by Rene Fomby
Andy shared a quick glance with Gavin. “What you’re telling us is, assuming Boucher doped you up to the gills, he could easily have gotten full access to all that information. To the launch codes for the bank, to use a metaphor.”
“Right.” Sam was wearing a small, secretive smile. “Except for the fact that I never memorized that information. Security specifically recommended against that, in case I was ever kidnapped and forced to reveal any of it.”
“So you kept that safely stored away somewhere. Smart.” Gavin was catching on quickly. “I take it you kept it in an encrypted file on your phone? Or your tablet?”
“No, encryption is a poor man’s game,” Sam answered with a smile. “Anyone with a supercomputer can bust 128-bit encryption in a heartbeat. No, I kept it somewhere even safer. Right out in the open, actually. But, for obvious reasons, I’m not talking. A secret is only safe as long as it remains a secret.”
“Right.” Gavin and Andy shared another look. “So, we’ve got some good ideas, here, some leads to chase down. A fresh start on finding William Tulley, and hopefully putting a hiatus on whatever he has planned. Is there anything else you want to know from us?”
“Okay, so I was thinking last night. Those names, Crismon and Labarum. I would have loved to look them up on my phone, but apparently it was a collateral casualty of the whole bombing thing. So, my little Google Gavin, let me ask you. Do they mean anything, or are they just made up names, like they do with cars?”
“I wondered the same thing, Sam,” Gavin answered. “So I had the analysts back home look into it. Turns out they’re both two different names for the same thing. A symbol of some sort. Looks like an Rx, which makes sense. Rx means prescription, and they’re both drug companies.”
Something tugged at the back of Sam’s mind. “Wait. Can you draw it out for me?” she asked.
With his notepad in front of him, Gavin drew a rough depiction of the symbol from memory, then turned it around and showed it to her. “Here. What do you think?”
There was no mistaking it. The names of both companies represented the same symbol. Not the symbol for prescriptions. The symbol for Christ. One of the oldest symbols for the Christian faith. Chi Rho.
“I think we need to bring in a consultant.”
89
Akko
Mehmed’s face lit up brightly when he saw Sam sitting in a wheelchair, being rolled through the door into his room, pushed by Gavin with Andy close behind.
“Sam! I was wondering when I’d get a chance to see you! How are you feeling?”
Sam smiled and held up her casted right arm slightly. “A bit worse for wear, but otherwise okay. How about you?” She could see that Mehmed had casts on both of his legs, as well as a bandage covering his left eye.
“Well, I won’t be out and about at the dance halls anytime soon, and Doc says I’ll be playing pirate for another week or two while my eye recovers from the blast, but otherwise I’m coming along. My wife flew in last night, so that helps. She was worried sick that the doctors might be lying to her, that I might be worse off than they were letting on, so seeing me in the flesh was a big boost for her spirits. And for mine.” He nodded toward Gavin and Andy. “I see you’ve met our new security detail. Would have been nice to have had them in place a little sooner, right?”
Gavin smiled at that. “Well, you know what they say. When seconds matter, the police are just minutes away.” He glanced behind him at Andy, then down at Sam, sitting comfortably but impatiently in her wheelchair. “Look, Mehmed, I’d like to say this is all a social visit, but Sam seems to think we’ve come across something that you might be able to shed some light on. Something that might help us round up the folks who set off that bomb.”
Mehmed suddenly sat up straighter in his bed. “By all means. Anything I can do to help, just ask.”
Gavin reached down and grabbed the legal pad Sam was carrying in her lap, flipping a few pages in and passing the pad over to Mehmed. “What do you know about this symbol?”
Mehmed grabbed the pad, his eyes widening immediately when he saw what Gavin had crudely drawn in the middle of the page. “A Chi Rho. One of the oldest symbols of Christianity. Where did you come across this?”
Gavin and Andy quickly related what they had discovered so far in their investigation, and how the Chi Rho symbol fit into all of it.
