Genesis

by Tom Fox

  But the once-almost-nun and the now-ex-priest were an odd couple. Perhaps it had been too much to think it ever could have worked. And maybe Gabriella could have handled it, but Alexander couldn’t. She’d offered her heart to him so freely, so wholly. But Alexander wasn’t used to such emotion, or to a life paired with another. He was a man who didn’t know what to do with such a gift. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he treated it badly. He became self-obsessed in the concerns of his new life. He grew more and more emotionally absent, unable to respond to her care. Until one day he simply hadn’t been able to take it any more—the tension, the emotion, the guilt, the fear. And so he shut it down: their relationship, his heart, all of it. He’d been fierce and firm, as much to himself as to anyone else. It had to stop, definitively and unequivocally. If it didn’t, he didn’t know if he would be able to survive.

  It had crushed Gabriella. He knew that—he admitted it all. But he hadn’t felt there was any other choice. And he still didn’t. Life after the clergy was a continual adaptation. He knew that old part of him was dead, but what had been born in its place—if anything at all—was still something he couldn’t clarify. And until he could, he wasn’t any good for anyone but himself. If that. So he chose to throw himself into his work, as uninspiring as it so often was, and wait upon an inner change that he secretly suspected might never come.

  But yesterday, that work and his past with Gabriella had been thrust together. Wrestling with that fact throughout the restless night, he decided the only way to keep focused was to let the work drive things. Not their relationship, not their past. Just the work.

  And in that work, Gabriella had shown an interest. That had cemented Alexander’s certainty that there was something to the strange references he’d spotted in the financial transaction codes, and he’d handed the papers over to her as they’d departed so she could have her people look into them more fully. They’d been copies in any case. He had the originals on his computer, and he had a different path he wanted to explore.

  The forensic investigators with the Polizia di Stato would be able to chase out any links that existed between the relevant transactions on the sheets—and any others not on the paperwork he’d been given. But Alexander was less interested in the transactions themselves than in who had made them. If “Genesis” was a reference deliberately inserted into what were normally randomly assigned identifiers, then it had to have been inserted by someone. And it was people, not numbers, that attracted Alexander the most.

  9:45 a.m.

  The voice that had spoken over the telephone to Father Alberto Agostini had wasted no time in assembling the core of his Fraternity around him. What the rambling priest—an innocuous, unimportant man—had revealed was anything but insignificant.

  When the core leadership had assembled in his office the next morning, he nodded to the man closest to the door to close it. It swung into place silently, and the gentle sound of a well-used bolt sliding into the lock brought their meeting to order.

  “The old man’s done it,” he suddenly barked. His face, a moment ago calm and poised, was suddenly red. “The bastard’s gone and exposed everything.”

  Kitty-corner to him in the room was a younger man, distinctively well dressed despite the fact that most members wore similar attire. His was of a fabric of a higher grade, tailored by more skilled hands. He reeked of elegance and, now, of annoyance.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Agostini watched a cop and a reporter enter his church,” the leader continued. A slight intake of breath from every other member stressed the significance of the words. “The reporter had already obtained documents.”

  “Documents?”

  “Financial records, limited in scope.”

  “I thought we were protected,” another member protested, “against precisely this. No big transactions. No red flags. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “All that is true,” the leader answered. “But the reporter seems to have spotted something. Something that should have been invisible.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” An angry fist slammed down on a black-clad knee. Despite the rank and office of the occupants of the room, the profanity surprised no one.

  “It means,” the Voice spoke his next words with a solemn severity, “the reporter is a former priest.”

  The clenching of stomachs was so instant and so fierce it was almost audible. A priest. Of all the …

  “That doesn’t mean he’ll spot the code.”

  “Of course he’ll fucking spot the code!” another man answered angrily. “I told you before, it’s too damned obvious!”

  “Agostini felt it was secure.”

  “Alberto, clearly, is a feckless dimwit! A religious code? How the fuck more exposed could you be?”

  “It’s just a few letters, scrambled in amongst a hundred others!”

  “A few letters, my ass. You watch. The priest will figure it out. And then … then we’re entirely screwed.”

  The Fraternity’s leader raised a hand, gently yet forcibly. “Nothing is screwed,” he responded. “And nothing is unduly at risk. We’re not deviating from our course.”

  Another of the members eyed him curiously. “You mean the Venezuelan operation is still on?”

  “Without modification.”

  “And this new risk?”

  “So far, it’s contained. Only three people have any idea of its significance, and they as yet know very little.”

  The leader looked around his men, his face somber.

  “We can change the codes for future transactions,” he added. “And we can wipe out the past as if it never happened. The reporter will find nothing else.”

  “And what of our inept coordinator, Agostini?”

  A pause, but the answer came as every man in the room expected it would.

  “I think we all know what must be done with our little leak.”

  Chapter 14

  The present day: 1:30 p.m.

