God's Spy (28 page)

August 1999

There wasn’t a single noise in solitary confinement – which was why the urgent, demanding voice that kept whispering his name filled Karosky’s ears like an incoming tide.

‘Victor.’

Karosky jumped out of bed, like a child. There he was, once again. He’d come to help Victor, to guide him, to light the way; to give him a reason for and to help him channel his strength and his needs. Now he was able to endure the cruel interference of Doctor Conroy, who examined him as he would a butterfly pinned under a microscope. There he was on the other side of the iron bars; but it felt almost as if he were sitting with Victor in his cell. Victor could respect this man; he could follow him. And he in turn could understood Victor, and give him direction. They had spoken for hours about what he should do. About how he should do it. About how he should act, how he should respond to Conroy’s repetitive, bothersome interference.

During the night-time he thought about his role and waited for the man’s arrival. He only came once a week, but Victor waited for him impatiently, counting the hours and even the minutes one after another. As he went over it in his head, he patiently sharpened the knife, trying not to make any noise. The visitor had brought it to Victor. He could have given him a sharp knife, or even a gun, but he wanted to temper his courage and his strength. And Victor had done what he asked. He had given proof of his loyalty and devotion. First he had mutilated the sodomite and then, a few weeks later, he had killed the pederast – both priests. If he pulled out the weeds the way the man had asked him to, he would receive his reward – the reward he wanted more than anything in the world. He would give it to Victor because no one else could. No one.

‘Victor.’

He was demanding his presence. Victor crossed the cell with hurried steps and bowed down in front of the door, listening to the voice that spoke to him of the future; of a mission, far away; in the very heart of Christianity.

Sunday, 10 April 2005, 2.14 a.m.

Silence followed Dicanti’s words like a dark shadow. Fowler looked around, his hands gripping his face, caught between astonishment and despair.

