The Fourth Prophecy

by Glenn Cooper

Genres: Christian Suspense; Conspiracy Thrillers

Synopsis

Filled with action, intrigue, and suspense, The Fourth Prophecy is a nonstop adventure that proves Glenn Cooper is a master at thrillers.
 
A beloved professor of theology and archaeology at Harvard, Cal Donovan has achieved renown – but he drops everything when he is called by his friend Pope Celestine to investigate the potential existence of a mysterious prophecy. And it soon becomes clear that another party is desperate and willing to kill for the same information.
 
In a race against time that will lead him from Lisbon to Rome and to London and Paris, Donovan will become the only person standing in the way of unspeakable destruction. Now his only hope for survival is to outwit, outrun, and outlast his enemies long enough to get to the truth behind the Fourth Prophecy.

Release date: May 24, 2022

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

 1 

It had rained hard the previous night, a blood rain whipped by wind, but the storm had passed, and the morning sky was luminous and nearly cloudless. A morning such as this seemed a magic trick conjured by a grand illusionist. The sirocco winds from North Africa had carried red Saharan sand clinging to raindrops, and when Romans awoke, they found their city steaming with humidity and dusted with rosy glitter. At Saint Peter’s Square, the sun beat down at just the right angle, transforming the wet cobblestones from hardscape to light, a yellow light that danced with sparkles and flashes. Looking toward the Vatican obelisk from the Piazza Papa Pio XII, pilgrims and tourists appeared to be walking not on gray stones, but on the surface of a shimmering, mystical red sea.

A man made his way across the square at his usual plodding pace. Right foot forward, left knee raised high to clear the left foot from dragging. He was fine on a flat surface, but uneven cobbles threatened to catch his sole and pitch him forward. He loathed canes, for they marked one as disabled. His custom was to survey the ground and adjust his leg lift as required. He was well practiced; his foot drop was old. He had been five, playing near the gardener as the old man with sunbeaten skin pushed a lawn mower. The blade hit a rock and cracked, and a length of jagged steel kicked up from the turf and spun into the boy’s leg just below the knee, breaking the fibula and nicking the peroneal nerve. In time, the bone healed; the nerve did not. When the boy returned from hospital, the gardener, whom he liked, had been fired. The boy protested, but blame had been assigned. His father showed him the rock. The boy recognized it by its color and shape, black and pyramidal. He had found it in a flower bed and had been using it to bash toy soldiers until it became lost in high grass. He wanted to tell his father that it was his fault, not the gardener’s, but he worried that he too would be sent away.

The consequence of this small carelessness was permanent disability. First, he blamed the rock. When he was older and classmates made fun of his limp, he would stare at the statue of Jesus above the altar of his white-plastered church and blame a cruel God. It was only when he was an adult that he came to conclude that although God was indeed behind his accident, it had been a blessing, not a curse. A young man who could not play sports or dance with the girls had little to distract him from a life of study and spiritual devotion. His foot drop made him cast his gaze downward, but his mind had been freed to roam the heavens.

The exceptional beauty of the morning escaped him. In anticipation of the ordeal he was to inflict on himself, he had woken angry and brooding. He could have waited and avoided the opening-day crowd, or not gone at all, but in a fit of self-mortification, he hurled himself toward the spectacle as punishment for the great sin he was planning.

He arrived early to avoid the lines that would soon pack the square, but even so, there was a wait of thirty minutes to enter the basilica. On either side of the central portico, large placards announced the event, each with a photograph of the statue and two words: THE RETURN. When he was close enough to see a placard clearly, the photograph was confusing, but that was the intent, he supposed. The trickery infuriated him.

He reached the portico, where the brightness and heat of the morning gave way to the cool darkness of the atrium. Ahead, the line of visitors snaked to the right and disappeared from view. He slowly made his way forward on the mosaics. The floors of the basilica were often overlooked by tourists, who found loftier wonders to capture their attention.

He of downward gaze always noticed floors, and he knew the history of this one. Sixteenth-century stonemasons had used the finest Tuscan marbles and inlaid them with rose porphyry looted from ancient imperial temples and the Colosseum. Roman emperors had been drawn to the royal purple of porphyry and sent their minions to the single mine in Egypt on Mount Porphyrites, where the stone was known to exist. When the location of the mine was forgotten in the fourth century, the only way to obtain the ultrahard stone was to loot it. He had to take care, because the porphyry inlays were higher than the rest of the floor—unlike soft marble worn down by centuries of foot traffic, porphyry was indestructible. It would take a modern cutting laser an hour to penetrate a mere centimeter. With each high step he took, the sole of his left shoe slapped down hard on these rarest of stones.

