by James Becker
87
‘You have just got to be kidding me,’ Angela said, glancing across at Bronson to see the expression on his face. ‘I thought he died of a heart attack?’
‘I wish I was. Nothing about the death of John Paul made sense. He was young, for a pope, fit and healthy, and had no serious medical problems. Ultimately everybody dies of a heart attack because sooner or later it stops beating. What we don’t know is why his heart stopped beating, because there was no autopsy. But we do know that the day before his body was discovered, he had announced his intention to cleanse the Vatican of the influence of members of a so-called Masonic lodge named Propaganda Due, or P2.’
‘I remember,’ Angela said. ‘Roberto Calvi and Blackfriars Bridge.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But I thought it was disbanded after all that controversy over the Banco Ambrosiano?’
‘So did I, but the official view must be wrong. I think it just went underground.’
‘So it’s not the Vatican that is sending out teams of trained assassins to hunt us down? It’s this P2?’
Bronson nodded. ‘That’s what I think. I believe that the sheer existence of that parchment — or more accurately the text that is written on it — poses such a threat to the entire Christian religion that the Church will do anything, and I do mean anything, to destroy it. That’s why they’ve handed over the job to P2, which would have no scruples at all about killing us or anybody else. After all, if they’re prepared to act inside the Vatican itself and assassinate the Pope, murdering us wouldn’t give them a moment’s pause.’
Angela drew the hire car to a stop at a red traffic light on an almost deserted street somewhere near the centre of Madrid, and looked across at him.
‘You’re serious, aren’t you? But we still don’t know for sure if the parchment is real, what date it is, or what the text says.’
‘Well,’ Bronson said, ‘it was made pretty clear by Pere that the Roman Catholic Church has no doubts whatsoever about its authenticity, because it was stolen from the Vatican in the first place. Presumably they ran whatever test or tests they needed to do some years ago. I asked Pere what secret the text was describing, and he said he didn’t know, and I’m inclined to believe him.’
He paused and glanced over at Angela as she accelerated away from the junction.
‘Absolutely the only thing we can be sure of,’ Bronson continued, ‘is that whatever’s written on that old piece of parchment has the capability to do very serious damage to the Christian religion. The secret has to be something so fundamental that it would prove without doubt that the entire Christian religion was founded upon a lie. And that’s the reason why we can’t just buy an airline ticket or turn up at a railway station. If we’re going to survive this, we have to keep the lowest profile we possibly can. And we have to get back to Britain.’
‘You’re right,’ agreed Angela. ‘If we can get back to London and authenticate the relic, we can publish the information. Once it’s in the public domain there won’t be anything else they can do, and hopefully they’ll leave us alone.’
Bronson didn’t respond for a short while, but then he nodded.
‘I suppose that makes sense,’ he conceded.
‘My worry,’ Angela went on, ‘is that if the parchment passes whatever tests we subject it to and we do go ahead and publish what we’ve found, these people might still try and kill us out of revenge.’
‘You could be right,’ Bronson said, ‘and our best defence against that happening will be to organize the maximum possible publicity and ensure that our names are splashed across every newspaper and magazine in the country. That way, if they do make an attempt on our lives, whatever credibility the Catholic Church has left would be completely destroyed. It’s not much, but I still think doing that would be our best form of protection.’
Angela snorted in derision.
‘So what you’re saying is that our best option is to let ourselves be murdered because that would embarrass the Vatican! I should have walked away from this right at the beginning,’ Angela muttered. ‘I wish I’d done what Ali said, and forgotten all about the parchment as soon as he told me about the murder in Cairo.’
Bronson shook his head.
‘From what we’ve seen of these people, you would still have been a target, simply because you knew about it. And we’re not dead yet.’
88
‘That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence,’ Angela muttered. ‘So what now?’
Bronson was silent for a minute, trying to decide on their next move. He could think of only one thing they could do at that precise moment.
‘Right. Quite apart from anything else, I’m tired and I’m sure you must be as well. We’ll both function a lot better if we had a decent night’s sleep, and that will also give us time to work out the best route we can take up through France.’
‘So you are quite sure that the hotel will be safe?’
‘We paid cash, and we weren’t followed to the building, so I don’t see how anybody can know we’re there. But we’ll park the car a few streets away in a multistorey and walk the last part. And if I see anything I don’t like,’ Bronson added, patting his jacket pockets, ‘I’m now more or less a walking arsenal, so I should be able to handle any members of the opposition who have by some miracle found out where we are.’
Thirty minutes later, they were in their room back at the hotel, Angela taking a shower while Bronson sipped a gin and tonic he’d prepared from the somewhat limited supplies in the minibar, and studied a map of France that also included northern Spain. He still wasn’t entirely sure how comprehensive the surveillance of Madrid would be, but he thought it was certainly possible that P2 might be able to obtain access to the traffic cameras that covered much of the city. But just being able to see the surveillance footage would still leave them with an enormous amount of data to sift through.
