“And I didn’t have you down for a murderer.”
De Angelis breathed out as he seemed to mull his response. When he finally spoke his voice was laced with indifference. “I need you to calm down. We’re on the same side.”
“So what was that, back at the lake? Friendly fire?”
De Angelis studied Reilly with cool, insolent eyes. “In this battle,” he stated flatly, “everyone is expendable.” He paused, seeming to wait for its significance to fully sink in with Reilly before continuing. “You’ve got to understand something. We’re fighting a war. A war we’ve been fighting for over a thousand years. This whole notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’…it’s not just a fanciful theory coming out of some Boston think tank. It’s real. It’s happening as we speak, and it’s growing, becoming more dangerous, more insidious, more threatening by the day, and it’s not going to go away. And at its core is religion, because, like it or not, religion is a phenomenal weapon, even today. It can reach into the hearts of men and make them do all kinds of unimaginable things.”
“Like murder suspects in their hospital beds?”
De Angelis let it go. “Twenty years ago, communism was spreading like a cancer. How do you think we won the Cold War? What do you think brought it down? The SDI, Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’? The Soviet government’s stunning incompetence? Partly. But you know what really made it happen? The pope. A Polish pope, reaching out, connecting with his flock, getting them to tear down those walls with their bare hands. Khomeini did the same thing, broadcasting his speeches from Paris while he was in exile, igniting a spiritually starved population thousands of miles away, inspiring them to rise up and kick out the Shah. What a mistake that was, allowing that to happen…Look where we are today. And now, Bin Laden’s using it too…” He paused, frowning inwardly, then fixed on Reilly sharply. “The right words can move mountains. Or destroy them. And more than anything in our arsenal, religion is our ultimate weapon, and we can’t afford to let anyone disarm us. Our way of life, everything you’ve been fighting for since you joined the Bureau, hinges on it…everything. So my question to you is simple: are you, as your president once put it so eloquently, with us…or against us?”
Reilly’s face hardened, and he felt his chest constrict. The wall of doubt he’d hastily erected was obliterated by the monsignor’s mere presence. It was an unwelcome substantiation of everything Vance had said.
“So it’s all true?” he asked, as if emerging from a fog.
The monsignor’s answer came back dry and fast. “Does it matter?”
Reilly nodded absently. He wasn’t sure anymore.
De Angelis looked around, scanning the bare ground. “I assume you don’t have it anymore?”
“What?”
“The astrolabe.”
Reilly was taken aback by the question. “How did you know about—?” he fired back, before his voice trailed off, realizing he and Tess must have been under audio surveillance the whole time. He went quiet and let his anger settle for a moment, then shook his head, dejected, and said, “They’ve got it.”
“Do you know where they are?” De Angelis asked.
Reluctantly, and still deeply mistrustful of the monsignor, Reilly filled him in about what had happened the night before.
The monsignor weighed the information somberly. “They don’t have much of a head start, and we know the general area they’re heading for. We’ll find them.” He turned, raising a hand and twirling it around, signaling the pilot to fire up the twin turbines, before glancing again at Reilly. “Let’s go.”
Reilly just stood there and shook his head. “No. You know what? If it’s all one big lie…I hope it blows you all out of the water.”
De Angelis looked at him, thrown.
Reilly held his gaze for a moment. “You can go to hell,” he said flatly, “you and the rest of your CIA buddies. I’m out.” And with that, he turned and walked away.
“We need you,” the monsignor called out after him. “You can help us find them.”
Reilly didn’t bother turning around. “Find them yourself. I’m done.”
He kept walking.
The priest’s voice bellowed out after him, struggling against the growing whine of the chopper’s engines. “What about Tess? You gonna leave her with him? She could still be helpful. And if anyone can get through to her, you can.”
Reilly turned, still walking, taking a few steps backward. He saw De Angelis’s knowing glare, which made it clear the monsignor knew how close he and Tess had gotten. He just shrugged. “Not anymore.”
