A Pius Legacy

by Declan Finn

  Ioseph’s son, Nikita, cleared his throat. “Sir?” Nikita said, his accent thick.

  Ioseph turned and smiled affectionately at his son—a sudden reversal that Nikita was used to. He continued, “Davidoff had requested more information—there’s a problem.”

  Ioseph’s brows darkened. “I noticed.”

  “Not that one,” Nikita answered, putting the folder on the desk that was still intact. “His father-in-law is a captain with the New York police force; Kovach routinely interviews Deaglan Lynch of the Provisional IRA, and then there are his relatives. We know he’s distantly related to a mafia boss known as Alfredo Masciale…emphasis on distantly. However, Kovach seems to be close to a cousin who is close to Masciale. And Kovach may be related to Michael Finn.”

  Mikhailov sighed. “So you are telling me that not only does his wife have practical experience in combat, but that she could have called upon the mafia, the NYPD, the IRA, or the CIA?” He closed his eyes. He had a headache coming on. “We may have underestimated him.”

  Nikita smiled sadly. “Yes, sir.”

  “Hmm, maybe we’re being too professional. Maybe we need an amateur.”

  Chapter XX

  A Politic Response

  Day 7. 9:00 AM.

  By the time the next day in Belgium had gathered to a full, brisk pace, the assault on “the author’s wife” had dominated the news cycle for hours already, and threatened to overtake the prosecution’s case as a news item in America. It had a well-known monument, a celebrity’s wife, who herself was a celebrity (if you counted having an Olympic gold medal).

  Kovach, for his part, seemed almost revved up, and had three back-to-back interviews within the same daytime news block—daytime for Europe, that is; he would see what he would do about the daytime for American news when the time came.

  Wilhelmina Goldberg sat at the hotel room desk not five feet away from the young author as he spoke into the camera, answering questions only he could hear via an earpiece. Captain Williams sat off to the side, on one of the couches, reading a magazine with one hand, his other hand on his gun. Outside, Maureen McGrail and Fr. Williams were stalking the halls.

  Wilhelmina smiled to herself. If these bozos decide to come after Kovach instead of his wife next time, they’re going to be in for a world of pain. I just wish that the rest of us could be a little more useful, other than just sitting here.

  Unfortunately, the only thing left for any of the spies and gunslingers was almost literally to sit around and protect the author—the only viable target left.

  Kovach leaned back as the camera on the computer blinked out. Having his interviews webcast to news outlets saved them a lot of time, and made him less vulnerable.

  “So,” Goldberg said, “how’s your wife?”

  Kovach blinked and looked her way. “Moira? Good. Hardly shaken.”

  The Secret Service agent leaned back in her chair. “You know, last night, you seemed really pissed over her being attacked. Now you don’t even seem to mind.”

  Matt gave a single laugh through his nose. “We’re used to it.”

  * * *

  Thomas Healy, right hand man to Provisional IRA Commandant Deaglan Lynch, sighed, practically groaning, at the amount of work he’d had to put into persuading this particular killer to cooperate.

  At the moment, there was nothing more he could think of to do with him. The man had been worked on for days and yet nothing had come out of him aside from the occasional growl.

  But that didn’t change the fact that this bastard had not only murdered a priest, but did it while claiming to be a member of the IRA. That just wasn’t done if you wanted to live through it. And at the moment, Healy’s job was to make death look like a pretty darn good option.

  “Do you know what a six-pack is?” he asked rhetorically, loading a six-shooter. “I shoot out your ankles, knees and elbows. And then I let you go. Last chance: where are the guys who took the Pope? We know it’s Belgium, now where?” He tapped the muzzle against his ankle and cocked it.

  “An abattoir,” he whispered. “I don’t know where.”

  Healy nodded solemnly and blinked. He got up and walked out, asking, “What the fock is an abattoir?”

  * * *

  Sean Ryan had never considered himself a great thinker.