The queue moved slowly. Although it was the nearest chapel to the entrance, it took several more minutes to reach it. For hundreds of years, the chapel had been accessible, but that changed in 1972 when a deranged Hungarian named Laszlo Toth took a hammer to the sculpture while screaming, “I am Jesus Christ. I have risen from the dead.” Since then, ballistic glass had greeted visitors.

When he arrived at the closest viewing point, he put his hands on the railing and peered through the thick glass at the cream-colored statue that filled the chapel. Since its creation in 1499, Michelangelo’s Renaissance marble masterpiece, the Pietà, had inspired the highest emotions of faith through its elegant depiction of the body of Jesus Christ brought down from the cross and draped over the lap of a youthful Virgin Mary, who gazed upon him with maternal sadness. The Pietà was the only work Michelangelo ever signed, a petty reaction to a rumor that it was the work of his rival Solari. Until the catastrophe—that was how the limping man put it—the statue had left Rome only a single time since its creation, when it traveled by ship to New York City for display at the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. This was precious cargo indeed, and its crate was waterproof, equipped with a marine beacon, and designed to float if the ship foundered.

For a moment, the statue evoked the same deep response it had done countless times. He caught himself and allowed anger to reclaim the space. A black plaque with white lettering was bolted to the wall. He knew what it said—he had read the text on the official Vatican website—but while he waited for the line to move him to the central viewing point, he read it again.

When Pope Celestine VI decided to create a 30-billion-euro fund to alleviate the suffering of the poor, the sick, and the victims of war, he directed the Vatican to sell selected treasures from its museums and churches. One of these treasures was Michelangelo’s Pietà. At auction, the Louvre Museum acquired the magnificent statue with a bid of 1.5 billion euros, by far the highest amount ever paid for a work of art. As a condition of the sale, the Louvre agreed to undertake and fund the creation of a replica of the Pietà to once again grace its traditional chapel at Saint Peter’s Basilica. For years, a team of Italian, French, and German engineers, scientists, and artists worked to produce a perfect full-sized replica.

This magnificent re-creation of the Pietà is the result. The original statue was scanned by lasers in Paris as the first step in producing a “digital twin.” The data was then processed and fed into the largest 3D printer in the world, located in Hamburg. Over a period of months, the printer created the replica, layer by layer, utilizing special resins created for this project. The statue was then transported to Florence, where a group of art restoration experts polished it by machine and by hand, and added the finishing touches of color to perfectly match the tonalities of the original marble. The visitor to the chapel will see a scientific marvel virtually indistinguishable from Michelangelo’s masterpiece. The Pietà has returned.

The line progressed until he reached the prime sight line. People on either side of him babbled and took photos, but he stared violently at the scientific marvel and thought, No, it has not returned. This is a sleight of hand for the foolish and the gullible. It belongs in Disneyland, not the holiest of churches. He had watched Pope Celestine on television at the papal viewing following its installation. He heard him extol the best of both worlds—amelioration of the suffering of the poor and the return of the Pietà in a form that would give even Michelangelo pause. He had hurled curses at his television. This pope was toppling the pillars of the Church. He was replacing centuries of orthodoxy with liberal garbage. He was replacing precious marble with cheap resin. He had traded the priceless cultural patrimony of the faith for pieces of silver. He gripped the wooden railing hard enough to blanch his knuckles. When the woman behind him told him the line was moving, he silently cursed the pope and gave this ersatz Pietà one final look.

He would never visit it again.

 2 

It was a small conference with sixty international participants who were mostly known to one another. The few newcomers were younger academics, excited to have been invited into a circle of scholars whose work they had read but whom they had never met in such close quarters.

The venue was the Lapa Palace Hotel in Lisbon, a nineteenth-century palace with parklike gardens overlooking the Tagus River. At the opening dinner the night before the lectures, the host and clerical chair of the symposium, Cardinal Rodrigo Da Silva, had presented all the participants with ecclesiastic-red T-shirts silkscreened with OFFICIAL MEMBER OF THE THREE SECRETS CLUB.

