Dominus

by Tom Fox

  With those men. But there were two other men he now wanted to know a whole lot more about.

  Steam whistled from the old yellow kettle as Gabriella switched off the hob and lifted it from the burner. She flipped open the whistler and poured the boiling liquid over the grounds at the bottom of the cafetière. Its scents rose up and wafted at her nose like the familiar caresses of a lover.

  Like the familiar caresses of a lover? Why was everything reminding her of romance this morning? Since she’d woken in the guest room and had her first thought of the new day—the inexcusably unhappy observation that she was alone in the bed—her mind had been possessed. Was she really so love-starved that merely being around a man with whom she’d once had a brief fling could turn her mind in such a way? And shouldn’t the fact that they’d been shot at and chased mitigate at least a little of the emotion she was feeling?

  Of course, it wasn’t the first time she’d been shot at in Alexander’s presence. Last night marked the second exchange of gunfire they’d shared since their break-up four years ago. Maybe they were still in some kind of a relationship after all.

  Gabriella chuckled at the thought. In the light of day there was nothing between her and Alexander Trecchio. He was handsome and sensitive, but he was . . . she didn’t know the right word. Unsettled? Ungrounded? In any case, he’d left her. She said it to herself again. He. Left. Me. And the words he’d used to do it had made things worse. The gall of calling her his Eve, the biblical image of temptation who led men astray. It tightened her throat even now to think of it.

  She stirred a spoon through the coffee pot then fixed the lid and pressed down the plunger. She’d already prepared a small tray with two cups and toast.

  Was she bringing him breakfast in bed? How would that be read?

  She caught herself. Even thinking these thoughts gave substance to the memories as something more than remnants of the past. Let Alex think whatever he wanted. This was her aunt’s place, she’d rescued him, and damn it, she liked coffee in the morning.

  Alexander was still sitting in nothing more than his T-shirt and shorts when Gabriella walked into the room, a tray of coffee in hand. For an instant, all his interest in the materials on his computer screen vanished, displaced by discomfort. To be alone with her, not fully dressed. This was something new, despite the circumstances. He wasn’t entirely sure how he, or she, would react.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling the quilted, flower-laden blanket toward himself. “I’ve only got the one set of clothes with me. Thought it best not to sleep in them.”

  Gabriella set down the tray on the coffee table next to his laptop. “At least you don’t sleep in the buff. I think I can handle the sight of a man in a T-shirt.”

  He forced a laugh, then reached forward, poured half the contents of the cafetière into the two mugs and handed one to Gabriella. He tried desperately not to think of being in the buff, an almost impossible feat after a woman of such evident beauty had brought it up.

  “Thanks for this,” he said, raising his own mug and shaking the thoughts from his mind. “I definitely need it.” He took a long, slow sip of the steaming liquid. It was black and oily and the perfect consolation to a restless night.

  “You’re already at work,” Gabriella observed, motioning toward his laptop. “I should have guessed as much.” She sat down on the sofa next to him, and he could smell that strange scent that only women had in the morning—a scent that for most of his life he’d thought he’d never know.

  He forced himself to turn to his computer.

  “I’ve been doing some further background research on Marcus Crossler and Salvatore Tosi.”

  “Our two professors.”

  “Both men were academics, though not in the same field. Crossler was a professor of religion, while Tosi was senior research fellow in . . .” he leaned forward and scanned over his monitor, “in Italian social politics.”

  “So their connection probably wasn’t related to their research.”

  “That’s what I thought too. At first.”

  Gabriella’s eyebrows rose. She let the question ask itself.

  “As I started to look at their professional lives a little further,” Alexander continued, “examining their CVs and publishing records, I could find only one thing that the two men had in common.”

  “You’re going to keep me in suspense?”

  He smiled. “They both published papers on the Istituto per le Opere di Religione.”

  Gabriella’s posture tightened. “The Institute for the Works of Religion—the IOR.”

  “Better known as the Vatican Bank.”

  Her back straightened. The police officer in her was instinctively emerging. “Crossler and Tosi worked together on these papers?”

  “Not from what I can tell. I was able to gain access to electronic versions of each of them for nothing more than an extraordinarily expensive subscription to two journals I can promise you I’ll never read again. But it allowed me to compare their notes and references, and neither of them cites the other.”

  “So they were each studying the bank on their own terms, independently.”

  “Salvatore’s paper is chiefly concerned with the IOR’s interaction with public business and political capital, while Crossler was looking at the sociological question of a sacred institution being involved in economic affairs.”

  “Sounds like both men were suspicious.”

  “That’s putting it mildly. Both articles are critical of the IOR and of the Church, and they both raise some pretty substantial questions about the links it maintains with outside organizations and institutions.”

  “What sorts of links?”

  “The IOR is a bank, privately held by the Church. But just because it’s ecclesiastical doesn’t mean it doesn’t work like any other major bank. It deals in astronomical sums of money in just about every currency on the planet, and interacts with other banks, financial markets and investors. Everything you’d expect from big banking.”

