The Final Pontiff

by Neil Howarth

  Father Walter McGeechan had a very diverse set of skills, for a priest. In fact, apart from his undoubted devotion to God, he was not like a priest at all. But as Father Luca had often told him, it takes all types to fight the devil.

  He had a Bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering from St. Andrew’s University in his native Scotland, a Master's degree in Computer Science from MIT, and once had an illustrious career as a computer whiz on Wall Street. That was before he had attempted to stuff most of what he earned up his nose, and when Father Luca had found him and put him on the path to redemption. Or something like that. Four years in Seminary had cleansed his body and his soul, well his soul at least, but he had still retained his old skills.

  He became Father Luca’s technical assistant, gofer and general dogsbody, his mentor’s eyes on an increasingly complex world. He had worked tirelessly for him, drank with him, listened to his pain and sorrows, had even followed him faithfully to Rome when Luca was summoned by the previous Holy Father. And despite the fact he had often been the butt of Luca’s most un-catholic curses and frustrated anger, he had loved the man dearly.

  But that had all been a long time ago and Father Luca, like many other things close to Walter’s heart, was now gone.

  ‘Tell me why the road turns.’ He acapella'd the line of an old Diana Ross song. He had a strong, melodic voice, even with the cigarette in his mouth. As a child, he had been dubbed the fat boy with the voice of an angel. Yet another dream that had died on the vine. Still, he got to exercise it often with various choirs in and around the Vatican. He had lots of time these days.

  It had been two years since he had single-handedly saved the world. Well, the story went something like that, it depended on how much he had had to drink, and despite the fact that he was sworn to never utter a word about it. The Vatican had not been vaporized, and most of the Church and World leaders were still alive, all down to him. He was never really sure if that was necessarily a good thing.

  Life should have been wonderful. Six months ago he had been heading the Vatican Cyber-Intelligence Group, a small, but increasingly necessary team of talented individuals, dedicated to providing the Vatican with vital information as it battled with the war that seemed to be continually raging out there. It had started with the CRACKERS, the Hackers of Christ, his own brainchild, along with a small group of talented friends who inhabited the netherworld of cyberspace, but this new group was far more serious and professional. It also had more money and technical resources.

  So why was he sitting here now, kicking his heels and drinking before noon? But he knew the answer to that one. His name was Brennan.

  Okay, so he had accused Father Brennan of being complicit in the death of the previous Pope, Salus. As usual, no one believed him, a small matter of solid evidence, and a deep Vatican need to sweep nasty things under the rug. Brennan had walked, disappeared back to his native U.S. where it might have been acceptable for him to stay. But six months ago he had reappeared, more elevated than ever. He was now Archbishop Brennan, and personal secretary to the Holy Father, no less. It seemed that memories were very short in the corridors of Vatican power. Either that or Brennan had some powerful friends — or both. And after this morning’s events, Cardinal Brennan’s dark figure would cast an even greater shadow. Which was another reason Walter was drinking before noon.

  Within a month of Brennan arriving back at the Vatican, he had seen that Walter was off counting toilet rolls and had put Roberto, his assistant in his place. Walter had once had powerful friends of his own, but now they were all gone, shifted aside, retired, lost, or dead. But he still had Carlo. Carlo was his inside man on Roberto’s team. He supplied him inside snippets on what was going on.

  The latest rumor was personal. They were shipping him out to Africa, but they hadn’t told him yet, not officially. It was not going out there that was the problem, though he had to admit, the thought did occasional squidgy things to his digestive system. His friends William and Joseph had both spent time out there and not only survived but had returned enriched in their souls. No, it was what Brennan would be getting up to while he was away. Whatever it was, he knew it would not be good.

  He finished his tinkering with the mobile phone and clipped the back cover in place. No one would track his location on that phone. He took a long pull on the cigarette and removed it from his mouth, blowing the smoke out into the crisp Roman morning. Sometimes he wondered if he was getting too paranoid.

