Chapter Eight

I

“The Body of Christ....”

Mancini received the host on his tongue. A traditionalist of the old school, he refused to sully the verum corpus, the True Body, by first receiving it in his hand.

Faith burned deep within his heart and fuelled the unswerving conviction that what he ate was no mere emblem of his crucified Saviour.

By the miraculous intervention of the Holy Ghost, whose same power had conceived the humanity of Christ in Mary’s womb, he believed without any shadow of doubt that the very substance of the wafer had been changed, and that the real bodily presence of Jesus had been communicated to him.

“The Blood of Christ....”

The sweetness of the wine allegorised the sweet mystery of the Gospel, while faith once more transcended the constraints of metaphor. ‘This is my blood....’ The words of the consecration echoed in Mancini’s heart that the wine became to him the very nature of the sign and seal of the New Covenant.

What could Martinez ever off his own followers to compare? He would not - could not - die for them, much less dispense to them his actual body and blood to eat. The very notion of pesonal sacrifice was anathema to Satan’s earthly ambassador. As for a sacrifice of such perpetuity that untold numbers had gathered before a million altars to partake of it these past two millennia....

“Amen.”

Mancini crossed himself, and from where he knelt beheld the magnificent altar piece portraying a moving depiction of the pieta - Mary’s cradling of her dead son after he had been taken down from the Cross. A scene of unutterable loss, yet paradoxically filled with hope because of it.

This was what Martinez would never be able to understand. And why ultimately he was doomed.

II

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Maneuvering his wheelchair round to face the front of the chapel, Daniel joined Mancini in staring up at the Perugino triptych.

“Exquisite,” the old priest agreed. He roused himself from his reflection. “Although I presume it is only a very creditable copy.”

“Presume again,” Daniel smiled. He gestured to their surroundings. “As you can see, there were some treasures of far more worth than this old man saved from the Vatican.”

Mancini shook his head in wonder as he regarded the icons, statues and paintings decorating the walls of the chapel. The Michelangelos, Raphaels and Caravaggios he had mistakenly thought were merely excellent replicas.

“Praise God,” he whispered. Then Daniel returned his attention to the altarpiece, pointing towards it with a trembling hand.

“We are living in the last pieta of the Church, my friend,” he said gravely. “The body of Christ appears to be destroyed; crucified afresh. But we hope for the morning of our resurrection.”

Mancini sighed. “I’ve felt so old and tired, Daniel,” he admitted. “After the group, after everything....”

He sighed again and turned to face Daniel. “I just wanted it to be all over. I saw no further point to life.”

“And now?” Daniel asked kindly.

“Still old,” Mancini replied with a smile.

“We have seen so much, you and I,” said Daniel. “A burning Rome. A Church decimated and reviled. Things which we would never have wished to see given the promise of a hundred lifetimes.”

He smiled and patted Mancini’s arm. “And in the midst of it all, so many miracles, great and small. Not the least of which, your own deliverance, Edward.”

“Mother Rome in flames whilst I am saved.” Mancini’s voice began to break as the sense of loss overwhelmed him. “Would that I had died with her whenever I think of it.”

“No, Edward!” Daniel rebuked him gently. “No! You were preserved for a purpose. To serve the spirit of Rome which survives here, in this place. Which survives in both you and me, Edward. The Shekinah! The Spirit of Christ our Saviour!”

“Forgive me.” Mancini strove to compose himself. He took a deep breath and clasped Daniel’s hand, freckled with age, between his own leathern palms.

He held it there for a long moment filled with tenderness for his spiritual father, then kissed the Fisherman’s Ring with more meaning than ever before. As though he kissed Jesus himself.

“In the sure and certain hope, remember,” Daniel responded. “Whilst we keep the faith, not even Martinez can rob us of that destiny.”

III

They left the chapel shadowed by an impassive yet clearly armed security guard, the butt of a handgun obtrusive in the holster beneath his unbuttoned jacket. All the while that Daniel and Mancini had been talking, the agent had waited silently by the entrance to the sanctuary, standing beneath a panoramic mural of the archangel to whom the chapel was dedicated: St Michael, traditional defender of believers from the forces of darkness.

