The Martian Pendant (5 page)

FIVE                                                        

The
Plotters

The musty office of the Special Security Operative of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards had not received a visitor for more than a week. There was only one window, covered by the dirt and grime of the city. That obscured the view, and barely allowed sufficient light to enable a visitor to distinguish night from day. His oaken desk in the small dark room held only a few papers in its many cubbyholes, leaving ample space for the resident spiders to spin their webs. Most coming onto the scene uninformed would think it was dark humor.

It was hardly a joke. One look at the man himself would immediately kill any impression of humor. His eyes, an unusual silvery-gray, seemed to give off a luminosity.  He had oily black hair and swarthy skin, with a long beak-like nose over thin pale lips that, even at rest, revealed his pointed canine teeth. His height was concealed by a marked stoop, almost a coiling, and his muscular arms ended in grotesquely large claw-like hands. By the time the caller’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, it seemed as if the operative was some unusual predator, ready to spring.

Armando Celestre. He didn’t look Swiss, and he wasn’t, but he had become fluent in most of the European tongues, and the Italian he spoke was that of southern Switzerland. Actually, he had been born in Sicily of a large peasant family. Grotesque in appearance, he had always been somewhat of an outcast, even among his many siblings.

This combination of alienation by his peers, coupled with his having excelled academically, brought him early to the attention of the local Mafia. When they had approached his father regarding recruiting him to their ranks, the parental reaction was, of course, ambivalent. They had parental love for him, although he was a source of friction in the family and with the villagers. And he was so young. But you couldn’t refuse such an offer, the Mafia being what it was. Besides, he would be guaranteed an otherwise unobtainable higher education.

The Mafia had not always been the criminal organization that reached its peak in Sicily, and which thrives even today. It was first organized by mainland Italians, in resistance to the Napoleonic incursions into their homeland. At first confined to isolated regions in the mountains and islands such as Sardinia and Corsica, it became a thorn in the side of Napoleon’s generals. The name “Mafia,” in fact, was originally an acronym for what now might be called a corporate mission statement. Morte Alla Francia, Italia Anelia. (Death to the French, Italy Cries.) After the French withdrew, and Garibaldi finally unified Italy, the organization lost its original high purpose. Its members in certain areas, especially in Southern Italy and Sicily, elected not to disband but to seek other areas of profit. In time, their power brought the usual result: corruption.

Celestre was earmarked early for infiltration into the Church hierarchy, and so received a most Catholic education. After graduation from the Jesuit University of Sicily, he moved to Rome, studying as a novitiate for the priesthood and teaching as a scholastic at the university there. After being ordained, he applied for a position as chaplain to the Swiss Guard at the Vatican. It was quickly seen that his appearance better suited him to the enforcement arm, undercover rather than in uniform. Such a position was fine with him. After all, his mission wasn’t really a spiritual one anyway. Violence in different forms had become second nature for him as he had grown up in the Mafia organization.

Pope Pius

World War II began in 1939, just a few months after a new Pope, Pius XII, took the Crook of St. Peter in Rome. He would reign until his death in 1958. Long before he was even a Cardinal, he had been trying to appease Germany’s Adolf Hitler as Papal Nuncio, the Vatican’s Ambassador to Munich and Berlin. He had risen through the ranks, strengthening the doctrine of Papal infallibility, authority in which he himself would later bask.

Born in 1876 north of Rome as Eugenio Pacelli, after ordination he was trained in law. Following the First World War, his greatest fears concerned a Communist takeover of the defeated Germany. Later, as Papal Nuncio, his mission was to preserve Catholicism in that country, but also to suppress godless Marxism. The Vatican certainly knew the power of the Church there, which in the previous century had defeated the powerful Chancellor Bismarck’s attempts to encroach on their rights. More than half of Germany was Catholic, after all.

But now, the preservation of the Church took precedence over the rights of the people. As the Pope’s representati
ve, he negotiated an agreement known as
The Reich Concordat
. To aid in the fight against Communism, no longer would Catholics in Germany play any role in the politics of that country. This meant that there would be no organized resistance to Nazi policy and tactics. In return, they were assured that the
Reich
would not interfere with the Vatican. The consequences were unintended. The Concordat actually aided Hitler’s rise to power by helping silence the opposition.

Pacelli was not alone among those in the Church’s undemocratic power structure. There was much admiration for Europe’s dictators. In the Vatican, the top of the monolithic pyramid of international Catholicism, the Pope was most certainly a leader as autocratic as Mussolini, Salazar, and Franco, all dictators of Catholic countries.

As Pius the Twelfth, despite his esthetic demeanor, he was intoxicated by his new power. But when it appeared that all Europe would be engulfed by the Nazi legions, he became frightened of Hitler. With the Nazi conquest of overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Poland soon after he was elected Pontiff, he became more concerned for the Church’s flocks than ever. The Nazi dictator was threatening to become even greater than the Church.

So great had the Pope’s fears about Hitler’s intent become that, at the onset of the war, he began to entertain thoughts of having Hitler eliminated. It was at his direction that reorganization of the Vatican’s Swiss Guard to include men of more than ceremonial training was carried out. A new spy agency to infiltrate “Areas of Need” was organized. This, of course, had to be done in secret under the watchful eye of the Fascist authorities surrounding his little hundred-acre enclave who were also watching the numerous religious institutions that dotted the Roman scene.

This need was the opportunity for the Mafia to further insinuate itself into the fabric of the Roman Church, and the means by which Celestre came to be the denizen of that poorly-lit little office. But throughout the war, Italy was bottled up not only by the Allies, but also by its fellow Axis partner, the Germans. Vatican spies remained therefore largely ineffective, mostly cooped up at home.