  He switched on the phone with a stubby finger and took a sip of his wine, a rather rough Sicilian red. He gave a slight grimace. Like his Nazionali cigarettes, it was an acquired taste. A taste he had acquired from his late friend and mentor, Father Luca. The phone chirped rapidly, showing five missed calls from the same number. Walter recognized it immediately. He hit call. The phone on the other end rang twice before it picked up.

  “Carlo, my man,” Walter boomed into the phone. “What's up.”

  The line was silent.

  “Carlo, is that you?”

  When Carlo eventually spoke it was barely more than a whisper.

  “Carlo, are you okay?”

  “I think I have been stupid.”

  “Tell me about it, my son.”

  Carlo raised his voice to an audible level. “I found it.”

  “What did you find?”

  “I found Roberto’s stash.”

  “Carlo,” Walter flashed a wide grin. “I always said you were a star. So what’s the big problem?”

  “I may have got us both in big trouble.”

  Walter’s exuberance disappeared abruptly. “I told you to be careful.”

  “I sent you a file. Did you see it?”

  “No, where did you send it?”

  The stress in Carlo’s voice increased. “Where do you think?”

  “Sorry, I’ve been a little tied up. Look, I’ll come round and see you.”

  “No, stay away. It is not safe, and anyway, I am not there.”

  “What do you mean, what’s going on?”

  “I need to disappear for a while. You might want to do the same when you see what I have sent you.”

  “Hey, just take a deep breath and tell me what this is about.”

  Carlo spoke in a whisper. “They will kill me for this.”

  “Carlo,” Walter called out, but the line was dead.

  Walter stared at the phone, then flipped open the laptop sitting on the table and brought up a console window. He typed in a string of hieroglyphics then entered the details of a ‘Dark Web’ address. The cursor blinked for a moment then a new window popped up, a web page filled with swirling clouds. It was the access page to what he and Carlo euphemistically called the Dirt Locker. The place where they stored their deepest secrets, odd tidbits, and cyber dirt, gleaned from their Internet trawling.

  He entered the passcode to gain entry, and the screen responded with a list of entries. Their names consisted solely of the date and time they were stored, with no indication of their content. Walter clicked on the latest entry. The screen appeared to think for a while then a video clip started to run. He dragged out the window size to get a better view and sat in silence as the video footage rolled on.

  It looked like the footage from a traffic-cam, pedestrians waiting to cross at the traffic lights of a busy city intersection. The action happened so fast he had to rewind and replay the final part to be sure he had not imagined it.

  A man, dressed in a long dark overcoat and a woolen hat pulled down on his head, stood waiting to cross. He seemed to stagger out into the road, in front of a large truck and was swept away.

  Walter drained his wine glass and refilled it, his eyes barely moving from the screen. He lit another of his foul-smelling cigarettes, then played it through once more, pausing it and replaying the vital part over again.

  He sat there staring at the screen. His hand holding the cigarette was shaking. Carlo said he had found it in Roberto's stash, his replacements version of the Dirt Locker. But
where did Roberto get it, and why was he keeping it? Carlo had said they would kill him for this. Surely not Roberto. But who? And Why?

  Maybe he was getting too paranoid, but Carlo was right about one thing. They were in big trouble.

  4

  Trastevere, Rome.

  Walter had tried calling Carlo half a dozen times, but all he got was his voicemail. He had considered going over to his place, but based upon the last thing that Carlo had said, he knew he would not be there. So he did what he always did in times of stress. He ate. Or at least he tried.

  He walked out of Gabriele’s pizzeria at the bottom of the hill from his apartment, clutching a pizza box under his arm. It was early to eat by Rome standards, but he had never really got over his Glaswegian roots of having the evening meal over and done by six o’clock, and Gabriele’s was open all day. There was a perfectly good establishment that sold pizzas and pasta directly across the road from where he lived, but Gabriele’s, in his own humble opinion, made the best pizzas in the whole of Rome, so it was worth the extra walk.

