The Lost Testament

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.

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.