Icon Rapture — Chapter 6

Chapter 6 — Serialisation of Icon Rapture by Osman Khareef

9 min read

Chapter 6 — Serialisation of Icon Rapture by Osman Khareef

Prologue — Chapter 1 — Chapter 2 — Chapter 3 — Chapter 4 — Chapter 5

“He wants to see the Veronica? Tell him he will have to wait until the end of the next century, like everyone else. No! No! I don’t care who he is, how many books he’s written or who his friends are, he’ll just have to wait. He says he’ll be dead by then? Fine, that’ll be one less meddling amateur. God spare us from these people, Guido!”

Cardinal Von Helsinger banged the phone down and pushed himself away from his desk. A big obese man with small eyes dotted like black shiny currants in a pasty moon face the colour of dishwater, suspended over a plump cushion of double chins, wisps of black hair combed back in greasy furrows — the very image of a dissipated mediaeval red hat so often reproduced in sinister portrait after portrait in the Vatican, Uffizi or Siennese galleries.

Here was a man who secretly hankered after the old days, not the Fifties or Sixties, no — the real old days, maybe sometime around 1300 AD when there were plenty of hapless heretics on whom to practice his Inquisitorial arts and inclinations.

Thoughtfully, he stroked his many-layered chins. The phone conversation had given him an idea. An idea of how to implement the wishes of the Holy Father and to distract the pesky unwanted attentions of holy relic investigators. He smiled to himself. Yes, indeedy! Kill two birds with one stone. Drop a pebble into the lake of history and see where the ripples go! Put a cat amongst the flying peckers! It would need some planning of course and a Curial Special Projects Team for implementation.

Cardinal Von Helsinger stubbed the intercom button on his desk and spoke in his grating voice. “Sister Emmanuel. Please come in — there is the Lord’s work to be done.”

Sister Emmanuel came in with a secretary’s shorthand notebook clutched in her bony hand. Face as yellow as tallow wax and as narrow as two hands folded in prayer, Sister Emmanuel’s hard brown eyes — like those on a cheap toy teddy bear — stared out at His Reverence, from under the crow-black cowl of her nun’s habit, with the fanaticism of terminal bigotry. “I am ready, Holy Father,” she said.

“I need to go to Argentina tonight after evening Mass. Have the Vatican Lear Jet readied at Fiumicino. Call Claudio and Cardinal Paliado and have them meet me at the ‘plane.” He added, “arrange a private audience for Dr. Ian Milson for next Thursday at 2.00, for Mr Michael Bagent at 3.00 and Mr. David Pallop at 4.30. You will find their details in the file marked ‘Pests’.” Von Helsinger paused and tapped his teeth with a pen.

“I will be going to New York after Sao Paulo and will be back on Wednesday night. Please call Cardinal Mirphy in New York to alert him of my arrival. I may want to go on to Chicago. Ring Father Moloc in Paris and tell him to activate the Plan codenamed Atbash without delay. I want progress reports twice daily. Use the secure link to the Lear Jet only.” He paused while Sister Emmanuel wrote it down.

“Oh, yes and make sure to order some decent food for the flight!”

“At once, Holy Father” said Sister Emmanuel obediently and left the room.

The Cardinal felt excitement rising in him. He hadn’t felt like this since the heady days before and during the Conclave. Gross Gott but those were desperate hectic times, he recalled. But his man had squeaked in by the narrowest of margins after several burnings of the black smoke, many secret intercontinental phone calls, ultimatums and brazen threats.

Cardinal Von Helsinger, Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Roman Church, had started to feel hungry again — enough to spin out a complex web of cunning intrigue, at the centre of which he would sit with arachnoid patience, waiting for those delicious ambrosial tingling twitches which signalled the struggling of his political prey. Cocooned in sticky Vatican machinations, he could suck out their finances, their Mafioso muscle, their immortal souls, at will. The desiccated husks of Von Helsinger’s victims littered the corridors of power within the volatile Italian government, the Curia, the EEC, the CIA and Civil Services of most Western governments. Men for whom there was no hope, no future, no forgiveness, interest on past misdeeds compounded hourly by relentless computers that never forget. Men and women with hollowed-out cheeks and the dull hooded eyes of advanced inoperable Kafka.

