In Australia, just to look at a single nation that particularly concerned the Church, belief in Christianity fell from over 95 per cent of the population to just over 60 per cent in the twentieth century alone, and the fastest growing ‘religion’ on that continent was, in fact, atheism.
And while Christianity, though still the world’s largest religion, was in possibly terminal decline, other religions that shared no part of the Christian ideal, such as Islam, were beginning to grow.
The portents for the future were not good, and successive occupants of the Throne of St Peter had been made very aware that the last thing the Church needed was any other damage to the core beliefs of Christianity. And it was the growth of the single largest communication medium in history, the Internet, which had provided them with the tools they needed to detect any such undesirable ripples of doubt.
At the end of the twentieth century, the governments of Western Europe and America had created a global monitoring system known as Echelon, a way of eavesdropping on telephone conversations, faxes and electronic mail transmissions from almost anywhere in the world. The purpose of Echelon was entirely laudable: the detection of potential terrorist activity before it could be turned into a devastating reality. To achieve this, the security services of the world employed a program known as the Echelon Dictionary, a vast list of words that the monitoring system was created to detect, and which it was hoped would lead to the surveillance, and if necessary the arrest and imprisonment, of potential suicide bombers and members of terrorist groups.
The Vatican, for all its enormous wealth and influence, possessed neither the resources nor the legal authority to create such a global monitoring system. But some years earlier, as the first handful of computers began to be connected to the fledgling network that would soon begin to grow exponentially into the Internet, a group of far-sighted and technologically literate priests working at the Vatican had seen the potential of the new information resource and also realized that it could be a useful — perhaps even an essential — tool to help guarantee the future of the Church.
Like every large organization, there were a fair number of skeletons in the Vatican’s closets, documents and objects which, if they ever saw the light of day, would cripple — or at least very severely damage — the Church’s credibility. And it made sense that anyone who discovered even a hint about any such dark secret would very probably use an online search engine to research the topic. A kind of early-warning system was needed.
So the Vatican approached the emerging companies operating the search engines and explained the concerns the Church had. And, because almost all of the owners of these companies were American, a nation with far more than its fair share of fundamentalist Christians, getting agreement to install monitoring software had proved to be surprisingly easy.
The result was a loose and informal arrangement with the providers of all of the major search engines on the Internet. Somewhat like the Echelon Dictionary, the Vatican’s monitoring system — known to the handful of indoctrinated senior clerics in the Holy See as ‘Codex S’, a nod to perhaps the most important single extant book in the Christian world, the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, a Bible handwritten in Greek — was programmed to detect certain words being entered into the search engines, particularly when two or more of those words were entered together. The date and time would be noted, and the search term recorded, the information then being fed back to the Vatican.
As a further refinement, when any such search term was entered, the monitoring software would also locate the precise Internet address of the initiating computer. Every computer that accesses the Internet is allocated either a permanent or a temporary address — this is essential to ensure that responses go to the right place — and also geographically locates that computer. So by this fairly simple method, the Vatican was informed every time any search that might be considered dangerous to it was entered on any computer in the world, as long as one of the principal search engines had been used.
Early that morning, in a large open-plan office in a building in a part of the Vatican to which the public, and almost all of the staff of the Holy See, never had access under any circumstances, a speaker system attached to a desktop computer emitted five short beeps, indicating a hit from the monitoring system. The room was unmanned for most of the time, but a log was maintained at each of the workstations and these were combined into a master electronic document that was inspected at least once a day.
Late that evening, a senior member of the Vatican staff inspected the log and immediately saw the two words that had triggered the response by the monitoring system. His orders were clear, and he followed them straight away. He printed a hard copy of the entry and then ran a simple program that identified the precise geographical location of the computer from which the search had been generated, translating the Internet address into a street address.
Then he left the room, secured the door behind him, and made his way quickly through the corridors and passages of the building to the Secret Archives. There, he went straight to the office occupied by the Prefect in charge, Father Antonio Morini, and placed on his desk a sealed envelope containing the printouts.
9
That evening, Husani fired up his home computer and began to do his own research. Within a very short time, it was clear to him that almost all of the papers in the case were in Italian.
He identified an online translation service, and converted some of the words into Arabic. That didn’t help much, except to confirm what he had first suspected: the pages must have been randomly chosen, and what was typed on them was of absolutely no importance. Most of the phrases he translated had very obviously been taken from various sorts of business correspondence, letters, draft contracts, price lists of goods and the like.
But at least Husani could now discount the papers and get to the item that excited him. He turned his attention to the parchment, placing it on the table in front of him and angling a couple of bright desk lights towards it so that its surface was clearly visible.
In the much better lighting then available to him, he found that a few more of the letters and words were visible. And it was possible, he knew from talking to other traders who tended to specialize more in this kind of relic, that other examination techniques, such as bathing the object in infrared and ultraviolet light, could sometimes reveal text that remained invisible to the naked eye.
Husani knew that whatever value the object had must be determined by the text that would be revealed: it was the information that was important, not the parchment itself. The message, not the medium.
He took a few clean sheets of paper, a pencil and an eraser, positioned his desktop magnifying glass on its mount over the first line of words on the parchment and began to carefully copy out every single letter that was clear enough for him to identify. Where he could see that a letter existed but was unable to determine what it was, he marked the paper with an underscore because that, he hoped, would help him when it came to trying to translate the Latin. And the writing, he was still quite certain, was Latin.
He worked his way down the sheet of parchment, filling in those letters he could easily identify, then started again from the top and repeated the process, this time concentrating on the gaps in the text. Then he did the entire process once more, just to make absolutely sure that he hadn’t missed anything. Only after he had completed this did he begin looking at the words and letters he had written out, to see if he could make sense of any of it.