The Order Page 6

  He switched on the television. It was tuned to the BBC. Remarkably, there had been no fatalities in the Berlin bombing, though twelve people had been wounded, four critically. Axel Brünner of the far-right National Democratic Party was blaming the attack on the pro-immigration policies of Germany’s centrist chancellor. Neo-Nazis and other assorted right-wing extremists were gathering for a torchlight rally in the city of Leipzig. The Bundespolizei were bracing for a night of violence.

  Gabriel changed the channel to CNN. The network’s premier foreign affairs correspondent was broadcasting live from St. Peter’s Square. Like her competitors, she was unaware of the fact that a letter addressed to the director-general of the Israeli secret intelligence service had mysteriously vanished from the pope’s study the night of his death. Nor did she know that the Swiss Guard who had been standing watch outside the papal apartments was missing, too. If Niklaus Janson’s phone was powered on and broadcasting a signal, the cyberwarriors at Unit 8200 would find it, perhaps before the night was out.

  Gabriel switched off the television as Chiara came into the sitting room. He took his time with his appraisal—the pearls, the strapless black dress, the pumps. She was a masterpiece.

  “Well?” she asked at last.

  “You look …” He faltered.

  “Like a mother of two who’s gained eight pounds?”

  “I thought you said five.”

  “I just stepped on the bathroom scale.” She gestured toward the bedroom door. “It’s all yours.”

  Gabriel quickly showered and dressed. Downstairs, they climbed into the back of a waiting embassy car. As they raced up the Via Veneto, his phone pulsed with an incoming message from King Saul Boulevard.

  “What is it?”

  “The Unit just breached the outer wall of the Swiss Guard’s computer network. They’re searching the database for Janson’s personnel file and contact information.”

  “What if they’ve deleted it already?”

  “Who?”

  “The same men who murdered the pope, of course.”

  “We’re not there yet, Chiara.”

  “Not yet,” she agreed. “But we will be soon.”

  10

  CASA SANTA MARTA

  UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, SWISS GUARDS did not stand watch outside the Casa Santa Marta. But at eight fifteen that same evening, there were two. The clerical guesthouse was now occupied by several dozen princes of the Church, mainly from the distant corners of the realm. On the eve of the conclave, the remaining cardinal-electors would join them. After that, no one but the Casa Santa Marta’s staff—nuns from the Daughters of St. Vincent de Paul—would be allowed to enter. For now, a select few, including Bishop Hans Richter, superior general of the Order of St. Helena, were free to come and go as they pleased. With Cardinal Domenico Albanese firmly in control of the machinery of the city-state, Bishop Richter’s long exile was finally over.

  One of the Swiss Guards held open the glass door, and Richter, his right hand raised in blessing, went inside. The gleaming white lobby echoed with a multilingual din. The 225 members of the College of Cardinals had spent the afternoon discussing the Church’s future. Now they were partaking of white wine and canapés in the lobby before sitting down to supper in the Casa Santa Marta’s simple dining room. The Apostolic Constitution dictated that only the 116 cardinals under the age of eighty would be allowed to take part in the conclave. The elderly cardinals emeriti made their preferences known during informal gatherings such as these, which was where the real pre-conclave horse trading took place.

  Richter discreetly acknowledged the greetings of a pair of well-known traditionalists and endured the icy stare of Cardinal Kevin Brady, the liberal lion from Los Angeles who saw a pope each time he looked in the mirror. Brady was conspiring with tiny Duarte of Manila, the great hope of the developing world. Cardinal Navarro was brimming with confidence, as though the papacy was already his. It was obvious that Gaubert, who was scheming with Villiers of Lyon, did not plan to go down without a fight.

  Only Bishop Hans Richter knew that none of them stood a chance. The next pope was at that moment standing near the reception desk, an afterthought in a room filled with towering egos and boundless ambition. He had been given his red hat by none other than Pietro Lucchesi, who had been deceived into believing he was a moderate, which he most definitely was not. Fifty million euros, discreetly deposited in bank accounts around the world, including twelve at the Vatican Bank, had all but guaranteed his election by the conclave. Securing the vast sum of money required to purchase the papacy had been the easiest part of the operation. Unlike the rest of the Church, which was on the verge of financial collapse, the Order of St. Helena was awash with cash.

