Death of a Pharaoh

  Father Marco Degl’innocenti, OP sat hunched in his crowded dank office deep in the basement of the Palace of the Holy Office in the Vatican. The only natural light came from a small half window at street level protected with two iron bars in the shape of a cross and set high in the wall across from his desk. For only a brief moment each morning, during two weeks in September, the late summer sun managed to clear the imposing dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica at the perfect angle to shine through the clouded glass and etch his face with the shadow of the cross.

  Today was such a day. As much as possible, he tried to be in residence during this period, sitting in his chair at the prescribed time and praying the Holy Rosary when the crepuscular rays illuminated his face. He always closed his eyes and imagined that he could feel the outline of the cross on his skin. It was a moment of true ecstasy that he had cherished every year since they chose him, more than a decade ago, to be Director of the Office of Sanctus Verum, a secretive branch of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formally known as the Holy Inquisition.

  Although the official Vatican organization chart showed he reported to the Cardinal Prefect, in reality Father Marco only took orders from God. At the time of his appointment, he was a recently ordained Dominican Priest and had proven his dedication to defending the Holy Mother Church against heresy by causing the death of the Antipope’s daughter, Eshe Carter, and her bastard infant son.

  Since that moment he had devoted his life to ridding the world of the blasphemy detailed in an ancient document hidden deep in the secret Vatican Archives; a story almost as old as the miracle of Christ’s passion itself. Only he possessed the code to open the special lead lined box that protected the leather bound codex, consisting of some ten sheets of vellum, from the eyes of the world. Only a handful of people among the living knew of its existence, himself as Director of Sanctus Verum, the reigning Pope if Father Marco deigned it necessary and a few top members of the satanic organization known as the Servants of Ma’at. Father Marco’s sacred mission was to ensure that all but the first two were eradicated in his lifetime.

  Today he was a step closer to the realization of his God given task although he had no idea how it had been accomplished. In his hands, he held a copy of a short newspaper article forwarded to him through the Office of the Archbishop of Philadelphia in the United States. The extensive information gathering capability of the Church picked up a name highlighted in confidential orders that he updated frequently as more intelligence on the Servants of Ma’at became available. The devoted diocesan clerk dutifully copied the article and included it the Cardinal’s daily communications briefing but remained blissfully ignorant as to the import of the obscure news item. Father Marco received the information in an email three hours later.

  Although overjoyed to learn of the death of the so-called True Pharaoh, an instrument of the Devil himself and the greatest threat to Christianity in the world, he was perplexed. Despite his most fervent prayers begging for just such a glorious result he felt positive that he had nothing to do with her blessed demise. It generated great consternation. It meant there might be others who knew of her blasphemous work and any meddling in the affairs of the Servants of Ma’at presented a grave danger to his Holy Crusade. As the reporter noted, the possibility existed that her death was merely a common robbery that went wonderfully wrong. Still, he could not be certain and he would need to monitor the situation closely to see who might step up from within the ranks of her acolytes to take the reins of power now that she and all her issue burned in hell.

  Father Marco remembered the first time he ever read the deeply disturbing report describing the theft of Christ’s body from the tomb and its subsequent transfer to Egypt for further preparation and burial.

  In the past fifty years, only a very limited group of people in the Church had been privy to the contents and only he was still alive. Of course, they included his predecessor as Director of Sanctus Verum, Monsignor Alberto, a Spaniard and a member of Opus Dei, as well as two Pontiffs. The first, elected in 1978, demanded to see the document and mysteriously died a week later after serving as Holy Father less than two months. Some feared that he had shared the terrible truth with his closest confidants and advisors. None of them survived more than a year and their deaths were equally enigmatic. Several were obviously murdered, one struck by a speeding car just outside the walls of the Vatican, while the others including the dangerously ambitious new Pope, perished suddenly of natural causes that could never be confirmed since their bodies were embalmed with almost obscene haste. Any scandal with the press over the destruction of forensic evidence was far preferable to the world knowing the truth.

