The Hand of Christ (22 page)

“
Excuse me, Monsieur Primitus, but of course I am aware.” Pausing, he gathered himself before saying to the fuming leader, “What I meant was that the confirmation that the parchment found by the Pope was our parchment occurred only two weeks ago.” Pausing again, and taking a breath, the Messenger slowly meted out, “The Pope found our parchment nearly three months ago, after the renovation of his apartment, after the Conclave. I had to be sure that it was the Apocryphal that we have long searched for before informing you.”

The Messenger was enjoying this.

He continued, “I could only confirm two weeks ago that it was the parchment lost during the sack of Constantinople. I did not want to make any mistakes; I needed to be sure. One of our followers is inside the Vatican. He has worked to confirm what I already know to be true. The Pope has found it; indeed, it was our Apocryphal.”

“
You mean Monsignor Hauptmann?” The Primitus was clearly distressed; his voice was quivering when he said, “It was found three months ago? You have known for this long and have withheld this from me?”

“
As I said, I had to…”

The Primitus cut him off and interjected, “The Pope, he still has it, where?”

Smirking slightly now, the Messenger could sense that his plan was working, the geriatric bastard was losing the usual steadfast control of his emotions. He responded to the question, “Yes, he does still have it, but I do not yet know where he has been keeping it. Our man is working to find it, but it is a difficult task. One cannot simply nose around the Vatican or the private quarters of the Pope unabated and unquestioned.”

The Primitus’s painful grasp of the phone radiated up his arm; he forced himself to relax, and loosened his grip on the phone as he closed his eyes. He needed to take a moment to process what he had just heard. The lost Apocryphal of Paul was found, and by none other than the Pope. The Primitus before him had warned him of this moment just as the one before him warned each new leader. But each always reassured the next man in line that the potential devastation caused by someone other than a member of the Order holding the parchment meant little without the proof that the book would bring. Now, the book was gone and the parchment found; the odds of this seemed incalculable.

The Primitus suddenly felt like the chamber’s decorated amber panels within which he sat were closing in on him. The artistic and architectural marvel that surrounded him was a playful design by Wolffram, the 18
^th
century amber master. The Primitus’s feet seemed heavy on the parquet flooring, as if they couldn’t possibly move. Casting his eyes upward, he stared momentarily at the ubiquitous painting that covered the ceiling; it seemed to stare angrily back at him, mocking him. This room has always been his favorite, a gift to his lineage in 1945, and on its own worth a fortune. Stolen from the Russians by Nazi soldiers, many still search for the so-called
Eighth Wonder.
This is the place that the Primitus went to find solace.

At this moment he found no peace.

The Primitus returned his focus to the telephone and to the Messenger and asked, “How did the book come to be missing, you didn’t answer my question, was the vault damaged and exposed in the attack?”

“
No, the Aramaen vault is still intact and unknown to anyone. I had sent my Second to retrieve the book.” The Primitus wouldn’t like this.

“
What! You told your Second? How could you so carelessly tell another man of the book’s location! It is your charge to guard that book. No one else was to know of it! You fool! You have violated that which keeps us bound to our mission! The centuries of protocol, abandoned!”

The Primitus felt his control beginning to evaporate once more, but at a much faster rate, he felt drained of it. His voice trembled with the ripples of rage as he leaped quickly onto his aged feet, and before he completely lost his grasp of what little control he had left, screamed his orders to the Messenger, “Monsieur, I will have no choice but to trust you with these tasks, you must recover our parchment. You must find the book immediately; you must recover both items! It would seem that there is much to be concerned with this evening, what else can you tell me, do you have any idea where the book may be? Where is your Second now?”

“
I am sorry to report that he is dead, Monsieur, he was killed in the attack at Umayyad,” the Messenger lied, but continued, “The book’s resting place in the vault was empty; he had checked to be sure and was able to inform me of this before he was killed. The book was not in the mosque. But I believe that I know who has it.”

“
Who?”

“
Monsieur, only one man made it out of the attack at Umayyad alive. He was last seen being extracted from Damascus by a team of men; they were a U.S. Special Operations Team.”

“
US Special Operations?”

“
Yes Monsieur, they conducted the extrication with the same methods used by Navy Seals or Delta Force but it is hard to say for sure which. They evacuated the man on two Blackhawk attack helicopters that had been scrubbed of their markings. I have satellite photos of this.

He was carried to the Mediterranean and put on board of a US Aircraft carrier, but only for a short time. An unknown aircraft was catapulted from the deck. It disappeared from RADAR but I was able to get a satellite photo before it did. It is an unidentified but obviously black aircraft with stealth and high mach capabilities.

“
High mach capabilities? You mean hypersonic?”

“
Yes, but faster.”

“
What do you mean faster? How can you be certain? I thought you lost it on satellite and RADAR?”

“
Yes, sir, I did. But the satellite photo clearly shows a high mach contrail that, until now, had been only theoretical: it is unique, very faint, and completely atypical in shape. This suggests that theory is now real; it would indicate that this is a high mach, top-secret aircraft, and the first and only of its kind I suspect. It was the last image I received before the aircraft completely disappeared.

I believe that the survivor of the attack was flown back to the US on this aircraft, but cannot be sure, as I said, I lost track of it.”

“
Who is this man? How can you possibly know that he has the book? Why would he have our book Monsieur? How could the American have come to know of it?”

“
He is the attaché to the U.S. Ambassador killed in Damascus. But that was just his cover; he is an officer with the CIA. He is Dr. Michael Sterling, an expert in the Middle East and Religious Studies. We know that the attaché to Syria had been working with the CIA for years; he was also with Syrian Intelligence. The CIA agent and the Syrian have a lengthy relationship going back more than a decade.

