Adrian D'Hage - The Omega scroll

‘Something terrible, Father. His Holiness… He’s…’ Sister Vincenza choked on the words.

Giovanni recoiled in shock when he entered the Pope’s bedroom. His Holiness was upright in bed, his face twisted in agony, eyes bulging. His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose. Giovanni felt a strange and overwhelming need to remain calm as he glanced at the Pope’s slippers that had been kicked off in disarray beside the bed, the toes covered in vomit. He picked up the phone beside the Pope’s bedside and rang the Cardinal Secretary of State in his Lateran Palace Apartment. The Cardinal answered almost immediately.

‘ Mon dieu, c’est vrais tous ca? My God, is that true?’

The Cardinal, Giovanni would reflect later, sounded awake and alert.

‘When did you find him, Sister?’ Giovanni asked.

‘Just before I woke you, Father,’ Sister Vincenza replied, tears streaming down her kindly old face. ‘I left the Holy Father’s coffee outside his room at four-thirty as I always do and when I checked just before five it hadn’t been touched, so I knocked and then…’ Her voice trailed off as she started to sob.

‘You did all you could,’ Giovanni said, comforting the old nun. ‘Make yourself a cup of tea,’ he said, giving her something to do.

‘Would you like one, Father?’ Sister Vincenza asked, ever concerned about the welfare of those in her care.

‘Only if you feel up to it.’

When the old nun had left Giovanni looked more closely at the dead Pope. In the short time he had held the Keys of Peter, Albino Luciani had come to be loved by most and feared by some. He was a man of unassuming charm and softness, with a searing intellect. Giovanni glanced at the small bottle of medicine the Pope kept on his bedside table for low blood pressure, then at the crimson folder clutched in the dead Pope’s hand. The papers that had spilled from it onto the bed were part of Professor Fiorini’s brief on the Omega Scroll. Giovanni felt a cold fear in the pit of his stomach as he scanned the scattered pages. And in the beginning, the third will triumph over the first and second… all mankind will be annihilated.

‘Don’t touch anything, Father.’ Lorenzo Petroni’s voice was steely, his lack of emotion sinister. ‘Does anyone else know that the Pope is dead?’ He was clean-shaven and fully dressed in the formal robes of an archbishop. Only minutes had passed since Giovanni had alerted the Cardinal Secretary of State. It was not yet five-fifteen.

‘Only Sister Vincenza and the Cardinal Secretary of State.’

‘You should have rung me as well, Father Donelli. To protect Sister Vincenza from the media she is to be returned to her convent in Venice. Immediately.’

‘Eminence, a terrible thing,’ Petroni said smoothly. The Cardinal Secretary of State, also fully dressed and clean-shaven, hurried into the room. He was followed a little later by the Papal Physician, Dr Renato Buzzonetti. While Dr Buzzonetti examined the body, Archbishop Petroni systematically removed the papers and the file from the bed, as well as the dead Pope’s glasses, his slippers and his medicine. He crossed to the Pope’s desk and removed the file on the impending sackings and transfers, as well as the Holy Father’s appointment book.

Later in the morning Giovanni, still trying to come to terms with both his and the Church’s loss, was stunned to hear the official announcement of the Pope’s death on Vatican Radio: This morning, 29 September 1978, at about five-thirty, the private secretary of the Pope, not having found the Holy Father in the chapel of his private apartment, looked for him in his room and found him dead in bed with the light on, like one who was intent on reading. The physician, Dr Renato Buzzonetti, who hastened to the Pope’s room, verified the death, which took place presumably around eleven o’clock yesterday evening, as ‘sudden death’ that could be related to acute myocardial infarction.

‘The Vatican Radio has got it wrong, Excellency,’ Giovanni remonstrated with Petroni.

‘The Vatican Radio has got it absolutely correct, Father Donelli. Their statements are in accordance with the official press release, which is going on the wire as we speak. All press inquiries are to be handled by the Vatican Press Office and should anyone else ask, the Holy Father was found reading a copy of the devotional The Imitation of Christ. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Excellency,’ was Giovanni’s only response, a touch of steel in his own voice.

Petroni watched the young priest leave his office and wondered how much of the brief on the Omega Scroll he had seen. Time enough to deal with him after the conclave elected the next Pope. Hopefully this time, the Curial Cardinals would get it right and the Church could return to the right path.

Tom Schweiker prepared to go to air, adding to the growing calls for the truth about the death of John Paul I. Up until now the CCN network had not had a reporter dedicated to ‘religious affairs’ and although Tom Schweiker was CCN’s correspondent across the Mediterranean in the largely Muslim Middle East, given the relative proximity to Rome, management had not objected to Tom’s request to cover the Holy See. Management had no idea the request was part of Tom’s search for his own haunting truth, something that had driven him since his youth.

‘And this evening we cross live to Tom Schweiker reporting from outside the Vatican. Tom, there are growing calls for an investigation into Pope John Paul’s death.’ The anchor in New York was the grey-haired, avuncular Walter Casey, a household name in the United States.

Tom nodded as the satellite cross from Washington reached his earpiece. ‘That’s right, Walter. The respected Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has been just one of those in the forefront of calls for the Vatican to come clean.’

‘Do you think the Vatican is hiding something?’

‘That’s very clear. The Vatican has lied about this from the outset, Walter, and the web of fiction has been almost childish. Pope John Paul I was not found by his private secretary, as claimed in the Vatican’s initial press release. We now know that the body was found by a member of the Papal household, Sister Vincenza, who has been spirited away, and the Vatican is refusing to say where she is.’

‘And there is a question about the documents the Pope was reading when he died?’

‘Initially the Vatican claimed he was reading a devotional book, The Imitation of Christ, but that claim fell apart when the book couldn’t be found in the Pope’s apartments in the Vatican but turned up in his old apartments in Venice. The Vatican has now claimed the Pope was studying a list of new appointments but there are claims that this is also not true, and that he may have been reading a brief on the legendary Omega Scroll.’

‘Will there be an autopsy do you think, Tom?’

‘There is enormous pressure for that, Walter, but the Vatican are resisting it on the basis that Canon Law forbids it. The problem with that argument is that several theologians have confirmed that Canon Law doesn’t say anything about autopsies. As far as Italian law goes the injection of embalming fluids is not allowed within twenty-four hours of death without the express permission of a magistrate, yet Pope John Paul’s body was injected immediately. There is now a very strong sense that Pope John Paul I was murdered, possibly by the addition of digitalis to a regular medicine he took for low blood pressure.’

‘Do we know if he was in good health?’

‘He was examined by Dr Giuseppe Da Ros only a few days before his death and Dr Da Ros said, “ Non sta bene ma benone – he is not well but very well,” and his personal doctor in Venice says Albino Luciani was a very good mountain climber with absolutely no history of heart problems.’