The Vatican Conspiracy: A completely gripping action thriller (A Marco Venetti Thriller Book 1)

by Hogenkamp, Peter

  “It’s common knowledge that I don’t agree with the pope on almost anything; his hypothesis on Curial involvement is just another unfounded conspiracy theory in my opinion. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look into it—if for nothing else, just to say we did.”

  A trio of nuns marched past, heads bowed more out of deference to gravity and time than respect, on their way to the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery fifty meters distant.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re afraid of something.”

  “I’m afraid of a great many things, primary among them the press catching wind of a possible Curial conspiracy. We need to get back to the basics, like shepherding our dwindling flock; heaven knows we’ve been doing a poor enough job of that lately. If we get any further distracted, there may not be any Catholics left to shepherd when we’re done sorting it all out.”

  “Are there any ground rules for the investigation?”

  “Please don’t call it an investigation. Giving something a name or a title makes it seem … real.”

  “It’s not real?”

  “Between us? Yes, it’s real. Beyond us, it’s just a figment of the pope’s imagination.”

  “I see.”

  “I thought you might. That’s why I handpicked you for this task. It calls for discretion … you’re discreet.”

  The breeze picked up, swaying the fronds of the palm trees. The smell of roses drifted down from the garden on the hill above them.

  “Who do I report to?”

  “Me. I suspect the pope is going to want to touch base with you personally once he gets back from Nigeria, but for now, me.”

  “How often?”

  “You’re making it a thing, Giuseppe. Don’t do that. Do you know what happens to ‘things’ in this city? They grow. No ‘thing’ ever goes away here.”

  “It is the Eternal City.”

  “Please don’t remind me!”

  Lucci splashed more water on his face. The smell of chlorine engulfed his nostrils; his eyes teared from the acidic sting of the chemical.

  “There are two questions unanswered.” He held up his index finger, adorned with the cardinal ring designed by and given to him by Pope Benedict. “One, did Benedetto have help inside the Vatican, and if so, who? The second question is more pressing: where is Benedetto now? When you find something out, you tell me, and only me. Right away, no matter what the time. Are we clear?”

  “Very.”

  A group of Jesuit priests walked past them, heading to Radio Vaticana just up the hill from them. From where he stood, Lucci could see the tall antenna on the top of its administration building cutting into the sky like a lance. The Jesuit order had run Vatican Radio since Marconi had set it up in 1931, only to be put under the authority of the Roman Curia by Pope John Paul III, ending eighty-five years of independent operation.

  Scarletti got to his feet, rubbed the dust from his black cassock, and waved his goodbye. “It’s always a pleasure, Vincenzo.”

  “Likewise, Giuseppe.”

  Lucci splashed himself one more time with the water and watched as Cardinal Scarletti walked toward the basilica, whose bells were tolling loud and clear in the hot, dry air.

  Thirty-Five

  Marco woke with a shiver; the sun had disappeared behind a bank of pewter-colored clouds, and the breeze blew with a new zeal. Sarah was sitting next to him, looking over at something to the southwest with the Zeiss binoculars. He followed her line of sight and saw Haus Adler in the distance. It was several hundred meters below their position and at least three kilometers away in the linear plane. He rummaged through the backpack, found his anorak, and donned it. He grabbed Sarah’s and tossed it on her lap. A group of teenagers were clumped on the knoll behind them; a straggly-haired youth was strumming on a guitar, belting out a surprisingly good rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.” Sarah handed the binoculars to Marco and slipped into her anorak.

  Marco raised the glasses and looked over Haus Adler, which was a large rectangular building with murals of alpine scenes overlaid on the stucco. He dropped the power down and surveyed the real estate. Haus Adler was situated in the center of a large appendage of rock, several acres in area, jutting out from a long ledge running in a north–south orientation. From his vantage point with a tree-covered promontory in the foreground and nothing but air behind it, it looked like it was suspended on an island of rock in the sky. A long drive wound along the bluff from the south, terminating in a large garage that lay behind the main building, wedged in between the edge of the bluff and the down-slope of the promontory.

