O’Connor opened the bathroom cabinet. Amongst Aleta’s personal toiletries there was a single bottle of medication labelled ‘Sarafem’, half-full of purple-pink capsules. He examined the capsules and compared them to the wide range of pills in different colours, shapes and sizes in his briefcase. He wondered why Aleta might have been prescribed fluoxetine, otherwise known as Prozac, and then as Sarafem for women. Might Aleta be taking it for a severe form of premenstrual syndrome? Or could she be clinically depressed? The latter might be more likely, he thought, although with the administration at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue wanting her head on a plate, Weizman’s medical issues were perhaps the least of her problems.
O’Connor selected a sachet from his briefcase and chose an identical pill to those in Dr Weizman’s bottle, a pill the boys back in Science and Technology at Langley had dubbed ‘aspirin roulette’. The purple capsule contained a massive dose of morphine, equivalent to 200 milligrams of heroin, more than twice the dose required to kill even severe addicts with high resistance. The Polizei would find morphine in her bloodstream and the media would speculate, but with a lack of motive and the absence of any other poisoned pills in the bottle, the Polizei would suspect she was on drugs, the media would lose interest and the coroner would be forced to reach an open finding.
O’Connor paused as he recalled his conversation with Wiley back at Langley: ‘Find out everything there is to know about this Weizman bitch, and then silence her!’ Again the question demanded an answer … why? ‘You’re skating on fucking thin ice, O’Connor.’
For the first time in a long career, Curtis O’Connor disobeyed an order that had been put to him as a ‘clear and present danger’, an order that only the President could approve. O’Connor doubted the President had any idea of what the Vice President, Wiley or the hotheads in the Pentagon were up to. He put the aspirin roulette pill back into the sachet in his briefcase. The CIA was not the same agency he’d joined nearly twenty years before; and not until he worked out why Washington wanted this woman dead would he comply.
26
THE VATICAN, ROME
The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Salvatore Felici, was working at his huge desk in his opulent office in the Palazzo della Sacra Inquisizione. A forbidding grey-and-ochre palace, it still went by the name of the Sacred Inquisition. Felici’s father, Alberto, had been a trusted advisor to Pope Pius XII and the cardinal was carrying on in his family’s tradition of service to the Holy Church.
Tall and powerfully built, Cardinal Felici was proud of his good head of fine black hair, flecked with grey and combed straight back under his scarlet zucchetto, the distinctive skull cap of the College of Cardinals. He had a long rectangular face, and a large aquiline nose. His piercing grey eyes were hooded, underscored by dark circles, but, like a peregrine falcon, Salvatore Felici missed nothing. His anger rose as he again scrutinised an article by the Guatemalan archaeologist, Dr Weizman, dutifully forwarded to his office by the papal nuncio in Guatemala City. Felici’s red pen was poised to strike as he absorbed her assertions on the existence of a lost codex, and tried to decipher the intermeshing glyphs on Aleta’s diagram of the Mayan calendars:
Unlike our own linear calendars, the Mayan calendars, as the diagram shows, measured time in short and long cycles which enabled them to accurately predict major recurring events. The Mayan short- and long-count calendars intermeshed like gears in a gearbox. The larger wheel, the Haab, was based on cycles of the earth, using eighteen months with twenty days in a month giving 360 days. A short nineteenth month consisted of the extra five days, totalling 365. The smaller gear, the sacred Tzolk’in, was based on the cycles of the Pleiades star cluster in the constellation Taurus, so prominent in the night skies of planet earth. The twenty-first of December 2012 heralds a rare once-in-26 000 years meshing of calendar gears that can predict four days, 4000 or 40 000 days in advance.
We are living in the Mayan end times, an end time that is dictated precisely by the movement of the planets. The great 26000-year cycle, or 25625 years to be precise, consists of five smaller cycles, each 5125 years in length, and the Maya discovered that our sun, which they called Kinich-Ahau, synchronises with the centre of our galaxy once in each of the smaller cycles.
There is an abundance of evidence that proves the accuracy of Mayan predictions. Over a thousand years before it occurred, the Maya predicted the solar eclipse on 11 August 1999 down to the last second – 11:03:07 universal coordinated time – an eclipse that was the most watched in history and the first visible in the United Kingdom since 1927.
