by James Becker
He took a few clean sheets of paper, a pencil and an eraser, positioned his desktop magnifying glass on its mount over the first line of words on the parchment and began to carefully copy out every single letter that was clear enough for him to identify. Where he could see that a letter existed but was unable to determine what it was, he marked the paper with an underscore because that, he hoped, would help him when it came to trying to translate the Latin. And the writing, he was still quite certain, was Latin.
He worked his way down the sheet of parchment, filling in those letters he could easily identify, then started again from the top and repeated the process, this time concentrating on the gaps in the text. Then he did the entire process once more, just to make absolutely sure that he hadn’t missed anything. Only after he had completed this did he begin looking at the words and letters he had written out, to see if he could make sense of any of it.
At first glance, he wasn’t hopeful.
He had managed to transcribe only a dozen or so words at different points in the text, and for three of those he wasn’t entirely certain that all the letters were correct. All the other words he had tried to decipher had at least two illegible letters, and in some cases all he had been able to ascertain was the approximate number of letters in the word, and nothing more.
It was, he supposed, a start, and he decided he would begin working with what he had. Using his pencil again, he circled the handful of words on the paper that he was reasonably certain he had transcribed correctly, then turned back to his computer and opened up a Latin dictionary.
Ten minutes later, he looked down at the result. No two of the words were consecutive, and they had appeared at widely separated points on the sheet of parchment, so he wasn’t expecting to make much sense out of them. At best, he hoped that the translations from the Latin would give him an indication of the subject matter of the text.
Altogether, there were nine words in addition to the two words that Mahmoud had already partially deciphered and which he had believed were parts of proper names. None of them appeared to be particularly helpful. In the order in which they appeared on the parchment, the translated meanings were: ‘down’, ‘along’, ‘fighting’, ‘battle’, ‘soldiers’, ‘street’, ‘house’, ‘ran’ and ‘cloak’. And there was another word which he couldn’t make any sense of because it didn’t appear in the dictionary – could that be another proper noun, perhaps the name of a town or other location?
It looked to him as if it was a description of a skirmish, possibly between a Roman legion and some unspecified enemy, but exactly who that enemy might have been, and where and when the conflict had taken place – because he had never heard of any town or country that sounded like the proper name he thought he’d discovered – he had absolutely no idea.
But Husani believed that it was worth pursuing. If the skirmish was important enough, then commercial organizations such as museums and even the history departments of universities might be interested in acquiring it, as well as the antiquarians and collectors of relics around the world who were his usual bigspending customers.
Clearly, what he needed to do was get far more of the text deciphered. And he had a good idea how that could be done, and exactly who could help him.
10
Father Antonio Morini stared at the sheets of paper on the desk in front of him and clasped his hands together almost as if he was in prayer. The conclusion seemed utterly inescapable. The nightmare that he’d hoped he would never experience while he was in the Holy See had materialized. Somehow, the relic that he had hoped – had, in fact, come to believe – had been either destroyed or lost for ever, had apparently reappeared, and in Cairo, of all places. He stood up abruptly from his desk and walked across to a small wall safe located in one corner of his office. Unusually, the safe had both a numeric keypad and a physical keyhole. Morini loosened the neck of his habit and pulled out a long chain at the end of which was a slim silver key. He inserted the key in the lock and turned it once clockwise, then entered a six-digit code which he personally altered at the end of every week, and turned the key clockwise a second time. Then he removed the key, grasped the handle on the left side of the door, rotated that a quarter of a turn and pulled open the door.
Inside the safe, hidden beneath a pile of folders, was a slim and sealed red file, devoid of any name or other identifying features apart from the single Latin inscription A cruce salus, which translated as ‘From the cross comes salvation’. Before he had listened to his dying predecessor, Morini would have had no difficulty asserting that that statement was the absolute truth. But with his newfound knowledge, it seemed to him more like a cruel joke.
He took out the file and carried it back to his desk where he cut through the tapes around the heavy seal, the impressed image on the wax causing him to cross himself as he recognized it.
The Annulus Piscatoris, the Ring of the Fisherman, was an important part of the regalia of every pope, a new version of the ring being cast for each incumbent, and was kissed as a mark of respect by visiting dignitaries. In the past it had also been used as a signet to authenticate documents signed by the occupant of the Throne of St Peter, but that practice had stopped in 1842. Its use was clearly a measure of the importance of the documents contained within the file.
Morini extracted the contents, a mere half a dozen sheets of paper, five of them providing information and a series of instructions, and the other one a very short list, bearing only three names, together with brief information about those individuals and their international telephone numbers. He placed the last sheet to one side and then began to read the secret protocols that had been entrusted to him alone.
The document began by stating that the protocols had been formulated by the reigning pope just under half a century earlier, and had been approved by every pontiff since then, including the present occupant of the Throne of St Peter. Even so, Morini was scarcely able to believe what he was reading. Several times, in his office in the Secret Archives, he stood up and walked around his desk as he struggled to reconcile the implications of the orders he was reading with what his conscience was telling him.
