The Source - Michael Cordy [141]
Hackett smiled and led him to the door. 'It barely dented the pyramid. There's loads left. And we found more gold there. My contacts can sell it, without alerting the authorities, but I don't know how we're going to spend it all.'
Glancing over his shoulder at the map, Ross considered the endangered areas of the world. 'I'm sure we'll think of a few things.'
The Vatican, the next day
Cardinal Prefect Guido Vasari hurried down the long, wide corridors of the Apostolic Palace to the Holy Father's office. Ignoring the guards, he pushed open the door and strode in. The pope looked up, pen hovering over a pile of unsigned documents. 'Cardinal Prefect, what is it?'
Vasari placed an open copy of Time on the desk. 'It's about the Superior General.'
'Have they found him?'
'No.'
'Then what? I thought this unfortunate matter was closed and that we'd put it down to over-zealousness on his part.'
'Look at the article.'
The pope skimmed it. 'So? The Voynich has been translated but there's no mention of the Church's involvement. No suggestion that the garden exists. What's the problem?'
'The person who translated it, the person in the picture holding the baby, is the geologist's wife, the one who was paralysed with a broken neck and comatose, the one who was dying, the one the geologist sought out the garden to save.'
'She recovered. It happens. You're not suggesting . . .?'
Vasari threw a copy of the International Herald Tribune, open at page four, on to the desk. There was a picture of two men and a red-haired woman standing with the Peruvian Minister of the Interior. The pope began to read the article Vasari had ringed with blue ink.
'The man in the left of the photograph is the geologist, Dr Kelly,' said Vasari. 'He and his colleagues have done what the Superior General planned to do and bought a tract of virgin jungle. Their land is now protected in perpetuity and can only be entered with the trustees' permission.' He paused. 'I fear the Superior General's obsession with the Garden of God may have been justified.'
At first the pope didn't respond or react. Then his face changed and Vasari knew the Holy Father had seen what he had seen: the name of the trust that had bought the land. A name that – apart from the missing Superior General – only they were supposed to know.
It was the name of a man their predecessors had burnt at the stake four and a half centuries ago for claiming to have discovered a miraculous Garden of God in the Amazon jungle, a man whose Devil's book had become known as the Voynich Cipher Manuscript: Orlando Falcon.
Epilogue
The jungle surrounding the eye-shaped crater is a vibrant lush sea of green splashed with primary tints. The crater, however, is a patch of desert in the forest, a negative oasis devoid of life or colour – only grey and black.
As the sun penetrates its hidden depths, its rays reveal the desolation: white ash and black charcoal. It is said that the purging power of fire can revitalize life, encourage new, more vigorous growth. However, the ash is so thick on the ground it is hard to imagine anything ever growing there again. And the circular black lake in the centre, the pupil of the eye, looks stagnant, blind.
But all is not as it seems in the eye-shaped crater. Some parts of its soot-covered floor are blacker than others, particularly beside the fallen rocks blocking the caves at one end. Ironically, it is in these blackest sections, where a trickle of phosphorescent green water seeps out through the fallen rocks to darken the ash, that the first signs of life can be found.
Pushing up through the black ash is a small flower with unique leaves. It is unlike any other plant in the surrounding jungle, unlike any other plant in the world.
Acknowledgements
I plundered many books and periodicals to research the scientific and historical aspects of this novel, but I found the most inspirational source material in the pages of the Voynich Manuscript, which the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript