by Tom Fox
‘Call whom you wish,’ she replied, stepping forward and gently brushing him aside as she led Ben through the door, ‘but we’re under no obligation to remain here, and we’re going.’
Ben followed, and Angelina walked as boldly as she could towards a staircase beyond. There was motion behind them – presumably the guard moving for a phone or radio – but Angelina didn’t allow herself to look back. Just one foot on to the steps, then the next, and the assumption that up meant out.
Outside the Apostolic Palace
Angelina and Ben emerged from the Swiss Guard’s command centre beneath the Apostolic Palace fewer than five minutes after they’d departed from their interrogation room. Apart from the Guardsman who had attempted to stop them at the initial door, they’d encountered no additional resistance as they’d made their way up through the two levels that led to the surface. None of the other officers of the Guard seemed to know about them, much less have instructions to hinder their movement, and apart from the occasional side glances that Angelina associated more with her being a woman than anything else, the officials they had passed had gone about their business without accosting them.
Outside, the glow of daytime had almost entirely faded. The lights of Vatican City had come on, bathing the ancient buildings in golden illumination as a navy blue canvas gradually repainted itself into black high above.
‘I can’t believe we just did that,’ Ben said after they had fully emerged into the open. ‘All my years here, I’ve never even been in there. I can’t believe we just marched our own way out.’
‘Sometimes it just takes a little boldness,’ Angelina answered. In honesty, her limbs were shaking. Walking determinedly out of the captivity of the Swiss Guard was as brash a thing as she’d ever done, and until this precise moment she hadn’t been sure it would work.
But they were free now, and Ben owed her.
‘You promised me you’d take me where I wanted to go?’
‘Did I?’
Angelina nearly started, not wanting to face denial and frustration from another man, but in the electric light of the square she saw gentle wrinkles forming around Ben’s eyes as he lifted his cheeks in a smile.
Something of his confidence was returning, and a touch of wit along with it.
‘Very funny,’ she answered, trying to sound annoyed, but her own smile had made its return appearance, too.
The light had also reminded her of something else. She reached into her handbag and fished out a wet wipe.
‘You need to wipe off your face.’ She unwrapped it and handed it to Ben. ‘And you’ll probably want to take off that coat.’
He looked down and saw the dried red stains on his jacket. Seriousness marched back across his face, and he unzipped it and pulled it off, tossing it into a nearby rubbish bin in revulsion. He took the wet wipe from Angelina and cleaned his cheeks and brow.
‘So, where is it, then,’ he finally asked, ‘that you’d like to go?’
Angelina had become serious as well. She drew the folded piece of glossy photo paper out of her pocket. ‘I don’t know about you, Dr Verdyx, but this photograph isn’t quite enough to cut it for me. If people are shooting at us because of this tablet, then I want to see the real thing.’
Ben peered at her a moment, and then his smile returned.
‘It so happens,’ he said, ‘that I know where items like this are kept once they come into the possession of the Vatican.’
Angelina met his gaze. ‘I thought you might.’
Ben began to move, signalling her to follow. ‘But I have to swear you to silence before I take you there,’ he added.
‘To silence?’
When he looked back, his expression was genuinely warm.
‘They don’t call them the Secret Archives for nothing.’
23
Throughout Rome
As evening had fallen on the Eternal City, as the river had returned to its normal colour and the day moved towards its end, the citizens of Rome had left the edges of the Tiber which had captivated them since morning. Tension was thick in the popular conscience now. Details of the two gun pursuits earlier in the day had been reported on widely, small clips of mobile phone video from passers-by released to the press and cycling through the news. When, only hours later, the water had changed again, it had not calmed the city’s nerves. There was nothing left to see, but sections of Rome had been shut down, combed for any clues as to either the attacks or the changes in the Tiber, and they were only beginning to be reopened. Perpetrators were being hunted for, but none had been found. Fear escalated, then escalated further.
Humanity at its finest, taking advantage of any opportunity to find a new low to which it might sink. And in a world too familiar with how quickly situations could escalate, there were more Roman doors locked on a double bolt this evening than there had been in months.
But behind those bolted doors and drawn curtains, the city’s discomfort did not equate to inaction. It led Rome’s inhabitants through smartphones and laptops, home computers and Internet cafés, towards the twisting web of the Internet and whatever truths it might disclose about the events that had taunted them. They were shocked, increasingly afraid and wanted answers.
Instagram was as red as the Tiber had been, tens of thousands of photos transforming its feeds into shared emotions about the oddity of the transformation. Facebook emoted every emotion its enhanced features would allow, permitting droves to offer explanations, reactions and general commentary.
And dotted amongst it all, the video clips of hundreds who had something to say, vocally, about the day that had overtaken them.
One video, in particular, was already taking on a life of its own.
A young man with short hair and a plain shirt, perhaps no more than twenty-five, sat before a camera in a small and unremarkable room, cropped to a bust in the frame. He had a look about him that some would call possession, others madness, yet others inspiration. But he spoke with purpose and zeal to whatever audience would find him, on a new YouTube channel for a religious group most had never heard of, and which had never ventured into Internet video before.
