The Celtic Conspiracy

by Hansen, Thore D.

  Thomas took three small cloth bags out of his pocket and handed one to Shane and one to Deborah.

  Shane sniffed at his bag. He smelled meadowsweet immediately, then ash leaves, beard lichen, fleabane, ivy, and mistletoe. It was a sweet-tart smell, and he was quietly moved by this present, since it had come from Thomas’s Druid heart.

  “But that’s not all. Deborah also put a bit of Irish wisdom in with it, which, I think, is quite appropriate for you, Adam.”

  Shane opened the bag carefully, taking out a small piece of paper.

  Act, before it happens,

  Steer, before it’s lost,

  The wise man retraces the steps that men have gone,

  Working to bring things back to their true nature.

  And he fears only one thing: to act against nature and the unity of all life.

  “Thank you, Thomas, and many thanks to you as well, Deborah. Yes, that’s it exactly.” Shane took Thomas’s and Deborah’s hands. “I’d like to thank you both from the bottom of my heart.”

  Thomas and Deborah smiled and squeezed his hands.

  “Just one more thing, Adam,” Thomas said. “We have no idea what we’re about to experience on the continent or what we’ll find there, but I’m asking you to trust me, no matter what happens.”

  “What’s the plan, practically speaking?”

  “We’ll drive to Klagenfurt first. There Ronald’s friend will give us all the equipment we need. He has invested quite a bit of money for us three, well, let’s call ourselves hobby archaeologists.”

  “And then? I mean, we can’t just walk all over the place and dig.”

  “Don’t worry, Adam,” Deborah said. “This isn’t the first time Thomas has been involved in something requiring both courage and good planning.”

  Shane was confused by this for a minute, until he understood what Deborah had meant. Thomas had, after all, spent his early childhood in Northern Ireland.

  * * *

  Jennifer had postponed her early-morning meetings at Ronald’s request. Now she was sitting in his kitchen eating breakfast, a bit the worse for wear after her late-night discussion with Adam Shane. Ruth was puttering around the kitchen, quietly scolding.

  “I always knew that this confounded scroll would bring more bad luck,” she remarked yet again. “I should have just knocked it over while I was cleaning.” She poured Jennifer another cup of coffee.

  “Ruth, it’s OK,” Jennifer said. “First of all, Ryan knows his way around an operation like this. Second, we’ve made sure that no one can connect Ronald with the whole thing. And third, I honestly don’t think they’re going to find anything at all.”

  Ruth looked at Jennifer for a moment, sighed, and got back to her work.

  Just then Ronald came into the kitchen. He was holding a stack of papers. “Jennifer, would you come on a walk with me?”

  “Sure. Some fresh air would do me good.”

  In the foyer, Ronald helped Jennifer with her coat. Outside, sunlight was streaming off the puddles left by the morning rain, so much so that Jennifer decided to wear her sunglasses.

  “Ronald, tell me what you think this expedition is going to uncover. I mean, you’re not going to find Jesus’s tomb there.”

  Ronald seemed unusually serious. “I haven’t told you everything up to now. Let me put it this way: my father left details about some crucial items he had seen in the cave but couldn’t rescue. This has created a context for me that has always fascinated me as a lawyer and a judge.” Ronald handed the papers to her. “Here, please read through this. In these papers, my father describes the results of the Church’s activities in culture, economics, and politics over the whole spectrum of our society.”

  Jennifer was a bit annoyed; she already knew the whole history of Christianity, thank you very much, a history of war and torture, of betrayal and abuse of its own ideals. She also knew all too well MacClary’s attempts at taking legal action against the Church. In 1984, he had been head council in the conviction of the Jesuits and the Mafioso Michele Sindona. This man was very well acquainted with Pope Paul VI, friends with the then-head of the Vatican Bank, and responsible for the reorganization of finances in that bank. He had been convicted in what was at the time the largest bank failure ever in the history of the US. But before Ronald could bring additional charges connected to the Vatican Bank’s role in Mafia money laundering, Sindona was sent to Italy. Despite being under heavy guard, he was found dead from cyanide poisoning soon thereafter.

