The Hand of Christ (3 page)

In the shadows of Umayyad, the Grand Mosque of Damascus, a company of Hezbollah soldiers waited for the signal from Major Shalid Maliki - the signal to attack.

Chapter Two

Papal Apartment

The Vatican

Joshua Apalis Reisenberger sat in his private third floor studio, trying to stay focused on the task at hand; the entire world was watching, and anxiously waited for his first words of wisdom.

Expectations for him were high.

As is always the case with men in lofty positions, there were those that were waiting for him to fail, wanting for him to fail. The pressure to perform more than just admirably was suffocating.

The absence of any new and well-received doctrine from him would constitute a failure, and should have been the very matter that encapsulated every thought he now had, but it wasn’t.

His mind was elsewhere.

Through the nearby and oversized third-floor window, intense rays from the high sun painted the one hundred and thirty-two foot obelisk in the middle of St. Peter’s Square before making their way uninvited into his studio. The unassuming window, now bare of the white-robed man, is the place where he stands each Sunday, blessing the crowds amassed on the square below.

Joshua was distracted and his thoughts were unfocused; the bright sunlight that came through the window only added to that distraction. Instead of attending to his task his mind wandered to the invading mid-day sunlight. Starting from the heavens, the rays traveled over the tired currents of the darkened Tiber River, drifting lazily as they peacefully burned their way into the Apostolic Palace: his new home.

Joshua stared at the light as it split through the slight separation of the blood-
-
red velvet curtains adorning his pulpit. His eyes traveled their path as they floated from the window to the apartment floor, to where they sharply caught a slightly raised corner of the inlay on one of the 16
^th
century marble slabs.

He squinted at the sunlight as it bounced off of the marble floor as the refraction from the slightly misshapen floor fiercely latched onto his: the eyes of Pope Leo XIV.

He was reminded him of what he had found there and underneath the slab.

The Pope – now and forever to be known as Leo – let out a heavy sigh and reeled deeper into the worn confines of the oversized padded leather and ancient chair, resigned by the distraction and the remembrance it brought.

When Leo looked at the broken tile, his mind drifted to that day of nearly three months ago. He thought the same thing now that he had thought on that day when he had first noticed the broken floor:
odd, how could they have not fixed this?

The part that had been odd was that the new Pope’s apartment had recently undergone an extensive as well as exhaustive three-month renovation. Sworn to secrecy, over two hundred laypersons, engineers, and architects worked incessantly around the clock to manage a nearly complete overhaul of his new home, the place where Leo – just like every Pope – would reside until his death.

His predecessor had no real desire to change his quarters or to modernize them; he had preferred quite simply a place to relax and reflect. The recently deceased Pope’s inattention, or apathy, had led to the laborious remodeling of the apartment.

Numerous renovations, updates, and additions to the apartment were made; the walls were even lined with new bookshelves to house Leo’s vast collection of both ancient and modern texts and classic works. Each piece of literature had been meticulously placed by the workers in precisely the same order they had been found on the bookshelves they were removed from, and when relocated from their previous home. There were thousands of books.

Updates to the apartment were expertly managed and in a tremendously short time given the scope of the project. The electrical system was archaic by modern standards; having long since been phased out by Italy, the apartment still had the 125-volt electrical outlets of previous generations that were rarely found elsewhere.

Additionally, during the renovation it had been found that the piping for the apartment’s water supply was covered with tremendous amounts of rust and lime; thus, the entire plumbing system had required extensive modernization. The out of date kitchen was begging for a facelift and had been completely remodeled, including new, modern appliances, cabinetry and counters.

Most interesting, if not slightly crude, the false ceiling throughout the apartment had contained unseen buckets of water resting precariously along the unseen rafters. They had been quietly placed by the staff of the previous Pope to catch the falling rain that leaked through the holes in the seldom maintained and surprisingly dilapidated papal roof. Upon inspection, some of the buckets were nearly full of stagnant rainwater.

Numerous heads of state had taken audience with the Pope in his apartment, and had been merely a heartbeat away from being drenched by a falling bucket of dirty old storm water. Hardly representative of the fastidious nature and attention to detail one would expect from the Vatican.

The Vatican had been an independent sovereign city-state since the Lateran Treaty in 1929 with the Kingdom of Italy (signed by the fascist Prime Minister Benito Mussolini) and contained some of the world’s oldest and most precious works of art and architecture. In addition to its historical possessions, the Roman Church holds the records of some of history’s greatest moments both known and unknown to the world (and the source of Leo’s current trouble).

Upon its consummation, the Lateran Treaty conferred in perpetuity enormous wealth to the Holy See. So immense and valuable were the Church’s holdings that, with all of its global interests, the Church was rumored to be one of the wealthiest organizations in the world.

To find the Papal Apartments of the Apostolic Palace in such need of refinement and repair was an embarrassment to the Vatican; they had worked hard to stifle the extent of the apartment’s needs. Using only devout Catholics during the remodeling, the Church had threatened all of the workers with excommunication if they broke their vow of secrecy.

The table at which a distracted Leo sat idly was small, simple in design, and constructed of old and deeply rich mahogany. Immensely dark, it was marked with the nicks and dents of papal frustration from its three centuries of prior use. The table rested on a raised platform in front of Leo’s numerous bookshelves and was the same ritualistic spot where each Pope would sit to work on Catholic doctrine and sermons from one Conclave to the next.