We are now in the fifth cycle of the sun. Mayan stelae recovered from Guatemala record that four previous civilisations have been totally destroyed by horrendous apocalypses driven by the alignment of the sun with the centre of the galaxy. Intense energy from the centre generates solar flares of unimaginable power, coupled with a reversal of the sun’s own magnetic field. So, is there anything we can do about this? An ancient Maya codex holds the keys to our survival, but Mayan elders remain tight-lipped about its location.
In his fine, spidery hand, Felici wrote in the margin of The Mayan Archaeologist article:
Mayan pagan practices have always been a threat to the one true faith. Libraries burned for good reason. If Maya Codex exists, imperative it be recovered and stored in secret archives – Weizman is searching for it, and needs watching.
Felici returned the magazine to his in-tray and glanced at the photograph of Tomás de Torquemada displayed prominently on his bookcase, a man he constantly drew on for inspiration. Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, had been a staunch guardian of the Faith.
Felici rose from his desk, his Italian leather shoes sinking into the crimson carpet as he moved to the opposite wall where St Jerome, Leonardo da Vinci’s priceless oil on wood, on loan from the Vatican’s Pinacoteca, dominated the room. Saint Jerome was Salvatore Felici’s favourite saint. In 393 AD Jerome had denounced sexual intercourse as corrupt, and Felici, too, believed that apart from the purposes of procreation, married couples should abstain from sexual activity altogether. He swung the painting aside, dialled the combination of his wall safe, extracted a crimson file embossed in gold with his personal coat of arms, replaced the painting and returned to his desk. The file held copies of the CIA documents on Dr Weizman that Howard Wiley had forwarded the previous week in the diplomatic bag. The file also held the regular reports from the papal nuncio in Guatemala City, many of them charting the rise of those left-wing governments in the Americas that were opposed to the Church in Rome.
Felici sank back into his plush red-leather chair. Deep in thought, he looked out the palazzo windows towards the 300-year-old columns of Bernini’s Colonnade across the Piazza San Pietro. The Palazzo della Sacra Inquisizione, adjacent to the Porta Cavalleggeri, one of the ancient gates in the walls of the Vatican, had been built in 1571 by Pope Pius V to house what was then known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. In the sixteenth century the Holy Church condoned the Inquisition’s widespread use of torture. For those who refused to reconcile with the Catholic faith, that torture included burning at the stake, a policy that turned the Vatican’s Inquisition into one of the most feared offices in Europe. The Holy Church’s successor to the Inquisition had been given a softer title – the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – but it was still housed in the same palace and still charged with investigating heresy. As Aleta had pointed out elsewhere in her article, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had towered over the modern-day Inquisition for nearly twenty-four years, earning the nickname of ‘God’s rottweiler’, before being elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. It was a career path Cardinal Salvatore Felici had every intention of following. At sixty-two, in terms of being papabile, a future contender for the papacy and the Keys of Peter, Felici was still young; but he alone knew that if his past ever surfaced, his career would be finished.
Agitated, he fiddled with the solid gold pe
ctoral cross that was suspended over his crimson silk sash on a heavy gold chain. The chain was attached to one of the thirty-three silk buttons of his soutane, each button symbolising one year in the life of Christ. The unusual cross, encrusted with a large ruby surrounded by twelve large diamonds, had been acquired by his father during the war. Felici turned his attention to the growing threats posed to the Holy Church in Latin America. The threat came not only from newly elected governments, but from outspoken academics, and of the latter Dr Aleta Weizman was at the top of his list. He opened her CIA file but was interrupted by a soft knock on the heavy office doors. Felici’s private secretary, Father Cordona, closed the door behind him.
‘The CIA delegation is on its way, Eminence. His Holiness’s chamberlain has collected them and they will arrive at the Arch of the Bells in twenty minutes, from where they will be escorted to His Holiness’s private library.’
Felici knew the procedure by heart, but it was his nature to want to be briefed on every detail of every visit.
‘And the briefing aids?’
‘His Holiness’s private secretary has personally checked them, Eminence.’
