Read The Holy Bullet for Free Online

happen in the future.”
    Showing no reaction to these last words, the cardinal left and closed the door.
    All the theories end with the closing of this door, witnessed by the employee in the outer office.
    Marcinkus ordered no interruption whatsoever until further notice, a decision the employee noted without understanding why. With the American you listened, shut up, and complied.
    Inside, the bishop grabbed a phone and dialed a number.
    “They’re tightening the circle,” he told the person on the other end of the line, not bothering with a greeting. It wasn’t the time for protocol. “We have to act quickly.”
    The bishop listened for some time to the person he’d called.
    “I don’t want any mistakes or excuses. I want this resolved as quickly as possible. The German, Ratzinger, just left.”

Chapter 6
    S olomon Keys was an American. In itself this was neither a fault nor a virtue, just a fact. He was eighty-seven, and those times of excessive patriotism, of America, land of opportunity, liberty, and so on, were long gone for him. Let it be clear, Solomon Keys did go for all of that in the past even until very recently. He was born in the District of Columbia—named in honor of the discoverer of the continent—the center of world politics since 1800, and Solomon Keys fought in the war of his generation, World War II, “fought” in quotations, since he never saw a front line, death, wounds, or anything similar. His field of operation was in London, in the Office of Strategic Services, decoding German messages, and, perhaps, while hurting his back as he leaned over his desk, he had saved some lives. He escaped the Blitz that darkened England’s nights and days in 1940 and 1941, for he arrived in the English capital in May 1943. Be that as it may, he served his country with dedication, competence, zeal, and obedience, like a good American.
    When he returned home, he set off to New Haven, Connecticut, to enroll at Yale, where he studied law. Of course a young man born in the nation’s capital, who had served in the OSS, which, at the end of the war was converted by order of President Harry S Truman into the Central Intelligence Agency, didn’t take these steps as easily as they are described. Everything depended on knowing the right people at the right time and place, including his initiation into the secret society of Skull and Bones in 1948 in the same group as the forty-first president of the United States. Every Thursday and Sunday night there was a meeting in the Tomb, where the not-very-secret society met for notoriously secret activities, from dignified mud wrestling to the celebrated and awkward moment in which the future member was called on to reveal some secret he’d never revealed to anyone, after which and from that day on he was treated as a “bonesman.” They are the men who will be most influential in the country and even in the world, linked to one another by rites and secrets, blood brothers, in mutual service for the rest of their lives. The “gentlemen,” as the members call themselves, are chosen for taking power, for molding the “barbarians” to their will, “barbarians” being their term for all nonmembers.
    But all this was part of Solomon Keys’s rich past. After decades of work and dedication, he decided to set off to meet the unknown, solely for pleasure without destination or ambitions, as these had already been abundantly achieved. And now we find him, far into his travels, in downtown Amsterdam hurrying to catch the Go London tour, which included a train to the Hoek van Holland Haven station, followed by a ferry to Harwich and, then, a train from Harwich International to London with arrival at Liverpool Street station. The trip was called the Dutchflyer, and Solomon Keys had a return ticket to Amsterdam, on this same service, departing in three days. From there he would leave immediately for Eastern Europe to explore the former Iron Curtain countries.
    It’s a little