Paul: By Mithras and Jesus, I will. I swear loyalty to the emperor.
Seneca: As we all do. But be careful. Your life and mine depend on it.
THIS IS THE END. NOW FOR THE FALLOUT . . . WILL
***
To celebrate their complete translation of the Unity Report, Fisher and Garvey picnicked on panini and Chianti outside the Baths of Mithras in Ostia Antica. Wildflowers poked up through the cracked marble ruin they made their picnic table. Basking in the sun, she leaned back and ran her fingers over her collarbone up her neck and through her hair.
“Do you think,” he said, “we fooled the manager of the Castello of Julius II?”
“Yep.” She twirled a lock of hair. “Would’ve fooled me.”
They had embellished their honeymoon cover story to the point of holding hands while asking the manager for directions to the Baths of Mithras. Fisher planted a kiss on her cheek on their way out of the castle. The kiss wasn’t in her version of the honeymoon script. It melted her cheek like fire on wax.
“My former acting skills are a little rusty.”
She felt the spot where he had kissed her. “Not so rusty, Will.” She ran her hand down the red sundress over her thigh.
“To us, partner . . . or pardner . . . as Wes would say.” He clinked his wineglass with hers.
She winced at the mention of Wesley Bemis. “To us.”
After their picnic, he offered a hand to help her down the brick steps to the mithraeum beneath the ancient baths. She didn’t need help but used it as an excuse to meld her hand into his.
They walked through the mithraeum entrance. She pointed out two holes in the ceiling opening up to the sky without any obstruction from the baths. Under the opening stood an iconic sculpture of Mithras slaying the bull. An altar and two small brick columns stood before the sculpture. On a sunny day, the ancient congregation must have contemplated sunlight streaming through the holes onto the sculpture in the way sunlight streams through church windows onto an altar cross. Her eyes caught something odd. “What’s on that bench?” She picked up a mask. “Look, Will . . . a raven mask.”
“The Raven rank of Mithras.” He turned it over in his hand. “They’ve been using this mithraeum. We have to tell Commissario Leone.”
While searching for other objects left behind, she stumbled on a rock. He grabbed her before she fell. His arms around her shoulders, she looked into his face. She sucked in the scent of musk from his neck. He pressed his lips to hers. He drew his head back. With her right hand, she lowered his head back down and kissed him with an urgency he repaid. She steadied herself and pulled away. “We’re alone now. No need to playact.”
“Who’s playacting?”
His smartphone buzzed.
“Commissario Leone. Good timing. What do you have?”
“The scientists told me one thousand nine hundred fifty-six years for both the Unity Report and the Callinicus letter, give or take fifty years.”
“Nineteen centuries for both? Wonderful news.” He shot her an I-told-you-so look. “Science has settled things.”
“I’m sure it hasn’t,” Leone said. “Ciao.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
“You’ll miss the turn,” Leone warned Renaldi’s replacement from Turin. “Turn left now.”
He looked askance at this Inspector Rossi, unfamiliar with the streets of Rome. The short sleeves of his summer blue shirt exposed the tattooed phrase “La Famiglia Sempre” on his forearm. The Family Forever? Would he turn into another homesick transfer unable to make the grade? “God help us,” Leone said under his breath.
“Faster, faster.” Leone resolved not to fail. “We’ve got to stop it this time.” Shlomo’s overdue contact that morning about a threat to the church of Santo Stefano Rotondo fit the Mithraic hypothesis. The church rested on a second-century mithraeum near the barracks of Roman legionnaires transferred from imperial provinces. When he pressed Shlomo for details, the line had gone dead. He rocked in the passenger seat of the squad car as if his energy could speed it up.
The vehicle screeched to a stop.
Leone ran into the round building known as the Hungarian national church in Rome with Rossi right behind. The commissario shoved his way through a circle of mourners past the ring of colonnades encircling the altar. Near the altar lay a closed casket on purple cushions. Yellow roses adorned the casket. Around it, wreaths of white and yellow chrysanthemums huddled on latticework. At the altar, a priest in a purple-and-gold chasuble stood ready to begin the funeral service.
