by Tom Fox
‘I wouldn’t say I’ve ever felt myself on a mission to break the commandments,’ Emil continued undeterred, ‘though there’s one in particular that really pisses me off.’
Ridolfo halted. ‘Which?’
‘The seventh,’ Emil answered. He let his hands fall into his lap.
‘The seventh?’ Ridolfo’s features scrunched in confusion. ‘Can’t say as I know them by number.’
Suddenly Emil rose. With fierce intention he walked over to a small bookshelf and pulled a bible out from amidst a stack of other volumes. He considered the shelf ‘research materials’ and gave the bible a similar significance to a dictionary or an atlas – and he knew how to use it, just as he knew how to use those.
A few seconds later he’d thumbed his way through to the page he wanted, and he set the open volume down in front of Ridolfo.
‘Right there,’ he said, pointing to a verse, ‘that’s commandment number seven.’
Ridolfo leaned down to the page, focused on the words, and read aloud.
‘Thou shalt not steal.’
When he looked up, Emil was smiling down on him.
‘Care to break the law of God, my son?’
PART FOUR
Distraction
28
The present day – evening
A hilltop in Rome
The sunset over the hills of Rome had been beautiful. As the bright rays of daytime had gradually transformed into brilliant oranges and reds, then faded with their customary swiftness into blues and eventual night-time blackness, the lights of lampposts and storefront windows had gone through their traditional dance and blinked into life. Rome’s daytime display of sandstone and domes had changed into the electric glow of modern Rome at night – cobblestone streets glimmering under street lamps, fluorescent blues shimmering out of glass skyscrapers, creating the supernatural and strangely beautiful brilliance of a night-time skyline only modern man could imagine.
What made it more majestic tonight than most nights, Bartolomeo reflected, was that in the flickering of an eye, in the glimmer of a single instant, it would all disappear. The brightness of man’s creation would fall away, and the Eternal City would stop her shining.
Unlike the river, this plague would not arise unobserved, flowing gently into the public consciousness. They would mark the moment the darkness came. The minute, the second. It would be beheld by young and by old, by those who knew the prophecy and by those that did not.
It would come upon them all and, God willing, it would overcome every one of them.
Bartolomeo shivered in his place. The thought, this impossible, wonderful, marvellous thought, was almost orgasmic.
Belvedere Courtyard
Vatican Palace
Angelina and Ben approached the heavy wooden door, wrapped in brick, that marked the entry into what were technically known as the Vatican Secret Archives. Their full name, the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum, was emblazoned on a brass plaque to the side of the door, a small rendition of the apostolic seal positioned immediately above it in a tarnished and blackened rotunda of unassuming metal. There was a black buzzer beneath the plaque, and nothing else – nothing to mark the grandeur and singularity of what was contained within.
As they crossed the tarmacked Belvedere Courtyard on the interior of the Vatican Palace, Angelina’s mind involuntarily flashed back to the last time she’d been in this impressive, daunting space. She’d pressed the small bell, wearing a navy blue trouser suit she’d ironed into nearly regimental stiffness. Her hair had taken almost a full can of spray before finally yielding to the uber-tidy look she’d been going for the morning of her interview. She’d left her favourite white Versace handbag at home in favour of a leatherette holdall binder, which added just that extra touch of formality and professionalism.
None of it had worked.
The circumstances of her arrival today were as different as she could possibly imagine. It was nightfall, first of all, which lent the lamplit courtyard a rather different feel from the bright daylight she’d experienced there before, and she suddenly realised that she was as dishevelled as she’d ever been in public. The chase of the afternoon had left her hair in a wispy mess, and though the sweat of the run had dried over the hours since, it had left her clothes splotched and stiff. She felt like a vagabond, treading into one of the most vagabond-free locales on the planet.
Ben marched ahead of her with purpose, oblivious to surroundings that were far more familiar to him. The door was locked when at last they reached it, the opening hours of the Archives well surpassed, but Ben withdrew a security card from his wallet and slid it through a reader so slender and well concealed that Angelina hadn’t even noticed it was there. A millisecond later a faint buzzing indicated it had been read successfully and Ben pulled the door towards him.
‘After you,’ he said politely to Angelina, motioning her towards the dimly lit interior, and with a few steps she was inside a palace of secrets she’d never thought she’d see again.
Ben watched Angelina enter the small foyer, pulling the door closed as he entered behind her. For the first time since they had been ‘re-acquainted’ with each other through their abduction by the Swiss Guard, the memories flooded back of their earlier encounter. He’d met Angelina Calla here, in this diminutive vestibule, the day she’d arrived for her interview.
‘Welcome to the Secret Archives.’ He’d greeted her with a handshake. He hated being assigned the role of interviewee liaison: it was far too social a task for his liking. But the staff rotated through the responsibility when it arose, and it had been his turn.
‘Though that title is something of a mistranslation,’ he’d added, falling into the well-rehearsed speech that was always used for these first introductions. ‘The Latin secretum doesn’t really mean “secret” the way it’s used today, as if it implied something hidden, or kept from public knowledge. A better translation might be “personal”. The Archives began their lives as the collection of the pope’s personal materials: correspondence, records, that sort of thing. Though it’s expanded over the years.’
