God's Spy (25 page)

Barely two miles away, in the basement of a Vatican building, Archangel, one of the Vatican’s security computers, sprang into action. One of the many routines it performed automatically had detected the presence of an external agent in its system. It immediately activated its location program. The first computer activated another, this one named Saint Michael. Both were Cray supercomputers, able to undertake billions of operations per second, and valued at well over 00,000 euros apiece. Both began to run through their calculation cycles, searching for the intruder.

An alert appeared on the main monitor. Albert pursed his lips. ‘Shit. Here they come. We’ve got less than a minute. I can’t find a
list of accredited press.’
Paola tensed. She watched as the red dots on the map of the world
started to go out, one by one. To begin with, there had been several
hundred, but now they were disappearing at an alarming rate. ‘Press passes.’
‘Nothing. Fuck. Forty seconds.’
‘Media?’ Paola suggested.
‘We’ve got it. Here’s a file. Thirty seconds.’
A list appeared on the screen. A database.
‘Shit, it has more than three thousand entries.’
‘Arrange it by nationality and pull up Spain.’
‘There. Twenty seconds.’
‘Damn it, there aren’t any photographs. How many names are
there?’
‘More than fifty. Fifteen seconds.’
There were only thirty red dots left on the map of the world. ‘Eliminate the men and arrange the women by age.’
‘Done. Ten seconds.’
Paola’s hands were balled into fists. Albert took one hand off the
keyboard and placed it on top of the panic button. Large drops of
sweat fell from his brow as he typed with one hand.
‘Here you are! At last! Five seconds, Anthony!’
Fowler and Dicanti memorised the names on the screen as fast
as they could. They still hadn’t finished when Albert hit the panic
button. The screen and the whole apartment went pitch black. ‘Albert,’ Fowler said in the depths of the darkness.
‘Yes, Anthony?’
‘You don’t by any chance have candles, do you?’
‘You ought to know I never use analogue systems, Anthony.’

Saturday, 9 April 2005, 3.17 a.m.

Andrea Otero was very, very frightened.
‘No, sir, I’m not afraid, I am fucking terrified.’
The first thing she had done when she got to the hotel was to

buy three packets of cigarettes. The first shot of nicotine had been a blessing. Now that she was on to the second packet, the contours of reality had begun to stablilise. She felt a slightly comforting dizziness, something like a lullaby.

She was sitting on the floor of the room, her back against the wall, her arms clutching her legs while she smoked non-stop. Her laptop computer was on the other side of the room. It was turned off.

Considering the circumstances, she had acted correctly. Once she’d seen the first forty seconds of Victor Karosky’s film – if that was his real name – she’d been ready to throw up. Andrea had never been the kind of person who could hold things back, so she’d looked for the nearest bin and then coughed up macaroni and cheese, her breakfast croissant and probably yesterday’s dinner as well. She asked herself if it was a sacrilege to vomit into a bin belonging to the Vatican.

When the world had finally stopped spinning around her, she’d walked back to the Press Room door thinking that she had made such an awful racket that somebody would certainly have heard her. No doubt, by now, two Swiss Guards were on their way to arrest her for postal fraud, or whatever it was they called opening an envelope that obviously hadn’t been addressed to you – because none of these envelopes was.

‘OK, officer, so I thought it might be a bomb, and I acted as bravely as I could. I’ll wait here while you go for my medal.’

That wouldn’t be very believable. Decidedly unbelievable. But the journalist didn’t need an explanation for her captors because they never came. Andrea collected her things and left the Vatican as calmly as she could, giving a flirtatious smile to the Swiss Guards at the Arch of the Bells, the entrance journalists used, and then crossed Saint Peter’s Square, which was finally clear of people after so many days. She stopped feeling the Swiss Guards’ eyes clamped on her when she got out of the taxi at her hotel. She stopped believing that they were following her about half an hour after that.