The slurred sibilants and hard consonants of a strange language, sounding like the buzz of agitated bees, surrounded Leone. “Hungarian,” Rossi whispered into his ear.
“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” the priest asked in accented Italian.
“A police investigation.” Leone removed his hat. “Why a closed casket?”
“A Hungarian diplomat died in an automobile accident. The accident mutilated his features.” The buzzing of the mourners grew louder. “What do you want? I must begin this service.”
It’s San Clemente all over again. The revelation shook Leone.
“The casket contains a bomb. Clear the church at once.”
The priest gasped. He ordered everyone out before a bomb exploded.
Answering the commissario’s call, two bomb-disposal specialists in protective gear arrived, looking like astronauts. From the church rear, Leone watched the bomb squad work. He rejected their advice to wait outside.
The specialists lowered their helmet visors. The heavyset one set to work opening the casket lid with a long, flat strip of metal. While prying the lid open, he slipped on yellow roses fallen from the casket. The metal strip clanged on the floor.
The lid banged shut.
Leone hit the floor.
No explosion. He still lived.
“The point,” Leone said, getting on his feet, “is to defuse the bomb without blowing us up.”
Full of apologies, the specialist reopened the casket lid far enough to peek inside. He motioned his colleague to take a peek. Taking off their helmets, they closed the lid and looked bullets at Leone.
“Speak up. What did you see?”
“Disfigured corpse,” the heavyset one replied. “No bomb. The point, Commissario, is to call us only for bomb threats.”
They packed up their tools. “We’re leaving,” the other one added. “You do the apologies.”
Leone’s apologies did nothing to soothe the deceased’s brother, who tongue-lashed him in both Hungarian and Italian with some colorful English phrases for emphasis. Other mourners backed Leone against a wall depicting Christian martyrs in baths of boiling pitch or with hands set afire or spears thrust through their throats. Subjected to his own self-inflicted tribulation, Leone bought off their wrath with the promise of a church donation to atone for his blunder.
Leone waved off Rossi’s offer of a ride home. He wandered through the park of the Villa Celimontana, where protestors gathered around the smallest obelisk in Rome and demanded its return to Egypt. When he arrived home alone, Mondocane licked away the wound of Shlomo’s false information.
Chapter Fifty
Inside the climate-controlled consultation room of the Vatican Library, Fisher pondered the blank papyrus sheets shipped from the Villa of the Papyri. The staff had done a superb job of removing mold spots with a spatula plus a mixture of ethanol and water. He consulted his notes on the quantity and dimensions of the papyrus sheets before shipment. He examined the sheets.
Something was off.
He cross-checked the sheets and notes again.
No mistake.
When he deposited the sheets with the library, the numbers matched. Now they didn’t. He turned to the library assistant accompanying him. “Sheets are missing.”
“How could that be?”
“That’s what I want to know. What about the staff?”
“If you’re insinuating—”
“I’m insinuating nothing.” His heart raced. “Did anyone else examine the papyrus?”
“Just another professor.”
“Another professor?”
“I thought you knew. Someone cleared by Superintendent Piso’s office.”
The professor’s name clicked. A gifted classics scholar whose mind went off the rails. After assaulting a dean, he had disappeared under the radar of academic gossip.
***
By the time Fisher exited the cab in front of the Marriot Park Hotel, the public hearing on the authenticity of the Callinicus letter and the Unity Report had already begun in the Michelangelo Ballroom. In conjunction with Brigham Young University and the Vatican, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities sponsored the hearing. The scrolls riveted public attention and pushed aside all other news. Even the anticlerical and secular parts of the city feared the papyrus revelations. If Christianity were undermined, would tourists still visit and help fill the coffers of a Rome teetering on bankruptcy?
