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Mahmoud’s bluff. He closed the catches on the suitcase and turned as if to leave the storeroom.
    “On the other hand,” Mahmoud went on, “it’s not the usual kind of item that I would sell. Would you make me an offer for it? I’ll include the suitcase and the papers as a part of the deal.”
    Husani turned back to look at the trader.
    “You know as well as I do that the papers are completely valueless, and the case is so old and battered that most people would just throw it away, not try to sell it. I’m not sure that it’s even worth my while bothering about the parchment,” he finished. Then he suggested a figure that was little more than the old leather suitcase was worth by itself.
    Mahmoud reeled backward somewhat theatrically, clearly appalled at the sum offered, and proposed a figure more than ten times higher. And then the haggling, the part of the transaction that in truth both men enjoyed more than any other, began.

8
    Many people think Vatican City is living in the past. The fact that the official language is still Latin—a dead language that is spoken by no other nation anywhere else in the world—the medieval weapons carried by the Swiss Guard, the burning of incense, using different colored smoke to signal the choosing of a new pontiff, and the ancient robes worn by the senior clergy who attend the Pope, all hark back to the Middle Ages. What they don’t realize is that these facts deliberately conspire to suggest that both the Vatican and the papacy are essentially medieval in nature, an anachronism.
    In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Behind the chanting and the piety and the centuries of tradition and custom, the papacy of the twenty-first century is every bit as modern as any multinational corporation or Western government, and with good reason. The Catholic Church has had more than its fair share of problems over the last century. Some were self-inflicted, like the assistance given at the end of the Second World War to wanted Nazis to escape from the ruins of Germany and establish themselves in new lives and with new identities elsewhere in the world. The whole question of resistance to birth control also showed that the Vatican, and most especially the then Pope, was completely out of touch with reality, by promoting unlimited expansion of the human race at a time when the world was already grossly overpopulated.
    Perhaps most worrying of all for the Vatican were the fundamental criticisms of religion itself, whether from academic sources or from popular books—especially criticisms of Christianity and Roman Catholicism. The basis of the problem was that science had now been able to explain virtually everything from the creation of the universe itself right through to identifying the most fundamental particles, the very building blocks of every kind of matter.
    In Australia, just to look at a single nation that particularly concerned the Church, belief in Christianity fell from over 95 percent of the population to just over 60 percent in the twentieth century alone, and the fastest growing “religion” on that continent was, in fact, atheism.
    And while Christianity, though still the world’s largest religion, was in possibly terminal decline, other religions that shared no part of the Christian ideal, such as Islam, were beginning to grow.
    The portents for the future were not good, and successive occupants of the Throne of St. Peter had been made very aware that the last thing the Church needed was any other damage to the core beliefs of Christianity. And it was the growth of the single largest communication medium in history, the Internet, that had provided them with the tools they needed to detect any such undesirable ripples of doubt.
    At the end of the twentieth century, the governments of Western Europe and America had created a global monitoring system known as Echelon, a way of eavesdropping on telephone conversations, faxes and electronic mail transmissions from