But in the end, and despite his personal misgivings, he knew absolutely where his duty had to lie.
11
Propaganda Due, better known by the abbreviated name of ‘P2’, had been founded as a private Masonic lodge in Italy in 1877, its membership principally drawn from the Italian government, but it had later expanded to include the heads of all the country’s intelligence services, Cabinet ministers, prominent public figures, senior clergymen and, inevitably, senior members of the Mafia.
For decades, P2 had avoided the limelight, not least because the Catholic Church had officially banned Masonic membership for all priests, but in the late 1960s a massive financial and political scandal broke when it was revealed that the head of the Vatican Bank, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, had joined the organization. And not only that, but Marcinkus, along with the P2 lodge treasurer Michele Sindona and his protégé Roberto Calvi, had created hundreds of fictitious accounts in the Vatican Bank as a convenient device to allow the Mafia to launder drug money. Even worse, in an extremely ill-advised move in 1969 a large portfolio of the Holy See’s investments had been handed to Sindona to manage, with the result that the Vatican lost the equivalent of almost a quarter of a billion dollars over the next six years.
That brought matters to a head, and on 28 September 1978 Pope John Paul I announced his intention to immediately remove Archbishop Marcinkus and three other P2 members from the Vatican Bank, in a belated attempt to, as it were, cleanse the Augean Stables. The following morning, the Pope was found dead in his bed.
As is the invariable custom in the Vatican, no autopsy was performed on this apparently fit and comparatively young Pope – he was only sixty-five – who had reigned for a mere thirty-three days. It is, of course, entirely possible that his announcement about Marcinkus and his death less than twenty-four hours later were entirely unconn
ected, but very few people inside or outside the Vatican really believed that the pontiff had actually died of natural causes.
The death of John Paul I might have stopped the immediate dismissal of the archbishop, but the bastions around P2 were already beginning to crumble, Sindona being arrested in 1980 and Italy’s largest bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, which had been headed by Roberto Calvi, collapsing two years later. There was a sudden spate of unexplained deaths of men who were involved in either P2 or banking operations connected to it, including Calvi himself whose body was found dangling from a rope underneath Blackfriars Bridge in London.
And, just as nobody believed that Pope John Paul I had died peacefully in his sleep, nobody believed that Calvi had committed suicide, especially when it was learned that his secretary had also killed herself on the very same day by jumping out of the window of her office in the Banco Ambrosiano building in Italy. Eventually Calvi’s ‘suicide’ verdict was overturned and changed to ‘cause of death unknown’, which was almost as inaccurate: it was quite certain that he had died of asphyxiation due to the rope around his neck. What wasn’t known was precisely how he came to be hanging from the end of that rope, but most people presumed that P2 had struck once again with lethal force.
In the aftermath of this scandal, which had not only reverberated within the Vatican but also swept through the Italian government and the world of international banking, P2 seemed to quietly fade away. But, as with so many organizations in Italy, this was not exactly the case. The Masonic charter had been withdrawn from the P2 lodge in 1972, but in reality membership of the brotherhood had only ever been a convenience, and the powerful members of the lodge, drawn by now from most of the nations of Europe, knew they could function perfectly happily outside Masonry, just as they had functioned for so many years outside the law.
So officially P2 had ceased to exist; in reality it remained as a shadowy entity, answerable to no one but still inextricably linked with both the Vatican and the Catholic Church in a relationship that was virtually symbiotic. The Church benefited financially from some of P2’s quasi-legal business ventures, while the Vatican ensured that the lodge received an important measure of protection from exposure in the media and elsewhere. And so P2 remained, as it had been almost from its inception, the Vatican’s first and most powerful ally.
And it was the head of this organization that Morini must contact – the instructions in the file were clear and unequivocal. Only they could resolve the problem that he and the Church now faced.
He read the final paragraph of the instructions once more, then noted down the person’s name and telephone number, and the code word the document listed. Finally he closed the file and locked it away again in the safe.
Then he left his office, returned to his room in the Holy See, changed into civilian clothes and walked out into the streets of Rome. That, too, had been specified in the protocols, which had clearly been reviewed on an occasional basis by both his predecessor and the Holy Father himself to take account of changes in technology. Under no circumstances was he ever to use either his personal mobile telephone or any of the landline phones within the Vatican City. His contact with the three widely dispersed members of P2 was to be by public telephone – and he was never to use the same one twice – or by an anonymous pay-as-you-go mobile phone, which he was also never to use within the Holy See.
12
The calm male voice on the end of the line said the single English word ‘Yes?’ in a neutral tone before lapsing into silence.
‘The code word is “Angharad”,’ Morini said, replying in the same language. ‘I will call you back in ten minutes.’
‘No,’ the voice said, suddenly louder and instantly commanding. ‘Remain where you are and I will call you. Five minutes.’