De Angelis watched him leave. “What are you going to do? Walk back to New York?”
Reilly didn’t stop. He didn’t answer either.
The monsignor called out after him one last time. His voice was now angry, and tinged with frustration.
“Reilly!”
Reilly stopped, dropping his head for a moment before deciding to turn.
De Angelis took a few steps forward and joined him. His mouth shaped a smile, but his eyes remained bleak and remote. “If I can’t convince you to work with us…maybe I can take you to someone who can.”
Chapter 71
Vatican or CIA, whoever made the travel arrangements had done a pretty good job. The helicopter had flown to a military air base near Karacasu, not far north from where Reilly had been picked up. Once there, he and De Angelis boarded a waiting G-IV, which had flown up from Dalaman to pick them up, and made the fast journey west to Italy. Immigration and Customs were swiftly bypassed in Rome, and, less than three hours after the monsignor had materialized out of a dust cloud in the Turkish mountains, they were speeding through the Eternal City in the cosseted comfort of an air-conditioned, black-windowed Lexus.
Reilly needed a shower and clean clothes, but, as De Angelis was in a hurry, he’d had to settle for washing on board the jet and replacing his wet suit with BDU pants and a gray T-shirt hastily obtained from the Turkish air force base’s supply center. He didn’t complain. After the wet suit, the battle dress uniform was a welcome relief, and, more to the point, he was in a hurry too. He was feeling increasingly uneasy about Tess. He wanted to find her, although he tried not to delve too deeply into his motives. He was also having second thoughts about having agreed to the monsignor’s invitation; he wasn’t sure what awaited him at their final destination, and the sooner he was out of there and back on the ground in Turkey, he thought, the better. But it was too late to pull out. He had clearly sensed from De Angelis’s quiet insistence that this visit wasn’t just an idle whim.
He had spotted Saint Peter’s Basilica from the aircraft, and now, as the Lexus cut its way through the midday traffic, he saw it again, looming up ahead, its colossal dome soaring gloriously out of the haze and chaos of the congested city. Although the sight of such a prodigious edifice inevitably inspired feelings of awe in even the most hardened of disbelievers, Reilly felt only betrayal and anger. He didn’t know much about the world’s greatest church, beyond that it housed the Sistine Chapel and that it was built over the resting spot of the bones of Saint Peter, the Church’s first pope, who had died there after being crucified, upside down, for his faith. As he looked at it, he thought of all the sublime works of art and architecture the same faith had inspired, the paintings, statues, and places of worship that had been created around the world by the followers of Christ. He thought of the countless children who said their bedtime prayers every night, the millions of worshippers who attended church services every Sunday, the sick who prayed for healing, and the bereaved who prayed for the souls of the departed. Had they all been deceived too? Was it all a lie? And, even worse—had the Vatican known all along?
The Lexus made its way down the Via de Porta Angelica to the Saint Anne gate, where a large, cast-iron portal was opened by colorfully outfitted Swiss Guards just as the car reached it. With a quick nod from the monsignor, the Lexus was waved in, entering the smallest country on the planet and ushering Reilly into the center of his troubled sp
iritual world.
The car stopped outside a porticoed stone building, and De Angelis promptly got out. Reilly followed him up the short steps and into the solemn hush of a double-volume vestibule. They walked briskly along stone-flagged corridors, through dim, high-ceilinged rooms, and up wide marble staircases, finally reaching an intricately carved wooden door. The monsignor put away his aviator shades and replaced them with his old tinted glasses. Reilly looked on as, with the ease of a great actor about to go onstage, De Angelis’s expression morphed from that of a merciless covert operative into the gentle priest who had materialized that day in New York. To Reilly’s added surprise, he took a deep breath before he rapped his knuckles firmly on the door.
The answer came back quickly in a soft-spoken tone.
“Avanti.”
De Angelis opened the door and led the way inside.