And no, no one had followed her and no one suspected a thing. In the Piazza Navona she had thrown the nine unopened envelopes into a bin. Better to have only one bit of evidence on her. Back at the hotel she’d gone directly to her room, though she did make a stop at a kiosk to buy some nicotine.

When she felt sufficiently at ease – after inspecting the pot of dried flowers in her room for the third time without finding any hidden microphones – she loaded the disk into her laptop and tried to watch the film again.

The first time, she managed to last sixty seconds. The second, she watched almost the entire thing. She made it all the way through the third time, but had to race to the bathroom. The fourth time, she managed to stay calm enough to convince herself that it was very real, that it wasn’t a tape of something like The Blair Witch Project.

Andrea was a very intelligent journalist, which was both her great advantage and her major downfall. Her intuition had already told her from the very first viewing that the film was genuine. Perhaps some other journalist would have dismissed the disk almost immediately, thinking that it was a fake. But Andrea had spent days looking for Cardinal Robayra, and she suspected that other cardinals were missing as well. Hearing his name on the film dispelled any remaining doubts she had in an instant.

She’d watched the film a fifth time, just to get used to the images. And then a sixth time, to take notes – barely more than a few disconnected squiggles. She’d shut down her laptop, sat as far away from it as possible in a sliver of space between the desk and the air-conditioning unit. And then she’d surrendered to the lure of nicotine.
‘Definitely a bad time to give up smoking.’
Those images were a nightmare. At first, the disgust they had

filled her with, the dirty way they had made her feel, was so intense that she was unable to react for a couple of hours. When the shock finally wore off and she was able to think, she began to take stock of what she had on her hands. She took out her notebook and wrote down three points which would serve as the basis for her article.

1. A satanic killer is murdering cardinals in the Catholic Church.
2. The Catholic Church, most likely in collaboration with the Italian police, is keeping this hidden from us.
3. The Conclave, where those cardinals would have played a key role, is taking place within the next nine days.

She typed in an nine and then replaced it with an eight: it was now very early on Saturday morning.

She had to compose an impressive piece of reporting. A full report, three pages long, with summaries, quotes, sidebars and a killer headline. She wouldn’t send any images to the newspaper beforehand, because she knew they’d take her off the story without a second’s delay. The editor would no doubt drag Paloma out of her hospital bed so that the article would have the weight it deserved. Maybe they would let her have a byline on one of the sidebars. But if she sent the completed story to the paper, laid out and ready to send to the printers, then not even the editor-in-chief would have the gall to take her name off it. It wouldn’t happen, because if it did, Andrea would also send a fax to the Nation and another to the ABC with the complete text and photographs for the article before it was published. And to hell with the exclusive – and her job, for that matter.

