Vatican - Easter Sunday, March 22
Jean sat at the foot of the hotel bed with her arms wrapped around her legs, her knees pulled up under her chin, and couldn’t take her eyes off the TV set on the dresser. The nun’s habit she had worn to the library was thrown on the bed along with the two other outfits she had worn at the Vatican, and she had switched into jeans and an Oxford sweatshirt. She crushed wads of Kleenex in both fists and rocked slightly as the CNN anchor told the world over and over that the Pope, most of the high-ranking members of the Curia, and hundreds of ordinary faithful had been killed by a suicide bomber while attending Easter Mass at St. Peters Basilica in Vatican City. She watched the TV reporter repeat the same thing again.
Yes, Tom, the casualty figures continue to mount here in Vatican City in the aftermath of a huge explosion that shook this ancient edifice… you can see St. Peter’s here behind me… this morning as the Holy Father… Pope Pious XIII celebrated Easter mass. We understand the mass was a con-celebration of sorts with about twenty high-ranking cardinals and archbishops assisting… all assisting the Pope in the same mass… so all of them were gathered together at the huge, canopied altar in the center of the Basilica. Sources tell us over one thousand people have been taken to hospitals around Rome and in the surrounding suburbs, and the death toll is approaching five hundred. That’s five hundred dead as of this counting… and nobody really has a good handle on it since the situation inside the huge Basilica is still being resolved. And the injured… we don’t have any figures… but as you can see, this entire plaza here… the Plaza of St. Peter’s… the field hospital and triage center… the body bags continue to leave here.
One of the problems we are encountering in bringing you this breaking story is that most… or almost all… not all, but almost all… of the Vatican officials who usually deal with such things have been either killed or seriously injured.
One of her throwaway cell phones rang. She had several of these, purchased off the shelf with a fixed number of included minutes. Use it a few times, throw it away, and start with another.
“I have to see you. Can I come up?” It was Hammid, who she had last seen when they triumphantly left the Vatican Library with the treaty. That was before she knew what had really happened, saw the ambulances and emergency medical people in St. Peter’s Square, saw the bloody people wandering in confusion, and saw the black body bags being laid out in rows in the square. They had quickly split up and Hammid said he would contact her at the hotel. He gave the treaty to her in case either of them was stopped, since a medieval historian would have a natural reason for having such a document. She took the document, put on her floppy hat and large sunglasses, blocked out everything around her, and nearly ran back to the hotel.
“Yes, you can come up. Get your dead ass up here! Do you know what you have done?”
“Not on this phone, my dear. Let’s not be hasty.”
When she opened the door, he looked like the typical well-heeled tourist from London. Blue blazer, gray slacks, tasseled loafers, and a silk shirt open at the collar. A stupid gold chain hung around his neck.
“Have you had an opportunity to look at the document again?” he asked.
“The document? The opportunity? Are you out of your mind? Have you seen the TV? Did you know about this? Hundreds of people, a thousand, a flock of bishops, and the Pope! They blew up the Pope! What the hell have you gotten me into? Where are your brains? You said they were going to blow up a substation and make a lot of smoke and noise. You didn’t say you were going to blow up the Pope and a thousand other people.”
He eased down into the room’s only chair and steepled his fingers. “I’m sorry about that substation story, but I had to get you to go along. I doubted you would agree, even for the million Euros you are getting for this.” He flipped his hands up. “But the more serious matter? Did I know about it? Could I have stopped it? Or was I involved in it?”
“Don’t give me that stupid crap with your phony Oxford accent! You sound like somebody’s butler.” She pointed at the TV. “Is this stupid crap the work of you and your stupid assed Arab Jihadis?”
“That’s harsh, Jean. I expected better from you.” He waved a hand at the TV on the dresser. “That is indeed stupid crap, as you put it, and it’s a cowardly waste of innocent lives.” He took a deep breath and continued. “It shames my people, and it shames me. It shames all of us. We are better than that.” Tell her whatever she needed to hear, he thought. Tell her anything to keep her working.
“Better? Better than what? Tell that to those little kids in the body bags.” She folded her arms, turned and stared out the window. “You haven’t answered me,” she said very quietly. “Are you part of this?”
She turned back to him and sat up on the window ledge. “Did you kill all those people to get a treaty? A stupid treaty?”
He shot up from the chair. “I had nothing to do with that. Nothing. Did I know about it? Yes, I knew. But could I do anything about it? No. Nothing. I didn’t plan it, and I didn’t have anything to do with carrying it out. That stuff is stupid and accomplishes nothing.”
“You knew, but you couldn’t pick up the phone?”
Hammid shifted around and rubbed a handkerchief over his sweating head. “That’s different. I found out about it. Then stayed away. That’s all.”
“That’s all? And it’s just coincidence you planned to rob the Vatican Library on the very day, and at the very time, when a thousand people were getting blown to bits?”
She went to the small refrigerator and took out two beers. “Want one?”
“Please.” He took the green bottle and twisted it open using the bedspread to protect his hand. Jean gritted her teeth and determined to twist hers off with her bare hands, no matter what it took.
