Hunt for the Holy Grail

by Preston W Child

  “Shush, it is me.”

  Olivia’s palm was on her Glock when she saw it was the priest. They were in an equipment room. Cases marked with different inscriptions were piled on each other. The place smelled like a tanner’s shop.

  Father Andre walked ahead of her to another room that looked like an office. There was a VCR and a TV on a table. Olivia placed the flowers on the table and extracted the disc; Father Andre went to a corner and removed a CD player. He connected the devices and stood aside.

  “Go on,” he whispered.

  Olivia sighed and slotted the disc in the player.

  Someone was walking on the cobblestone floor, the arc of torchlight in front of his dusty black shoes. The person made several turns. The shoes and torchlight continued. Olivia glanced at the cleric; his face showed no expression.

  The walking feet stopped at one door. Still no faces, just the shoes, the torch, and the stone floor.

  Now the door opened into darkness, low audio. There was an inaudible conversation. The torchlight was back. It shone on a curving wall of stones as the dusty shoes walked on. There were more voices as the feet approached a more darkened place.

  Then the shoes stopped walking, the torchlight dangled, the light concentrated on a spot on the floor by the shoes, a metal gate swung open.

  The feet moved about a yard or two and stopped.

  The torch shone on a seated figure in black clothing. The person's head was covered with a black hood, and others were standing behind him; two or three people. Olivia couldn’t be sure because the torch had become unstable.

  Father Andre watched with mild interest. The corner of his lips pulled in a small smile, but his eyes remained impassioned.

  “Peter,” Olivia breathed. She pulled up a chair and sat in it. “What have they done to you?”

  The torchlight achieved stability; the holder must have placed it on something.

  A hand appeared over Peter’s head; it pulled off the hood slowly.

  A gasp escaped Olivia’s throat.

  Peter looked so pale he could be dead already. His head lolled to the side. His hair had grown longer, his beard too, and he looked lean, also.

  Someone struck him across the face and he groaned in pain, his eyes fluttering open. They pulled his hair back to make him focus on the camera. His dark eyes remained so, but the whites looked paler. Or was it just the poor light?

  Olivia’s hands formed into a grip on her lap. Hot blood filled her head and ears.

  He glanced at the cleric behind him. He was staring at the screen with more interest now.

  Peter Williams stared at the screen. Someone barked in poor English, “Say something to the camera!”

  “Just lemme go, I got to get home,” Peter murmured.

  Olivia seethed. “They’ve probably poisoned him.”

  “No.”

  She looked at Father Andre. “What?”

  “He’s the same.”

  Olivia frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  Father Andre pointed at the video. “That place, I know where it is. The Templars have taken over the central portion of the archdiocese. That is the main bowl, without the lights, that is.”

  Olivia glanced at the screen again.

  “Without the lights?”

  “Yes, without the lights, you couldn’t tell the truth,” said the cleric. “The English say 'evil loves misery,' but they are wrong. Evil loves darkness.”

  His eyes were even more impassionate as he stared continually at the face of Peter Williams. The hood came down on his face again. The screen went black.

  “It is wrong, all wrong,” Olivia said.

  “What is?”

  “There is no way to prove when this video was made. There was no timer on it.”

  “Indeed.”

  “They fooled us.”

  Father Andre touched her shoulder tenderly. “Yes, they did. But are you fooled?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Good. Time to find out the truth.”

  —

  8

  “We are ready to trade.”

  “Be at the Calamari Square, 12:00 noon.”

  The hang-up tone.

  Olivia looked at Father Andre. “Where’s the Calamari Square at?”

  The cleric frowned. His alert eyes roved up and down the street. They were standing at a different pay phone in the part of the Borgo he hardly frequented. The dogs from the Templar Order could be sniffing them out as they stood on the street.

  And Calamari Square?

  “You must know now, we go to that place, there is no turning back.” The priest pointed hastily.