‘Who else is attending?’
‘The Cardinal Secretary of State, and His Holiness has asked that the prefects for the Congregation for Bishops, the Congregation for the Clergy and the Congregation for Catholic Education be there as well.’
Felici clicked his tongue in annoyance. He networked and dined his fellow cardinals assiduously, but he had a low regard for all of them, and he guarded his own intelligence, especially from the powerful and ambitious Cardinal Secretary of State.
‘His Holiness felt that since all of the prefects are asked to report on the appointments for our bishops in the Americas, they should be there, Eminence,’ Father Cordona added, reading his cardinal’s mind.
‘You have scheduled dinner this evening?’
‘Il Signor Wiley will join you for dinner at eight in your private dining room. The menu and the wine list are in your tray. Will there be anything else, Eminence?’
‘No,’ Cardinal Felici replied. Well accustomed to his cardinal’s irascibility, Father Cordona withdrew.
Felici prepared to make the short walk across the Piazza San Pietro to the Papal Palace, his mind absolutely focused. The papal nuncio in Guatemala City had already provided evidence that Dr Weizman was not only searching for the Maya Codex, but that she was investigating the links between the CIA and the death squads in Central America. Worse still, Felici now knew she was also looking into the links between the CIA and the Vatican. Dr Weizman was far more dangerous than she appeared.
27
MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, VIENNA
The Naturhistorisches Museum Wien held one of the largest natural history collections in the world. Aleta Weizman had spent the break after the morning presentations wandering amongst enormous mammoths, dinosaurs, pterodactyls and other rare fossils of a bygone era. On her way back to the conference room, she crossed the main foyer, which was dominated by a huge stuffed elk. A massive lion, fangs bared, challenged the elk from the other side of the foyer. Aleta climbed a short flight of steps to the mezzanine floor and as she took one of the seats close to the front, she saw that Matthias Jennings was already on the dais. She wasn’t surprised by the sizeable media contingent assembled at the back of the room; the controversial Jesuit priest created headlines wherever he went. Behind her, Curtis O’Connor slipped into the room and took a seat near the side wall at the back, a position from which he could observe the entire room.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to introduce Monsignor Matthias Jennings, although to many in this audience he needs no introduction at all!’ The President of the European Mayanist Society chuckled at his worn-out joke and Monsignor Jennings inclined his head.
Pompous prick, O’Connor thought, glancing at Aleta to gauge her reaction, but her expression told him nothing. He scanned the rest of the audience and noted that the swarthy, fit-looking young man who’d arrived late and sneaked into the back row didn’t seem to belong. O’Connor felt in his pocket for the latest high-resolution miniature camera the agency’s techs had provided and, choosing his moment, he quietly recorded the man’s face.
‘Thank you, Mr President,’ Jennings replied, moving to the lectern. ‘As a Fellow of this society, it is an honour to be able to update everyone on my latest research.’ His garish yellow bow tie clashed alarmingly with his dark-red shirt. Monsignor Jennings not only had bizarre dress sense, O’Connor thought, he had a body to match. A large, portly man with a ruddy face, Jennings parted his thinning red hair down near his left ear, sweeping it up in heavily greased strands over a bald, pink pate. He wore thick black glasses on the end of a bulbous nose. His watery blue eyes were restless and his heavy, unkempt bushy red eyebrows seemed to defy gravity.
‘There has been a great deal of alarmist speculation in the media about a coming cataclysm, including, apparently, a collapse of the earth’s magnetic field and an increase in sunspot activity accompanying a pole shift in 2012. All this has been supposedly predicted by the ancient Maya,’ he began, pointedly looking over the top of his glasses towards the media contingent.