‘As my brother Michael would say, “Either we all get a fuck, or we’ll dump the whore in the river.”’
It wasn’t exactly a simile appropriate for a young lady like Andrea Otero, but nobody butted in to insist that she was a young lady. It wasn’t proper for young ladies to steal other people’s correspondence as she had done, but she’d be damned if it mattered to her. She could already see herself writing the bestseller I Caught the Cardinal Killer. Hundreds of thousands of books with her name on the cover, interviews all over the world, conferences held about her work. Shameless robbery had definitely been worth the trouble.
‘Though, of course, sometimes you have to be careful who you rob.’
Because the film hadn’t been sent by the senior executives of a newspaper. It had been sent by a heartless killer who was probably counting the hours until his message would be broadcast all over the world.
She considered her options. Today was Saturday. Certainly whoever had sent the DVD wouldn’t find out that it hadn’t reached its destination until the following morning. If the messenger service was open on Saturday, which she doubted, they’d be on her trail within a few hours, perhaps by ten or eleven. But she doubted that the messenger had read the name on her press badge – he’d seemed more preoccupied by what lay inside her shirt. Best-case scenario: if the service didn’t open until Monday, she had two days. Worst case: she had a few hours.
It was true that Andrea had learned that the most sensible thing to do was always to act as if the worst case was the most likely. So she would put the story together right away. As soon as the editorin-chief and the newspaper’s director in Madrid sent the article to press, she’d have to dye her hair, hide behind her sunglasses, and fly out of the hotel like a bee.
She got to her feet, told herself to be strong. She switched on the laptop and opened the newspaper’s paste-up program. She started writing straight into the template. She felt much better when she saw how her words would look in the text.
It took her three-quarters of an hour to prepare the three-page mock up. She was almost finished when her mobile phone rang.
‘Who the hell is calling me at three in the morning?’
Only the newspaper had that number; she hadn’t given it to anyone else, not even to her family. So it had to be someone from Editorial with an emergency. She got up and searched around in her bag until she found it. She looked at the screen, expecting to see the long display of numbers that appeared when there was a call from Spain, but what she saw instead was a blank. The screen didn’t even say ‘Caller Unknown’.
She took the call anyway. ‘Hello?’
The only reply was an engaged signal.
She hung up.
‘Must have been a wrong number.’
But something inside told her that the call was important, and she’d better hurry up. She went back to the keyboard, writing faster than ever. The errors she let stand – she’d always been good at spelling – and never went back to correct them. They could do that at the newspaper. She was suddenly in a tremendous rush to finish.
It took her four hours to complete the rest of the article – hours spent searching for profiles and photos of the cardinals, biographies, snippets of information and, of course, writing about their deaths. The article included several images she’d taken directly from Karosky’s video, some of them so shocking they made her blush. What the hell. Let Editorial censor them if they wanted to.
She was right in the middle of the closing lines when there was a knock at the door.

Saturday, 9 April 2005, 7.58 a.m.

Andrea looked at the door as if she’d never seen one before in her life. She took the DVD out of her computer and jammed it back into its plastic slipcover before burying it inside the waste-paper basket in the bathroom. She walked back to her room, her heart balled like a fist, wishing that whoever it was on the other side of the door would just go away. But the knocks continued, courteous but insistent. It couldn’t be housekeeping. It was barely eight in the morning.

‘Who is it?’
‘Signorina Otero? It’s breakfast, courtesy of the hotel.’ Andrea opened the door. She was surprised. ‘I didn’t order

any—’

The man on the other side of the door didn’t let her finish her sentence. There wasn’t the slightest chance he was one of the hotel’s elegant porters or waiters. Short and stocky but clearly fit, he wore a leather jacket and black trousers, and he hadn’t shaved for a day or so. He was sporting a broad smile.