  “Jennifer, the current abuse scandals, the facts about the Vatican’s role in international money laundering, and the sheer mass of internationally active historians who have demonstrated the Church’s almost unbroken history of crime—perhaps all of this might offer us an unexpected chance to end the whole nightmare.”

  “And you think your three Druids will find something in the cave that could help you with this? You’re completely crazy, Ronald MacClary.”

  “I don’t think so, Jennifer. My father told me that even the foundation of the Church was a criminal act and that there was still so much to discover, unsuspected even by critical historians.” MacClary pointed to his father’s papers again. “I also had a meeting last week with Bob Chaney. He’s one of the judges on the International Criminal Court. Believe me, with what we now know, the Vatican can no longer be so certain of its immunity.”

  “Now we just have to hear from the United Nations,” Jennifer said, half in jest.

  “Spare me the sarcasm. There’s really only one country whose legal system might offer us the possibility of attack, and that’s the US. Ryan might be able to help us, both with his dual citizenship and his history, but only if you’re prepared to represent him. Then we could at least make sure it gets the proper attention and use the media to open the subject for discussion. Can I count on you? Purely theoretically, of course.”

  Jennifer couldn’t believe the course this conversation had taken. “Yes, you can, Ronald, and afterward I’ll be your geriatric nurse. You must realize that we’ll both be out of a job before a single hearing or even one complaint can be written.”

  Jennifer stood next to him as if rooted to the spot. The whole story was utter nonsense and had no chance of succeeding. On the other hand, there had been that case in Boston where her good friend Louis Baker, a federal prosecutor, had managed to launch the Blackfoot Indians’ action for restitution of old cultural artifacts. Jennifer had handled it so well that the judge admitted the case and Jennifer won it. The museum being sued eventually had to return the artifacts.

  Compared to what MacClary had in mind, though, that was a walk in the park.

  * * *

  Lambert seemed to be walking aimlessly through the Sistine Chapel when Salvoni approached him nervously from behind. “Ah, Salvoni,” Lambert said, turning, “I’ve already heard about the events in Dublin. You have, I think, everything under control for our Austrian expedition?”

  Salvoni was surprised by Lambert’s calm. “Yes, we’ll try to be there by nightfall. Unfortunately we don’t have the exact coordinates, but I have some people following MacClary’s friends.” He had the feeling that the matter could get out of control since his contacts at the Austrian secret service hadn’t yet confirmed their assistance.

  “Tell me, what is our greatest concern here?”

  Salvoni had expected to be berated for the sloppy work in Dublin, not plied with cryptic questions. “There is always the possibility that something could go wrong. Why don’t we go the unofficial path and make public what we know? We could declare the discovery the result of our own research.”

  Lambert answered with unusual indifference. “Oh, Salvoni. In order to hate our history, you’d have to know what it was. And who knows our history? Only the disoriented atheists flailing around in the world of science. The people of faith won’t have any understanding of these events.”

  “But Cardinal, you know that MacClary’s father was hot on our heels once. Too close, to be honest. And a
lthough we can’t really be certain of what the man discovered, we can guess. You must know that the possibility still exists of finding evidence from the period when the Church was founded.”

  “Even so, I have always argued that you can’t apply today’s ethical and moral standards to the actions of the bishops of Constantine’s time.”

  Salvoni knew that this was an ambiguous line of reasoning, and he was sure that Lambert knew this as well. “What should we do now, then?”

  Lambert’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll say this for the last time: remaining calm is our best option. Go about your work, but don’t take any risks. It’s just not worth it, even if MacClary does find what he’s looking for. Take a couple of men and try to stay two steps ahead of him. But keep your distance at first. Only intervene if it seems prudent. I don’t want MacClary to know that we have any interest in him and his activities.”

  Salvoni had his misgivings—the scandals were already beginning to pile up—but he was clever enough not to express these out loud. “Good, Cardinal. You bear the responsibility for this, so we will proceed with caution.”

  “Yes, Salvoni, I do bear the responsibility. Thank you, and keep me informed.”

