The Celtic Conspiracy (39 page)

The pain came quickly. It burned like fire. Ryan suddenly had trouble breathing. Next to him, an agent fell to the ground. Blood flowed from the man’s head onto the bright concrete of the steps. Several agents threw themselves on top of Ryan and Deborah to protect them from the bullets.

More shots came and another agent fell to the ground, badly injured. Shots ripped through concrete.

“Back there!” yelled one of the FBI agents, pointing at a van. Three agents were kneeling down in the open field of fire. Another one was hit and fell backward. The agents launched a fusillade of bullets at the van. Finally the driver’s door seemed to open on its own, and a man fell out. He was definitely dead. But was he the only shooter?

Two other agents ran to the van to secure the location. Ryan slumped down and tried to use everything he had to shut out the pain of the burning wound in his chest.

One of the agents was already tending to Ryan. He quickly examined the gunshot wound and pulled out his radio.

“Agent Rupert Cook. I need an ambulance at the side entrance of the Supreme Court immediately! And send a helicopter! Yes, numerous injuries, one life-threatening, at least two men dead. No, I can’t tell you anything further right now.”

Deborah knelt next to Ryan. “Thomas, Thomas, no, please don’t! Please, please don’t! Damn it all, get some help! Please, please help us!” Her jacket was soaked with Ryan’s blood.

Ryan could barely muster the energy to speak. “Give me your scarf, Deborah.”

“What? Why?”

“You have to help me. I can’t do it alone. Bind the scarf around my chest and pull as hard as you can.”

“What are you talking about? We have to get you to the hospital. Oh God, Thomas!”

“Deborah...I need to. I want to go in there. You have to help me. Otherwise I’ll lose too much blood before I get to the courtroom.”

In the courtroom, Jennifer was nervously looking at her watch.
Where is Ryan? He should have been here a long time ago.

The lawyer for the Vatican had pulled out all the stops to make everything look like an unlucky combination of circumstances, and the mood of the justices seemed as if it were being swayed. Suddenly MacClary started to speak.

“In light of what must now happen, I must recuse myself from this case. In expectation of this possibility, the president has entrusted Barbara Andrews as my successor.”

Jennifer opened the envelope containing the documents MacClary had given her the night before. A murmur swept through the court. Even Salvoni didn’t understand what was about to happen. They hadn’t overheard the justice talking about any other evidence, had they? So what was all this about? Was the justice going to testify? Lambert picked up his coat, as if he were planning to go.

“Order!” Chief Justice Andrews said. “This court will come to order. I turn the floor over to attorney Jennifer Wilson.”

Jennifer stood. “Madam Chief Justice, we have here confirmation from the Austrian Foreign Ministry that the authorization for archaeological excavation is illegal and was issued after the fact. The official concerned has already been taken into custody in Vienna.”

Lambert sat there stunned. Nervously he whispered something to his lawyer.

“Second, I am able to inform the court that Victor Salvoni’s termination papers have been falsified as well. This morning we received by special courier the actual termination papers for Victor Salvoni from the Vatican’s special envoy to the United Nations. They were dated yesterday and personally issued by the pope. It is therefore an impossibility that Salvoni left the service of the Vatican more than a year ago.”

Another murmur swept through the crowd. Heated discussions were breaking out in the audience, and from the bench of bishops and cardinals loud cries of protest could be heard.

Chief Justice Andrews again called the court to order and requested that Jennifer continue.

“Madam Chief Justice, aside from the testimony of the petitioner, who should be here any minute, we have a witness who can prove that the Vatican acted as the contractor in connection with the excavation at the Magdalensberg, and in a manner that can only be construed as exclusively
secular, not religious. In addition, we can prove that this man, the witness himself, has been spying on the MacClary family for decades, since the Church was afraid—”

“Is this witness at least here, if the petitioner has not yet arrived?” Andrews said.

“Absolutely, Madam Chief Justice.”

The door opened, and a man entered the courtroom, his body completely hidden by a monk’s habit. From his bent figure and gait it was clear that he was quite old.

An expectant silence fell upon the room. Seeing the man, Salvoni was shocked to the core. He had already started to have his suspicions about who the witness might be, but hoped he was wrong. Now every cell of his body was flooded with fear as he saw those gaunt hands covered with age spots. When the witness finally pulled back his hood, Salvoni crossed himself, lay his hands behind his head, and took a deep breath. Now everything was going to come out.

When Lambert recognized the old man—Padre Morati—he clenched his hands on the edge of his seat. “You’ll burn in hell for this, you bastard,” he said as Morati passed by.

The old man paused a moment in front of him. “I’ve been burning in hell my whole life,” he responded quietly, composed.

Jennifer began to speak again. “Approximately three weeks ago, the witness Padre Luca Morati informed Victor Salvoni, who is sitting here today, about a possible threat. He suspected that Ronald MacClary might have
access to the parchments that are before the court, the scrolls of the Druids and several Roman philosophers.”

“How do you intend to prove this?” Justice Winster asked.

“I will come to that presently. The Vatican police only learned the actual information about the location of the cave where the parchments were stored by wiretapping Ronald MacClary’s residence in Ireland. Both the wiretapping operation and the party responsible were confirmed by experts from the American embassy in Dublin.”

“How do you know that the bugs were placed by employees of the Vatican?”

Shane could feel the fear emanating from the cardinals and bishops. He saw Salvoni seething with rage. Others were cursing old Morati as well, who had sat down between himself and O’Brian in the first row. None of this seemed to affect the old man.

“I have here a report from the FBI that documents the origin and whereabouts of the bugs. They were purchased by the Vatican police approximately four years ago in the United States.”

