The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

  “But he refused,” María clarified.

  “And so you killed him.”

  “Not so, Father,” María responded testily. “I was with Corso before he died. I spent several hours trying to convince him, without success. Distraught, he decided that very morning to shelve the Chronovision project. He let me copy his archives and, extremely agitated, he reformatted his hard drive while I stood there watching.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I left him there alone, making up his mind whether he was going to work with us or continue to serve the enormous lie to which he had consecrated his life. And he decided to end his life.”

  Baldi looked away, grief-stricken.

  “How can I be certain you didn’t kill him?”

  “At least, we had no desire to do so,” Ferrell interjected.

  “And what does that mean?”

  “You have perhaps already noticed that our presence can change a person’s normal cardiac rhythm, yes?”

  Baldi was shaken, and surprised. It was true: his heart was still pounding against his chest. And if he gave it a little thought, the same thing had occurred the last time he had met Ferrell.

  “Well, then,” Ferrell went on, “the autopsy revealed that Corso suffered from a moderate cardiac irregularity. Let me put it another way. Perhaps, after being around María for too long, Corso’s irregular heartbeat turned into a heart attack, which caused severe pain. And when the pain led him to his window to call out for help, he fell out, having already died.”

  Baldi’s face was a picture of horror.

  “That,” he stammered, “is that merely a hypothesis?”

  “No, it’s a certainty. Corso’s heart was no longer beating when he fell to the ground from his apartment at the Santa Gemma. The final autopsy stated that fact; I simply forgot to mention it.” He smiled.

  “And so, tell me,” Baldi said as he got control of himself, “have you already chosen a substitute to replace Corso?”

  “We have. At this moment,” María said, looking at her watch, “he is a little over six thousand miles from here, and he is just about to discover his mission.”

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  VENICE BEACH

  Carlos took more than two hours to read the version of the manuscript Benavides wrote for the king. He devoured not only the principal text—not so very different from the Memorial printed in 1630 for Philip IV—but also the notes in the margin, the ones specifying the sacred melodies that encouraged “mystical flight,” as well as the interventions certain angels carried out in María Jesús’s brain, which enabled her to converse with them.

  The journalist was aware that the world’s mystical literature abounded in these types of stories. In fact, María Jesús de Ágreda was not the only religious figure of that era who interacted with angels of flesh and blood. Saint Teresa of Ávila, the greatest mystic of Spain’s Golden Age, also suffered from these “interventions.” “In his hands I saw an enormous golden spear, and on its iron tip there seemed to be a point of fire,” she wrote. “I felt as if he plunged this into my heart several times, and that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out with it, and left me aflame with a great love of God.”

  Benavides’s Memorial included another sort of commentary as well. There existed—the text confirmed it—a formula based on acoustic vibrations that made bilocation possible. A formula given to Christianity by a class of “infiltrators” who had descended to earth during the Dark Ages. The text further stated that the Holy Office of the Inquisition had identified the whereabouts of their descendants, and had wrested the formula from them.

  “Jennifer . . . ,” Carlos said in a whisper after a long period of silence.

  “Yes?”

  “You saw the Lady in Blue in your dreams, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Well . . . I saw her descend from heaven in the middle of a cone of light. She was glowing so brightly it was very hard to see her clearly . . . although I’d bet that she was the same woman I dreamed of later on. The one they called María Jesús de Ágreda.”

  “It was always the same woman?”

  “I believe so.”

  “And she was always alone when you saw her?”

  “Yes, why do you ask?”

  “Because according to this document,” Carlos said, holding the pages in his hand, “there were a number of different ladies in blue who flew to America during this time period. It says that at least three nuns were sent to spread the Gospel in the same area. And that they were all later identified by the natives as the Virgin. Do you know anything about that?”

  “No, no one in the project told me about any other ladies in blue.”

  Carlos stared at Jennifer, who was anxiously waiting for him to finish translating the text.

  “You have absolutely avoided telling me the name given to the Vatican and INSCOM’s joint project.”

  “I haven’t told you, no. I have no idea if it’s important, or whether it’s a state secret. It’s all the same. Do you know what I mean?”

  Jennifer leaned closer to him on the sofa and whispered something that left him unable to move.

  “It was called Chronovision. Have you ever heard of it before?”

  The journalist avoided Jennifer’s gaze.

  “Yes . . . some time ago.”

  Jennifer let the subject drop.

  Carlos by then had unequivocally embraced a faith in synchronicity. A pattern of events minutely designed by the Programmer. And it was no longer important whether one day he hunted down the Programmer or not; now Carlos knew that he was real.

  And that was more than enough.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  ROME

  Five sleek black Fiats, small curtains drawn across the windows in the rear seats, passed through the entrance to the one building that stands apart from the others on the Piazza del Sant’Uffizio: number 11, a short distance from the esplanade leading from Saint Peter’s Square to the basilica. Their joint entrance was not a good sign. The Prefect of the Council for the Laity, the Cardinal in charge of the Holy Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, the director general of the Institute for External Affairs (IEA), the Pope’s personal secretary, and the Prefect of the Holy Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had all been ordered to attend the meeting on the highest authority. Their gathering was to be held in the master salon belonging to the latter organization, in the Holy Office, at 9:30 PM sharp.

