*
Hunting cabin a few miles outside Vienna Wien
June 1
The sun went down over the treetops. The gravel road to the house was deserted. In front of the house was a barn with a shooting range, outside the barn was a lawn with some exercise equipment. The cottage was alone in the woods. It was several miles to the nearest neighbor. At the outhouse near the forest edge were a few months of garbage in a pile.
Four men stepped out of the barn. It was their third training session in two days. Sweat stung their eyes. The leader Matteo was barely out of breath.
He gathered the men on the grass, turned to one Spanish-kined man.
”Juan. Practice the throwing shoulder. Good results in the barn.”
He went on to Marco who had a scarred face, who was short and dark.
”Marco. Improve foot sweep, improve outcomes in the barn.”
Finally, he turned to a man with a rat face, which was long and slender.
”Luca. Continue at this rate you will be in Juan and Marcos shape in a few weeks.”
Matteo opened the door to the barn. Turned on the light again. Waved in Juan and Marco. They stood in front of two shooting ranges. They put on earmuffs. Peltor Bulls Eye III.
Matteo stopped Luca. Showed him to his range, where there was an armrest. He saw that several of his shots had missed the target and hit the barn wall. He put him on a dry exercise for half an hour. Closed the doors.
He went to the house and sat down in an armchair. He read the book of the Great Doctor's words and their mission.
After a while he went to the kitchen and turned up some canned crushed tomatoes in the kitchen. Chopped onion, crushed garlic, mixed with chili and cream in a pan and sizzled up with the tomatoes.
The kitchen was filled with the smell of cooking. He opened the window. Threw in eight chorizo sausages in the pot. He let it simmer for half an hour and then added food on four plates. He looked towards the lawn, barn and the dark forest. The night had settled over their little glade.
He resumed to the Doctor´s book and read a few minutes. He came to the parts which were incomplete. He swore that they only had access to the Montepulciano manuscripts and not the great book: Theatrum Diabolus.
Matteo called on the men. They sat at the table in the little cottage. It was a careful diet and exercise. In a few weeks, it was time.
After dinner Juan, Luca and Marco went out to continue exercising.
Matteo hit the news. The newscast mentioned nothing about the burglary of the City Hall Offices. The police still seemed to have no trace. He turned and kissed his cross given to him by Father Carlo.
He went to the window and looked at the men. From the beginning, it had just been him and Father Carlo in the tiny mountain monastery hidden in Lazio outside Rome where he had been left by unknown parents as a child. Father Carlo, the monastery's abbot, had taken him in and given him an education.
In Matteo's eyes Father Carlo was an exceptional man. He knew the Bible by heart, and if there sometime was a dispute between him and a brother the always came away ashamed. Even the haughty Vatican consulted with him in interpretations when there was disagreement.
Father Carlo opened their eyes. They looked out over the plains, the mountains, the Eternal City. He was a true apocalyptic, he revealed the hidden secrets of creation, the pattern of the real web. The threads that explained the motives.
Matteo remembered the evening when the four men's fate was sealed. They sat in one of the library´s towers overlooking the fields in the valley below. They had just completed a massive survey of what Father Carlo meant was the abscesses along the Creation´s spine.
They had used the scientific approach, Father Carlo argued that the scientific method was second to none when it came to define processes, properties, compile facts and draw conclusions.
But the method was missing something vital: meaning.
God had given them the scientific method and the instrument to draw meaning from the results:
The Bible.
The results of the survey were as Father Carlo predicted. The abscesses they investigated were natural behavior and human behavior over a period of a few centuries. They had come to the conclusion that natural disasters had increased manifold, the belief was firmly shaken and in a downward spiral, wars harvested more victims now than any time in history, while more children died of starvation.
When they were finished Father Carlo gathered them around in a circle. He praised their work and took out the Bible. He put his hand on the book and asked the same question he always asked. But this time he was deadly serious.
”What is the meaning of this result?”
Afraid to utter the wrong answer kept all four silent. Father Carlo said nothing. He opened the Bible and turned to the New Testament. He turned the page to the Gospel of Mark and the 13th chapter. With the men on edge, he read aloud:
”People will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in one place after the other, and hunger-emergencys shall arise, this is the beginning of birth pains.”
It was breathtaking for all four to hear the sentence, how all their work was intertwined with the Big Book. Father Carlo said that it was not a coincidence that the four sat in the tower with him.
He beat up an old binder.14
”The Church's Great Doctor, Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmine, had, as you know, a secret mission.”
Surely, they were well aware of the secret mission, but it had never been confirmed. Father Carlo continued.
”Doctor Bellarmine did not complete his mission, he left it to posterity to pursue it. This, my brethren, is his Montepulciano manuscripts in which he in detail described its mission.”
Matteo and his brothers leaned closer, curious to the burst-limit.
”You have proved to me and the Monastery and God that you are worthy of this mission. I've been looking all my life for you.”
Proudly they listened to their father. Carlo stood up.
”I want us to swear an oath in this tower, with the library and God as witnesses that you are to pursue the Great Doctor Bellarmine´s mission.”
