The Lost Cathedral Read online

  When he followed the corridor as instructed, he came to Interrogation Room Seven: Stanza degli interrogatori Sette, in Italian, which was not a language to Kimball’s understanding. So he asked a nearby officer after pointing to a sign above the entryway: “Is this Interrogation Room Seven?”

  The officer nodded. “Sì.”

  “Thanks.” Kimball rapped hard on the door and entered the room without a verbal invite. Inside sat the Inspector General of the Gendarmerie and two recognizable faces from the Vatican’s Intelligence Service, the SIV, with Jesuit priests Fathers Auciello and Essex sitting in council.

  When Kimball first saw them he wondered why the SIV was involved, since the shooting was clearly under the jurisdiction of the Gendarmerie.

  Then Father Auciello waved him over to an empty chair. And Kimball could see the questioning features of the Inspector General who was trying to figure out the odd configurations of Kimball’s attire—priestly from the waist up, military from the waist down.

  Father Auciello offered the Vatican Knight his hand. “Good to see you again, Kimball.” His tone was flat and completely without inflection.

  After shaking hands with Father Essex and having been introduced to the Inspector General, Kimball took the seat, which appeared too small for him due to his immense size.

  “I’ve just been informed by Bishop Remaldi that Bonasero’s been shot,” said Kimball. “Status?” As soon as Kimball asked that question he cringed inwardly, expecting the worst but hoping for the best.

  Father Auciello was a deeply tanned man with shock-white hair and cocoa-colored eyes. His demeanor was stoic. “On the way to Gemelli,” he began, “he flat-lined.”

  Kimball felt a stab deep in his gut.

  “But they were able to bring him back,” Auciello added. “But they’re not sure if brain damage is involved since he’s in a coma.”

  Kimball nodded: But he’s alive.

  “The reason why we asked for you, Kimball,” said Father Essex---the SIV’s deputy director and British from his inflection---as he leaned over the table and winged his elbows across the tabletop, “is that the Gendarmerie was able to place the shooter into their custody.”

  “Which is why I don’t understand your presence here,” Kimball said, “since this type of investigation comes under Gendarmerie jurisdiction.”

  Essex nodded. “I agree. But this is different.”

  “How so?”

  “We’re here because of who the shooter is.”

  Kimball eased back into his chair and appeared to mull this over. On May 13th, 1981, Pope John Paul II was nearly assassinated by Mehmet Ali Ağca, with the assassination attempt believed to have been originated by the KGB who instructed the Bulgarian and East German secret services to carry out the operation. Further allegations pointed to the KGB as instructing the Bulgarian Secret Service to assassinate the pope because of his support of Poland's Solidarity movement, seeing it as one of the most significant threats to Soviet authority in Eastern Europe. Was this attempt also driven by political motivations? Kimball didn’t see it that way. But why the SIV?

  “Who are we talking about?” asked Kimball.

  “First of all,” said Father Auciello, “the General Inspector here has been sworn to secrecy that he is never to speak of your presence here. Of course, certain things as to who you are and what you do has been omitted for obvious reasons. All he knows is that you’re important to the Church.”

  Kimball looked at the Inspector general, a small man with a hatchet face and black eyes. “You’re talking to me as if the guy isn’t here. He’s sitting four feet away from me.”

  “He doesn’t speak English. Not a word. But he is the Inspector General and this is his jurisdiction.”

  “Why am I getting the feeling that this is somehow becoming my jurisdiction as well?”

  “The shooter,” was all Essex said.

  “What about him?”

  “You’re not going to like what you’re about to see.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think it’s best that we show you.”