  “When will you tell the Holy Father about these events?”

  Salvoni saw Lambert’s face redden, and he was certain an explosion was imminent. Instead, the cardinal’s expression softened, and he said, “What events? Please, Salvoni, the Holy Father really has other things to think about at the moment than some treasure hunters and heretical sinners like MacClary. Don’t give it another thought.”

  Salvoni knew when he had been rebuked. “Very well, Cardinal.”

  * * *

  In Dublin, Padre Morati sat at his desk. His mouth and his hands were trembling, partially from age and partially because doubts were beginning to eat away at his conscience again. What had he done with his life? How could he justify belonging to a church that had left such a brutal and bloody trail since the day of its founding? How could someone of his intelligence believe in a god whose death toll was so high?

  If Jesus appeared to us tomorrow on St. Peter’s Square bringing the same message he brought to us back then, we would kill him again, betray him again, and abuse him, Morati thought as he continued reading his book about land appropriation and the true heritage of his long-loved religion. Ninety percent of the practices, laws, revelations, and ceremonies were already a part of Judaism. Christianity is nothing more than a bastard child, and it isn’t even ashamed of its lack of originality and its thievery. What they didn’t steal from the Jews, they robbed from the pagans. In addition, they reviled and abused the people they stole from and even other Christians who tried to live and act according to the true revelations of Jesus. We would be faced with far fewer problems today if we had just followed these laws and not the adulterated Bible. Morati laid the book down.

  He had made an extraordinary decision.

  THE MAGDALENSBERG – MARCH 16, AFTERNOON

  Shane’s fear of flying turned out not to be a factor at all, yet another indication that the fateful events of the last few days were literally changing his life. After a three-hour drive from the airport in Vienna, they arrived in Klagenfurt. Markus Steinberger, an old friend of MacClary’s, had joined Ronald in 1970 in a vain attempt to find the site of the trove without any exact coordinates. For decades he had been keeping his silence and, with Ronald’s financial support, had continued to purchase the most up-to-date archaeological equipment. Now he drove them in a dark-blue van up the serpentine paths to the peak of the Magdalensberg.

  When they got there, an eerie sight greeted them: a church from the Middle Ages built entirely of a yellowish-gray stone, appearing wraithlike in the foggy, raw weather. As they got out of the van, Shane pulled his hood over his head to block out the freezing cold wind blowing in his face, stricken with the undeniable feeling that he’d been here before.

  * * *

  Yes, it was possible, Ryan thought. Even now, seventeen hundred years later, it was still possible to revive a culture whose divine gifts were so much more authentic and redeeming and whose relevance to Creation went so much deeper than anything the Christian churches had ever been able to accomplish. If it were going to happen, though, it needed to begin now.

  They walked silently through a wooded slope for about ten minutes when Shane suddenly pulled up short.

  “Thomas, how much further do we have to go?” he asked nervously.

  “Actually, we’re almost there. It should be within a hundred and fifty, maybe three hundred feet.”

  Ryan turned around to look at Adam as he balanced on the steep escarpment holding a magnetic field sensor. MacClary had told him he should look for some kind of sinkhole or concavity, a crater that could have been the result of an explosion. As he looked over Adam’s shoulder, he noticed a depression that might be it. “Adam, I don’t know how you do it, but you seem to have a very strong instinct. There’s a pretty big hollow down there, but we’ll probably have to go down a good ten to twelve feet. I’ll start digging carefully. You two should keep an inconspicuous watch over the area and give me a sign if someone’s coming. No matter what, we only go in under cover of night.”

  Shane and Deborah started off in opposite directions.

  * * *

  DUBLIN – MARCH 16, AFTERNOON

  Jennifer had decided to stay with MacClary to wait for word from Ryan. As she did, she thought about the last thing Adam Shane had said to her during their late-night conversation. He was firmly convinced that a culture was lost when people were robbed of their original spirituality. It would take a long time to revive this, and it would require, above all, evidence, knowledge, and the old, traditional ceremonies.