  The five men climbed to the third floor, escorted by their secretaries. As they took their seats, three Benedictines served them tea and cookies on small plates embossed with Saint Peter’s keys in low relief, while various functionaries of the Holy Office handed them thick files documenting the matters under debate.

  The Prefect of the Sant’Uffizio, a man with the reputation for having few friends, waited while his guests settled in. He then announced the beginning of the session with a formal gesture in keeping with his character: he rang his little bronze bell.

  “Your Eminences, Holy Mother the Church has been torpedoed from within, and it is the desire of His Holiness that we alleviate the effects of the attack before it is too late.”

  The Cardinals looked at one another with expressions of surprise. None of them had heard so much as a word about sabotage, conspiracies, or intrigues inside the Vatican for months. On the contrary, in the aftermath of the attack that the Pope had suffered at the hands of a fanatical Turk in Saint Peter’s Square, a certain calm had descended on Rome. Only Monsignor Ricardo Torres, head of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, raised his voice above the others and demanded an explanation.

  Joseph Cormack, Prefect of the Holy Office, was of slender build. Infamous by reason of his unbending nature, he had enjoyed great stature ever since 1979, when the Pope had put him in charge of neutralizing liberation theology. He waited for the whispering to taper off and observed the Cardinals with the
demeanor of someone about to deliver news of an irreparable disgrace.

  “We have yet to receive any news of Father Giuseppe Baldi, who was taken hostage this week in Spain.”

  He paused. The prelates began whispering among themselves again.

  “His disappearance has not only left the Chronovision project up in the air, it has also forced our secret services to investigate, taking the lid off a great deal of information I believe you must come to grips with immediately.”

  Cormack glanced around the room, and called for silence.

  “In the folders that you have just received,” he went on, “you will find documents that I ask you to examine carefully. They have been reproduced for the first and only time for this meeting. They were being kept in the sealed chamber of the Vatican’s secret archives, and I trust that you will watch over them with utmost caution.”

  The file folders to which Monsignor Cormack referred, whose plastic covers bore the Vatican’s white-and-yellow flag, were opened with great curiosity by everyone present.

  “Pay careful attention, please, to the first document,” their host continued. “There you will see a chronological table enumerating a number of the Virgin’s earliest apparitions. If you study it closely, you will see that before the eleventh century, the only documented apparition is the visit Our Lady made to the Apostle James the Greater on the banks of the Ebro in Spain, in the year forty AD.”

  “Your Eminence . . .”

  Monsignor Sebastian Balducci, Prefect of the Council for the Laity and the oldest cardinal in attendance at the meeting, rose to his feet, waving the files in a threatening manner.

  “I hope that you haven’t called for an urgent meeting merely to discuss old apparitions of the Virgin.”

  “Sit down, Your Eminence!” Cormack protested, his eyes flashing red. “You all know of His Holiness’s great regard for devotion to the Mother of God, and how much energy he has expended in its consolidation.”

  No one said a word.

  “Well, then, someone wishes to reveal the methods we have used in promoting this cult, and to bring dishonor upon our institution.”

  “The situation is disconcerting, Your Eminences,” said Stanislaw Zsidiv, the Pope’s secretary and the last man to see Baldi in Rome, as he regarded everyone present with a fixed stare. “Somehow the technique we have used to provoke particular apparitions of Our Lady has filtered out beyond the walls of the Vatican.”

  “Methods? Techniques? Is it permissible to know what you are talking about?” The elderly Balducci once again rose to speak, and he was even more noticeably irritated than before.

  “Monsignor Balducci, you are the only one in this room who is ignorant of the object of tonight’s discussion,” Cormack said, interrupting Balducci a second time. “Even so, you are going to play a fundamental role in trying to control the storm that is breaking over our heads.”

  “What storm? Speak so that someone can understand you, please.”

  “If you look at the chronology again, I will explain something to you, something our institution has kept secret for many centuries.”

  Despite his thirty years in Rome, Joseph Cormack had never successfully refined his manners, which were those of a priest from an embattled Catholic neighborhood. He waited patiently for Balducci to finish studying the docket of papers at the top of the pile.

  “What you are reading, Father, is the history of the Virgin’s first appearance. To put it briefly: it is believed that Mary, preoccupied by the meager advances of the Gospel in what was then Hispania, revealed herself body and soul to James the Greater on the banks of the Ebro, in the city of Caesar Augustus.”

  “This is the legend that gave rise to the construction of the Basilica of Pilar, in Zaragoza,” stated Monsignor Torres, the only Spaniard at the meeting and a declared devotee of Our Lady of Pilar.

  “The fact of the matter is, Your Eminences, that this ‘visit’ took place during the life of the Virgin, before her assumption to Heaven. In addition, it served to establish a physical memory of her visitation in Zaragoza: a stone column that is venerated to this day.”

