The Debt

by Glenn Cooper

  Celestino and Pinotti approached the officer with a stack of mobile-phone data and Celestino asked him what he was finding.

  ‘We didn’t know how far to go back,’ the fellow said, ‘so we made the decision to look at the past six months.’

  ‘I think that’s probably a waste of effort,’ Celestino said. ‘Unless we’re missing something, this affair started in December when Donovan began looking for the loan.’

  ‘The idea was to define a baseline of his calling practices to see if there was a deviation during the critical time period,’ Pinotti said.

  ‘OK, Vittorio,’ Celestino said, ‘I’ll buy that.’

  Pinotti ran his thumb over the edge of the stack and said, ‘Viola made and received a lot of calls, which isn’t unusual given his responsibilities. You’re number one on the list, actually.’

  Celestino clucked, ‘He kept me on a short leash. Who else?’

  ‘Lots of calls to various Governorate departments, the cardinal secretary and staff, various police and security departments in Rome. His sister in Trieste, a brother in Puglia. A lot of calls to a medical clinic in Rome. A lot of one-off and miscellaneous numbers I’ve yet to identify. So far I don’t see any obvious pattern changes during December or January.’

  Celestino picked up the stack and spent a minute rummaging.

  ‘What about the texts?’

  ‘He didn’t text as much.’

  ‘He texted me all the time,’ Celestino said.

  ‘You’re number one, for sure,’ the officer said.

  The stack of text records was smaller and Celestino looked at a random page.

  ‘It’s only numbers sent and received,’ he said. ‘What about the actual messages?’

  ‘We can get those,’ Pinotti said. ‘It’ll take a while to pull them off the server.’

  ‘Get them,’ Celestino said, ‘we have to have them.’

  ‘Will do,’ Pinotti said.

  Celestino leafed through the pages of texts, slowing down when he got to the month of December and then January. Something clicked and he took a chair, flipping back to the late-December sheets.

  ‘What’s up, boss?’ Pinotti asked.

  ‘Something’s not right.’

  ‘What?’ Pinotti asked.

  ‘Christ, give me a second to think!’

  Celestino whipped out his own mobile phone and went to the SMS app.

  ‘There! Look at this,’ he said, pointing to his screen. ‘I knew there was something. I remember he texted me half a dozen times on Christmas Eve about security for the pope’s midnight Mass. Here are the messages. Where are they in these records?’

  Pinotti took the pages and examined them. ‘You’re right. The twenty-fifth of December is missing.’

  ‘What’s up with that, Luigi?’ Celestino asked the reviewing officer.

  ‘You’ve got what I’ve got,’ the officer said. ‘I didn’t lose a sheet.’

  ‘Who’d we get these from?’

  ‘The Vatican Telephone Service. Major Pinotti picked them up personally.’

  ‘This is what they gave me,’ Pinotti said.

  ‘We need to get to the bottom of this. Luigi, get over to the Governorate Palace double-time and bring me another set of messages. OK, let me see the bank records.’

  Celestino took a personal interest in Viola’s bank accounts and was in his office examining a copy of the last several weeks of his banking and credit-card transactions. He had just circled a 31 December purchase for about sixty-five euros at a shop at the Rome Termini railway station when his sister, Elisabetta, called to see how he was doing.

  ‘I’m all right, considering,’ he said.

  ‘Any news on the Holy Father and the professor?’

  ‘Nothing yet. We’re working it hard as you can imagine.’

  ‘I shouldn’t bother you but Papa offered to help. He told me to tell you he could analyze data, help look for connections.’

  ‘He needs a break from Goldbach?’

  ‘Don’t be mean. You know how clever he is.’

  ‘Tell him I appreciate it.’

  ‘I’m paralyzed with fear,’ she said. ‘All I can do is pray.’

  ‘That’s not a bad strategy.’

  His officer, Luigi, knocked on the door with the new set of phone records and he signed off with Elisabetta.

