Apocalypsis 1.01 Demons

by Mario Giordano

  She didn’t seem to think this was funny. She just looked at him disapprovingly.

  »Have you ever been to Africa?« she asked.

  Peter cursed himself; thanks to his remark, she had stopped smiling. The sounds coming from the adjacent room had gotten louder; they could hear sobbing, suppressed gurgling and gasping for breath.

  »I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.«

  She didn’t say a word but continued to look him over with steadfast eyes.

  »What are you thinking right now?« Peter interrupted the silence.

  »Don Luigi has a high opinion of you. I am wondering why.«

  They were startled by an obscene and bloodcurdling scream coming from the adjacent room. »Maledetto! Porrrrrca Madonna!« There followed a tirade of blasphemous curses occasionally interrupted by Don Luigi’s sonorous and authoritative voice repeating time and again: »Tell me your name! What is your name? Tell me your name!«

  Peter knew that the demon became vulnerable when he revealed his name. Then you had him by the collar, so to speak.

  Five minutes later it was all over. A heavy woman of around forty entered the kitchen. She looked slightly flushed but otherwise well, and she greeted everyone in the room before making a few remarks about the weather and the forthcoming garbage workers’ strike. Behind her, two stocky deacons stepped into the kitchen followed by two seasoned Carthusian Sisters, holding rosaries. They washed their hands and then they dug out their cell phones and started to text. Don Luigi welcomed Peter with a handshake that almost crushed Peter’s hand, and then he introduced him to Maria.

  »We’ve had already the opportunity to get to know each other a little,« Peter said. »I have to admit, though, that I behaved like a complete idiot.«

  Maria raised her eyebrows and Don Luigi looked at them both for a few seconds, visibly amused. Then he asked the mother and her son to follow him into his treatment room, signaling Peter to join them.

  »Come on, Peter,« he said with verve. »It may well be that the boy starts to vomit nails or soars up into the air. Then you would finally be forced to change your agnostic view of the world.«

  The room looked like a country kitchen. The walls were half tiled, and there was a small sink, a small altar, three chairs and a little table with plastic cups for séances. On the walls were a crucifix, some pictures of Padre Pio, Mother Teresa, the Pope and one photo that showed Don Luigi with a young Diego Maradonna. An ancient massage table dominated the center of the narrow room. Don Luigi asked the adolescent boy, who introduced himself as Luca, to lie down on the table. His mother sat down on one of the chairs and didn’t say a word. Each of the deacons grabbed one of Luca’s arms, holding him tight. The two older nuns sat on his legs and Don Luigi signaled to Maria to hand him the jar with the holy water. Everything was done as smoothly and as unsentimentally as a professional teeth-cleaning, Peter thought. Luca did not seem to be afraid; he was just very quiet.

  »It won’t hurt,« Don Luigi assured him. »Do you believe in Satan?«

  »Si, padre.«

  »That’s good. Whoever does not believe in the devil, does not believe in the Gospel.« Don Luigi turned around and looked at Peter. »Isn’t that right?«

  Peter shrugged his shoulders and didn’t say a word; he was used to Padre Luigi’s provocative statements. He looked at Maria, standing behind Luigi and rolling up her sleeves before grabbing Luca’s head between her hands. She ignored Peter completely.

  »The demon is everywhere,« Don Luigi explained. »Even the Pope is vulnerable.«

  Peter’s ears pricked-up. Don Luigi had said this in German. Maria also seemed shocked, judging from the way she looked at him.

  »At least in theory,« Don Luigi added, and turned back to the boy, who seemed to find the strange German language scarier than the devil.

  Don Luigi sprinkled a few drops of holy water over him and began the procedure, as usual, with the invocation of the Archangel Michael, Psalm 68(67), and the exorcism prayer of Pope Leo XIII.

  »In the Name and by the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ, we drive you from us, whoever you may be, unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders, all wicked legions, assemblies and sects: may you be snatched away and driven from the Church of God and from the souls made to the image and likeness of God and redeemed by the Precious Blood of the Divine Lamb.

