The Atlantis Code by Charles Brokaw Read Free Book Online

he was, and policemen.
    Only one man walked through Vatican City fearless, and Murani hoped to one day be that man. He wanted to be the pope. The pope had money. Vatican City yielded over a quarter billion dollars annually through its various tithes, collections, and commercial enterprises. The money wasn’t what Murani wanted, though. He wanted the pope’s power. Even when the position of pope had been filled by men bent by age, illness, and infirmity, the respect for the office had been there. They were mighty.
    The people—the believers and the world at large—thought the pope’s word was law. That was without a show of force, without any attempt to demonstrate the power the pope wielded.
    Cardinal Stefano Murani was one of the few that truly knew the amount of power the pope could raise if he so chose. Unfortunately the current pope, Innocent XIV, didn’t believe in flexing the power of the office. He was trying to preach about peace despite the constant terrorist attacks and economic devastation that troubled the world.
    The old fool.
    At an early age, Murani had been drawn to the Catholic Church. He’d served as an altar boy in the church he’d grown up around in Naples and loved the organized way the priests performed. He wasn’t supposed to become a priest. His father had had other ideas for Murani. But when he became a young man and had explored his father’s business interests and found them lacking, he turned to the cloth.
    His father had gotten angry at that announcement, and had even tried to beat such a notion from his son’s head. For the first time in all his twenty-five years, Murani discovered that his willpower was stronger than his father’s: he could take all the abuse his father handed out and still not waver. But he did find his father’s training of some use in his new career. When he was ordained, he continued his studies in the field of computers and excelled. He was fast-tracked to Vatican City and soon made his way to the top of the computer division where he now served. He’d eventually been made a cardinal, one of the men capable of electing a pope. He’d barely missed out on the last papal convocation, but he been part of the gathering of cardinals that placed Innocent XIV into power.
    During the last three years, just days before his forty-first birthday, he’d been brought into the Society of Quirinus, the clandestine group of the Church’s most powerful, men who held the most closely guarded secrets within the Church.
    Most of those secrets were minor matters—instances of papal mistakes or children born out of wedlock to cardinals and archbishops, or high-ranking priests who paid too much attention to the altar boys. Those were things that could be quietly dealt with, although even that was getting harder to do in this day of instant media attention. Tales of sexual misconduct dogged the Church these days, bringing her down into the gutter and making her appear weak. In 2006, a priest had even been convicted of a particularly abhorrent murder.
    The scars to his beloved church troubled Murani.
    For the last three years, Murani had become convinced that the popes before him—and he did think of himself as papal, for he knew that he would one day be among them, without a doubt—had squandered their power, constantly backing away from securing what was rightfully theirs. People needed faith. Without faith, they couldn’t understand all the confusing things that were a part of simply being alive. The great masses had an animalistic panic about them today. But being truly faithful meant being truly penitent, truly fearful.
    Perfect fear was a beautiful thing.
    He loved to inflict it.
    Murani intended to bring that fear of the papacy back into the world.
    As a child, he’d sat on his mother’s knee and listened to the old stories of the Church. In those days, the pope’s blessing could make kings more powerful, wars last longer or end abruptly, and trigger conquests and