“Look.” He leaned his elbows on his knees. “I found out about this, and at the same time I found out about that treaty. In war sometimes things just come together and you have to take advantage of them.”
“War, my ass.”
“It’s been war for over a thousand years. You of all people know that.”
“Well, you’ve done it now. We have every hunter killer team on three continents after us now. They’ll go to the ends of the Earth looking for us. The CIA, KGB, MI6… hell, even the Israelis will join in for the fun of it.”
She boosted herself back up so she was sitting on the windowsill and said very softly, “Do you think those guys will give a damn it’s war when they have you hung upside down over a slow fire? You’ll be sizzling and popping like a Christmas goose and spill everything you know. You think these people will read you your rights? There are no more rights, no lawyers, no courts, no legal mumbo jumbo, and you’ll take a long, very long time to cook. These are the people who are really out there while everyone else is distracted arguing about prisoners’ rights and how the guards have to carry the Quran.”
“We know who we are up against.”
“We? Who’s we?”
He took a long swallow of the Heineken. “That’s Al Qaeda,” he said, pointing at the TV. “They think the West will crumble if they plant bombs in pizza parlors, girls’ schools, and churches. At the most, they are a distraction. They can’t win. Look what happened to them in Iraq. The Americans just set up machine guns on one side of a bridge and these brave warriors charge the guns from the other side and get cut to ribbons. Then the Americans reload and wait for the next bunch.”
Now he got up and wandered around the room. “But we are older and wiser. Much older and much wiser. This is a long struggle, and won’t be settled in our lives. Let’s say we take a different perspective, a very long perspective. And that’s why we want this treaty.”
“Well, I don’t give a damn. I take a short-term perspective, and I want out of here and away from this.”
“Jean, you are in this up to your eyeballs. Finish what you agreed to do, which is only the work of a scholar, and you can go on your merry way. What are you going to do? Walk in
to a London police station and say you’re the one who blew up the Pope? I doubt it.”
Time to take the quickest way out of all this, she thought, and that was to finish her work on the treaty. It was time to save her own ass.
“Ok,” she said, “I had a quick look at the treaty in the library, but couldn’t authenticate it there. It matched the catalog numbers you gave me, and the title is the same. I presume it’s real, but it’ll take some time to really look at it. It’s readable with the filters and lights I have in my kit, but it’s faded and takes time. I can tell you it’s in Secular Latin, not Church Latin, and appears to be a treaty between the Vatican and the major European powers in the year 1189. I never heard of it. It’s called the Treaty of Tuscany.” She shrugged. “Never heard of it. Nor has any other scholar. ”
“Let’s not worry about the scholars. How long will it take to determine if it is real, and not some hoax done two hundred years ago that has just been sitting there waiting for daylight?”
She shoved her hands into her jeans pockets and looked up at the ceiling. “Translating it is no big deal. I can read it just as it is. And I can give you a quick summary, then do a detailed translation into English later. The technical verification of the age will take a bit more time. The parchment and ink has to be tested, then the style, calligraphy, format and scrollwork around the margins. It’s like a document from any time. You look at how people wrote stuff at the time, then see if there is a match. Word usage, phrasing. Does it fit history? Like I told you, the ultimate tech test is laser testing at a major center. Can’t do that here.”
“How long?”
“Doing it right would probably take a team a few weeks in a modern lab. That would give about 99.9% probability it was real. Working myself? I would have a very good idea in about a day, say 95% probability. But it’s that last 5% that is the tough part. A good forger can hit 95%.”
Hammid looked up at the TV images of ambulances moving out of the Vatican in an unbroken line. He smiled for the first time and looked at her. “Ninety-five percent is good. Very good. Give me 95% and I’ll take the bet any day. And you are the best there is. That’s why we hired you.”
She was one of the best, she thought, and here she was hiding in a hotel room rather than sitting in faculty lounge in London. A dozen Classics departments had recruited her, offered tenure, her own lab, graduate assistants, prestige, and unlimited access to any collection in the world. But professors didn’t make much, and not nearly enough to match what she spent. And not even close to what she wanted to spend. London was a great city, but it was an expensive city.
It also cost money to travel to Paris for weekends, go the Spanish Costa Brava for longer weekends, and come back with the latest continental fashions. None of that came with a professor’s salary. Prestige didn’t buy squat.
At first she had stayed within her means, taught classes, did her research, wrote papers that were well-received by the academic community, bedded ambitious graduate students, and socialized within the university community. But when her horizons expanded a bit, she always found what she wanted was just out of reach. She could have married money. She certainly had the looks and the brains. But that would have tied her down too much. She had other ways she could take care of herself.
And she did. She had augmented her income by writing a letter and consigning it to a rare books dealer. The letter sold for fifty thousand pounds. That bought the BMW. It wasn’t so much that it would cause many to notice, but it did fulfill her need for speed. And it was so easy. The difficulty was the letter was from Christopher Marlow writing from Newgate Prison in 1589. Jean reasoned that Marlow might not have actually written the letter, but it did accurately reflect his fertile mind. It’s something he would have said if he had thought about it.
That letter led to a second in Latin signed by Johannes Kepler, who died in 1630. She didn’t know much about astronomy, so she kept it to commentary on his ideas of the proper pursuit of knowledge. Again, it was a hit on the market, and the proceeds, disguised as a small inheritance, made a substantial down-payment on a modest, but fashionable, flat in London.
Whenever she produced a letter or document, it went through her solicitor, who represented her to the dealers. She never dealt with them directly, but she did visit them often in a professional capacity to examine what was coming onto the market. The solicitor asked few questions and told the dealers the letters were from a collection inherited by a cultural boor who cared only for the good life. Unfortunately, he had to sell things occasionally to finance his lifestyle. And the dealers asked even fewer questions, especially if they knew of a likely buyer who could afford to keep the letter buried in his collection for the next forty years. Both solicitor and dealer happily took their cut.
All she needed was one letter each year, or maybe two depending on her impulse control, and she could have a very good life teaching, studying, and researching in her field, while pulling more fun out of life than the average academic. She really did love the scholar’s life, but that wasn’t all she loved.
And now she was cowering in a hotel room in Rome, wanted for mass murder and killing the Pope.
Hammid pointed to the document case on the bed. “Let’s take a look at that treaty.” He moved over to the other side of the room and picked up the document case.
“Have a look if you want, but be prepared for the thing to fall apart. It’s eight hundred years old and you don’t have a clue what you are doing. It’s not like the morning newspaper. Go ahead. Trash it. You’re the real smart guy who takes the long view of history.”
“Ah, yes. Best left to the experts.” He gently laid the case on the bed. “Could we just have a peek?”
Jean shrugged. “Sure, why not. One last wish for the condemned.”
She carefully opened the case and slid out a flat plastic container. It was clear, and about one-half inch thick with a rubber seal around the edges. Inside, Hammid could see a piece of parchment with brown lettering, what looked like a fancy letterhead at the top, flowery scrollwork along the edges, and ornate signatures and seals at the bottom. The page was about ten inches long and ten inches wide, darker at the center, and lighter at the edges.
“This is sealed to keep the air and elements out,” said Jean, “and I’d prefer if you didn’t touch anything. This thing was in a climate-controlled environment in the library, a special room. Those same conditions are inside the seal here. I’m not going to break the seal in a hotel room. There’s no point now.”
She took a magnifying glass from her suitcase and bent over the bed.
“That’s the seal of the Vatican on top. Means it’s from the Pope. It’s on parchment, actually fine vellum. It’s written in Diploma Hand. Papal Minuscule. That was common for Roman Church stuff in the Twelfth Century. It’s addressed to all Christendom. That was supposed to mean all the Christians, but it usually meant just European types. The darker variety in the Middle East and Africa weren’t part of the in-crowd.”
She moved down the page with the glass, slowly tracing along the lines with her finger. She said nothing until she reached the bottom. Then she read it again.
“Why is it all brown in the center?” he asked. “How can you read that?”
“Age. Discolors over time. And right now, I can’t read it all. It needs special filters, but I looked at it earlier with the right light and it all comes out.”
She tapped her finger on the plastic case.
“It’s signed by the Pope and the three monarchs of the major European powers. Each one also fixed his official seal. If this thing is real? I don’t know. I just can’t see how it stayed secret for so many years. A few years after this, the Popes started keeping registers of everything they wrote, very complete, but that was later.”
She pointed to the signatures and seals. “Look. It’s signed by all the heavy hitters of the day. Henry II of England. He’s the father of Richard the Lion Heart. Frederick Barbarossa from the Holy Roman Empire, and Phi
lip of France. And look. Two Popes signed. Gregory was the guy who pushed the Third Crusade, and it looks like he signed before the rest. But he died in 1187 and we see Clement signing after all the others. The Popes bracketed the national leaders.”
“What else?”
“Well, it’s dated 1189. It doesn’t say 1189. Gregorian and Julian calendars mess things up, but just trust me on that. For one thing, Gregory only reigned as Pope for two months at the end of 1187.” She twirled the magnifying glass in her fingers. “That’s just a year before the Third Crusade started. And it’s just a year after Saladin captured Jerusalem. The First Crusade started a hundred years earlier, and the second started in 1147. Forty years after that, the timing is right for the boys to get together and document an agreement.” She pointed to the bottom of the treaty. “See the dates by each of the signatures? They span the year. It looks like some flunkey, probably a high-ranking Cardinal, ran this around Europe collecting signatures. By the time he got back to Rome, Pope Gregory had died, so Clement signs it, too, you know, to show consistency and support.”
He ran his finger around the edge of the plastic case. “Eight hundred years old, and here it is in front of us.”
“You haven’t asked me what it says,” said Jean. “Aren’t you interested?”
“What it says? Why, I know what it says, and I’m sure when you type up an English translation we’ll both know what it says.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll get what you’re paying for. I can give you a summary now.”
“No. Do a full translation into English. I can wait until you have finished your full analysis. And be sure to do an exact transcription of the Latin. Word for word. Exact. That’s vital.”
“Ok. Don’t forget,” she said, “no matter what I come up with here, nothing I can do is anywhere as good as the laser analysis. That’s the gold standard. And for that, a sample probably has to go to London.”
The Templar Concordat Page 9