  “What’s there?”

  “The Holy Grail will be there, and then there is no turning back for us all. If the Templars get it, they’ll take everything we ever care about. Our world as we know it will change, it is what they want—”

  “All I want is to go back home with Peter. All I want is to save him. I can’t have another’s blood on my hands,” Olivia cried. She grabbed the priest’s hands. “Please, I can’t take the guilt once more.”

  Flustered, the cleric frowned. He pulled Olivia away from the street and into a doorway where there was shade.

  “Tell me, why are you really doing this, Miss Newton?”

  Olivia swallowed hard. The lump that had grown in her throat, she felt the pinch anew—the remorse gnawed at her conscience.

  “How much does it cost to pay for a life, Father? How much?”

  “No one can fully pay. No man can,” he answered gently.

  “Then we must do this. I must save him. Please, we must stop them if we can,” she implored him. “We are not different if we do nothing in the face of tyranny. These people, whoever they are, will not stop just because we run away. And what use is the Holy Grail if it cannot help us?”

  Father Andre turned from her. “You do not understand the power that the Grail embodies.”

  “Tell me, help me understand.”

  He looked at her sharply. “It has the power to heal and to destroy. It has the power of the blood of Christ. It is the blood of Christ, the essence of his being. In the hands of a good man, it can do astonishing things, extraordinary things!”

  “Are you familiar with the gospel?”

  “No, I left Sunday school when I was nine,” Olivia said.

  Father Andre peeped around the corner. He came back and pulled Olivia’s hand. They plodded down a side street. “This should get us quicker across town.”

  The cleric bowed forward and talked as they went on; his forefinger poked the air as he explained.

  “Now, according to the gospels, Christ was nailed to the cross. He died earlier than the two men on both sides of him, remember?”

  Olivia said she did.

  “Then the Gospel says the soldiers came to the first thief, apparently the one on the left first. They see he is still alive, they break his legs, to make his death faster, now—note this—the soldiers jump Christ and go on to the thief on the right, they do the same to him—”

  “They broke his legs too,” Olivia supplied.

  “Yes, they did. Question is, why jump Christ? Now that’s some gap in the narrative, don’t you think?”

  Olivia said she hadn’t thought about it.

  “Well, the church fathers always thought about that little glitch in the story. Well, according to some tradition, there is nothing to the story other than what it is. But Joseph of Arimathea knew the truth, and he wrote it in a letter he sent to his brother in the Sanhedrin; his name was Zeroth. Now Zeroth tells us that a different soldier was milking Christ.”

  “What? How’s that even possible?”

  “They were Roman soldiers, dear. They could do to a Jewish convict whatever they wanted,” said the cleric. “When they poked Christ with the spear, water came out of his stomach, yes. True. But some say there was blood as well.”

  “Of course there would be blood. It was only a manner of speaking when the scriptures menti
oned water.”

  The cleric nodded. “Yes, yes, to the point; the soldiers collected Christ’s blood in a golden cup.”

  “But why?”

  “It was an age of superstitious fear and religious euphoria. Men were afraid of a man who could calm the seas. They were awed by a man who could feed ten thousand men, women, and children with two fishes and five loaves of bread. These soldiers would like to show their pagan wives some proof that they’ve been around that man, that they touched his body, whipped his body with whips of bony thorns and shrapnel, that they speared that man.”

  “But the Romans did not believe—”

  “Oh yes, they did, Miss Newton, they sure did, right after the storm and the earthquake that night. They believed. The Roman soldiers were the first custodians of the Grail, the Spear, and the Shroud.”

  “The Spear?” Olivia puzzled. “I have heard of the Shroud, not the Spear.”

  “If we are alive when this is over, I may take you to see a replica in the Vatican museum.”

  They had walked so far away from the main street and were standing before a tall wall. There was a small wooden gate in front of Olivia and the cleric. The cleric stood before the gate. He sighed.