‘I’ve always been of the view that those who espouse this nonsense know nothing of the true nature of the ancient Maya. Far from being an educated, spiritual people who were in touch with nature, they were amongst the most ignorant and bloodthirsty people in the entire history of mankind. The Maya make Attila the Hun look a very suitable candidate for the boys choir in this very city. I’ve spent a lifetime researching this primitive civilisation, and in the past year I’ve had access to some exciting new hieroglyphs recovered from a recently discovered tomb in Tikal.’ Jennings flicked on a PowerPoint presentation and a series of images appeared on a screen suspended from the ceiling. ‘These stelae – for those at the back of the room, stone monuments on which the Maya engraved their complex messages in glyphs – clearly show the daily life in a Mayan city in all its gruesome detail. Stela One, shown here, depicts the mass rape of young boys and girls. Quite commonplace.’ Jennings sniffed haughtily. ‘Stela Two, which was discovered in thick jungle north-east of Tikal, clearly shows the absolute disregard for human life so typical of the Maya, who thought nothing of ripping still-beating hearts out of their captives’ chests, in grisly and macabre sacrifices to their pagan gods.’
As the lecture ground on, O’Connor noticed that Aleta was studying the Jesuit priest with intense interest. At times she quietly shook her head, her full lips pursed in a thin angry line. Was it the savagery of the Maya, or the Monsignor’s interpretation that had angered her? O’Connor breathed a sigh of relief when Jennings brought his dissertation to a close and the society’s president invited questions from the floor.
‘I note with interest your description of the Maya as ignorant and bloodthirsty, Monsignor.’ The voice held a distinct authority. ‘No one would deny that sacrifice was part of Mayan ritual, but I would suggest that it took place very much in the late post-Classical period and was linked to the warlike Aztecs and Toltecs to the north. Sacrifice was most often associated with war, and if we compare the Mayan propensity for fighting with our own readiness to wage war, I would put it to you that they were somewhat less bloodthirsty than we are.’
O’Connor grinned. There was a delightful Spanish lilt to Aleta’s accent and her English was perfect. The eminent Jesuit priest looked furious.
‘Not only that, the Maya were often known to settle their differences with their ancient ball-court game, rather than resorting to war, as we so often do. As to their gods, it seems to me that most of humankind’s wars have at their base, disagreements in religious outlook: Islamic fundamentalists and terrorism, the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland, the President’s claim that God told him to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, right back to the Crusades … I would suggest that far from being the ignorant race you have described, the Maya were responsible for some of the greatest achie
vements in astronomy and architecture, as well as being possessed of a deep spirituality; a belief that a spiritual force is clearly present in every aspect of the natural world.’
O’Connor could sense the anticipation of the media pack. Several journalists and cameramen were grinning broadly. The pompous Jesuit priest had at last been challenged by someone other than their own.
‘Who’s she?’ one journalist whispered.
‘Dr Aleta Weizman,’ a journalist from The Times replied. ‘A Guatemalan, but her grandfather lived and worked in Vienna. She’s well on her way to being just as famous as he was.’
‘I must say, I’m surprised, Dr Weizman, that your assessment doesn’t demonstrate a more scholarly approach. Then again, you’re a woman, and you haven’t enjoyed the untrammelled access to ancient artefacts that is afforded to scholars of my standing.’ Jennings sniffed again.
O’Connor watched the exchange with interest. To the outside world Aleta Weizman might be an obscure archaeologist, but she was obviously known to the Monsignor, and to some of the journalists.
‘Why so surprised, Monsignor?’ the Times journalist challenged in support of Aleta. ‘Are you denying the ancient Maya’s ability to chart the movement of the planets? And are you suggesting we should ignore the alignment of those planets in 2012?’
‘That mystical nonsense is entirely overblown. I predict without a shadow of a doubt that 21 December 2012 will have as much effect on our planet as Y2K – another date you media people played for all it was worth.’
‘You yourself have admitted that the Maya also warned that a geographical or magnetic pole shift would be associated with increased sunspot activity,’ a journalist from Montreal’s Gazette said. ‘Some scientists, including those at NASA, have confirmed the Mayan predictions of a massive peak in sunspot activity in 2012, and there’s evidence we’re already experiencing increasingly violent solar storm activity. Two years ago solar storms brought down the entire electrical grid in Quebec. Long-range radio communications and GPS navigation satellites were crippled and aeroplanes had to be rerouted to avoid the worst of it. Don’t you think if an ancient civilisation had advanced knowledge of what might happen in 2012, we should at least explore what that might mean?’
THE MAYA CODEX Page 16