This American is well trained. Syrian Intelligence believes he has been involved in a number of extremely successful covert operations against Muslim forces over the past decade. It is plausible that the Syrian had learned of the book. I can not be certain how he could know this, but at the moment it is the only possible explanation.”

The CIA? Could it really be that the Other was somehow involved?
The Primitus was instantly troubled by this thought.

“
Monsieur, what you hypothesize implies that we have a traitor in our organization and that is impossible, unless that traitor is you. You and your dead Second were the only people that knew where that book was kept. How could the Syrian have learned of the book if one of you hadn’t told him?”

The Messenger felt as if he had allowed himself to become trapped in a corner, he wanted to attack but knew that could prove dangerous.
Be careful,
he thought
to himself
, remember Sun Tzu.
Instead, he conceded, “I handpicked and trained Shalid myself,” this was the first time he had spoken his name out loud since having put a bullet into his head. “From the day I pulled him of the streets of Beirut, I raised him like he was my child, I saw to his education and upbringing personally. I cannot say yet how this has all transpired, just that it has.”

When finished, the Messenger used his tactic for the second time today and waited with his breath held for what seemed an inordinate amount of time: golden silence.

The Primitus carefully calculated his thoughts. Finally, he responded, “You have been most careless, and I am discouraged and disappointed in you. You have put our mission, our very existence at risk. The power that we hold has been carefully crafted and guided for longer than you can comprehend. We are entrusted with the world’s most guarded secret, a secret that is the very essence and fulcrum of our power. We obviously have much work to do. Inform the Other and prepare for a gathering. I will be in touch.”

The line went dead.

The plan was working.

Soon, he would be face-to-face with the only man in his way.

The Messenger smiled as he thought, in the words of Sun Tzu: crush him.

Chapter Twenty-Two

1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW

The White House Situation Room

In the basement of the West Wing of the White House, the Secretary of Defense, the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff, and the respective directors of the varying offices of US and Military Intelligence, along with their aides, deputies, and second-in-commands were gathered in the Situation Room – all were unsettled.

Staff members of the National Security Council were huddled tightly in one corner of the room’s five thousand square feet, frantically debating amongst one another. At times, their voices rose above the rest, causing a powerful head or two to glare in their direction.

“
The two may be unrelated, Ron!”

Ron Willis is a man that is comfortable in stressful situations, thriving on them. An unassuming man of average height, weight, and proportion, Ron can blend easily in any setting. As a Deputy Director of the CIA and a member of the National Security Council, he has experienced his share of tense moments throughout his career.

Beginning his tenure with the CIA in the late 1970’s, Ron was unrepeated in history lessons, but had been instrumental in guiding the US through the cold war, which resulted in a fast rise through the ranks of the CIA. It is largely suspected by those with compartmentalized information, and deeply classified, that during the decade and a half he had spent deeply embedded in the former USSR he had gained the ear of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist party and Head of State before communism fell.

Ron’s grasp of the Russian language is better than impeccable, even having a hint of a Moscow accent. A brilliant man, unencumbered with ties to a wife and children, he had blended into communist Russia and infiltrated the offices of Gorbachev over the course of the time he had spent in the communist country.

In a daring and calculated move, Ron had entrenched the ideas of glasnost and perestroika – openness and restructuring – into the mind and policies of Gorbachev. These were the very policies that had lead to the fall of the Iron Curtain. The operation had been codenamed Chrysalis: absolute change of the body, unseen, and from within.

It had been the CIA’s second successful silent coup, the first having occurred in Iran twelve years earlier. (Although many would argue that the Iranian coup was an abject failure, having allowed for the rise of the current Islamic Republic.)

During Ron’s time in the Soviet Union, a number of CIA-turned Russian operatives were being executed at an alarming rate. A former classmate of Ron’s, Aldrich Ames, had been selling the names of Russian double-agents for a number of years in order to fuel his ego and his wife’s relentless need for the finer things in life.

Ron’s identity had been one of those names disclosed to the Russians. Consequently, a team of KGB agents, commanded by a young agent named Vladimir, and future head of the communist counterpart to the head of the CIA, were closing in fast. Dressed as a downtrodden beggar, Ron was able to escape Moscow with only a handful of cash and forged Russian travel documents. He even held the street level entrance of his 4
^th
floor Moscow flat open for the armed agents whilst boldly holding out his hand asking for spare change.

In the same calm manner that he now displayed in the White House Situation Room and on that day in Moscow, Ron had stolen a car and fled Moscow. He had been nearly at freedom’s gate when the car had run out of gas. At a nearby farm, he was able to find a bike, which he rode to the border between Finland and the Soviet Union. The border guards gave Ron little trouble. He killed them both.

Since then, Ron has spent his time fighting government officials.

The Director of the National Security Council, Dr. Samuel Montag, was uneasily close to Ron as they stood in the corner of the Situation Room, and was playing devil’s advocate.

Ron chose his words carefully. “Of course, Sam, it is plausible that the two events are unrelated. However, I don’t believe that they are.”

“
How can you say that, what makes you think that the attack on the delegates in Damascus and the Ayatollah’s assassination are related?”

Before Ron could answer, the room suddenly became void of all sound. An uneasy tension cascaded the room almost as if every occupant had suddenly held his breath. The reason soon became clear; a deep voice spoke, “Ron, please answer the Director’s question, I am also curious as to what makes you think that the events are related to one another.”