Vatican City, July 24th, 1500 hours

            Rachel Harding didn’t look much like a writer for National Geographic; for one thing… she was only around twenty-four years old. The golden-tanned brunette was a rare beauty in the literature circles, especially at her age.  Her facial features were arranged to the point of perfection, thin eyebrows arching elegantly down toward a straight but not overpowering nose. Her lips were full but not overly fleshy and her cool gray eyes were impossibly symmetrical.

            She was incredibly shapely, not just for a reporter. This was a fact that even her modest clothing couldn’t hide. She held herself with a natural elegance and good posture, even though she currently had her nose pressed into the glowing screen of her laptop. Suddenly, a large stack of books slammed down at the table beside, causing her to start. Scowling, she glared up at the smirking face of her partner Laura Keith.

            Laura Keith was not a reporter; rather, she was a college student interning as a reporter. Being somewhat the same age as Rachel Harding, the two had become fast friends when they were assigned together. Like her friend, Laura was a very beautiful woman. But, unlike Ms. Harding, Laura practically oozed sexual appeal.

            Her long straight hair, braided in a popular African-American hairstyle, was dark blonde at the top and gradually lightened to beach blonde by the end. Her dark eyebrows were a little thicker than Harding’s but they were aided by make up and met up nicely with her high nose bridge. She had relatively large eyes with gravity-defying lashes that were naturally brown, but were currently covered by blue contacts. That, coupled with her full lips and South-American tan, made for a very feminine and angled face that practically beckoned at the opposite sex. Though she was fleshier than Harding, Laura Keith was by no means a porker. Her curvy form did not try to hide the fact that she was a woman; instead, it only enhanced her splendor.

            “C’mon, Rach. You’ve been staring at that computer screen for hours, take a break already!”

            Harding smiled and heaved a large volume off the pile of records that Laura had just slammed onto the table.

            “This is journalism for you, Laura,” she smirked, “you could always go into modeling.”

            “Modeling? Please, I already tried that about five years ago, they said I was too fat,” she spread her arms, as if displaying her own figure, “this is fat? Are they making ads for bulimic people?”

            Harding chuckled and returned to her research. The official story that they were covering was a history of the Catholic Church, but secretly, Rachel Harding was a conspiracy freak. Flipping through the records of Vatican spending over the last century, she happened to notice a strange disappearance of funds every so often. Small in the eyes of the church, but if one was to look hard enough, one would realize that recorded spending and money left the church’s treasury didn’t match up. So either someone was filching from the Church, not likely, or… like so many others had suspected, the Church was secretly funding operations hidden from the public eye.

            Normally, the Vatican would not have allowed anyone NEAR their archival vaults. But because Rachel was here on a National Geographic assignment to write a glorified history of the Church’s humanitarian deeds, she was made an exception. Besides, monks who haven’t seen real women for a lifetime could hardly complain… they are still men after all; no amount of faith could change that.

            Despite the fact that most leads ended up as a dead end, one minor clue remained constant. Every year since 1885, the Church had been secretly transferring money to an unknown asset. The amount was generally the same, the slightest fluctuations occurring only during wartime or periods of civil unrest. This funding disappeared for a time during World War II and returned again after the Baby Boom.

            Rachel had actually pursued this mystery for quite a while know… every clue ending up in a dead end marked by “Authorized Personnel Only”. But at last she thought she had the final clue… the Vatican’s Archival Vaults. But so far, all financial records she’s found had either stopped tracing the flow of money or redirected it to various excuses like garbage disposal, miscellaneous items, or humanitarian needs.

            “Hey, what’s this?” Laura pointed a slender finger at a portion of the records.

            “’H.G.V.’, probably some little known human rights activist.”

            Laura shook her head,

            “Unlikely, unless the same guy’s been alive ever since the late 1800s.”

            Rachel’s head snapped up, her eyes were confused and intrigued at the same time.

            “Look,” the younger woman pointed again to the pages, “there’s the initial H.G.V. next to every one of the suspicious transactions,” she flipped the pages back, “all the way back to the very first.”

            Rachel looked skeptical, “had it ever occurred to you that it might be multiple different persons with the same name?”

            “What kind of family, short of royalty, would continually name their heirs the same first and middle name from 1885 all the way to 2006?”

            “There you go, royal family.”

            “Which royal family do you know of that rose in 1885 and worked with the Vatican all the way to 2006? From what I can think of off the top of my head, there’s about a cat’s chance in hell of a royal family that steadfast,” Laura paused, “besides, name one royal family that has a last name starting with the letter ‘v’.”

            “Well then, perhaps it’s an organization. Let’s look into that,” Rachel smirked, “I have a feeling we’re about to hit the jackpot.”