  Most cunning serpent, you shall no more dare to deceive the human race, persecute the Church, torment God's elect and sift them as wheat.«

  Then he made the sign of the cross on the boy’s forehead. This was the moment when Peter saw that the boy was wearing a gothic earring.

  »Stay away from Satanism, Luca!« Don Luigi intoned each word in a loud voice. »Stay away from sorcery and witchcraft, from demons and psychic readers!«

  A couple of times, Don Luigi smacked the boy’s forehead with his flat hand. »What is your name?« Don Luigi moved his ear close to the boy’s mouth. No answer.

  The old exorcist smacked Luca’s forehead again. »I am asking you, Demon, tell me your name!«

  »Goblin Hammer,« whispered the boy’s mother. »His name is Goblin Hammer. From that computer game.«

  Peter couldn’t help but break into a grin. The alleged demonic possession of this boy was nothing more than the overwrought fantasy of a pubescent lad who’d spent too much time with online role-playing games.

  Luca did not grin. This was no longer any fun for him.

  »Goblin Hammer!« Don Luigi’s voice was thundering now and again, he slapped him with holy water on the forehead. »In the name of the glorious Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, in the name of Lord Jesus Christ, in the name of the Archangel Michael, I command you to leave Luca!«

  Peter saw that the boy had begun to sweat profusely. Time and again, Luigi smacked his forehead and commanded the demon, in the name of all the saints, to leave Luca’s body. Because this was what exorcism was all about: the demonic possession of the human body, not of the human soul.

  Luca’s face grimaced and his body squirmed and convulsed as if he were in agony and his legs were tensing up.

  »Depart from Luca, Goblin Hammer, I command you! Depart from him!«

  Luca gurgled something and gasped for air, jerking in convulsions, and then he began to throw up. Maria, the Deacons and the nuns struggled to hold him on the table. It slowly began to feel eerie in the narrow room. An absurd thought flashed through Peter’s mind. What if this little Neapolitan lad really did begin to levitate or vomit nails, as Luigi claimed to have witnessed several times before?

  But Luca didn’t throw up nails and he didn’t soar above the massage table either. The only thing that he did do was to open his mouth, all of a sudden, and begin to speak. In a voice that was no longer his own.

  In German.

  »Chaos reigns in the Via della Conciliazione. Ambulances rush to the scene from all directions. Dead bodies and debris litter the streets, which look like a battlefield. Around thirty minutes ago, a huge explosion shook the entire Vatican. Eyewitnesses described a blazing flash of light ripping through the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. The blast killed thousands of people and tossed debris and parked cars several hundred yards into the air. At this hour, nothing is known about the background details of this devastating attack, nor about the fate of the one hundred and seventeen cardinals who had gathered in the Sistine Chapel for the Conclave. At this point, only one thing is clear: the Vatican, the center of the Catholic Church, no longer exists.«

  XI

  May 9, 2011, Vatican City

  There were few things in this world that Urs Bühler truly despised. Filth, for instance, the human scum that mingled with the garbage in the suburbs of Rome, Algiers, Paris, or even Basel, forming a foul-smelling mass. Discarded needles in city parks, the pocked-marked arms of half-starved junkies, the desperation of the whores, the stench of squalor, the stench of decomposition, the stench of chaos. The sight of gunshot wounds and strangulation marks, stab wounds and shredded limbs, and of
bruises on the bodies of infants. The taste of blood. The moans of dying men. The killing. Strangely enough, Urs Bühler also hated the sight of calcium deposits on faucets. Actually, there were only a few things in life that Bühler really liked. And there was only one person in this world whom he loved with all his heart and for whom he was willing to do anything. But more than anything and anyone else, Urs Bühler hated the Italians. An aversion that he had adopted from his parents and that grown ever more intense. He hated the Italians for their self-glorification, their arrogance, and their untrustworthiness, and he hated them for their tearful sentimentality and their paranoia towards order. He hated the fuss they made over their food and their coffee. Their cowardice. Their language that overflowed with subjunctive conditionals and ambiguities, wasting many words without saying a thing. Bühler hated the Italians for their apish gesticulation and their pride in the decadence of their elite. He hated the Italian women for the way they stuck out their little fingers, and he hated the Italian men for their mothers. There were a thousand reasons. In his eyes, the Italians were worse than the Jews and the Blacks. And the worst Italians of all lived in Rome.

