At first glance, he wasn’t hopeful.
He had managed to transcribe only a dozen or so words at different points in the text, and for three of those he wasn’t entirely certain that all the letters were correct. All the other words he had tried to decipher had at least two illegible letters, and in some cases all he had been able to ascertain was the approximate number of letters in the word, and nothing more.
It was, he supposed, a start, and he decided he would begin working with what he had. Using his pencil again, he circled the handful of words on the paper that he was reasonably certain he had transcribed correctly, then turned back to his computer and opened up a Latin dictionary.
Ten minutes later, he looked down at the result. No two of the words were consecutive, and they had appeared at widely separated points on the sheet of parchment, so he wasn’t expecting to make much sense out of them. At best, he hoped that the translations from the Latin would give him an indication of the subject matter of the text.
Altogether, there were nine words in addition to the two words that Mahmoud had already partially deciphered and which he had believed were parts of proper names. None of them appeared to be particularly helpful. In the order in which they appeared on the parchment, the translated meanings were: ‘down’, ‘along’, ‘fighting’, ‘battle’, ‘soldiers’, ‘street’, ‘house’, ‘ran’ and ‘cloak’. And there was another word which he couldn’t make any sense of because it didn’t appear in the dictionary — could that be another proper noun, perhaps the name of a town or other location?
It looked to him as if it was a description of a skirmish, possibly between a Roman legion and some unspecified enemy, but exactly who that enemy might have been, and where and when the conflict had taken place — because he had never heard of any town or country that sounded like the proper name he thought he’d discovered — he had absolutely no idea.
But Husani believed that it was worth pursuing. If the skirmish was important enough, then commercial organizations such as museums and even the history departments of universities might be interested in acquiring it, as well as the antiquarians and collectors of relics around the world who were his usual bigspending customers.
Clearly, what he needed to do was get far more of the text deciphered. And he had a good idea how that could be done, and exactly who could help him.
10
Father Antonio Morini stared at the sheets of paper on the desk in front of him and clasped his hands together almost as if he was in prayer. The conclusion seemed utterly inescapable. The nightmare that he’d hoped he would never experience while he was in the Holy See had materialized. Somehow, the relic that he had hoped — had, in fact, come to believe — had been either destroyed or lost for ever, had apparently reappeared, and in Cairo, of all places. He stood up abruptly from his desk and walked across to a small wall safe located in one corner of his office. Unusually, the safe had both a numeric keypad and a physical keyhole. Morini loosened the neck of his habit and pulled out a long chain at the end of which was a slim silver key. He inserted the key in the lock and turned it once clockwise, then entered a six-digit code which he personally altered at the end of every week, and turned the key clockwise a second time. Then he removed the key, grasped the handle on the left side of the door, rotated that a quarter of a turn and pulled open the door.
Inside the safe, hidden beneath a pile of folders, was a slim and sealed red file, devoid of any name or other identifying features apart from the single Latin inscription A cruce salus, which translated as ‘From the cross comes salvation’. Before he had listened to his dying predecessor, Morini would have had no difficulty asserting that that statement was the absolute truth. But with his newfound knowledge, it seemed to him more like a cruel joke.
He took out the file and carried it back to his desk where he cut through the tapes around the heavy seal, the impressed image on the wax causing him to cross himself as he recognized it.
The Annulus Piscatoris, the Ring of the Fisherman, was an important part of the regalia of every pope, a new version of the ring being cast for each incumbent, and was kissed as a mark of respect by visiting dignitaries. In the past it had also been used as a signet to authenticate documents signed by the occupant of the Throne of St Peter, but that practice had stopped in 1842. Its use was clearly a measure of the importance of the documents contained within the file.
Morini extracted the contents, a mere half a dozen sheets of paper, five of them providing information and a series of instructions, and the other one a very short list, bearing only three names, together with brief information about those individuals and their international telephone numbers. He placed the last sheet to one side and then began to read the secret protocols that had been entrusted to him alone.
The document began by stating that the protocols had been formulated by the reigning pope just under half a century earlier, and had been approved by every pontiff since then, including the present occupant of the Throne of St Peter. Even so, Morini was scarcely able to believe what he was reading. Several times, in his office in the Secret Archives, he stood up and walked around his desk as he struggled to reconcile the implications of the orders he was reading with what his conscience was telling him.
But in the end, and despite his personal misgivings, he knew absolutely where his duty had to lie.
11
Propaganda Due, better known by the abbreviated name of ‘P2’, had been founded as a private Masonic lodge in Italy in 1877, its membership principally drawn from the Italian government, but it had later expanded to include the heads of all the country’s intelligence services, Cabinet ministers, prominent public figures, senior clergymen and, inevitably, senior members of the Mafia.
For decades, P2 had avoided the limelight, not least because the Catholic Church had officially banned Masonic membership for all priests, but in the late 1960s a massive financial and political scandal broke when it was revealed that the head of the Vatican Bank, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, had joined the organization. And not only that, but Marcinkus, along with the P2 lodge treasurer Michele Sindona and his protégé Roberto Calvi, had created hundreds of fictitious accounts in the Vatican Bank as a convenient device to allow the Mafia to launder drug money. Even worse, in an extremely ill-advised move in 1969 a large portfolio of the Holy See’s investments had been handed to Sindona to manage, with the result that the Vatican lost the equivalent of almost a quarter of a billion dollars over the next six years.
That brought matters to a head, and on 28 September 1978 Pope John Paul I announced his intention to immediately remove Archbishop Marcinkus and three other P2 members from the Vatican Bank, in a belated attempt to, as it were, cleanse the Augean Stables. The following morning, the Pope was found dead in his bed.
As is the invariable custom in the Vatican, no autopsy was performed on this apparently fit and comparatively young Pope — he was only sixty-five — who had reigned for a mere thirty-three days. It is, of course, entirely possible that his announcement about Marcinkus and his death less than twenty-four hours later were entirely unconnected, but very few people inside or outside the Vatican really believed that the pontiff had actually died of natural causes.
The death of John Paul I might have stopped the immediate dismissal of the archbishop, but the bastions around P2 were already beginning to crumble, Sindona being arrested in 1980 and Italy’s largest bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, which had been headed by Roberto Calvi, collapsing two years later. There was a sudden spate of unexplained deaths of men who were involved in either P2 or banking operations connected to it, including Calvi himself whose body was found dangling from a rope underneath Blackfriars Bridge in London.