“We, Gabriele, we talked about the conspiracy between death and eternal life.”
“We? You and I?”
“Yes.”
Gabriele dropped his pistol just a bit, maybe an inch, no more.
“How did this conversation come about?” he asked.
Christina made a hardly noticeable appeasing movement with her hands. Nancy noticed it through the corners of her eyes. She was close to pulling the trigger. She felt that her moment, her opportunity had arrived. Gabriele’s concentration had changed, his focus had changed. If her first bullet hit him in the head, it would be very unlikely that he could still pull the trigger of his pistol. But even if he could, it was unlikely that his bullet would find its target. Gabriele suddenly looked like a man who had forgotten his target.
“No shooting please,” Christina said. She looked towards Nancy.
She is worried that I may kill him, Nancy thought. Is she crazy? Has she changed sides? Nancy was still focused, determined and tense like not many times before in her life. She was waiting to pull the trigger. This was the moment to do it.
“Alberto,” Christina said, “can you hear me?”
Gabriele still didn’t move. His pistol was pointed at Nancy. He replied, “Yes, I can hear you.”
“Please drop your gun. Don’t shoot Alberto. Please.”
The man who a few minutes earlier had been Gabriele and who now was Alberto dropped his pistol and turned his head towards Christina. Sarah moved with lightening speed and took his pistol.
Tony turned towards the two men who were standing beside Mike’s mother and said, “The war is over. We have to get away from here before the police arrives. Hurry up. Remove the explosives and secure them. Make sure they don’t blow up accidentally. Get out of your bomb disposal gear and tell your friends below to get away from here as quickly as possible.”
Tony told the men what to do as if this was the most natural thing in the world. At the same time he started removing the gag from the elderly lady’s mouth with one hand. This took him nearly a minute. He had to be careful that he did not interfere with the strings that were attached to the explosives. The two men in the bomb disposal suits pushed the buttons they had been pressing deeper into the metal boxes in their hands and then twisted them ninety degrees to the left. Their hands must be tired, Tony thought; they are probably as glad as I am that this is over. The two men removed the explosives and Tony managed to remove the gag.
Mike’s mother, who was known to everyone as a very dignified lady, yelled with a voice that was not less gigantic than Gabriele’s voice a little earlier, “Antonio! Antonio! You are alive! You are alive! It’s me! Natalie!”
55
“Natalie? Antonio?” Alberto whispered. “Natalie?”
Suddenly he yelled, “Antonio and Natalie Garcia! I am Antonio! I remember…”
He rushed into the room and looked at Natalie. Tears came from of his eyes. He touched Natalie’s face. He hugged her, slowly and tenderly.
For a few seconds Tony was the only one who knew what to do. Turning to Christina and Sarah he said, “Take your knives and free our friends. Hurry up.” He took his knife and cut through the ropes that were used to bind Mike’s mother onto the chair.
The two men who until a minute earlier had held explosives to an elderly woman’s head got out of their bomb disposal gear. Tony told them, “Hurry up. Move. Move. Tell you mates outside Gabriele has regained his memory. Tell them to get everything ready for a quick get away. I assume that Gabriele – well, his real name seems to be Antonio – will join them in a few minutes and decide where to go to.”
“Okay boss,” one of the men said.
Nancy joined Tony and asked, “What now boss?” There was a big smile on her face. Tony kissed her and replied, “Let’s get out of here. Quickly. We may have to help Mike, his mother, Vanessa, Steven and the elderly lady. They may feel a bit stiff.”
“We’re okay,” Mike said. He had just been freed by Christina. “Your guess earlier was spot on. Alberto changed into Gabriele only late last night. At that time they locked us in this room, two hours ago they put ropes around us and gagged us.”
“We have two Landcruisers outside,” Tony said. “Nancy, I, Sarah and perhaps Vanessa and the old lady take one and Christina, you, your mother and Steven take the other one. Don’t worry about all the stuff here. Let’s get away, now.”
“What about Alberto or Antonio or whatever his name?” Christina asked.
“If he promises that he will never bother us again he can go with his people,” Tony replied. “Otherwise we shoot him.”
