Genesis

by Tom Fox

  Maybe this man is right, his features seemed to telegraph through the church. Maybe there is a way out. Maybe they don’t have to die after all. He gazed up at the mosaics of the apse, high above. From his position, the saints seemed to stare straight back down at him. Maybe my soul can still be saved.

  The look of pleading hope on the face of the priest caught Alexander’s attention. It was the first moment of promise since he’d entered the church.

  But it vanished as fast as it came.

  Father Agostini lowered his gaze from the apse. When his eyes returned to Alexander’s, they were hollow and cold.

  “There is nothing to be done,” he said, a chill descending through his voice. “They will find them. My family will never be safe, no matter what you do. This is the only way.”

  Alexander tried to protest, but the priest’s expression was final and absolute.

  “I’m sorry,” was all he said. He was already swinging the gun back to Gabriella.

  Time seemed to slow. Alexander watched the muscles in Agostini’s neck flex as he prepared to pull the trigger and fire. In that instant, he knew there was nothing else to be negotiated.

  He reached behind his back and grabbed the gun from his belt. Wrapping his fingers around its grip, he swung it forward. His thumb snapped the safety to off.

  He wasn’t aware of pulling the trigger. Only the massive jolt in his wrist as he fired. The first gunshot of his life, aimed at a priest.

  Far across the sacred space, Alberto Agostini flew backward as the round slammed into his body. His eyes were wide, surprised. As he fell on to the stone steps leading to the green-clad altar, they looked upward to the vaults of heaven, crafted in timeless mosaic far above.

  They never moved again.

  Chapter 26

  9:20 p.m.

  In the explosive noise of the moment, Gabriella had opted for the only defense she could muster: motion. As the priest again held his gun in her direction and the gunshot bellowed through the air, she lunged downward and flung herself to the floor.

  It was there the world seemed to end. Her breath left her, her vision went dark. She expected pain, but felt none. Only a burning at her heart, an inability to breathe, to move.

  So this is what it feels like to die, came her final thought.

  She closed her eyes as her chest collapsed. She relaxed, gave in. There was nothing else to do.

  But a second later, feeling returned. A hand grabbed her shoulder. Pulled. Flipped her on to her back on the church floor.

  High above, the golden ceiling of Santa Maria in Trastevere seemed a sacred blur. And closer, the face of Alexander Trecchio hovered only inches away.

  “Gabriella!” he whispered, energy firm in his voice. “Talk to me!”

  She blinked repeatedly, trying to get his features to come into focus. As they did, they were a picture of relief.

  “Alex,” she wheezed, struggling for breath. Her chest felt as if it were compressed beneath a palette of bricks. “He shot me.”

  But Alexander shook his head, warmth spreading across his face. “He didn’t have a chance. I got him first.”

  She didn’t understand. “But I can’t, I can’t brea—”

  “You got the wind knocked out of you in your dive,” he reassured her. “You hit the floor hard. But you’re okay.”

  Without another word, he pulled her to him and embraced her tightly.

  Life seemed to return to her body.

  A few minutes later, Alexander rose from the floor, sitting Gabriella on one of the nearby pews.

  “Wait there,” he instructed. “Help will be here in a few minutes.” Outside, they could already hear the sirens of the approaching emergency services. Alexander had phoned the police from the car on his frantic drive over, but had received a markedly disinterested response. The series of gunshots in the church, however, had apparently prompted a more immediate reaction.

  As the sirens grew louder, Alexander walked to the front of the church. The body of Father Alberto Agostini lay on the steps of the altar, his left arm flailed out at a right angle, the other raised above his head. The small Beretta M1951, an old gun not used by the Carabinieri or other military services since the late seventies, was still in his grasp. His eyes stared vacantly up to heaven.

  Alexander did not stoop to close them.

  He gazed at the fallen priest a few moments. His clerical shirt had pulled open at the chest, and beneath it Alexander thought he could make out fresh scabs and score marks on the man’s flesh. It looked for all the world as if he’d been tortured.

  It now seemed almost certain that whatever had driven Agostini to his actions would forever remain a mystery to Alexander and Gabriella. Secrets and lies, all taken to the grave.

  But at least they were alive.

  As he turned to walk back to her, Alexander took one more glance at the gunshot in Agostini’s chest, nestled in the midst of his other wounds. Inexperienced as he was with firearms, Alexander had done well. The single bullet he’d fired had hit the priest precisely in the middle of his chest. As if there had been a target printed on his shirt.

  Maybe miracles happened after all.

  Chapter 27

  The next day: 1:31 p.m.

  A day after the shooting at Santa Maria in Trastevere, Gabriella was called before her superior officer, Sostituto Commissario Enzo D’Antonio, for a full report. She gave him everything she and Alexander had found, but with Agostini’s death the potential scope of their leads had been torn from their grasp. What was left were financial records that on paper might look curious, but which no longer linked to anything that could be verified. Consequently, the question of whether or not “GEN” in the transfer codes really stood for Genesis, as Gabriella wrote up in her report, became irrelevant. The potential connection to Venezuela had no concrete substantiation—at least none that her boss would accept. And the priest who supposedly held all the answers was in no position to tell them anything.

