The Vatican Conspiracy: A completely gripping action thriller (A Marco Venetti Thriller Book 1)

by Hogenkamp, Peter

  “I’m not sure, really.”

  “What will you do?”

  Pietro shrugged. “Cardinal Lucci has something for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know; I came here first.”

  “Where have you been? That business in Austria ended three weeks ago.”

  “I had some things to take care of.”

  Eduardo took another sip of the white wine he drank from noon until midnight every day, and puffed on the cigar.

  “What kind of things?”

  Pietro shrugged.

  “Something to do with your new pal Lucci?”

  “He’s my godfather.”

  A Bonelli’s eagle soared overhead in the cobalt sky, floating on the thermals that came off the dusty peak of Monte Gallo.

  “How long will you be staying?”

  “I told you; I can’t stay.”

  “If you’re not staying, why did you come?”

  “I came to say goodbye.”

  Eduardo set down his wine and picked up a glass of limoncello, offering it to his son. Pietro made no move to take it.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I promised Cardinal Lucci I wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t care what you promised Lucci.”

  “I do.”

  They stood without speaking, listening to the faint sound of the waves breaking against the shore and the whisper of the wind through the umbrella pines.

  “Do you know why I want you to drink the limoncello?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s a rite of passage into the family business. I did it once. I won’t do it again.”

  “It’s more than that.” Eduardo put the glass down and held up his hands. The thick fingers were bent and knobby; a simple wedding band adorned his left ring finger. “My hands look like this because I dropped out of school to work in the sulfur mines. It was the only way I could earn enough money to eat.”

  He lowered his hands and used one to grab his wine glass.

  “I promised myself I would never allow my children and grandchildren to have to choose between eating and going to school. When I see you drink the limoncello, I know you and your children will never have to make that choice.”

  The eagle screamed, loud and shrill. In the distance, its mate responded, or perhaps it was just an echo off the limestone bluffs.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes.”

  Eduardo scowled, a look that fit his countenance well. “You’re too young to understand. When you’re old like me, then you’ll realize what you passed up.”

  Pietro turned to go, accidentally bumping into the wicker table as he did so.

  “It’s never too late to change your mind. I’ll always be here for you.”

  He walked off the porch, taking one last look back at his father. Eduardo was standing in the same spot in which Pietro had found him, staring in the same direction. Behind him, on the table, one of the glasses had tipped over, seeping sweet and sticky liquid into a yellow pool on the tray.

  Fifty-One

  “Mass is ended. Go in peace.”

  It was a sentiment with which Marco concurred, even if he wasn’t sure he would ever find peace again. There were moments, certainly, like now, when all he could hear was the pope’s smooth baritone as he said the Eucharistic prayer and all he could smell was the cloying reek of incense, when the harsh report of gunshots and the velvety stink of blood vacated his mind, but they never lasted very long, the vivid memories returning whenever there was nothing else to distract him.

  The pope dismissed the small congregation, consisting mainly of maids, gardeners, and other members of the staff at Castel Gandolfo, and stood next to Marco as he watched them file out. When the last of the mass attendees had dipped their fingers into the font of holy water, made a hasty sign of the cross and exited the chapel, he waved for Marco to follow him and strode off. Passing by the large baroque cross Bernini had carved for Pope Alexander VII in 1650, he weaved through an open marble archway made by the same sculptor and stopped in front of the door to his private study, which was the only room in the entire Apostolic Palace in which Marco had not set foot. He opened the door, allowing Marco inside, and then slipped in behind him and closed the door, using the same skeleton key to lock it.

  The study was not a large room. It consisted of two long walls adorned by murals and a short wall on the opposite end that was hidden by the bulk of a huge mahogany desk. Tall spires shot upward from the back of the desk, giving it the appearance of a cathedral. The pope gestured for Marco to sit down in the chair in front of it.

  “Thanks for coming down from Monterosso, Marco.”

