The Lost Testament

25

Antonio Morini, sitting in civilian clothes at a table in a small café near the Tiber, ended the call and slipped the mobile phone back into the pocket of his light jacket. He had been worried about just how specific he should be in his responses, because the Englishman had emphasized so forcefully the need for security in all communications, and especially during telephone calls, to protect everyone involved. But he had come to the conclusion that he needed to risk spelling out the name of the man who’d originated the new search — indeed that he really had no other option. He had to ensure that the correct action would be taken.

The Italian priest was becoming more concerned with every hour that passed. What had seemed at first to be a simple and uncomplicated, albeit brutal, operation — to locate, seize and possibly destroy a piece of ancient parchment, and to ensure that the owner of the relic was in no position to tell anyone anything about it, ever — was beginning to assume unwelcome proportions.

He had prayed for guidance every night, and by summoning up every scrap of his faith he’d been able to rationalize the actions he’d been ordered to take, the instruction to eliminate the market trader in Cairo, telling himself that a dealer in relics was absolutely the last person who should have access to the parchment. If the man had realized what he held in his hands, and decided to sell it to the highest bidder or even went public with the contents, the consequences would have been catastrophic. It was a case of measuring the life of one unimportant but potentially dangerous individual against the spiritual well-being of tens of millions of worshippers around the world.

But now that man was dead, as the Englishman had instructed, and still the parchment hadn’t been recovered. Worse than that, it appeared that another person, a second market trader, in fact, was in possession of the relic, and somehow he had managed to involve a scientist in a museum in Cairo. And that man had contacted a professional colleague about the parchment. Knowledge of the object was spreading uncomfortably fast.

Morini regretted the loss of even one life — as a priest all human life was sacred to him — but the situation he found himself in offered no relief. If he didn’t relay the Englishman’s orders, far more than just a couple of men would die, and he knew it. Feeling a dull ache of revulsion course through his body, he muttered another brief prayer, then took out his mobile again. He knew he had to pass on the latest developments to the Englishman. It would not, he anticipated, be a very enjoyable conversation.

He raised his hand and ordered another café latte. When the drink was on the table in front of him and he was satisfied that nobody was close enough to be able to overhear any part of his conversation, he dialled the number.

As before, the call was answered by a quiet English voice which simply said ‘Yes?’, and Morini glanced around him, checking his surroundings once more before he said anything. Then he briefly explained the new developments. When he’d finished, the man he’d called didn’t respond for a few moments, and when he did Morini could hear the cold, suppressed anger in his voice, though his first words were a surprise.

‘I apologize. With what you’ve told me, it’s very clear that my agent in Cairo and the contractor he selected were inadequate, and I will take steps to remedy this, but only when the present operation has been concluded.’

Morini felt a fresh pang of guilt, guessing that whatever penalties the Englishman intended to visit upon the two men in Egypt would almost certainly be painful and possibly fatal.

‘So we have two further targets to take care of,’ the English voice continued, ‘and the precise location of the relic is still uncertain. It could be in the possession of the second custodian, or with the third, at the museum itself. In a few minutes I will send you a message with further orders. Anything else?’

‘Yes,’ Morini replied. ‘There is one other matter, which concerns the scientist. He has supplied some details of the relic by email to a professional colleague in England.’

‘What details?’

‘According to the intercept program, only two or three words.’

‘It might only be two or three words, but that could be quite enough to be a real threat to you. I will make arrangements to attend to that person as well. As he’s in England, there will be no need for you to get involved.’

‘It’s a woman,’ Morini pointed out.

‘Immaterial. When you reply to my text message, include everything you know about both the email and the recipient.’

For a couple of minutes after he had ended the call, Morini just sat at the table, the mobile phone still held in his right hand and his eyes staring vacantly in front of him.

He knew he was only acting as a conduit, relaying orders that had been formulated and decided upon by the Englishman who was in overall charge of the operation, as the protocols had stipulated. But he was still fighting a losing moral battle with his conscience. He knew with absolute certainty that the orders he had previously passed on to the man in Cairo had resulted in one death. But on the other side of the coin was the almost inevitable catastrophe of global proportions if the relic could not be recovered and its contents were made public. And that was a possibility that he simply could not tolerate.

Ever since Father Gianni’s revelations, Morini had viewed everything about the Vatican and the Catholic Church in a very different light. But despite that, he still believed in the fundamental goodness of his religion, and knew that he would do whatever was necessary to protect it. The only thing he couldn’t understand was why the damning — and damnable — parchment hadn’t been destroyed centuries earlier.

The reality Morini personally was facing was that if the parchment were not recovered, he would be the one who would have to explain the sequence of events, and the inevitable consequences, to the Holy Father. And that was something he was desperate to avoid, at all costs.

The text message he’d been expecting arrived about five minutes later, and even before he read it, Morini had guessed the contents.

He read the text twice to ensure he hadn’t missed anything, then finished his coffee, paid the bill and left the café. Five minutes later, from another payphone he hadn’t used before, his call to a mobile phone in Cairo was answered, and two minutes after that, he’d passed on the orders he had just been given.

Morini crossed himself as he ended the call, but in truth he was less concerned about the imminent deaths of two men in Egypt than he was about what the scientist had done. Ali Mohammed had emailed a woman in England, a woman — the software had informed him — who worked at the British Museum in London.

The leaks were getting worse and had now spread far beyond the borders of Egypt, and not for the first time he seriously doubted whether the contagion could be contained at all.