‘My beloved brothers and sisters,’ his voice began, ‘the time of wonders is upon us.’ The religious verbiage that followed was rich, filled with talk of revelation and divine encounter. ‘. . . Today, the world saw a sign of the glory of God. The ancient river ran with blood, like the Nile of old, that God’s power might be known.’
But it was his next words that would capture the public interest.
‘We knew this would come.’
A few hits of the ‘like’ button had initiated the response to the short clip. Then it was shared, embedded, reposted – and spread like a virus across the web that spanned city, country and world. The ‘likes’ ran into the thousands, then the tens of thousands.
‘. . . What happened this morning,’ the speaker continued, his voice filled with foreboding, ‘is only the beginning.’
And then he had lifted up a sheet of paper, and had begun to read.
‘The old pharaoh’s heart was hard, but the new pharaoh’s heart is harder.
I shall lay my hand upon him anew, and all his people, and my signs and wonders shall be multiplied.
I shall stretch out my hands against them, that they may know my great judgements – as I will upon the one who discovers these things, whose terrible death shall come most swiftly.
It shall come to pass in the seventeenth year of the second millennium after the coming of the Sun, when the great star is at her peak over the Eternal City.
And the first sign shall be that the river shall run with blood.
The next shall be like it in power, as the bright places become dark in a city filled with light.
Then shall come the fog, which clouds the minds of the children of fallen men;
And in the fourth place, a cross of fire shall consume their holy things, the seat of the Mighty See at its head.
And then shall come th
e moment, at the hour of first light on the third day after these things have begun, when above the resting place of the Rock dawn itself shall be stopped and the sun shall be blotted out of the sky.
And then the earth shall quake,
And the firstborn son shall die as he stands,
They shall come, one by one,
Until all the world shall know the power of the Lord.’
PART THREE
Deception
24
Eighteen months earlier
Rome
Emil Durré had never contemplated a move like this in his life. He was no criminal – at least, he never had been. Until now. He was a professional man, a scholarly mind in a capable body. His were the circles of the educated elite, and his measure of excitement had always been purely intellectual, scaled in terms of expanding awareness and new levels of mental comprehension.
Yet if he were to venture into the territory he was now contemplating, Emil’s life would be traced out by entirely new contours. He would certainly be a criminal. That much was understatement. He was entertaining a life of purest and most perfectly contemplated crime. And of danger. Risk. Elements Emil had never known before, but which shot new thrills through him, body and spirit. Excitement, he realised, was a term that was going to take on entirely new dimensions.
Emil’s life would change. That was, in the end, the whole point.
Nobody does something for nothing, he reminded himself constantly, save the petty self-sacrificers and the self-destructive philanthropists.
God, he loved Ayn Rand. A furious pity the woman wasn’t still alive – there was someone who knew the true difference between power and weakness. And Emil was still in the market for a second wife.
His first, back in Belgium, had been a bombshell – a far higher grade of beauty than he’d deserved, especially since at the time he’d met her he’d been a scrawny postgraduate student with a monthly income barely capable of covering his food and board expenses at the University of Leuven, and with little to commend him other than the possibility that one day, somewhere down the line, he might be able to make a name for himself in a field that, at its finest, would provide him with a salary that would only slightly outdo his current circumstances. But Theresa Laclerq, feisty bombshell of the neighbouring accommodation block, had said she’d loved him anyway, chirping out sentiments about being ‘in love with your mind, babe’, that had drawn Emil in. However imbalanced the visual relationship had seemed to be – her with a curvaceous, silken figure flowing under shoulder-length blond hair and emerald eyes that glowed like gems set in a face of perfectly made-up skin; him with brownish, curly hair that always tried to stick to his oily forehead, capstoning a frame that might have looked decent done up in a suit and tie but for which he could only afford casual trousers and button-down shirts that made him look gangly and awkward – something between them had clicked.
And unclicked almost as quickly. The woman, Emil lamented, had proven herself a complete airhead. ‘I love you for your mind’ had, he eventually decided, been the confession of a woman craving what she herself didn’t possess. A year into their hasty marriage, he’d had as much as he could take. Emil was an historian. He’d completed his PhD eight months after their wedding and he craved learned conversations about antiquity, about the human condition, about the plight of man and the saga of social enlightenment. Instead he spent his evenings chit-chatting about new Italian fashion trends and music releases – topics about which he couldn’t conceivably care less. It was all more than he could bear, and Emil hadn’t been able to find his way to the local court office to pick up the divorce papers fast enough.
Theresa had already been pregnant by the time he’d left her, but Emil had decided that subdividing his paltry pay cheque between his personal maintenance and support for a son was better than sticking around. So he’d faithfully posted off a cheque each month as he’d left Belgium for Italy, where the Roma Tre University had offered him a junior lectureship in Mediterranean Antiquity following a year’s postdoctoral research. He had a stable salary, such as it was. He had a career.
