had got by without it before.
O’Malley sat forward on the edge of his chair. For all his size, he seemed to Patrick a remarkably gentle man. Gentle, but not soft. Patrick sensed something in him, a kind of righteous anger that would tear his gentleness to shreds and burn it if it seemed necessary.
‘You’ll have to forgive my theatricality in taking you off so mysteriously, Patrick. But I did have a serious purpose in showing you that document. Had you not seen it - the original, mind, not a copy - you
might think some of the things I am about to tell you a little ... far-fetched. Unfortunately, they are not. I would give anything to have them so, but they will not be other than what they are.’
He paused and folded his hands in front of him as though in prayer.
‘Roberto Quadri and I,’ he began, speaking slowly, ‘are directors of an organization called fraternita. The name is really an acronym: Fondazione per Reabilitazione degli Aderenti e Transfughi delle Religioni Nuove in Italia - the Foundation for the Rehabilitation of Adherents and Fugitives from New Religions in Italy. Actually, the Foundation is just the Italian branch of a much larger network set up by the Church a few years ago to help people who have been harmed in some way by their involvement in new religious movements - what the newspapers sometimes call cults. Moonies, Scientologists, followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Children of God, Krishna devotees, Baha’is, Divine Light Missionaries - the list is endless.
‘We’re only interested in people who think they have suffered through their involvement: disciples who are in and want help getting out, former members who have problems adjusting to the ordinary world again. We find them jobs, give them temporary accommodation, help reconcile them with their families. And sometimes protect them from other cult members who want to get them back or teach them a lesson for leaving in the first place. If someone’s in a group and is happy that way, we’re just as happy to leave him there. Unlike some organizations I could mention, we don’t go in for kidnapping sect members and deprogramming them. That only amounts to brainwashing them to accept what society thinks is normal.’
He glanced round the room.
‘But since modern society is itself even more abnormal than many of the sects, I see no particular benefits in forcing someone who has found some sort of meaning for himself to return to the lunatic asylum out in the streets.’
He paused.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to preach. To continue. Our little group has been in existence about ten years now, but during the last five of those Roberto and I have spent an increasingly large amount of our time with one particular cult. Roberto, by the way, used to be a member of ISKCON, the Hare Krishna movement. He stopped travelling to other planets twelve years ago, studied law, and started helping fraternitA full time six years back. I think I’d better let him take over at this point.’
Quadri put his cup on the floor. Again, Patrick noticed the tiredness, the slow movements of someone critically ill. When the lawyer spoke, however, his voice had none of the languor Patrick expected. He was incisive, clear, and wholly in command of his subject.
‘Okay, where do I start? At the beginning, I suppose. So, how did all this start? Not fraternita, but this thing we’re all involved in.’ He paused.
‘Not long after I started working for Dermot, a woman arrived at our office in Rome. I was on duty. I answered the door and brought her in. She looked to me as though she was in her mid-forties, but something made me think she might be much younger than that. At first, she was in a state of extreme distress - very frightened, very jumpy. She kept looking round, as though expecting someone she didn’t want to see. It took a long time before she could summon up enough courage to talk. It
took days. Weeks for all the details to emerge.
We’d just bought this apartment as a refuge for people on the run from the more violent sects, and I brought her here the same evening. After Dermot and I heard her story, we gave her exclusive use. Since the deeds had not yet been transferred to fraternita, I was able to make the entire transaction disappear. Not even the other directors knew of its existence. They still don’t.’
He paused to pour more coffee into his cup.
‘For weeks I stayed here in the apartment with her. She was so frightened, she could not be left alone, not for a moment. Dermot came on the second day and every day after that. Sometimes we talked into the early morning, sometimes we just sat with her in silence, reading, waiting for her to talk again. She was on edge, you see, so much on edge. But the more she talked the calmer she became. It was a sort of therapy, you understand, just to tell us what she knew.
‘At first we thought, she’s making this up; she’s telling lies or she has a vivid imagination. No doubt we thought other things too - that she was mad at heart, frantic with some grief, perhaps, a lonely woman looking for fears to comfort her, to give her existence meaning and purpose. Well, we were used then to milder sorts of madness, the trivial obsessions of spiritual misfits. Sex is the chief obsession: if they dream, they dream of sex. Some have too little, some too much, others none at all; it makes no difference. But not for her. If she was mad, she was mad with violence. If she dreamed, she had dreams of slaughter.’
He paused, as though entranced by the mere possibility of such dreams. ‘But the more we talked with her, the more we came to know she was not
mad. She was sane, you see. Very sane indeed.
‘She gave us a list of things we could investigate without drawing attention to ourselves. And everywhere we looked, we found confirmation of what she had told us. Her story held water. I wish ...’ He hesitated, glancing at Patrick, then at Assefa, ‘I wish now it had been a lie, or she had been mad.’
Then his eye caught Francesca’s and he smiled, a little wan smile, lonely, private. ‘Well, perhaps not that. How could we have wished that? Mistaken, let
us say.’ He paused briefly, fixing his eye on Patrick before
continuing.
‘Signor Canavan, the document you were shown this morning at the Vatican - you are satisfied as to its authenticity?’
Patrick hesitated.
‘I’m not an expert,’ he said. ‘But superficially, yes - it seemed genuine. It had the feel of the thing, it felt like ... what I imagine a document from that period would be like.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry, that isn’t very specific. Well, the Aramaic was convincing, the details of the siege were historical, as far as I remember them from Josephus. But for any sort of certainty, you’d have to bring in a paleographer, someone with the right equipment, with the expertise to do a proper job, to examine the material, the ink, the script, the language. Ideally, a team of experts.’
‘Yes,’ said Roberto. ‘I know. But that has already been done to our satisfaction. Eamonn De Faoite examined the letter in the Archives under the pretence of working on the other documents in that volume. There are facilities there, excellent facilities. They are not so medieval as they would like to seem. I have a copy of his report here, if you would like to examine it.’
Patrick shook his head.
‘Very well. Perhaps you will give us a description of the contents of the letter, for the benefit of Father Makonnen, who has not seen it.’
Hesitantly, Patrick did as requested. Assefa listened carefully, motionless, like a condemned man hearing his sentence read out in court, slowly, with deliberation, line by damning line. When Patrick finished, he said nothing. He had come to a redundancy of words.
Quadri spoke again in his quiet lawyer’s voice. ‘As you will have guessed by now, the Brotherhood to which that letter refers did not vanish into the mists of time. They are still very much with us. Over the centuries, they have grown subtle and rich and powerful, and now they are poised to make a bid for a power and influence even they have never previously dreamed of.’ He paused and took a mouthful of hot coffee.
‘I think Francesca should explain the rest in her own words,’ he said.
Patrick turned his eyes to Francesca, only to find her gaze fixed on the floor, avoiding all contact with the others. He watched her collect herself, and with a pang recognized the way she drew her brows together, frowning briefly as she gathered her thoughts.
‘There has always been a Brotherhood,’ she began. ‘Since the days of John the Zealot, there has been in existence somewhere a body of men and women dedicated to the preservation of mankind’s greatest secret, the