It had been left to the academic chairman, Professor Calvin Donovan of Harvard Divinity School, to deliver the after-dinner remarks. He had knocked back a couple of vodka martinis during the cocktail mingler and a couple of glasses of wine over dinner, but he was a fast metabolizer, and rising to the microphone, he displayed no signs of inebriation. Mere seconds into his talk, he knew he had his audience, but then again in this arena, he never failed. He peered at his colleagues with lively eyes that crinkled at the corners when he laughed, and shifted his gaze to make strong contact with every table. When you’d done as many lectures and speeches as Cal had, you didn’t sweat after-dinner remarks.

He winged this one, but it came out light and witty and erudite. Wrapping it up, he gave a warm toast to the bald, rotund Portuguese American cardinal.

“This symposium would not have occurred if not for the tireless efforts of Cardinal Da Silva,” he said. “And more importantly, if not for him, the blessed event scheduled for less than two weeks from now, when a new saint will join the firmament, would not have come to fruition.”

With that, Cal thrust his hand toward the ballroom ceiling, a gauzy mural of a blue sky with puffy clouds, a theatrical act that set the audience tittering. “So, please, ladies and gentlemen, lift your glasses to the finest bishop to ever serve Providence, Rhode Island, the finest cardinal to ever serve Boston, Massachusetts, the finest secretary of state to ever serve the Vatican…my dear friend, His Eminence Rodrigo Cardinal Da Silva.”

As the cardinal got to his feet to bask in the applause, the professor, armed with a fresh martini, dispatched it with an energetic turn of his wrist.

Toward the rear of the ballroom, two women, who had only just met as tablemates, continued to talk over coffee. The younger one, Estel Coloma, a profesora asociada at the University of Barcelona, starstruck by her more senior colleagues, gushed over the Harvard prof. “He’s amazing. How well do you know him?”

The older woman, Margaret Hawthorne, a British don who taught religious studies at Cambridge, looked over half frames, brushed back some errant strands of hair, and said, “I know him quite well.”

“What’s he like? Is he married?”

“Cal married? No. Never was, never will be.”

“Really. How old would you say he is?”

“A few years younger than me.”

“And how old are you?”

“Your age and double it.” The waiter interrupted with an offer of more coffee. Hawthorne requested a glass of port instead and added, “And one for my colleague.”

“Tell me more about him. Not his work—I’ve read his books. The other things.”

“All right. For one, his name says a lot about him. He’s a religious and cultural hybrid. His father was the famed biblical archaeologist Hiram Donovan, a staunch Boston Catholic. His mother was a vivacious New York socialite, a Jew. Apparently, at birth, they haggled and chose Abraham as his middle name as a nod to his mother’s side. Amusingly, they found compromise and came up with an arch-Protestant first name, Calvin.”

“How fantastic.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I’ve read about his friendship with Pope Celestine.”

“Yes, they’ve been quite matey ever since Cal helped him sort out a mess over a young priest who blossomed with the stigmata of Christ. Cal had written a seminal book on stigmata years ago. The Vatican sent out the Bat-Signal, and he answered the call.”

The young woman mumbled that she didn’t know the book and asked for its name. Hawthorne told her, and she began ordering it on her phone.

Near the head table, the cardinal was waxing lyrical on one of his favorite subjects. With his ample face, animated and mirthful, he would happily spout, to any and all, some variation of: My vocation is the work of the Church; my avocation is food. I assure you, my only vice is overindulging.

Cal wasn’t standing particularly close, but Da Silva’s bulging waist bumped against him whenever the cleric gesticulated. They effected a characteristic pose—Cal, far taller, would bow his head and lean, and the cardinal would counter by arching his neck as far back as its thick roll of posterior fat allowed.

“Please don’t tell a soul, Cal,” he said, “but I spent more time working on the menus than on my talk for tomorrow.”

“The food was excellent, Rodrigo. I’m quite sure your talk will be as well.”

“Did you like the carne de porco à alentejana? You know, being Portuguese, I felt a special obligation to treat our guests to the finest my homeland has to offer.”

“It was superb. I don’t think I ever had pork and clams in the same dish.”

“Yes, completely local! The chef did himself proud. Do you like octopus?”

