The Devil Will Come Read online

  The Devil Will Come

  Glenn Cooper

  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.

  About the Author

  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.

  Also by Glenn Cooper

  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.

  ONE

  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 wa
nts 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.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ he said. ‘I was delayed. My meeting ran over, and the traffic was dreadful.’

  ‘I understand,’ Elisabetta said smoothly. ‘It was good of you to come back tonight to see me.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I know you’re upset. It’s difficult, but I think there are important lessons that in the long term will only help your career.’

  De Stefano hung up his overcoat and sank into his desk chair.

  She had rehearsed the speech in her mind and now the stage was hers. ‘But, Professor, here’s what I’m having great trouble with. You supported my work from the moment I showed you the first photographs of St Callixtus. You came with me to see the subsidence damage, the fallen wall, the first-century brickwork, the symbols on the plaster. You agreed with me that they were unique to the catacombs. You agreed the astrological symbology was unprecedented. You supported my research. You supported publication. You supported further excavation. What happened?’

  De Stefano rubbed his bristly crew-cut. ‘Look, Elisabetta, you’ve always known the protocol. The catacombs are under the control of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology. I’m a member of the Commission. All publication drafts have to be cleared by them. Unfortunately, your paper was rejected and your request for funding to mount an excavation was also rejected. But here’s the good news. You’re broadly known now. No one criticized your scholarship. This can only work toward your benefit. All you need is patience.’

  She leaned back in her chair and felt her cheeks flushing with anger. ‘Why was it rejected? You haven’t told me why.’

  ‘I talked to Archbishop Luongo just this afternoon and asked him the same question. He told me the view was that the paper was too speculative and preliminary, that any public disclosure of the findings should await further study and contextual analysis.’

  ‘Isn’t that an argument for extending the gallery further to the west? I’m convinced, as you are, that the cave-in exposed an early Imperial columbarium. The symbology is singular and indicates a previously unknown sect. I can make tremendous progress with a modest grant.’

  ‘To the Commission, it’s out of the question. They won’t support a trench beyond the known limits of the catacomb. They’re concerned about larger issues of architectural stability. An excavation could trigger further cave-ins and have a domino effect that could lead back into the heart of St Callixtus. The decision went all the way up to Cardinal Giaccone.’

  ‘I can do it safely! I’ve consulted with engineers. And besides, it’s pre-Christian! It shouldn’t even be the Vatican’s call.’

  ‘You’re the last person to be naive about this,’ De Stefano clucked. ‘You know that the entire complex is under the Commission’s jurisdiction.’

  ‘But, Professor, you’re on the Commission. Where was your voice?’

  ‘Ah, but I had to recuse myself because I was an author on the paper. I had no voice.’

  Elisabetta shook her head sadly. ‘Then that’s it? No chance of appeal?’

  De Stefano’s response was to splay his palms regretfully.

  ‘This was going to be my thesis. Now what? I stopped all my other work and immersed myself in Roman astrology. I’ve devoted over a year to this. The answers to my questions are on the other side of one plaster wall.’

  De Stefano took a deep breath and seemed to be steeling himself for something more. When it came out it shocked her. ‘There’s another thing I need to tell you, Elisabetta. I know you’ll find this somewhat destabilizing and I do apologize, but I’m going to be leaving Sapienza, effective immediately. I’ve been offered a rare position at the Commission, the first non-clergy Vice-President in its history. For me, it’s a dream job and, frankly, I’ve had it up to here with all the bull I have to endure at the university. I’ll talk to Professor Rinaldi. I think he’ll make a good adviser. I know he’s got a full plate but I’ll persuade him to take you on. You’ll be fine.’

  Elisabetta looked at his guilt-ridden face and decided there was nothing more to say besides a whispered, ‘Jesus Christ.’

  An hour later she was still at her desk, hands resting in her lap. She was staring out the black window onto the empty parking lot behind the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, her back to the door.

  They crept up in their crepe-soled shoes and came into the office unseen.

  They held their breath lest she should hear air escaping from their noses.

  One of them reached out.

  Suddenly there was a hand on her shoulder.

  Elisabetta let out a short scream.

  ‘Hey, beautiful! Did we scare you?’

  She wheeled her chair around and didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry at the sight of the two uniformed policemen. ‘Marco! You pig!’

  He wasn’t a pig, of course – he was tall and handsome, her Marco.

  ‘Don’t be mad at me. It was Zazo’s idea.’

  Zazo jumped up and down
like a little kid, giddy at his success, his leather holster slapping against his thigh. Since she was a toddler he’d delighted in scaring his sister and making her howl. Always scheming, always a prankster, always the motormouth, his boyhood nickname, Zazo – ‘Be quiet, shut up’ – had stuck fast.

  ‘Thank you, Zazo,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I needed that tonight.’

  ‘It didn’t go well?’ Marco asked.

  ‘Disaster,’ Elisabetta muttered. ‘A complete disaster.’

  ‘You can tell me about it over dinner,’ Marco said.

  ‘You’re off work?’

  ‘He is,’ Zazo said. ‘I’m pulling overtime. I don’t have a girlfriend to feed me.’

  ‘I’d pity her if you did,’ Elisabetta said.

  Outside, they braced themselves against the cutting wind. Marco buttoned his civilian greatcoat, concealing his starched blue shirt and white pistol belt. When he was off duty he didn’t want to look like a cop, especially on a university campus. Zazo didn’t care. Their sister Micaela liked to say that he loved being in the Polizia so much that he probably wore his uniform to bed.

  Outside, everything moved and flapped in the wind except the immense bronze statue of Minerva, virgin goddess of wisdom, who loomed over her moonlit reflecting pool.

  Zazo’s squad car was pulled up to the steps. ‘I can give you a ride.’ He got behind the wheel.

  ‘We’ll walk,’ Elisabetta said. ‘I want the air.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ her brother said. ‘See you at Papa’s on Sunday?’

  ‘After church,’ she said.

  ‘Say hello to God for me,’ Zazo said lightly. ‘I’ll be in bed. Ciao.’

  Elisabetta double-looped her scarf and headed arm in arm with Marco toward her apartment on the Via Lucca. Ordinarily at nine o’clock the university area would be bustling but the precipitously falling thermometer seemed to catch people unawares and pedestrian traffic was sparse.