The Lost Testament

87

‘You have just got to be kidding me,’ Angela said, glancing across at Bronson to see the expression on his face. ‘I thought he died of a heart attack?’

‘I wish I was. Nothing about the death of John Paul made sense. He was young, for a pope, fit and healthy, and had no serious medical problems. Ultimately everybody dies of a heart attack because sooner or later it stops beating. What we don’t know is why his heart stopped beating, because there was no autopsy. But we do know that the day before his body was discovered, he had announced his intention to cleanse the Vatican of the influence of members of a so-called Masonic lodge named Propaganda Due, or P2.’

‘I remember,’ Angela said. ‘Roberto Calvi and Blackfriars Bridge.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But I thought it was disbanded after all that controversy over the Banco Ambrosiano?’

‘So did I, but the official view must be wrong. I think it just went underground.’

‘So it’s not the Vatican that is sending out teams of trained assassins to hunt us down? It’s this P2?’

Bronson nodded. ‘That’s what I think. I believe that the sheer existence of that parchment — or more accurately the text that is written on it — poses such a threat to the entire Christian religion that the Church will do anything, and I do mean anything, to destroy it. That’s why they’ve handed over the job to P2, which would have no scruples at all about killing us or anybody else. After all, if they’re prepared to act inside the Vatican itself and assassinate the Pope, murdering us wouldn’t give them a moment’s pause.’

Angela drew the hire car to a stop at a red traffic light on an almost deserted street somewhere near the centre of Madrid, and looked across at him.

‘You’re serious, aren’t you? But we still don’t know for sure if the parchment is real, what date it is, or what the text says.’

‘Well,’ Bronson said, ‘it was made pretty clear by Pere that the Roman Catholic Church has no doubts whatsoever about its authenticity, because it was stolen from the Vatican in the first place. Presumably they ran whatever test or tests they needed to do some years ago. I asked Pere what secret the text was describing, and he said he didn’t know, and I’m inclined to believe him.’

He paused and glanced over at Angela as she accelerated away from the junction.

‘Absolutely the only thing we can be sure of,’ Bronson continued, ‘is that whatever’s written on that old piece of parchment has the capability to do very serious damage to the Christian religion. The secret has to be something so fundamental that it would prove without doubt that the entire Christian religion was founded upon a lie. And that’s the reason why we can’t just buy an airline ticket or turn up at a railway station. If we’re going to survive this, we have to keep the lowest profile we possibly can. And we have to get back to Britain.’

‘You’re right,’ agreed Angela. ‘If we can get back to London and authenticate the relic, we can publish the information. Once it’s in the public domain there won’t be anything else they can do, and hopefully they’ll leave us alone.’

Bronson didn’t respond for a short while, but then he nodded.

‘I suppose that makes sense,’ he conceded.

‘My worry,’ Angela went on, ‘is that if the parchment passes whatever tests we subject it to and we do go ahead and publish what we’ve found, these people might still try and kill us out of revenge.’

‘You could be right,’ Bronson said, ‘and our best defence against that happening will be to organize the maximum possible publicity and ensure that our names are splashed across every newspaper and magazine in the country. That way, if they do make an attempt on our lives, whatever credibility the Catholic Church has left would be completely destroyed. It’s not much, but I still think doing that would be our best form of protection.’

Angela snorted in derision.

‘So what you’re saying is that our best option is to let ourselves be murdered because that would embarrass the Vatican! I should have walked away from this right at the beginning,’ Angela muttered. ‘I wish I’d done what Ali said, and forgotten all about the parchment as soon as he told me about the murder in Cairo.’

Bronson shook his head.

‘From what we’ve seen of these people, you would still have been a target, simply because you knew about it. And we’re not dead yet.’