move to make his dream a reality. That gospel could ensure his elevation to the papacy. The whole world would know his name after he discovered these sacred documents. He knew exactly how he would use them achieve his purpose.

  Chapter Six

  Holy City of Kom,

  Islamic Republic of Iran, 1:15 a.m. Tehran time

  Ayatollah Hasham Arad peered over his spectacles to find his assistant, Habib, rushing toward him with a cell phone.

  “Not another call. I don’t like to talk on cell phones. I directed you not to use them around me.” The Ayatollah used his sternest command voice. Regular phones he didn’t mind, but wireless phones seemed to be the target of the devilish National Security Agency in America. This must be something out of the ordinary for Habib to break his often-stated rule.

  “Why do you hand a cell phone to me?” the Ayatollah asked as Habib bowed his head.

  “I think this will be of such importance that you will excuse my lapse. Please talk to the Imam who is on the phone from Warsaw, Poland. He has startling news.”

  Ayatollah Arad scowled at the youth, who was not old enough to have a beard, and decided if the aide dared to break his rule, he had better listen. He stood up and shook his robes, feeling like the true successor of the grand Ayatollah Khomeini from the revolutionary era. His clerical garb fell to its natural hanging position and he reluctantly reached for the instrument he so completely mistrusted.

  If the matter proved not of sufficient importance, he would take fitting disciplinary action later. He placed the phone to his ear. “Peace be with you,” he said. Then he listened.

  After four minutes, he handed it back to Habib and ordered him to get the President of Iran on the telephone. The young man scampered off. He listened as Habib in the next room explain to someone in the President’s office that the highest grand ayatollah in Iran wished to speak with the country’s leader. The late hour was regrettable.

  Habib returned to the ayatollah’s desk, picked up the receiver, and handed him the phone. The Ayatollah waited for the President’s voice. After a few pleasantries, he focused on the reason for his call.

  “I have reason to believe the original copy of the Holy Koran is in Poland— in Warsaw to be specific. I urge you to take immediate action to recover it. The information comes from one of my most trusted Imams in the west. He has always been accurate in his information in the past.”

  He paused and waited for the questions, allowing time for the slow-witted Peacock President to come to the correct conclusions. After answering all of the President’s queries with the information the Imam in Poland had provided, he added, “I believe they could be the original. We know the army of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, commanded by the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa, carried the documents with him to demonstrate to Almighty God that he was carrying out his command to convert the entire world to Islam.”

  The ayatollah remained convinced this dimwit didn’t know a pittance about history, as he made obvious in his speeches. A little education on the facts might penetrate through to his limited powers of understanding.

  He stood, and continued, “For centuries, we assumed the holy writings were destroyed in 1683 during the fighting at Vienna and never recovered. Now I urge you to recover them. Some of the documents might be from the time our armies’ sacked Constantinople. Besides the inherent religious value, if we obtain them the Sunnis will be devastated by our possession of the original Prophet’s writing. If anything in the book goes against our current beliefs, we will be in a position to control it.”

  He waited, at last nodding his head, agreeing with whatever the president said. Then he put the phone back in the receiver. He stared at Habib and smiled.

  “You did well to break my rule,” he said in a pleasant voice. He observed the aide’s face. The boy relaxed his posture, smiled and took a deep breath.

  “May I bring you tea?” the boy asked.

  The Imam decided as a reward he would give him some privileged information, which he would probably overhear anyway. “Yes, but first, connect me again to the Imam in Poland. Do not use a cell phone. He will be glad to hear that our leader has ordered two of his personal guards to go there to bring back the documents.” To ensure the recovery these sacred manuscripts the president had sanctioned the use of extreme measures. “I need to inform our Polish Imam of the President’s orders before those men arrive.”

  Chapter Seven

  Archbishop’s Residence

  Warsaw, Poland – 9:15 p.m. local time

  “Stanislaw, I have a car waiting outside to take us to the museum,” Father Jablonski said, taking Wozniak’s arm and leading him to the door.

  As they exited the archbishop’s residence, the priest noticed the sun still shone at this late hour. It was normal for the daylight to continue well past ten in the evening during midsummer in this northern country. A light warm breeze churned the leaves of the nearby trees allowing the stifling automobile exhaust smells of the busy day to give way to the fresh evening breezes. He loved the heat, so much better than the arthritic cold of Polish winters.

  A Mercedes was parked at the curb, with the chauffer standing at the open back door. The two men cut through a group of Japanese tourists passing on the sidewalk and climbed into the backseat of the black car.

  “Exactly what have you found? What do you plan to do with it? I’m extremely curious.” Jablonski said. “I want to hear all the details. Please tell me.”

  Wozniak relaxed as he started to recount in great detail the story of the day he made the discovery. “On Wednesday, I went down into the deepest section of the museum on an inspection of an area. I hadn’t visited it in years. On descending to the basement, I noticed an old picture of Count Komorowski, a person I loathed because the apostate fought for the Protestants, and decided to donate it to an art academy. I dropped the gold-framed oil painting onto the floor and pulled out the nail that previously supported the picture frame; my effort caused a brick to tumble from the wall.”

