and present danger’, an order that only the President could approve. O’Connor doubted the President had any idea of what the Vice President, Wiley or the hotheads in the Pentagon were up to. He put the aspirin roulette pill back into the sachet in his briefcase. The CIA was not the same agency he’d joined nearly twenty years before; and not until he worked out why Washington wanted this woman dead would he comply.
26
T he Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Salvatore Felici, was working at his huge desk in his opulent office in the Palazzo della Sacra Inquisizione. A forbidding grey-and-ochre palace, it still went by the name of the Sacred Inquisition. Felici’s father, Alberto, had been a trusted advisor to Pope Pius XII and the cardinal was carrying on in his family’s tradition of service to the Holy Church.
Tall and powerfully built, Cardinal Felici was proud of his good head of fine black hair, flecked with grey and combed straight back under his scarlet zucchetto, the distinctive skull cap of the College of Cardinals. He had a long rectangular face, and a large aquiline nose. His piercing grey eyes were hooded, underscored by dark circles, but, like a peregrine falcon, Salvatore Felici missed nothing. His anger rose as he again scrutinised an article by the Guatemalan archaeologist, Dr Weizman, dutifully forwarded to his office by the papal nuncio in Guatemala City. Felici’s red pen was poised to strike as he absorbed her assertions on the existence of a lost codex, and tried to decipher the intermeshing glyphs on Aleta’s diagram of the Mayan calendars: Unlike our own linear calendars, the Mayan calendars, as the diagram shows, measured time in short and long cycles which enabled them to accurately predict major recurring events. The Mayan short- and long-count calendars intermeshed like gears in a gearbox. The larger wheel, the Haab, was based on cycles of the earth, using eighteen months with twenty days in a month giving 360 days. A short nineteenth month consisted of the extra five days, totalling 365. The smaller gear, the sacred Tzolk’in, was based on the cycles of the Pleiades star cluster in the constellation Taurus, so prominent in the night skies of planet earth. The twenty-first of December 2012 heralds a rare once-in-26 000 years meshing of calendar gears that can predict four days, 4000 or 40 000 days in advance. We are living in the Mayan end times, an end time that is dictated precisely by the movement of the planets. The great 26000-year cycle, or 25625 years to be precise, consists of five smaller cycles, each 5125 years in length, and the Maya discovered that our sun, which they called Kinich-Ahau, synchronises with the centre of our galaxy once in each of the smaller cycles. There is an abundance of evidence that proves the accuracy of Mayan predictions. Over a thousand years before it occurred, the Maya predicted the solar eclipse on 11 August 1999 down to the last second – 11:03:07 universal coordinated time – an eclipse that was the most watched in history and the first visible in the United Kingdom since
1927.
We are now in the fifth cycle of the sun. Mayan stelae recovered from Guatemala record that four previous civilisations have been totally destroyed by horrendous apocalypses driven by the alignment of the sun with the centre of the galaxy. Intense energy from the centre generates solar flares of unimaginable power, coupled with a reversal of the sun’s own magnetic field. So, is there anything we can do about this? An ancient Maya codex holds the keys to our survival, but Mayan elders remain tight-lipped about its location.
In his fine, spidery hand, Felici wrote in the margin of The Mayan Archaeologist article: Mayan pagan practices have always been a threat to the one true faith. Libraries burned for good reason. If Maya Codex exists, imperative it be recovered and stored in secret archives – Weizman is searching for it, and needs watching.
Felici returned the magazine to his in-tray and glanced at the photograph of Tomas de Torquemada displayed prominently on his bookcase, a man he constantly drew on for inspiration. Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, had been a staunch guardian of the Faith.
Felici rose from his desk, his Italian leather shoes sinking into the crimson carpet as he moved to the opposite wall where St Jerome, Leonardo da Vinci’s priceless oil on wood, on loan from the Vatican’s Pinacoteca, dominated the room. Saint Jerome was Salvatore Felici’s favourite saint. In 393 AD Jerome had denounced sexual intercourse as corrupt, and Felici, too, believed that apart from the purposes of procreation, married couples should abstain from sexual activity altogether. He swung the painting aside, dialled the combination of his wall safe, extracted a crimson file embossed in gold with his personal coat of arms, replaced the painting and returned to his desk. The file held copies of the CIA documents on Dr Weizman that Howard Wiley had forwarded the previous week in the diplomatic bag. The file also held the regular reports from the papal nuncio in Guatemala City, many of them charting the rise of those left-wing governments in the Americas that were opposed to the Church in Rome.
Felici sank back into his plush red-leather chair. Deep in thought, he looked out the palazzo windows towards the 300-year-old columns of Bernini’s Colonnade across the Piazza San Pietro. The Palazzo della Sacra Inquisizione, adjacent to the Porta Cavalleggeri , one of the ancient gates in the walls of the Vatican, had been built in 1571 by Pope Pius V to house what was then known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. In the sixteenth century the Holy Church condoned the Inquisition’s widespread use of torture. For those who refused to reconcile with the Catholic faith, that torture included burning at the stake, a policy that turned the Vatican’s Inquisition into one of the most feared offices in Europe. The Holy Church’s successor to the Inquisition had been given a softer title – the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – but it was still housed in the same palace and still charged with investigating heresy. As Aleta had pointed out elsewhere in her article, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had towered over the modern-day Inquisition for nearly twenty-four years, earning the nickname of ‘God’s rottweiler’, before being elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. It was a career path Cardinal Salvatore Felici had every intention of following. At sixty-two, in terms of being papabile, a future contender for the papacy and the Keys of Peter, Felici was still young; but he alone knew that if his past ever surfaced, his career would be finished.
Agitated, he fiddled with the solid gold pectoral cross that was suspended over his crimson silk sash on a heavy gold chain. The chain was attached to one of the thirty-three silk buttons of his soutane, each button symbolising one year in the life of Christ. The unusual cross, encrusted with a large ruby surrounded by twelve large diamonds, had been acquired by his father during the war. Felici turned his attention to the growing threats posed to the Holy Church in Latin America. The threat came not only from newly elected governments, but from outspoken academics, and of the latter Dr Aleta Weizman was at the top of his list. He opened her CIA file but was interrupted by a soft knock on the heavy office doors. Felici’s private secretary, Father Cordona, closed the door behind him.
‘The CIA delegation is on its way, Eminence. His Holiness’s chamberlain has collected them and they will arrive at the Arch of the Bells in twenty minutes, from where they will be escorted to His Holiness’s private library.’
Felici knew the procedure by heart, but it was his nature to want to be briefed on every detail of every visit.
‘And the briefing aids?’
‘His Holiness’s private secretary has personally checked them, Eminence.’
‘Who else is attending?’
‘The Cardinal Secretary of State, and His Holiness has asked that the prefects for the Congregation for Bishops, the Congregation for the Clergy and the Congregation for Catholic Education be there as well.’
Felici clicked his tongue in annoyance. He networked and dined his fellow cardinals assiduously, but he had a low regard for all of them, and he guarded his own intelligence, especially from the powerful and ambitious Cardinal Secretary of State.
‘His Holiness felt that since all of the prefects are asked to report on the appointments for our bishops in the Americas, they should be there, Eminence,’ Father Cordona added, reading his cardinal’s mind.
‘You have scheduled dinner this evening?’