  “It’s good to be here, Holiness.”

  Marco had seen the pope after returning from Austria, meeting him in a rectory overlooking the city of Florence so that he could tell him what had happened in Salzburg. The pope had listened quietly for the most part, asking only a few questions, most of those relating to Marco’s welfare and how Elena was doing. When the invite to Castel Gandolfo had come, Marco had taken it as a sign that the pontiff harbored no hard feelings about him skulking off to Austria behind his back.

  “Will you be staying long?”

  “Just overnight, I’m afraid.”

  “Then I will ask you now.”

  “Ask me what, Holiness?”

  The pope paced back and forth in front of a large mural depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a replica of Michelangelo’s Temptation and Expulsion frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the first depicting Adam and Eve being tempted by the snake with a woman’s head—Marco thought she looked a lot like Sarah—and the second picturing them being expelled, ashamed, and in anguish, after eating the forbidden fruit.

  “I want you to do something for me.”

  Marco waited for the pope’s request, but he didn’t speak, continuing to pace back and forth, back and forth, walking from Temptation to Expulsion and then Expulsion to Temptation, the human journey in a microcosm, until at last he stopped in front of the mahogany desk.

  “Let me show you something.”

  Producing another key from the depths of his flowing purple robes, he unlocked the lower right-hand drawer and extracted a document contained in a plastic bag, setting it down on the desk.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  Marco recognized the lead bulla stamped with the Ring of the Fisherman. “Yes, it’s a papal bull.”

  “Read it, please, aloud.”

  Marco switched on the desk lamp, which, in contrast to everything else in the study, was modern and functionally designed. He remembered seeing a similar lamp at IKEA. Starting at the top, where the words ‘John Paul III’ began the document, he read it through, not stopping until he reached the seal at the bottom. In between, with simple and direct wording and in the pope’s own cursive, Pope John Paul III declared that birth control and homosexuality were no longer sins, and that women and married persons of either sex would no longer be barred from the priesthood, summarily reversing the Church’s long-standing doctrine on these issues.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m not sure I know what to say.”

  The pope grabbed the document, holding it gingerly by the loose end of plastic at the top, and deposited it back in the drawer.

  “My reaction was quite the same.”

  “Your reaction, Holiness?”

  “Yes, when I found it on my desk after you saved my life in Vatican City.”

  “You didn’t write this bull?”

  The pope removed his white zucchetto, adjusted the chamois liner, and placed it back on top of his tight gray curls. “No, but it is an amazing forgery, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I fear we have an even greater enemy than the men who brandished guns against us.”

  He walked over to the far side of the room, gazing at the mural there depicting the
Crusaders defending the Holy Land against the Saracens.

  “I fear we have an enemy in our midst.”

  He walked back to the desk and removed several other items from the drawer, dumping a bag of white powder and a stack of pornographic magazines on the desktop.

  “If you had not saved my life in Piazza San Pietro, they would have come in here to clean out my study and found these as well.” He held Marco in his gaze. “You see, Marco, they didn’t want to just kill me; they wanted to discredit me, so that another reformer pope doesn’t rise from my ashes.”

  He returned the items to his drawer, locked it, and put the key back inside his robes.

  “It’s ironic, because I have considered doing all the things decreed in this fake papal bull, but I held back because of the Curia’s extreme resistance to such measures. The Church is weak enough; I’m not sure we would survive it. At best, it would lead to discord that would make the Great Schism seem like a petty squabble.”

  In 1054, a succession of theological disputes and political differences had led to a break in the communion of what were now the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, which had remained separate since that day.

  “I want to unify the Catholic Church, not further divide it. So I have never said anything about these issues. But now I have half a mind to walk down to the Holy Office and just drop that document on Cardinal Garcia’s desk.”

  It was well known that Cardinal Garcia, the chief executive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, despised the pope; Marco got the impression that the feeling was mutual.

  “Just to see the look on his face might be worth the trouble it would cause.”

