Читать книгу The Babylon Idol - Scott Mariani, Scott Mariani - Страница 21

‘Gennaro, you are a gift from God.’

When Massimiliano Usberti had uttered those words six months earlier, he’d meant them literally. For a man of such profound religious faith as his, there had been no other way to describe an event so serendipitous. It was the act of Divine providence he had been praying for. Now that it had come, with it came the long-cherished opportunity to start putting his plans into action.

He’d been waiting a long time.

Life was quiet when you were a disgraced former archbishop. Too quiet. For years, Massimiliano Usberti had seen almost nobody, spoken only to the small band of faithful disciples who hadn’t abandoned him since his fall from grace. And what a spectacular fall it had been. The pain and humiliation of his rapid, sudden descent remained with him every waking moment. His private retreat, the villa set into its own four acres on the shores of Lake Como, was his only comfort, though for all its opulence it was a far cry from the magnificent Renaissance palace outside Rome that had been his main residence at the peak of his career as a senior archbishop.

Back in those halcyon days, it had seemed as if nothing could stop him. He’d been on track to become a cardinal. One day, perhaps even Pope. Anything, everything, he dared to dream felt within his grasp. Gladius Domini, the Sword of God, his brainchild, his life’s work, had secretly attracted powerful investors from every fundamentalist Christian enclave across the world and mighty friends in China and the USA. Its goal: to re-Christianise the globe and destroy once and for all the rising Islamic threat that was spreading everywhere like a cancer; to bring about a new golden age of holy crusade against the heathen menace in the East. Its mission statement was Necos eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. Or, in layman’s terms, ‘Kill ’em all and let God sort them out’.

When the crash had come, thanks to the combined efforts of Usberti’s enemies, the blooming flower that had been Gladius Domini had been trampled into the dirt. All but a handful of his powerful friends in high places had deserted him in the wake of the disaster. The investors had dropped him like a hissing stick of dynamite and run a mile. His dreams had crumbled into ashes as he escaped imprisonment by the skin of his teeth, letting minions like the hapless Severini take the fall in his place.

And so, with his power hugely diminished, his ambitions crushed and his once-substantial wealth slowly eroding, Massimiliano Usberti had become a virtual recluse. No longer the proud, physically imposing, leonine man he once had been, he grew scraggy and wrinkled and started paying less attention to his personal appearance. He lost interest in food and gained a little too much interest in strong spirits. His beloved motor yacht, in which he’d once merrily sailed the sparkling blue waters of Lake Como, no longer held any joy for him. He would sometimes be confined to his bed for days on end by fits of black depression from which not even his new assistant, a devoted young priest called Silvano Bellini who had joined his shrivelled retinue a few months earlier, could rouse him.

When he did take Bellini’s advice to get some fresh air and exercise, all he could do was pace restlessly about the lakeside estate, brooding and muttering to himself. Indoors, he became glued to the internet, obsessing over the state of the world. Was he the only one who could see how desperately, now more than ever, God’s guiding hand was needed to avert the catastrophic decline of civilisation? The more he scoured the web for fuel to feed the fire burning inside him, the more evidence he saw of the entire globe’s descent into ruin: heading faster and faster towards utter degradation as the situation that had seemed untenable even at the height of Gladius Domini’s glory days now seemed to spiral ever further into complete chaos.