  Cardinal Domenico Albanese was whispering something into the ear of Angelo Francona, the dean of the College of Cardinals. Spotting Richter, he beckoned with a thick, furry hand. Francona, a leading liberal, immediately turned on his heel and fled.

  “Did I do something to give offense?” asked Richter in flawless curial Italian.

  “You offend by your very existence, Excellency.” Albanese took Richter by the arm. “Perhaps we should speak in my room.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve actually moved in.”

  Albanese grimaced. As prefetto of the Secret Archives, he was entitled to a luxurious apartment above the Lapidary Gallery of the Vatican Museums. “I’m simply using my room here as an office until the start of the conclave.”

  “With any luck,” said Richter quietly, “you won’t have to stay long.”

  “The media are predicting a titanic struggle between the reformers and the reactionaries.”

  “Are they?”

  “Seven ballots seems to be the general consensus.”

  A blue-habited nun offered Richter a glass of wine. Declining, he followed Albanese to the elevators. He could almost feel the eyes of the room boring holes in his back as they waited for a carriage to arrive. When one finally appeared, Albanese pressed the call button for the fourth floor. Mercifully, the doors closed before loquacious Lopes of Rio de Janeiro could squeeze inside.

  Bishop Richter made several unnecessary adjustments to his purple-trimmed cassock as the carriage slowly rose. Handmade by an exclusive tailor in Zurich, it fit him to perfection. At seventy-four, he remained an imposing physical specimen, tall and square-shouldered, with iron-gray hair and an unbendable countenance to match.

  He looked at Cardinal Albanese’s reflection in the elevator doors. “What’s on the menu this evening, Eminence?”

  “Whatever they serve us will be overcooked.” Albanese smiled gracelessly. Even in his red-trimmed cassock, he looked like the hired help. “Consider yourself lucky you don’t have to actually take part in the conclave.”

  In the nomenclature of the Roman Catholic Church, the Order of St. Helena was a personal prelature—in effect, a global diocese without borders. As superior general of the Order, Richter held the rank of bishop. Nevertheless, he was among the most powerful men in the Roman Catholic Church. Several dozen cardinals, all secret members of the Order, were obliged to obey his every command, including Cardinal Domenico Albanese.

  The elevator doors opened. Albanese led Bishop Richter along an empty corridor. The room they entered was in darkness. Albanese found the light switch.

  Richter surveyed his surroundings. “I see you’ve assigned yourself one of the suites.”

  “The rooms were assigned by lottery, Excellency.”

  “Lucky you.”

  Bishop Richter held out his right hand, the wrist cocked slightly. Albanese dropped to his knees and placed his lips against the ring on Richter’s third finger. It was identical in size to the Ring of the Fisherman that Albanese had recently removed from the papal apartments.

  “I swear to you, Bishop Richter, my eternal obedience.”

  Richter withdrew his hand, resisting the urge to reach for the small bottle of sanitizer in his pocket. Richter was a germophobe. Albanese always str
uck him as a carrier.

  He moved to the window and parted the gauzy curtain. The suite was on the north side of the guesthouse, overlooking the Piazza Santa Marta and the facade of the basilica. The dome was aglow with floodlights. The wounds from the Islamic terrorist attack had healed nicely. If only the same could be said for the Holy Mother Church. She was a shadow of her former self, barely breathing, close to death.

  Bishop Hans Richter had appointed himself her savior. He had been prepared to wait out Lucchesi’s disastrous papacy before putting his plan into action. But His Holiness had given Richter no choice but to take matters into his own hands. It was Lucchesi who had erred, Richter assured himself, not he. Besides, God had been knocking on Lucchesi’s door for some time. To Richter’s way of thinking, he had merely given Pope Accidental an early start on the inevitable process of canonization.