  Much like the legends surrounding the discovery of the tomb of King Tut, almost everyone who touched or read the document over the centuries suffered a mysterious death. Father Marco was not worried about himself. He was not a superstitious man and he actually welcomed martyrdom.

  From what he knew of its history, the codex transcribed in Latin was stolen from a caravan crossing the Sahara in the 14th century. The destination of the convoy was Gao in what is now known as Mali. A bundle of documents including the report eventually made its way into the hands of a wealthy Moorish slave trader living in the Caliphate of Granada around the time of the discovery of America. Where they had been for almost two hundred years, no one would ever know.

  The Moor had an affinity for antiques, especially ancient documents. It was doubtful that he understood Latin and he might have been completely unaware of the historical importance of the ten modestly illuminated pages of vellum. After his death, they passed from father to son over three generations until they formed part of an impressive private library in a grand home in Seville; arguably the wealthiest city in the world at the beginning of the 17th century.

  Many in that parochial and conservative society were jealous of the success of the owner of such a fine residence and with a surname that invited much speculation as to the pureness of his bloodline. His wife, much younger than he, liked to dress in the latest fashions from Paris and made the mistake of wearing a new frock as they rode a carriage around the Alameda of Hercules on a sultry Friday afternoon. A neighbor betrayed her to the Inquisition.

  On the basis that she had exhibited with foolish pride a new garment on the day held holy by the followers of Mohammed, they accused the entire family of being false converts. They tortured the husband, a devote Catholic his whole life and a pious member of the Brotherhood of the True Cross, until he confessed then burned him at the stake. In their mercy, they gave his wife and children 48 hours to abandon the realm. They could take nothing with them but the clothes they wore on their backs. The elegant palace on Sierpes Street, along with all of its contents, became the property of the Inquisition to be auctioned off in benefit of its holy efforts against heresy.

  One of the clerks working for the Inquisition at the time was a young Dominican monk named, Isidoro. His family immigrated to Seville from Zamora in Old Castille after the conquest of the city from the Moors by King Ferdinand III in the middle of the 13th century. Another branch of the family moved to Valencia and much to his regret became far wealthier.

  Isidoro, well-hailed as a diligent albeit timid functionary, received orders to make an accounting of the property of the unfortunate victim who although very dead was ironically considered to be now in a state of God’s grace. He found many gold coins, bolts of the finest silk, exquisite jewelry and an extensive library that he feared would take much effort to convert into reales.

  A great lover of books, he took time doing the inventory of the collection to marvel at the many titles that were in themselves enough to warrant any good Christian a summons from the dreaded Castle of Triana, headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition. Several parchments with strange symbols that he imagined to be the form of writing once used by the ancient Egyptians piqued his curiosity. Among them, he discovered a very old document in Latin. He settled into a large wooden chair with a comfortable seat
of tooled Cordovan leather and began to read.

  Isidoro never returned to the small damp office he shared with the other clerks in the imposing castle on the banks of the Guadalquivir River. That evening with nothing but a loaf of bread, fifty gold coins that he assumed no one would ever miss and a packet of securely wrapped documents in his saddlebag, he led his horse through the Puerta de la Carne or Meat Gate, so named because it led to a large municipal slaughterhouse just outside the walls of the city. It was the only gate still open at that late hour.

  He pulled his cloak tighter around his neck and prayed for the protection of the Holy Virgin Mary from bandits and other demons of the night. He steered his mount in a westerly direction along the ancient Roman road leading to the Mediterranean coast. A fortnight later, he booked passage on a small vessel departing the port of Alicante for Sicily, then a vassal state of the Kingdom of Castille and Aragon. In the end it took him more than a month to arrive in Rome at the doorstep of his distant cousin, Gaspar de Borja y de Velasco, only recently elected to the Cardinalate by Pope Paul V and at the time the Ambassador of Spain before the Holy See.