“This symbol just keeps popping up way too often for it to be merely a coincidence,” Gavin explained. “Especially given the fact that its use is so archaic. And the fact that William Tulley himself is apparently an avowed sedevacantist, a believer in the old church. It makes sense that he would therefore be enamored with a symbol from the earliest days of the faith.”
“Hmm.” Mehmed stared at the page, thinking. “That last part, about Tulley being a sedevacantist. Are you sure about that?”
“Pretty sure,” Gavin answered. “I mean, most of what we have to go on regarding all of that was what his son Luke told Sam, in the year or so before his death. Why do you ask?”
Mehmed’s eyes took on a far-off quality, like he was reading from the pages of a book materializing invisibly in the air in front of him. “Sedevacantism is an interesting phenomenon, a schism in the modern Catholic Church. It exists in at least several dozen variations, mostly a matter of relative intensity, testing just how far Traditional Catholics are willing to go to deny the validity of what they call the Novus Ordo, the ‘new order.’ But all of them agree that the doctrinal changes brought about by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council are heresy. Their basic argument goes, because the Church is indefectible, her teaching cannot change, and because she is infallible, her laws cannot result in evil. They therefore see the reforms of Vatican II as an interference in the true path of the Church, imposed by Satan himself, and they deny the legitimacy of John XXIII and all his successor popes. Thus, the name sedevacantist, which literally means ‘empty seat.’ To them, the Holy See has been empty since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958.”
“So why would you think Tulley is not a true sedevacantist?” Andy asked.
Mehmed shook his head. “I’m not saying he isn’t. What I’m saying is, if he’s clinging to the use of the Chi Rho, then it suggests he might be following a religious imperative that goes much deeper than simple sedevacantism. An imperative that harkens back to a time well before the Great Schism. To a time when there was still just one true Christian Church, both orthodox and catholic. And that is even more disturbing.”
“Why is that? And what the heck was the Great Schism?” Sam asked, intrigued.
Mehmed grabbed a pen off the bed stand beside him and, flipping the notepad to a blank page, drew a large Y, then a smaller C and an O, on either side. “Okay, originally, there was just one Roman Empire,” he told them, pointing to the base of the Y. “The original capital of the empire, of course, was Rome itself. In the early 300’s, Emperor Constantine came to the conclusion that Rome had become too worn down, its citizenry too political and too socially inbred, and so he decided to move his capital far to the east, to the ancient city of Byzantium. A place we now call Istanbul.”
“Yeah, you explained all that to Margaret and me when we toured Göreme,” Sam said, following along. “But I guess Gavin and Andy haven’t heard any of that, so go on.”
“Right,” Mehmed agreed. “So, after the move, Constantine named his new capital city New Rome, but the locals adopted a different name, Constantinople, which lasted until the city fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Overthrown by my namesake, Mehmed the Conqueror, by the way, no actual relation. For over eleven hundred years, then, the true capital of the Roman Empire was Constantinople. Rome itself, and the western half of the Empire that surrounded it, saw itself increasingly abandoned and ignored by the emperors in Constantinople, and by the late 300’s, Rome had become the war prize of a succession of Goths and Huns, interspersed on rare occasions by half-hearted Eastern efforts to reconquer the region. Thus we have the per
iod Westerners refer to as the ‘Dark Ages,’ the collapse of the last vestiges of Roman civilization in Western Europe. During this time, the See of Rome largely collapsed as well, and the Latin language all but disappeared.”