Ushers shepherded him to his seat on the dais just in time to hear Cardinal Furbone’s spokesperson blast the Callinicus letter and Unity Report as forgeries inspired by a Mormon agenda. The agenda was intent on proving the pagan corruption of early Christianity through what Mormons called the Great Apostasy in order to justify what they considered the reestablishment of true Christianity by the revelations of Joseph Smith, their founder. When the spokesperson’s attack degenerated into repetitive bombast, Fisher checked his voice mails on the sly.
Still in the hospital for third-degree burns, Wes Bemis, poor man, had called yet again. The arson at the National Archaeological Museum scarred not only his body but his mind. He had a paranoid’s conviction of an anti-Mormon mob lurking around the hospital to burn it down and get at him. The caustic tone of the cardinal’s spokesperson reminded Fisher that even paranoids have enemies, and one prominent enemy was Cardinal Gustavo Furbone.
When Nicole rose to speak, Fisher knew her integrity forced her to make common cause with the Vatican spokesperson on the Unity Report. Although she thought the Callinicus letter genuine, her suspicion of the Unity Report, she said, began with its provenance. For such a confidential report to be left in the open for others to find struck her as peculiar. The writing style and the apparent hesitancy in the application of ink further raised her suspicions.
Bringing science to bear, she disclosed what the Unity Report revealed under a multispectral scanner. The ink did not show the type of aging or quality consistent with the ancient time period of the document. It also contained a suspicious degree of iron content not typically found in ink until the early Middle Ages. She concluded a forger had written modern text on ancient papyrus authenticated by carbon-14 testing.
When his turn came, Fisher walked to the lectern on leaden feet. Why had he appeared on a vulgar TV variety show a week earlier to hype carbon-14 testing as proof the Callinicus letter and the Unity Report were both authentic? He had broadcasted his professional misjudgment about the Unity Report to the entire country and beyond.
After a moment of stammering, he confessed to the audience that the blank papyrus sheets inventoried at the Villa of the Papyri and stored at the Vatican library had gone missing. The inventoried sheets also bore the same characteristics of scraping and washing Dr. Garvey observed on the Unity Report. Because the papyrologists at the library had completed those restorative tasks on all the sheets, he concluded the Unity Report was written on blank papyrus taken from the Villa of the Papyri, and most likely purloined by a visitor to the storage bunker of the Vatican Library.
He should have listened to her. He hesitated but he had no choice. He needed his friend Jack to console him.
He gripped the lectern to steady himself. A modern forger had concocted the Unity Report on ancient papyrus. He gulped. Therefore, he apologized to Dr. Garvey and others for his earlier view and retracted any public comments to the contrary.
“What about the Callinicus letter?” A reporter stood up. “Is that a forgery too?”
“I was too hasty with my assessment of the Unity Report,” Fisher said. “But I will say carbon-14 testing and paleography . . . the study of ancient writings . . . validate the age of the Callinicus letter. Like Dr. Garvey said, the Unity Report problems do not apply to the Callinicus letter.”
“I have no such hesitation.” The Vatican spokesperson interrupted. “The Callinicus letter is also a Mormon forgery. If the Unity Report is a modern forgery on ancient papyrus, why shouldn’t the same conclusion apply to the alleged copies of the Callinicus letter? Where is the original of the Callinicus letter? Gone up in smoke because of arson at the National Archaeological Museum. Rather convenient, don’t you think, if you want to prevent conclusive authentication. How do we know the photographed . . . alleged . . . copies of the Callinicus letter weren’t concocted out of thin air? At the center of all this is a Mormon, Dr. Wesley Bemis, aided and abetted by these two Americans with a bias against the Roman Catholic Church.”
“Any last word, Professor Fisher?”
“My last word is defamation . . . like in defamation lawsuit, if the Vatican representative doesn’t stop making false accusations.”
Nicole winked and gave him the look.
The look meant he didn’t need Jack for consolation later that night.
Chapter Fifty-One
“Hey Rocco,” a coworker said. “Did you know that a Sicilian is just a black African who’s good at swimming?”
Rocco struck the bicep of his upraised left arm with his right hand in a classic gesture of defiance. “Up yours, you Roman cretin.” He walked toward the coworker with clenched fists but stopped short. His mission was too important to be jeopardized.