He’d interviewed for a visiting curatorship at the Vatican Secret Archives three years later – a post for which he considered himself perfectly qualified – and the interview panel had apparently agreed. Thus it was that he’d moved into slightly more comfortable digs in the massive city, continuing to correspond with his son back in Belgium, and took up the job that should have made him.
Memories of the Vatican Archives brought bile into Emil’s throat. Fourteen years of his life he’d dedicated to that godforsaken place. Fourteen years! His curatorship had become a permanent residency with the institution, and that had been followed in due course by a promotion to senior researcher. There were few positions higher in the ancient environs of what was properly the private papal library, at least for those unwilling to give up sex and everything Emil considered part and parcel of a normal life. The clerical ranks of a Monsignor or cardinal were unwritten requirements for the Archives’ highest posts. Yet Emil’s pay had gone up with his newer position, and while no academic was ever going to make it rich on an institutional salary, even within the Vatican, Emil took home a pay packet that allowed him to live comfortably, if modestly.
Then the troubles had begun. Emil had never considered his actions anything like sufficient to arouse the ire of his colleagues. They worked in the Vatican’s Secret Archives after all – why should a little secrecy be frowned upon? A little undisclosed dealing, all in the name of the greater cause of learning and progress? Emil hadn’t done anything dramatic like try to steal artefacts or smuggle out documents for quick sale on the black market. All he’d done was take a few photos with a tiny digital camera – and not even of the collection’s items themselves. Shit, it had basically been nothing. He’d quietly gone into the Leone XIII reading room when no one else was there, taking advantage of his staff access to the facility outside the hours it was open each day to hordes of academic researchers, and photographed a few pages from the bound indices of the Archives’ contents.
Content listings, nothing more. Indices. It had been before much of the catalogue had been digitised for internal reference – Emil imagined he would have just cut-and-pasted the data from his computer had those resources been complete when he was there – but the same rules were in effect then as still technically applied to the bound indices today: no photography, no scanning, no reproduction of any kind.
Emil supposed he could understand, in principle, why the Vatican didn’t want the whole inventory of their collection out in the public sphere. The treasures contained in the Secret Archives were almost incomprehensibly vast, and what was known to be located on a certain shelf in a certain basement might easily become intoxicating prey for relic hunters, ‘traders’ and petty thieves. So, security first – it was a policy that made sense. But Emil saw no real harm in sharing a few pages of content listings with researchers from a foreign institution when they’d asked for them. They were men of a common mind, engaged in a common work, not treasure hunters or fame-seekers. Emil hadn’t even accepted payment for his assistance. He’d just done it as what had felt like a professional favour.
A few pages, from a catalogue. And they’d sacked him as if he’d tried to deface the Papal Apartments or give away the keys of St Peter.
One of the professors to whom Emil had sent the photographed indices eventually contacted the Admissions Secretariat with a request for a research entry licence, citing his knowledge of specific contents he wanted to review, about which he had been made aware ‘through the kind cooperation of your senior staff member who sent me photos of the relevant index pages’. The letter had been Emil’s professional death warrant. After a brief investigation, yielding the discovery that the culprit had been him, the ranking supervisors of the Archives had unceremoniously terminated Emil’s employment and placed a black mark on his academic reputation – the status of ‘a man of questionable professional ethics’
– which had meant he couldn’t get academic work anywhere once the Vatican’s doors had been slammed closed behind him.
Bastards. It was the biggest overreaction Emil could have contemplated. Asinine curates too concerned to preserve their secrets to know real talent when they had it in their employ.
The irony was that they didn’t even know what secrets they were really guarding.
Emil could feel his molars grating against each other, the muscles in his cheeks sore from the tension. The memories always did this to him. He scolded himself, forced his jaw apart, then took a series of long, calming breaths. Life had not been entirely intolerable since he’d been sacked from the Archives. He’d had to work blue-collar jobs for a time, which was grating, but an aunt back in Belgium had had the good courtesy to die only eighteen months later, leaving him the settlement of her small estate. It was enough to live off without needing extra income. And it gave him the means to plan for . . . greater things.
It was time to let go of all this. The past was done. It was unpleasant, but it was over. The time had come to cease being gripped by it.
The time had come, too, to acknowledge that he was far past ‘contemplating’ or ‘entertaining’ the course his life was going to take in the months ahead. He was certain of it. He had been, he knew, since the first day the idea had occurred to him.
At first it had felt too grandiose, too impossible; but as time had worn on and the burgeoning thought refused to flee his attention, its impressive dimensions and apparent impossibilities had come more carefully under his diligent scrutiny. They had started to become – lesser. Manageable. Not insignificant, but surmountable.
The goal was simply too great not to take the risks the operation would involve.
For an instant, the past again encroached on his present, but Emil allowed this particular intrusion.
The goal. His goal. The bastards he’d worked for had been so damned keen to guard their secrets and treasures, that they’d led him to something far greater.