  Even as Gabriella spoke, her frustration surged. She and Alexander had found something, there was no doubt in her mind of that. Those “Genesis” codes were linked to a cardinal’s death halfway around the world, and a priest’s here in her own city. She could prove none of it, but that didn’t change her certainty.

  The case was closed. D’Antonio accepted Gabriella’s written report, peered at her spitefully, then sent her on her way.

  Alexander had fared little better. He’d undergone his own police interview, though the officers had been less interested in background information than in substantiating that he had genuinely fired in self-defense. Convincing them had not been difficult, given the circumstances and the substantiating testimony of one of their own. Alexander’s frustration had arisen in his dialogue at the paper. As much as Niccolò Marre craved scandal to print in La Repubblica’s “Church Life” section, he wasn’t about to send to press anything that had as little behind it as Alexander’s proposed story. Journalistically, San Sebastiano had proved a failure. A non-lead. Rumors, and barely a handful of those—and they’d cost him a hundred euros at that. Out of it all, the only item Marre was willing to print was the account of the shooting itself, but with nothing solid to substantiate Alexander’s claims of conspiracy behind the priest’s actions, he assigned the column to another writer, who reported Agostini’s actions as acts born of stress and unrest, to which a local reporter had responded and which had ended tragically. The ecclesiastical equivalent of workplace violence.

  Alexander tried to protest, but he had nothing definitive to offer. He’d been so close to what would have amounted to real column inches: he and Gabriella had been on to something real, he knew it. Something was going on beneath the surface of the Church. Something involving money, death and power. It was simmering out of sight, getting ready to burst into the open. And for a moment, at least, it had been called Genesis.

  But that name, like all his other leads, had disappeared. The darkness had come too close to the light, and had ret
reated to a place where Alexander couldn’t find it. Whatever story he’d once had, he’d ended up with nothing at all.

  3:02 p.m.

  “You’re okay?” Alexander asked Gabriella once both of them had returned from their respective, and equally discouraging, post hoc encounters with their superiors. They met in a small café in the heart of Prati as the midday crowds circulated on the busy Via Cola di Rienzo.

  “A few bruises and sore bones,” she answered. “You might not know this, Alex, but getting shot at and leaping for cover isn’t a normal part of my job. My usual excitement comes in the form of someone else being thoughtful enough to brew the coffee before I come into the office. Remind me to take a refresher course on fall techniques before our next gunfight.” She smiled sarcastically, yet there was something else behind her words, and she knew she wasn’t doing well at concealing it.

  “Gabriella, you clearly have something else to say,” Alexander said. “What is it?”

  She hesitated, downing most of her coffee before finally mustering the resolve to answer.

  “Alex, I don’t want to sound cruel. I’m incredibly grateful for what you did for me.”

  His expression showed that he sensed where this was going.

  “But?”

  “But it doesn’t change anything. Between you and me.” Her heart felt stony as she spoke, but the words had to be said. “I know you, Alex. Too well. I can still see it in your eyes.”

  Alexander looked strangely resigned at her words. When his question came, there was no sarcasm or malice to it. “See what?”

  “Discontentment,” she answered. “That same unsettled discontentment I saw two years ago.” She reached out to touch his wrist. “You didn’t know then who you were becoming. Who you were. That’s why it didn’t work out between us. And it’s why it wouldn’t work now.”

  Her feelings surged. There was sorrow in every vein, and the touch of his skin made her doubt each syllable of what she said.

  But truth was truth. If she and Alexander hadn’t been able to find the truth behind Genesis, at least she knew she’d found it between the two of them.

  Chapter 28

  4:15 p.m.

  To change history, one need not rewrite the whole of it. One need only understand its cycles, its beginnings and ends. Then, when an end is on the horizon, it is sufficient to craft a new beginning to follow it. A beginning in one’s own image. Where a man himself can stand at the edge of a new dawn, in the beginning, and speak into creation existence as he desires it to be.

  The new dawn of Genesis was over. The Fraternitas Christi Salvatoris had hoped it would be the start of their rise to power. The path to the return of the church of might and authority that they loved. They had taken steps few others would have taken. A cardinal was dead. A contender for the papal throne was out of the picture. It was not a total failure.

  But their plan to funnel funds toward their chosen candidate—to support him in the kind of politicking that wasn’t supposed to happen in the run-up to papal conclaves; to provide him with resources he could never muster on his own—had fallen apart. If Genesis was about speaking words that ushered in a new creation, a new era, then the Fraternity had to admit that newer words would have to be penned. Those they’d fashioned thus far would not stand the test of time. There had been too much exposure. A different plan would have to be put into effect.

  What it was, the Voice had yet to reveal. But they still had time. The pontiff’s frail health continued to be tended to by the finest doctors Rome had at its disposal.

  For the first time in any of their lives, the members of the Fraternity prayed for the success of the Pope’s healers.

  4:55 p.m.