There was only one source of mortal dread in this world for Von Helsinger. Only one sphere of political influence in which he had not a fat podgy finger. This was the Priory Arcadia — perpetrators of Nestoriansism, Carpocratianism, Catharism, Albigensian Heresy, Modernism and sworn enemies of Roman Catholicism since the Council of Nicaea in AD325.

Not for the first time, Von Helsinger wondered what the Priory was up to. Were they behind this Jerusalem break-in? He was sure Licio Belli would have known. Belli’s successor in Sao Paulo, whom he was travelling to see tonight, still controlled vast slices of the Vatican billions and share blocks that were used to finance what his CIA chums like to call ‘black operations’ — secret Inquisition Projects like Plan Atbash. But he didn’t have the P2 sources that his dear friend Licio had had at his peak. Many of these had been murdered, ‘suicided’ or disappeared in the recent chaos of Italian government.

“Sister Emmanuel? I will take my afternoon tea now. Did you get that excellent torte from Fabriccio’s bakery? Yes? Good. Please find and bring in the Project File marked Atbash as well. Thank you.”

*

Across the courtyard, in the Papal Apartments, His Holiness Pope John XXIV lay on his daybed and stared at the small framed motto on the far wall. It was hand-scripted text on velum in black and gold letters. Taken from the twelth century prophesies of the Irish monk Malachi, it read “John XXIV — Reaper of the Whirlwind.” He didn’t like the sound of that at all. He never had. His predecessor of the same name had been ‘Shepherd and Navigator’. Now that was rich in hidden meaning and good connotation. But Reaper of the Whirlwind? That smacked of Divine retribution of some sort. He’d had a team of Curial semanticists working many weeks on finding alternative meanings for the original Latin, but all were essentially similar. There was no way around it; Malachi had predicted he would be a harvester of death.

The Holy Father had subsequently taken great pains to suppress this particular prophesy, even going so far as to author a Pastoral Letter castigating prophets of any sort — now adding Malachi, who was previously well regarded by his predecessors, to a list of proscribed visionaries which included such luminaries as St.Bernard, St.Dagobert and Nostradamus.

At the age of sixty-eight, His Holiness was still in good health apart from some arthritis. His mind was still agile, but the tremendous workload and relentless responsibilities of the Papacy were eroding the cunning and poker playing skills that had led to his election. Born Emilio D’Ascriba in Madrid, the ‘Spanish Pope’ was chosen largely by the South American and Third World votes. Just before World War II, his parents emigrated with their only child to Brazil where they established a small shoe shop business. Showing an early vocation for the Church after seeing so many well-fed priests, young Emilio was educated in a seminary in Rio de Janeiro before starting pastoral work in the same sprawling city. Rising swiftly through the clerical ranks due to dedicated and unerring administrative skills in one of the largest hothouse dioceses in the world, he became the youngest Archbishop in the S.American Church. Paul VI posted him to Spain where he rapidly assumed important places on Vatican committees dealing with South American issues. In due course, with the backing and insistence of Opus Dei, this work earned him a red hat. He had made it known that he had voted for Benelli, Wojtyla and Ratzinger in the previous three Conclaves, thus establishing a reputation for ‘political correctness’ which stood him in good stead at his own election to the Ultimate Office.

Papa Emilio rarely delegated anything. His modus operandi was complete precision control of a few selected issues. Throughout his Papacy a multitude of urgent complex issues had gone unaddressed or put off because they weren’t on the Pope’s agenda. His attitude was if it couldn’t be done properly, let it not be done at all. This approach had enabled him to stay clear of the various scandals that had rocked the Church hierarchy over the decades and had enabled him to carve out the niche of expertise for which he was known; giving the Papacy a clear direction. His refusal to delegate, make senior appointments or even spend money, had allowed power to concentrate in his own hands to an unprecedented extent with a concomitant weakening of the Vatican bureaucracy. Pope John XXIV was not a team player. He expected the Vatican to behave like a well-oiled machine to carve out and perpetuate his personal God-given vision for a recalcitrant unbelieving world. Tutored in the ways of Escriva de Balagua, he pursued his narrowly defined goals with ruthless efficiency, showing that he understood clearly the role and sources of money in power politics — lessons learned the hard way in South America which was still his political power base.