More specifically, they would be searching for the car he’d hired at the airport. And there was something he could do about that. Before they set off the next morning, he had every intention of swapping their number plates with those from some other car. That would make the job of identifying the vehicle, far less following it, infinitely more difficult.
A few moments later, Angela emerged from the bathroom in a faint cloud of steam, a towel tied around her head like a turban and another wrapped around her slim body, and Bronson handed her the second gin and tonic he had prepared.
‘There’s no lemon and no ice, I’m afraid.’
Angela took the plastic beaker from him.
‘Right now,’ she said, ‘I don’t care about ice or lemon. What I need is alcohol, the stronger the better.’
As they prepared themselves for sleep, or at least rest, Angela received an email.
‘What is it?’ Bronson asked.
‘It’s an email from a laboratory in England,’ she replied, ‘attaching some kind of test results.’
She was silent for a few moments as she scanned the message, then nodded.
‘I see what it is now. Ali Mohammed must have asked for carbon-14 testing to be done on a small piece of the parchment, without telling anyone. This is the test results, and he must have asked for them to be expedited, because that’s a really quick turnaround.’
‘But why have they sent them to you?’
‘They haven’t,’ Angela replied, ‘or not directly, anyway. I’m just copied in, but it’s been sent to Ali himself. Because I mentioned to him that the British Museum might be interested in buying the relic, I suppose he asked the laboratory to copy the results directly to me.’
Bronson stood up and walked across to peer over Angela’s shoulder at the computer screen.
‘So how old is it?’ he asked.
‘Just a minute. I need to open up the attachment.’
Bronson found himself looking at some kind of a graph, and below it a table containing a large number of figures. It meant nothing to him, but Angela appeared unfazed by it, ru
nning a finger down the table as she checked the data displayed in it.
‘I suppose that’s good news,’ she said, ‘or perhaps bad news, depending upon your point of view. According to the radiocarbon analysis, the relic dates from AD 25, and that figure is accurate to plus or minus roughly seventy-five years — the dating can’t be much more accurate than that — and so the parchment had to have been prepared between 50 BC and AD 100, which is pretty much the timescale I’ve been assuming, because of the reference to Yusef, to Joseph. If it is authentic, then that would have to be approximately the period it dates from, round about the beginning of the first millennium.’
* * *
Despite the fact that he was bone-weary and had the reassuring warmth of Angela’s body lying right next to him, sleep eluded Bronson for several hours. Every time he closed his eyes, one part of his brain persistently replayed the events in the warehouse. He heard the shots, saw the blood and watched the bodies fall to the floor, time after time. Killing another human being was never an easy thing to live with, and the feeling of guilt and revulsion was almost overwhelming, despite his certainty that what he’d done was the only possible course of action he could have taken.
He finally fell into a shallow sleep at around four in the morning, but still tossed and turned restlessly for what was left of the hours of darkness.
89
Early the next morning, Bronson stepped out of the hotel and made his way to the car park where he’d left the Renault late the previous night. En route he made a brief stop at a small hardware shop, where he bought a cheap and basic tool kit. In the car park, he took the lift to the top floor and then started making his way down to the level where he’d left the Megane, walking around each floor as he did so. Most of the vehicles parked there were shiny, meaning that they were probably in regular, possibly daily, use, but there were a handful bearing a layer of dust, which suggested they’d been parked some time before and not touched since. But on the fifth floor he spotted one car actually covered with a dust sheet and when he took a look underneath it he guessed that car hadn’t moved in months.
He checked to make sure there were no surveillance cameras that could record what he was doing, then knelt down beside the car and snapped open his tool kit. Inside five minutes he’d removed both of the number plates. Fifteen minutes after that he was able to get back into the lift and leave the multistorey car park, the new number plates already attached to the front and back of the Renault.
Angela was waiting for him in the hotel room.
‘Any problems?’ she asked.
‘Good news and bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The good news is we have a temporary disguise for our car. The bad news is there’s almost no traffic on the streets, and I don’t think we can leave until it’s a bit busier, and we will be less conspicuous. I think we’ll need to give it a couple of hours.’
‘Well, I can’t just sit here and do nothing,’ Angela replied. ‘I’m going to work on my translation of the parchment. If I can translate just a little bit more, that might give us another clue as to its authenticity. Like every other language, Latin evolved over time, and it’s possible that if the parchment is actually some kind of forgery I might be able to detect that from the words used or the sentence forms.’
‘Good idea,’ Bronson said, then gestured towards his overnight bag.
‘And as I now seem to be the owner of three unlicensed Glock 17 pistols and a handful of loaded magazines, I’m going to clean those three weapons, just in case. Once I’ve done that, I plan to do a bit of Internet research. From what Pere said, the parchment was stolen from the Vatican a long time ago. That must have made the papers, at least in Italy, so I’m going to see if I can find some record of it.’