  Sarah tapped him on the shoulder, and he lowered the glasses. She had the trail map spread out on her lap and was indicating a point that corresponded to the promontory. “We need to get here.”

  It was the ideal spot to reconnoiter the target. They would have the high ground, a non-obstructed view, and only three hundred meters of distance. There was only one problem: it was too close. They would be spotted. He shared his concerns.

  “We’ll have to go tonight.”

  Marco glanced up; the clouds were thickening and showed no signs of breaking up.

  “There won’t be any moon tonight; we won’t be able to see anything.”

  “I brought night-vision equipment.”

  They consulted the map. The spur trail continued north from their current position. They would need to leave it after another kilometer, bushwhack down a rocky slope, and then climb the nearside of the promontory. It would be an easy task in daylight, but much more difficult at night.

  Marco traced the route with his finger, and Sarah checked it out with the glasses. “Think we can manage it?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So do I.” She took the glasses away from her face and looked at Marco. “Let’s hike back to the Gasthof at the summit, have some dinner, and come back after it gets dark.”

  “Why don’t we just have dinner here? There’s plenty of food left.”

  “Because I have a terrible craving for Wienerschnitzel.”

  It was around eleven by the time they reached the top of the promontory overlooking Haus Adler. They had started off at nine, having eaten a heavy meal, in the gathering dusk after sunset. A local church group had occupied half the tables at dinner, and they had followed them out after dessert—a thick piece of Apfelstrudel smothered with whipped cream—and slipped past the tram station as they climbed into the last car of the night. They had made it back to their lunch spot in the gloom, Marco leading the way, with Sarah holding onto his hand like a caboose in tow. They had used the night-vision goggles for the remainder of the trip, turning the darkness into an eerie green glow.

  The ascent of the promontory proved easier than expected. There was a game trail leading up, carved by generations of chamois, the dog-sized goats that inhabited the mountain slopes. They followed it to the top and settled in on a flat spot between two latschen bushes.

  Haus Adler was right underneath them, or at least it appeared that way from their vantage point. It looked even bigger from close up, especially with the lights burning from almost every window. A pair of headlights appeared from the left, and they watched them sweep around a distant corner and then straighten, cutting through the blackness. As the vehicle approached the house, the grounds took form under the illumination of the lamps. Marco noted it all: the rows of firewood stacked neatly against the south wall of the garden shed, the vegetable garden beyond the garage, the swimming pool immediately behind the main house, and the tangle of berry bushes positioned on the extreme southern end of the estate. By the time the car stopped and the lights were extinguished, he would have bet his modest pension he could navigate around the property with his eyes closed.

  Sarah brushed against him, and he looked over. She had assembled a rifle and was fitting a telescopic sight on top.

  “What are you doing?”

  She screwed the barrel into the receiver. “Practicing.”

  “Why?”
/>   “Because it makes perfect.”

  She installed the sight, which had the girth of a soup can, folded down a bipod from the end of the black composite stock, and checked her watch.

  “How long?”

  “Just over a minute.”

  “Not bad.”

  “It’s not good, either.”

  They remained there for several hours, until Marco grew so stiff from not moving he had to get up. By that time, he knew every square centimeter of the grounds from sweeping over them again and again with the binoculars. He knew the timing of the sentries; he could distinguish one from the other by their gaits, the heat signature of their bodies on the infrared wavelength, and how they held a cigarette. He knew the schedule of the car used to patrol the long drive that evacuated the property: it departed from the garage at eight minutes past the hour and returned twenty-three minutes later.

  It seemed silly to him to keep such a rigid schedule, but what did he know? He was a Jesuit priest from Monterosso, and only the One with infinite wisdom knew what he was doing here, lying prone on a rocky butte, wedged in between the hard, cold boughs of an evergreen and the warm, soft limbs of an American sniper. Three weeks ago, he was absolving his parishioners from their transgressions and advising them to avoid the near occasions of sin; now he was plotting to kill a Saudi prince before he incinerated the Vatican in a nuclear firestorm.