  Fathers Essex and Auciello got to their feet with the Inspector General following their lead, and with Kimball following the Inspector General’s. They walked out of the room and into an adjoining hallway, one that was built for single-filing. At the end of the corridor was a squared chamber that led to a holding cell. In front of the door stood two guards of the Gendarmerie. After the Inspector General barked orders in Italian and waved his hand, the first guard nodded, swiped a card over the glass reader, then pressed a code on the keypad which caused the bolts to the cell door to pull back, unlocking it. With a whisper the door detached itself from its locking mechanism and parted slightly from the doorjamb. Grabbing the handle, the guard opened the door fully and allowed Kimball a wide berth to enter the cell.

  As soon as he entered the cell, Kimball recognized the shooter. At first his mouth slowly opened with the beginnings of mute protest, then he gathered himself as he took a few steps deeper into the cell. Fixing his eyes on the assassin, who was sitting on the mattress with his legs underneath him and hands on both knees, Kimball’s mind tugged at him from many different directions. He was confused and angry, with logic and reason quickly abandoning him.

  From his position on the bunk, the assassin looked up with vacant eyes and said, “Hello, Kimball . . . I wish I could say it was good to see you again.”

  Kimball wanted to kill the man.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The second assassin was stowing himself in a hotel in Rome, not too far from the Coliseum, listening to the news that monopolized the airways. Pope Pius was shot and severely wounded, but he was still alive and speculated to be in a coma by the media, who formulated that particular theory from marginal leaks by hospital staff. Little else was said.

  “The Luminaries won’t like this,” he commented softly to himself in German. “Not one bit.”

  As if on cue his satellite phone chirped. Only one number was attached to it. Hitting the ‘on’ button, he said, “Yes, Your Luminary.”

  “The pope lives.”

  “But not for long.”

  “We don’t know that. Bonasero Vessucci is a very strong man. One of conviction. I know this firsthand.”

  “Yes, Your Luminary.”

  “Finish the job.”

  “Yes, Your Luminary.”

  After hanging up the assassin went to the closet, removed a small aluminum case, then placed it on the bed. Inside was a foam bedding that housed the disassembled pieces of a Glock, and a suppressor that was as long as the gun’s barrel. After removing the pieces and attaching them, then seating the clip and racking the slide, he removed the foam bedding to reveal what was underneath it.

  The assassin looked at the vest with neutral eyes. Feelings, sentiments or ideas were muted. He simply responded by the imbedded wishes that were not his own. Life and death had no reason for him; therefore, he had no fear.

  Picking up the vest, he then examined it and noted the thin bricks of Semtex attached to it. The wires were disconnected from the ignition device, disabling it. After donning the vest, he then made the connections. When a red light on the device signaled a live connection, he ran the wire of the activation-button along the length of his arm and to his hand, and taped it. For the button to be engaged, he would have to flip the protective lid back, and then push the button to set off the Semtex. Once he secured the vest he put on a shirt, a suit coat, and hid his shoulder holster beneath the fold of his jacket.

  Looking into the mirror the assassin stood staring at his image. His face was young and lean with nary a line other than the bordering appearance of crow’s feet. His hair was raven with eyes just as dark. And in those eyes nothing seemed to exist—no will, no conscience, no self-sustaining mechanism that governed his dreams or motivations, nothing but a vacuum filled with the whispers of voices that were alien and familiar to him at the same time.

  After smoothing out the seams and checking for
bulges that could draw suspicious eyes, and then seeing that he was good to go, the voices began, all hushed whispers, telling him to kill the man who lay in Gemelli Hospital with a bullet in his chest.

  Feeling the vest and knowing the power of Semtex, he knew he would not fail.

  And the Luminaries would be pleased.

  #

  After the Luminary closed the call with the assassin, he walked along dark corridors beneath the surface of a jungle landscape with the tunnels originating from the sacristy of an aged cathedral. The air was cool underground, not like the syrupy thickness above ground where the humidity was always in the eighty-percent range. Ancient torches lined the walls with the licks of fire casting weird and eerie shadows against the walls. And every footfall, which was more of a dragging of feet across the stone floor, sounded off as haunting scratches.