Mehmed paused for a moment to take a sip of water from a glass on his bed stand, then continued. “That takes us to 1054. Prior to that year, the Bishop of Rome—who had taken to styling himself as the ‘Pope’—was but one of five bishops that stood as ecumenical equals at the head of the ‘One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.’ The Church at that time was strongly democratic in its nature, just as the Orthodox churches remain today. Any changes in church rituals or beliefs had to be approved by a consensus of the five holy sees, the bishops, although a significant split had already developed between the so-called Latin churches, who celebrated Mass in Latin, and the eastern churches who celebrated in Greek. There were other doctrinal differences, as well, such as whether leavened or unleavened bread should be used in the Eucharist, and of course the filioque controversy, but leave it to say that the two halves of the one Church had begun to drift apart. By 1054, any remaining semblance of church unity evaporated entirely, as the Pope in Rome asserted his own unilateral authority over the Church, and demanded that all Greek-speaking churches in southern Italy be shuttered. In retaliation, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, declared that all Latin churches in Constantinople be closed as well. Pope Leo IX then sent a papal legate to Constantinople to order the Patriarch to accept the primacy of the Roman church, but he refused, and the legate promptly excommunicated the Patriarch. This led to a back-and-forth series of excommunications and other acts, and before you knew it, the One True Orthodox and Catholic Church had split in half, a condition that remains to this day. Thus we have the Roman Catholic Church on one side, and the Eastern Orthodox Church in its many regional flavors on the other.” He pointed down to the picture he had drawn earlier on the notepad, showing the one church branching off in two directions.
“So how does all this fit into Tulley and the Chi Rho symbol?” Gavin asked, lost a bit in all the historical detail and impatient to get to the heart of all this.
“Right. Well, that’s a little more complicated.” Mehmed took another short sip of water. “You see, while technically the Chi Rho is still in use today in many churches, in practice the symbol is pretty archaic, relating back to the pre-schism church. Sedevacantists in particular would tend to avoid it like the plague, because of its close association with Constantine and the Eastern church. If anything, sedevacantists are Latin to the core, and are deeply troubled by Pope John XXIII’s assertion that all of humanity is united in Christ, not just Roman Catholics. In fact, many of them insist to this day that the papal conclave of 1958 actually elected Cardinal Giuseppe Siri—the Archbishop of Genoa—as Pope, and that Satan stole the throne and placed his own agent, John XXIII, on it instead.”
“So Siri is actually Pope?” Sam laughed, looking down at the iPhone Andy was grasping in her left hand. “We’re all doomed!”
“Yeah. Well, the sedevacantist movement makes about as much sense as Siri, sometimes,” Mehmed chuckled. “But, seriously, this whole Chi Rho business has popped up somewhere else, which is why, I think, Sam has drug the two of you in here.”
Gavin and Andy had started drifting off during Mehmed’s long lecture on the various religious schisms within the Catholic Church, but suddenly both were on full alert.
“You’ve seen this symbol somewhere else recently?” Gavin asked.
Mehmed looked over at Sam, who nodded. “Actually, it was Sam who first discovered it, during a little field trip to some of the ancient Christian sites in Central Turkey. A little decal, stuck inside the doorway of a thousand-year-old church. Almost unnoticeable, if it hadn’t been for Sam. The thing is, I knew right away that it shouldn’t be there, that someone had stuck it there recently. So I did a little research, and what I found was a disturbing pattern. These little Chi Rho decals have been popping up all over southern Europe, spreading out apparently from an starting point in the heart of Istanbul.”
Mehmed carefully detailed everything he had been able to piece together regarding the decals, while Gavin took careful notes on the notepad he had retrieved from the bed. When Mehmed was finished, Gavin leaned back against the wall, trying to make sense of everything he had just learned.
“What you’re saying is, this whole Chi Rho phenomenon is moving directly west out of Istanbul, but confining itself solely to the southern part of the continent.” Gavin tapped his pen slowly on the notepad.
“Right. And it seems to be especially concentrated in areas where there’s been a great deal of social unrest recently,” Mehmed observed. “The statistical correlation on that is pretty high, so I don’t think we can ignore it.”
“And you say it appears that this whole thing may be coming to a peak pretty soon?” Andy asked.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a peak,” Mehmed answered. “Just that the edge of the Chi Rho wave is now stuck somewhere in central Spain, but is still moving westward. At the current rate, it should hit the Atlantic Ocean soon, maybe a month, maybe two or three. It’s hard to be exact, given the looseness of the raw data. But yeah, when the pattern is finally complete, what happens then?”