The cries of protest from the bench of cardinals and bishops became more agitated, forcing the chief justice to hammer her gavel forcefully on the desk.

“Either this court will come to order or I will have the courtroom cleared. Continue, Ms. Wilson.”

Jennifer continued. “In addition, the padre has gone on record as saying that he spoke with the cardinal state secretary about the circumstances of his discovery.”

“Where are you going with this?” Justice Copter interjected.

“As you know, Cardinal State Secretary Lambert is one of the most important senior figures in the Vatican City State. If he was involved in all of these matters, that further justifies our complaint against the Vatican City State.”

Lambert conferred with the Vatican’s lawyer again. Morati looked at him for a few seconds, contemplating the cardinal’s horrified, furious, inhuman face, then he pulled himself together and seemed to have come to a decision. With difficulty he stood up and signaled that he wanted to say something. Although it was not customary to hear witnesses in this court, Justice Andrews gestured that he had permission to speak.

O’Brian stood up and gave the old man his arm for support. Between the pressure of the situation and the burden of his confession, Morati could hardly stand up on his own.

“I am too weak to tell the entire story, but I can assure you of one thing: in the upper levels of the Vatican, the fear has always been present that one day it would become clear with what inhumanity we stood opposed to the Enlightenment and reason, and how much we wanted, from our earliest days into the present, to make our teachings irrevocable law. I myself...” Morati swayed, looking as though he were about to collapse. “I have regretted it my entire life, but I...” Tears were running down his face. With his last ounce of strength, he finished. “I myself
have killed a man for it. When Sean MacClary, the father of the honorable Justice Ronald MacClary, refused to tell us the location of his discoveries, I was also responsible, shortly before his release from the clinic...for poisoning him.”

His voice shook with every word he spoke. He was slowly collapsing. O’Brian wanted to help Morati sit down on the chair, but one last thing came from the padre’s lips.

“I can only ask for that which we as a Church have failed to give in the face of our critics, although we still hold it as one of our core values. I ask for forgiveness.”

There was a shocked silence in the courtroom. Even MacClary sat as though he was paralyzed. Morati had so far only told him that he knew the murderer—not that he himself was the murderer.

Shane turned around expectantly, but when he saw Deborah’s tear-streaked face and her blood-soaked clothes, his blood froze in his veins. A moment later he saw the FBI agents helping Ryan into the courtroom.

Everyone in the room could see that something horrible must have happened to Ryan. He seemed weak, but still his pride radiated from within as he looked into their shocked faces. “Leave me, I can manage the rest alone,” he said to the two people who had been helping him. He went up to the justices’ desk. His face was contorted with pain, his clenched hands betrayed the incredible pain he was trying to suppress.

Salvoni didn’t know what do anymore. Was this really the man he had knocked down in the cave? It had all happened so fast.

Paying not the slightest attention to court protocol, Deborah ran over to Jennifer in a panic. “Someone shot him. He’s losing a lot of blood. Jennifer, please, hurry and finish this up,” she begged through her tears.

“What? Oh no.”

Shane felt sick. Yesterday they had all been so full of hope. Every last one of them had felt that for all of them, but especially for Ryan, a long journey was finally coming to a happy end. And now this.

He had the feeling that the pain of an entire age was reflected in the suffering, the horror of this moment. Issues of faith, power...when would it end? He wanted to get up to help Ryan, but Jennifer motioned him to stay seated and wait. When she continued speaking, it was clear that she was struggling to remain calm.

“I am unfortunately forced to interrupt the response to the testimony you have just heard. This man is the petitioner, Thomas Ryan, and I believe it is of the utmost urgency that we hear his testimony now, since he has just been shot in front of the courthouse.”

“Please go ahead,” Justice Faster responded.

“I am Thomas Ryan, rightful heir to the library of the Druids, descendant of the Druid and scholar Rodanicas, which this parchment substantiates.” With his last ounce of strength he opened the box, took out the parchment,
and rolled it out on the lawyer’s desk in front of the justice’s podium.

“And this man”—Ryan pointed his finger at Salvoni, who was watching his fate unfold as if in a trance—“this man tried to kill me at the Magdalensberg.”

Ryan pulled out a hood from underneath his coat, a hood that belonged to Salvoni and which still contained a clump of hair that he had ripped out during the struggle. The courtroom was filled with a dead silence. Even the church officials sat in their seats in shock.

“I condemn you, and I am asking that one day all of this...”

With a groan Ryan slumped to the floor. The door to the courtroom opened and paramedics rushed in. Deborah knelt down and took Ryan’s head in her arm.

The pent-up emotions in the courtroom suddenly exploded into a tumultuous scene. While several of the bishops continued to hurl curses at Morati, Justice Faster gave a signal to two court officers to take Salvoni into custody. Salvoni had been staring at Ryan as if paralyzed and didn’t put up any resistance when they placed the handcuffs on him. In the commotion, Lambert tried to sneak quietly around the side and out of the courtroom.

When he got to the door, he found two police officers standing in front of him, accompanied by Luciano Verosa, the Holy See’s envoy to the United Nations.

“Let me through this instant! I have to get back to Rome on urgent business,” Lambert said in his usual
authoritarian manner. However, the handcuffs that one of the police officers had pulled out were impossible to ignore.

“Cardinal, I have been ordered to have you taken into custody with regard to your participation in a theft and attempted murder in Austria,” Verosa said coolly and calmly.

“Are you crazy?” Lambert said as he tried to force his way past the officers. “And in any case, you know that I have diplomatic immunity.”

“I am afraid that you are mistaken, Cardinal. As of yesterday you have been removed from office and are no longer a member of the Vatican City State. Here are your termination papers.”