Chapter 8

Mentor’s attitude on who should kill the Pope really shook me up. It was as if he could tell me to do it and that relieved him of all responsibility, yet he could not take the responsibility of doing it himself. I may have been too harsh with him, but he had really caught me by surprise. I think that I needed to apologize the next time I talked to him.

That opportunity came up that night. “Mentor, I want to apologize for the way I acted the last time we talked.”

“Thank you, Doug, but I have had some time to think about it, and I now believe that you were correct in your assesment of my attitude. I will undertake your attitude from now on and accept the responsibility for my decisions. I realized that I had been using you as a scapegoat, and that had to stop. Please accept my apology.”

“Certainly, and I now consider us to be back on our former footing. That makes me feel one hell of a lot better.”

“Very good. I now have the Pope’s schedule for the next three weeks. He has a public Mass scheduled for the Sunday after next in the largest cathedral in Rome. I think that would be the perfect place and time for his death. In public like that, there would be no way to hide his death or to cover up any of the circumstances. The details have been worked out, and we can snatch him and put him back so quickly that no one will be able to see what actually happened.”

“That sounds perfect. Is there anything that I can do that will be of any use? Can you rig up sort of a viewing screen so that I can see the Pope’s death from the point of view of a person in the audience? I may need to refer to the event later.”

“Yes, you will be able to see the event, but possibly not in real time. Will that make a difference? There is nothing that you need to do to help. We will take care of the whole thing.”

“Okay. No, a delayed viewing will be sufficient.” We talked about a few other details, including what to do about Duke Marno if he continued to be a problem. Nothing was decided, but a few options were discussed. Of course he could be eliminated just as was going to happen to the Pope, but I hoped for a more spectacular end for him. That was undoubtedly because I hated his guts.

Things were pretty routine up until the death of the Pope, but the situation changed then. There was a delay of about six weeks while the election of the new pope was organized. Among other things, travel time had to be allowed for those Cardinals who did not live in Rome.

That gave Mentor plenty of time to prepare a list of the likely candidates for the job. We went over the list and found the ones whom we knew would be no improvement over the one who had just died. We didn’t want a general slaughter of the College of Cardinals, so we had to come up with an alternate program. I suggested that Mentor visit them in a dream acting as if it were a visit from God himself. All Mentor would have to do to look the part was to change his purple jumpsuit to a flowing white robe and make the background look like a huge cloud.

We worked out a script that went like this. “I am your God, and I am visiting you so that you will believe my message. You will make sure that you are not nominated to be the next pope. Should you be elected, you will immediately join your predecessor in his current abode, and I can assure you it is not in Heaven with me.” Future visits would be made if the order were not obeyed. The third visit would be a heart attack.

Five Cardinals announced that they were not candidates for the job. One Cardinal was too stubborn to believe his dream, so he died of a heart attack. That simplified things considerably. We could not be sure of the man who was elected Pope, but we could always induce another heart attack if it became necessary. We had several reforms in mind for the Church, and we would start working on them as soon as things calmed down under the new Pope.

The newly elected Pope was indeed a compromise candidate, and we hoped to push him in what we considered to be the right direction. Mostly, we were going to let him run things as he saw fit, but we were going to put pressure on him when it seemed appropriate. At this point, our plan was to halt the persecution of Jews and other minorities and to give women more of a voice in the Church’s operations, eventually heading toward women as Cardinals. We knew that it was way too early to push for a female Pope. We figured that radical step was at least 100 years away.

Things were going so well with the campaign to change the Catholic Church that we figured that we could now concentrate our efforts on the Knights Templar through their money operations. The first thing we did was to start issuing our own money similar to what the Knights Templar did. There was no monetary standard in Italy at the time, so a lot of people were issuing coins of various denominations, but all based on the Knights Templar gold coin.

The problem here was that the Knights Templar gold coin was way too valuable for general retail commerce, and the Knights Templar did not issue anything of smaller value. Therefore, we issued our gold coin called the “dollar.” However, we issued a silver coin where this coin was worth 1/10 of a dollar. It was called a “dime.” We then went further and issued the copper penny, valued at 1/100 of a dollar. We also issued a copper “half-penny” and a copper “quarter-penny.” Mentor supplied those to us ready to issue.

