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windows and stonework. His heart wasn’t in it, as much as he normally enjoyed these amazing architectural tributes. The more he thought about it, the more he became certain that the theft had to be about the specific items in the vault. It was too much of a risk otherwise, when there was so much valuable art so much more readily accessible. In the time they took to rob one safe, they could have stripped dozens of canvases from their supports, rolled them up, and been gone. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars in paintings and sculpture in the Lisbon office, not counting the pieces stored in the other basement vaults. The company bought, collected, restored, leased out and sold art to businesses and individuals all over the world. It just didn’t make any sense that all the easy money was bypassed for whatever was behind an unknown curtain. Then again, all that preparation and money to steal a letter didn’t seem to make much sense either.
    His phone rang again, and he hurried towards the main doors of the Cathedral as he punched it on.
    “Yeah?” He whispered.
    “It’s me—what are you doing?” Rei asked.
    “Sorry, hang on…” He got outside to the front steps. “I was in the Cathedral. Go ahead.”
    “Ok, so he is one flipped out guy.”
    “Tell me something I don’t know.” Gideon couldn’t help but smile. His wife was very even keeled. She could hold her own if needed, but she was more likely to kill you with sticky sweet Southern charm than snap your head clean off.
    “OK… So there were a few things in the box. Three different time periods, I guess you’d say. The first was the letter. This is the only significant artifact, both from a historical and a monetary point of view.”
    “The letter from Paul to Jerusalem?”
    “Right. Supposedly, if the translation done by the great great great whatever was accurate, the letter was written by Paul, to the church at Jerusalem. The letter says how pleased Paul is that Peter has been made the bishop of the church at Jerusalem, and further affirms that the church there, in Jerusalem, is the center of the faith.” She paused for a response.
    “Uhhhh… I don’t think I get it.” Gideon slowly strolled along the tree lined street away from the Cathedral, listening.
    “You wouldn’t, since we’re not Catholic. OK, so short version is, the Catholic Church has always claimed that Peter was the first Pope, because Jesus called him the “rock” on which He was building His church. And Peter was traditionally thought to have been the bishop of the Church of Rome , the Roman Empire being the dominant world order of the day. The Church has gained tremendous wealth and power—the Vatican is a country , for heaven’s sake!—by staking its legitimacy on the Peter heritage. So if Peter was actually the bishop of the church in Jerusalem, and if Paul confirms in his letter that the church in Jerusalem is the base for this new religion of The Way, or Christianity…”
    “Then the Roman Catholic Church gets the stilts pulled out from under their beach house.”
    “Exactly.”
    “But would anyone really much care about that these days?”
    “Well, that’s hard to say. The Catholic Church still has a tremendous amount of wealth, and there are millions of Catholics throughout the world who worship not just the Trinity, but the Pope, and Mary and all those saints they have. But the main thing is, when the great great great grandpappy of Mr. Xavier got hold of this letter, the Portuguese Inquisition was still technically in effect, and it would have been considered the greatest heresy. The Pope had issued a five year cease-and-desist in Portugal, to try to regroup and see what was what with those Inquisitors and all, but the five year hiatus had expired, and the whole infrastructure was still intact. And not just in Portugal—in Spain, in India, in all of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial holdings. This was not a safe thing to possess.”
    “Why on