by Alex Thomas
Suicide victim: Cardinal Benelli
Last location: Villa Benelli, near Rome
Age: mid-70s
Height: about 1.65 metres
Weight at least 75 kilograms
Eye colour: brown
Hair colour: white
Description: small and chubby, flabby build, yet agile, intelligent
Behaviour:
Charming with a high IQ,
Sincere, yet somewhat dodgy
Above-average emotional intelligence,
Rational behaviour and targeted action (even if his alleged suicide might seem to contradict it)
Religious,
Apparently a philanthropist.
Special features:
Member of Lux Domini (since when?),
Curia cardinal with a certain level of influence
Similar aura to Father Darius’.
After he had finished taking notes about Darius and Benelli, he rested his eyes on them for a bit. Catherine had said that both men’s auras were like twins. It was true that even their profiles were similar. Ben started to think about Sister Isabella’s and Father Sylvester’s profiles. Could it be that they too were the same as Darius’?
He thought about it some more, until LUKE finally occurred to him. He hadn’t a clue what was behind the name. LUKE could be anything – from a seemingly harmless file to a secret, trailblazing research project. But one thing was for certain: LUKE was somehow associated with Lux Domini. It also had something to do with both Darius and Benelli, as Abel had discovered. Quite possibly, Isabella and Sylvester had something to do with LUKE, which would mean they both must have been psychically gifted people as well. Darius, Benelli, Isabella and Sylvester had one thing undeniably in common: they were all dead.
Ben turned his thoughts to Catherine who was now at the Apostolic Palace with His Holiness in order to lend strength to the weakened Pope upon Benelli’s instruction in order to…
He faltered.
…in order to balance out the energy that Pope Leo had lost through the deaths of Sylvester, Isabella and Darius…
Was that perhaps an indication about LUKE? Does the Pope have something like a mental protective community?
Ben opened up the communication programme once again, sending out an urgent heavenward prayer at the same time. But Abel was nowhere to be found on IRC.
He let out a sigh of disappointment, turned off his computer and sat in the dark. When his eyes had gotten used to the darkness, he trudged over to his bed. But he couldn’t dream of sleeping just yet. He had too many things running through his mind.
His thoughts returned to the perpetrator’s profile that he knew matched the Pope’s assassin. In his mind’s eye he circled the word "contract killer". In this case he was nearly certain that the murderer knew nothing of the true reason for the job. With that the first perpetrator’s profile was deemed invalid. He would have to create a new one. He shifted to the contractor, the mastermind, quite possibly a hostile organisation.
Ben frowned, knowing full well that most questions about possible masterminds were left unanswered, even if the assassins were captured. If Lux Domini brought forth such people as Darius, Isabella, Sylvester or Benelli to protect the Pope, then it was most unlikely that the order was behind the murders. Who could have such a motive to weaken or even kill the head of the Catholic Church in such a bizarre way? At any rate, it had to be someone who knew about LUKE in great detail, that is, if LUKE had anything to do with it at all. So maybe it was a Lux member after all?
Ben began to feel his exhaustion take hold. His thoughts became muddied, melting like bath salts in hot water. He desperately needed some rest. He needed sleep. But as he closed his eyes in an attempt to fall asleep, his brain kept working. He suddenly came back to the question about what the stranger who tortured him with the truth serum was looking for in Cardinal Benelli’s villa.
In the end it seemed to Ben that the stranger was just as surprised as he was to have discovered that the files in the cabinet had gone missing and the computer had been stolen. Ben had learned from Ciban that he had told Gasperetti about his unfortunate situation in the villa’s dungeon. Apparently, the entire thing had been a misunderstanding. They had mistaken him for a burglar. That the Lux agent himself was a burglar didn’t seem to interest anyone in the least.
Ben kept his eyes shut, breathing with regular intervals and trying to relax. At some point he finally fell asleep with the thought that he should speak with Ciban as soon as possible. Guilty feelings or no. The prefect owned him an explanation or two.
37
West Bengal, Calcutta
The Order of Charitable Missionaries
Shanti Nagar
The fingerless hands of the mutilated man reached for Sister Silvia. Lepers made their way daily to the colony after having been left by their spouses or excluded from their villages. Even today many people in India believed that the illness came from a curse and therefore incurable. Leprosy was an infectious disease that could be stopped and healed with modern medicine as long as the immune system didn’t react against it with leprosy antibodies that could arise decades after healing, causing nerve inflammation.
Sister Silvia came from the Irish suburb of Dublin called Rathfarnham that lay to the Southwest of the city where the mother house of the sisters from Loreto was located. It was there that Mother Teresa had been prepared for her mission to Calcutta. In the meantime Sister Silvia had been working for the past twenty-five years in "Shanti Nagar", the "city of peace" as the leper colony was called.
Contrary to some of her other European sisters, her first encounter with India, with its noise, dirt, stench, suffering and chaos on the streets, didn’t make her horrified or call forth monstrous images. She had liked Calcutta and the uniqueness of the natives from the very beginning. She saw the pulsating life behind the suffering, its lack of complication, its joy.