  This was not to imply that he didn’t think, or was an idiot—quite the contrary. He spent his time each morning listening to audio books during his exercises whenever he could, or reading whenever he had a slow moment. Most of the facets of his life he had already pondered, usually before the situation had come up. He would never take an idea at face value, lest it be wrong—he never went for ideologies that bent facts to fit the system, only philosophies that incorporated facts to enhance the idea, where it always evolved. Even the teachers at Mel Gibson’s parish had to use Thomas Aquinas on him each day of the week to argue with him into belief. He came to his faith through his reason, and would always use one to back up the other.

  And while he wasn’t a genius, he made up for something many intellectuals didn’t have: a creative, practical, and functional imagination.

  Three-dozen Columbians attack you at the house? Blow up the house. Heavily guarded door? Blow up a side wall.

  Underground Nazi compound turned into a prison?

  He was still working on that one. After all it wasn’t like he could…

  He grinned broadly. And then his laughter could be heard throughout the Papal Palace.

  He had a plan, all he needed were people;

  Cardinal Sin of Japan; the Bucharest Auxiliary Bishop Vladimir Pieczenik, who ran the Gypsy vicariate; and Police Chaplin Evan Nolan, shot at on the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant, the Bronx, and he had been the Chaplain to many of the police officers vaporized on September of 2001 (after that, he had gone overseas to Afghanistan to visit the troops, and some old parishioners turned marines). Then there was the Sikh cardinal, Harsharan Khan, dressed in dazzling scarlet, with an equally red turban with a large crucifix in the middle, and he carried his iron shepherd staff with him.

  The one thing they all had in common was that they all knew Thomas Aquinas’s answer to the question: What is the Purpose of the shepherd staff? To herd the sheep, of course.

  And to crack a few wolves’ skulls.

  With Fr. Frank Williams, Sean Ryan, and eventually the Pope when he was broken out, it was decided by Ryan that seven was a good solid number, a good core group for his own personal operation.

  Operation: CATHERINE OF SIENA.

  Objective: To bring the Pope back where he belonged.

  He pumped his fist and cried out, “Yes!”

  He turned for the door and was immediately confronted by a tall, ugly bastard in a red cloak.

  Cardinal Alphonse Canella stood in the doorway, his big ugly features tucked under his red hat. He wore solid red robes, making this lanky Cardinal look more like a bird than any priest. His eyes were such a shade of brown they’d turn color if he had some fiber, and his uncut, unkempt hair was roughly the same color. He had opened his mouth once in front of a parishioner and had his nose justly broken, and it never healed properly. Rumor had it that he’d only been ordained because someone had mixed up his paperwork with a qualified applicant.

  But Ryan knew the truth—he had been made cardinal as part of someone’s plan to elevate the incompetent into the Church. Obviously, Ioseph Mikhailov had been a very busy boy.

  Ryan shook his head, almost amused. “Didn’t someone lock you away somewhere?”

  “I’m better at things than people give me credit for.”

  The charge was so lumbering and so ridiculous that Ryan was half-frozen with amusement as the Cardinal lunged at him, trying to slap him across the face. Ryan was ahead of him, however, and simply leaned back, letting the hand go by, and he caught the wrist, dropped his arm and twisted, pulling the arm behind the Cardinal’s back, and slamming a palm down on his elbow to lock the arm straight behind Canella.

  An
d Ryan blinked as a sharp pain lanced through his palm. He jerked the hand off the Cardinal’s elbow, and saw a small droplet of blood.

  The Cardinal smiled. After being freed from his confinement, his handlers had provided him with elbow pads with a needle sticking out of it for just this arm lock, as well as an entire pad of needles on his trapezoid muscles that, if he shrugged the wrong way, he would have gotten a point in his own ear.

  Ryan quickly worked through the possibilities—he was drugged, or he was poisoned, and either way, he only had seconds to do something. Canella could pull that trick on almost anyone.

  Solution: Ryan made a hammer fist and slammed down on Canella’s elbow, breaking it.

  Ryan smiled as the Cardinal howled in pain. “How do you like that, you moron?” Ryan grinned as the man writhed in pain, but the smile faded as Ryan dropped to the floor, his world going black.

  * * *

  The Hague.

  Noon

  The next witness up was—“Jonathon Leighton, PhD, Harvard symbologist.”