  But the Vatican was not Rome. Even though it was surrounded by the blustering waves of Roman filth, Urs Bühler felt that the Vatican was the only place in the world which was still run in a reliable and orderly fashion. And he was prepared to risk his life to protect and to maintain this holy order, at all costs and under all circumstances.

  As a Swiss national and as a Catholic with basic military training, he had met the requirements to join the Swiss Guards – the oldest and smallest army in the world – when he was still a young man. However, during a visit to a café in his second year of service as a guardsman, he had beaten the living hell out of an Italian who had told one too many racist jokes about the Swiss. As a result, Bühler had quit the service voluntarily and, at the age of 28, he had entered the Foreign Legion. For fifteen years he had seen and experienced the worst shitholes in the world on several different continents. He had seen death coming for him and others, and he had seen enough insanity, chaos and dirt to break him utterly. But Urs Bühler had not been broken; he had enjoyed being a legionnaire. Every year on April 30, he and some comrades still celebrated the anniversary of the Battle of Camarón, the highest holiday in the Foreign Legion’s calendar. Bühler had simply understood that it was time for a change. Before it was too late.

  It so happened that this desire for change had fallen just as the Vatican was trying to update its safety and security operations, and was searching for well-trained people with experience who fitted the profile of the Swiss Guards. Bühler had rejoined the Guards at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and within five years he had risen to Colonel and Commander of the Guards. Five happy years, which he had used to systematically modernize his troops: he had turned an operetta army in bloomers, with halberds, muzzle-loading rifles and crossbows, into the modern and combat-able personal protection force of the Pope. Not an easy task considering the limited number of only 109 troops.

  Even though his guardsmen still wore the slightly carnivalesque Renaissance uniforms in the colors of the Medici and still protected the gates of the Vatican, the aisles of the museums and the Apostolic Palace with halberds and pepper spray, there was now a sala operativa in the quarters of the Swiss Guards, an operational room with the latest surveillance and communication equipment. Bühler had also modernized his guardsmen’s armaments, but his main concern was that the young guards should receive excellent combat training. As the troops would never be able to withstand any attack with heavy weapons, their strength could only be the mobile defense of the Vatican interior and, under all circumstances, the protection of the pope.

  Indeed, Urs Bühler understood his service in the Swiss Guards as a service to God. For him, the Guard was neither a group of pompous bodyguards, nor a monastic order, neither a club for the preservation of traditional costumes nor an elite crew of military men. For Bühler, the Swiss Guard was something utterly old-fashioned and only for this reason so successful – a confederacy bound by oath.

  Now, in his late forties, the stocky man from Switzerland still looked well-toned but not athletic. His legionnaire-style shaven head made him look slightly bullish; besides that, Bühler’s face would almost have had soft features, had it not been for his eyes, those hard and bright eyes.

  Bühler had no family and lived exclusively for the Guard, almost in celibacy, if one disregarded his occasional visits to a Thai brothel, which was also frequented by one of the Curial Cardinals. Bühler had even resolved the eternal rivalry between the Swiss Guards and the papal gendarmerie by reaching an agreement that the gendarmerie had to report to him in the case of an attack on the Vatican.

  Last week, this attack had begun.

  Bühler did not have any doubt that the three homicides on the day of the Pope’s abdication marked the beginning of an offensive against the Vatican. The resignation of the Pope alone raised so many questions and Bühler had believed, until an hour ago, that the Pope had been kidnapped or that he was already dead. In the meantime, he could no longer rule out the possibility that the danger to which the Vatican was exposed was actually posed by the former Pope himself. And this irritated him deeply.

