CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Cotton stared at the man who called himself Pollux Gallo. “The guy who just tried to kill me used that name, too.”

“I know, and I apologize,” Gallo said. “But I have a serious situation simmering within the ranks of the Hospitallers. The man you were dealing with was an imposter.”

Obviously. “Who was he?”

“A knight, as were the others with him. Every organization has its share of fanatics. We are no exception.”

That subject required more delving, but first he wanted to hear more from Stephanie.

“Cotton, I had no idea you were involved with any of this until a few hours ago,” she said. “I’ve been working this situation for over a week, but I just learned about the Brits.”

“What situation?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Things have been fluid, to say the least. I understand you’ve been dealing with James Grant, and Grant has been dealing with the Entity.”

Back when he was active with the Magellan Billet he’d worked several times with Danjel Spagna’s people. Most of the Western world’s spy agencies did the same. The Vatican was an intelligence gold mine. Every day ecclesiastical, political, and economic information poured in from thousands of priests, bishops, laypeople, and nuncios. An amazing array of eyes and ears in nearly every country in the world. No one else possessed that kind of surveillance network.

“Of course,” Stephanie said, “working with the Entity is not a one-way street. Information has to be traded. I’ve learned that a week ago, James Grant shared the fact that the Churchill letters had surfaced. He’d tracked the potential seller, then inquired if the Vatican had any information on that seller. Anything that might corroborate the letters’ authenticity. Smartly, he didn’t want to waste time dealing with a fraud. He spoke with Spagna personally.”

He asked, “What did Grant learn?”

“Supposedly, Spagna was no help. Yet the Lord’s Own is now on Malta, wreaking havoc, and Grant is here in Italy searching for those letters. Hopefully Luke has things under control there, though he’s had some issues today.”

He smiled at her performance assessment. “He’ll get the job done.”

“I’m sure he will. But like you, he’s working blind.”

Gallo said, “This is a difficult situation for me, Mr. Malone. My twin brother, Cardinal Gallo, is deeply involved with all of this. I’m afraid he’s drawn himself into another difficult situation.”

“I read about him and what’s happening within your organization. You said twin. Identical?”

Gallo nodded.

Unfortunately, in the articles he’d read there’d been no photograph of Cardinal Gallo. Which would have been helpful in ferreting out the imposter he’d just encountered.

“Who just tried to kill me?” he asked.

“A group within our ranks known as the Secreti.”

He noticed no ring on the man’s fingers, and no evidence that he may have worn one in the past. “The imposter told me about them and said they no longer existed.”

“And until a few hours ago I would have agreed with him. But that’s not the case. They do exist, in some new form. It’s my belief they’re the ones who attacked you in the villa and killed three men, including one of their own.”

“To keep me from taking him?”

Gallo said, “That seems logical. You have to understand, thanks to my brother, the Knights of Malta are currently in a state of fracture, polarized to the extreme. It’s a civil war. One side is loyal to the order, the other is in open rebellion. You met some of the rebels tonight.”

“Where were you when those rebels were trying to kill me?”

“In Rome. I only learned of the situation, and that you were at the Villa Malta, after you were airborne. I’ve been in contact with Ms. Nelle for the past few days, working with her. When I mentioned the situation and your name, we came north as fast as possible.”

He had no reason to doubt this man, particularly with Stephanie involved.

“The Secreti want the Churchill letters,” Gallo said, “so they can make a deal with the British. Supposedly, the British have information that the Secreti want.”

“Like what?” he asked.

Gallo hesitated, but a nod from Stephanie seemed to answer his reluctance to speak.

“Tell him,” she said.

“The Knights Hospitallers are unique among the warrior-monks,” Gallo said. “The Templars are gone. The Teutonics barely exist. But the Hospitallers remain strong. We are a viable, worldwide charitable organization. Some of that survival is thanks to our adaptability, perpetually making ourselves useful. Some of it is due to perseverance, some to luck. But some is attributable to what we once knew. It involves something called the Nostra Trinità. Our Trinity.”

“Sounds ancestral,” Cotton noted.

“It is. In fact, it goes to our core. At first it was the Nostra Due. The Holy Duo. Two documents the knights had always held dear from our earliest existence. The Pie Postulatio Voluntatis, the Most Pious Request, from 1113, that recognized our existence and confirmed our independence and sovereignty. The second is the Ad Providam, from 1312, where Pope Clement V handed over all of the Templars’ property to us in perpetuity. The Templars had been dissolved five years earlier and the Ad Providam gave us nearly everything they owned. There are signed originals of both of those documents in the Vatican, so there is little doubt of their existence. But we always kept our own originals.”

“Why?” Stephanie asked.

“They are the sole evidence of our legitimacy, our independence. Both those principles have been called into question many times in the past, and it was always those two papal decrees that ended any debate.”

“And the third part, which made it a trinity?” Cotton asked.

“It came to us later, in the Middle Ages, and is much more mysterious. No one alive today, to my knowledge, has ever seen it. It’s called the Constitutum Constantini. Constantine’s Gift. It’s what Napoleon and Mussolini sought, and it’s also what my brother is after. All three documents were kept together and guarded for centuries by the Secreti, whose members pledged an oath to protect them. And they did, until 1798, when all three documents disappeared and have not been seen since. To bind them together in solidarity, the Secreti wore a ring with a palindrome that dates back to Constantine the Great.”