‘How could I have been so blind? He kills because he’s been told to. Jesus Christ. And the messages, the ritual?’
‘If you think about it carefully, they don’t make any sense: the “Ego te absolvo” written first on the ground and then on the victim’s chest; the hands washed clean, the tongue cut out: it’s the exact equivalent of the Sicilian practice of putting money in the victim’s mouth.’
‘The Mafia ritual that indicates the victim talked too much – is that it?’
‘Exactly. At first I thought Karosky was condemning the cardinals for some crime, something done to him or some affront to their position as priests. But the clues left on the crumpled pieces of paper don’t add up. In my opinion, they were his personal contribution, his own finishing touch to a scheme dictated by someone else.’
‘But why kill them in such a dramatic way then? Why not just get rid of them?’
‘The mutilations are nothing more than an absurd disguise to cover up one crucial fact: someone wanted them dead. Just look at this.’
Paola pointed at the flexible lamp on her desk. Its beam was directed on to Karosky’s dossier. Everything that didn’t fall inside its cone of light was in darkness.
‘Now I get it. They forced us to look at what they wanted us to see. OK, but who would want to do something like this?’
‘The essential question when you want to find out who’s committed a crime is: who benefits? A serial killer erases that question with one swipe because he does it for his own benefit. His motive is the body. But in this case the killer’s motive is his mission. If he had wanted to give free rein to his frustration, his hatred for the cardinals, supposing that he feels these things, he could have done it at some other time when the cardinals were much more visible. And much less protected. So why now? What’s different now?’
‘Because someone wants to influence the Conclave.’
‘So now you must ask yourself who does want to influence the Conclave. And to answer that it’s essential to look at who they killed.’
‘The cardinals who died were eminent figures in the Church – men of great standing.’
‘With a simple connection between them. Our job is to work out what that is.’
Fowler stood up. He began pacing around the room, his hands clenched behind his back. ‘Dottoressa, I have an idea about who might be prepared to eliminate the cardinals in this way. There’s one clue we’ve conveniently ignored: Karosky underwent a complete facial reconstruction, as Angelo Biffi took the trouble to show us. It’s an expensive operation and requires a long convalescence. If done well, especially with the necessary discretion and anonymity, it could cost more than one hundred thousand dollars. That’s not the kind of money that a poor priest like Karosky would have lying around. Nor would it be easy for him to come to Italy, or to pay his expenses after he got here. We’ve relegated these questions to the back burner the whole time, but they’re crucial now.’
‘And they reinforce the theory that there’s an unseen hand behind the assassinations.’
‘Correct.’
‘Padre, I’m not in your league when it comes to knowledge of the Catholic Church, or the way the Curia works. In your opinion, what is the common denominator between the three dead cardinals?’
The priest mulled it over. ‘There could be a link – something that would have been much more obvious if they’d simply disappeared or been executed. They were all ideological liberals. They were part of – how should I describe it? – the liberal wing of the Holy Spirit. If you’d asked me for the names of the five cardinals who were most in support of Vatican Council II, those three names would have been on the list.’
‘I need more detail.’
‘OK. With the arrival of John XXIII to the papacy in 98, it was obvious to everyone that the Church had to change course. John XXIII convoked the second Vatican Council, a call to bishops all over the world to come to Rome to debate with the Pope about the state of the Church. Two thousand bishops responded to the call. John XXIII died before the council finished but his successor, Paul VI, completed the job. Unfortunately, the initial reforms that the council planned didn’t go nearly as far as John XXIII had hoped.’
‘What are you referring to?’
‘There were enormous changes inside the church. It was probably one of the landmarks of the twentieth century. You won’t remember it because you’re very young, but until the end of the sixties it was considered a sin for a woman to smoke or even wear trousers in public. And those aren’t the only examples. Suffice to say that, although the changes were extensive, they were by no means far-reaching enough. John XXIII wanted to throw open the doors of the Church to the reviving air of the Holy Spirit. They were only opened a crack. Paul VI turned out to be a very conservative pope. John Paul I, his successor, was barely in the job for a month; and John Paul II was an apostolic pope, strong and media-savvy, who certainly did a great deal of good on humanitarian issues but was extremely conservative when it came to normal Church politics.’
‘So the great reform of the Church still hasn’t happened?’
‘There’s a lot of work to be done – there really is. When the results of Vatican Two were published, the most conservative sectors of the Church were up in arms. And the council still has enemies – people who believe that anyone who isn’t a Catholic will go straight to Hell, that women don’t have the right to vote, and other, even worse, ideas. Even the clergy expects this Conclave to give us a forceful, idealistic pope, a pope who will dare to open the Church up to the world. And the perfect man for the job would no doubt have been Cardinal Portini, a hard-core liberal. But he’d never get the votes of the ultraconservative wing. Robayra would have been something else: a man of the people but a brilliant one. Cardoso had similar backing. Both were defenders of the poor.’
‘And now they’re both dead.’
Fowler’s expression darkened. ‘Paola, what I’m going to tell you now has to remain a secret at all costs. I’m risking my life and yours and, take my word for it, I’m scared. This line of reasoning points in a direction I really don’t want to look at too closely, much less follow.’ Fowler paused briefly to take in some air. ‘Ever heard of the Santa Alianza – the Holy Alliance?’
Once more, Dicanti’s head filled with stories of spies and assassinations, just as it had when they were visiting the messenger. She’d always thought that they were the sort of tall tales told only by drunks, but at that late hour, sitting in her room with a man whose background was, to say the least, unusual, the possibility that such stories were real acquired a new dimension.
‘It’s supposedly the Vatican’s Secret Service, or so they say – a network of spies and secret agents who won’t hesitate to kill. But it’s just an old wives’ tale, used to scare rookie officers who’ve just joined the force. Nobody takes the rumours seriously.’
‘Doctor Dicanti, you should take the Santa Alianza very seriously indeed, because it does exist. It has existed for the last four hundred years, and it’s the right hand of the Vatican for assignments that even the Pope himself doesn’t know about.’
‘I find that very difficult to believe.’
‘The motto of the Holy Alliance is: “The cross and the sword”.’
Paola had a flashback of Dante in the Hotel Raphael, his pistol pointed at the journalist. Those had been his exact words when he’d asked for Fowler’s help, and now she understood.
‘Oh, good Lord. So you’re . . .’
‘I was, a long time ago. I served two flags: those of my country and my religion. I had to let one of them go.’
‘What happened?’
‘I can’t tell you, so don’t ask.’
Paola didn’t want to push the point. This was part of the darker side of the priest, the cold pain that clutched at his soul. She suspected there was a great deal more to this than he was letting on.
‘Now I understand why Dante loathed you so much. It has something to do with that part of your life, doesn’t it?’