Of course, the troops of the People’s Army were paid with these coins, and every merchant in Silano readily accepted them at face value. Our coins were easily identified, so other money rapidly disappeared from circulation. We swapped our coins for these “foreign” coins at every opportunity, and that was what took them out of circulation so fast.

Merchants still took the Knights Templar’s gold coins, of course, but made change in our coins. That also pushed the Knights Templar’s coins off the market. We took in the Knights Templar’s gold coins from anybody who wanted to swap for our dollar, and we soon had a fairly large quantity of the Knights Templar’s coins which went to Mentor. They went uptime, and I have no idea what he did with them.

When that was combined with the fact that most honest people borrowed from Martino’s bank instead of the Knights Templar bank, the Knights Templar was rapidly becoming a non-factor in Silano’s economy. That really shook them up. We were a long way from their major source of income, but this was the first time that they had ever been driven out of business in a city purely because of economic reasons. That was a quick way to get their attention.

The first reaction from Knights Templar was a visit by a messenger in full Knights Templar war regalia. He politely knocked on the door and asked to speak to the person in charge. He was led to my Office, and I offered him a seat which he refused. He said that he would not be here long enough to need to sit down. He handed me a letter in the form of a scroll and sealed with the Knights Templar seal. Obviously, it was meant to be impressive, and it was, but not the way they intended.

All of this formality surely indicated that they were afraid of us and considered us a real threat. As far as I was concerned, that was great news. Up until receiving this message, I was not sure how seriously they were taking us. Well, now I knew.

I waited until the messenger was escorted out of Fort Mentor before I opened the scroll. There was a lot of mumbo-jumbo in the first part of the message to indicate how important the writer was, and I skimmed quickly through that. I figured that the writer was important just because of the way the message was delivered.

The main body of the message could be condensed into a simple order for us to cease our monetary activities, and that included Martino’s bank. Obviously they knew that the bank was an integral part of our operation. I debated with myself whether or not to answer the message. This came from an office in Rome, and I did not want to waste the training time of several troopers just to deliver a refusal, so I chose to ignore the message. I did tell Mentor about the message just in case he had missed it, and he agreed with me.

Hidden in the fancy talk was a threat of military action if we did not do as ordered. As long as it was a direct attack on Fort Mentor and not an attack on the city of Silano, then I was not really worried. I knew that the word would be around the whole of Fort Mentor within an hour, and it probably would not take that long, about the visit of the Knights Templar messenger in fancy dress. Therefore, I called a meeting of every resident of Fort Mentor over 12 years old to tell them the contents of the message and what I planned to do about it. Naturally, with the way women love to gossip, the full story would be all over Silano by supper time.

There was a delay of about two weeks before anything significant happened. Word leaked out of the palace that they had to get ready to feed 255 officers and men of the armed segment of the Knights Templar detachment in Rome. They should be expected in five days. That meant that they would arrive on Saturday, and we would have a day to look them over. That was a big quirk of fate in our favor because it would let us distribute our 93 men to our best advantage.

Mentor added two balconies to the other exposed wall of Fort Mentor that duplicated what we had on the front. Also, I had Lt. Jamin find two of the best marksmen with the crossbow and start training them to be snipers. Modified sights were supplied for their crossbows and they began training with the 250-yard targets that afternoon. Mentor installed a platform so that they could practice shooting down. I kicked myself for waiting so long to begin the training.

Fortunately, the two snipers, both of whom happened to be women, learned quickly. I was confident that either one could hit with a wounding shot at a range of 200-300 yards, and that should be plenty of range. In this day, any wound even in the arm or leg would result in amputation if the patient were to be saved, and a hit anywhere else was going to result in death, though it might take a month to happen. Gangrene would be the culprit in most cases.

The Knights Templar arrived on Saturday afternoon and were billeted in the homes of citizens of Silano, whether they wanted them or not. Of course, the citizens were not paid for servicing their unwelcome guests. Lt. Jamin sent out several pairs of scouts to look over the Knights Templar to determine if any of them were archers. None of them were, based on the lack of bows and no stock of arrows. Wonderful! This was going to be a repeat of Duke Marno’s abortive attack on us, just larger in scale.