There had thus been little enforcement work for the unhandsome priest. He had always remained behind the scenes at receptions given by the Pontiff, or in the crowd, his men in plainclothes during the Papal addresses. It was not until 1957, the year before the Pope’s death, when an unusual new threat to the Church was perceived. Word leaked back to Rome that data from GeoSat had pinpointed a huge focus of radiation in a region in East Africa otherwise barren of such activity. The Roman Catholic missionary presence there was being undercut by several of the newer Evangelical Protestant offshoots. The African natives seemed to take to the methods of the Pentecostals and other “Charismatic” sects, with their singing, dancing and speaking in tongues that mimicked the natives’ own rituals, even if the lessons they taught didn’t match their ancient Animistic beliefs.

Rumors started by the findings of GeoSat had led to speculation that relics of a godless or pagan people might be uncovered there, leading to further defections and other complications. That was enough to send a spy to observe, and if need be, to guard the Church’s theological interests. An alien pantheistic or atheistic belief could not be tolerated in this area of Africa that was marked for the expansion of Catholicism.

The Mafia had a different interest in the expedition, and when Celestre reported to them, not only was approval given, but additional armed help at the scene was promised. No telling what riches such an expedition might uncover.

The KGB

Intelligence regarding GeoSat had always been thoroughly monitored in Moscow. The KGB, the secret police of the USSR, created an entire new office to deal with that. Spies were deployed in the U.S. to learn more of the technology involved, and in addition, one of their operatives was detailed to follow developments at the scene of the most intriguing location, East Africa.

Sergei Dragunov, still a young man in his late thirties, was tall, muscular and clean-cut. With glacial-blue eyes set under a shock of flaxen hair, he was built like an Olympic athlete. Looks were deceiving, in his case. He had been carefully trained from an early age in both espionage and the art of liquidation in the super-secret school of the KGB’s more murderous predecessor, the NKVD, organized for that purpose. The NKVD had been started under the direction of Joseph Stalin in 1943 during what the Soviets called the “Great Patriotic War.” After the bloody conflict, at that despot’s direction, its agents were turned loose in the conquered territories to identify facilities and goods worthy of shipping back to Mother Russia.

Objections by the owners of items marked for reparations, whether artwork, gold or machinery, led to their being shipped off as slave labor to the Gulags in Siberia. In cases of those who were especially vociferous, summary executions by these same agents, usually employing the garrote, were commonplace.

Dragunov was one of those operatives. He took special pleasure in the brutal liquidation of any who stood in his way. It mattered not whether they were Nazis, neutrals, or even citizens of Allied nations. His techniques were singularly sadistic, and often extended to family members of his primary victims as well. Most efficient in his interrogations were his Genghis Khan-like threats of violation and torture of the wives and daughters of those arrested. This always brought the needed information regarding the location of treasure.

It was obvious that he would not blend in easily with the local population, as might the swarthy Mafioso priest from the Vatican, but his cover as a South African mining engineer was perfect for the situation. In his lengthy preparation for espionage, he had learned to speak English fluently.
                            

Big Oil

In Los Angeles, some executives of United Oil of California were having second thoughts. Oil and natural gas had become the king of energy in the U.S., replacing coal on the railroads and for much of heating uses, but was being threatened by the infant nuclear power industry in the generation of electricity. Boardroom debate, which in the past had mostly been concerned with rival coal, now seemed to always end with concern about the plans certain electrical utilities had for building nuclear plants. Still, hard-bitten oilmen were convinced that petroleum and natural gas would remain the top priority for transportation and furnaces, both home and industrial, for many decades. Fully one-third of U.S. energy consumption was for internal combustion engines, land, sea and airborne, and that meant gasoline, diesel, bunker oil, and the recently added jet fuel. But the perceived potential of nuclear energy, theoretically at least, remained a serious threat.

The new data generated from GeoSat suggested the possibility of the discovery of oil, but the intensity of the signal focal to the Great Rift Valley of East Africa meant that something else might be found there. To most it looked like uranium ore of unprecedented concentration, and all of them were afraid of what that might mean. Plans had, of course, already been made to mount an expedition to the region, and final preparations were awaiting the ponderous but necessary British bureaucratic clearances for exploration in their protectorate of Tanganyika, which they had obtained from the defeated Germans during World War I.

But they were meeting governmental resistance. Officials there were concerned about the possible plundering of resources that could be brought about by letting in such a powerful force as the American Oil Cartel. Further, there was no doubt that the drilling specialists and others sent there would have to be accompanied by ample American security agents, and the local native police were resisting the project. It seems they wanted that plum for themselves. Corrupt, and always short of funds, guarding an oil expedition could prove golden for them.

Some of the executives were pushing for a cover for the operation, and much time in the boardroom in Los Angeles was spent examining possible solutions. They finally agreed upon a plan that would certainly expedite things with the British authorities in Tanganyika. The preliminary exploration would be, in effect, an archeological dig! Governments had always favored that activity, more willing to trade their ancient fossils and artifacts than natural resources for scarce foreign currency.

A three-man task force was appointed by the Board to contact an appropriate archaeology department at a top university. Normally, they would have sounded out a nearby California school, but it was decided to enlist academics from a university in the Midwest, far away from any petroleum interests that might arouse suspicion. So they made a connection with the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago.

*    *    *

Max Werner was due for a sabbatical. He had been teaching palaeoanthropology at the University of Chicago for eight years. At the time, he felt a bit stale, and he needed a break. He had participated in some minor digs in the Southwest, and the one in Spain, but he yearned for something of significance. The position offered by the oilmen, that of leading their expedition, seemed perfect. Many insufficiently sampled sites, he knew, existed in the Great Rift Valley, but most specialists in the field would have balked at the deal. A dedicated scientist would rarely agree to serving as cover for such a sub-rosa venture that was so completely different.