The Devil Will Come
Read The Devil Will Come Online
Authors: Glenn Cooper
About the Book
A terrifying secret.
A shocking discovery has been made deep within Rome’s ancient catacombs. One that the Vatican is determined must never be made public – for the sake of all mankind.
A deadly conspiracy.
But there are others who want to keep the truth hidden for far more sinister reasons, others who believe that not only are the church and the faith of millions at threat, but life as we know it is about to be destroyed – for ever. And only one woman – a young Italian nun – can save us…
The nightmare is about to begin.
Glenn Cooper graduated with a degree in archaeology from Harvard and got his medical degree from Tufts University School of Medicine. He has been the Chairman and CEO of a biotechnology company in Massachusetts and is a screenwriter and producer. He is also the bestselling author of
Library of the Dead
, its sequel
Book of Souls
, and
The Tenth Chamber
.
Library of the Dead
Book of Souls
The Tenth Chamber
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned
.
from
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
by
Christopher Marlowe
PROLOGUE
Rome,
AD
1139
He kept his curtains parted to keep an eye on the night sky but the window faced west and he needed to look east.
The Palazzo Apostolico Lateranense, as the Romans called it, was vast – surely the largest and grandest building he’d ever seen. His native tongue was Irish, which was of no use in these parts. He found conversational Latin tough going so during his visit he and his hosts limped by with English. In English this was the Lateran Palace, the residence of the Pope.
He peeled away his thin blanket and fished in the dark for his sandals. He had bedded down in his simple monk’s habit, which he wore despite his right to grander attire. He was Máel Máedóc Ua Morgair – in English, Malachy, Bishop of Down, and he was here as the guest of Pope Innocent II.
It had been a long, difficult journey from Ireland, taking him through the untamed lands of Scotland, England and France. The journey had consumed the entire summer and now in late September the air
was
already carrying a chill bite. In France he had stayed for a while with the esteemed clerical scholar Bernard of Clairvaux, a man whose intellect clearly matched his own. But he’d fooled Bernard with his faked piety and earnestness. He’d fooled them all.
Malachy’s cell in the guest dormitory was a great distance from the high-ceilinged regal rooms of the Pope. He’d been in Rome for a fortnight and had only seen the old man twice: the first time for a perfunctory audience in his private chambers, the second as part of an entourage to tour the pontiff’s pet project, the rebuilding of his favorite church, the ancient Santa Maria in Trastevere. Who knew how long it would be before he was summoned again to conduct his main business – petitioning Innocent to grant the pallia for the Sees (the seats of ecclesiastical authority) of Armagh and Cashel? But that was unimportant. What was vital was that he had succeeded in being in Rome on the twenty-fourth day of September in the year 1139 with midnight approaching.
Malachy crept carefully down long bare corridors, coaxing his eyes to accommodate to the darkness. He fancied himself a slithering creature of the night, gliding silently through the sleeping palace.
They have no idea who I am
.
They have no idea what I am
.
And to think that they swallowed me whole and allowed me to dwell within their own belly!
There was a staircase leading to the roof. Malachy had seen it before but had never taken it. He could
only
hope that he’d be able to make it unimpeded all the way up into the night air.
When he could climb no higher he turned an iron latch and put his shoulder against the heavy hatch until it budged and then yielded outwards. The pitch of the roof was steep enough that he had to take great care to keep his footing. To be safe he removed his sandals. The slates felt cold and smooth against the soles of his feet. He didn’t dare sneak a look at the eastern sky until he’d pressed his back against the nearest chimney stack and jammed his heels against the slates.
Only then did Malachy feast his eyes on the heavens.
Over the great slumbering city of Rome the cloudless black firmament was perfect in every way. And just as he knew it would have, the lunar eclipse had already begun.
He’d spent years studying the charts.
Like the great astrologers before him, like Balbilus of ancient Rome, Malachy was a master of the heavens but he doubted whether any of his predecessors had ever had an opportunity like this. How disastrous, how catastrophic it would have been if the sky had been overcast.
He had to see the moon with his own eyes!
At the precise moment when he had to count the stars!
Complete eclipses of the moon were uncommon enough but was there ever one like tonight?
Tonight the moon was in Pisces, their sacred constellation.
And it had just completed its nineteen-year cycle, sinking once again below the sun’s ecliptic to its South Node, the point of maximum adversity – the Devil’s Tail, as astrologers called it.
This convergence of celestial events had perhaps never happened before and perhaps would never happen again! It was a night full of glorious portent. It was a night when a man like Malachy could make powerful prophecy.