  The Cardinal looked surprised when his cousin so many times removed that only his surname hinted at their shared parentage, covered with a patina of dust walked into his luxurious study a few steps behind a page. He remained in his chair as if uncertain whether he should rise to embrace him or order him to take a bath first. Isidoro’s hands trembled. It was the first time he had ever stood in the presence of a Prince of the Church, a great-grandson of St. Francis de Borja and a close relative of two previous Popes. He could barely speak out of fear and in his state of near exhaustion, he only managed to hand the pages in Latin to his cousin.

  His Eminence began to read them more out of politeness than any conviction that they might be worthy of even a thumb of the wax on the candle he moved closer to compensate for the late hour. He had never been more mistaken in his life.

  The young Cardinal was at times alarmed and at others moments deeply moved by the extraordinary account of the Egyptian embalmer, Rahotep. A politician as much as an ecclesiastic, he had no difficulty imagining the power he now held in his hands. Intrigue was part of his bloodline and even though the period of the family’s greatest influence had long waned, perhaps with these documents the era of the Borgias would rise again. He ordered the page to take his cousin to a suite of apartments where he might rest from his long and doubtless tiring journey. According to the deathbed confession of his manservant years later, when the ill-fated Isidoro enquired what he should do with the documents the Cardinal insisted that they would remain with him for safekeeping while he prayed to the Holy Spirit for guidance.

  Isidoro died an agonizing death less than a week after his arrival. The Cardinal’s private physician attributed his demise to the cholera that was sweeping Italy at the time. Only a cynic would note that the symptoms were remarkably similar to acute arsenic poisoning. A technique employed to perfection by his ancestor Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI, only a century before. As a precaution, the Cardinal’s household moved to a villa in the country for several months.

  Father Marco had no problem imagining what Cardinal Borja planned to do with the explosive document in his possession. He participated as an elector in the conclave of 1621. The proceedings were of course secret and elected Pope Gregory XV; within months, he decreed the establishment of two new congregations. One was the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and the other, in pectore, was the Office of Sanctus Verum. He also issued a Papal Bull changing the manner of electing a Pope; perhaps in response to Cardinal Borja’s maneuvers.

  Less than a year later the Holy Father died. The conclave of 1623 chose Maffeo Barberini, who became Pope Urban VIII. The twice-thwarted Spaniard served as Camerlengo of the Sacred College of Cardinals for the year ending January 10, 1628. During the preceding twelve months, three members of the Holy Father’s private household died under mysterious circumstances. Although some in the Curia suspected arsenic poisoning and many fingers secretly pointed at Cardinal Borja, nobody could prove it. The Camerlengo was the person responsible for certifying the death of a Pope and had he succeeded, his position would have made his treachery so much easier to hide.

  At a secret consistory held in March of 1632, Borja openly challenged the Pope in front of the other Cardinals. Father Marco wondered if that was when Borja finally knew he was defeated. Three years later the Pope effectively banned him from Italy. Forced to return to Spain as Bishop of Seville, Cardinal Borja abandoned Naples in 1635. After an ignominious wait, he finally obtained transport in two ships belonging to the Duke of Tuscany. During the voyage, a large trunk containing the private papers of the Cardinal mysteriously disappeared, never to be found again. He died ten years later of natural causes.

  The recovery of the document crudely alluded to by Cardinal Borja in the conclaves of 1621 and 1623 in an attempt to win election as Pope by blackmailing the Sacred College of Cardinals, represented the first significant success of Sanctus Verum. Over the centuries, agents of the secret office systematically hunted down suspected members of the Servants of Ma’at and submitted them to time-honored methods of torture to wring out confessions, even after the Inquisition itself had long ended. Despite their best efforts and the zeal at which they practiced their hideous crafts of persuasion, the agents of Sanctus Verum were never able to identify a reigning True Pharaoh.

  Indeed, not a single Servant of Ma’at ever died giving up another member. The satanic organization with thousands of years of history had developed an indecipherable system of communication and a sophisticated structure with a unique form of compartmentalization that ensured that no member knew the identities of others in the immediate region. They may very well have lived their entire lives beside a neighbor who was also a Servant of Ma’at, yet they would never have known. Even if induced to confess under torture, they had no names to betray. It vexed Father Marco’s predecessors for centuries.