Like few of his contemporaries, he knew what real poverty was. He had understood early in life how Catholicism provided a bulwark and social framework against nihilism and militaristic capitalism. He had realised that he would stay alive longer as a dictator of the Church, than of a military junta. The same unwritten rules and skills applied to both jobs and as far as he could see, the only difference being one of sex. As a South American dictator you got plenty of every imaginable kind of sex, while as a Catholic churchman you got zip. Since he was not a highly sexed person in the first place and in the second there were well-established ways of privately indulging sexual appetite out of the limelight, Emilio D’Ascriba saw no contest in the choice of occupation. Power over others is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

As far as his personal beliefs were concerned, in his secret heart he was a Pauline Christian. The real Jesus had not been a factor in Catholic thinking for 1,500 years. He had no patience with simplistic visionaries and Jesus-based Fundamentalism. Since the time of Constantine, the Church had been, in his view rightly, suppressing or manipulating any information passed down about the ‘real’ Jesus who is regarded in the higher echelons of the Church as largely an irrelevance or, in the words of Pope Alexander VI, ‘it has served us well, this myth of Christ.’

A rich married Jew of royal blood spouting regurgitated Essene dogma, military head of the zealots intent on wresting the throne of Israel from the Romans, a ‘seeker after smooth things’ and thereby suffering the inevitable crucifying consequence. He couldn’t imagine why anyone, apart from historians, would be interested in such a person, let alone worship him. What Emilio did admire was what the Church had subsequently made of the basic story. He had to admit also to a sneaking regard for the way in which Jesus had organised his life to fulfil Old Testament prophesies so as to attain ‘Messiah’ status amongst the Jews. This showed sophisticated understanding of Jewish people and their mentality but no more than what would be expected of a trained Pharisee steeped in Biblical learning with years of intensive postdoctoral study at the Qumran desert university. Pope John XXIV thought he would probably have done exactly the same, given the same historical circumstances.

It was only after the Council of Nicaea that modern Christianity managed to acquire and consolidate the tools that would transform it into a world religion. With these tools, adopted and borrowed from other more successful religions such as Mithraism, Christianity finally acquired the right psychological formulae to strike a rich reverberating chord in the human psyche. Mysticism, revelation, crowd psychotics, archetypal symbolism, hierarchical structuring, repository of trust, leaps of faith and as an opposite counter-force evil in the form of Satan backed up by threats of real or social damnation. All the essential ingredients missing from Jesus’ narrow political and militaristic aims of re-acquiring Israel.

The Church had re-written history marvellously, in his view. God knows they had more than enough material in the archives of antiquities in the vaults here in Vatican City — from the Dead Sea and Nag Hamadi Scrolls, the Mar Saba library and other records, to completely substantiate a mundane historically accurate view of Jesus the Zealot. But why? What purpose would it serve? It is debatable whether most people would even care. These stories were already about and passively sanctioned by the Church in that no active suppression was done — not these days anyway.

People do not want or need Truth. This was a lesson he had learned long ago in the slums of Rio. People want comfort in a harsh world, a belief in a hierarchical value system, an unattainable goal, a bit of magic and a champion of nebulous causes like the ‘common good’ or righteousness. These are summarised in the concept of God. This was not cynicism; this was action out of belief and knowledge of human nature.

The threat was not from historical revelations alone, no. It was from ambitious people who wanted to take over at the top. Replace him and the Vatican with another hierarchy essentially similar under the same banner of Christianity. The business and product of the religion would stay the same; just the people at the top would change — just like a corporate take-over. There would be changes in corporate policy, of course, to reflect the new men.

Emilio had always known who these people were — the Grand Master and members of the Priory Arcadia. Historical revelation, monarchic symbology and other psychological power tools would be the weapons of attack to undermine the trust in the present Church. This is why the Q4 material and the Podgorny File of ’67 must never get into their hands.

The Priory would not want to destroy Christianity as a religion. Not now. It was a true psychic Cadillac with plenty of juice and deep comfortable upholstery. No! They just want to get behind that steering wheel and stick their own flat feet on the gas pedal. And they were coming in the guise of the Repo man! What bloody cheek!

The Pope felt a rare flush of anger that got him off his bed. He must get back to work!

Prologue — Chapter 1 — Chapter 2 — Chapter 3 — Chapter 4 — Chapter 5

Icon Rapture by Osman Khareef can be purchased HERE