The First Apostle

by James Becker

  At the same moment, two young men wearing dark suits and sunglasses each took a seat at the nearest tables, flanking them. They looked well built and very fit, and exuded an almost palpable air of menace. They glanced with disinterest at Vertutti, then began scanning the street and the pedestrians passing in front of the café.

  Although he’d been watching the road carefully, Vertutti had no idea where the three men had come from.

  The moment his companion was seated, the waiter reappeared, took his order and vanished, taking Vertutti’s slopped drink with him. In less than two minutes he was back, two fresh lattes on a tray, together with a basket of croissants and sweet rolls.

  “They know me here,” the man said, speaking for the first time.

  “Who exactly are you?” Vertutti demanded. “Are you a church official?”

  “My name is Gregori Mandino,” the man said, “and I’m delighted to say I’ve got no direct link to the Catholic Church.”

  “Then how do you know about the Codex?”

  “I know because I’m paid to know. More important,” Mandino added, glancing around to ensure they weren’t overheard, “I’ve been paid to watch for any sign that the document the Codex refers to might have been found.”

  “Paid by whom?”

  “By you. Or, more accurately, by the Vatican. My organization has its roots in Sicily but now has extensive business interests in Rome and throughout Italy. We’ve been working closely with the Mother Church for nearly a hundred and fifty years.”

  “I know nothing of this,” Vertutti spluttered. “What organization?”

  “If you think about it you’ll realize who I represent.”

  For a long moment Vertutti stared at Mandino, but it was only when he glanced at the adjoining tables, at the two alert young men who hadn’t touched their drinks and who were still scanning the crowds, that the penny finally dropped. He shook his head, disbelief etched on his florid features.

  “I refuse to believe we have ever been involved with the Cosa Nostra.”

  Mandino nodded patiently. “You have,” he said, “since about the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact. If you don’t believe me, go back to the Vatican and check, but in the meantime let me tell you a story which has been omitted from official Vatican history. One of the longest-serving popes was Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pope Pius IX, who—”

  “I know who he was,” Vertutti snapped impatiently.

  “I’m glad to hear it. Then you should know that in 1870 he found himself virtually besieged by the newly unified Italian state. Ten years earlier the state had subsumed both Sicily and the Papal States, and Pius encouraged Catholics to refuse cooperation, something we’d been doing for years. Our unofficial relationship began then, and we’ve worked together ever since.”

  “That’s complete nonsense,” Vertutti said, his voice thick with anger. He sat back in the chair and folded his arms, his face flushed. This man—virtually a self-confessed criminal—was suggesting that for the last century and a half the Vatican, the oldest, holiest and most important part of the Mother of all Churches, had been deeply involved with the most notorious criminal organization on the planet. In any other context it would have been laughable.

  And to cap it all, he, one of the most senior cardinals of the Roman Curia, was now sitting in a pavement café in the middle of Rome, sharing a drink with a senior Mafioso. And he had no doubts that Mandino was high-ranking: the deference exhibited by the normally surly waiters, the two bodyguards, and the man’s whole air of authority and command proved that clearly enough. And this man—this gangster—knew about a document hidden in the Vatican archives, a document whose very existence Vertutti had believed was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Catholic Church.

  But Mandino hadn’t finished. “Cards on the table, Eminence,” he said, the last word almost a sneer. “I was christened a Catholic, like almost every other Italian child, but I’ve not set foot inside a church for forty years, because I know that Christianity is nonsense. Like every other religion, it’s based entirely on fiction.”

  Cardinal Vertutti blanched. “That’s blasphemous rubbish. The Catholic Church can trace its origins back for two millennia, based upon the life and deeds and very words of Jesus Christ our Lord. The Vatican is the focus of the religion of countless millions of believers in almost every country in the world. How dare you say that you’re right and everyone else is wrong?”

  “I dare say it because I’ve done my research, instead of just accepting the smoke and mirrors the Catholic Church hides behind. Whether or not huge numbers of people believe something has no bearing whatsoever on its truth or validity. In the past, millions believed that the earth was flat, and that the sun and the stars revolved around it. They were just as wrong then as Christians are today.”

  “Your arrogance astounds me. Christianity is based upon the unimpeachable authority of the words of Jesus Christ himself, the son of God. Are you really denying the truth of the Word of God and the Holy Bible?”

  Mandino smiled slightly and nodded. “You’ve gone right to the crux of the matter, Cardinal. There’s no such thing as the Word of God—only the word of man. Every religious tract ever written has been the work of men, usually writing something for their own personal gain or to suit their individual circumstances. Name me one single thing—anything at all—that proves God exists.”

  Vertutti opened his mouth to reply, but Mandino beat him to it. “I know. You have to have faith. Well, I don’t, because I’ve studied the Christian religion, and I know that it’s an opiate designed to keep the people in line and allow the men who run the Church and the Vatican to live in luxury without actually doing a useful job of work.

