The Caravaggio Conspiracy (32 page)

The press of people around him was suffocating. He had never seen a crowd like this. Three hundred and fifty thousand – that was like the combined
population
of Cork, Limerick and Galway. And the temperature was a sweaty thirty-five degrees! A cold beer – that’s what he’d like right now. And a cool bath, and Maya to share it with him.

That was when the phone in his pocket rang. He didn’t hear it at first and when he snapped it open the connection was broken, leaving the message on-screen,
Missed Call Jesuit 1
. Uncle Declan. Seconds later, O’Malley’s voice came on the line. He sounded excited.

‘Listen to me, Liam. I’m in the Governate with Aprea. One of the surveillance cameras has picked up a monk behaving suspiciously. He’s obviously tense. He keeps looking round him, and he keeps one of his hands permanently inside the fold of his habit, as if he’s got got something hidden there. But more to the point, I think I recognize him. The other day, when I went to visit Bosani, this same fellow – a Benedictine – was talking to Visco. He’s tall – six-four at least – aged about thirty. And he’s got a tonsure. At the moment, he’s about thirty or forty feet from where you’re standing, in the direction of the Sistine Chapel. The head of the gendarmerie has ordered two of his men to make their way towards him, but they’re in uniform and Aprea is worried they may startle him.’

‘Don’t worry, Uncle. I’m on it.’

‘Please be careful,’ O’Malley said. But Dempsey had already rung off.

A tall man. Six-feet-four. Wearing a monk’s habit and with a tonsure. At least he shouldn’t be hard to spot. He fixed his eyes on the Sistine Chapel, a hundred metres or so to his right, and began to press his way through the throng.

‘Excuse me. Please let me through. This is important.
Mi scusi. Excusez moi. Entschuldigung
.’

His progress was plainfully slow. One person in ten in the square must have been a priest or member of a religious order. At least the priests would mostly be in their everyday suits, while most of the religious were nuns. Even so. It was like looking for your cousin in a football crowd.

He took a deep breath and pushed ahead. That was when he smelled it. Drifting into his nostrils: the sweet smell of marzipan or almonds. He sniffed again. The bomb that nearly killed him four years ago had given off an aroma of marzipan just before it went off in the sickly summer heat of that September afternoon. He remembered it like it was yesterday. He was leading his platoon on a routine patrol on high ground about ten kilometres northeast of Kirkuk. A device fashioned from decaying plastic explosive had been concealed beneath a water trough. It detonated less than four feet from one of his troopers ten paces behind, killing the young man and two comrades and, in his own case, stripping the skin off the right side of his back from his shoulder down as far as his buttocks.

That was the day his old life had ended.

He stopped. There it was again. That smell … like marzipan in a low oven.

He looked around cautiously. There were at least a dozen people within six feet of him: a middle-aged couple, Spanish by the sound of them; a group of
overweight
Romans; two Germans in their twenties; a pregnant woman; an elderly nun wearing a Carmelite habit; a student-type drinking from a bottle of Evian water … and a tall monk with a Benedictine tonsure. He swallowed hard. Was this the man who would start the next world war? He inched towards him, trying not to appear in any way interested. The smell grew stronger as he drew closer. The explosives must be sweating in this heat. He brushed past him, looking straight ahead, while allowing his trailing left hand to touch lightly against the man’s cassock. There was no doubt about it. He was wearing something solid around his middle.

He didn’t know what to do. There were officers on the way, but with 300,000 people in the square focused on what they regarded as a sacred event, no simple order to clear the area could be given. In any case, action by the police might very well have the effect of ensuring the disaster it was intended to prevent. The bomber could almost certainly trigger his device with one flick of his thumb – assuming, that is, that he had activated it. But maybe he hadn’t got to that point yet. As Dempsey struggled to keep up with him, the suspect edged his way through the crowd in the direction of the Sistine Chapel. Maybe he wanted to get closer to the conclave before he pressed the switch, for maximum impact. It was even possible that he planned to damage the chapel itself, thus adding to the sense of outrage that would sweep the world. Dempsey halted for a second and looked around him, hoping against hope to see a policeman or a gendarme nearby. But there was no one. What should he do? If he kept on following him, the suspect was sure to realize that he had been spotted. And then what? He swallowed hard. There was nothing for it. He would just have to tackle him and hope for the best. If he could just knock him over, then hold firm to his arms until help came …

He got ready to charge.
Holy Mother of God!
he said to himself.
Here goes!