“I do.”

“At the closing dinner tomorrow, we’ll have polvo à lagareiro—octopus and potatoes, swimming in enough olive oil to float a boat. And pastéis de nata for dessert. Our famous custard tarts.”

They first met when they appeared together on a panel on the history of Catholicism in Portugal. At the time, Da Silva ran the Diocese of Providence. Cal delivered a paper on the two Portuguese popes, and Da Silva spoke about the dissolution of the monasteries after the Portuguese Civil War. They easily fell into friendship and began to dine regularly on Cal’s home turf in Massachusetts or Da Silva’s in Rhode Island. When Da Silva was called to become a cardinal, Cal was a personal guest at his Vatican investiture. And years later, Cal again traveled to Rome for Da Silva’s installation as cardinal secretary.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me,” Da Silva said, touching the sleeve of Cal’s suit jacket, “I wasn’t entirely joking about being unprepared. I need to retire to my room and do some editing.”

Cal undertook the mission of schmoozing, gliding from table to table, gossiping with colleagues he had known for years. He arrived at Hawthorne and Coloma’s table when they were on their second glass of port.

“Megs,” he said, bending to give Hawthorne a peck on each cheek. “Having a good time?”

“What could be better than swanning around swanky hotels and gabbing about saints and secrets? You were your usual dazzling self tonight.”

“Hardly dazzling. Twinkly at best.”

“Have you met my new friend, Estel Coloma from Barcelona?”

He knew her particulars—he had personally invited all the attendees and had spotted her at the cocktail party but never made it over.

“I’m delighted to finally meet you,” he said. “Your paper on Marian visions in the fifteenth century was excellent.”

“Was it my ticket for admission?” she asked saucily.

“It was. Plus look at how ancient we are—Professor Hawthorne not included. We desperately needed fresh blood.”

Coloma extended a hand and said, “I am very happy to be a blood donor.”

His radar was a perfect instrument. It never failed to alert him to a woman’s attraction, and it was pinging like crazy. Coloma’s flush extended down her neck and disappeared under her blouse.

Hawthorne watched with a knowing bemusement and said, “We were just talking about your book on stigmata.”

“You mean the one I signed a contract with my publisher to update and never have?”

“The very one.”

Coloma looked at him rather slyly and said, “I have it on my tablet.”

*  *  *

Cardinal Da Silva puffed his chest, climbed onto a box to get some height on the podium, and asked Cal to project the first slide. It was a split-screen image, a pair of photos of a young girl and an old woman. The photo of the girl was grainy and black-and-white. She had an oval face and a dark complexion. Her downturned mouth and wide eyes gave the impression that she hadn’t enjoyed being photographed. She was dressed in peasant clothes, but Sunday ones, and her black hair was covered in a long veil of dark cloth. The old woman was a nun with the same downturned mouth, the same wide eyes, now under thick plastic glasses, and the same delicate nose, although her face was scrunched with age. Her Carmelite habit covered everything save the disk of her face and a bit of neck. She, too, appeared uncomfortable in front of a camera.

Da Silva said, “My friends, we are here today because of this girl, this woman, the Blessed Sister Lúcia, who, less than two weeks from today, will be canonized by Pope Celestine as Sancta Lúcia. Lúcia’s journey has been a long one. It began on a fine spring day in 1917 in Fátima, in what was then a farming and sheep-raising community of peasants, and what is now home to one the most venerated shrines in Christianity, attracting millions of religious pilgrims and tourists every year. Has anyone in the audience not been to Fátima?”

There were a few apologetic hands.

“Well, you must go soon,” Da Silva said warmly, “or you’ll have to give your T-shirts back. As a Portuguese man and a member of the clergy, it is almost impossible to describe how gratified I am to speak to you this morning about Sister Lúcia and Fátima. I know that some of my comrades from the mainland look down their noses a little at us Azoreans—especially one like me, who emigrated in my youth to the fishing community of New Bedford, Massachusetts—but my every fiber is Portuguese, and my heart is in Fátima. Why is Fátima so important to me? Why is it so important to Christianity?