  The car went over two or three ruts in the road and made the curator almost fall out of his seat. He recovered his cane and used it steady himself on his seat. He looked at his companion and made a wiping motion with his hand.

  After a few seconds, he continued, “I observed an empty space revealed by the brick’s absence. I knew that there was no space like that on any building plans I had ever seen in my many years a curator. It was not on the old drawings in the original construction over an ancient monastery that had eventually expanded to become the National Museum of Poland.”

  “It seems like only yesterday we were at those Olympic Games,” Father Joblonski observed. “How many years have you been the curator of the National Museum?”

  “Way too many, my friend, but I don’t want to stop anytime soon – especially now.”<
br />
  “Please continue with your story.”

  “I assure you that I had always understood this wall abutted the earth in the basement recess of the National Museum. I used a small halogen flashlight, which had proven invaluable to me in many areas of the museum. Standing on my tiptoes, using my cane for support, I directed the beam into the cavity behind the wall. I froze at what I saw.”

  “You certainly know how to spin a tale Stanislaw. What did you find?” the priest asked and gave a thin smile.

  “My light flicked around inside a chamber. Then a putrid smell filled the air, coming through the spot exposed by the brick’s absence. With the light I could distinguish some papers stacked on a table. The cavity appeared to me like a depository sealed long ago.” He shifted in his seat and removed his glasses.

  “As you might imagine, my hands shook. I removed another brick and, applying some force, jimmied out the surrounding bricks. I climbed on top of a nearby stool, turned on the flashlight, pushed it into the hole, and my heart started to pound in my chest and in my ears, loud enough for me to fear a heart attack.”

  Wozniak continued his narration of the discovery as the car wound its way to the museum.

  He related that when he took a deep breath with his face close to the hole provided by the absent bricks, the full force of the bile-producing odor escaping the cavern again wafted over him. Stanislaw gagged, coughed, and grabbed his handkerchief to cover his nose as the air inside the room whisked past him after centuries of confinement.

  He swung the flashlight to another section of the hidden room, and stared at the sight of a male skeleton slouched in a chair wearing the remnants of a uniform. The body’s tattered clothes, the insignia, the sword and the man wore the uniform of a Polish army officer during the Napoleonic wars. Stanislaw admitted that fear was his first reaction on seeing the corpse. His conclusion was verified as his beam of light revealed the soldier wore the insignia of a Polish major. A similar uniform was currently on display in the military section of the museum. Why was a man sealed up in a room centuries ago with documents and how important could they be?

  “What did the Napoleonic era soldier have to do with the documents?’’ Joblanski asked.

  “I didn’t know, but I believed that I had discovered something after all these years and decided to keep his unearthed chamber a secret until sure of its importance. I knew that I needed help, so I plan on getting Cezar Zamoyski, to help me next week. Cezar is the museum archaeologist. I have known him since college days, so I know he’s trustworthy.”

  Wozniak continued with his story, recounting how he had removed bricks and at last succeeded in creating a hole big enough for him to enter the room. On entering, he could clearly see a large pile of manuscripts of various types lay on the table beside a small chessboard with pieces scattered on it. At first, the documents appeared to be like ancient parchments, maybe even rolled papyrus. Many lay in small stacks on the floor near a wood chest.

  Wozniak related that he closely examined one document without touching it. Precautions were primary when handling the items but he needed to copy them before any damage occurred from atmospheric or climatic damage. He bent over to examine the paper at close range. The writing was Arabic, with the flowing curly script so foreign to Europeans. Also there had been a fire built in front of the chair, using some of the documents.

  “Why build a fire in an enclosed space and die of smoke inhalation?” Wozniak wondered aloud.

  “Perhaps that’s what the man had wanted to do,” responded the priest.

  “Yes,” Wozniak agreed, “he must’ve given up on ever escaping and decided to go quickly instead of starving to death. The fire would have consumed the oxygen in the sealed space and helped to preserve the documents in the resulting partial vacuum.”

  Based on Wozniak’s recollection of Napoleonic history, he thought the king had ordered Warsaw evacuated to prevent its capture. He told Father Joblonski that the man in the chair must have considered the manuscripts too valuable to take on any evacuation road in wartime. Perhaps the people who knew about him, who planned to return to let him out, died before they could return to Warsaw. At that point in his thinking the value of these documents geometrically increased in Wozniak’s mind.

  “Nobody dies for pieces of paper unless they are of supreme political or religious importance,” Wozniak said. “The dead man must’ve known something of the documents’ contents as well as their value, if that soldier sacrificed his life for them.”

  “I agree with that conclusion,” Joblonski said.