  For a day and a half, Gabriella’s man in forensic accounting had worked on chasing up the numbers. For a day and a half, the same response to every phone call querying his progress: “Working on it. These things take time.” But for some intangible reason, Gabriella did not feel she had time at her disposal. Her boring case had become interesting, and interest had bred an urgency to discover just what lay behind whatever Alexander had so quickly been able to spot.

  As it was, he was standing beside her when the discovery came.

  The phone in her pocket rang. Gabriella was on the move so often that she rarely used, and almost never shared, her office landline number, so even though she was seated at her desk when the call came, it rang through to her mobile.

  Her eyes perked up when she saw the number flashing on the screen. “It’s Agent Negri,” she muttered to Alexander as she slid her finger across the display to answer.

  “Fierro,” she said abruptly. “What have you got?”

  “Are you sitting down?” the young voice answered. A greeting that heightened Gabriella’s expectation. She switched the mobile to speakerphone and set it on the desk between Alexander and herself. “Yes, I’m sitting. Tell me what you’ve found.”

  “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve discovered …” he let the moment linger dramatically, “nothing.”

  Gabriella and Alexander sat in silence. “What do you mean, nothing?” she finally asked. The disbelief was as obvious in her voice as the disappointment. “The reference codes didn’t point to anything conclusive?”

  “It’s not that,” the young man answered. Gabriella noticed that there was a puzzled excitement in his voice—the tones of an excited child poring over a pleasing conundrum. “I mean, it’s nothing. There is absolutely nothing associated with them.”

  Gabriella’s face screwed up in confusion. She glanced at Alexander for an explanation, but he only shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t understand, Vito.”

  “What I�
��m trying to tell you is that the transactions are … I don’t really know how to say it. They’re gone. Or not really gone. According to every computer on the financial system, they never existed at all.”

  Gabriella sat sharply forward. “That’s impossible. I have the printouts here on my desk. I gave you copies.”

  “I know that. You know that. And when I made my initial inquiries yesterday, the reference codes played out. They were all active, and they linked to a few key banks. So I set the transaction records aside in order to concentrate on making connections—both the legitimate and the back-door kind—with those institutions. When I finally had those established this morning, I went back to run the reference numbers through their systems. And that’s when I discovered it.”

  “That they’d vanished,” Alexander interjected.

  There was a hesitation from the other end of the line. “Who’s that with you, Agent Fierro?”

  “A friend, working with me on the case.”

  Negri’s silence seemed a contemplation of the wisdom of speaking in someone else’s presence, but intrigue won out over suspicion and he continued. “That’s right. The codes are simply non-existent. No record of their ever being created. No deletions. Simply … nothing.”

  “Can that happen? With codes that had been active before?”

  “I’ve never seen it. Technically, it’s supposed to be impossible. The codes are there to provide accountability, to give a visible trail to the movement of money. That they’ve gone can mean only one thing.”

  Gabriella’s eyes were already wide as the forensic investigator pronounced his verdict.

  “Someone caught on to the investigation I was conducting and covered their tracks. And they did it well. It’s not easy to completely eliminate all traces of so many financial transactions.”

  “They know they’ve been spotted,” Alexander added. “Whoever they are.”

  The three fell silent for a few moments. Finally, it was Gabriella who asked the necessary question.

  “Vito, you mentioned you’d made connections with a few financial institutions. At least that’s something. You have their details?”

  “You’re really going to like this,” he answered. “It’s not the institutions themselves that are curious. It’s their location.”

  “Location?”

  “Of the three I checked out,” he replied, “all of them are in Venezuela.”

  Chapter 15

  One day ago: San Cristóbal, Venezuela: 1:31 p.m.

  The assassination could be as brutal as the man in the black shirt desired. There was no need to strive for either secrecy or discretion. The execution of a leading cleric in Rome, much less an obvious contender for the future of the papal see, would have been more restrictive. Too many people were eager to see conspiracy theories everywhere—right though they might accidentally be—and any death of a contender would raise suspicion. Investigations. Questions. All the things they did not want as the progress of Genesis moved forward.

  But here circumstances were entirely different. San Cristóbal was crime-ridden on the best of days. It had the second highest kidnapping rate in the country. The third highest rate of knife violence.

  And the highest rate of handgun violence. Which made it essentially perfect. Gang killings and street attacks were commonplace and, while detested, were nonetheless a culturally accepted fact of life. Part of the risk of living in a region that shared a border with Colombia. Here, the bloodier and the messier the death, the less out of the usual it would seem.

  The man in the black shirt couldn’t have imagined a more ideal scenario. Maybe there really was a God, if he had placed the cardinal here, of all places.

  He sat in the driver’s seat of a taxi, dwelling on the sheer beauty of it. The cab’s usual driver, recently expired from an untimely knife wound, now lay motionless in the back seat.