Usberti was convinced that the age of Sodom and Gomorrah was returning in modern times exactly as prophesied in Scripture, bringing with it a plague of abominations that were the sure signs of the approaching apocalypse. The holy institutions of family and marriage breaking down. Promiscuity and drugs, pestilence and mental illness everywhere, perpetrated and encouraged by a subculture of corrupt intellectual elitists who had turned their back on God’s wisdom and taught others to follow their disgraceful example. Men marrying men now, heaven help us. What next, sheep and goats? As if that perversion were not gruesome enough, barely a day seemed to pass without Usberti wanting to throw up at the sight of yet another aberrant bearded transsexual being fêted by the online media. The Western world was in the throes of lunacy, celebrating bestial sin and surrendering to all manner of vile unnatural passions and self-obsessed neurosis, even as the invading enemy hordes came flooding through their open borders: a never-ending army of so-called refugees bringing with them a wave of crime, rape and violence perpetrated against the decent Christian people who had welcomed them into their lands. Roaring in like a rogue wave, the heathen invaders were set to colonise all of Europe and beyond, one nation after another. The weak, ineffectual puppet governments of those countries, paralysed by the spell of political correctness and terrified of committing what the propagandists defined as a ‘hate crime’, would simply stand back and do nothing, until the faithless and dissolute West ultimately fell to the invasion of Islam and Shariah law.

Needless to say, Usberti had seen the whole ugly mess coming a long time ago; nobody had wanted to listen to his warnings and now it was almost too late to stem the tide. It was left to a brave few to fight back, and Usberti yearned to take his place at the head of a righteous campaign to restore sanity and godliness to the world. But what could he do? His money was dwindling, his influence was dead and his name was a joke.

However badly his frustration over the state of human affairs consumed him, it was his bitter hatred of his personal enemies that ate deepest of all into his soul. He spent hours daily plotting all kinds of bitter revenge against those who had engineered his downfall. One in particular: Ben Hope.

Ben Hope.

Even the sound of the name made Usberti want to spit bile. For years, the only thing that sustained him was to dream about the terrible things he would do to the despicable swine who, more than anyone, had destroyed his future. Not just Hope, but all the others too: a list of names that Usberti recited endlessly in his mind and often wrote down by hand, scratching the letters so deep that his pen would wear right through the paper and mark the surface of his desk.

Those filthy pigs thought he was finished. They thought they had stopped him. How wrong, how oh-so-very wrong, they were. And how pitifully they would all squeal for his mercy when he was restored to his former power, one day.

One day.

But he knew that could never happen. Oh, he had the means to take his revenge, all right. He wasn’t broke, not yet, and he still commanded the loyalty of followers who would do whatever he asked. Neither his personal assistant Silvano Bellini nor his administrator Pierangelo Volpicelli were coarse or brutal men, but Usberti had made sure he surrounded himself with others who were exactly that: men such as Ennio Scorceletti, known simply to his associates as ‘the big man’, along with Renato Zenatello, Federico Casini, Aldo Groppione, Luca Iacono, Maurizio Starace and half a dozen others who lived in barrack-style accommodation on the estate, were uncompromisingly vicious thugs from a variety of criminal backgrounds. The hulking Scorceletti was a staunch Catholic who had beaten his estranged wife to death with a hammer after she left him for another woman. Zenatello, a former carabiniere, had done time in prison for his role in the murder of four Afghan immigrants. Convicted rapist Groppione had performed similar tricks against a Nigerian asylum seeker and his wife, killing them in their car outside Fermo with a hunting rifle. Iacono was a computer hacker by trade, who had proved his fealty to God by setting fire to a mosque in his home town of Naples.

The list went on.

For all of these men, the primary appeal of their employer’s brand of Christian fundamentalism was that they could vent as much hatred as they liked against homosexuals, Muslims, atheists, liberals and other filthy servants of Satan. They each loved nothing more than being sent on a vigilante mission of faith-inspired violence in the sure knowledge that they were consolidating their places in heaven. Some of them, like Scorceletti, had been recruited into the ranks of Gladius Domini back in the glory days, before the fall; if anything, Usberti’s topple from grace had only intensified the fierceness of their loyalty to him. He had only to give the order, and he could unleash all manner of bone-breaking, razor-slashing nastiness on those he dreamed of punishing.