* * *
While Angela worked on the specialized photographs of the parchment, Bronson sat on the side of the bed, a hand towel from the bathroom beside him, and carefully stripped each of the Glocks in turn, cleaning and reloading them.
When he’d finished, he replaced one of the Glocks in the shoulder holster he had put on under his jacket, wrapped the other two weapons in one of the shirts he’d already worn and tucked away the bundle in his overnight bag. The loaded magazines he distributed around various pockets, where they would be readily to hand if trouble started anywhere down the line.
Then he opened his laptop, and was quiet for a while as he did various searches.
‘Oddly enough,’ he began, breaking the silence, ‘it looks as if the Vatican’s been a target of thieves for quite some time. This very first result here is about a robbery that took place in nineteen hundred when thieves stole 350,000 lire from a room in the building, aided and abetted by some minor Vatican official.’
Bronson laughed shortly as he read something else.
‘What is it?’ Angela asked.
‘It’s just rather sweet. Apparently in previous cases thieves had been forced to return whatever goods or money they had stolen, and then they were forcibly expelled through the “bronze door”, the principal entrance to the Vatican. In one case a clerk who worked for the Papal Secretary of State stole about 280,000 francs, but wasn’t able to return the stolen money, presumably because he’d already spent it. He was condemned by an ecclesiastical tribunal to undergo eight days of spiritual exercises, which would encourage him to repent his sins, and was then given his job back. I don’t somehow think they’d do that today.’
‘Not a chance,’ Angela agreed.
‘There was another theft in nineteen thirty-seven, and even an attempted armed robbery — thieves with guns, no less — who tried to steal the entire Vatican payroll in nineteen eighty-six. The place seems to be a hotbed of crime. Here’s another one. A couple of thieves riding motor-scooters got away with about £150,000 just before Christmas in nineteen eighty-eight. It sounds like they had accurate inside information because they identified a Vatican car in the traffic near St Peter’s Square, blocked it in with one scooter while the other man smashed a window on the vehicle, grabbed the briefcase containing the money, and they both got away on the second scooter.’
‘All very amusing, but that’s not the kind of thing we’re looking for,’ Angela said. ‘If that parchment was stolen from the Vatican, then it was either an inside job or a breakin by thieves who were looking for relics, and maybe even stealing them to order.’
‘But surely almost anything stolen from the Vatican would be easy enough to identify,’ Bronson objected. ‘I’m sure they must keep detailed records of pretty much everything they have in the archives. So if something was being stolen to order, whoever organized the theft would never be able to sell it.’
Angela shook her head.
‘For some collectors, the idea of selling any of the items they own never even occurs to them. For people like that, possession is all that matters.
‘If this parchment was taken out of the Vatican, it was probably one of a number of items stolen; otherwise the robbery really wouldn’t make much sense. According to one of Ali’s emails, this relic turned up in a metal box in the wall or floor of a building being demolished in Cairo. If it had been taken by a collector, he certainly wouldn’t have done that with it. He would have wanted the parchment to be displayed somewhere, in some room in his house, and probably in a specially designed case to ensure the right light, temperature and humidity to preserve it. Because of where the relic was found, my guess is that it was picked up with a number of other items during a robbery.
‘The thieves probably tried to find a buyer for it, but a grubby old bit of parchment with illegible writing on it is not the kind of thing that most collectors will be interested in purchasing. After a while, they probably gave up, locked it away in the steel box and cemented it into a wall or hid it under the floorboards so that no one would find it, and then forgot about it.’
Bronson was still scanning the results of his Internet search while he listened to Angela.
‘That makes sense,’ he said, ‘and it’s just po
ssible that I know when the robbery took place.’
90
While Bronson and Angela were waiting until the right time to leave, a meeting of a very different type was taking place only a couple of miles away in a large and secluded house on the eastern outskirts of Madrid.
Four people were discussing the situation, though only three of them were physically present in the room. The fourth man — Antonio Morini — was sitting on a bench at the edge of a park in Rome, his mobile phone pressed to his ear and his face pale and drawn. The news that he had received just moments earlier had been even worse than he had expected, and for the first time since the Vatican’s Internet monitoring system had alerted him to the problem, he was seriously considering telling the Englishman to shut down the whole operation and just walk away, to let events run their natural course, despite the likely consequences.
‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ Morini instructed, in English. He and the men sitting in the house in Madrid had established that as their common language.
‘We were in a very strong position,’ the Spaniard — who was using the name Tobí — replied, his voice cold and bitter. ‘We had traced the two of them to their hotel, and very nearly ended the matter there, but they slipped away and we lost them in the city traffic. We’d already found and seized the third man who’d flown out from London, the specialist in ancient documents, and we were using him as bait to try to pin down the other two people in a location that we could control and where we could recover the relic. Unfortunately, this man Bronson is more resourceful than we expected, and somehow he managed to identify the building where we were holding the other man. He got inside, killed two of my men and knocked out two others, one of whom is still in hospital with severe concussion. The other one is here with me now, and listening to our conversation.’