  “We are here?”

  “Where’s here?”

  “We are looking at the wall of the Holy See, the Vatican City itself.”

  Olivia asked what they were doing there. “I thought we should be heading away from it, not coming to it.”

  “There is someone I have to see, Miss Newton. At this time, even I need guidance.”

  The cleric knocked three times and waited. He deepened his hand in his black cassock and pulled out a long rosary. He twisted it around his fist.

  The gate swung open slowly. There was a short bald priest behind the gate; he wore a black robe too like Father Andre. The man had a genial face, eyes that smiled, and little small teeth.

  “Welcome, Andre,” he said pleasantly.

  Father Andre put his rosary in the man’s open hand. “For both of us.”

  The short man bowed and let Olivia through.

  “Who was that?”

  “Julio, he works for the man we are about to see,” the priest said.

  —

  The CIA station in Rome was located in the Borgo. The part of the city that was once both present and past.

  The house was a three-story building. All the floors above the surface were fronts; a law firm at the top, a printing press on the second, and the last story was mostly empty and built like a car garage for the offices.

  The basement was where the real action took place.

  Station Chief Paul Talbot was just transferred in from Paris. He had been Eiji Fumihiro's controller for five years. And he had been a Templar for longer.

  Recruited immediately, the Order noticed his talent for work and getting things done. Talbot had zero fails and the highest percentage of kills. He didn’t do the fields anymore, he let others do the actual killings—cleaning, as he liked to say.

  And how messy this project had been. Lin was dead in the street, his van turned on its back, his men down. Lin was a complete disappointment.

  Talbot pulled his fitted Louis Vuitton jacket closer. No matter, nothing he couldn’t handle.

  The woman, the journalist, was with the cleric now. Well, they have the Grail, but the CIA had the technology. You could run, and you could hide as well, but you couldn’t close your eyes to sleep.

  Talbot stepped out of the short elevator trip to the basement and walked into a massive situation room, equipped with state-of-the-art equipment. A large screen showed the whole of Rome in real-time, and the Vatican area in particular.

  “What’s the status of our fleas?” he called.

  A lady analyst, charming, stood up and started talking fast.

  “Spare me the details. Throw me the bone, Alita.”

  The girl smiled. “We think the lady and the priest might be trying to get into the Vatican, get help from someone.” She tapped her keyboard and a face appeared on the screen. “This Cardinal.”

  Talbot squinted. “Aww, double-dealing motherfucker.”

  “His name is—”

  “Yeah, Emilio Bartolini.” Talbot nodded.

  The girl tapped some more, and another slide pulled into the screen. Three men were in front of a shop downtown, running away from a wreck. There was a body in the street.

  “We believe these three are still alive, and former operative Lawrence Diggs is still at large. We have signals from our safe house in Piazza Adriana. Last time we used it was three years ago. Do you want one of our assets to go visit him, boss?”

  “Yes, send two teams, he’s a tough guy,” Talbot said. “Let us focus on the priest and his girl. We need assets out there. Stop them, retrieve the Grail, kill them both.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me, Alita. Get the best. Who do we have in Rome?”

  The girl punched buttons again and a man’s face appeared. Crew-cut hair, hard blue eyes, slightly bent nose, and a cruel mouth that ladies would have loved to be kissed with.

  “Gerald Dietz, special ops, former US marshal, 164 kills, no losses. Pulling up his file now.”

  A guy in a black suit brought the file to Talbot. The chief took it and read through.

  “Good, activate him.”

  “Done!”

  —

  Diggs knew they were going to come soon. But not this soon. He had hoped they’d be preoccupied with catching the priest and the girl.

  He had gone into the basement of the safe house for supplies. He found weapons, food, and medical supplies. The murmur of the others hummed in the small living room.

  Diggs seldom followed procedure, and it had saved him many times. He set tripwires four blocks out, instead of the standard two blocks. So, when the first one tripped, he heard the beep in his earphone as he was picking up a can of salted meat.