  Richter’s thoughts were interrupted by a thunderous flush of the commode. When Albanese emerged, he was wiping his big hands on a towel—like a ditchdigger, thought Richter. And to think he actually regarded himself as a potential pope, the one Richter would choose to be his puppet pontiff. He was no intellectual giant, Albanese, but he had played the curial insider’s game well enough to secure two critical papal appointments. As camerlengo, Albanese had shepherded Lucchesi’s body from the papal apartments to his tomb beneath St. Peter’s with no hint of scandal. He had also placed in Richter’s hands copies of several sin-filled personnel files from the Vatican Secret Archives that had proven invaluable during the preparations for the conclave. For his reward, Albanese would soon be the secretary of state, the second most powerful position in the Holy See.

  He dried his pitted face and then tossed the towel over the back of a chair. “With all due respect, Excellency, do you think it was wise to come here this evening?”

  “Are you forgetting that many of those cardinals downstairs are now wealthy men because of me?”

  “All the more reason you should keep a low profile until the conclave is over. I can only imagine what the likes of Francona and Kevin Brady are saying right now.”

  “Francona and Brady are the least of our problems.”

  The simple wooden armchair into which Albanese lowered himself groaned beneath his weight. “Is there any sign of the Janson boy?”

  Richter shook his head.

  “He was obviously distraught that night. It’s possible he took his own life.”

  “We should be so lucky.”

  “Surely you don’t mean that, Excellency. If Janson committed suicide, his soul would be in grave peril.”

  “It already is.”

  “As is mine,” said Albanese quietly.

  Richter placed a hand on the camerlengo’s thick shoulder. “I granted you absolution for your actions, Domenico. Your soul is in a state of grace.”

  “And yours, Excellency?”

  Richter removed his hand. “I sleep well at night knowing that in a few days’ time, the Church will be in our control. I will allow no one to stand in our way. And that includes a pretty little peasant boy from Canton Fribourg.”

  “Then I suggest you find him, Excellency. The sooner the better.”

  Bishop Richter smiled coldly. “Is that the type of incisive and analytical thinking you intend to bring to the Secretariat of State?”

  Albanese suffered the rebuke from his superior general in silence.

  “Rest assured,” said Bishop Richter, “the Order is using all of its considerable resources to find Janson. Unfortunately, we are no longer the only ones looking for him. It appears Archbishop Donati has joined the search.”

  “If we can’t find Janson, what hope does Donati have?”

  “Donati has something much better than hope.”

  “What’s that?”

  Bishop Richter gazed at the dome of the basilica. “Gabriel Allon.”

  11

  VIA SARDEGNA, ROME

  THE PALAZZO WAS OFTEN MISTAKEN for an embassy or a government ministry, for it was surrounded by a formidable steel fence and watched over by an array of outward-aimed security cameras. A Baroque fountain splashed in the forecourt, but the two-thousand-year-old Roman statue of Pluto that had once adorned the entrance hall was absent. In its place stood Dr. Veronica Marchese, director of Italy’s National Etruscan Museum. She wore a stunning black pantsuit and a thick band of gold at her throat. Her dark hair was swept straight back and held in place by a clasp at the nape of her neck. A pair of cat’s-eye spectacles gave her a faintly academic air.

  Smiling, she kissed Chiara on both cheeks. She offered Gabriel only her hand, guardedly. “Director Allon. I’m so pleased you were able to come. I’m only sorry we didn’t do this a long time ago.”

  The ice broken, she led them along a gallery hung with Italian Old Master paintings, all of museum quality. The works were but a small portion of her late husband’s collection.

  “As you can see, I’ve made a few changes since your last visit.”

  “Spring cleaning?” asked Gabriel.

  She laughed. “Something like that.”