“I promise if you promise to visit me in Rome.”
“Sure, should we ever manage to go to Rome, we will visit you Antonio, I hope your name and address are in the phone book.”
“Don’t be crazy. You have to ask around,” the man who five minutes earlier had tried to kill them replied.
“I’ll go with my husband,” Natalie said.
For a few seconds there was silence, until Mike said, “Mum, are you sure this man is your husband? Your husband is meant to be dead.”
“I am absolutely sure. He is my husband and your father.”
“I was rescued by a friend,” Antonio said. “Someone else who died that night over fifty years ago took my place. The police were paid off and I was officially declared dead.”
“Really?” Tony enquired.
“Happens in Italy all the time,” the ninety three year old Agnola Babili said.
“My dear woman,” Tony replied, “you are the only person in here I trust. Let’s go. Everybody. Hurry up. See you in Rome.”
56
On their flight from Paris to Rome Natalie asked Antonio, “Why did you try so persistently to kill Mike, your son?”
That conversation took place less than ten minutes before at a height of 30,000 feet an explosion in the cargo area ripped a big hole into the left hand side of the plane. The explosion was meant to take place earlier, within minutes of the plane’s departure from the Charles de Gaulle airport. It took place above Florence and was the work of a terrorist group based in France. The group was known as AXF. Within hours of the explosion the French police was able to arrest one of the terrorists. He admitted the attack and told the police that the plane was meant to explode over Paris.
However, this is another story.
To come back to Natalie’s question, “Why did you try so persistently to kill Mike, your son?”
“I didn’t,” Antonio replied, “Gabriele did.”
“Why did he? What was this all about?”
“In Gabriele’s defence it has to be said he didn’t know that Mike was my son and, I guess, his son.”
“Are you sure he didn’t know?”
“Well, with Gabriele you can’t be sure about anything.”
“But why did he try to kill him? Why? Do you know?” Natalie asked again.
“I am not sure. I remember Gabriele and I remember Alberto only vaguely. When I think of them they are like people I knew a long time ago. Gabriele was always restless, active, scheming and conspiring: one day with God against the devil, the next day with the devil against God. He wanted to live forever. Alberto just wanted to live from one day to the next. He didn’t worry about tomorrow. Gabriele always worried about tomorrow.
“Then one day a monk, I believe it was a monk in a monastery in California, talked to him about the importance of attaining eternal life. This was a few years ago and ever since this day Gabriele was looking for that recipe.”
“Did the monk actually talk about a recipe for eternal life?”
“I don’t remember. It could be that he used the word recipe in a metaphorical sense, but what he was really referring to might have been something of a spiritual nature. I remember there was a long discussion, Gabriele was very excited, but I don’t remember details.”
“But after he found the recipe, both the copies and the original recipe, that should have been the end of it all.
There was no need to try to kill Mike and later Jean in Rome. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“I remember, there was something else the monk talked about. He talked about one. Like there is only one God, or one way …”
“One?”
“Yes one,” Antonio confirmed.
“Could it be,” Natalie contemplated aloud, “that Gabriele misunderstood this and thought that only one man can live forever?”
“Hmm … Yes! I think that’s it. I remember him saying ‘this damn detective knows too much; he is smart, he is not meant to be the one, he has to go’.”
“So he had to kill everybody who in his opinion might have known the recipe. He had to kill the publisher, the four painters, Mike … Who else?”
“There may have been more killings – maybe, maybe not – I can’t remember names or locations. I also don’t want to remember. I don’t want to become him again.”
“No, don’t even try,” Natalie agreed. She continued, “There were so many things that happened and have no answers. There was a woman who found out about mine and Mike’s background and talked to the police about it. She phoned Mike’s boss. Christina’s private life suddenly was no longer private; a man talked to her on the phone about it. Then there was the publisher, Edward Rose, who wanted to talk to Mike about a crime; besides, he had published over seven hundred thousand books.”
“That’s a lot of books.”
“It is, but the funny part is, nobody knows what happened to them. Not so funny is that nobody knows what crime he came across. What did he want to talk to Mike about?”