  The coroner for Roma, Precinct Sixteen, had received the body of Alberto Agostini following the shooting the previous day at Santa Maria in Trastevere. From the perspective of his professional work, the case was straightforward. A gunshot wound had been inflicted by a gun that the police had in their possession: a nine-millimeter Ukrainian Fort-12 fired by a man in the same church. A single shot, straight to the chest, despite the cleric’s puzzling host of other wounds, was unequivocally the cause of death.

  But that was precisely what gave the coroner pause.

  For a single gunshot wound had indeed caused the priest’s demise. But the coroner had the lethal round in an evidence bag in his office, removed from the deceased’s body. And it was not from a Fort-12.

  It was not a nine-millimeter round at all. From the analysis he’d done by computer, it was from a Beretta Pico, a relatively rare gun, tiny and used chiefly for concealed self-defense. A gun that fired only standard .380 rounds.

  And that was something the coroner could not explain.

  He’d picked up his office telephone, about to make a call up the chain of command, when his door slid quietly open. The blue-white light of the corridor outside momentarily blurred his vision. A second later, he recognized the man who stepped inside.

  The chain of true command had come to him.

  “I gather you’ve found something interesting,” the man said knowingly. Without asking how he could possibly know what had been found, the coroner quickly explained the puzzle he’d discovered.

  “I was just about to make the call. To report up the ladder that a further investigation will be necessary. This priest was not killed by the reporter in the church.”

  The man in the coroner’s office looked sternly at him. When he spoke, the Voice was unwavering.

  “Allow me to explain to you why you are never going to make that call.”

  Chapter 29

  6:18 p.m.

  In the bustle of the Trevi Fountain square at its mid-evening peak, no one gave a second thought to the man in the black shirt as he strolled, seemingly aimlessly, through the crowds. He stopped occasionally to gaze up at the bright sky, as did many others. He reached out a hand to grab a grape from a fruit stall, and popped it into his mouth with a smile as the vendor tutted an unaggressive “now, now” in his direction.

  He carried a newspaper beneath his arm—a copy of La Repubblica that contained a host of uninspiring European news articles along with a page eleven column on the unfortunate death of a Catholic priest in a local church.

  Pity. Bad things, good people and all that.

  No one noticed as the man in the black shirt approached the metal rubbish bin that stood on the corner of Via del Lavatore and Via di San Vincenzo. Nor as he reached a hand to the paper in his armpit and threw it away.

  Nor as the tiny Beretta Pico .380, folded into the paper’s pages and with only two shots ever fired from its muzzle, fell with a thud into the bin.

  Chapter 30

  One month later

  For what does religion stand, if not the hope of the impossible?

  This was the thought that inspired the monsignor as he stood over the bed of the frail young woman whose disease had stripped her of all hope. All she had left was the inevitable: the absolute medical certainty of increasing pain, advancing organ failure and unavoidable death. The impossible was all she could pray for—and she’d long since given up on that.

  The monsignor smiled. Everyone hoped for miracles. So few believed they would actually occur, giving up on them long before they ever had the chance to. Such a pity. Miracles had the power to change the world.

  And he intended to ensure they did again. On a scale that hadn’t been seen since the time of the ancients.

  In a way that would change the world as soon as the time was right.

  He leaned down, close to the sick woman’s ear. The fevered sweat on her skin brushed against the tip of his nose. There, as close as he could come, he whispered words he wanted her to hear.

  “Your faith has made you well.” He paused, allowing the woman’s rasping breath to halt slightly, a sign she’d heard his gentle phrase.

  “What is lacking has been made whole,” he added, “and the sick have been healed.” Then, rising back to his full height, he laid an open
palm softly on her forehead and closed his eyes.

  Everything else had already been done.

  It took less than ten seconds. The monitor at her bedside, which had been bleeping the arrhythmic tones of a heart losing its power and slipping inevitably toward death, suddenly changed its register. The bleeps regularized. Blood pressure stats began to climb. Digital indicators of vital functions, all of which had been in the red for hours, began to slide toward green in a strangely synchronized, almost uniform motion.

  The monsignor lifted his hand away as nurses flooded into the hospital room to check on the sudden change in their patient’s hopeless condition.

  He took a step back, satisfied. He’d done it.

  A miracle. And it hadn’t been that hard, after all.

  He smiled as he walked quietly away. There was a pure contentment in his heart as he moved. Genesis had been abandoned, but perhaps a new creation wasn’t what was required.

  After all, beginnings and endings happened all the time. They came and went. What was needed was something else.

  The Voice had finally spoken anew.

  What was needed was a Second Coming.

  Preview: Dominus—coming in June 2015

  Read on for a preview glimpse of Dominus, the page-turning full-length novel coming from Tom Fox and Quercus. If Genesis revealed the beginnings of intrigue, Dominus sets it fully into haunting, other-worldly motion.

  For more from Alexander and Gabriella, keep reading for an exclusive extract

  DOMINUS

  Behold, he cometh with the clouds, and every eye shall see him, even those that pierced him. And all the tribes of the earth shall wail because of him. So it is to be. Amen.