It did not go one second until Matteo, Juan, Marco and Luca almost in unison proclaimed that nothing would make them more proud.
Father Carlo continued.
”As you heard from the Gospel, we must pave the way for the Lord. We need to honor Dr. Bellarmine´s mission. When we do this, we must not blink when we look into the eyes of Satan. He has agents everywhere who will try to deceive you. Be faithful to the mission and God will be faithful to you.”
The men knelt before Father Carlo, and clasped their hands.
12
Rome
Year 1599
In a bare monk's cell in the Inquisition headquarters Palazzo del Sant'Uffizio at the side of the St. Peter's Basilica lay the General Inquisitor Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmine as a cross on the stone floor. He moved a rosary slowly in one hand with closed eyes. He mumbled the Rosary prayer. When he was finished, he stood up and brushed off his black coat.
The sun peeped into the room. He turned toward the light. Closed his eyes again. He felt his face was hot. It was as if God had heard his prayer.
Despite years of service, he felt humbled before his duties as the General Inquisitor. It was he who had been bestowed the confidence to crush the remnants of the medieval heretical movements of the Cathars and Waldenses, who recently grown with the Lutheran movement. But he had another, far more important and secret mission.
He would destroy the underground movement Thoth´s Brotherhood that recently had become one of the Church's worst enemies.
He would destroy their sacred Theatre of the Five Gates.
Because of Thoth´s Brotherhood the Theatre had become too well-known and talked about with riddles of legends. Bellarmine had noticed that more and more searched for the powerful force that was believed to be in the Theatre. The old truths were beginning
to be brought back to life, those he had fought so hard against his whole life.
A few weeks earlier, the philosopher Giordano Bruno, the magician of Nola, the notorious Nolan had been imprisoned in Venice. Bellarmine´s belief was that he would give him the location of the Theatre. However a tough fight waited. He had heard nasty things of faithful in Venice, Paris and London that had followed him.
Giordano Bruno was not of this world.
The Nolan was Thoth´s Brotherhood´s foremost disciple.
He was the incarnation of the Egyptian Thoth.
Allegedly he had insane power and was extremely dangerous. Bellarmine did not even want to think about the stories he heard.
The Great Doctor sat at his writing desk where he had sat so many times over the years. Before him lay his notebook entitled Theatrum Diabolus – The Devil's Theatre, which centuries later would come in August's possession and eventually faced Ludwig´s eyes.
He turned up the first page and read a few sentences. A habit which for him was equal to litany and prayers, but to my ears it sounded more like a mantra because he thought that he unleashed the power of God through his fingers if he repeated the same procedure over and over again.
As far back as the Doctor could remember, he had looked for the Theatre, which was the resting place for Thoth´s holy book. A book that Thoth´s Brotherhood swore was the source of the original truth of Creation and man.
It was the first, the only holy scripture.
Bellarmine had over the years sent delegations to the ancient land of Egypt, the Crusades and the Templar´s Jerusalem, Ottoman Constantinople and the chamber where the Doctor heard that several men swallowed their tongues when a priest read from the Book. He had even sent good men, whom he considered his confidantes, to the monastery where Leonardo of Pistoia had retrieved the Corpus Hermeticum from and the cavity where the book had allegedly been hidden in.
But there was just dust left and the monks had long since left it which now was a godforsaken place in Bellarmine´s eyes.
The delegations were a great disappointment to an even greater cost but they had at least convinced the Doctor that the Theatre was in Florence or Rome.
It lay stone to his already, as he understood it, heavy burden that not only heretics had been blinded by Thoth´s Brotherhood through the centuries.
It was a shame for the church not only according to the Doctor, there were several that were ashamed in silence that there were traces of influence from the Brotherhood in the writings of the ancient Fathers, Tertullian, Augustine, Lactantius, Clement of Alexandria.
Bellarmine thanked God that he allowed this to be forgotten even if Thoth´s Brotherhood recently did everything to bring it back to life.
Bellarmine slammed the notebook. He got ready to go and inform the pope that one of the Church's worst enemies would soon arrive to Rome from Venice.
13
Vienna
February 12
Gruppeninspektor Alexander Wagner looked out the window at Schottenring from a room on the second floor of the police station. A woman in high heels ran after a tram with a suitcase behind. She managed to catch it.
Wagner was distracted.
He was somewhere else.
He turned away from the window and joined his two colleagues who were sitting at a table with an open folder. In the folder, there were pictures of a naked woman in her sixties who had been shot in the head. The colleagues sorted images on the table one by one. Although the murder was done outside Vienna they went through hotel records at the time of the crime in the city, parking violations and traffic crimes around the country.
They were in search of a four-leaf clover, and what was worse was that they were aware of it. They knew that the investigation would soon be closed down, but they dragged on because the victim was the wife of a big shot in business, Mr. Iacobi.
For August, she meant everything, for Alexander, she meant nothing.
Two minutes went by. It was enough. Wagner stood up and rubbed his hands on his face.
He went to the manager and asked for reassignment.