Over twenty-one meters in the air, the two workmen glared at each other on the aluminum-tube scaffolding surrounding the pink granite obelisk in the center of St. Peter’s Square. Others returned to festooning the obelisk for a special Mass of Deliverance from the earth tremors afflicting Rome.
Rocco squeezed the yellow-and-white bunting in his hands as though it were his heckler’s throat. When begging for work up north, a train conductor outside Rome had pointed to a train map of the Italian mainland and Sicily. He stomped his foot. The boot of Italy stomps Sicily, the conductor said. The Roman bastards would pay soon enough.
“Knock it off, you two.” On the other side of the scaffolding, the burly boss, his hands full of nylon bunting, followed up his command with a string of curses. “The Mass of Deliverance is tomorrow. No one leaves until we finish beautifying this twenty-five meter prick with the papal colors.”
Rocco diverted his rage by contemplating the crowd milling below like mindless insects over cobblestones sectioned off by lines of white travertine. Laborers positioned potted olive trees around the obelisk base. The insects prepared to celebrate the special Mass of Deliverance outdoors the following morning. Because the tremors had cracked the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica, on Sunday morning the pope would instead celebrate the Mass of Deliverance next to the obelisk flanked by two fountains.
“He’s just an ignoramus trying to provoke you.” The boss put his arm around Rocco. “Forgive him. He’s even too dumb to find his ass.”
“Never.” Rocco broke free. “I don’t forgive . . . and I don’t forget.”
“How did it go?” The boss looked down and then into Rocco’s eyes. “With your mother’s medical exam, I mean.”
“That’s my business.” He turned his back and returned to fixing the flapping bunting on the obelisk. “I must finish up.”
How did it go? Rocco wondered. He distrusted these smooth-talking sawbones in Rome, but he had no choice. Even though moving his aunt and mother to Rome had taken his last euro, only superior medical treatment offered his mother the hope of salvati
on. After the consummation of his masterpiece tomorrow, he would dine with her and brave whatever prognosis fate had dealt her. She insisted on getting out of bed to make his favorite dish of pasta with sardines and pine nuts. Only she mattered to him. After the Pater Patrum saw the spectacular results of his craftsmanship, he would have more than enough money for his mama.
The metal cross at the top of the obelisk glinted in the sun. Some said the cross contained a piece of the wooden cross from Christ’s crucifixion. The Pater Patrum ranted that the papacy had substituted the cross of the obelisk for an ancient metal globe containing the ashes of Julius Caesar. They were all out of their minds. How could they get so worked up over past events distorted by memory and devoured by the black hole of history? But the Pater Patrum paid handsomely, and in the credo of the mighty euro Rocco believed. He could feel it and buy things with it. And save his mother with it.
When quitting time came, cleanup remained. To the delight of the crew, he volunteered to stay behind and take care of it himself. The boss thanked him. Even the worker who had taunted him shook hands, adding he had nothing against Sicilians—in fact, his barber was one.
After their departure, Rocco reached into his duffel bag and pulled out sticks of military-grade C-4 explosives.
Chapter Fifty-Two
The next day, clouds like cotton candy swirling in soot loomed over St. Peter’s Square on the somber Sunday morning set for the Mass of Deliverance. From the viewing gallery on the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, Rocco trained his binoculars on the fifty thousand persons packed around the obelisk. A cantor intoned Psalm 22—My God, why have you forsaken me?—joined by organ music and thousands of swelling voices.
Professional pride demanded he be present to observe his handiwork during the hours-long ritual. The insects below could then no longer claim that because the obelisk had witnessed the upside-down crucifixion of Saint Peter, it was divinely destined to never collapse. Out there, another Roma Rinata craftsman, unknown to him, would bring this religious service to an explosive finale at any moment. Cells of operatives, unknown to one another, worked independently toward a master plan known only to the Pater Patrum. If one cell of the organism were eradicated, the Pater Patrum could replicate it without compromising the others.
The Mithras Conspiracy Page 21
