Paul Christopher - The Lucifer Gospel

“Think nothing of it, Mr. Hilts.” Simpson looked fondly up at Finn through the open window of the car. “Repaying a favor to the memory of an old friend.”

“We will pay you,” said Finn, her tone firm.

“On your way,” Simpson ordered.

“What about you?” Hilts asked.

“I have some people to see back in Italy. But I’m sure we’ll meet again before this is over. Look for me.” He smiled again, rolled up the window, and drove off. Hilts and Finn turned, crossed the broad sidewalk, and went into the low-ceilinged modern terminus. They bought a pair of first-class tickets on the next high-speed train to Paris, a brand-new TGV double-decker Duplex with big airplane-style seats, lots of leg room, and a top speed of 186 miles per hour. They boarded the train, found their seats, and settled in for the relatively short journey. So far they had seen nothing suspicious, but without passports and only forged documents to identify themselves they both felt vulnerable. The train was packed, mostly with tourists of various nationalities on their way back to Paris, but they had seats together and no one paid them any attention. The train headed smoothly out of the station, right on time, and a few minutes later they were gathering speed as they raced through the suburbs of the big French city. Neither one of them had spoken since leaving Simpson at the entrance to the station.

“You want something to eat?” Hilts asked. He had taken the aisle seat, giving Finn the window.

“No, thanks.”

“Drink?”

“No, I’m not thirsty,” said Finn, shaking her head. “Maybe later.”

“Yeah, maybe later,” said Hilts awkwardly. Another moment passed.

“What do you really know about this man Simpson?” he asked finally.

“Not much,” she responded. “He came to my room in Cairo. He said he knew my father. He warned me about Adamson.” She paused. “He says he knew Vergadora back in the old days.” She paused again. The train began to sway and vibrate slightly as they hit the open countryside and continued to gain speed. “I know he got us out of a lot of trouble last night. He’s arranged for passports today. Stuff we couldn’t have done ourselves.”

“Like some kind of guardian angel, is that it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You ever wonder what’s in it for him?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I can’t give you an answer because I don’t know. I only know what he’s done for us so far.”

Hilts was silent for a moment. He stared at the striped fabric and the pull-down table on the seat ahead.

“You ever watch a TV show or read a book and come to a place where you stop and ask yourself, why don’t they just go to the cops?”

“Sure,” Finn said. “It’s like in a horror movie when the girl goes down into the dark basement and everybody but her knows she should turn and run.”

“But if she did, the movie would end right there,” agreed Hilts. “That’s where we are. We’re at the place where the movie should just end, because if we had any brains we’d run to the cops.”

“But we can’t. They want us for killing Vergadora.”

“And our guardian angel, your friend Mr. Simpson, who keeps on turning up, is helping us to get away from the cops.”

“What are you getting at?”

“He’s keeping the movie going.”

“So?”

“Why?” Hilts asked. “Unless he wants us to keep on looking for DeVaux.” He paused. “Or unless we’re being led into some kind of trap.”

“That thought had crossed my mind,” Finn said abjectly. “But what are we supposed to do about it now?”

“That story he told us today, out in Liam Pyx’s garden, about DeVaux.”

“What about it?”

“Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out.”

While they’d waited for Pyx to create their new identities, Simpson had told them about his relationship with the vanished monk and with the man who’d been after him for years, Abramo Vergadora. According to Simpson, Hilts was correct; not only was Vergadora now a sayan for Israeli Intelligence-the Mossad-he had once been an active member, back before it, or Israel itself, had even existed. In the late thirties Simpson had met the Italian Jew at Cambridge, where Vergadora was reading anthropology and archaeology under Louis Clarke and T. C. Lethbridge, who was curator of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Cambridge Archaeological Museum. With the war Vergadora chose to join British Intelligence in Switzerland rather than return to Italy and face persecutions under Mussolini. He eventually joined the so-called Jewish Brigade, which infiltrated German-speaking Jews into Germany toward the end of the war as resistance fighters and spies. Through his work he discovered DeVaux’s history with his own archenemy Pedrazzi, and also learned that after Pedrazzi’s disappearance in the Libyan Desert, DeVaux had briefly reappeared in Venosa to dig in the old catacombs, and then fled again, this time to America. Somewhere along the line, perhaps with the help of old friends at the Vatican, he managed to change his name to Peter Devereaux and resurfaced as an assistant curator at the Wilcox Classical Museum at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

“Pretty obscure,” Hilts had commented.

“Obscure perhaps, but fitting,” replied Simpson, nibbling on a small piece of baguette slathered with fresh churned butter and goose liver pate. “The Wilcox is entirely given over to Greek and Roman antiquities, including one of the world’s best collections of Roman coins and medallions. Just like the one you found on Pedrazzi.”

DeVaux-Devereaux had kept a low profile at the university for years, but according to Vergadora he had continued his researches and also his connections with the school in Jerusalem. According to Vergadora, and confirmed by Simpson, the school was more than simply an institute for biblical archaeology; it was also a Vatican listening post in a chronically troubled part of the world and always had been.

According to information gathered covertly by his friends in the Mossad, Vergadora found out where DeVaux had been hiding and what his new identity was. Following this information, at least according to Simpson’s story, Vergadora also found out that the onetime Vatican archaeologist had made a discovery of profound religious and historical significance: the so-called Lucifer Gospels, written by Christ himself-after the Crucifix-ion. The gospels, sometimes also known as Christ’s Confession, told the story of how Christ’s place was taken by his brother James in the Garden of Gethsemane and then “betrayed” by Judas to the Roman soldiers who came to arrest him, the soldiers having no idea of what Christ looked like. Christ, with the help of several recently converted Romans, was spirited away into the wilds of the Libyan Desert, where he lived a long life as a hermetic monk. His own mythology eventually became confused with that of the Lost Legions, Zerzura, and his so-called Aryan protectors, the blue-eyed fair-haired Knights of Saint Sebastian. All of this, of course, completely denied the entire foundation of the Catholic Church and of Christianity as a whole; a disaster of monumental proportions when even the most basic tenets of the Church were under attack. Even more bizarrely, it seemed that DeVaux-Devereaux had made this discovery in the United States. By his estimation the gospels had been transported by early Templar explorers deep into the central United States, perhaps along with the greatest treasure of all: the bones of Jesus Christ himself. Myth or reality, either way it was a story with powerful implications for everyone.

DeVaux-Devereaux’s discovery eventually led to an agreement to meet, but on neutral ground. The onetime Vatican historian knew that his information, and his proof, were inherently both incredibly valuable and equally dangerous. The meeting was to take place in Nassau in the Bahamas, easy enough for both parties to reach, on board the French passenger liner the Ile de France, now renamed the Acosta Star. The man he was to meet with was a scholar named Bishop Augustus Principe from the Pontifical Institute of Biblical Studies in Rome. Unfortunately, soon after leaving the Bahamas, with DeVaux-Devereaux on board, the ship caught fire and sank. In the process the ex-priest and Bishop Principe were killed and the secret of the Lucifer Gospel lost. First Vergadora and then Simpson had managed to check the bare facts of the story and found them to be true: there had been a spate of three-way coded correspondence between the school in Jerusalem, the Vatican secretariat, and the man known as Peter Devereaux in Lawrence, Kansas, and the Acosta Star had in fact sunk somewhere in the Caribbean on Thursday, September 8, 1960, at 11:22 p.m. with a man named Peter Devereaux listed on the passenger manifest.