  It was too improbable to fill him with guilt. It was like waking from a hazy dream during which he had broken his vows, only to drift back to sleep before he could examine his conscience. He wondered if similar thoughts were going through Sarah’s head, but suspected it was filled with other, more technical concerns, like wind speed, muzzle velocity, and bullet drop. But he realized these thoughts would haunt her too, afterward, when the technical concerns had become irrelevant and all she could remember was the smell of cordite and the sight of blood erupting from the target’s chest like a spout of lava. He sincerely doubted anyone was immune to it: not the most cold-blooded assassin or the most fervently religious zealot. It was the common denominator of all killers: the fate of having to watch the slow-motion replay of every life she or he had brought to ruin.

  It would come to him, too. He could sense it, like a rheumatic could sense the approaching storm front. There was the isolated muzzle flash here, and the transient whiff of lacerated bowel there, but the trough of low pressure was swirling in, building in intensity. The storm would break, the gale would be unleashed; he just hoped he wouldn’t be in the middle of something when it did, like a small boat in unprotected waters trying to weather a typhoon.

  He stretched behind the thick bole of a pine and watched as Sarah did one last run-through. He was fascinated by the precision and efficiency with which she fitted the barrel into place, snapped the stock into position, slid the sight over the rail, and screwed the suppressor over the aperture. As she loaded the clip into the magazine and worked the bolt to chamber the first round, he imagined the countless times she had gone through the same routine, lying in cramped quarters to simulate live-fire conditions, so that she could do it reflexively, in the complete absence of direction.

  She checked her watch again and disassembled the rifle, stowing the components into her pack in opposite order. When she was done, they crawled back away from their perch, used a couple of pine branches to sweep away any marks they had left in the dirt, and started down the game trail. They hiked down the easier Weitwanderweg, rather than risk a misstep on the precipitous Dopplersteig. The Weitwanderweg was the long way down and around the mountain, more than twice the length of the other trail, which also meant it was less than half as steep, something Marco reminded Sarah of every time she complained about the distance.

  “Didn’t you hike when you were growing up in Vermont?”

  “Sure, I was always out in the woods with my father. In the spring, we walked the riverbeds to gather wild leeks and fiddleheads by the pailful. Come summer, we trekked up to the clear-cuts to pick berries: black raspberries in June, blueberries in July, and blackberries in August, the fattest ones as thick as your thumb. End of summer was mushroom season: yellow and black morels, chanterelles, and hen-of-the-woods.”

  She stopped for a minute and turned around to splay her hands a foot apart. Even in the dim light of the moon, Marco could see the melancholy expression the memories had drawn upon her face.

  “Some of those hens were as big as this, but still tender, cooked up just right in some olive oil and wild leek.”

  “Sounds idyllic.”

  “It wasn’t. Take my word for it.”

  “What could be so bad about picking berries?”

  “It would have been okay if it were just once or twice, but you have to understand the whole story. We weren’t out for a leisurely afternoon; we were picking enough berries to make jam to last us the whole year. It was all right when I was younger, but I had other ideas about how to spend my time as a teenager, and we started butting heads like a couple of bucks.”

  “No grocery stores in Vermont?”

  “Plenty, not that that made any difference to my father, mind you. Twice a year, we would get into the truck and pick up supplies like flour and sugar, but other than that, everything we ate came from the land on which we lived.”

  “Your father sounds like an interesting person.”

  She laughed at this, a derisive cackle that echoed off the rocky ground and dissipated into the blackness of the night sky.

  “That’s putting it mildly. Closest thing to a modern-day Thoreau there ever will be, and that’s a fact. He used to quote from Walden at town meeting day; drew quite a crowd.”

  “Did you go to school?”