60

Fowler didn’t respond. Paola had to make a quick decision because they were short on time. There was no room for doubt. She finally let her heart speak. She knew she was in love with the priest – with each and every part of him, from the dry warmth of his hands to the afflictions of his soul. She wanted to be able to rid him of all that, to give him back the open smile of a child. She knew that what she wanted was impossible: there were oceans of bitterness inside him and they’d been there for a long time. It wasn’t only the unsurmountable wall of his priesthood: anyone who wanted to get near him would have to cross those oceans, and they would most probably drown. At that moment she realised that she would never be with him; but she also knew that he would risk his own life before letting anyone do her harm.

‘It’s OK, padre. I trust you,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Go on.’

Fowler sat back down; and he began to unfold a long and chilling story.
‘They’ve existed since 66. In those dark times, Pius V was fearful of the rise of the Anglicans and heretics. As head of the Inquisition, he was tough, inflexible, pragmatic. The attitude in the Vatican was much more territorial then than it is now, though it enjoys more power today. The Holy Alliance was created to recruit young priests and uomos di fiducia – trustworthy lay persons of proven faith. Their mission was to defend the Vatican as a country and the Church as a spiritual entity, and their numbers grew with the passing of time. By the nineteenth century the number of members had reached the thousands. Some were mere informants, dreamers, sleepy-heads . . .Others – around five hundred men – formed the elite: the Hand of Saint Michael. This was a group of special agents who were posted throughout the world and could execute an order precisely and at speed. They’d invest money in a revolutionary group when necessary, trade influence, fabricate crucial information that would change the course of a war. They would silence, deceive, and at the furthest extreme, kill. Every member of the Hand of Saint Michael was trained in weapons and tactics – originally, also in population control, codes, disguise and hand-to-hand combat. A Hand was capable of splitting a grape in two with a knife from fifteen paces. He could speak four languages. He could decapitate a cow, throw its decaying body into a well full of pure water and place the blame on a rival group. The Hands trained for years in a monastery on an island in the Mediterranean, whose name I won’t reveal. With the arrival of the twentieth century, the training evolved, only to have the Hand of Saint Michael nearly pulled out by its roots during the Second World War. It was a time bathed in blood, a time when many men perished, some of them defending noble causes but others far less so.’
Fowler paused to take a sip of coffee. The shadows in the room had grown darker and longer, and Paola shivered.
‘In 98 John XXIII, the Pope who initiated Vatican Two, decided that the time for the Holy Alliance had passed and its services were no longer required. Right in the middle of the Cold War he dismantled the lines of communication between the various informants, absolutely prohibiting members of the alliance from carrying out any action without his prior approval. And for four years it stayed like that. There were only twelve of fifty-two Hands left in 99, and several of them were getting on in years. The Pope ordered them to return to Rome. The secret location where they trained mysteriously went up in flames in960. And the head of the Hand of Saint Michael, the leader of the Holy Alliance, died in a car accident.’
‘Who was he?’
‘I can’t say – not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t know. The identity of the head is always a mystery. It could be anybody: a bishop, a cardinal, an uomo di fiducia, a simple priest. It has to be a man, and he must be more than forty-five years old. That’s all. From 66 until today only the name of one head has ever been discovered: the parish priest Sogredo, an Italian, originally from Spain, who fought Napoleon tooth and nail. And that piece of information is only available in very limited circles.’
‘It’s not exactly strange that the Vatican wouldn’t recognise the existence of a secret service, if it uses methods such as those you describe.’
‘That was one of the reasons why John XXIII wanted to have done with the alliance. He said it was never right to kill, even in the name of God; and I agree. I know that a few of the campaigns undertaken by the Hand of Saint Michael hit the Nazis very hard. One of their attacks saved hundreds of lives. But there was one faction, albeit a very small one, that operated completely on its own and committed terrible atrocities. I don’t want to go into that now, especially not at this hour.’