He explained to Stephanie about the ring and the five lines that could be read the same in every direction.

“The Latin has been interpreted many different ways,” Gallo said. “One variation is something like ‘the sower, with his eye on the plow, holds its wheels with care.’ Which is nonsense, as are all of the other interpretations.”

Including Grant’s from earlier.

“The real message is hidden.” Gallo reached inside his jacket pocket and removed a pen and small notebook. He drew a cross of squares and inserted letters, adding four other boxes outside the cross.

“Taken together, the letters of the five words are an anagram. The key is the N at the middle. All of the letters in the palindrome are paired except the central N, which stands alone. By repositioning the letters around the central N, a cross can be made that reads Pater Noster, in both directions. Latin for ‘Our Father,’ and the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer. The remaining four letters, which are two A’s and two O’s, are a reference to Alpha and Omega. The beginning and end. Symbols of eternity, from the Book of Revelation. For Christians in the 4th century that meant the omnipresence of God.”

“Who would have thought?” Cotton said. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

“It’s not. Early Christians shared the five-worded palindrome as a way to identify themselves with one another. Constantine himself sanctioned its use. The Secreti eventually adopted it as their symbol.”

“What does any of this have to do with the coming conclave?” Stephanie asked.

Cotton was wondering the same thing.

“Perhaps everything,” Gallo said. “There’s a relevance today to Constantine’s Gift that my brother has somehow garnered. With Archbishop Spagna’s help, I’m sure. As I’ve already told Ms. Nelle, Kastor wants to be pope.”

That was new to the mix, and he filed further inquiry away for later. Right now he wanted more information about the third part of that trinity.

“Here’s what I do know,” Gallo said. “Constantine sanctioned Christianity over paganism. By then, it was no longer some small regional movement. A sizable percentage of the entire population was Christian. So he made it the official state religion, with himself in charge. The Constitutum Constantini has something to do with that move. What? I truly don’t know.”

“No one in the organization has a clue what the document says?” Stephanie asked.

Gallo shook his head. “My brother discovered in the Vatican archives that it has something to do with the early church. Its structure and organization. What that might be? I don’t know. What I do know is that popes have long feared its surfacing, preferring that the document stay hidden. The Hospitallers accommodated that request and kept it hidden.”

“Using that to their advantage,” Cotton added.

“That’s true. It’s why we survived and the other orders perished.”

He could tell Gallo was hedging. So he said, “Now’s not the time to be coy.”

The admonishment brought a curious stare, then a nod.

“You’re correct. This is not the time. We did use what we knew to our advantage.” Gallo paused. “Within five hundred years of Constantine’s death, the church became the most powerful political force in Europe. Not until the 16th century and Martin Luther did anyone successfully challenge its authority. Then along came Napoleon. In his world there was room for only one omnipotent ruler with the ear of God. Himself. He wanted the church gone. He wanted his own new docile religion, to use his words. So he abolished both the Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books and established a new Catholic creed, even a new Christian calendar. Year One started in 1792, and he identified Paris as the holy city, with Rome as its subsidiary. He wanted a new world religion, like Constantine wanted with Christianity, and, like Constantine, he wanted himself as head. But first he had to destroy the Roman Catholic Church.”

Cotton was familiar with some of what he was hearing, particularly the use of religion as a political tool. But other parts were new to him.

So he kept listening.

“Napoleon invaded Italy and defeated the papal army,” Gallo said. “He then marched on Rome and entered unopposed, plundering the Vatican. In 1798 he proclaimed Rome a republic and demanded the pope renounce his temporal authority. Pius VI refused, so he took the pope prisoner, where he died in captivity seven months later. A new pope tried to make peace, but failed, and Napoleon invaded Italy again and took that pope prisoner, too. He was only released when the British ended Napoleon’s rule in 1814. Then something extraordinary happened. After Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena, the pope wrote letters urging leniency. Can you imagine? After all Napoleon had done—held him prisoner, stripped him of everything—he still wanted mercy extended.”

“Could simply have been the Christian thing to do,” Cotton noted.

“Perhaps. But we’ll never know. Napoleon died in 1821, still a prisoner. The pope in 1823. It has always been our belief that the Holy See thought Napoleon possessed Constantine’s Gift and, for whatever reason, it was dangerous enough for them to placate him.”

“Did Napoleon have it?” Stephanie asked.

Gallo shook his head. “But he ran a good bluff, using the two opportunities when he’d plundered the Vatican to his advantage. He likewise looted Malta.”

Cotton was curious. “Did the church know that the Trinity had been lost when Napoleon invaded Malta?”

Gallo nodded. “Absolutely. But no one at the time had any idea where it had been hidden. We know now that the man who hid it away was executed, never revealing what he knew.”

“And now your brother is after it,” Stephanie asked. “Spagna too?”

“That’s my assessment.”

“You still have not explained why the Secreti just tried to kill me.”

“That’s simple,” Gallo said. “The British asked for that to happen.”

Stephanie nodded. “He’s right. James Grant is running rogue.”

No real surprise.

“And Mussolini?” he said. “How does he figure into all this?”

Gallo faced him. “That’s precisely why my brother and Archbishop Spagna have teamed together.”