  ‘Was the page for Christmas Eve there?’ Celestino asked.

  ‘Right here. You’ve got to take a look at it, Colonel.’

  At the same moment, Julian Sassoon was sitting in his father’s chair at his father’s desk in his father’s office. Henry Sassoon hadn’t gone into his work office during the last six months of his life and it was dusty and untouched from his last day. There were a couple of oxygen cylinders standing in the corner and some unused suction catheters coiled in the bathroom. Outside on the street, one protester with a bullhorn made his life miserable for a while until the police ticketed the shrill lady for a noise violation and things got more peaceful.

  He’d decided that it had been time to jump in with both feet and put his fancy business-school education to work. If he was going to sit in the big chair and not get steamrolled by Marcus and members of his staff he needed to get up to speed and learn the operations. So, he approached it as if he’d been assigned a case study at the B-School and he had piled the desk with spreadsheets and audit reports – the guts of the business – and had begun his own analysis. On day three of the exercise, he was trying to figure out some balance-sheet entries that on the surface looked mundane, but that had niggled at him overnight.

  Equity position in Plowshares Master Fund IV, LLP: $203,387,290

  Plowshares had first appeared in the books two years earlier at approximately the sixty-million-dollar level. A year later it was over two hundred million. It wasn’t unusual for the bank to carry an equity investment on its books for a quarter or two until it unwound its position but he hadn’t seen one of this magnitude and duration. The audit reports were fairly mute on Plowshares, describing it as a Cayman Islands diversified hedge fund with a five-year annualized rate of return of fourteen percent.

  He phoned the bank’s chief financial officer, Mike Ritter.

  ‘Mike, what can you tell me about Plowshares IV?’

  ‘It’s a Cayman hedge fund we invested in a couple of years ago. The investment got upped last year.’

  ‘Upped? It quadrupled.’

  ‘Yeah, a big up.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I never met the management. West coast guys I understand. It’s Marcus’s deal. They’re supposed to be studs.’

  ‘Since when do we hold a position this long?’

  ‘It’s unusual, I’ll give you that. But you should talk to Marcus.’

  His next call was to the bank’s external auditors. He’d never met the audit partner who spent a little while giving his condolences.

  ‘So I understand you’re the new sheriff in town,’ the auditor said. ‘We should meet.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll set something up,’ Julian said. ‘Look, I wanted to see what you guys know about our investment in Plowshares IV, a Cayman hedge fund.’

  ‘I’m glad you called about that. It’s been a concern of ours.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Well, when the bank put sixty-odd million into it two years ago, it wasn’t particularly material, since past practice was to roll out of these things pretty fast. At two hundred mill it’s become a lot more material. We wanted to dig into it but Marcus assured us that he was in the process of liquidating it.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘We have their Cayman filings but if you’ve ever seen those, they’re on the minimalist side.’

  ‘Do you think you could get more forensic? I want to understand what makes them tick.’

  ‘More than happy to.’

  ‘And do me a favor. Don’t talk to Marcus about this.’

  Celestino strode over to Vittorio Pinotti’s office with a si
ngle sheet of paper in his hand. The office was empty.

  ‘Anyone seen the major?’ he called out to the duty room.

  One of the clerks looked up from her computer and told him she’d seen him leave a half-hour earlier.

  ‘Go see if his car is in the lot,’ he told the clerk.

  He sat down at Pinotti’s desk and looked at the sheet again.

  On 24 December there was an 8:14 p.m. text to the mobile phone of Cardinal Pascal Lauriat and at 9:02 p.m. there was a text to Vittorio Pinotti, the one and only text in six months between Viola and Pinotti.

  Celestino’s mobile phone rang. His officer sounded out of breath.

  ‘What do you have, Luigi?’

  ‘I’ve got the texts off the server, Colonel. The one to Cardinal Lauriat was “Consider it done.”’

  ‘And to Vittorio?’