Now all he could do was wait.
It would take almost an hour for the golden moon to slip into blackness, its orb nibbled away by an unseen giant.
When the moment came Malachy had to be ready, his mind had to be free of distraction. His bladder ached a bit so he pulled up his habit and let loose, watching in amusement as his urine streamed off the roof onto the Pope’s garden. Too bad the old bastard wasn’t standing there, looking up with open mouth.
The eclipse was a quarter done, then half, then three-quarters. He hardly felt the night chill. When the last of the moon’s light was gone a penumbra suddenly formed, glowing thick and amber. And then Malachy saw what he’d been waiting for. There were stars shining brightly through the penumbra. Not a few, not too many.
He’d have time enough to make his count and check it once before the penumbra disappeared.
Ten.
Fifty.
Eighty.
One hundred.
One hundred twelve!
He bore down mentally and repeated the exercise.
Yes, one hundred twelve.
The eclipse began to reverse and the penumbra collapsed.
Malachy carefully scuttled back down to the hatch, descended the stairs and made his way to his room, anxious not to lose a moment.
There he lit a fat candle and dipped a quill into a pot of ink. He began to write as fast as he could. He would write all night until the dawn came. He saw it clearly, as clearly as the stars brightly imprinted on his mind’s eye.
Here in the Lateran Palace, here in Rome, here in the bosom of Christendom, the home of his great enemy and the enemy of his kind, Malachy had a lucid and certain vision of what would come to pass.
There would be 112 more Popes: 112 Popes until the end of the Church. And the end of the world as they knew it.
Rome, 2000
‘WHAT DOES K
want?’ the man asked. He was seated, nervously drumming thick fingers against the wooden arms of a chair.
Although the line had gone dead, the other man still had the phone in his hand. He set it back into its cradle and waited for a city bus to pass under their open window and for its annoying rumble to fade. ‘He wants us to kill her.’
‘So we’ll kill her. We know where she lives. We know where she works.’
‘He wants us to do it tonight.’
The seated man lit a cigarette with a gold lighter. It was inscribed
TO ALDO, FROM K
. ‘I prefer more planning.’
‘Of course. So do I.’
‘I didn’t hear you objecting.’
‘That wasn’t one of his people. It was K!’
The seated man leaned forward in surprise and exhaled a plume of smoke which floated off and merged with the wafting diesel fumes. ‘He called you himself?’
‘Couldn’t you tell by the way I was speaking?’
The seated man drew on his cigarette so deeply that the smoke penetrated the deepest reaches of his lungs. When he breathed out he said, ‘Then tonight she dies.’
Elisabetta Celestino was shocked at her own tears. When was the last time she’d cried?
The answer came to her in a vinegary rush of memory.
Her mother’s death. At the hospital, at the wake, at the funeral and for days afterwards until she prayed for the tears to stop and they did. Even though she was a young girl at the time, she hated the wet eyes and the streaked cheeks, the awful heaving of the chest, the lack of control over her body and she vowed to banish henceforth this kind of eruption.
But now Elisabetta felt the sting of salty tears in her eyes. She was angry at herself. There was no equivalence between these long-separated events – her mother’s passing and this email she’d received from Professor De Stefano.
Still, she was determined to confront him, change his mind, turn the situation around. In the pantheon of the Università Degli Studi di Roma, De Stefano was a god and she, a lowly graduate student, was a supplicant. But since childhood she’d possessed a gritty determination, often getting her way by peppering her adversary with a fusillade of reason and then launching a few piercing missiles of intellect to win the day. Over
the
years many had succumbed – friends, teachers, even her genius father once or twice.
As she waited outside De Stefano’s office at the Department of Archeology and Antiquity within the heartless Fascist-style Humanities Building Elisabetta composed herself. It was already dark and unseasonably cold. The boilers weren’t putting out any perceptible heat and she kept her coat on her lap draped over her bare legs. The book-lined corridor of the department was empty, the volumes secure in locked glass-fronted cabinets. The overhead fluorescent lights cast a white stripe on the gray-tiled floor. There was only one open door. It led to the cramped office she shared with three other grad students but she didn’t want to wait there. She wanted De Stefano to see her as soon as he rounded the corner so she sat on one of the hard benches where the students waited for their professors.
He kept her waiting. He was almost never on time. Whether it was his way of demonstrating his position on the totem pole or just scatterbrained time management, she was uncertain. He was nonetheless always appropriately apologetic and when he finally did come rushing in he spouted
mea culpas
and unlocked his office door hurriedly.