Before Morini could reply, the line went dead. For a few seconds the priest just stood there, looking at the telephone handset he was holding, then he replaced it and stepped away from the booth. There were no seats anywhere nearby, but there was a low wall a few yards away, near enough to the booth that he’d certainly hear the phone when it rang, but not so close that he would appear to any passers-by to be waiting for a call.
About two minutes after he’d ended the call, a middle-aged woman with badly dyed blonde hair partially obscuring her face, and wearing old jeans and a shapeless jumper, despite the heat of the day, walked up to the phone booth, slid coins into the slot and embarked on what looked like a lengthy and somewhat acrimonious call. She wasn’t shouting, but it was the next best thing.
Morini glanced at his watch, counting the seconds, but he knew there was almost nothing he could do about it. The last thing he wanted to do was attract attention to himself, and if he did anything to cut short the woman’s call, that would certainly result in some kind of a scene.
Five minutes came, then six. When his watch showed that seven minutes had elapsed since he’d ended his call, and despite his misgivings, Morini decided he had to do something. He got up and walked across to the phone booth, stopped right beside it and fixed his gaze on the woman using the phone. After a few seconds she became aware of his presence and turned to stare at him, an irritated expression on her face. Embarrassed but determined, Morini stared back at her, pointed at the telephone in her hand, and then tapped the face of his watch for emphasis. The woman turned her back on him, but Morini simply walked around to the other side of the booth and repeated his actions.
A few seconds later the woman angrily slammed the phone down on its rest and stepped out of the booth. Morini moved to one side to allow her to pass, and received a mouthful of invective for his trouble, the insults liberally laced with a scattering of descriptive words that the priest had not heard in a very long time.
But Morini didn’t care because as the woman walked away, simmering anger evident in her every stride, the telephone began to ring, and he immediately snatched up the handset.
‘Hullo?’
‘This is the fifth time I have tried to call you back,’ the cold voice at the other end of the line snapped. ‘What happened?’
‘This is a public phone box,’ Morini began, ‘and a woman stopped here to make a call.’
‘The next time you use a public telephone to call me – if there is a next time – you will remain in the booth until I call you back. Is that perfectly clear? My time is too important to waste.’
‘I understand.’
‘I hope you do. Now, I know who you are, or at least the position you hold and the organization you represent. And if your documentation is current you will know my name – or one of the names that I use – and the group that I control.’ The man’s voice dropped to little more than a whisper, and his tone seemed to exude a cold menace that Morini found instantly alarming. ‘I hope for your sake that you have not contacted me for some trivial problem. What has happened? And before you speak, be aware that it is possible that this call may be monitored, so choose your words with care.’
Morini had anticipated that he would need to explain the circumstances to the man, and had prepared a simple overview. He talked for less than ninety seconds, taking care to mention no names or any other definitive information.
Almost as soon as he’d finished, the other man replied.
‘I hope that you and your masters realize that this is an entirely self-inflicted problem,’ he said. ‘If there was anyone in your organization with a functioning brain, they would have made sure that the relic was destroyed centuries ago. Instead, you not only kept hold of it, but you failed to keep it in a secure location, which is why you’re now in this mess.’
‘I’m sure that the people responsible believed they were doing the right thing,’ Morini couldn’t help but plead.
‘They were wrong,’ the man replied flatly. ‘Now, I hope you have an untraceable mobile phone because you must send me a text message giving me all the information I need to resolve this situation. I want names, addresses – IP addresses as well as geographical locations – a full
description and photograph of the relic, and any other information that you have about it and what happened to it. You already have my number, and as soon as you send me the text I will have your mobile number as well. From now on, we will mainly communicate using mobiles rather than landlines. When I reply I will send you a list of times when you are to be available to take my calls. At those times you must be outside your place of work – your entire place of work, I mean.’
‘That may not be possible,’ Morini objected. ‘I have duties that I need—’
‘You will adhere to the schedule. Your duties are of secondary importance to resolving this situation. You will also need to advise your masters that this may end up being a costly operation, and I do not anticipate any disputes over my expenses. One last question.’
‘Yes?’
‘Which languages do you speak?’
For a moment or two, Morini didn’t reply, because he couldn’t see the relevance of the question.
‘English,’ he said finally, ‘and Italian, obviously. I’m reasonably fluent in French as well. Why do you ask?’
‘Because you will be relaying my instructions to the contractors who will be carrying out the work.’
‘That was not my understanding,’ Morini replied, in surprise. ‘I believed that your organization would take over and resolve this problem. You must have people who can speak as many languages as I can.’
‘I do, but they will not be employed for this job. Either you translate my instructions as I have ordered or I’ll take no further part in this situation and you can solve the problem yourself, using whatever resources you have. I will not allow the Vatican to deny their involvement if this matter ever makes the news. We won’t be your scapegoat any more.’
‘But I have no resources,’ Morini protested. ‘You know that.’
‘Then it should not be a difficult decision for you.’