The Third Secret

He stepped to his right, toward one of the long corridors--the Hall of Parchments. Beyond was the Room of Inventories and Indexes. As he walked, overhead bulbs flashed on and off, casting a succession of light pools, and he felt as if he were underground, though he was two stories up.

He ventured only a little way, heard nothing, then turned around.

It was early in the day and midweek. He'd chosen this time for his research deliberately--less chance of impeding others who'd gained access to the archives, and less chance of attracting the attention of curial employees. He was on a mission for the Holy Father, his inquiries private, but he was not alone. The last time, a week ago, he'd sensed the same thing.

He reentered the main hall and stepped back to the reading desk, his attention still on the room. The floor was a zodiacal diagram oriented to the sun, its rays able to penetrate thanks to carefully positioned slits high in the walls. He knew that centuries ago the Gregorian calendar had been calculated at this precise spot. Yet no sunlight leaked in today. Outside was cold and wet, a midautumn rainstorm pelting Rome.

The volumes that had held his attention for the past two hours were neatly arranged on the lectern. Many had been composed within the past two decades. Four were much older. Two of the oldest were written in Italian, one was in Spanish, the other in Portuguese. He could read all of them with ease--another reason Clement XV coveted his employment.

The Spanish and Italian accounts were of little value, both rehashes of the Portuguese work: A Comprehensive and Detailed Study of the Reported Apparitions of the Holy Virgin Mary at Fatima-May 13, 1917, to October 13, 1917.

Pope Benedict XV had ordered the investigation in 1922 as part of the Church's investigation into what supposedly had occurred in a remote Portuguese valley. The entire manuscript was handwritten, the ink faded to a warm yellow so the words appeared as if they were scripted in gold. The bishop of Leira had performed a thorough inquiry, spending eight years in all, and the information later became critical in the 1930 acknowledgment by the Vatican that the Virgin's six earthly appearances at Fatima were worthy of assent. Three appendices, now attached to the original, had been generated in the 1950s, '60s, and '90s.

Michener had studied them all with the thoroughness of the lawyer he'd been trained by the Church to be. Seven years at the University of Munich had earned him his degrees, yet he'd never practiced law conventionally. His was a world of ecclesiastical pronouncements and canonical decrees. Precedent spanned two millennia and relied more on an understanding of the times than on any notion of stare decisis. His arduous legal training had become invaluable to his Church service, as the logic of the law had many times become an ally in the confusing mire of divine politics. More important, it had just helped him find in this labyrinth of forgotten information what Clement XV wanted.

The sound came again.

A soft squeak, like two limbs rubbing together in a breeze, or a mouse announcing its presence.

He rushed toward the source and glanced both ways.

Nothing.

Fifty feet off to the left, a door led out of the archive. He approached the portal and tested the lock. It yielded. He strained to open the heavy slab of carved oak and the iron hinges squealed ever so slightly.

A sound he recognized.

The hallway beyond was empty, but a gleam on the marble floor caught his attention.

He knelt.

The transparent clumps of moisture came with regularity, the droplets leading off into the corridor, then back through the doorway into the archive. Suspended within some were remnants of mud, leaves, and grass.

He followed the trail with his gaze which stopped at the end of a row of shelves. Rain continued to pound the roof.

He knew the puddles for what they were.

Footprints.

TWO

7:45 A.M.

The media circus started early, as Michener knew it would. He stood before the window and watched as television vans and trailers eased into St. Peter's Square and claimed their assigned positions. The Vatican press office had reported to him yesterday that seventy-one press applications had been approved for the tribunal from North American, English, and French journalists, though there were also a dozen Italians and three Germans in the group. Most were print media, but several news outlets had asked for and were granted on-site broadcast permission. The BBC had even lobbied for camera access inside the tribunal itself, part of a documentary it was preparing, but that request was denied. The whole thing should be quite a show--but that was the price to be paid for going after a celebrity.

The Apostolic Penitentiary was the senior of three Vatican tribunals and dealt exclusively with excommunications. Canon law proclaimed five reasons a person could be excommunicated: Breaking the confidentiality of the confessional. Physically attacking the pope. Consecrating a bishop without Holy See approval. Desecrating the Eucharist. And the one at issue today--a priest absolving his accomplice in a sexual sin.