It was an interesting if not juvenile tradition starting with Pope Clement XI in 1700 for each successive Pontiff to carve his initials into the table’s top. There were twenty-three sets of initials, including his newly carved set. For a moment, he had felt like a young choirboy after having carved his own initials onto the table.

Today, the new Pope had sat down with his intent to work on his first Encyclical as the Holy Father, but could not stay committed to the task. He was supposed to be hard at work on his first letter of Catholic doctrine and had intended to release it by week’s end for use by the Church’s Bishops around the world. But his current state of duress had him thinking only of one thing, and that one thing wasn’t the Encyclical.

I wish I had not been elected the Pope
, thought Leo.

He wanted to regret this thought, but did not and would not. Leo’s recent discovery had changed him.

A worker must have put it there
, he thought.

It was a thought – a hope – that he had had numerous times.

But he knew that it couldn’t have been a worker.

He buried his face into his hands and repeated the thought:
I wish I were not Pope.

Only a few months prior, upon the deliverance of the white smoke from the Conclave, the Cardinals seated around the wall of the Sistine Chapel all decisively wrote on folded paper,
Eligo in summum pontificem Joshua Apalis Reisenberger
, electing him Pope.

His election was not without some controversy, and this bothered Pope Leo XIV; Leo wanted this controversy to be the basis off his first communication to the Bishops and, thus, to all Catholics worldwide.

The center of the controversy around his selection as Pope emanated from the time that he had held a position as an influential member of the Roman Curia, the administrative arm of the Holy See and the governing authority for the entire Roman Catholic Church.

His selection as Pope came as a bit of a surprise to the world mostly due to a document published in 1999 – written by him while he had worked in the Roman Curia – titled
The Dominion of our Lord.
The publishing of this document had sparked heated debate, outrage even, amongst the world and with many Catholics. Most troubling was the contradictory nature of his document’s main theme of salvation against the view held by many young Catholics that the Church was finally modernizing.

By electing Joshua as Pope, many within the flock had felt the Church was taking a very large and unnecessary step backward.

During his time with the Curia, he felt that he had been correct in writing that the Roman Catholic way is the only way. The main issue with the central theme of the document had been the manner in which it was interpreted; to many, the document clearly had denied salvation to non-Catholic Christians.

The recent death of his friend, the last Pope, had shaken Leo. The death of a great man and close friend, coupled with his own recent brush with mortality and impending open heart surgery, had forced Leo to think once more of the path to salvation.
Must one necessarily be a Roman Catholic to find his path to heaven? Wouldn’t a benevolent God accept all into his kingdom that had led a virtuous and moral life whether Catholic or not?

Time and age tends to make a man more conservative, more reserved, and unwilling to see beyond his own periphery. Leo had fallen into this same geriatric trap, but as of late was seeing quite a bit more clearly and beyond his own diminishing horizon.

He had become much more introspective and realized that as his life was nearer to the end the opportunity to create a new beginning for the Church was at hand. Leo wondered if what he had found – the source of his worries – was some sort of divine inspiration showing him a way to give the Church that new beginning.

Lost in his thoughts, Leo’s gaze drifted unknowingly back to the rays of light coming through his window.

Today was no different than that day three months ago.
Is God reminding me of what I found, somehow telling me what to do?
Leo looked skyward and hoped that some divine message would be there answering his question.

He thought back to that day. Just like today, he had been annoyed by the persistent distraction from the sunlight.

He had intended only to close the curtains.

But he had tripped on the broken tile.

Leo looked down at his pen; it was the same pen he had been holding on that day. Rolling it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, he was instantly shamed by the damage he had caused to it. The pen had been presented to him as a gift when he had been named Pope, and was a clearly expensive one.

On that day three months ago, he had lowered himself slowly to one knee to inspect the broken tile and took caution while doing so: at 78 years of age, every movement must be thought out carefully.

Leo remembered that day and all of its details, as if it were playing out like a staged production in front of him. He could see and hear himself quite clearly as if he had traveled back in time and was watching the events play out once more.

He saw himself bending lower to the broken tile and saying, “Joshua, too many of your peers find themselves with broken hips.” This had made him chuckle out loud; he was clearly not yet accustomed to referring to himself as Leo.

Staring at the tile, he saw himself fingering the slightly misshaped marble’s edge; the slab had seemed a bit loose. It was loose. He saw himself scratching at the slightly raised corner of the tile with a bit of fervor. He remembered how the mortar connecting it to the adjacent slab had easily broken free.

When he was Joshua, he had always been a curious man, and becoming Leo hadn’t changed that; he had been unable to pull himself away from his destructive doings. He remembered thinking, as he had dug out the tile’s mortar, that perhaps the workers had simply not given this tile enough attention.

But the floor didn’t need repairs; they had only cleaned it.

Leo sat at his table and just stared.

That day flashed through his mind. When he couldn’t dig away the mortar with his fingers he had used his pen, damaging it.

And then the tile had shifted.

It was only after the marble tile had moved that he had looked at the pen and had become aware of the damage he caused to it. He had become flush with shame and quickly had set the magnificent pen down on a nearby shelf and next to a large golden crucifix; he had realized that he should not have used the expensive gift as a tool and hoped that Geoffrey, his faithful assistant, wouldn’t notice.