Holy Cover Up

"Hand me the binoculars, Carlo"

"Not binoculars, Maria. Lasercam. This little baby is about as related
to binoculars as you are to that goat we just passed."

"Fine, Carlo. Hand me the lasercam. Please."

They were perched, Eagle like, on a cliff edge where the high Central
Anatolian plateau swept down to the Konya plain and the ancient
Hellenistic Kingdom of Cappadiocia. The two great volcanoes, Hasan Dagi
and Erciyes Dagi, that once inspired legends as the "Abode of the Gods"
stood like giant bookends to the East and West. The curious volcanic
landscape before them was the stuff of fairy tales. Strange fairy
chimneys rose from the plain dwarfing the few poplar trees and
providing a dramatic contrast to the otherwise boring, monochromatic,
dusty landscape.

"You know Carlo, this place used to be busier than the Vatican museum.
Assyrians, Hittites, Mongols, Persians, Syrians, Kurds, Armenians,
Greeks, Romans. They all passed through here, some even stayed a while.
It's hard to believe looking at it now, eh?"

"Jesus! Here we go again. Maria, what is it with you? Every time we go
on one of these missions together you catch verbal diarrhoea at exactly
the wrong time! You've hardly said a word all the way from Rome and now
you decide it's time for the history lesson?"

Carlo started emptying the packages and assembling the equipment they
needed for the job. Maria was not listening. Her attention was focussed
on the view from the lasercam. She was looking for something.

"Aha! Found it. Look Carlo." Carlo put his eyes to the lasercam.

"Very interesting. A cave. Never seen one of those before."

"Carlo, you are such a Neanderthal. This is not just a cave, this is
the cave. The 'cave of truth'. They say there's a blind priest in the
village who can find his way to that cave without assistance. He's been
making the journey for years, before and after he lost his sight. He's
the only one who ever visits the cave these days. Amazing."

"Fantastic. If he's in there now I hope he's also been practising
emergency exits otherwise he's in for one hell of a shock!"

Carlo broke into fits of laughter. "Maria. I know I'm going to regret
this, but having come all this way it would be nice to know what is so
special about this cave. Other than the fact that it seems impossible
to get to unless you are a blind priest or mountaineer? And please bear
in mind we only have eight minutes before we start uploading
transmissions."

"Officially, of course, there is nothing special about this cave. We
are not here. This is not about to happen. Unofficially, this cave
holds evidence that could mean early retirement for a number of our
colleagues in Rome. Not to mention many other centres of world
religions."

"Go on, I'm listening"

"Even you, Carlo, may have heard of the 'Gospel of Thomas'. Like the
'Gospel of Philip' it's a so called 'missing' gospel and stands outside
of the four canonical gospels of the new testament with no chance of
ever making it into the bible. Nevertheless, it is authentic and
potentially troublesome. The first fragments of Greek copies were found
in Egypt about one hundred years ago but it really came to our
attention in 1947 when the director of the Coptic museum in Cairo
purchased 13 leather bound papyrus books from peasants who had
discovered them in a jar standing in an old tomb cut in limestone
cliffs near Luxor. Am I boring you yet?"

"Not quite. Six minutes left. Go on."

"We of course were first on the scene to inspect the books, in fact it
was my father who was given the investigation. The books were written
in Coptic, in the third or fourth century, but were copies of much
older Greek originals, probably from the first century. The books
contained forty four treatises, most of them harmless and in fact forty
three of them were quickly published. However, the text of one book
clearly reflected Christ's ability to speak parables in the language of
the people. This was the 'Gospel of Thomas', written by Judas 'the
twin', not at all harmless, and was therefore kept secret. Even more
intriguing was the fact that, ignorant of the importance of the
documents, the Egyptian farmers who discovered the books had used one
to start a fire to heat their tea while they collected
fertiliser."

"Smart guys! Must have been on our payroll." Carlo started laughing
again.

"Yes. Well. As far as everyone outside the Vatican knows that is the
end of the story. The 'Gospel of Thomas' has since been published,
widely debated, and has not proved to be more than a minor
irritant."

"But that's not the end of the story is it? Because we are the end of
the story, as always. Somebody gets in a mess, we clean it up."

"Very good Carlo. Indeed the story did not end there. My father
investigated further and eventually found the half burned remains of
the missing book. It proved to be the most interesting of all, the
'Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth'."

"Holy shit! You're kidding me?"

"I kid you not Carlo my friend. The text of this book was straight from
the horses mouth, no second hand accounts, no translations or
interpretations, this was written by Jesus of Nazareth himself. The
text was worrying enough but if the fourteenth book followed the same
chronology as the rest then the original was written in the first
century A.D. I remember to this day my father returning home with the
book. The look on his face. He was never the same after that."

"So where's the book now?"

"It's in the vaults below the Vatican of course with all the
rest."

"So why are we here?"

"We are here, Carlo, because in that cave lies the original document
from which my fathers burned copy was taken. We are here to bury the
truth."

"Cool! Okay, satellite uplink is ready, thermal missile launcher as
well. I need you to point the lasercam directly into the entrance
doorway so this baby's got something to aim at and the folks back home
have a good view. We don't have the best angle of attack here but get
the marker just into the shadow and the explosion will do the rest. I
just hope we don't take the whole top off the chimney!"

"You don't care at all, do you?"

"No and neither do you. We're paid not to."

The missile, guided by the lasercam, hit the right hand side of the
entrance. There was a small explosion and a moments silence before a
muffled but much larger explosion threw flames back out of the doorway
into the still air over the Konya plain.

"Okay. Let's get out of here."

Carlo was too busy packing away the equipment to notice Maria take the
revolver from her jacket. She shot him once in the back of the head and
then covered his body and the equipment which would be picked up later.
She pocketed her revolver and headed in the direction of the village,
looking for a blind priest.