Not to mention Marks and Spencer, Daniel remarked playfully as they passed beneath.

“It’s all somewhat removed from the opulence of the Vatican,” Daniel admitted of their stark, fluorescent-lit surroundings, “but we must look to the future now. Or at least what’s left of it on this old condemned world of ours.”

“Britain, the new Rome,” Mancini pondered. “No one would have thought it.”

“I guess poor old Henry the Eighth must be turning in his grave, sure enough!” chuckled Daniel. “If anyone ever doubted that God has a sense of humour, I reckon this wraps up the argument!”

Daniel’s wheelchair came to a smooth stop at an elevator, its doors the only apparent feature to break the drab, steel-plated monotony of the corridor walls. The elderly pontiff placed his palm to the scanner beneath a sign which blared ‘Strictly Authorised Personnel Only’ in scarlet lettering, and the lift doors opened with a slight hiss a second or two later.

“This will take us all the way down to the very heart of Abraham’s Bosom,” Daniel revealed. His wheelchair rolled into the lift and negotiated a perfect one-eighty degree turn to face Mancini.

“Come; there’s something very important I need to show you. Then you will understand why God in his mercy brought you safely to us.”

IV

Mancini could barely comprehend just how vast the Abraham’s Bosom complex actually was. Levels and sub-levels, what seemed like miles and miles of corridors and service passages. How long had it taken to build? It was surely the stuff of science fiction in a world facing an all too real fact of evil.

Daniel said nothing during the thirty second elevator ride ever deeper into the bowels of the earth. Mancini felt the slightest of tremors as the lift came to rest and the doors slid open on to a scene straight from a Hollywood movie.

It was a vast control room reminiscent of NASA, similarly packed with banks of computer terminals, with one wall taken up totally by a huge screen relaying what looked to Mancini like the kind of images he’d seen on the TV weather forecast: satellite photographs of the Earth covered in a swirling mass of cloud, with the briefest glimpse of some geographical feature just visible in the few clear breaks. And operating it all, a crowd of excited technicians and analysts, all bustling, all talking at once.

It was all so alien to Mancini as he trailed after Daniel’s wheelchair. The Pope, on the other hand, appeared strangely at home.

“What do we have?” he snapped efficiently, and the room quietened somewhat. “Jason?”

A dark haired, athletically-built young man, his shirt sleeves rolled up, with patches of sweat staining the light blue polyester, swiveled in his seat as the pontiff’s wheelchair paused beside him.

He shook his head. “Nothing concrete. But a couple of hours ago, we did intercept this.”

The analyst reached for a sheaf of printouts, peeled off the top sheet of paper and handed it to Daniel.

“There was one heck of a lot of static,” Jason explained. “The other side has taken to embedding their transmissions within increasingly complex carrier frequencies that can sometimes take us a week to scrub out.”

Daniel studied the transcript. “The Sword of Shem,” he read aloud. He half-turned to Mancini standing at his elbow. “Some good news, my friend. One of our downed pilots appears to have been rescued.”

“Nothing concrete, Holy Father,” Jason reminded him cautiously. “All we have is a short burst of radio chatter that tells us very little.”

“But which also tells us a lot more than we knew yesterday,” Daniel countered. “We had no idea that a cell of the Sword of Shem was operating so far north.”

“When they usually prefer the urban battlefield.” Daniel turned fully as Mancini voiced his thoughts.

“Of course, Edward. You must have encountered them before.”

“They helped our little band more than once,” the priest recalled. “Provided us with help and supplies as they could. If they had not done so, then we would not have survived for as long as we did.”

A decentralised network of resistance fighters operating from within the Antichrist’s kingdom, The Sword of Shem had proven itself to be very much a thorn in the flesh of Martinez. As the dictator had endeavoured to tighten his grip on the world, it was not only the Christians whom he had found eluding his iron fist. A second and more pro-active opposition to his autocracy had emerged to wage an armed struggle against his totalitarian vision.