‘Miss Otero? I’m Fabio Dante, superintendent of the Vatican Corpo di Vigilanza. I’d like to ask you a few questions.’
In his left hand he held an ID card. Andrea looked at the photo intently. It appeared to be authentic.
‘As you can see, I’m very tired and I need to get some rest. Please come back later.’
She tried to shut the door abruptly, but the man had his foot wedged in the gap like an encyclopedia salesman with a large family to support. Andrea was forced to remain where she was. ‘Didn’t you understand me? I need to get some sleep.’
‘It seems that you are the one who doesn’t understand me. I need to speak with you urgently. I’m investigating a robbery.’
‘Oh Christ,’ she thought to herself. ‘How did they find me so quickly?’
There wasn’t a twitch on Andrea’s face, but inside, her nervous system switched from ‘alarm’ to ‘total crisis’. She’d have to bluff her way out. Her nails digging into her palms, she opened the door wide so the superintendent could enter.
‘I can’t give you much time. I have to send an article to my paper.’
‘A little early to be sending an article, wouldn’t you say? The printers won’t even have shown up for work yet.’
‘Right, but I like to have time to spare.’
‘Are we talking about a special story, perhaps?’ Dante asked, taking a step in the direction of Andrea’s laptop. She stood in front of him, blocking his way.
‘No, nothing special. Just the usual conjectures about who’s going to be the next Supreme Pontiff.’
‘Of course. A question of great importance, no?’
‘Of great importance. But there’s not much in the way of news at the moment. You know how it goes: the usual human-interest stories. Not much else.’
‘And we’d like it to stay that way, Signorina Otero.’
‘Except, of course, for this robbery you were talking about. What exactly was stolen?’
‘Nothing extraordinary. Just a few envelopes.’
‘What’s in them? Must be something very valuable. The cardinals’ payroll?’
‘What makes you think the contents were valuable?’
‘Well, why else would they put their best sniffer dog on the trail? Maybe it’s a collection of Vatican stamps. I’ve heard that collectors would kill to get their hands on them.’
‘Actually, it wasn’t stamps. Mind if I smoke?’
‘You ought to take up mints.’
The superintendent breathed in the air around him. ‘Advice which you don’t seem to be following yourself.’
‘It’s been a long night. Smoke, if you can find an empty ashtray.’
Dante lit up a cigarette and exhaled. ‘As I was telling you, Miss Otero, the envelopes don’t contain stamps. It’s a matter of some extremely confidential information that mustn’t fall into the wrong hands.’
‘For example . . .?’
‘I don’t follow. For example what?’
‘Whose hands would be the wrong ones?’
‘Someone who has no idea what’s good for them.’
Dante looked around in vain for an empty ashtray. He resolved the question by flicking the ash on to the floor.
Andrea swallowed hard: if what he’d just said wasn’t a threat, she was a nun in a convent.
‘And what kind of information is it?’
‘The confidential kind.’
‘Valuable?’
‘It could be. I expect that when I find the person who took the envelopes, it will be someone who knows how to negotiate.’
‘You’re prepared to offer money for it?’
‘No. I’m prepared to let the person keep their own teeth.’
Dante’s words didn’t frighten Andrea, but his tone did. He spoke with a smile and used the same tone as he would have done to order a decaffeinated coffee. And that was dangerous. Andrea was suddenly very sorry she’d let him into the room. She had one card left.
‘Fine, it’s been interesting talking to you, but now I’ll have to ask you to leave. My boyfriend is due back any minute and he’s the jealous kind.’
Dante burst out laughing. Not Andrea, though – not at all: Dante had drawn his gun and was aiming it at her chest.
‘Game’s over, pretty one. There’s no boyfriend. Give me the disks, or we’ll get a look at the state of your lungs.’
Andrea glared at the pistol. ‘You’re not going to shoot me. We’re in a hotel. The police would be here in thirty seconds, and then you’d never find what you’re looking for, whatever it is.’
Dante wavered for a few seconds. ‘You know what? – you’re right. I’m not going to fire.’
He landed a left hook with terrible force. Andrea saw coloured lights and a solid wall in front of her. It took her some time before she realised the punch had knocked her legs out from under her and she was staring at the ceiling.
‘I won’t take much more of your time, Miss Otero. Just enough for me to get what I need.’
Dante walked over to the computer. He pushed the letters on the keyboard until the screensaver disappeared and Andrea’s article materialised in its place.
‘First prize!’
She staggered to her feet, one hand massaging her left eyebrow. The bastard had split it and now blood was pouring out all over the place. She couldn’t see a thing out of that eye.
‘I don’t get it. How did you find me?’