The walls of the cavernous room were lined with shelves from floor to ceiling and overflowed with books. The herringboned oak floor had no rugs. In one corner, by a stone fireplace, a large chenille sofa sat between two matching armchairs. Backing up to a towering pair of French windows was a desk, which had a heavily padded chair behind it and three wingback chairs facing it. The room’s only occupant, a burly and commanding figure with grizzled gray hair, stepped around the desk to greet De Angelis and his guest. A somber severity was etched on his face.
De Angelis introduced Cardinal Brugnone to Reilly, and the men shook hands. The cardinal’s grip was unexpectedly firm, and Reilly felt he was being studied with an unsettling perspicacity as the old man’s eyes moved over him silently. Without taking his eyes off his guest, Brugnone exchanged a few words in Italian with the monsignor, which Reilly couldn’t make out.
“Please sit down, Agent Reilly,” he finally said to him, motioning toward the sofa. “I hope you will accept my gratitude for all that you have done and continue to do in this unfortunate matter. And also for agreeing to come here today.”
As soon as Reilly had taken a seat, and with De Angelis settling into another chair, Brugnone made it clear he was in no mood for idle chatter by coming quickly to the point. “I’ve been given some background information on you.” Reilly glanced at De Angelis, who did not meet his gaze. “I’m told you are a man who can be trusted and who does not compromise his integrity.” The big man paused, his intense, brown eyes bearing down on Reilly.
Reilly was more than happy to dive straight in. “I just want the truth.”
Brugnone leaned forward, his large square hands pressed flat against each other. “I’m afraid the truth is as you fear it.” After a quiet moment, he pushed himself out of his chair and took a few heavy paces to the French windows. He stared out, squinting against the harsh midday glare. “Nine men…nine devils. They showed up in Jerusalem, and Baldwin gave them everything they wanted, thinking they were on our side, thinking they were there to help us spread our message.” He chortled, a sound that in other circumstances might have been mistaken for a laugh, but which Reilly knew was an outward expression of a very painful thought. His voice lowered to a guttural grumble. “He was a fool to believe them.”
“What did they find?”
Brugnone took a breath, a kind of inward sigh, and turned to face Reilly. “A journal. A very detailed and personal journal, a gospel of sorts. The writings of a carpenter named Jeshua of Nazareth.” He paused, fixing Reilly with a piercing gaze before adding, “the writings…of a man.”
Reilly felt the air leave his lungs. “Just a man?”
Brugnone nodded his head somberly, his big shoulders suddenly sagging as though an impossible weight was upon them. “According to his own gospel, Jeshua of Nazareth—Jesus—was not the Son of God.”
The words ricocheted around Reilly’s mind for what seemed like an eternity before plummeting to the pit of his stomach like a ton of bricks. He lifted his hands, making a vaguely all-encompassing gesture. “And all this…?”
“All this,” Brugnone exclaimed, “is the best that man, that mere, mortal, frightened man, could come up with. It was all created with the most noble of intentions. This you must believe. What would you have done? What would you have us do now? For almost two thousand years, we’ve been entrusted with these beliefs that were so important to the men who began the Church, and which we continue to believe in. Anything that could have undermined these beliefs had to be suppressed. There was no other choice, because we could not abandon our people, not before and certainly not now. Today, it would be even more catastrophic to say to them that it is all…’’ He struggled with the words, unable to complete the sentence.
“A massive deception?” Reilly concluded tersely.
“But is it really? What is faith, after all, but a belief in something for which there doesn’t need to be any proof, a belief in an ideal. And it’s been a very worthy ideal for people to believe in. We need to believe in something. We all need faith.”
Faith.
Reilly struggled to grasp the ramifications of what Cardinal Brugnone was saying. In his case, it was faith that had helped him, at a very young age, to deal with the devastating loss of his father. It was faith that had guided him throughout his adult life. And now, of all places, here at the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church, he was being told that it was all one big sham.
“We also need honesty,” Reilly countered angrily. “We need truth.”
“But above all, man needs his faith, now more than ever,” Brugnone insisted forcefully, “and what we have is far better than having no faith at all.”