Sister Silvia touched the mutilated man, carefully helping him up with an encouraging smile. He had most likely waited half the night at the colony’s entrance. She carefully brought him to the ward where one of her colleagues took him in. The leper lied down on one of the cots, utterly exhausted and relieved. Sister Silvia returned to the entrance gate to help other patients in the colony.
As the Irishwoman knew too well, leprosy began rather harmlessly at first. The skin grew discoloured with a numb spot. It was rare that those infected even noticed the first signs of the disease or they kept it a secret. Most of those affected came to the colony only after their bodies had become mutilated and filled with boils. Their village communities had long since ostracised them. Many of the patients in Shanti Nagar lived with leprosy-induced handicaps.
The fact that Shanti Nagar, "the city of peace", even existed was thanks to the courage and drive of a single person: Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, the later Mother Teresa for whom a prayer without accompanying action was merely a prayer. Active faith was love, and active love was service. Sister Silvia had worked side by side with Mother Teresa for many years. She had marvelled at her incomparable dedication to caring for the ill and dying. The "angel of the poor," as the wealthy Westerners called her to this day, even after her death.
Sister Silvia had often accompanied Mother Teresa on her way through the slums’ tight and dirty alleys, equipped with the most basic medicines to help the ill. Without the elderly woman knowing, Silvia had long since known about the enormous crises of faith that plagued Mother Teresa, well before the public learned of the correspondence between the Catholic missionary and her spiritual guides.
In her correspondence Mother Teresa had spoken of an emptiness and darkness in the deepest parts of herself and that she had lost her faith, barely daring to even mention it. She felt God had abandoned her. Despite all her doubts and pain, her smile and extraordinary commitment to helping the poorest of the poor never left her.
"Should I ever reach sainthood," said Teresa one time, "then I will most certainly be called ‘the Saint of Darkness�
��. I will go missing in heaven forevermore so that I can ignite a light for all those who live in darkness here on Earth."
Silvia gave an inward sigh. It was moments like these in which she was tempted to breach the holy oath she had made to the Pope and the committee. She would have loved to have "proven" to Teresa that God had not abandoned her, not for a second. Quite the contrary! He had placed Silvia and all the other helpers on Mother Teresa’s side. The missionary was never abandoned by God and left to her own devices, even if she felt it in her heart of hearts. But Sister Silvia was all too familiar with her companion’s dilemma. No matter how hard Teresa worked, not matter how much she fought for the poorest of the poor, the suffering on the streets of Calcutta saw no end. In fact, it just kept growing.
Sister Silvia walked through the colony’s entrance gate and saw a thin, mutilated person, nearly still a child.
The girl was too weak to make it to the ward on her own. Relatives had left the sick girl in a desperate attempt to give her a chance at survival behind the colony’s gates. She recognised their hope by the fact that they had given the girl a piece of bread and some water while she waited. Perhaps the little girl would have an even better life than her parents and siblings in the city. Unfortunately, they had waited until the girl was handicapped before seeking help. Sister Silvia touched the patient, stroking her hair and comforting her. She noticed a glimmer in the girl’s dark eyes. Then she picked up the little girl who was light as a feather.
"What’s your name, child?" she asked.
"Asira," said the little girl with a measure of hesitation, looking back at the nun.
"Asira…what a beautiful name!"
Sister Silvia gave the sick girl a kiss without showing her surprise. As far as she knew, Asira was an Arabian name and meant "the chosen one."
38
Rome, The Vatican, Apostolic Palace
The master followed the show from his midsize flat screen in his Vatican office. The show was being transmitted live from one of the Catholic television channels via the Internet. It showed something that was actually quite incredible: an energetic Pope full of life while praying with believers and pilgrims to Rome. Tens of thousands of people had found their way to St. Peter’s Square with flags and banners. They looked up toward the window of the Pope’s private office and prayed the traditional Angelus with him.
The master zoomed in to show only the pontiff on the monitor without the papal flag that hung from the windowsill and without the crowd standing below on St. Peter’s Square. Unfortunately, the transmission quality was rather poor so he was unable to see Leo’s face clearly. The master would have loved to look the Pope in the eye.
Leo spoke of the good and evil in this world, claiming that good would triumph over evil in the end. The master’s lips curled into an awful grin at the sound of his words. The old lyre. What did Leo know about good and evil anyway? Evil had existed long before good. After saying the Angelus, the Pope mentioned the canonisation of one of the religious men. The master knew him. In his mind, the monk hadn’t deserved canonisation. Neither had Mother Teresa. The Pope then expressed his sorrow about the natural catastrophe in South America. He prayed for all the people who had been affected by the tragedy, the victims and the population. The large community of believers and pilgrims on St. Peter’s Square waved their flags and prayed with the Holy Father. The master postponed his prayer for another time.
When the official papal visit was over and the window to the papal office had been closed, the master switched off the telly and leaned back in his red-backed chair, lost in thought. He hadn’t let the Pope out of his sight for even a moment, observing his every move, gesture, word. During his entire appearance, Leo hadn’t shown a single sign of weakening and that, even though three of his committee members had been obliterated, despite his latest severe collapse. The Pope had even stood there larger than life, cheering to the crowd of people and praying the Angelus with them. That wasn’t a hallucination!