  ‘It was, “See me at ten.”’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘OK, look, get me all of Vittorio’s records. Everything – phone, bank, credit cards – the works. And do the same for Pascal Lauriat.’

  ‘The cardinal secretary?’

  ‘Yes, the cardinal secretary.’

  He tried calling Pinotti’s mobile a couple of times and on the last try he left a simple voicemail: ‘We need to talk, Vittorio. We need to talk now.’

  His next call was to Cecchi. He told him what he’d found out and asked for his help in finding Pinotti. Cecchi took down the make, model, and plate number of the major’s car and his home address. Celestino also asked if he could send the Carabinieri over to the Rome Termini station to find out what Viola had purchased there. After he hung up he emailed over the information on Viola’s credit-card transaction and began rifling through Pinotti’s desk.

  Forty-five minutes later, Cecchi rang Celestino back.

  ‘We found your man,’ Cecchi said. ‘We put out a bulletin on his car to the Municipal and State Police and a cop spotted it in the south, near the Laurentina subway station. It’s a few blocks away from his flat.’

  ‘Is he in custody?’

  ‘They have him boxed in but he’s waving them off. He’s got a gun.’

  ‘We need him alive, Tommaso.’

  ‘Understood. I’m on my way over there. I’ll call you back.’

  Celestino tried Pinotti’s number again. He was startled when he picked up.

  ‘Emilio.’

  ‘Vittorio,’ he said as calmly as he could, ‘you need to throw down your gun and give yourself up.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Of course you can. Whatever it is, we can work this out.’

  ‘I don’t think we can.’

  ‘Where is the pope, Vittorio?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Believe me, I don’t know.’

  ‘Who else is involved?’

  He replied in an insistent, childlike whine. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then tell me why you did it.’

  ‘Because it’s my Church too.’

  ‘Listen to me, Vittorio …’

  Pinotti didn’t let him finish. ‘Tell your sister, Micaela, something for me, will you? Tell her I’m sorry we never went out together.’

  ‘Vittorio …’

  The gunshot was so loud, Celestino dropped his phone.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The next few hours sped by but to Emilio Celestino it seemed as if each hour was merely minutes.

  Pieces of data flowed into the ops center like flotsam floating along the strong current of the Tiber.

  On 6 January, Pascal Lauriat made a cash withdrawal of ten thousand euros from his personal Vatican bank account. On 7 January, Vittorio Pinotti sent a postal money order of ten thousand euros to a company called Alpha Epsilon Ltd. The money order was cashed at a post office in Reggio Calabria in southern Italy but the company appeared to be fictitious with no incorporation or trading records according to the Italian financial police, the Guardia di Finanza. Then, as evening fell, the Carabinieri, working with the manager of the Hudson News store at the underground level of the Rome Termini station, located Viola’s credit card purchase on 31 December, a pair of prepaid Vodafones. With the bar codes of the phones in hand, Cecchi applied for an emergency court order to compel Vodafone to provide the mobile numbers. The managing director of Vodafone, Italy was tracked down at a restaurant and an hour later, Cecchi had the numbers and the call logs of both phones.

  ‘The two numbers only call each other,’ Cecchi told Celestino over the phone. ‘Two times before the kidnapping, four times since, the last two hours ago.’

  ‘Can you trace them?’

  ‘One of them. The other signal is too weak. Guess where the strong signal is coming from?’

  ‘Vatican City.’

  ‘Bullseye.’

  ‘Lauriat, for sure.’

  ‘Are you going to question him?’

  ‘He’s not going to admit his role so easily,’ Celestino said, ‘and we’ve only got a few small pieces of circumstantial evidence. We can’t arrest the second most powerful official at the Vatican based on crumbs.’

  ‘If the two Vodafones call each other again we’ll be more likely to pick up the signal of the other one as it bounces off the nearest towers. We’ll have to wait and see.’

  ‘Maybe we don’t have to be so passive.’

  The policeman in him made Celestino want to do this in person. He could have picked up the phone but he wanted to get a measure of the man, to see the small movements of facial muscles, to peer into the soul of a liar.