  Across the plaza, Cardinal Ernesto Medina sat at an outside café table sipping a double espresso, as he was known to do most afternoons. He smiled at passers-by, almost all of whom appeared to recognize him. His reputation for being a man of the people seemed to be accurate, and it played out here in motion. The cardinal looked content with life.

  The right time to end it, thought the man in the black shirt. He took a deep, restorative breath. Holy work. There was no reason to waste more time.

  He lifted the tiny gun from his lap. The engine of the Chevrolet Aveo was already running, and drawing the gun into a comfortable position in his grip, he depressed the accelerator and began slowly to circle the roundabout that enclosed the center of the plaza.

  His window was already down.

  The cardinal lifted a small porcelain cup to his lips. The steam from the espresso rose up in tendril-like swirls that flittered against his nose.

  Pedestrians walked slowly by.

  The gunshot from the palm-sized piece was barely noticeable in the general noise and bustle of the busy plaza. But the explosion of red that erupted from the prelate’s head couldn’t be missed. His body flew backward, his arms flailing wide. Shrieks of shock, then terror, erupted from others in the street as they saw the beloved man of God succumb to a gruesome death.

  But the man in the black shirt heard the cries only through the glass of his rear windshield as he veered the stolen taxi into the traffic of the first exit and drove away.

  In the motion and exhilaration of the moment, his heart soared and sang familiar words: And the earth was formless and void, and chaos ruled in the darkness of the deep …

  Chapter 16

  One day ago: 8:15 p.m.

  The man who had been bound to the chair had been set free. Free. If ever there was a misnomer in life, this was it. He was liberated of the silk bonds that had fastened him while his former friends observed his gradual torture. He was free of the knife blade that had scored more marks across his chest than he could count or bear to look at. He was free of the looming face of the Voice, who spoke with such gentleness and such poison at the same time.

  But now, released from all those things, he was trapped. And there was no possibility of escape.

  He knew what the penalty for treachery was—even if, as in his case, the treachery was entirely accidental and unintentional. The Fraternity had men. Men not bound by the same risible moral code to which its members subscribed. Men they sent to do the work that required bloodied hands and the kind of final justice none of them would ever stoop to enact.

  They would send these men without a moment’s hesitation.

  And worse, the man knew that vengeance was not simply meted out upon the offender. “Let them be accursed, even unto their children’s children …” wasn’t that how the scripture went? The tortured man had no children, of course. No spouse. But his sister, so much younger than himself, lived in Rome, together with his three beautiful nieces. No man had more glorious nieces: golden hair, bright eyes, rosy cheeks. They were like storybook triplet beauties, each full of nine-year-old innocence and joy.

  They would all be killed. It was a certainty. The Fraternity would kill his relatives, and they would make him watch. Then they would end his life.

  The latter no longer mattered, but the tortured man was unwilling to allow the former. Some innocents might have to suffer for his fault, but it would not be these. Not his own flesh and blood.

  There was only one solution. One way to fix this: an offering. If he could convince the Fraternity that he had contained the damage he’d inadvertently caused, perhaps they would spare his sister and her children. Those he loved would be safe.

  An offering of blood. The blood of those who had seen what they should not.

  Chapter 17

  The present day: 1:42 p.m.

  “Venezuela?” Gabriella asked, incredulous. What the hell was a minor Roman parish doing with a series of biblically encoded financial transactions linked to Venezuela? Intrigue had become intense, confused suspicion.

  A television blared away softly in the background, a fixture of her
office. The presence of background noise helped her think.

  Venezuela.

  Whatever the Genesis links had meant, they connected the small parish of San Sebastiano Penitente to what was now, from all appearances—or lack thereof—an international money-laundering scheme. But why through a church? And why with overt religious overtones?

  “What’s that?” Alexander suddenly asked, cutting short her internal questioning. Gabriella peered up and saw him motioning toward the television.

  Her attention was immediately captivated. Alexander increased the set’s volume as a reporter continued a digitized monologue over a blue RAI-1 station logo that lingered at the bottom of the screen.

  “The brutal murder of a citizen in public view is hardly extraordinary news in San Cristóbal.” The correspondent had a thick Spanish accent. “But Catholics across the nation, and indeed across the world, will surely mourn the death of such a beloved figure as Cardinal Medina.”

  “Was he—”

  “Shh,” Alexander cut Gabriella off before she could finish her question. His eyes were glued to the screen.

  “A drive-by shooting claimed the life of the senior Catholic bishop,” the newsreader continued. “The reason for the killing remains unknown, but local authorities are assuming that the gang violence of the area has claimed another in a long litany of victims, albeit one of more general popularity than most. However, this is hardly the first case of a religious figure falling prey to unpredictable gang agendas.”

  Alexander stepped forward abruptly and switched off the television. He turned to face Gabriella.

  “Before you ask anything else, answer me this. Wasn’t San Cristóbal one of the places to which your Agent Negri found financial links, before all the transaction codes were deleted?”