The master took a deep breath. For the moment, it appeared all his work had been for nothing. But then he allowed himself a little smile. In a way he owed the Pope and his committee a certain level of respect. Through this latest twist that he never thought Leo could pull off, the master now stood before a tiny dilemma. For a moment he even considered interrupting his mission in Calcutta until he could get to the bottom of Leo’s sudden recovery. In the end he thought better of it. Things should simply take their course.
He made a mental list of the names of the papal committee. Sylvester, Isabella, Darius, Silvia, Thea…
There was always a way. There was always a solution.
39
Catherine sat with Cardinal Ciban and Monsignor Massini in the office of His Holiness. She was now wearing the costume of a nun employed as a domestic worker in the papal household with thick horn-rimmed glasses and a good portion of theatre make-up complete with a wart over her lip. The three waited until Leo, who was standing on the podium at the window, completed the traditional Angelus with the community standing below on St. Peter’s Square.
Catherine had followed the Pope’s entire public appearance via one of the two monitors in his private office. The people loved the Pope. That much was true because they listened to him with a great deal of rapture and devotion. They loved him at least as much as they had loved John XXIII or John Paul. Not even Leo’s opponents could deny it. Unfortunately, the enemy now officially knew about the Holy Father’s excellent health condition too.
Catherine had had a second dream about Benelli the night before. It had been as real and intoxicating as the first. She didn’t have a good feeling about the cardinal’s plan to challenge the opponent and bring him to make a grave mistake, especially since they only had a few days left to capture the murderer. That’s how much time they had before Benelli’s additional energy dried up and she stood there alone with only her own.
"I am so sorry," Benelli had told her in the dream. "But I can do nothing more at the moment. Even the after world has its limits that we must obey. We also ask ourselves here: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of death? Evil has always had the ability to disguise itself."
Catherine watched as the Pope got down from the podium with a dynamic step. Massini closed the window so that they could only hear crowd’s cheers on the open piazza as a dampened murmur. She had told Leo first thing this morning about her second dream, but Benelli’s revelation hadn’t unsettled him in the least. The Holy Father seemed to be as solid as a rock.
She took a deep inward breath as the Pope approached her because she had kept something from him. Before the dream with Benelli, she had had another one that was just as real and utterly bizarre. In her pre-Benelli dream or whatever Catherine should call it, it was like a sequel to the first travelling dream through the history of the New Testament that she had experienced two nights before. But this sequence had not been recorded anywhere in the New Testament. Catherine had decided to keep the dream, along with her encounter with Benelli in Golgotha, to herself.
She didn’t wish to provide any more ammunition that the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith could use against her. Catherine, the visionary! Just the thing to add to the list of charges! How could she have gently told the Holy Father? Oh yes, by the way, Holiness, I had a chat with Maria Magdalene in Jerusalem right after our Lord ascended to heaven. No, she would prefer to keep those completely crazy appearances to herself.
As the Holy Father stood before her and Ciban, he took the opportunity to give Catherine a good look over. She now looked like a nun in her early forties, slightly chubby or, more politely put, with a solid build, a big nose and a thick pair of glasses. With the exception of her blue eyes, she was completely transformed. Not even Massini recognised her and as the Pope’s confidante, he was in the know about her disguise.
"You look great, Sister," said the Pope with a wide grin, hooking his arm in hers as he guided her to the seating area. Her fake wart seemed to fascinate him in p
articular. "Even in this get-up, you still have style."
"Thank you, Holiness. I gave it my all."
In truth, Catherine felt like a bloated whale. She was out of practice playing theatre. It had taken her nearly an hour to apply her make-up to perfection and she had almost missed her first task of laying out the papal breakfast buffet. Ciban had remained expressionless at the breakfast table when he first saw her in her new outfit, but Catherine could have sworn she could hear his inward efforts to suppress the laugh of the century. Why else should he have hidden his face behind one of Leo’s daily newspapers for so long?
When Monsignor Massini had left the office after the Angelus prayer in order to prepare an audience, Leo said: "That was Act One, Sister. Do you have any idea where this journey is headed?"
Catherine shook her head. "I’m afraid not, Holiness. His Eminence Cardinal Benelli has only shown me the tip of the iceberg. I’m in the dark on everything else."
"Well, then," said Leo, "it’s the opponent’s turn."
"I’m afraid so," she said. "Let us hope the murderer sees how senseless his efforts are."
Ciban shook his head. "He’s come this far. I doubt he’ll give up now. Let us just hope he gives up his cover and makes a mistake." The cardinal looked Catherine directly in the eye. "There’s something else that puzzles me, Sister."
"And that would be, Eminence?"
"It may sound odd, but should you choose to leave the papal palace or even the Vatican in the coming days, for whatever reason, please let me or His Holiness know."
"I don’t intend to leave the palace, much less the Vatican," she said firmly. Ciban kept his gaze on her. "Alright. You have my word."
"Thank you, Sister." The prefect nodded with satisfaction.
The rest of the day remained unchallenging for Catherine. She insisted on helping the nuns with their housework in the papal household and got a sense of everyday life behind the scenes in the Apostolic Palace.