Andy and Gavin exchanged a hard look.
“Mehmed, you’ve given us a lot to think about,” Andy finally said. “And this all somehow fits into the enigma we’ve come to find surrounding our friend William Tulley. The thing is, there’s no way any of this could possibly be random. A long-lost symbol from Christianity’s ancient past suddenly showing up everywhere we look? No, it’s got to be related to Tulley. He’s got something brewing, and now we’ve only got a month or so to figure out just what pot he’s planning on stirring up.” She looked over at Sam, lost in thought herself about the connivances of her missing father-in-law. “Sam, thank you for bringing this to our attention. And Mehmed—” She nodded to him, her brow knotted with concern. “Thank you, too. I have an analyst back at our headquarters in Washington that has shown a really keen interest so far in this investigation, and I know he would love to get his hands on that spreadsheet you’ve put together. And, of course, we need to get some agents out into the field right away to get a better handle on where exactly those decals are coming from.”
“I’ll send you everything I have later on today,” Mehmed promised.
“Good.” Andy motioned to Gavin that it was time to leave. “In the meantime, you two need to leave all this nonsense to us, and put all your energy into getting better.”
“We will,” Sam said, as Gavin leaned down to unlock her wheelchair. “And I hope it’s sooner rather than later. I’ve got an old acquaintance from back home in Texas who’s going to be giving a lecture next week in Venice on an archaeological dig down near Pompeii. The whole thing is being funded by our arts and humanities foundation, so I would hate to have to miss it. Especially since it’s probably going to be the last hoorah for the Ricciardelli family. The way things are going, the family bank may very well be gone before those decals ever hit the Atlantic shore.”
“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” Gavin assured her. “We’re all praying that you somehow pull off another miracle, like you always seem to do.”
“I think I’ll need more than a miracle at this point,” Sam noted dryly. “I doubt even an intercession by the Pope himself would make much of a difference.” She reached back and patted Gavin’s left hand as he guided her out of the room and down the hall. “But hey, I’m not turning down any help I can get. You never know, right?”
90
Venice, Italy
Sam left the hospital a week later despite the protestations of her doctors. Things were deteriorating rapidly at the bank, and she needed to meet with her bank managers to try and devise some way to hold off the inevitable collapse for just a few more short weeks. Giving her one last desperate chance to find someone willing to fund the
sale of the tractor company.
They met in the boardroom at the top floor of the bank, a room soaked in centuries of history, of loving service to the Ricciardelli family. A service that now was apparently coming to a final end, strangled to death by the treachery of her husband’s father.
“So you see, Ms. Tulley, even the Finance Minister can no longer turn a blind eye to what is happening.” The president of the bank was standing before a chart that showed the massive hemorrhaging of cash reserves, as frightened investors pulled the money out of their accounts like rats fleeing a sinking ship. “At this rate, even with the new caps on withdrawals we’ve put in place, the bank will be upside down in two weeks, maybe three.”
“If I can find someone who’ll underwrite the sale of the plants before then?” Sam asked. “At this point, would that save us?”
The bank managers around the table shared a quick look. The president spoke up again, hesitantly. “Yes, most likely, but the window for that is even shorter. Maybe a week, at most. After that, too much damage will have been done. And then—there’s the other problem.”
Suddenly the atmosphere in the room grew a bit colder, as none of the managers seemed to be able to look her way. “Yes, Alberto, what is that?”
The bank president made a show of studying his notes. “As you may recall, Ms. Tulley, we prepared a political analysis for you just before your meeting with the Finance Minister, detailing the growing unrest in Italy.”
“I remember that very clearly. Something about the Lega Nord, and the possibility of northern secession.”
“Yes, well, that movement has apparently picked up a great deal of steam in the past few weeks. To the point where we’re actually seeing acts of sabotage at a number of our manufacturing facilities. Including the tractor plants.”