  “You can’t prove God exists, but I can almost prove that Jesus didn’t. The only place where there’s any reference to Jesus Christ is in the New Testament, and that—and you know this just as well as I do, whether you admit it or not—is a heavily edited collection of writings, not one of which can be considered to be even vaguely contemporary with the subject matter. To come up with the “agreed” gospels, the Church banned dozens of other writings that flatly contradict the Jesus myth.

  “If Jesus was such a charismatic and inspiring leader, and performed the miracles and all the other things the Church claims he did, how come there’s not one single reference to him in any piece of contemporary Greek, Roman or Jewish literature? If this man was so important, attracted such a devoted following and was such a thorn in the side of the occupying Roman army, why didn’t anybody write something about him? The fact is that he only exists in the New Testament, the “source” that the Church has fabricated and edited over the centuries, and there’s not a single shred of independent evidence that he ever even existed.”

  Like every churchman, Vertutti was used to people doubting the Word of God—in an increasingly Godless world, that was inevitable—but Mandino seemed to harbor an almost pathological hatred of the Church and everything it stood for. And that begged the obvious question.

  “If you hate and despise the Church so much, Mandino, why are you involved in this matter at all? Why should you care about the future of the Catholic religion?”

  “I’ve already told you, Cardinal. We agreed to undertake this task many years ago, and my organization takes its responsibilities seriously. No matter what my personal feelings, I’ll do my best to finish the job.”

  “You’re lucky to be living in this century if you harbor such heretical views.”

  “I know. In the Middle Ages, no doubt, you’d have chained me to a post and burned me alive to make me see things your way.”

  Vertutti took a sip of his drink. Despite his instant and total loathing for this man, he knew he was going to have to work with him to resolve the present crisis. He put the mug back on the table and looked across at Mandino.

  “We must agree to differ in our views of the Church and the Vatican,” he said. “I’m much more concerned about the matter in hand.
You obviously know something about the Codex. Who told you about it?”

  Mandino nodded and leaned forward. “My organization has been involved in the quest to find the source document since the beginning of the last century,” he began.

  “The task has always been the sole responsibility of the head—the capofamiglia—of the Rome family. When that mantle fell upon my shoulders, I was given a book to read, a book that to me made little sense. So I sought clarification from your dicastery, as the source of the original request, and your predecessor was kind enough to supply me with some additional information, facts that he believed would help me to appreciate the critical nature of the task.”

  “He should never have done so.” Vertutti’s voice was low and angry. “Knowledge of this matter is restricted to only a few of the most trusted and reliable senior Vatican officials. What did he tell you?”

  “Not a great deal,” Mandino replied, his tone now conciliatory. “He simply explained that the Church was seeking a document lost for centuries, an ancient text that must never be allowed to fall into the hands of anyone outside the Vatican.”

  “That was all?” Vertutti asked.

  “More or less, yes.”

  Vertutti felt a surge of relief. If that genuinely was all the information his predecessor had divulged, then little real damage had been done. The Vitalian Codex was certainly the darkest of all the multitude of secrets hidden in the Apostolic Penitentiary and it seemed that for now this particular secret was safe. But the crux of the matter was whether he trusted Gregori Mandino enough to believe him.

  “We’ve established you know about the Codex. But what I still don’t know is why you called me. Do you have some information? Has something happened?”

  Mandino appeared to ignore the question. “All in good time, Eminence. You’re obviously not aware that a small group of my people has been constantly watching for the publication of any of the significant words and phrases contained within the Codex. This is in accordance with the written instructions given to us by your dicastery more than a hundred years ago.

  “We have monitoring systems in all the obvious places, but since the arrival of the Internet, we’ve also focused on dead language translation sites, both the online programs and those supplying more professional services. With the agreement of your predecessor, we set up a small office here in Rome, ostensibly charged with the identification, recovery and study of ancient texts. Under the guise of scholarly research, we requested all Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Coptic and Aramaic translators we were able to identify to advise us whenever they received passages that contained the target words, and almost all of them agreed.

  “We’ve also approached the online programs, and most of these have been easier—it’s amazing what cooperation you get if people think you work for the Pope. We’ve simply supplied the same word list for each language service, and in every case the Web site owners have agreed to notify us whenever anyone requests a translation that fits the parameters. Most of the sites have automatic systems that send us e-mails containing the word or words, and any other information they have about the person making the request. This sometimes includes their name and e-mail, but we always get their IP address.”

  “Which is what?” Vertutti asked.

  “It’s a set of numbers that identify a location on the Internet. We can use it to find the person’s address, or at least the address of the computer they used. Obviously if an inquiry comes from an Internet café there’s no easy way of identifying the person who made it.”

  “Is all this relevant?”

  “Yes, just bear with me. We’ve cast our net wide and we’ve specified a huge number of words to ensure that nothing gets past us. We also have programs in place that scan the e-mails we receive and identify the most likely matches. They’re known as syntax checkers. Until last week, no expression scored more than forty-two percent.

  “And then two days ago we received this.” He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a single sheet of paper. He unfolded it and handed it to Vertutti. “The syntax checkers rated it at seventy-three to seventy-six percent, almost double the highest score we’d seen previously.”

