by Declan Finn
Mikhailov raised a brow. “You do not ask why?”
Pius shook his head with a small smile. “I saw the news. I am now the United Nations’ number one human rights abuser, apparently. Hence I am to be put on trial. The only place I can imagine that is in the World Court, thus The Hague. Which means I am in Belgium. But this place? I do not know. There are no bars, so it is not usually a prison. Where am I?”
Mikhailov nodded, acknowledging his deduction. “An old Nazi bunker. We decided to make use of it. It is made of solid concrete, underground, and might as well be invisible.”
Pius raised a brow. “How ironic.” He leaned back against the concrete wall and folded his hands on his chest. “I suppose this will be a show trial?”
Mikhailov grinned. “No, not quite. The verdict is rigged, but the testimony will be genuine. You will be your own lawyer, and you can do,” he waved his hand in the air, waving it off, “whatever it is you think will give you the best advantage. Do not worry, this will not be a re-creation of Cardinal Mindszenty in ’49. The French do not have the stomach to torture you, and I am afraid that I simply don’t have the time to break you myself. It took months to break one Cardinal. I do not have the time to break down a Pope.”
Pius raised a brow. “You know that there are some people who will not stand for it. Even if the governments of the world show me the same apathy they show my home country, there are still individuals who would stop at nothing to see me free. Giovanni Figlia is one of them.”
Ioseph Mikhailov shook his head. “I hate to break this to you,” he said with a broad grin, “but Mr. Figlia is dead. Have a pleasant trial.”
* * *
Sean Aloysius Patricus Ryan started looking over a topographical map of the area where the Pope was being held—Belgium was the only logical place, especially since Wilhelmina Goldberg had traced the signals of the extraction team there.
He glanced at his watch, and guessed that while all of America had heard about the Papal abduction, the rest of the world was still ignorant about it…mainly because most of the world was still asleep. It was only 4:00 AM.
That gave Sean Ryan only four hours before the entire place was covered in reporters, newsmen, and everything he said would be monitored by someone—or someone would at least attempt to, but he had solutions for that as well. As he poured over the maps, Swiss Guards were putting up a jamming net over the Vatican, jamming all listening devices that might have been in effect. Thankfully he had gotten the authorization from XO, who everyone seemed to see as being the de facto active governor of the Vatican while the Vatican Secretary of State, the official sustituto, acted as his front man.
“What are you planning to do?”
Ryan looked up from the computerized map to see Father Francis Williams, violet eyes, collar and all.
“I should’ve known it was you, I didn’t hear anything.” He looked down again. “As for what I’m doing, that much should be obvious, yes?”
“Is this a solo activity, or can anyone join in?”
Ryan smiled. “I’ve taken down harder targets than this. All I need to do is get inside, and then I get to have a little party.”
Fr. Williams appeared next to him, leaning over the map, same as Ryan. Ryan nearly jumped.
“You know what that is, don’t you?” Fr. Williams asked. He traced the outline of the blueprint with his finger. “I saw something similar in the newspaper lately. It’s an old Nazi bunker.”
Ryan thought a moment. “Aren’t they still finding them? I seem to remember some being discovered back in the nineties.”
Fr. Williams nodded. “The Belgians turned it into a prison for the French…they’ve held Greenpeace members and occasionally terrorists and spies in there…or so Bishop O’Brian tells me.”
“Hmm. I’ve always liked a challenge.” He leaned over the map again, considering angles of entry, plans of attack, how many people he would need to crack it versus how many people he would actually have.
“Would you want me along?”
Ryan gave him a sidelong look. “I’m guessing with your ability to move around, you can get through locks?”
Fr. Williams smiled gently. “You could say that.”
“You have any ability with weapons?”
“I’m as well trained as Ms. Shushurin, or Ms. McGrail. I am a weapon.”
Ryan chuckled. “Funny, that’s a line Maureen’s used.”
