A Woman Involved
A Pope is dead; his successor has just survived an assassination attempt; death is meted out in the South Atlantic with the explosive fury of Exocet missiles; a disgraced banker is found hanging under a London bridge; a row of US servicemen’s coffins is lined up in the Caribbean heat of Grenada …The events at first seem unconnected, but are linked by their shocking violence. And it is these events that take Jack Morgan back to the Caribbean island where the woman he was to have married, Anna Hapsburg, is fighting for survival. Morgan has been drummed out of the Navy on trumped-up charges, and Anna’s husband, Max, is deeply implicated not only in Morgan’s fll from grace, but also in an international network of shady deals that tie in with the recent events.Together, Morgan and Anna uncover a deviously camouflaged trail that will lead them to the rotten core of a worldwide conspiracy that goes to the top of the seemingly respectable governments and religious institutions …
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JOHN GORDON DAVIS
A Woman Involved
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1987
This edition 2014
Copyright © John Gordon Davis 1987
John Gordon Davis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007574438
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780008125370
Version: 2015-02-11
To Minna and Max Lucas
Contents
Rome, 1978
‘Who murdered you?’ people cried at the corpse.
There was no autopsy to find out why he died. Yet he had been in excellent health. No death certificate was ever published. And when he was embalmed, within twelve hours of his death, the morticians were forbidden to draw one drop of blood off his body. For three days Pope John Paul I lay in state in the Basilica of Saint Peter’s, and thousands of people filed past the coffin to pay their last homage to the Pope who had reigned for only thirty-three days. At seven o’clock on the third day the doors of Saint Peter’s were closed, and the body lay in flickering candlelight for the last night, Swiss guards standing vigil at each corner of the catafalque. But at seven-thirty, through a side door, entered some more pilgrims. They came from the Pope’s birthplace, and they had received special permission to come late to pay their last respects. They began to file past the body, mourning. Then something strange happened.
Suddenly a group of Vatican officials and doctors appeared. The pilgrims were told to leave immediately. They did so, bewildered. Then the Swiss guards were ordered to leave. Then big crimson screens were erected around the body, so that nobody who had chanced to hide inside the massive basilica could see what was happening. The officials and the doctors began an examination of the Pope’s body, behind the screens.
The examination lasted one and a half hours. The press demanded to know whether this had been a belated autopsy, but the Vatican announced that it had been a routine examination, lasting only twenty minutes, by the morticians and a professor of medicine to check on the state of preservation of the body.
But neither the morticians nor the professor were even present.
Rome, May 1980
He was probably the most popular man in the world when they tried to murder him.
There were thousands of people in Saint Peter’s Square to attend the papal audience in front of the basilica. At about five pm Pope John Paul II appeared in his popemobile and a roar went up from the crowd. He stood in his vehicle, beaming, dressed in white, his arms outstretched, waving and leaning out to touch people as he rode slowly between them. Then suddenly the shocking shots rang out.
They were fired from seven feet away. Two bullets struck Pope John Paul II in the abdomen, three more grazed him. He clutched himself and lurched, then he fell back into the arms of his private secretary. There was pandemonium. The screams from the crowd, the shock, the horror, the surging. A young man was trying to race away, dodging and shoving, but within moments outraged people overwhelmed him.