Fowler waved one of his hands in front of him, as if he was trying to chase away ghosts. In someone like him, whose economy of movement seemed almost supernatural, the gesture betrayed tremendous anxiety. Paola realised he wanted to be done with this particular story.
‘You don’t have to go on. Just tell me what you think I need to know.’
Fowler smiled gratefully. ‘But that, as I guess you might imagine, wasn’t the end of the Holy Alliance. The arrival of Paul VI on the throne of Saint Peter in 96 came amidst the most fraught international situation the world had ever seen. Less than a year before, the world had been only a few inches away from nuclear war. And a few months later, Kennedy, the first Catholic president, was assassinated. When Paul VI learned the news, he ordered the Holy Alliance back into action. The network of spies, although diminished by time, regrouped. The tricky part was recreating the Hand of Saint Michael. Of the twelve Hands who had been recalled to Rome in fifty-eight, only seven were fit for service in 96. One of them was put in charge of rebuilding the organisational structure to train new agents. The job took about fifteen years, but they succeeded in training a core of thirty agents. Some of these men had absolutely no prior experience, and some came from other secret services.’
‘Like yourself: a double agent.’
‘In reality, I was considered as a potential agent. That’s someone who normally works for two allied organisations, but the first is unaware that the second adds to or modifies the directives in each mission. It was my job to use my knowledge in order to save lives, not to take other people’s. Almost every mission they sent me on involved getting people out: saving endangered priests in complicated positions.’
‘Almost every mission.’
Fowler nodded. ‘We had a complex job where things got bent out of shape. I stopped being a Hand that very day. It didn’t make things easy for me, but here I am. I thought I would be a psychologist for the rest of my life, and look where one of my patients has led me.’
‘Dante is one of the Hands, no?’
‘Years after I resigned, there was another crisis. Once again there were very few agents, and all of them were far away, involved in missions it wouldn’t have been easy to get out of. The only man available was Dante, and he wasn’t known for his scruples. In reality, he was probably a perfect fit for the job, if my suspicions are right.’
‘So Cirin is the Head?’
Fowler looked straight ahead, unperturbed. After a minute Paola decided he wasn’t going to answer, so she asked him another question. ‘But why would the Holy Alliance want to make a mess like this . . .?’
‘The world is changing. Democratic ideals are taking root all over the world, including among some flexible members of the Curia. The Holy Alliance needs a pope who will steadfastly support them or they’ll disappear. But the alliance is a divisive issue. What the three cardinals had in common was that they were all determined liberals – as liberal as a cardinal could be, when all is said and done. Any one of them would have dismantled the secret service, maybe for good.’
‘Take them out of the picture, and that threat is gone.’
‘And in doing so you increase the need for security. If the cardinals had just disappeared, there would be a lot of questions. And they wouldn’t have been able to make it look like an accident either: the Pontificate is naturally paranoid. But if you have something certain ...’
‘A killer in a disguise. Jesus, this is making me sick. I’m glad I distanced myself from the Church.’
Fowler moved closer to her and knelt down in front of the chair, taking both her hands in his. ‘Don’t make that mistake. Behind this Church, made out of the blood and bricks you see before you, there is another Church, infinite and invisible, whose flags are raised towards Heaven. This Church lives in the hearts of the millions of faithful who love Christ and his message. It will be reborn from its ashes and fill the world. The Gates of Hell shall have no dominion.’
Paola’s eyes bored into the priest. ‘You really believe all that?’
‘I do believe it, Paola.’
Both of them stood up. He kissed her tenderly and slowly, and she accepted him as he was, with all of his scars. Her anguish flowed into his pain and came undone there, and over the course of the small hours of the morning they discovered what it was to be happy.