The priest shrugged slightly. “We watch the same TV shows?”
He went back to studying the map, and muttered, “Perhaps.”
“Have you considered bringing anyone else along?”
Ryan shook his head. “As few people as I can manage. I want to risk no one else, if possible. You want in, you keep this quiet. I’ve got a few people I can call in from the continent, people who can move without being seen.”
Frank cocked his head. “Such as?”
“You’d be surprised.” He pondered over the map a few more moments, his gaze intense and unwavering. “What happened with Cardinal Canella?” he asked without looking up.
Fr. Williams allowed his smile to grow just a little wider. “He has been put under a variation of house arrest. When Manana explained how the Cardinal was supposed to act as the Pope’s replacement after her father and company blew up the Pope and the College of Cardinals, Joshua was not amused.”
Ryan looked up from the maps and gave Fr. Williams a quick look. “Thank you, Mr. Exposition. Didn’t we have enough of that when Kovach first arrived?” He turned back to his plans. “Besides, Canella should have been taken out and shot. I don’t like having assets of the other team wandering loose on the premises.”
Fr. Frank shook his head with a light chuckle. “Not wandering. While we do not have the resources attributed to us by some fantastical authors, we have done everything but send him to a bottomless pit. There are even Swiss Guards on him.”
Ryan nodded absently, still intent on the goal.
“Are you always this intense?”
He blinked and looked up. “I suppose so, why?”
“It’s just that I…try not to be noticed.”
Ryan smirked. “Tell me about it.” He chuckled. “As for Canella… Gee, a Boston Cardinal who’s either stupid or malevolent? Who’d’ve thunk it?”
A nod. “True.”
“Anyway, you’re going to want to chat with a Fr. Nolan, an Auxiliary Bishop named Vladimir Pieczenik, and a Cardinal named Khan. I think I can use them to go after the Pope, and they haven’t had their faces plastered all over television.”
Sean Ryan looked at his watch. He wondered how much time he would have before the Pope was put on trial…and he wondered if he could get any sleep by then.
* * *
6:00 AM
Matthew Kovach checked his watch. He would need to report to the hotel room interview setup shortly. Wilhelmina Goldberg had rigged a webcam that would broadcast to Fox News in almost picture-perfect quality. He wasn’t going to have a cameraman come to his hotel room, considering the other people who were going to be around him—two Williamses, Murphy, Manana—who didn’t want to be seen by any random newsman.
But he would have enough time for a little chat.
Hashim Abasi was tall for his people and powerfully built, his broad shoulders accentuated by the fit of his hospital gown. At thirty-five, he had enjoyed moderate professional success—given where he lived, being alive counted as success.
Right now, Hashim looked like hell. His bald scalp had several stitches in it, after he had bounced his head off the concrete in his last shootout. His face had also been impacted, which was why his sharp, angular nose had been reset and bandaged. He had been worried, at first, that his health insurance as an Egyptian policeman didn’t cover the damage he had taken, but he had been told that it would be covered in the long run.
Hashim had been shot up…a lot. The first bullet took Hashim in the leg, the next had entered his shoulder. A third round scraped along his upper back,
shattering his right scapula into several pieces, which was why his arm was in a sling. The fourth and final bullet had raked his right side, shattering two ribs, and puncturing a lung.
And only a matter of days ago, he had been in Cairo, waiting to be sent to a nice, dull trip to Rome.
The Arab studied the light brown hair of his Irish wife, grateful that she opted to wear a hajib before resorting to various and sundry makeup—he liked her face the way it was, even if she did need to hide her fair skin. There had been plenty of people who had been upset when he had married an Irish woman in Foreign Aid, stationed in Egypt. Originally, she hadn’t needed to hide any of her features, because they would have had to worry about retaliation from one of the most powerful men in the police force.
Meara Byrne shook her head, a light smile on her lips. She was supposed to have been “deceased” in an honor killing years before. Fragments and splinter cells of Irish Republican Army groups had been angered at her for various irrational reasons—like her hatred of bombing civilians, her refusal to embezzle funds from Irish aid abroad, and that she had cut off funds from an embezzler they had co-opted.
The solution was simple: Hashim had “stoned” his wife to death in public. The punks chasing her had bought it whole and entire.
There was a knock at the door, and Hashim tensed a bit before the door opened slowly. It was a tall blond male who seemed friendly and open, and called himself Matthew Kovach.
“I’m the propaganda,” the young man said.
Hashim nodded, glancing towards Meara. “Are you aware of the situation, sir?”
“Sort of. But I wanted more of your point of view on the whole thing.”
“What do you mean?” Hashim asked.
Kovach slipped into a chair by the foot of the bed. “I’ve heard of research and shootouts, and I heard that you basically kept everyone alive at the airport. But I need to be able to counter with any fact at my disposal.”
Abasi blinked. “How so?”
“Have either of you kept up with the news?”
Meara and Hashim shook their heads. Kovach rolled his eyes. “Well, here’s the fun part—after you were put in here, the United Nations had been given the job of going after the nations involved in this, especially after Sean dropped a house on Mikhailov.”
“I heard that part,” Hashim replied. “Had I been conscious at the time, I could have told you all that it would have been a bad idea. Too many on the Security Council would support the fall of Rome, or would be apathetic, and too many in the United Nations themselves are dictators—Joshua’s thoughts on freedom would not go over well. The response of the Human Rights Council was predictable.”
“Well, no one asked me,” Matt said. “I’m just the PR guy. Last night, they came in and arrested the Pope, killing Giovanni Figlia in the process.”
Hashim blinked, than gaped. “What did…were they Russians? Mikhailov’s people again?”
Kovach shook his head. “French Paras mostly. Most were stopped, but Mikailov’s people were there, and they gave enough cover for the French to get away.”
Abasi frowned. “This sounds like President de Villepin to me.”
“I know, which means that at least one of the Russians left standing has connections in the French military. All you need is for one of them to be buddy-buddy with a Captain or up, and there they have their own French paratrooper unit.”
“This…is not good.”
“No kidding.” Kovach glanced at his watch, then glanced at the television. “Tune in to Fox News after I leave, they’re going to have live coverage, and I’ll be doing commentary.”
Hashim blinked. “Coverage of what?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I skipped that part—they’ve brought the Pope before the International Criminal Court, and they’re going to prosecute him on all the charges that the Sudanese ambassador and the HRC brought against him the other day at the UN.”
The Egyptian cop gaped a moment. “You are joking now, yes?”
“Mr. Abasi, I couldn’t make this up if I tried, and it’s my job to do that.”
* * *
The Hague.
The judges sat high above Pius XIII, looking down on him. The clerks around them were legion, separating the judges from the world by at least twenty feet. Instead of the boxlike shape of an American courtroom, it was rounded, with balcony seating for several members of the UN who had come to oversee this show trial.
Although not even His Holiness had any idea why any of them had come—there were cameras all along the courtroom. However, the Pope had no illusions about what this was. They were here to hang him, one way or another.
But then again, the rule of law, rhetoric, was the one thing they had not thought about.
For he was a Jesuit!
“Joshua Kutjok, alias Pius XIII, you have been indicted on human rights abuses, and resisting arrest, how do you plead?”
“That depends,” he said darkly. “If you want to accuse me of reminding Europe of its Christian roots, or trying to stop you from aborting yourself out of existence or from being so open minded your brains fall out, or screwing your brains out, or for telling you to be kind to each other, ,, and for trying to defend myself against an unwarranted attack, then I’m as guilty as sin itself. In which case, I have a defense.”
“Oh? And what do you say to the UN ambassador from the Sudan?”