Ben remembered that Angelina had tried hard not to look like the words were something of an insult to a woman who, though she was applying for an assistant-level post with a background in his own linguistic speciality, Akkadian, nevertheless would obviously be proficient enough in Latin to know this for herself.
She’d straightened herself, returned a polite smile, and allowed him to lead on with the brief tour. There was a strength about her that he remembered well. There had been little chance she would ever be hired to the post for which she was applying, of course. He remembered that, too. It was the way the world worked. Unfair, but understood by all parties – including, he had swiftly realised, Dr Calla. He’d seen it in her eyes as he’d shown her around the corridors and reading rooms: the look of anticipated defeat and the harsh sorrow of recognising that what was being beheld would never be possessed. Yet it was coupled with a determination to, if not today then someday, break through the barriers society was imposing around her.
Nothing had been able to mask her obvious love for the world that was being perpetually dangled before her like a carrot on the end of a string. Angelina positively lit up at the first signs of a genuine discussion on antiquity, and she had seemed truly rapt at the sight of the few sections of the Archives into which Ben had led her on her tour.
Ben knew that rapture well. He’d been working here almost five years, and he still felt it every day. For some people history was dust and outdated stories, unpronounceable names and the irrelevancies of bygone eras. For others, it was the human story in all its vibrancy and life: every artefact was a point of contact between the hands that held it today – which also held smartphones and laser scanners – and the hands that had crafted it, which might have milled flour from a pestle and mended wheels on chariots. Every ancient document was the voice of someone the world had long considered dead, but who was now, in the hands of those w
ho could read it, brought back to life and given the chance to speak again. To teach again. To be heard again.
He knew Angelina Calla felt the same way as he. He could see it now in her face as he stepped across her path and moved in front of her, guiding her through the foyer a second time.
‘This way.’ He motioned to a door at the back. She said nothing, but followed as Ben drew her into a small corridor that led to the staircase that pointed down into the trove of the Archive’s treasures.
Angelina followed Ben down stairs that were surprisingly steep and narrow, the sound of her footsteps mixing with his and echoing off the metal-grate construction that was obviously a modern insertion into a space well over five hundred years old. Probably to conserve space, to redesign the interior shape, she mused as they walked, incapable of not analysing what she saw. Whatever the architect’s initial thoughts might have been when he’d designed this wing of the palace so many centuries before, he couldn’t possibly have considered that it would one day be used to house such an enormous collection as the Archives and Library had become – and so Angelina imagined that here, like just about everywhere else in Rome, interior ‘reconfiguration’ was a necessary response to space being at a premium.
Within a few steps they were on the first sub-level landing, where Angelina remembered Ben had led her on her tour. A metal door led off to the left, which in turn provided access to the Pio XI Reading Room, where scholars were allowed to read through documents called up from the stacks, which Angelina remembered were accessed through a small door yet further back.
But Ben didn’t stop. He carried on past the door, turning and continuing his descent down another flight.
That room, those contents – always just out of my grasp.
‘Won’t the tablet be in the stacks?’ Angelina asked. She watched her feet, the light dim in the staircase, trying to keep up with his pace as she grudgingly assented to follow him away from the reading room.
‘It’s too new,’ Ben answered without stopping. ‘Requisitions have to go through cataloguing and indexing, as well as digital records and conservation, before they’re assigned a place in the stacks and made accessible for general research.’
They rounded another corner and headed down to a third level beneath ground.
‘But even after that’s done, it’s unlikely something like this tablet would go into the stacks. They’re mostly reserved for documents and printed volumes. Something more fragile, and less likely to be accessed regularly, will be kept in the bunker.’
Despite herself, Angelina’s step halted. ‘The bunker?’ She’d heard of the multiple storerooms that housed some of the Archives’ most significant treasures – such as the quill-penned records of the trial of Galileo Galilei and the eighth-century documents establishing the functional nature of the Roman Catholic Curia – but she’d never heard of one of them being referred to as a ‘bunker’.
‘It was added in the 1970s,’ Ben explained, continuing their descent, ‘and officially opened by Pope John Paul II in 1980. Just through here.’
They had reached another landing, which housed a metal door identical to those on the other floors they’d passed. As Ben opened it, Angelina could see it fed into a narrow corridor running in a straight line for at least twenty metres.
‘The bunker is actually located under the Cortile della Pigna, part of the Vatican Museums which run through various lengths of the Palace, but it’s reserved solely as a storage vault for the Archives. We call it the bunker because, well, it basically is one.’
Angelina couldn’t see his face. She didn’t know whether the remark came with a smile, but noticed that the pace of his step increased as they moved through the narrow space.
At the far end of the corridor, as Ben swiped his access card through a digital reader far less subtle than the one outside, Angelina saw why.