So many sleepless nights he’d spent working out his vengeful plans, he knew exactly what form the punishment would take. But as much as he yearned to give the order, he knew that the moment he took any such action against his list of enemies, his involvement would be so transparently obvious to even the most obtuse law enforcement official that he’d be instantly whisked away to prison for the rest of his life. And however much he detested the scum who had brought him down, he wasn’t prepared to give up what little freedom and luxury remained to him.

Then how could he strike back at them? He couldn’t think of a solution. It would take a gift from the Lord above to make it happen. Every day he got down on his knees and prayed for Divine help in making his plans possible. Had he not been a loyal servant of God all his life? Didn’t he deserve just one break?

Usberti seldom ventured from the privacy of his sanctuary. That summer, however, he had taken a rare road trip to visit his last surviving relative, an uncle who lived in a luxury residential clinic for the elderly not far from Assisi in Umbria.

Usberti’s reasons for travelling four hundred kilometres to see the old man, on whom he hadn’t laid eyes in at least thirty years, were by no means sentimental: Fortunato Usberti was two months shy of his hundredth birthday, reportedly possessed barely an organ in functioning condition, had completely lost his marbles and was as rich as Croesus. His devoted nephew therefore felt obliged to rekindle the somewhat lapsed relationship between them, in the hope that the ailing Fortunato might consent to leaving him a little something when he shuffled off to a better place, which with any luck wouldn’t be too long away. This is what it’s come to, Usberti seethed on the journey south.

A double disappointment awaited him in Umbria. On arrival at the rest home he found his uncle disturbingly alive and plenty chipper enough to molest the nurses, while now so senile that he didn’t even know he had a nephew, let alone one he recognised. Usberti didn’t stay long. He got back in the Mercedes and instructed his driver to get him out of here. Soon afterwards, as they passed through a small village, Usberti spied a little church and felt the urge to go inside. Maybe the Lord would grant him some new miracle.

And that was exactly what the Lord did.

Usberti’s heart nearly stopped beating when he saw Gennaro Tucci walk into the coolness of the empty church. Then, of course, he didn’t know the man’s name or anything about him – except that this complete stranger could have been cloned from Usberti’s own flesh and blood. The resemblance was uncanny, quite stunning, although Usberti was the only one who seemed to spot it as the man barely glanced at him with a quick smile.

That was when the idea had come to him, in a flash. It was so simple, so blindingly obvious; and Usberti realised that God, in those mysterious ways of His, had provided His loyal servant with the perfect means to take his long-sought revenge.

The decision that followed was an easy one to make. Gennaro Tucci lived alone, a poor man with a simple life and few friends. That much had been easy to find out, and it was all Usberti needed to know.

Two days later, his men Casini, Zenatello and Scorceletti seized their victim at his home and brought him back to the Lake Como estate. There Gennaro was kept locked in a disused wine cellar for a week, while Usberti quickly and secretly, through a defunct company name, allocated a substantial part of his remaining fortune to the purchase of a small island off the Sicilian coast. The moment the sale went through, it was time to move briskly to the next phase. They brought the hapless prisoner up from the cellar, forced cognac down his throat until he was half unconscious, dressed him up in some of Usberti’s own clothes, then dragged him to the boathouse where the motor yacht was launched for the first time in years.

The rest was history. When the disfigured body was dragged from the water later that day, it was an open and shut case: death by misadventure. Nobody would lament the passing of the disgraced former archbishop, just as little was made of the disappearance of a retired, penniless carpenter from Umbria. Even if it had, nobody would ever connect the two.

And now Usberti, whisked off in the night to live in hiding on his island off the coast of Sicily, was ready to strike back at his enemies from a position of absolute safety, where nobody would suspect him, let alone come looking for him. Vengeance would be his, and it would be carried out from beyond the grave.

He couldn’t wait.

But what Massimiliano Usberti couldn’t possibly have known back then, six months ago, was that his revenge quest would lead him to a greater reward by far. A treasure he couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams of wealth and power.

Usberti was soon to make the discovery of his life.