The Pope smiled. “We hold a gun to no one’s head. If they have an abortion, that is their decision, and we cannot stop them, no matter how much we’d like to—and we have good reason to tell them not to, as will be proven later. As for killing abortionists, in fact, as our brother Cardinal O’Connor in New York once put it, ‘If anyone has an urge to kill someone at an abortion clinic, they should shoot me.’
“Also, our priests are told every day for eight years of seminary training that celibacy will be a way of life, and thus should be prepared for it—we hold no weapon to their heads, either. The Greek Orthodox Church has had its own problems with this matter, subordinating the priesthood to marriage, making their priests get married before they are ordained, lest they abuse the privilege of their position.
“As for homosexuals, we do not hate them for their actions, or for what they are; we don’t even hate them. We merely dislike the acts they do, and we try to help them recover from their actions, by running AIDS clinics across all the countries of the world. We run more facilities for the victims than any other organization on the planet.
“We are everywhere. Hagia Genghis Ecclesia: Holy Universal Gathering. And I would not talk about gay rights if I were the ambassador to the Sudan—they have stoned homosexuals and women to death on religious grounds, while my church does not even think of it as an option. We do not and have never severed limbs as part of religious policy, or dropped walls on homosexuals simply for what they are.
“As for the Crusades, the Muslims started the war with a jihad into the West. Only a hundred years after Mohammed died, the jihad came to Poitiers for the Battle of Tours, when followers of Mohammed tried to invade France. The West finished it by launching a massive counteroffensive that lasted over seven hundred years.” The Pope smiled. “By the way, in his statement, he also said that the Church condemned Sir Isaac Newton. The Ambassador to the Sudan should be reading historical texts—Isaac Newton was never condemned by the Catholic Church. He was Anglican. If he was condemned, talk to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“I also noticed that you have brought me to the International Criminal Court faster than the President of Sudan, and that I have been brought to a faster trial than Slobodan Milosevic ever was—I suspect that I will not die before the trial concludes, like he did.” He looked at several of the United Nations representatives sitting in the wings. “Please, I want you to put me on trial. I know your goal—the Vatican artwork, museum pieces, everything of monetary and historical value…well, not the documents, of course, you might find something inconvenient in them. Go ahead, try me, and attempt to enforce
whatever decree you want, because you will fail.”
The Belgian judge smiled at him. “How would you prevent us?”
The Pope smiled. “As the French Bishop said about nuclear war in the 1980s, defense of one’s culture is enough justification.”
The judge blinked, and several of the UN representatives exchanged a worried glance.
The Belgian asked, “For?”
“Using a small thermonuclear device on loan from Israel. There would be only a few casualties, including whoever you send to rob us, and Papal guards serve unto death anyway. I hear that the Chef Rabbi of Jerusalem has one under the Wailing Wall.”
The judge blinked, then gasped. “But, but, how can you do this? You are a man of God.”
Pius laughed. “When is God spelled F-O-O-L?” He smiled. “If you wish to steal from the Church of God, then you can do it over my dead body.”
“First witness.”
Chapter XVII
Party of Death
Belgium
The first witness against the Pope was a Bioethics Professor of an American Ivy League school in New Jersey, a woman named Patricia Cantor. She wasn’t what many people considered a perfect academic. She was bright, charismatic, colorful, and even personable. The Pope half-listened to what Cantor said, he had heard it all before. Abortion is necessary, it’s a right, poor women need it to get rid of unneeded children, rape victims would be traumatized by a pregnancy from rape, as would incestuous pregnancies.
And of course, God only knew the amount of unneeded children the Catholics allowed to be born because they forbade their people to have abortions. God only knew how many people the Catholic Church murdered because they forbade the use of condoms—who knew what sexually transmitted diseases they had caused to spread. After all, they know that people will have sex before marriage, and they know the risks it carries, so why ban it unless it’s through either malevolence or stupidity?
The Pope nodded and smiled. He had been prepared for this. While the French had given him a little time to prepare his own defense, he had been granted restricted Internet and library access, and that was all he needed.