  Bühler was a soldier and he had to know where the front-line was. Where the enemy was. Who the enemy was. At this moment, none of that was clear. The only thing that was clear was that the conclave would begin in a few days with over one hundred cardinals from all over the world, the entire spiritual leadership of the Catholic Church worldwide. And Bühler had to guarantee their safety with the same number of guards and the 130 men of the papal gendarmerie (who were, in his personal opinion, only slightly more capable than traffic cops ). This was his task and he hated it if some shit-ass Italians kicked him in the balls while he was trying to fulfill it.

  Only with the greatest efforts, and through Cardinal Menendez’s personal intervention with the Italian police authorities, had it been possible to conceal the bloodbath at the heliport as a tragic accident caused by rotor blades. They sold the murder of the papal chauffeur as a suicide, claiming that the young man had been having an affair with a married woman.

  Solving murders was not part of Bühler’s job description, nor was he trained for it. However, he was convinced that he could only efficiently protect the conclave and the new pope if he knew who was attacking them. Menendez had understood this right away and he had used all his influence with the Roman authorities to ensure that Bühler was kept up to date on the continuing investigation.

  The murderer of the helicopter pilot and the former private secretary of the Pope had obviously felt very confident, because he had left scores of fingerprints. However, they weren’t to be found in any system. Even Interpol’s search came back empty.

  For Bühler, the former legionnaire, Duncker’s murder had all the hallmarks of a special-forces operation behind enemy lines, even though the brutality of the attack somehow didn’t fit the mold. Bühler was nonetheless convinced that the murderer knew his way around the Vatican and knew it well. It was possible that he was walking in and out without being controlled. It was possible that he was still inside the Vatican, ready to strike again at any given moment.

  Bühler had put the Guard on alert immediately. He had tightened the permit controls at the gates, had developed a patrol plan for the gendarmerie, and had ordered new background checks on all employees of the Vatican. Furthermore, he had sent an email to the Curial staff, the Governorate and the individual religious orders as well as to the gardeners and the cleaning personnel, the locksmiths, the upholsterers, and every other institution within the walls of the Vatican, instructing all of them to report anything suspicious to him immediately, whether it was a person or an activity of any kind.

  But he should have known better. Of course he should! The editor in charge at Radio Vaticano, a pale Chaplain from Milan, had simply shrugged his shoulders when he told him how terribly sorry he was, but due to
the fact that the email from the former Pope had carried the security certificate of the Vatican server, it had not looked suspicious to him. Besides, the email had been sent from the Pope’s personal email address. Bühler would have loved to use the man’s face as a punching bag.

  »These goddam Italian assholes,« he yelled in the operation room of the Guard. »I want to know where this goddam mail came from!«

  A young guardsman handed him an Internet Protocol, which documented the path that the email had taken.

  »Sir, I wish to report that we have regrettably not been able to verify the IP-address of the source computer.« The man spoke slowly, with a heavy tongue à la Bernese. »The mail was probably sent through different proxy servers.«

  »Which means?«

  »The sender covered his tracks. And very skillfully, at that.«

  »How is it possible that this mail was sent with a security certificate from the Pope’s private email address – but not through the internal server of the Vatican?«

  »We are still working on that, sir.«

  Bühler forced himself to stay calm. »What about the video? Is it authentic or fake?«

  The young halberdier cleared his throat.

  »Based on what we can tell after a first analysis of the images… it is authentic.«

  Bühler groaned and watched the video again. It was less than four minutes long. If it really was authentic, this could mean that the situation was a whole lot more serious. It could mean that the former Pope himself was part of the problem. Or worse.

  XII

  May 9, 2011, Vatican City

  It was still very obvious how shaken Peter Adam was. His face drained of color, he sat in Don Luigi’s kitchen, drinking the third espresso that the exorcist had brewed for him, mixed with grappa, in an old and battered aluminum jug. Maria looked at him with sympathetic eyes; the Jesuit was the only one who seemed to be calm personified, as she poured some more grappa into Peter’s cup. Silence spread between the three of them. The only sound was the twittering of the birds outside.