  Balducci looked at Cormack out of the corner of his eye and muttered something.

  “Tall tales!” he said defiantly. “The Apostle James never visited Spain. It’s nothing more than a medieval myth.”

  “Perhaps James was not in Spain, Father, but the Virgin was. In fact, there was great discussion of that prodigy in the first years of our institution, and it was concluded that this was a miracle of bilocation. By the grace of God, Our Lady appeared on the banks of the Ebro, bringing with her a stone from the Holy Land, which remains there to this day.”

  “And so?”

  Cormack was undeterred.

  “If you continue down the list, the historical apparitions that follow date from the eleventh century. A thousand years later!”

  Monsignor Balducci was unimpressed. He regarded that enumeration of names, dates, and places incredulously, oblivious to where the Prefect was headed.

  “After the year 1000, fresh visions of the Virgin spread like an epidemic throughout Europe. No one knew what was happening, the Church even less so, until Pope Innocent the Third headed a thorough investigation, which uncovered something surprising. Something which, given its historic consequences, he decided to keep secret.”

  “Go on, Father Cormack.”

  “Very well,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Maybe you don’t remember, but Europe was close to collapse in the year 999. Everybody, including the Pope, thought the world would end on December 31, but nothing happened. As a result, churchgoers redoubled their faith in salvation, and the monastic orders saw recruitment grow to levels unthinkable in the past. Many of these new divinity students and religious people suddenly found themselves encouraged to explore their supernatural abilities, and mystics began to proliferate everywhere, generally women, who suffered intense ecstasies in which they radiated light, levitated, or underwent severe epileptic attacks. Pope Innocent’s commission established a clear parallel between the apparitions of the Virgin and the mystical phenomena lived by numerous monks and nuns.”

  “And why was all that hidden?”

  The men at the meeting smiled at Balducci’s naïveté.

  “Man of God! The uncertainty stirred up between bilocated nuns and the Virgin was not prejudicial to us. The growing medieval faith in Our Lady had the effect of burying many of the religions in existence before Christianity, especially the pagan goddesses, and it justified the construction of cathedrals and monasteries all across Europe. Where the faith was endangered, a Marian shrine was ‘invented.’ Nevertheless, it wasn’t until sometime later that the phenomenon of certain female mystics who could be in two places at once was brought under control, and appearances of the Virgin were created at will. We began to place the female mystics under ironclad control.”

  “At will?” Balducci still did not believe what he was hearing. “What are you trying to say? That the Church made the Virgin appear when it wanted to?”

  “Yes, Your Eminence. The church discovered that when these women underwent exposure to particular musical frequencies, it would increase the likelihood of an ecstasy that later led to bilocations. It was a dangerous game. The women would rapidly grow old, their mental health deteriorated in a few years time, and they were almost of no help in any new undertakings.”

  Monsignor Balducci cast a glance at the inventory of names included on the dossier that the secretary of the Holy Office had provided. On it were the names of religious figures, from the eleventh century to the nineteenth, who participated in the program. It was a scandal. Nuns like the Cistercian Aleydis de Schaerbeck, who became widely known around 1250: her cell overflowed with a pulsating light at the same time her body ‘appeared’ in Toulouse and other parts of southwestern France; the Santa Clara reformer Colette de Corbie, later sainted, who until her death in 1447 was seen on the outskirts of Lyon, inspiring the creation of various shrines to Our Lady of the
Light, due to the intensity with which her image was seen in those farms and villages; Sister Catalina de Cristo, in Spain in 1590; Sister Magdalena de San José in Paris a century later; María Magdalena de Pazzi in 1607 in Italy . . . and so on down the list of more than one hundred nuns.

  “But this would require an organization that coordinated an enormous number of people,” Balducci argued. His astonishment grew with each new name.

  “Such an organization existed: it was a small subdivision inside the Holy Office,” Giancarlo Orlandi replied amiably. The director of the IEA had been silent up until that moment.

  “And it acted with impunity over the course of so many centuries, without being discovered?”

  “More or less with impunity, Father.” Cormack stepped in to clarify things for Balducci; his voice was tinged with a certain regret. “That was precisely the motivation for this meeting. In fact, in another part of the dossier you will find the details surrounding the one grave indiscretion that the project committed in its eight centuries of existence. It took place in 1631, after the Holy Office had successfully completed a program of long-distance evangelization, projecting a nun from a Spanish monastery to the province of New Mexico.

  “The Lady in Blue?”

  Balducci’s answer took the other men at the meeting by surprise.

  “So, you are aware of that case?”

  “And who isn’t? Even rats in Rome have heard that historical documents relative to this incident have disappeared from libraries and public archives over the course of the last few months.”

  “That is our subject, Father.”

  Cormack cocked his head, allowing Monsignor Torres to speak further on the matter.

  “The issue of the disappeared documents remains a mystery. They’ve been stolen from the National Library in Madrid and even from the Secret Archives here at the Vatican. The thieves selected only those texts that highlighted the existence of this program of Marian ‘apparitions,’ and they have tried to leak them to the public.”