  He bundled up the stairs into the living room.

  “We’ve got company.”

  Liam turned his ghostlike face to him. “Again, what?”

  “We have to move. These guys will not take prisoners. They get the Grail, they kill us. If these guys don’t, they kill us. Either way, we are dead men. Come on, garner up!”

  Frank Miller got up slowly. He looked at Diggs. “You want me to call your old team from the Paris Field?”

  “No, boss. I can handle this.”

  Liam gasped. “What did you mean you can handle this? That Asian guy beat the shit out of you. What are these guys gonna do next, use a rocket launcher?”

  “Shut up, Liam,” Miller snapped. “Diggs, are you able to handle this alone?”

  The man glared at Miller so hard, Miller shivered in his bones at the chill around those eyes.

  “You are about to see me at my most horrific,” Diggs said.

  Two minutes later, Miller, Liam, Anabia, and Borodin were running through a passage underground.

  “Take this map.” Diggs gave it to Borodin. “It goes straight to this place under the Vatican, but when you get to this spot, wait for me.”

  The Russian nodded.

  “Goodluck, fellas.”

  —

  Cardinal Emilio Bartolini was huge. He looked like a big bald Amarillo wearing a skull cap and a red cassock. They were in his private quarters. It was an ornately decorated flat with paintings of antiquity on the grey walls. Incense burned on a small altar. Everywhere you turned in the place, there was something to do pagan and yet Christian.

  Olivia ran her hands on the soft cushion of the furniture. She gawked at the painting in the ceiling of John the Baptist in the water with the Christ. It looked so real she half expected the water to spill on the Venetian carpet.

  Emilio whispered in a gruff voice to Father Andre, “Did anyone see you come in?”

  “Julio at the gate?”

  “And her?”

  “She’s in danger, your eminence.”

  The big clergyman walked around a table
where there was a bottle of wine and glass cups.

  “Aren’t we all?” he said, a hint of regret in his voice. “But sometimes we have a chance to choose how we wish to be affected by the danger.”

  He poured a glass for himself and Andre. He gestured at wandering Olivia.

  “Miss Olivia?” Father Andre called. “Drink?”

  Olivia shook her head.

  The Cardinal nodded his huge head and looked at Andre with compassion in his eyes.

  “You were gone for too long, Andre; a lot of things have changed since you left.”

  “Things?” Andre sipped. “How about people?”

  The Cardinal placed his glass on the table. He put large paws on the table and stared at the young cleric.

  “The Lord attended a wedding ceremony, Andre, in Canaan.”

  “Yes, but not a single birthday party?”

  “We are going to have our arguments again, Andre. I used to enjoy them, you know. The problem with you is, you have refused to accept the terms of living in your own age. You prefer the old times to new ones, but if the old one was such a useful one, it would not have yielded a place for that which is new.”

  Andre finished his wine and put the glass on the table.

  “How many Cardinals can I trust now? How many still refuse to join the Templars?”

  “The proper question is,” corrected the Cardinal, “how many are true with the Church?”

  They stared at each other.

  “Do you have anything to live for? Your life, your position? What would you do to save your soul?” the big man asked.

  Father Andre felt a chill in his back. Something had happened that he didn’t know of. Father Andre had called him earlier to tell the Cardinal that he was coming for help. Now the clergyman stared at him with guilty eyes.

  The Cardinal looked at Olivia, and then at Andre. “In the pursuit of peace, we may lose a limb or two.”

  “What have you done, Cardinal?”

  “I did it for the church.”

  “You did it for the church? What church!?” Father Andre fumed.

  Olivia glanced at the two men. She frowned. Just like Diggs had thought in the past few hours, Olivia looked for an exit.

  “This woman”—the clergyman pointed at Olivia—“is in way over her head. She trifled with the wrong people, and now she has drawn you into this war!”