‘Signorina, you gave us the authorisation yourself when you handed over the number of your mobile phone and signed the waiver.’
Dante took two objects out of his jacket pocket as he was speaking: a screwdriver and a small, shiny, metal cylinder. He shut down the laptop, turned it over and used the screwdriver to get into the hard drive. He passed the cylinder over the drive several times, at which point Andrea worked out what it was: a powerful magnet that would completely erase the article and all the information stored in her hard drive.
‘If you had read the small print of the form you signed, you would have noted that one of its provisions authorises us to locate your mobile phone by satellite, “in case of danger to your personal security” – a clause put there should a terrorist infiltrate the press, but one which has turned out to be very useful in your case too. Just be happy it was me you met up with, and not Karosky.’
‘Oh yes, I’m jumping for joy.’
Andrea kneeled down again. With her right hand she felt around for the heavy crystal ashtray that she had been planning to take home as a souvenir from the hotel. It was sitting on the floor next to the wall, where she’d sat smoking like a demon. Dante brushed past her and then sat down on her bed.
‘It must be said that we do owe you a debt of thanks. If it wasn’t for your petty theft, the vile actions of that psychopath would be front-page news all over the world by now. You wanted to take advantage of the situation, but I’m afraid you haven’t pulled it off. That’s a fact. Be good, and we’ll leave things as they are. You won’t get your exclusive, but you will save face. What do you say?’ ‘The disks . . .’ Andrea mumbled a few unintelligible words.
Dante leaned down until his nose was almost touching hers. ‘What were you saying, my petal?’
‘I said you can shove it up your ass, you bastard,’ said Andrea.
She brought the ashtray down hard on his ear. The crystal collided with Dante’s head and the ashes flew in all directions. He cried out in pain, his hand over his ear. Andrea sprang to her feet and pushed him over, then tried to hit him with the ashtray a second time. But he was faster than she was. He grabbed her arm when the ashtray was a mere inch from his face.
‘Well, well. So the little whore has claws.’
Dante squeezed her wrist and twisted her arm until she dropped the ashtray. And then a straight punch to her stomach. Andrea hit the floor a second time, the air knocked out of her, feeling as if a heavy lead ball was pressing down on her chest. Dante massaged his ear as a thin thread of blood ran down the side of his neck. He looked at himself in the mirror: his left eye was half-closed, he was covered with ashes, and there were cigarette butts in his hair. He walked back over to the girl and dragged her to her feet. He was going to punch her in the chest. Had he done it, he would have broken a few ribs. But Andrea was ready for him. Just as Dante was pulling his fist back, she kicked him hard in the ankle. Dante lost his balance and fell to the floor, giving her just enough time to run into the bathroom. She slammed the door.
Dante got up, limping.
‘Open up, you bitch.’
‘Go fuck yourself, asshole.’ She said it more for herself than for him. She noticed she was crying and thought about praying, but then she remembered who Dante worked for and decided that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. She leaned against the door, but it didn’t do much good. It flew open, pushing Andrea against the wall as Dante burst into the room, his face red and overwhelmed by rage. Andrea put up her fists. Dante countered by grabbing her hair and dragging her across the room. He was a brute, using every ounce of his strength to hold her down. All she could do was tear at his face and his hands, trying to free herself from his grasp. She managed to scratch him twice on the face, making him bleed, and this enraged him even more.
‘Where are they?’
‘Go fuck—’
‘Tell me . . .’
‘—yourself!’
‘. . . where they are!’
He pressed her face against the bathroom mirror, then pulled her head back and slammed it against the glass. A spider spread its web over the mirror, with a glob of blood in the middle that quickly dripped down into the sink.
Dante forced her to look at her reflection in what was left of the mirror. ‘Want to keep going?’
Andrea quickly decided she’d had enough. ‘In the waste-paper basket,‘ she said in weak voice.
‘Good. Bend down and get it with your left hand. And no more tricks, or I’ll cut off your nipples and shove them down your throat.’
Andrea followed his instructions and handed Dante the disk. He examined it carefully: it appeared to be identical to the one sent to the Vigilanza.
‘Very good. And the other nine?’
Andrea swallowed hard. ‘I threw them away.’
‘More bullshit.’
Andrea felt as if she were flying and in fact she was, as Dante hurled her back into the main room and she landed on the carpet.