He leapt forward, pushing two Japanese tourists out of his path, and jumped the man from behind, encircling his waist, hoisting his arms upwards, shouting out at the same time, ‘Move away! Everybody back!’

A woman sreamed. Then everyone was screaming. The crowd shrank back like a single frightened creature. ‘It’s a bomb!’ somebody shouted. ‘He’s got a bomb!’

He could hear commands being shouted through a megaphone, too far off to be of any use. Then a police whistle. Maybe Uncle Declan had actually persuaded someone to
do
something. But they were too late. All the while, he and the bomber were grappling. ‘
Lascilo andare!
– Let go of me!’ the man shrieked. ‘I am here to do God’s work! Allah is with me!’

He wasn’t just tall, he was exceptionally strong, his power boosted by the adrenalin charge of knowing that these were his final seconds on earth. Dempsey, with his injured left arm, could barely constrain him. Amid further desperate struggle, their legs gave way together and they fell over, rolling over and over on the cobbles. During one twist, Dempsey managed to hook his feet round the man’s ankles, so that he now held him from both ends. But it was obvious he wasn’t going to give up. Once more calling on Allah, he gave a mighty heave and broke the Irishman’s grip. Wriggling to his right before he could be ensnared again, he groped with one hand around his middle until he found what he was looking for. A red light came on. Too late, too late. For Dempsey, the world now stood still. All he could focus on was the man, screaming out ‘Allahu Akbar!’ while his left thumb trembled over the simple pressure switch that would set off the bomb. Dempsey felt fear – fear and regret, and shame. He closed his eyes.

The next thing he heard was the dull thwack of a silenced automatic, then another, and another. He opened his eyes again. The smell of marzipan had been replaced by the stench of cordite. The bomber’s brains and skull were spread out over the cobbles, which were thickly stained with blood. His left foot twitched for a second, then lay still.

The screams from the crowd had reached a crescendo. Dempsey could feel the intensity of the excitement among the onlookers pressing in on him. Whoever had shot the monk had saved his life and the lives of hundreds of pilgrims. He sat up, noticing for the first time that his hands were shaking. Standing straight ahead, gripping an automatic in his right hand, was the assassin who had attacked him with a switchblade two days before. It wasn’t so much his face that he recognized. It was his bulk and the way he held himself – like a professional. The man was nodding down at him as if in acknowledgement of something. Then, twisting the silencer off the muzzle of his pistol, he turned away and disappeared into the crowd. No one tried to stop him. They were too stunned, too scared, and too grateful.

Seconds later, Sergeant Weibel of the Swiss Guard turned up, his P226 handgun out of his holster. He looked disappointed that he had arrived too late to shoot anybody. After that, it was the turn of the paramedics. O’Malley and Aprea were not far behind. Dempsey was immediately proclaimed by the crowd as a hero – or one half of a team of heroes. So where was the second man? Sergeant Weibel wanted to know. But no one knew, and Dempsey was saying nothing. 

Meanwhile, in a hotel room in Nicosia, Yilmaz Hakura switched off his
television
set. The news from St Peter’s Square was a setback, but not a defeat. With Bosani at the new Pope’s elbow, there would be other times and other
opportunities
. The crusaders had to win every time; jihadis only once. From the minaret of a nearby mosque, the voice of the muezzin could be heard calling the faithful to prayer. Hakura did not ignore the call.

It was another two hours before the white smoke rose from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. Colonel Studer, it turned out, had broken the iron rule of the conclave and entered the building to talk to the dean. To do so, he required not only his own key, but those of the prefect of the Pontifical House and of the
official
delegate of the Holy See. The prefect acquiesced as soon as he learned what had happened. The delegate, however, had to be pressured into giving his consent. ‘Listen to me,’ Studer said. ‘If you say no to me, first I shall take the key anyway. Second, I shall tell the world that you refused to inform Their Eminences of an unprecedented attack on the sovereignty of the universal Church.’ At this, the delegate, a retired banker, caved in completely.