  “Except that it’s all linked to the Church.”

  “Right, the moral guardians of virtue at the helm of an institution that deals in the root of all evil. I thought Christ said one or two things about not serving God and Mammon.”

  Gabriella sighed. There was exasperation in her breath and Alexander immediately regretted the sarcasm. He remembered how much she disliked his jabs against religion and the Church. You may have lost your faith, Alex, she’d said to him in one of those intimate moments four years ago, but I haven’t. You can keep your cynicism to yourself.

  “What’s most frustrating,” he said, drawing them back into the facts, “is how little is actually known about the inner workings of the IOR. Though it was founded back in 1942, it didn’t make its first public statement on its operations until 2012. Its first annual report was issued in October of 2013, and then apparently only under pressure from the new pope, then a cardinal. He’d been asking for greater transparency at the IOR for years. He finally pushed through a mandate for a public report.”

  “How does that tie in to our scholars?”

  Alexander turned back to his computer. “Tosi published two articles on his theories about internal corruption at the IOR, in each of the two years prior to that first report. He published a third article in November 2013, just after the report went public, accusing the bank’s Board of Superintendence of fraudulent accounting.”

  “Not making any friends.”

  “Crossler’s article on the bank came out just a month later. It’s a scathing attack on the moral turpitude of an institution headed by five cardinals and a prelate that has been involved in what he calls ‘some of the shadiest dealings in modern financial history.’”

  Gabriella was now leaning forward. She set down her coffee, her eyes fixed on Alexander’s computer.

  “What is it?” he asked, noticing her intensity.

  “I think we need to arrange a meeting with the bank’s president,” she answered bluntly.
r />   “The president? Talk about jumping to the head of the wagon.”

  “In my experience, it’s generally where the direction is coming from,” she answered, turning toward him. “And for the first time since you rang yesterday, this is starting to make sense to me. The deaths, the pursuit, everything.”

  “How’s that?”

  “A man pretending to be Christ is interesting, Alex, but not enough to kill for. Even healing the Pope . . . it’s sensational, but hardly the stuff to motivate murder. Money, on the other hand, is a different story. Especially the kind of money we’re talking about with the IOR. There are billions at stake there, and that’s motive enough for most men.”

  Thirty minutes later, Alexander had shaved and bandaged the scrape on his hand, they’d both taken quick showers, and Gabriella had made a series of phone calls to colleagues at central office. Relations between Rome’s police forces and Vatican City were not always easy, but neither were they always tense, and Gabriella knew a few officers who had close working relationships with the ecclesiastical authorities.

  To her relief, they’d been able to determine that the IOR’s office had not been closed down with the rest of Vatican City. Financial markets don’t switch off internationally for any man’s whim, even the Pope’s. The bank couldn’t afford not to engage in Monday-morning trading.

  And to Gabriella’s surprise, her contact had another bit of good news for her and Alexander—news that had them rushing, even now, toward her aunt’s garage with keys from the kitchen drawer in hand, plotting the best route into the city center.

  Despite every expectation, the head of the IOR was willing to see them.

  27

  Headquarters of Global Capital Italia: 7:18 a.m.

  The instructions from the CEO demanding immediate action had been clear, but not everything could truly be immediate. Not if the desired end-result was something that would hold up to scrutiny. The first rule of a good cover-up is that your target has to be able to look squarely at it and see only the truth that you want them to.

  And that sort of thing wasn’t easy when your target was the public, and when what you were manipulating was money. People were used to suspecting the evils of money, so systems everywhere were designed to safeguard against precisely the kinds of things Caterina Amato’s specialists needed to do if they were going to make the world believe what she wanted them to believe. This kind of manipulation required skill, means, and enough time to do the job right. The fact that they didn’t have the latter would not be accepted as an excuse for failure.

  This duo of men, whom Global Capital Italia employed as “financial technologies specialists,” had therefore been working for hours in the enclosed, windowless space that constituted their basement office. Their surroundings looked less futuristic than some might expect of talented hackers at their pay grade, but nonetheless represented some of the most powerful computing technology in their field.

  They’d been given their list of targets: a few firms, a few companies, a few individuals. On paper it looked innocuous; in reality, the work required was far more complicated.

  They’d already completed their tasks on the first target institution and its associated agencies. They’d look guilty as sin when they were discovered. Now they were at work on the second, which in the newscasts of the previous day had become by far the most visible.

  The bank accounts of the Lisa Tedesco MCL Research Unit were listed on one of the LCD displays in the room, a slightly longer listing of source investor accounts on another. They went through the lists, moving funds at the prescribed rates from the assigned sources. Two million euros here, ten there, half a million there. It was the backdating that was the hardest part. Banks and financial institutions had systems designed precisely to prevent this sort of fraudulent activity, and ensuring that the transactions they were effecting wouldn’t raise any red flags, that they would look entirely legitimate and register back as assigned—this one a day before, that one three days, the next two months—was critical.