  The identities of the True Pharaohs remained hidden until a fortuitous event occurred just after the turn of the 20th century. At the time, Sanctus Verum suspected that the current leader lived in the United States because of frequent visits there by people identified as very senior members of the Servants of Ma’at.

  On May 1, 1915, the RMS Lusitania departed from Pier 54 in New York bound for Liverpool. Among the passengers booked in First Class was one Elijah Carter, a prominent lawyer from Philadelphia. A list published in the society pages of the New York Times indicated he traveled alone. His driver accompanied him to New York with his luggage earlier that morning.

  Eyewitnesses at the pier recalled that the Purser delayed Mr. Carter’s boarding for more than an hour, after one of the female First Class passengers complained about the propriety of a “negro” traveling in her section of the ship. In order to placate the woman and due to the extreme urgency of his trip, Mr. Carter politely agreed to a voluntary downgrade to second class with a full refund of the difference in fare.

  Shortly after 2.00 PM on May 7th, on the final day of the voyage, a torpedo fired from a German U-boat struck the liner some eleven miles off the coast of Ireland. Passengers heard another more powerful explosion seconds later and the ship sank in less than twenty minutes. The Captain of the U-20 always insisted that he only fired once on the passenger ship. Rumors, vehemently denied by the British Admiralty, suggested that the Lusitania carried contraband munitions for the war effort; the probable cause of the second blast. Like the Titanic three years earlier, most of the fatalities were a result of drowning and hypothermia. One thousand one hundred and ninety-six souls perished.

  Most were British and Canadian but the total included 128 American citizens. A rescue trawler recovered the body of Elijah Carter the next day and transported it to Queenstown. Survivors reported seeing him alive giving his lifejacket to a young girl who became separated from her parents. Her name was Janet Nelson and she was Canadian. Her family sailed to Brit
ain to help her grandfather who owned a large dairy farm. All of his able-bodied workers had gone to fight in France yet the production of milk was vital to the wartime economy, so his daughter agreed to help.

  A vessel named the Stormcock, pulled Janet alive from the water and took her to Queenstown as well. While she waited for news of her parents in the lobby of the Rob Roy Hotel, a local parish priest, Father Liam O’Dwyer, tried to comfort her. As the day progressed with no sign of her parents or siblings, he feared that the poor girl might already be an orphan.

  She tearfully explained to him how a nice black man named Elijah gave her his lifejacket, as she had lost hers in the confusion. Father Liam first thought she referred to a member of the crew. She then told him that the man had also tied something around her neck. He called it an omelet and promised that it would keep her safe. She showed it to the priest. It was an amulet in the shape of a cross but with a loop over the transverse bar. He held it in his hand and judging by the weight it was solid gold. He asked her if he might sketch it in case Elijah’s next of kin were to look for it among his belongings. The priest would vouch that the gentlemen had given it to young Janet.

  Father Liam instantly recognized the object as an ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol of life. It was one of several archeological shapes he remembered from a letter sent years earlier from the Holy Office to every parish priest in Ireland. The epistle ordered that whenever anyone sighted one of the items whether in documents, as jewelry or even as a tattoo, the details must be reported immediately. Father Liam left Janet in the capable hands of a nursing sister and rushed out to send a telegram to the Bishop. The next day, two Dominican priests arrived in Queenstown with a letter for Father Liam. He was to afford them unlimited assistance in their search for information about the passenger who saved the girl.

  It was not difficult for two men of the cloth to insert themselves in the rescue and recovery operations. They soon discovered a body in the makeshift morgue identified as one Elijah Carter. The manifest provided by the Cunard Line confirmed that there was no other passenger named Elijah. The American Counsel sent from Dublin had already identified many of his compatriots among the dead and was busy contacting relatives to arrange for repatriation of the remains. In almost all cases, he delivered the sad news by telegram except in the case of Mr. Carter since a representative of the family appeared that very morning and was already organizing the transfer of the body to Liverpool on the first available ship.