  In life his real name was Gunter Wilhelm, a one-time servant of Hitler’s Youth. As part of the strict divide between the divisions of Hitler’s Youth and the Jungvolk—with Jungvolk boys between the ages of ten and fourteen, and the Youth between the ages of fourteen to eighteen—Wilhelm served as troop commander at sixteen years of age, when the two groups combined as Germany started to fall to Soviet and Allied aggression. He commanded boys as young as ten to serve the flak guns near Berlin. But as the situation worsened, the boys were eventually transferred all over Germany to operate search lights and assist with communications, often riding their bicycles as dispatch riders. Boys closer to fighting age, however, served along the Russian Front as soldiers who took on the Red Army, their days as a Youth, even at sixteen, gone. And Gunter, like most boys his age, with some younger by a year or two, were forced to grow up with the boyhood memories of death and dying, and of blood and gore.

  But when the fight became hopeless, when the battles had whittled the boys down to hollow-eyed waifs with dirty faces, Gunter Wilhelm still maintained Third Reich ideologies: elements of anti-Semitism and eugenics, the belief and practice which aims at improving genetic quality. He also believed in the ideology of One Rule, One Law and One Religion, with the world unified as a collective and having no self or ideas to contradict, since One Rule, One Law and One Religion was a given to be accepted with blind faith. And from this ideology would spring wholesale harmony since everyone and everything was the same. There would be no differences, no lack of intolerance since everyone shared the same view and values where only the strong would survive. Those without value or were mentally and physically challenged would be mercifully terminated in the name of eugenics to create a world that would accept one thing: perfection.

  Those of Jewish, Catholic and Protestant faiths had no foothold in Wilhelm’s world. Nor did the Muslims or those who held the Islamic faith quite dearly. And since Christianity had no place in his plans, nor any religion for that matter other than the belief of One Rule, One Law and One Religion, the senior of the Luminary Triumvirate was spearheading and staging a global coup using Third Reich values. The cherishment of Hitler had never strayed too far from his thoughts or beliefs, seeing the dictator’s world as his own.

  It would be a good world, he considered.

  When the war was finally lost and the children, for the most part, orphaned, Wilhelm kept his troops together while still clinging to the hope that the Reich was not dead. But in most people the spirit of hope had dwindled to a dead, cold ember. And when the boys within his ranks voiced their will to leave, they were either shot or summarily hanged on the spot with Wilhelm either keeping a finger on the trigger, or a hand on the hangman’s noose.

  But in the end one stood against him, a boy of thirteen who didn’t have a vicious bone in his body or was capable of raising a hand against another. But he was a good orator and an astute soldier who others believed in and followed, because he gave them a different kind of faith than Wilhelm Gunter. Instead of “One Rule, One Law and One Religion,” he rekindled a faith that was once lost under the weighted values of the Reich. The principles of killing and culling and perfecting a new regime of people with God nothing but an afterthought, this boy gave them a benign God that was courage. He gave them hope when they abandoned hope. He gave them the way to see the Light rather than the blackness that was the obscene dream of Hitler’s Reich.

  And this disturbed Wilhelm greatly because this child of thirteen was undermining his position by the strength of his words and the hope they provided. Everyone, he told himself, always gravitated toward the one they believed to have the answers or solutions.

  But Wilhelm had run the gamut and his words were no longer effective. He had lost his team to this boy whose hopes were never that of the Reich’s, but to a God Wilhelm knew he would never see.

  Few stayed behind to carry on the Führer’s dream. Most, however, turned a different way, believing Wilhelm to be the devil’s incarnate.

  When the war ended and the criminals left Germany for the refuge of other countries, Wilhelm departed with those who remained loyal to him and promised them that he would rebuild, relive, and once again resuscitate new life in the old ways. The group, however, had dwindled over the years due to age and sickness, the number down to its final three members, now a Triumvirate.