  The prosecutor blinked, then remembered who he was dealing with. “You have written books on the Catholic Church, haven’t you?”

  Leighton nodded. “I’ve been writing about Jesus of Nazareth and the truth about him and his life.”

  “The truth?”

  Leighton nodded. “You see, Jesus of Nazareth was a man, no matter how hard the Catholic hierarchy tries to rewrite history.”

  “What do you mean by that exactly? That he existed?”

  “Of course not, we know He lived. There is more documented evidence for His existence than we have for the Carthaginian war of Rome versus Hannibal. Both Josephus and Tacitus have made mention of Him, so we know the man exists. What I mean is that despite the efforts of the Catholic Church to deify the man, He was a man, pure and simple. He had a wife and children—”

  “Wife, you say?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “As I spelled out in my book The Michelangelo Pattern, there are signs and symbols that laymen have known the truth for centuries. Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ lover and wife, and they had children. And a ‘Virgin Birth’—please, everyone knows that that’s a myth, a story, not literal, but moral. Look at the artwork of the Renaissance, look at anything of Leonardo da Vinci; the symbols are clear that the truth was out there five hundred years ago.”

  “And the idea of Jesus as a God?”

  “It was a vote at the Council of Nicaea in the fourth century, a ploy by the pagan emperor Constantine. Good politics, you might say. He saw Christianity as the new wave, and he jumped on the bandwagon. He pulled it up the flagpole and they saluted. They voted on it, and it was a close vote.”

  “I see, thank you.”

  Pope Pius XIII glanced for a moment at his laptop, then smiled, not even needing notes to destroy this one. He stood next to his chair. “You say that my Church has lied about this for…what? Fifteen hundred years?”

  Leighton nodded. “About that.”

  Pius furrowed his brows and blinked several times. He even squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, as though thinking too hard. “That is quite something. Because I remember that my Church was not even a full organization until the second millennia AD…or CE, as you would probably call it.”

  Leighton scoffed. “Please, sir, don’t short yourself on my account.”

  Pius smiled, as though bemused. “Until the twelfth century, we did not have a thorough bureaucracy. We had nothing that truly codified the faith, and very little in a central structure. Communication took months, if not years, assuming anything got through at all. Even my noble predecessors had been chased out of Rome numerous times…yet you think that we’re organized enough to run an entire conspiracy?” He started, as though he had shocked himself. “My apologies, your honors, that question has been asked and answered.” He shrugged. “It is just, sir, that I cannot even get my Cardinals to listen to my own suggestions most days.” He sighed, theatrically. “Oh, for those days, when apparently, we could control even other clergy.”

  Pius looked down at his notepad. “Now, if I understood you, you said that if we looked at anything by Leonardo da Vinci, we’d clearly see evidence of this conspiracy in the symbols?”

  Leighton nodded, smiling snidely at the man in white before him. “That we would.”

  The Pope nodded slowly. “Such as The Last Supper?”

  “Of course.”

  “Could you explain?”

  Leighton leaned forward, glad to have a chance to talk freely. “Take Jesus himself. He’s dressed in light red and white, and the feminine figure next to Jesus is clothed in a mirror image. The mirror image shows that they were married, two halves to the same coin. They even fit together if you cut and pasted them with the female image on his left instead of Jesus’s right.”

  “Really? I always thought that was John the Apostle.”

  “No, the image was actually Mary Magdelene.”

  Pius “reeled” back, almost as in shock. “Really?…how many figures are in that painting?”

  “The Last Supper? Thirteen.”

  The Pope nodded solemnly and slowly moved back and forth across the room, as if doing math while he walked. “Okay…so Jesus, twelve apostles, Mary…” he stopped and turned. “Wait, that’s fourteen. Was there an apostle missing?” He smiled. “Maybe it was Judas? He left early, after all.”

  “No, Judas is there.”

  “But who’s missing?”

  “John.”

  “Really?” The Pope frowned, hit two keys, and the computer started to print something. “The most beloved apostle is missing? That is what he was called in the Gospel according to John, is he not?”