  The exquisite Greek and Roman statuary that once had lined the gallery was gone. Carlo Marchese’s business empire, nearly all of it illegitimate, had included a brisk international trade in looted antiquities. One of his main partners had been Hezbollah, which supplied Carlo with a steady stream of inventory from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. In return, Carlo filled Hezbollah’s coffers with hard currency, which it used to purchase weapons and fund terrorism. Gabriel had taken down the network. Then, after making a remarkable archaeological discovery one hundred and sixty-seven feet beneath the surface of the Temple Mount, he had taken down Carlo.

  “A few months after my husband’s death,” Veronica Marchese explained, “I quietly disposed of his personal collection. I gave the Etruscan pieces to my museum, which is where they belonged in the first place. Most are still in storage, but I’ve placed a few on public display. Needless to say, the placards make no mention of their provenance.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Your friend General Ferrari was good enough to take it off my hands. He was very discreet, which is unusual for him. The general likes good publicity.” She looked at Gabriel with genuine gratitude. “I suppose I have you to thank for that. If it had become public that my husband controlled the global trade in looted antiquities, my career would have been destroyed.”

  “We all have our secrets.”

  “Yes,” she said distantly. “I suppose we do.”

  Veronica Marchese’s other secret waited in her formal drawing room, dressed in a cassock and a simar. Music played softly in the background. It was Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio no. 1 in D Minor. The key of repressed passion.

  Donati opened a bottle of prosecco and poured four glasses.

  “You’re rather good at that for a priest,” said Gabriel.

  “I’m an archbishop, remember?”

  Donati carried one of the glasses to the brocade-covered chair in which Veronica had settled. A trained observer of human behavior, Gabriel knew an intimate gesture when he saw one. Donati was clearly comfortable in Veronica’s drawing room. Were it not for the cassock and simar, a stranger might have presumed he was the man of the palazzo.

  He sat down in the chair next to her, and an awkward silence ensued. Like an uninvited dinner guest, the past had intruded. For his part, Gabriel was thinking about his last encounter with Veronica Marchese. They were in the Sistine Chapel, just the two of them, standing before Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Veronica was describing for Gabriel the life that awaited Donati when the Ring of the Fisherman was removed from Pietro Lucchesi’s finger for the last time. A teaching position at a pontifical university, a retirement home for aging priests. So lonely. So terribly sad and lonely … It occurred to Gabriel that Veronica, widowed and available, might have other plans.

  At length, she complimented Chiara on her dress and pearls. Then she asked about the children and about Venice before lamenting the condition into
which Rome, once the center of the civilized world, had fallen. These days, it was a national obsession. Eighty percent of the city’s streets were riddled with unrepaired potholes, making driving, even walking, a perilous undertaking. Children carried toilet paper in their bookbags because the school bathrooms had none. Rome’s buses ran perpetually behind schedule, if at all. An escalator at a busy subway stop had recently amputated the foot of a tourist. And then, said Veronica, there were the overflowing dumpsters and mounds of uncollected rubbish. The most popular website in the city was Roma Fa Schifo, “Rome Is Gross.”

  “And who is to blame for this deplorable state of affairs? A few years ago, Rome’s chief prosecutor discovered that the Mafia had gained control of the municipal government and was steadily draining the city’s finances. A Mafia-owned company was awarded the contract to collect the garbage. The company didn’t bother to collect garbage, of course, because doing so would cost money and reduce its profit margin. The same was true of street repairs. Why bother to repair a pothole? Repairing potholes costs money.” Veronica shook her head slowly. “The Mafia is Italy’s curse.” Then, with a glance at Gabriel, she added, “Mine, too.”

  “It will all be better now that Saviano is prime minister.”

  Veronica made a face. “Have we learned nothing from the past?”

  “Apparently not.”

  She sighed. “He visited the museum not long ago. He was perfectly charming, as most demagogues are. It’s easy to see why he appeals to Italians who don’t live in palazzos near the Via Veneto.” She placed her hand briefly on Donati’s arm. “Or behind the walls of the Vatican. Saviano hated the Holy Father for his defense of immigrants and his warnings about the dangers posed by the rise of the far right. He saw it as a direct challenge orchestrated by the Holy Father’s leftist private secretary.”

  “Was it?” asked Gabriel.