  Vertutti looked down at the page in front of him. On it, typed in capital letters, were three words in Latin:

  HIC VANIDICI LATITANT

  5

  I

  “And this came from where, exactly?” Joseph Cardinal Vertutti asked, still staring down at the paper in his hand. Below the Latin was a translation of the words into Italian.

  “An online translation program on a server located in America—Arlington, Virginia, to be exact. But the inquiry originated here in Italy, at an address only a few miles outside Rome.”

  “Why would they choose an American site?”

  Gregori Mandino shrugged. “On the Internet, geographical locations are irrelevant.

  People pick whatever site they find the easiest to use or the fastest or most comprehensive.”

  “And the translation? Is this what the program provided?”

  “No, though it’s fairly close. The American site suggested ‘In this place or location the liars are concealed, ’ which is clumsy at best. My language specialist’s interpretation is much more elegant: ‘Here lie the liars.’ ”

  “The Latin is clear enough,” Vertutti murmured. “ ‘Hic’ is obviously ‘here,’ and I would perhaps have expected ‘vatis mendacis’—‘false prophets’—rather than

  ‘vanidici,’ but why ‘latitant’? Surely ‘occubant’ would have been more literal?”

  Mandino smiled slightly and extracted two photographs. “We anticipated that question, Eminence, and you would have been right if this inscription had been found at a grave site. ‘Occubant’—‘buried’ or ‘resting in the grave’—would have been far more likely. But this inscription isn’t on a tombstone. It’s carved on a small oblong stone that’s part of the wall above a fireplace in a six-hundred-year-old converted farmhouse in the Monti Sabini region.”

  “What?” For the first time, Vertutti was shocked. “Let me see those pictures,” he instructed.

  Mandino passed them over and Vertutti studied them for a few moments. One was a close-up view of the inscription, and the other several stones over a large fireplace.

  “Then why,” he asked, “are you so certain this has anything at all to do with the Codex?”

  “I wasn’t at first, and that’s why I decided to investigate further. And that, I’m afraid, is when things went wrong.”

  “You’d better explain.”

  “The person who made this inquiry left their e-mail address—it’s one of the conditions of using this particular site—and that made tracing them a lot easier. We identified the house from which the request for the translation was made. It’s located a short distance off the road between Ponticelli and Scandriglia, and was bought last year by an English couple named Hampton.”

  “And then what did you do?” Vertutti demanded, fearing the worst.

  “I instructed my deputy to send two men to the house when we believed the owners would be away in Britain, but what we didn’t know was that Signora Hampton was still on the property. For some reason she hadn’t accompanied her husband. The men broke in and began searching for the source of the Latin phrase, and quickly located it carved into the stone above the fireplace. It had been covered in plaster that a team of builders are replacing and only part of the stone had been exposed.

  That section contained the inscription.

  “They’d been ordered to find the Latin phrase and anything else that might be relevant, and their first task was to check the entire stone for any other inscriptions.

  The men began chipping away the plaster but Signora Hampton heard them, and came down to investigate. When she saw what was happening she ran away. One of the men chased her, and in a scuffle on the stairs she fell against the banister rail and broke her neck. It was a simple accident.”

  This was even worse than Vertutti had expecte
d. An innocent woman dead. “A simple accident?” he echoed. “Do you really expect me to believe that? I know the way your organization works. Are you sure she wasn’t pushed? Or even beaten to death?”

  Mandino smiled coldly. “I can only repeat what I’ve been told. We’ll never know what really happened in that house, but the woman would have had to die eventually. I understand that the provisions of the Sanction are unambiguous.”

  In the middle of the seventh century, Pope Vitalian had written the Codex by hand, not wishing to entrust his recommendations to even the most devoted of scribes.

  Down the centuries, the contents of the Codex had been known to only a handful of the most senior and trusted men in the Vatican, including the reigning pope. None had recorded any reservations about the steps Vitalian had suggested—known as the Vitalian Sanction—should any of the forbidden relics surface, but that was hardly surprising.

  “Don’t you dare presume to lecture me about the Sanction. How do you even know about it?” Vertutti demanded, his eyes flashing with annoyance.

  Mandino shrugged. “Again, from your predecessor. He told me that anyone who finds this document or has knowledge of its contents would be considered so dangerous to the Church that his or her life would be forfeit. For the good of the Church, obviously.”

  “The cardinal exaggerated.” Vertutti leaned forward to emphasize the point. “This document must be recovered, and under no circumstances must it be allowed to enter the public domain. That much is true. The provisions of the Sanction are secret, but I can tell you that assassination is not one of the options suggested.”

  “Really, Eminence? The Church has openly sanctioned assassinations in the past. In fact, it’s even condoned them inside the Vatican, and you know that as well as I do.”

  “Rubbish. Name one single incident.”

  “That’s easy. Pope Pius XI was almost certainly assassinated in 1939 to prevent him making a crucial speech condemning Fascism at a time when the papacy had decided to embrace it. It was no surprise when his successor, Pius XII, openly supported the Third Reich.”