  “I believe so. Maybe da Vinci ran out of room. He was painting it on a dining room wall, you know.”

  Joshua nodded. “Oh, I know, doctor. I know. And I suppose the Holy Grail is…?”

  Leighton waved that off. “Oh, that’s just the bloodline of Jesus. His children and descendants. You can count all thirteen cups at the table. Saying that he took the cup is just careful, selective editing.”

  Pius slowly approached him with a printout. “Can you identify this for me, doctor?”

  Leighton slipped on his glasses and examined the paper. “It is a duplicate of da Vinci’s sketch of The Last Supper. Even geniuses needed a first draft.”

  “Of course. Can you read that print? The figure next to Jesus, does it have a name attached?”’

  Leighton gulped. “I’m…not sure, I can’t seem to see it with these glasses.”

  “Understandable.” He turned to the prosecutor. “May I be allowed to have my esteemed prosecutor read it?”

  The prosecutor smiled, then nodded. He took it, and his face fell. He glared at Leighton, as though betrayed. “It says Giovanni.”

  The Pope nodded. “John in Italian. Thank you.” He turned to Leighton. “You’ve never seen the sketch before?”

  “No.”

  “Never?” Pius asked. “Do you always look at only the finished product and never the background material?”

  “No, I—”

  The Pope stepped forward, suddenly snapping, “So you were only being a bad researcher in this case, or is it most of the time?”

  “Objection!”

  “Withdrawn!” the Pope fired off, his next words coming at the fast, clipped pace of an automatic weapon, his accent becoming suddenly thicker, so that the witness needed to dedicate more time to thinking about what the Pope actually said. “Dr. Leighton, you said the Grail couldn’t be a cup because there was more than one cup in The Last Supper? What do you know about Passover?”

  Dr. Leighton hesitated. “Nothing that—”

  “Then did you not know that a cup was and is traditionally put aside for the prophet Elijah in case of his return one day from Heaven?”

  “No, I—”

  The Pope nearly leapt on him. “Then you were not able to consider that ‘the cup’ He took was meant to mean Elijah’s cup as a symbol that He was a repl
acement for Elijah?”

  “No, that—”

  “Yes or no will suffice, doctor. Now, you said Jesus’ divinity was a result of a vote and careful editing. What did you mean by that, exactly? And the Council of Nicaea? How close was this vote?”

  “Two hundred and eighteen … to two.”

  The Pope nodded and backed away. “Are there any gospels that suggest that Mary Magdalene married Jesus? Even in the Apocrypha?”

  Leighton shook his head.

  “Please answer verbally for the court.”

  “No, no gospels even suggest it.”

  “Does the Catholic Church in any way deny the humanity of Jesus?”

  “No.”

  “Is it true that the Catholic Church believes that Jesus is totally human and fully God? A dual nature? In fact, isn’t it true that the biggest heresy of the time were the Manicheans, who said that Jesus was fully divine? And that St. Augustine himself needed to slap them down and ridicule them for ignoring the humanity of Jesus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  * * *

  The news host named Bill turned to his guests. “How did that go?”

  “Awful, Bill,” the “con” side began. “Just like most of this. For example, from The Michelangelo Pattern, Leighton pointed out that monogamy is NOT natural, as we’ve seen in monkeys, and premarital sex is something God doesn’t care about. It’s very reasonable that Jesus was married, he’d be considered very, very odd if, as a 30-year-old Jew, he wasn’t, and—”

  Matthew Kovach glared at her and barked, “He was nailed to a set of two-by-fours and hung out to die—I think they found him quite odd. Oh, and if you have a direct line to God, please share, it’ll make our lives easier. Jesus said, when a man and a woman have sex, they ‘become one,’ and are one person. So monogamy sounds natural to me. I suggest you contemplate that human beings have abilities above and beyond a monkey…well, except you, perhaps.” He leaned forward into the camera, his warm blue eyes reaching out to the viewers. “We as a species have been gifted with natural reason and thought, which is something that no other creature has; if we’re to base our behavior on monkeys, then I suggest we blow our brains out now, because we certainly have no use for them.”