“It is because Fátima, along with Guadalupe and Lourdes, is one of the most significant Marian apparitions. When the Blessed Mother first appeared before the three peasant children on the thirteenth of May in 1917 and began to reveal her prophecies, she set in motion a chain of events that have rippled forward in time and that resonate today as strongly as they did over a century ago. For in these apparitions, the Blessed Mother gave the children a message to pass to the world, containing many central truths and devotions of the Catholic faith—the Trinity, the Eucharist, penance, the Rosary, and sacrifices for the conversion of sinners, all with special emphasis on the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is that Immaculate Heart in which we of the faith find the refuge of maternal love and a sure path that leads to God.

“But of course, for over a century, the somewhat breathless focus of the secular world, the religious world, and even the academic world in which you, my friends, dwell, has been on the Three Secrets of Fátima that were divulged in slow motion over the course of the twentieth century. In the afternoon session, Professor Donatelli will speak about the First Secret, Professor Gray, the Second Secret, and Professor Donovan, the Third Secret. This morning, you will hear presentations on the cultural and religious contexts of Marian apparitions throughout history and presentations about the long life of Lúcia dos Santos and the tragically brief lives of the two other shepherd children, Jacinta and Francisco.

“But first, please bear with me a while longer as I tell you about the exhaustive process that led to Sister Lúcia’s impending canonization. I never had a direct hand in the proceedings, but given my heritage and, in recent years, my duties as cardinal secretary, I have maintained an intense interest in those proceedings and perhaps I have nudged them along from time to time.

“The process was arduous and prolonged, because this was a woman who lived almost ninety-eight years and corresponded with all the popes from Pius the Twelfth to John Paul the Second, as well as many cardinals and bishops. Testimonies had to be obtained from sixty witnesses concerning her holiness and heroic virtues. All of her writings had to be collected and scrutinized, an immense undertaking, as she left us over ten thousand letters and a diary of two thousand pages. Thirty laypeople and theologians worked full-time for years on the positio, the official position document.

“And this was only the first, or diocesan, stage of Sister Lúcia’s canonization phase. The matter was then passed on to the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints, where documentary proof had to be obtained that a miracle had occurred through the intercession of the Venerable Sister Lúcia.

“Let me now show you the timeline of the process. Professor Donovan, could I have the next slide?”

*  *  *

Lunch was served on the lawn, and as Cal was placing a piece of fish on his plate, he detected a whiff of perfume. Estel Coloma had slid behind him in the buffet line.

“Looks delicious,” she said.

“Doesn’t it? Did you enjoy the session?”

“Very much. Mind if I join you?”

Cal’s table filled quickly, and Coloma hardly got a word in while Cal and his buddies traded academic war stories. When one of them left to return to his room, the Portuguese historian Albano Baptista, from the University of Coimbra, took the empty chair and produced a book from his bag to show his colleagues. He was one of the few attendees who had actually met Sister Lúcia, and he proudly displayed a copy of one of her memoirs, inscribed and signed.

The book was passed from hand to hand until it wound up with Cal, who read Lúcia’s scrawled inscription and said, “You’ve got yourself a real treasure, Albano.”

“Indeed I do. I have already bequeathed it to my university library, the beautiful Biblioteca Joanina. Have you been?”

“I haven’t,” Cal said, “but it’s on my bucket list.”

“You must come,” Baptista said. “The city is blessed by Lúcia’s spirit.”

*  *  *

Deep into the afternoon, Cal took the podium for the conclusory talk. Coloma had bagged a front-row seat, and she smiled whenever their eyes met.

“Gaetano and Angela have done wonderful jobs covering the first two secrets of Fátima,” he said. “So here’s what we know about the Third Secret. According to the accounts of Sister Lúcia, the Virgin Mary first appeared to the children at noon on May thirteenth, 1917, telling them to return to the pasture the same day and time in the coming months. On June thirteenth, the children returned and were told by the apparition to come back the next month and, in the interim, to pray the Rosary and, interestingly, learn to read. We do know that Sister Lúcia took this encouragement to heart, as her voluminous writings attest.

“Then came July thirteenth, 1917—the main event, as it were—when Mary revealed to the children the Three Secrets. Gaetano has told you about the First Secret, an eschatological vision of hell, a warning of what fate would befall those who did not repent of their sins and follow the path of God. Angela has told you about the Second Secret, one that might be described as historical in nature, involving as it did predictions about the First and Second World Wars and the perils of an unconsecrated, godless Russia.

“Lastly, Mary revealed to them he. . .