  Cardinal Lauriat received him in his apartment in the Apostolic Palace, dressed for the evening in slacks and a sweater.

  ‘You have some news, Colonel?’

  ‘I do, Your Eminence. It’s our first good news. We know where they’ve taken the pope.’

  Lauriat arched a brow and reached for his glass of hot lemon water.

  ‘Where? Where is he?’

  ‘The Carabinieri won’t tell me. Because of Viola and Pinotti they’re making the painful assumption that the Gendarmerie is riddled with conspirators. All they say is that they are planning an operation.’

  Celestino saw the cardinal’s jaw ripple. ‘When?’

  ‘They won’t even tell me that. But I thought you should know what I know.’

  ‘Thank you for that, Colonel. I will be retiring for the night but do not hesitate to wake me with updates. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I will pray for the Holy Father.’

  Viola had assumed a fetal position in his narrow bed to deal with the acute pain in his belly. When the mobile phone chimed from the dresser he was forced to uncurl himself.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘Hello?’ Lauriat said. ‘I can’t hear you.’

  Viola had to walk across the room, doubled-over. ‘I said, what’s the matter.’

  ‘That’s better. You don’t sound well.’

  ‘I’m fine. Why are you calling?’

  ‘Celestino came to see me. The Carabinieri are saying they know where you are and that they’re coming for you.’

  ‘Oh yes? Where is that?’

  ‘They won’t tell him. After you and Pinotti they think the Gendarmerie is rotten.’

  ‘They don’t know anything,’ Viola said. ‘Vittorio didn’t know where we are. Even you don’t know.’

  ‘What about the ones you brought with you?’

  ‘None of these ’Ndrangheta boys knew where we were going before we got here. I didn’t allow any of them to bring their phones. I had Vittorio rent the villa in cash through a false company.’

  ‘Why are the Carabinieri saying it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’d feel better if you could get Celestine to renounce the foundation now.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning is the deadline. When I put a gun to Donovan’s head, he’ll come around.’

  ‘Do it tonight. Make a video. We can’t wait any longer.’
/>   ‘Very well, I’ll do it but not for your reason.’

  ‘What reason then?’

  ‘You were right. I’m not well. I might not be alive tomorrow.’

  He was businesslike, not triumphant. ‘We’ve got him,’ Cecchi told Celestino. ‘Come to the ROS headquarters immediately.’

  The traffic was light but Celestino fired up his blue lights and gunned his car to the limits of safety.

  He parked on the Piazza del Popolo and flew into the ROS building where he was escorted to the operations center. Cecchi had been kind when he had said the two departments had similar technology. The ROS command post looked to Celestino like something he’d only seen on TV shows – super-high-tech with multiple satellite, infrared, and CCTV feeds projected on a wall of monitors.

  ‘Good, you’re here,’ Cecchi said. ‘This is the screen you need to be looking at.’

  It was one of the infrared images, the one on the central monitor. It was all shades of green and black, a shifting view of a roof in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘Where is it?’ Celestino asked.

  ‘Campania. A mountain near Sanza.’

  ‘South? We thought they were heading north.’

  ‘A sleight of hand, I think,’ Cecchi said. ‘They switch cars north of Rome and go south instead.’

  ‘Is this real-time?’ Celestino asked.

  ‘It’s a live feed. We got the air force to scramble an MQ-9 Reaper drone, one of the ones we use in Libya, from the Amendola Airbase in Foggia.’

  ‘You sure it’s the right location?’

  ‘The cell signal wasn’t strong but there’s nothing else nearby. The house is isolated as hell. See there? There’s a couple of cars in the driveway so it’s occupied. And get this. The villa is a rental. We’re trying to contact the owner but we’ve got some very useful photos of the interior from the rental website.’

  ‘How do you want to play this?’ Celestino asked.

  ‘I have an ROS tactical team assembling at our helipad as we speak. I assume you want to take part.’