  “I was home-schooled, of course, so that he could control the entire curriculum; I had read the entire works of Ralph Waldo Emerson by the eighth grade.”

  At a junction in the trail, Marco used his flashlight to consult the trail map, lest they take the wrong spur and end up a long way from their intended destination. Sarah took the opportunity to make sandwiches from the last of the bread and cheese, handing one to Marco.

  “When you’re a kid, you want to be like everybody else, but instead of Nancy Drew, I read Emerson’s essays on the ‘infinitude of the private man’; rather than play soccer, I fished and hunted; our vacations were camping trips deep into the woods. We used to go for days at a time with nothing to eat but food we could hunt and gather. When I got older, he encouraged me to go by myself, so that I could be completely alone with nature.”

  They finished their food, washed it down with what little water remained in the bottles, and resumed the hike. Enough light had gathered by this time for them to see their way without flashlights, and they stowed them away and let the false dawn guide them along the trail, which zigzagged down the steep pitch at the bottom of the mountain.

  “I used to think he was crazy. I’m sure my mother had come to that conclusion. He could charm you, hold you in his spell with his shining green eyes, brilliant smile, and smart banter about the primacy of the natural world, but after a while, the spell broke, and you just wanted out. My mom sure did.”

  It was beginning to get light in earnest by the time they made it back to the bus stop where they had started almost a full day previously. It had been a tedious slog, and Marco was glad to see the end of the trail. They fell onto a bench beneath the bus schedule and leaned against one another for support as they waited for the first bus of the day.

  They rode back to Salzburg in silence, watching the vehicle fill up slowly with the other early-morning riders. Marco wondered for a moment what pursuits had brought them to the same intersection of time and space at which he was stopped, but his tired mind couldn’t generate enough enthusiasm to sustain this line of thinking, and he went back to just sitting and staring, numbly waiting for the bus ride to end.

  They got off at Ferdinand-Hanusch-Platz and plodded back to the Goldener Hirsch. They trudged up the back stairs to avoid the lobby, shed their rucksacks,
and collapsed onto the massive bed without changing. Marco fell into a restless sleep full of dreams, during which he relived his frantic dash across St. Peter’s Square. It was a different version every time, with the same ending: three bullet holes in the middle of the pope’s forehead.

  Thirty-Six

  Marco awoke several hours later with Sarah leaning against him. He slipped out of bed, propped a pair of overstuffed pillows behind her back, and left the room with her still asleep. He took the back stairs out and exited onto the Universitätsstrasse, which was crowded with foot traffic from the outdoor market held there every afternoon. Sausages of every shape and color hung from wooden stalls, dozens of different cheeses were displayed in glass cases, and bundles of fresh produce filled baskets on top of horse-drawn wagons. It was an idyllic scene, but Marco had neither the time nor the patience for it; he weaved through the throngs of shoppers in a direct line for the Domplatz and mounted the steps of the cathedral.

  The Salzburger Dom had been ravaged by nine fires, imploded by a bomb dropped by a U.S. Air Force B-29, and rebuilt five times since its initial construction by St. Virgil in 774; even so, Marco trod carefully over the heavy stone floor, as if even a small misstep would shake the foundation and send the whole edifice crashing to the ground. It was not the perceived fragility of the building that caused him to walk lightly; rather, it was the fragility inside himself, the feeling that he might break open at any moment and spill his innards all over the floor.

  He walked up the central aisle and knelt down in the tenth pew from the back of the church on the right-hand side, as Lucci had instructed him. The cathedral was crowded with tourists, and he watched them with fascination as they milled in every direction. The walls echoed with noise: the shuffling of feet on the stone floor, the clicking of a hundred cameras, the muffled tones of tour guides, and the voice of a young priest in one of the side chapels trying to say mass for the faithful, straining to make his voice heard above the din.

  Marco looked up at the mural above, which depicted Christ’s passion. He had seen these scenes many times before, in a hundred different churches, but he looked at them differently now, reassured that even Christ had considered laying down the cross and walking away from it.