  “Unfortunately, I have no Arabic scholar on staff and I don’t want to hire any local Muslims who might be able to read and translate the Arabic documents.” The present flood of Muslim workers into Poland and his dislike for their religion prevented him from following such a course. “I believe there are at least six in Arabic. I didn’t see the Latin and Greek documents until today.”

  “And those could have the most significance,” the priest said.

  “Yes.” Wozniak nodded, turning in the seat to face Joblonski. “They could change Christianity as we know it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Warsaw Poland

  Joblonski waited in silence as Wozniak stopped his story to arrange his cane between them in the backseat.

  “This afternoon I discovered the document I showed you earlier.” Stanislaw Wozniak turned in the seat in the Mercedes to face Joblonski. “There were also some Greek texts, but the majority are Arabic from what I can tell. Unfortunately, I found only two pages of the Latin text so far.”

  The car stopped at the museum’s side entrance, the one used by employees. Jablonski allowed the curator to lead him into the building after he entered the code into the pad on the door. They climbed the stairs to his second floor office.

  On entering, the priest noticed the sparsely equipped office. An old framed copy of the cavalry charge under King John at Vienna hung on the wall. Three desks with the usual paraphernalia occupied the small office. One of the desks held a computer and an array of scanners. The largest desk against the back wall separated from the rest of the office by a few chairs surrounding it, displayed Mr. Stanislaw Wozniak in white letters on the black background of a nameplate.

  “I can make some coffee,” Wozniak said.

  “No, thank you.” The priest moved toward the computer’s location. The safe holding the documents filled the wall next to the secretary’s desk. This was undoubtedly the safe Wozniak had told him about in the car. The wall sported all manner of keypads to control the atmosphere in the safe.

  “This is some discovery,” Jablonski said. “But I was hoping for more of the Latin text.”

  “Sadly, not at this time. Still these few pages definitely provide proof as far as I am concerned that there was a so-called gospel, for want of a better word, written by Saint Peter the Apostle. But we have not yet gone through all the material.”

  Smiling, Wozniak walked with him over to the safe, entered two different codes on separate panels. “I plan to tell the world of my discovery on Monday and I have the documents to back up my claim. We’ll have it translated before I announce it. Don’t you think it’s momentous?”

  Jablonski took the copied pages from Wozniak’s hand and examined them further. He looked at the curator, and asked, “Did you make any other copies of any of these documents?”

  Wozniak moved his hand to his mustache and mumbled, “No, not yet. Everything is here. She only made the copies you have in your hands. The rest are there in the safe.”

  “Are you sure?” The priest stared at him and waited.

  “I only found them a few days ago.” He went over, hit some keypads, and pulled the safe door completely open. “See, they are here for my secretary to photocopy and to scan on Monday. We have elaborate procedures to comply with for the rendering of an image of these ancient documents. We have the latest equipment to carry out such an undertaking and protect the documents. You can see they are in the con
tainers ready for when she comes. Of course, we will have to obtain outside verification of the find’s authenticity, especially after so many attempted hoaxes in recent years.”

  Jablonski didn’t like the way the curator was side-stepping his questions. On the other hand, what Wozniak said made sense, and he presumed the man would have told the world already if he had recognized what they were before today. Glancing at the document in his hand, the priest asked, “Did anyone else gain access to these documents?”

  “No, just my secretary who saw me place them where they are now. Why all the questions? I thought you would be happy I told you about the writings of St. Peter.”

  “I am. I am. But there’s a small problem. I need to take all of the documents. There must be no record left here that the Latin text ever existed. Rome has ordered it.”

  “What?” Wozniak yelled. “No, no way! To hell with Rome.” He moved toward Jablonski. “This is my discovery and it will make this museum and me famous. Sorry, even for our friendship, I can’t do that.”

  He reached to grab the documents from Jablonski’s hands. He was too slow. Jablonski jerked away. Wozniak then raised his cane and became agitated well into the red zone of aggression.

  “Give me the papers. Give them to me.” Wozniak shouted, his eyes wild. He swung his cane and charged at Jablonski. Stepping quickly to the side, Jablonski planted his left foot.

  The curator moved fast, faster than the priest thought possible. “Stop Stanislaw,” he shouted.

  Wozniak tripped on Jablonski’s outstretched foot and careened into the sharp side of the metal desk’s corner. A loud thud filled the room. The curator’s body crumbled when it hit the floor. He lay sprawled by the desk, his glasses continued their slide across the floor and finally stopped somewhere under the desk; the cane clanked twice on the wood floor before it rolled to a stop.

  “Oh, my God,” Jablonski mumbled. He saw the left side of Wozniak’s head caved in and blood and brains oozing out. The impact had been at a full gallop. Checking for a pulse, he found none. It took a moment for him to comprehend that his old friend lay dead. Jablonski’s hands trembled as he administered general absolution and a blessing to the prone figure. He had been ordered to recover the text of St. Peter and transport it to Rome. Not now. His friend was dead. He had to call the police. He needed to call the Cardinal.