“Somebody must know,” Antonio replied.
“Nobody knows anything about the publisher. He is a mystery figure. Nobody knows where he came from, where he had his seventeen millions from. Nobody knows.”
“Somebody must know,” Antonio insisted.
“Who could that somebody be?”
“Gabriele. It wouldn’t surprise me if he knew it all.”
The conversation was interrupted by an explosion. Soon afterwards the aeroplane made an emergency landing at the Aeroporto de Firenze. Although the pilot and the crew did a brilliant job, the plane hit the tarmac very hard and broke apart and of the 154 passengers on board 27 died. Most of them burned to death, 45 were badly injured…
Epilogue I: one week later
Natalie and Antonio survived the plane crash. They were flying first class and suffered only minor injuries. In fact, all first class passengers and all passengers at the very back of the plane survived. The plane broke apart in the middle section, which was the area where the fatalities occurred. (But this is not to say you should worry about where you sit at your next flight; most planes don’t crash.)
Obviously, this attack by terrorists has nothing to do with this story. It is just one of these things that happen; fortunately not very often. If the plane had landed in Rome as planned, the result – as far as Natalie, Antonio, Mike, Christina, Tony, Nancy, Sarah, Vanessa and Steven are concerned – would have been the same: they all arrived safely in Rome and started their new lives. Whatever “starting new lives” means to people in their situation.
Epilogue II: twelve months later
What have subsequent investigations revealed about the unresolved parts of this story? There is the publisher who died before he could talk about – perhaps? – a crime that might have taken place decades or even centuries earlier; he also produced thousands of books which could not be found and he arrived somehow, mysteriously in New York with millions of dollars. Who was he? Where did he have his money from? Where are the books? These, I’m afraid, are questions I can’t answer completely. The man is dead and took his secrets with him to his grave, perhaps into another world.
What I know is this: The police and the IRS continued looking into his case. Today, twelve months after the plane crash they think the publisher might have come from South Africa. There was the mysterious disappearance of a Cape Town businessman about two months prior to the publisher’s arrival in the USA. The businessman’s name is Ernest Leon and his appearance, age and wealth show a great deal of similarity with that of Edward Rose, the publisher. However, of even more interest is the discovery that Gabriele (alias Alberto, alias Antonio) lived in South Africa for nearly two decades. It is likely that the two men knew each other and may even have been business partners. They both lived in Cape Town. If we accept that they have been business partners, then the publisher’s sudden disappearance from Cape Town could be related to business dealings between the two men. Perhaps there was a falling-out over something. In this case the assassination of the publisher in New York could be related to this part of his past. But the falling-out of the two men, as we will see, could also be related to Gabriele’s obsessive search for an eternal life recipe. Ernest Leon’s business in Cape Town had to do with the import and export of machinery, furniture and antique art. The antique art component could be the key. This means there are possible links that point to the murderous events that took place in New York and Paris, albeit years later. It might just have taken all that time for Gabriele to locate his former South African business partner in New York. I’ll come back to this in a minute when I try to present how everything may hang together.
As far as the books are concerned, in the meantime several thousands of them have turned up in towns and villages in South Africa, Mongolia, India and China. Why and how they got there is largely unknown. The involvement of a charity organisation, which was set up by the publisher, is all that’s known at this stage. The books were found in libraries and if there is one real mystery in all of this, it is these books. What’s the objective associated with them? Are they meant to achieve something? Are they meant to create awareness of something? Are they meant to convey messages? This is still being looked into. There are, as I am writing this Epilogue, historians in the USA, UK and France analysing these books in an effort to find answers to these questions.