  Deep inside the tunnels was a branch that served as the living quarters of the Luminaries. The rooms were ample and sizeable with a touch of sophistication---such as a wide bed, an old-time stereo to play the classical music of Bach and Beethoven, a cabinet to hold fine liqueurs and crystal glassware, an extensive library, all the benefits of a person of leisure. On the mantle of a faux fireplace that held the ornate carvings of a battle between the heavenly angels and those who had fallen, were several photos, some having yellowed to the color of old parchment due to their age. Wilhelm stepped to the mantle and traced a finger that was as long and thin as a talon over the photos frames. On one picture in particular he kept his finger still, then grabbed the frame. It was an old black and white whose edges, even within the protective frame, was frayed. On the lower left was a white spot where the film had once blistered and peeled away. But it did little to the photo since it was a spot of non-importance.

  He then traced a finger over the images, over the dirt-smudged faces of his Youth Unit. There were no smiles, no marginal fabrications to invent one. Everyone appeared stoic with the background of Germany in obvious ruins. But the look on one boy’s face seemed to radiate and bask in the glory not of Hitler’s vision, but in the vision of his God. There was hope, a spirit, something that no one else in the group seemed to have at the time.

  He traced his fingertip over the image, then tapped the point of his fingernail over the figure.

  . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .

  Then he stopped and sighed through his nose.

  “Franz Kleimer-Schmidt,” he said softly. Then even softer: “Franz . . . Kleimer-Schmidt.”

  He then placed the photo face down, went to his wind-up stereo, and fell pleasantly into the sounds of Beethoven.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When the assassin spoke, he did so in a manner that was flat and monotone. And when he looked directly at Kimball, Kimball could see that the pupils of the man’s eyes had contracted to pinprick points to forbid anything to enter or corrupt his thoughts.

  Kimball stepped forward and cocked his head to the side as if to better understand the actuality of the moment. “Phinehas,” was all he could say.

  The assassin continued to sit silently.

  Then from Kimball, “Why?”

  Phinehas leaned forward. “His death was ordained by the Luminaries,” he answered evenly. Then he eased back into a meditative position.

  “Who?”

  Phinehas remained silent.

  “You disappeared three years ago on Shepherd One,” added Kimball. “The plane went down with everyone onboard lost.”

  Phinehas appeared not to hear him, the man completely detached.

  “Phinehas!”

  The assassin sat idle.

  When Kimball took an aggressive step
forward, Phinehas reacted by clenching his fists, which stopped Kimball short. Phinehas was a skilled fighter, a Vatican Knight with exceptional skills matched by few. And since a challenge in Gendarmerie Hall would not be warranted, Kimball’s anger continued to percolate.

  “Talk to me, Phinehas! Why Bonasero? Why try to kill him? It doesn’t make sense!” And where the hell have you been for the past three years?

  There were so many questions that were met with zero answers.

  “Phinehas!”

  The assassin closed his eyes and whispered, “The Luminaries.”

  “Who are these Luminaries you keep talking about?” The frustration was so apparent in Kimball’s voice that he finally had to be ushered away by Father Auciello.

  Once the cell door closed behind them and locked, Father Auciello could see rage beginning to take control of Kimball’s features. “It’s not Phinehas,” the priest told him.

  “Of course it’s Phinehas.”

  “No, Kimball. The Phinehas we knew is gone. That man in there,” he said, pointing toward the cell, “is a facsimile of the man we once knew.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Something happened to him three years ago when the plane went down. We assumed they were killed in a crash. That may still hold true for most, maybe even for some. But Phinehas is here because someone sent him to kill Bonasero. And Phinehas, if he was in the right frame of mind, would never do that unless his mind had been recalibrated.”

  Then from Kimball, a sudden enlightenment: “A Manchurian candidate.”

  Auciello nodded. “He recognizes faces. He knew who you were. But he was also distant and obviously disconnected. There were six Vatican Knights onboard Shepherd One when it was lost. Six Vatican Knights, Kimball, is a small force to be reckoned with.”