  Walter was a regular, dining there at least three times a week. He liked the atmosphere as much as the food. He loved the rich aroma of baking pizzas and Italian herbs, mixed with the sharp tang of burning olive wood from Gabriele’s oven. Sophia, Gabriele’s wife, would fuss around him, making sure everything was exactly to his liking.

  He rarely had a carry-out, he much preferred the complete dining experience. Which was why it was most strange that he was carrying the partly eaten remains of his favorite, Pizza Prosciutto e Fichi, — organic stone ground flour in a sourdough, baked to a thin, crispy, base, and filled with delicious slices of prosciutto and sweet, overripe, figs. Normally just the thought of it would make his mouth water. But today more than half of it was wrapped in foil and packed in the pizza box under his arm as he stepped into the street. Walter could eat a large size variety in a single sitting and did so often. But today Sophia had tutted and shaken her head as she wrapped up the remains of the uneaten pizza and placed it in the box. The worried look on her face seeming much more concerned with Walter’s health than anything else. She had looked as if she was about to place a hand on his forehead to check for a fever.

  There was little that could take away Walter’s appetite, but worrying about Carlo had done the job. His phone pinged in his pocket. Walter scrambled to retrieve it, hoping it was a message from Carlo at last. His forehead wrinkled in a deep frown as he contemplated the screen. It showed an icon, a black skull, and crossbones against a red triangle. Being the ever trusting man that he was, Walter had built his own state of the art, alarm system in his apartment. The message on his phone showed him that someone had just tripped it.

  He hurried up the hill, punching more requests into his phone. A video window appeared showing a live camera feed from his apartment. He could see the back of one figure and another in full view across the room. The one in full view was in the process of picking up Walter's MacBook Pro laptop from the table and stuffing it into a backpack.

  “Son of a bitch,” Walter muttered out loud.

  He recognized the man immediately — Roberto. Such was gratitude. Roberto had been no more than a boy when he had taken him in, trained him, and treated him like a son. That was until Brennan had kicked him out and given his job to his understudy.

  Walter continued to mutter a string of very un-priestly curses as he entered a series of commands into the phone and flicked through a variety of camera angles. He stopped on a view of the other man’s face. He should have guessed, Franco, the Vatican’s version of the artful dodger, but with none of his redeeming features. Roberto was great when it came to breaking down firewalls and breaking into computer systems. But when it came to physical breaking in, Franco was your man.

  Walter’s instinct was to rush inside and confront them, but something, maybe Carlo’s final words, urged caution. He headed to the side of the street across from his apartment block and ducked into an alley. He still had the phone in his hand, and the pizza box clutched to his chest as he peered out from the shadows. The street was deserted apart from a few parked cars dotted either side. He glanced at his phone. The two men disappeared from the screen.

  He did not have to wait long before they emerged from the apartment block entrance. They stood under a street lamp talking, then Roberto said something to Franco and walked quickly across the street, directly towards where Walter was hiding. Roberto was a skinny, emaciated figure, he could not have weighed much more than a hundred and twenty pounds dripping wet. Walter considered leaping out and giving him an old-fashioned Glasgow kicking. The thought gave him a sense of pleasure that was most un-Christian, but he pulled back at the last moment as Roberto stopped and leaned down to the window of a car, parked just a few yards from where Walter stood. He could make out someone sitting inside but could not see who it was. They exchanged a few words then Roberto returned to Franco at the far side of the street. The two of them got into another car and drove away.

  The man in the parked car was obviously left waiting to see if Walter returned. He remembered Carlo’s last piece of advice. Maybe it was time he dropped out of sight. He could always send someone over tomorrow to retrieve his stuff. For now, he needed a bolt hole, somewhere to stay for the night.