Then there were unexplained phone calls and killings and attempted killings in New York and Paris. In one respect they are easily explained. In New York, just as in any other major metropolitan city in the world, there are sophisticated crime services organisations. Organisations that are run by bad people who have made it their mission to support other bad people. The biggest such organisation in New York employs roughly 300 people (gangsters) and within hours can mobilise hundreds of contractors (also gangsters). The services of these organisations are expensive. Very expensive... (Allow me to digress here for a moment. I mention that these services are very expensive just so that you don’t think they are an easy and quick way to fix some of your problems, in case you have problems of a nature where the assistance of such an organisation might come handy. And you are perhaps wondering: how do I know this? I know it because ever since I published the first version of this book, the version without this Epilogue, some of these organisations have me on their mailing lists and keep offering me their services. Their emails usually come from a Hotmail or Gmail account. Once, when I replied and asked to be taken off the mailing list, my email bounced back as undeliverable. I never received an email from the same email address twice. These people are not stupid. Don’t mess with them. They are expensive and dangerous.)
Gabriele had the money to employ the large organisation I was referring to. It cost him several million dollars, but he could afford it. Employees and contractors of that organisation did all the killings and the mysterious things that happened in New York and Paris. I have to add, there are reasons to believe that not everything they did was endorsed by Gabriele. If you employ such an organisation, it is easy to lose control over what their employees are doing. They kill the wrong people, they kill too many people and, as it happened in New York, they get killed themselves, which of course was not such a bad thing.
But let’s now return to the unresolved parts of the story. To summarize what happened in one paragraph, this is how I think it may all hang together: In his younger years Antonio was a highly successf
ul bank robber in Italy. He was married to Natalie. A big bank robbery went wrong and it seemed that Antonio was killed. Natalie with their baby son Michelangelo, who later became Mike, and with a big amount of money managed to escape to America. However, Antonio was not killed. He bribed the police so that it seemed he was dead. Probably shortly afterwards he suffered from a massive global amnesia and either at the same time or later from a split personality disorder. It is rare, but not impossible, for these mental impairments to occur concurrently. As far as Antonio was concerned he was now a man without a past (a bit like the character played by Matt Damon in the Bourne films). He starts a new life, sometimes he is Gabriele, sometimes Alberto, whatever his split personality demands. Somehow he ends up in South Africa and becomes a business partner in Ernest Leon’s export, import business. The business is successful and the two men are able to put away millions of dollars. At some stage they probably converted their South African currency into gold or diamonds or both and managed to smuggle their wealth into the USA. Somewhere along the way they had a big falling-out. This would have been in South Africa and could well have been about something to do with a perceived recipe for eternal life. Gabriele made several business trips to the USA. We know that he visited a monastery in California and he and Ernest sold and bought antique art in the USA. Next, and this would have been after their falling-out, they were both looking for that recipe for several years, most likely for different reasons. Gabriele because of his obsessive belief that the recipe would give him eternal life and his former business partner, who by then had established himself as a niche publisher in New York, perhaps more for art related, philosophical or other reasons; we don’t know. He is a mystery man. Then Gabriele finds and identifies the publisher in New York as his former partner and, most likely, also knows or suspects that the publisher found the recipe. Remember: the four French painters stumbled over the recipe in Rome, the publisher bought copies of it from them in Paris, Gabriele stole the originals, three painters were killed and the publisher was shot dead in a bar in New York with Mike sitting beside him and Tony opposite them. Now Mike became Gabriele’s target because Gabriele assumed that Mike knew the recipe: that the publisher had told him about it, perhaps even gave him a copy. So Gabriele had to kill Mike just as he had to kill everybody else because of his insane belief that only one person can live forever. From here on we know pretty well what happened as far as Mike, Christina, Tony, Nancy and everybody else are concerned. Gabriele – sometimes as Gabriele and sometimes as Alberto – together with the assistance of New York’s biggest and most sophisticate crime services organisation, discovered bits and pieces about Mike and Christina’s con-activities and about Mike and his mother’s Italian background. This explains the two mysterious phone calls to Christina and Mike’s boss. However, at this stage neither Gabriele nor Alberto realized that they were Antonio and that Mike’s mother Natalie was Antonio’s wife and Mike his son. The massive global amnesia stayed intact and would only break apart later during the fight in the farmhouse at the outskirts of Paris. After that fight Natalie and Antonio recognized each other and everybody managed to escape to Rome.
An Almighty Conspiracy – A novel, a thriller, four people doing the unexpected Page 22