  Jennifer couldn’t really argue with him. She knew only too well what had happened to the Native Americans in the US. They had become not much more than lost souls in their own country, ravaged by alcohol, drugs, and crime. In that case it had also been the Christians who, in their delusional belief that they were chosen by God, had taken over the country and treated people of other faiths like cattle. Maybe Ronald was right. Maybe it had to be the US where those responsible could be held accountable.

  She was starting to get impatient about finding out what was going on. What would the three scouts find in the cave? She had been staring at the telephone constantly, but there was still no sign of life from the continent.

  Ronald, on the other hand, seemed to be almost completely unfazed. Either he really was that calm or he was an even better actor than she had thought. Just now, he was in the library finishing up a telephone call with a colleague in Washington. Ruth had just prepared tea, and Ronald came to sit down with Jennifer. Now that she could observe him more closely, she realized that he wasn’t all that relaxed.

  “Why don’t you call him?” she asked.

  “Because we agreed that he would contact me. I don’t want to rob him of the satisfaction that that call will give him. I’m almost certain that he’s been successful. I know you don’t like Ryan, that you think he’s too coarse and abrupt, but I know him better than you do. We both have a very, very long family history. And coming from Northern Ireland, he knows all too well where fanatical faith can lead. That’s what you’re accusing me of, no? Fanaticism.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything at all. But you’re not laying all your cards out on the table, Ronald. I know you too well not to notice. What if something happens to them? Or if the cave collapses? Or if they’re discovered? And what about Adam? He has no idea what you boys are up to.”

  “Oh, I think he does. He’s got at least a basic idea of what this is all about. In any case, they’re three grown people. They’re old enough to take care of themselves. As far as Adam is concerned, I consider him to be a thoroughly intelligent and cautious man. He and Ryan seem to understand each other very well, which is unusual, as you know.”

  “You forgot sensitive.”

  “What was that?”

  “Ad
am is extremely sensitive and intuitive, in addition to being very intelligent.”

  “All the better,” MacClary responded, but she noticed that his thoughts were somewhere else again.

  “Oh, you don’t understand.”

  “Of course I do. I could hardly miss the fact that you liked him.” MacClary grinned as he stood up. “What I’ve been able to gather about Adam in the short time I’ve known him is that he and Ryan have very similar opinions about the spiritual effects of Christian dominance. Just like Ryan, he wants—”

  “—to burn the Christians at the stake? No, I don’t think that’s what Adam wants.”

  MacClary reacted more angrily than she had ever seen him. “Jennifer, that’s not what we’re talking about at all! The Vatican is not Christendom. But the Vatican is the origin of an incredible series of crimes against humanity. I thought we had a shared belief about legal ethics. We both know that our field seldom has anything to do with justice, but I want to make a difference here if I can.”

  “Don’t you get it, Ronald? What Adam is looking for is a new balance, one that he’s found in the lost tribal culture of the Celts and the other indigenous peoples, before we all got lost in the insanity of this culture of eternal growth. First the tribes lost their inner strength, and then, with the introduction of supercapitalism, the strength of the family. That’s where he sees the real drama taking place.”

  “But he also recognizes that this drama has its origin in a culture that exploited nature and humankind. And Adam is no—”

  “I have no idea what he is or isn’t. I only know one thing: he is not a vindictive or egoistic patriarch, like you are. You don’t understand him at all. The only thing you care about is yourself and your obsession.”

  Jennifer stood up and strode out of the room. A few seconds later, she slammed the front door.

  * * *

  Jennifer wandered aimlessly through Arbour Hill in a small park. The quiet was good for her. She sat down to rest on a bench, surrounded by trees. It was colder than she had thought; she should have put on something warmer. Suddenly she thought about her grandfather, who had worked as a healer in County Cork. He was one of the few people there who wasn’t Catholic, and he had his own very individual theories about the ways of the world. She must have been about eight or nine when he had tried to explain to her why there were so many poor people in the village. Long ago, he had told her, it was said that there had been great wise people whose spirituality offset the greed of kings and merchants. When these teachers had been pushed out, the quality of compassion was lost, the sense that we are all responsible for each other.