Studer was not exaggerating. ‘Please forgive me, Your Eminence,’ he began. ‘I greatly regret this intrusion. But something terrible has happened.’

‘Yes,’ the dean replied. ‘Cardinal Bosani told us.’

Studer had suspected as much. That’s why he had broken a rule established centuries before. ‘But how did he know?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be
incommunicado
?’

The dean looked uneasy. ‘The Camerlengo had apparently kept hold of his mobile phone … in case of an emergency. We live in a new age, Colonel.’

‘More’s the pity. And did he tell you what happened?’

‘He said an Islamist from somewhere in the Arab world had tried to kill himself and hundreds of pilgrims in the square. He said it was the work of those from outside Europe who wished to restore the caliphate.’

The colonel absorbed the significance of the dean’s comment. ‘Well, Eminence,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but the Camerlengo has deceived you.’

Studer went on to explain to the 75-year-old prelate that a suicide bomber had been about to detonate the plastic explosive strapped around his middle when two young men, one the nephew of the Father General of the Jesuits, the other as yet unknown, had tackled him with conspicuous bravery and foiled the attack, killing the bomber in the process. What he most wished the dean and his fellow cardinals to know was that the terrorist was not an Arab, or an Iranian or any kind of cradle Muslim. He was, in fact, as the battered ID card found in a pocket of his habit revealed, a monk, born in Padua, who had converted two years before while spending time in a monastic community in the Sinai. ‘Our civilization may indeed be under threat, Your Eminence, but not all of our enemies are to be found on the outside.’

While Studer and the dean were talking, no one noticed that the Camerlengo had left the Sistine Chapel by a rear door to which only he held the key. Bosani was in a quiet fury. He could not understand how all his planning had come to nothing. It was a crime against God that the bomber had not succeeded in his holy task. It was a further insult to Islam that the cardinals should now turn away from the candidate around which he had built a consensus and select instead a pope from among the Church’s so-called moderates.

Worst of all was the certainty that he himself, after thirty years in the Curia, would now be exposed as a spy and a ‘traitor’. He was not a traitor, he was a martyr – a hero of the One True Faith who, like his heroic forebear, Orazio Battista, would be traduced and expelled from history.

They would make up stories about him. They would say he was a madman. They would plant lies in the media. And then, after he had been humiliated in the courts, he would be sentenced to life imprisonment in a Western jail, alongside the scum of the earth – men of all religions and none.

His throat was dry. His failure was too much to bear. It was literally
unendurable
. He knew that he should flee, melt into the city and make his way east, where he would be received as an honoured guest, free to spend his last days in open worship of his God. It was not enough. Such an end, after his decades of power, was unacceptable. There had to be a way out consistent with his honour. He shut his eyes. Then it came to him. There was one last card to play – if only he dared to play it. He took a deep breath. Strapped to his left forearm, hidden beneath the sleeve of his soutane, was a curved dagger that had once belonged to Battista, given to him by the Safiye Sultan herself. Battista had died at the hands of the papal executioner still proclaiming that God was great. He would go one better. With this sacred dagger, he would kill the Father General of the Jesuits. O’Malley had prevented him from initiating the last great war – the war that would result in the establishment of a caliphate stretching from Pakistan and Afghanistan in the east to Spain and Portugal in the west, with its capital in Rome, as foretold by the Prophet. For that audacity, the Irishman would die and, in response, Muslims throughout Europe would come under attack. They would call on the Arab world, and Iran with its Islamic bomb, to rise in their defence – and this time their call would not go unanswered.

He stifled a laugh. Oh, the irony! O’Malley would turn out to have been the instrument of Allah’s divine plan. He would play his part in history after all. Yes! All was not yet lost. He looked around him, wiping a fleck of spittle from his lips. It was beautiful. Alone, in spite of everything the Christians could throw against him and without the help of the fool Hukura, he would rescue God’s plan from the wreckage imposed by the infidels.