“Faith in a resurrection that never happened?” Reilly fired back. “Faith in a heaven that doesn’t exist?”
“Believe me, Agent Reilly, many decent men have struggled with this over the years, and all come to the same conclusion: that it must be preserved. The alternative is too horrific to contemplate.”
“But we’re not talking about His words and His teachings. We’re just talking about His miracles and His resurrection.”
Brugnone’s tone was unflinching. “Christianity wasn’t built on the notion of a wise man’s preachings. It was built on something far more resonant—the words of the Son of God. The Resurrection isn’t just a miracle—it’s the very foundation of the Church. Take that away and it all collapses. Think of the words of Saint Paul in First Corinthians: ‘And if Christ has not risen, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is also in vain.’”
“The founders of the Church—they chose those words,” Reilly fumed. “The whole point about religion is to help us try and understand what we’re doing here, isn’t it? How can we even begin to understand that if we start with a false premise? This lie has warped every single aspect of our lives.”
Brugnone exhaled deeply and nodded in quiet agreement. “Maybe it has. Maybe, if it had all started now and not two thousand years ago, things could have been handled differently. But it isn’t starting now. It already exists, it’s been handed down to us and we must preserve it; to do otherwise would destroy us—and, I fear, deal a devastating blow to our fragile world.” His eyes were no longer focused on Reilly, but on something far away, something that seemed almost physically painful to him. “We’ve been on the defensive ever since we started. I suppose it’s natural, given our position, but it’s becoming more and more difficult…modern science and philosophy don’t exactly encourage faith. And we’re partly to blame. Ever since the early Church was effectively hijacked by Constantine and his political acumen, there have been far too many schisms and disputes. Too much doctrinal nitpicking, too many fraudsters and degenerates running around, too much greed. Jesus’s original message has been perverted by egotists and bigots, it’s been undermined by petty internal rivalries and intransigent fundamentalists. And we’re still making mistakes that aren’t helping our cause. Avoiding the real issues facing the people out there. Tolerating shameful abuses, horrible acts against the most innocent, even conspiring to cover them up. We’ve been very slow at coming to terms with our rapidly changing world, and
now, at a time when we’re particularly vulnerable, it’s all threatened again, just as it was nine hundred years ago. Only now, this edifice that we’ve built is greater than anyone dreamed it would become, and its fall would be simply catastrophic.
“Maybe if we were starting the Church today, with the true story of Jeshua of Nazareth,” Brugnone added, “maybe we could do it differently. Maybe we could avoid all the confusing dogma and just do it simply. Look at Islam. They got away with it, barely seven hundred years after the crucifixion. A man came along and said, ‘There is no god but God, and I am his prophet.’ Not the Messiah, not the Son of God; no Father or Holy Spirit, no confusing Trinity—just a messenger of God. That was it. And it was enough. The simplicity of his message caught on like wildfire. His followers almost took over the world in less than a hundred years, and it pains me to think that right now, in this day and age, it’s the world’s fastest-growing religion…although they’ve been even slower than us at coming to terms with the realities and the needs of our modern times, and that will inevitably cause them problems down the road as well. But we have been very slow, slow and arrogant…and now we’re paying for it, just when our people need us the most.
“Because they do,” he continued. “They need us, they need something. Look at the anxiety around you, the anger, the greed, the corruption infecting the world from the very top down. Look at the moral vacuum, the spiritual hunger, the lack of values. The world grows more fatalistic, cynical, more disillusioned every day. Man has become more apathetic, uncaring, and selfish than ever. We steal and kill on an unprecedented scale. Corporate scandals run into billions of dollars. Wars are waged for no reason, millions are killed in genocides. Science may have allowed us to get rid of diseases like smallpox, but it has more than made up for it by devastating our planet and turning us into impatient, isolated, violent creatures. The lucky ones among us may live longer, but are our lives any more fulfilled or peaceful? Is the world really any more civilized than it was two thousand years ago?
The Last Templar Page 32