29
Twenty minutes earlier
Via Tina di Lorenzo
Residential neighbourhood, north-eastern Rome
The three-man team Emil had assembled as his technical crew sat before their computer terminals, surrounded by greasy snacks and a flow of coffee that had been constant for nearly the whole of the day. It was a day that, in their dark seclusion from the outside world, had begun dully, but which since had escalated into something entirely different.
The man called Vico, who had been the dominant personality of their trio ever since they’d met at the TechCafé coffee house in their early days of graduate school and become as inseparable as brothers, stood watching the other two tap away at their keyboards. The basement room was a jumbled collection of cheap Ikea tables and masses of wires that linked up their three computers, the enormous monitors stationed at each of their positions casting the whole room into shades of electronic greens and blues.
‘You’ve got her?’ Vico asked impatiently. The man immediately in front of him, whose name was Pietro and who was slightly pudgier around the middle than any of his imaginary girlfriends would approve of, simply nodded. He shoved a collection of empty Pepsi tins aside to make more room for his mouse, his left hand tapping his keyboard as the glow of his monitor reflected on to his face.
‘Yeah, we got her,’ he finally said. A hand went up, pointing to a window on the monitor. Not a map with a blinking red cross hair as was always the case in movies – it was a black window with white plain text scrolled across it. Amongst the numbers, a series of digits marking out coordinates offered a far more precise location.
Their third member, Corso, sat at the other side of the small room, his blond hair hanging down in an overgrown fringe that covered far too much of his face. But he typed with a ferocity that Vico knew meant he was at work on the same feed.
IP geolocation was no longer a difficult chore. At one point in the not-too-distant hacking past it had been an arena of speciality, something to be proud of. Nowadays geolocation was so straightforward as to be essentially automatic, and the real skill of the twenty-first century was learning how not to be spotted by those who wanted to know far more about you than just your physical location. Of course, there were still certain hurdles that threw themselves up in the course of the task from time to time, but most people who used the Internet were so unaware of the trail of digital breadcrumbs left behind their every keystroke that they all but invited invasive tracking.
The woman that Emil had them following was a perfect case in point.
Once he’d instructed them to seek out anyone in the region who had an expertise in whatever the hell the ancient language Emil cared about was called, things had been more or less automatic. Apart from the man in the Vatican, about whom they already knew, searches revealed only one other: this woman. It had taken a matter of minutes to link her name from social media entries to the principal IP address attached to her online activity, and then a matter of keystrokes to connect the IP to a server company. From there a few rudimentary firewalls had been easily hacked through to reveal a username and account, which in turn provided full personal details stored on an equally vulnerable customer database.
IP address 0:0:0:0:0:ffff:d191:66c, the long IPv6 form tied to the old-fashioned 209.145.6.108, belonged to an Angelina Eloisa Calla. Vico had never heard the name before this project, but then he’d hardly suspected he would have. There were over 2.5 million Internet users in central Rome, and he didn’t particularly care to know any of them. Not until there was a need to do so.
When it was necessary, though, it was a matter of professional satisfaction to Vico that, through less than an hour’s worth of work by their little trio, he’d been able to learn a terrific amount about the woman who had been a non-existent entity to him before that hour had begun.
Calla’s Internet hosting company had her registered address as Via Antonio Cerasi 18a, which Pietro had verified by cross-referencing data from both the power and telephone companies. From those combined details he’d determined that the woman had a single computer – an abysmally out-of-date MacBook th
at Vico could only assume was powered chiefly by steam and memories, and which included a virus scanner as obsolete as the hardware – as well as a Samsung Galaxy smartphone operating the previous generation of Android. By the cellular and WiFi tracking logs, the phone appeared to be the woman’s primary access point to the online world.
But these things were rudimentary. Any two-bit hacker could know as much about a target in just as little time, and Vico had needed more.
From the Agenzia delle Entrate, the Italian Revenue Agency, he knew that Angelina Calla was unmarried and filed her taxes each year without spouse or domestic partner. A woman who lived alone. From those records he identified her bank, which he passed on to Corso, who had in turn learned that Calla’s income of roughly €1,200 per month was paid out chiefly on the rent of her flat in the neighbourhood of Monteverde, utilities and surprisingly pricey subscriptions to a number of online journals normally bought into only by university and college libraries. There were no car payments, which suggested that she either owned something outright – which seemed unlikely given her overall financial portrait – or that she was one of the tens of thousands of Romans who commuted from A to B to C on their normal daily routine.
The journal subscriptions were a unique thread of character, and Vico had followed them thoroughly. Angelina Calla was apparently a woman of strong academic mind. She’d finished a BA in Classics at the University of Bologna, then moved to the capital to do both a masters degree and PhD at the Sapienza University of Rome. Apart from the keyword ‘Akkadian’ in her published doctoral thesis, ‘Elements of Pseudepigraphic Revisionism in Middle Akkadian Cultural Mythology’, he understood nothing of her subject, but it was clear that Calla was an adept in her field. And it was that field that meant she had to be found. It was the reason they had located her in the first place. They’d been commissioned to search out anyone who might know the territory of the ancient language, and the digital net that Vico and his team had laid across Italy had quickly focused in on her and the man. They knew the territory, so they became targets.