‘I don’t have them, for fuck’s sake. I don’t have them! Go look in the damn bins in the Piazza Navona, you fucking pig!’
Dante approached her, smiling. She stayed on the floor, her breath coming in short, rapid gasps.
‘You don’t get it, do you, bitch? All you had to do was hand me the shitty disks and then you would’ve been on your way home with a nice big strawberry on your face. But no, you think you’re brighter than me, so now we have to get serious. Your chance of getting out of this alive has gone.’
Dante put one leg on either side of the journalist, took out his gun and pointed it at her head. Andrea was terrified but she looked straight at him. This bastard was capable of just about anything.
‘You won’t shoot. You’d make too much noise.’ She said it with less conviction this time.
‘You know what, you little cunt? You’re right again.’
He took a silencer out of his pocket and screwed it on to the barrel of his gun. Andrea was now face to face with certain death. But this time, it would be a little less noisy.
‘Drop it, Fabio.’
Dante spun around, an astonished look on his face. Dicanti and Fowler were standing in the doorway. Paola was holding a gun and Fowler the electronic pass with which they’d got into the room. Dicanti’s badge and Fowler’s collar had played a crucial part in obtaining it. It had taken them a while to get to the hotel because first they had tried one of the other four journalists on their list. They’d arranged them by age, beginning with the youngest, who’d turned out to be a gofer for a television crew, with brown hair, as the talkative receptionist at the front desk had informed them. As talkative as the receptionist at Andrea Otero’s hotel.
Dante stared at Dicanti’s pistol, dumbstruck. His body was turned towards Dicanti and Fowler, but his gun was still pointing at Andrea’s head.
‘Come on, Dicanti, you won’t do it.’
‘You’re attacking a civilian on Italian soil, Dante. I’m a police officer. You’re not about to tell me what I can or can’t do. Drop the gun or I’ll be forced to shoot.’
‘Dicanti, you don’t understand. This woman’s a criminal. She stole confidential information, property of the Vatican. She won’t listen to reason and she might ruin everything. It’s nothing personal.’
‘You’ve said that to me before. And I’ve noticed how deeply you’re involved in quite a few assignments that “aren’t personal”.’
This was more than Dante could take, and it showed. He changed tactics.
‘You’re right. Let me take the girl to the Vatican, so we can find out what she did with the envelopes. I will make myself personally responsible for her safety.’
But Andrea knew what that meant and she didn’t want to spend another minute with this cretin. She started to move her legs very slowly, getting them into position.
‘No way,’ said Paola.
Dante’s voice took on a steely edge. He directed his words to Fowler. ‘Anthony, you can’t let this happen. We can’t let her bring everything out into the open. For the cross and the sword.’
The priest stared back at Dante. ‘Those aren’t my symbols any more, Dante. Even less so if you tarnish them with innocent blood.’
‘But she’s not innocent. She stole the envelopes.’
Dante was still talking when Andrea finally managed to get into position. She chose her moment and kicked out with her foot. She didn’t use all her strength – not because she didn’t want to, but because she wanted to make sure she hit her target. She wanted to hit that son of a bitch right in the balls. And she did.
Three things happened at once.
Dante let go of the disk as he grabbed his crotch with his left hand. With his right hand he cocked the pistol, his finger pressing against the trigger. His mouth was open, like a fish out of water.
Dicanti jumped across the room in three bounds and rammed her fist into Dante’s stomach.
Fowler reacted a half-second after Paola – either because his reflexes were slower or because he was sizing up the situation – and beat a quick path to the pistol, which was still pointing at Andrea. He grabbed Dante’s right wrist at almost the same time as Dicanti’s shoulder barrelled into Dante’s chest. The pistol fired at the ceiling.
The three of them fell together in a confused heap beneath a rain of falling plaster. Fowler, without letting go of Dante’s wrist, pressed both thumbs down on the wrist joint, forcing Dante to release the pistol. He still managed to butt Dicanti in the face with his knee. She rolled over, out cold.
Fowler and Dante stood up. Fowler held the gun by the barrel in his left hand. With his right hand he undid the latch and let the clip fall out. It made a loud noise as it bounced on to the floor. With the other hand he took a bullet out of the firing chamber. Two more rapid movements, and the firing pin was in his hand. He threw it across the room, where it came to rest at Dante’s feet.