  His friend Aldo had moved from the house he had over by Termini railway station, after their last little disaster. He now lived down by the river, a short walk from Walter’s place. The last time he had got Aldo involved in his problems he had almost torn his friend’s life apart. He headed back down the hill still clutching the pizza box to his chest and prayed it was not starting all over again.

  5

  Opio, Alpes Maritime, Southern France.

  A dark shape moved out of the trees and into the moonlight, morphing into the figure of a man dressed in black. Tall and lithe, he ran with a steady, effortless grace, a tone about his body that suggested that running was not his only exercise. He skirted the edge of the woods and headed out into the open, following the path that ran straight between the open fields.

  He was dressed in cold weather, black, stretch, pants with a matching zip-up top, to keep him warm against the early morning chill. His dark hair was long and streaked with grey, protruding from the woolen beanie he wore pulled down firmly on his head. His beard was full but trimmed, and in his left earlobe, he had a thick, gold, earring. He looked little like the Roman Catholic Priest who had once been Father Joseph Fagan — or the man who had come before him, a lifetime ago. But then he felt a million miles away from who either of those men were.

  This was his regular morning run, striking out while it was still dark, barely able to see the farm track ahead, just a matter of head down and one foot placed in front of the other, in a world that stretched no more than a yard in front of him. It was the perfect cocoon in which to let his thoughts run free. Like the confessional but without the guilt.

  It was a five-mile run out to the lake. Fagan steadily ate up the distance, seeing nothing but the path at his feet, lost in his isolation and tranquillity. By the time he reached the lake and swung around for the run home, the light was good enough to illuminate the narrow pathway ahead, running around the water's edge and then down into the meadow, draped in a thin morning mist. He stepped up the pace, following the path alongside a shallow stream, the dark water tumbling across the rocks, seeming to track him as he ran.

  He crested the hill and stopped. His heart rate was barely raised. His meditation was complete, the endorphins had kicked in, and he felt as if he could float across the fields to where the house stood white and clear in the distance, nestled sleepily in this forgotten pocket of Provence. This was his favorite part, every morning

  In the distance, the outline of the mountains was etched clearly against the brightening morning sky, the vast sweep of the Alpes Maritime unfolding before him in all its majesty.

  The farmhouse was typical of the area, a substantial building constructed in whitewashed, rough stone, with
faded pink pantiles on a gently sloping roof. A hill rose up steeply behind it, covered with umbrella pines and dotted with thyme shrubs, and giant cactus plants thrusting up to the brightening blue sky.

  It had once been a working farm, but most of the land had been sold off years ago. Now all that remained was the house and across the track the olive grove, that ran down the sloping meadow to the river at the bottom.

  Frankie had bought the place almost a year ago via one of her shady undercover friends. No links back to her she had assured him. And Fagan had to admit, the place had been good for both of them.

  It was hard to believe it was almost two years since they had left Rome in a hurry after they had thwarted Dominic de Vaux’s plan to set the world on fire, and the Imperium had made De Vaux pay the price for failure. The Imperium had murdered his friend and mentor William, known to the world as Pope Salus, and another dear friend, Luca, and now were a constant threat to him and Frankie.

  They had drifted east, spending time in India and then on to Thailand and Vietnam, before ending up in the Philippines. They had spent almost a year there, on a tiny island just off the mainland. Fagan had quickly found his purpose, helping the locals recover from the devastating effects of a typhoon which had ripped through the island destroying everything in its path. He could have stayed. He felt a connection there, to the people, to what they had lost and what they were rebuilding. But Frankie had finally got homesick.

  Though her father and brother were both dead, she just wanted to be closer to them, in spirit. She wanted to go home. So they had made their way back. The moment she had seen this place she knew this was it. And she was right.

  The last year had been special. Frankie had cast off the dark cloak of melancholy that had sat heavy on her shoulders as if she had, at last, come to terms with the fact that it was over,. She had accepted her father’s passing a long time ago, but her brother, Jean-Claude had proved far more difficult. Though it seemed that now, at last, she was able to sit back and accept that he was gone.