Father Thomas Kealy of St. Peter and Paul Church in Richmond, Virginia had done the unthinkable. Three years ago he'd engaged in an open relationship with a woman, then in front of his congregation he'd absolved them both of sin. The stunt, and Kealy's scathing comments on the Church's unbending position regarding celibacy, had garnered a great deal of attention. Individual priests and theologians had long challenged Rome on celibacy, and the usual response was to wait the advocate out, since most either quit or fell into line. Father Kealy, though, took his challenge to new levels by publishing three books, one an international best seller, that directly contradicted established Catholic doctrine. Michener well knew the institutional fear that surrounded him. It was one thing when a priest challenged Rome, quite another when people started listening.

And people listened to Thomas Kealy.

He was handsome and smart and possessed the enviable gift of being able to succinctly convey his thoughts. He'd appeared across the globe and had attracted a strong following. Every movement needed a leader, and church reform advocates had apparently found theirs in this bold priest. His website, which Michener knew the Apostolic Penitentiary monitored on a daily basis, scored more than twenty thousand hits a day. A year ago Kealy had founded a global movement, Catholics Rallying for Equality Against Theological Eccentricities--CREATE--which now boasted over a million members, most from North America and Europe.

Kealy's bold leadership had even spawned courage among American bishops, and last year a sizable bloc came close to openly endorsing his ideas and questioning Rome's continued reliance on archaic medieval philosophy. As Kealy had many times pronounced, the American church was in crisis thanks to old ideas, disgraced priests, and arrogant leaders. His argument that the Vatican loves American money, but not American influence resonated. He offered the kind of populist common sense that Michener knew Western minds craved. He had become a celebrity. Now the challenger had come to meet the champion, and their joust would be recorded by the world press.

But first, Michener had a joust of his own.

He turned from the window and stared at Clement XV, flushing from his mind the thought that his old friend might soon die.

"How are you today, Holy Father?" he asked in German. When alone, they always used Clement's native language. Almost none of the palace staff spoke German.

The pope reached for a china cup and savored a sip of espresso. "It is amazing how being surrounded by such majesty can be so unsatisfying."

The cynicism was nothing new, but of late its tone had intensified.

Clement tabled the cup. "Did you find the information in the archive?"

Michener stepped from the window and nodded.

"Was the original Fatima report helpful?"

"Not a bit. I discovered other documents that yielded more." He wondered again why any of this was important, but said nothing.

The pope seemed to sense what he was thinking. "You never ask, do you?"

"You'd tell, if you wanted me to know."

r /> A lot had changed about this man over the past three years--the pope growing more distant, pale, and fragile by the day. While Clement had always been a short, thin man, it seemed of late that his body was retreating within itself. His scalp, once covered by a thatch of brown hair, was now dusted with short gray fuzz. The bright face that had adorned newspapers and magazines, smiling from the balcony of St. Peter's as his election was announced, loomed gaunt to the point of caricature, his flush cheeks gone, the once hardly noticeable port wine stain now a prominent splotch that the Vatican press office routinely airbrushed from photos. The pressures of occupying the chair of St. Peter had taken a toll, severely aging a man who, not so long ago, scaled the Bavarian Alps with regularity.

Michener motioned to the tray of coffee. He remembered when wurst, yogurt, and black bread constituted breakfast. "Why don't you eat? The steward told me you didn't have any dinner last night."

"Such a worrier."

"Why are you not hungry?"

"Persistent, too."

"Evading my questions does nothing to calm my fears."

"And what are your fears, Colin?"

He wanted to mention the lines bracketing Clement's brow, the alarming pallor of his skin, the veins that marked the old man's hands and wrists. But he simply said, "Only your health, Holy Father."

Clement smiled. "You are good at avoiding my taunts."

"Arguing with the Holy Father is a fruitless endeavor."

"Ah, that infallibility stuff. I forgot. I'm always right."

He decided to take that challenge. "Not always."

Clement chuckled. "Do you have the name found in the archives?"

He reached into his cassock and removed what he'd written just before he'd heard the sound. He handed it to Clement and said, "Somebody was there again."

"Which should not surprise you. Nothing is private here." The pope read, then repeated what was written. "Father Andrej Tibor."

He knew what was expected of him. "He's a retired priest living in Romania. I checked our records. His retirement check is still sent to an address there."