And its form could hardly have been more unexpected: a Judeo-Islamic alliance, forged of a common conviction that Christopher Martinez was nothing less than a harbinger of evil intent on destroying true faith in God.

Mancini pondered the ironic religious alliance manifested in The Sword of Shem. Jews and Muslims, at war for so long over the true nature of the divine, only to be united by unanimous agreement about the identity of the devil!

“We’ve been trying to initiate some kind of contact with The Sword of Shem for months now,” Daniel revealed. “But we could never quite pin them down.”

The old Pope looked up, beaming, at Mancini. “Now, though, circumstances seem to have conspired in our favour. Thanks to Major Sheridan, the mountain would appear to have come to Mohammed.” Daniel grinned apologetically. “If you’ll pardon the expression.”

V

Pouring a generous single malt, Daniel replaced the stopper of the decanter and handed the glass to Mancini. He gestured with friendly impatience to a high-backed leather chair next to his cluttered desk, and the priest sank gratefully into its embrace.

“I figure that it’s high time you were brought completely up to speed, my friend,” Daniel said after a sip from his glass. “I would be surprised if you didn’t have any questions after all you’ve seen today.”

Mancini swallowed a little of his own drink, enjoying the almost forgotten but simple pleasure of the whiskey cascading warmly down his throat. He nodded, and cradled the tumbler in his lap.

“For a start, I never realised that you were so technically astute!”

Daniel wagged a finger at his friend. “Ah, but you’re forgetting my former life, Edward,” he reminded. “I could never have imagined that all those years at Langley were themselves designed by the Almighty for my future tenure of the Holy See!”

Of course, Mancini remembered suddenly. Before answering the call to the priesthood, Daniel had been one of the CIA’s top analysts at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. How could he have forgotten? During the Reagan administration, Daniel had been heavily involved in covert support for the Polish Solidarity movement, the beginning of the end for the old Soviet regime.

It was those heady years which had cured Daniel of his agnosticism. Visits to the Vatican to brief the Polish Pope, John Paul II, had had a profound effect on the cyncial CIA man. The papal character, his humility and holiness had drawn Daniel inexorably to the Faith. By the time the Berlin Wall finally came down, he had not only been a Catholic for six years, he had resigned his post to become a seminarian at St Lazarus’ in Paris. That was when Mancini had first met him.

Daniel’s rise to the pinnacle of Church hierarchy had been nothing short of meteoric. From priest, to cardinal, to Bishop of Rome in the space of twenty years.

“You see all these?” Daniel cast a nod to the hovelish surroundings of his small apartment, to the numerous books lining the cold, metallic walls, and to those littering his desk. “Lives of the saints, theological insights of the Church Fathers, the Scriptures themselves. I have so little time to devote to them now. More and more of my days are spent analysing the kind of data we intercepted earlier, coordinating intelligence gathering and so forth. The kind of thing which never really fell under the job description of shepherd of Christ’s flock before!”

Mancini could sense the sorrow in his friend’s voice, and he could empathise strongly with how Daniel felt. Whether priest or pope, one’s overriding desire was the pastoral needs of the Church.

Daniel put down his glass and leaned forward, fingers steepled beneath his chin, his vivid green eyes staring straight at Mancini.

“Do you see now why the Lord preserved your life and brought you safely here?” Daniel’s tone took on a new intensity, sought to drive home his conviction.

“I’ve agonised for so long over my neglect of the flock, Edward. I’ve spent hours in prayer, crying for those outside the walls of Abraham’s Bosom, for their spiritual needs to be met.”

Mancini stared back, his eyes locked with those of his friend, who began to chuckle at the dawn of realisation in the old priest’s gaze.

“Yes, Edward,” he said triumphantly. “I can think of no one better suited to such a task. The moment we monitored the transmission which said you were being held at Station Twelve, I knew that my prayers had not been in vain.”