And, just as nobody believed that Pope John Paul I had died peacefully in his sleep, nobody believed that Calvi had committed suicide, especially when it was learned that his secretary had also killed herself on the very same day by jumping out of the window of her office in the Banco Ambrosiano building in Italy. Eventually Calvi’s ‘suicide’ verdict was overturned and changed to ‘cause of death unknown’, which was almost as inaccurate: it was quite certain that he had died of asphyxiation due to the rope around his neck. What wasn’t known was precisely how he came to be hanging from the end of that rope, but most people presumed that P2 had struck once again with lethal force.
In the aftermath of this scandal, which had not only reverberated within the Vatican but also swept through the Italian government and the world of international banking, P2 seemed to quietly fade away. But, as with so many organizations in Italy, this was not exactly the case. The Masonic charter had been withdrawn from the P2 lodge in 1972, but in reality membership of the brotherhood had only ever been a convenience, and the powerful members of the lodge, drawn by now from most of the nations of Europe, knew they could function perfectly happily outside Masonry, just as they had functioned for so many years outside the law.
So officially P2 had ceased to exist; in reality it remained as a shadowy entity, answerable to no one but still inextricably linked with both the Vatican and the Catholic Church in a relationship that was virtually symbiotic. The Church benefited financially from some of P2’s quasi-legal business ventures, while the Vatican ensured that the lodge received an important measure of protection from exposure in the media and elsewhere. And so P2 remained, as it had been almost from its inception, the Vatican’s first and most powerful ally.
And it was the head of this organization that Morini must contact — the instructions in the file were clear and unequivocal. Only they could resolve the problem that he and the Church now faced.
He read the final paragraph of the instructions once more, then noted down the person’s name and telephone number, and the code word the document listed. Finally he closed the file and locked it away again in the safe.
Then he left his office, returned to his room in the Holy See, changed into civilian clothes and walked out into the streets of Rome. That, too, had been specified in the protocols, which had clearly been reviewed on an occasional basis by both his predecessor and the Holy Father himself to take account of changes in technology. Under no circumstances was he ever to use either his personal mobile telephone or any of the landline phones within the Vatican City. His contact with the three widely dispersed members of P2 was to be by public telephone — and he was never to use the same one twice — or by an anonymous pay-as-you-go mobile phone, which he was also never to use within the Holy See.
12
The calm male voice on the end of the line said the single English word ‘Yes?’ in a neutral tone before lapsing into silence.
‘The code word is “Angharad”,’ Morini said, replying in the same language. ‘I will call you back in ten minutes.’
‘No,’ the voice said, suddenly louder and instantly commanding. ‘Remain where you are and I will call you. Five minutes.’
Before Morini could reply, the line went dead. For a few seconds the priest just stood there, looking at the telephone handset he was holding, then he replaced it and stepped away from the booth. There were no seats anywhere nearby, but there was a low wall a few yards away, near enough to the booth that he’d certainly hear the phone when it rang, but not so close that he would appear to any passers-by to be waiting for a call.
About two minutes after he’d ended the call, a middle-aged woman with badly dyed blonde hair partially obscuring her face, and wearing old jeans and a shapeless jumper, despite the heat of the day, walked up to the phone booth, slid coins into the slot and embarked on what looked like a lengthy and somewhat acrimonious call. She wasn’t shouting, but it was the next best thing.
Morini glanced at his watch, counting the seconds, but he knew there was almost nothing he could do about it. The last thing he wanted to do was attract attention to himself, and if he did anything to cut short the woman’s call, that would certainly result in some kind of a scene.
Five minutes came, then six. When his watch showed that seven minutes had elapsed since he’d ended his call, and despite his misgivings, Morini decided he had to do something. He got up and walked across to the phone booth, stopped right beside it and fixed his gaze on the woman using the phone. After a few seconds she became aware of his presence and turned to stare at him, an irritated expression on her face. Embarrassed but determined, Morini stared back at her, pointed at the telephone in her hand, and then tapped the face of his watch for emphasis. The woman turned her back on him, but Morini simply walked around to the other side of the booth and repeated his actions.
A few seconds later the woman angrily slammed the phone down on its rest and stepped out of the booth. Morini moved to one side to allow her to pass, and received a mouthful of invective for his trouble, the insults liberally laced with a scattering of descriptive words that the priest had not heard in a very long time.
But Morini didn’t care because as the woman walked away, simmering anger evident in her every stride, the telephone began to ring, and he immediately snatched up the handset.
‘Hullo?’
‘This is the fifth time I have tried to call you back,’ the cold voice at the other end of the line snapped. ‘What happened?’
‘This is a public phone box,’ Morini began, ‘and a woman stopped here to make a call.’
‘The next time you use a public telephone to call me — if there is a next time — you will remain in the booth until I call you back. Is that perfectly clear? My time is too important to waste.’
‘I understand.’
‘I hope you do. Now, I know who you are, or at least the position you hold and the organization you represent. And if your documentation is current you will know my name — or one of the names that I use — and the group that I control.’ The man’s voice dropped to little more than a whisper, and his tone seemed to exude a cold menace that Morini found instantly alarming. ‘I hope for your sake that you have not contacted me for some trivial problem. What has happened? And before you speak, be aware that it is possible that this call may be monitored, so choose your words with care.’
Morini had anticipated that he would need to explain the circumstances to the man, and had prepared a simple overview. He talked for less than ninety seconds, taking care to mention no names or any other definitive information.
Almost as soon as he’d finished, the other man replied.
‘I hope that you and your masters realize that this is an entirely self-inflicted problem,’ he said. ‘If there was anyone in your organization with a functioning brain, they would have made sure that the relic was destroyed centuries ago. Instead, you not only kept hold of it, but you failed to keep it in a secure location, which is why you’re now in this mess.’
‘I’m sure that the people responsible believed they were doing the right thing,’ Morini couldn’t help but plead.
‘They were wrong,’ the man replied flatly. ‘Now, I hope you have an untraceable mobile phone because you must send me a text message giving me all the information I need to resolve this situation. I want names, addresses — IP addresses as well as geographical locations — a full description and photograph of the relic, and any other information that you have about it and what happened to it. You already have my number, and as soon as you send me the text I will have your mobile number as well. From now on, we will mainly communicate using mobiles rather than landlines. When I reply I will send you a list of times when you are to be available to take my calls. At those times you must be outside your place of work — your entire place of work, I mean.’