  But they’d done it. The work was pure showmanship, of course. Amato and the massive reach of her firm all but owned these companies, although this ownership was hidden behind layers of corporate distancing that would deceive even the most industrious of tax assessors. Through those walls Global Capital Italia had complete access to their resources. Invest billions behind the scenes, and you can buy a lot of power.

  But tonight’s work wasn’t about control and it wasn’t about secrecy. It was about placing companies in such a position that they would be unable to deny their involvement in something they had known nothing about. It was, both of the computer specialists thought, brilliant.

  All that remained now was the personal touch.

  One of the specialists called up the private banking details of Dr. Marcello Tedesco, the “pious dupe” as they’d come to dub him. The tech had already created a second current account in the scientist’s name to go alongside the account the doctor had used for more than a decade. It looked far better to have another account, with its whiff of illegitimacy and intended secrecy.

  With a few keystrokes, he transferred 25,000 euros from one of their client corporations to the account, backdating the transaction three days. Then a second, equal amount, dated to this morning.

  Half then, half now. Wasn’t that the traditional way pay-offs worked?

  28

  Office of the Institute for the Works of Religion, Vatican City: 8:30 a.m.

  “This is a threshold I never thought I’d cross,” Alexander whispered to Gabriella as he stepped up to the door that led into the lobby of the Vatican Bank.

  Nothing about the central offices of the Institute for the Works of Religion inspired sentiments of openness or warmth. The round tower, situated at the edge of the Apostolic Palace, was one of the only places in Vatican City that hadn’t been completely isolated from public interaction since the arrival of the stranger at St. Peter’s yesterday morning. Protruding like a circular butt from the side of the palace on to the outer edge of the city state, it was accessible from beyond Vatican territory by a small black door that opened on to Via di Porta Angelica—that is, if one had the access to get it to open at all. Most of the tourists who passed within a stone’s throw of the building in their thousands every day on their way into the Piazza San Pietro never knew what lay within it.

  But knowledge, Alexander mused, did not always do away with fear. He’d noted the forbidding uninterrupted stonework that rose well over three stories from street level, its first row of inset barred windows ringing the tower well above a height that would allow anyone to peer inside. Everything about the structure was impenetrable, which was essentially what the Vatican had made it for the past few decades.

  And yet here he was. They’d driven directly here from Gabriella’s aunt’s, stopping along the way only to buy two new phones. Gabriella purchased a simple flip-top model. Alexander opted for a fancier LG G2—the same phone he’d had before. He’d grown accustomed to it as a portable research tool, however much he enjoyed grumbling about new-fangled technology. This time, however, they both bought pay-as-you-go versions and provided false names to the none-too-interested retailer. Better safe than sorry.

  “As mysterious as you thought it would be?” Gabriella asked, pointing at the round building before them. They’d taken her aunt’s tired but pristinely cared for Opel on as direct a route as they could manage toward the Apostolic Palace.

  “Quite,” Alexander answered. “Its reputation appears well earned.”

  “If it sets your mind at ease,” Gabriella said, “they didn’t hesitate in granting us this appointment, even with everything else going on inside.”

  “The influence of your warrant card and police identity. It’s not like that in the world of mere mortals.”

  “Not even when you were one of them?”

  Alexander nodded as they stepped through the cramped entrance into the reception room proper. “As priests we were never
allowed anywhere near the IOR. In my short stint working in the curia with my uncle, I think I only heard mention of it twice. It was as if the place didn’t exist.”

  As they entered, Alexander and Gabriella were confronted with a reception area unlike that of any bank either of them had experienced. The small space was surrounded by plain whitewashed walls. Monotone beige carpeting lined the floor. Three plain chairs sat along one wall, upholstered in cream fabric that could easily have passed for standard fare in any hotel lobby. Opposite them was a single small wooden desk. The only adornment was a crucifix above a white door that led deeper into the building, and a photo of the Pope that hung above the desk. On its surface a violet lily stood in a glass vase, providing the only sparkle of color in the bland room.

  “Not exactly the opulence I was expecting,” Gabriella muttered. There was no extraneous decoration anywhere. Nor, for that matter, were there any computers on the desk nor video cameras on the walls. The only technology in the room appeared to be an older-looking telephone, detailed in brass, next to a spiral-bound notebook on the desk.

  “Don’t be fooled,” Alexander answered. “Power doesn’t always sparkle.”

  A second later, the white door on the far side of the room opened and Gabriella received her second surprise of the morning. Into the foyer of one of the most concentrated realms of power in the famously male-centric world of the Vatican walked a woman. She was thirty-something, professional-looking. She stepped up to meet them with an air of corporate confidence.

  “I’m Beatrice Pinard,” she said in a strongly French accent. She extended her hand as she approached. “I’m the public liaison for the Istituto per le Opere di Religione. A pleasure to meet you.”

  Alexander shook her hand and Gabriella followed in turn.