  The pope shuffled over to an armchair the color of burnished bronze, which creaked in protest as he settled into it.

  “I’m sorry to burden you, Father Marco, I really am, but I wanted to tell someone about this. And frankly, I’m not sure who else I can trust.”

  “What about Cardinal Lucci?”

  “What about him?”

  “You can trust him, can’t you?”

  The pope leaned back in his chair to consider the question.

  “Cardinal Lucci was one of the favorites prior to the last papal conclave, and he made no secret about being disappointed with my election.”

  “Why did you appoint him to the Secretariat, then?”

  “He is an excellent statesman; I will give him that. But that wasn’t the reason I gave him the job.”

  The pope paused, resting his chin on his clasped hands as he searched for the right words.

  “I gave him the job because I believe in keeping my friends close, but my enemies closer.”

  “Is it often that the servant of the servants of God quotes from The Art of War?”

  “More often than you would think.”

  He got up and walked over to the desk, using a lighter to fire up the incense burner that sat there. When the sweet aroma of sandalwood had permeated the air, he sat down again.

  “But to be fair, Cardinal Lucci has served us all well. And I had started to learn to trust him until …”

  “Until?”

  “Until I found the items I just showed you.”

  The pope produced the key he had been using to open the doors and tossed it to Marco.

  “There are only three keys to these apartments. I have this one with me at all times; Sister Margarita, the head of the housekeepers, has the second one, and a legion of archangels couldn’t take it from her; Cardinal Lucci is in charge of the third.”

  The smell of sandalwood thickened in the stagnant air. The Apostolic Palace had been retrofitted with air conditioner many years ago, but the pope refused to use it in his study and in many other rooms, despite the clamoring of the palace’s curator, who was concerned about the effect of the excessive heat on its many paintings and murals.

  “Giampaolo Benedetto is accountable for much of what happened, yes, but he is not solely accountable. He had help from within our ranks, and I want to know from whom. You will be my eyes and my ears.”

  It seemed like more of an order than a request, but then again, Marco wasn’t going to say no, and they both knew it.

  “Am I not going back to Monterosso, Holiness?”

  “Yes, you are, but I am certain that opportunities will arise in the future, perhaps the very near future. When they do, I want you to be ready.”

  The pope fixed Marco with his large brown eyes.

  “Will you be ready?”

  Marco nodded.

  “That’s good, because the stakes are higher than ever. The enemy has nuclear weapons, and we have to find them before they are used against us. Which brings me to my last question. When you think back to your trip to Salzburg, is there anything that might shed light on the issue of help from within the Holy See?”

  It was a question Marco had spent time considering, especially when Father DiPietro, an inveterate conspiracy theorist, had come to visit him at the rectory and insinuated the same thing.

  “There was one thing, Holiness.”

  “Yes?”

  “In the garage at Haus Adler, there were two maintenance trucks from the Vatican’s fleet.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, they both had the crossed silver and gold keys emblem, and the tags both started with SCV.”

  “Did you mention this to Cardinal Lucci?”

  “Of course. He said he would look into it.”

  “He told me the same thing when I asked him if he thought Benedetto had inside help.”

  “And did he look into it?”

  “Not in the two weeks I gave him; he claimed—and with some justification—that he had been busy with other matters. I insisted he delegate the task, and he did, to Cardinal Scarletti, in early August.”

  The pope got up stiffly and started to pace again, this time with a decidedly unsteady gait. It was common knowledge that he had a badly arthritic hip that he refused to have replaced; he had taken to getting around with the long staff he had brought back from Nigeria.

  “Scarletti made some enquiries, or so he said, but he didn’t get any further than Lucci in the end. But this business about the maintenance trucks is interesting.”

  “Why couldn’t Benedetto have obtained them for the prince?”

  The pope got a chuckle out of this.

  “You haven’t met Cardinal Kowalcyzk, the head of the Department of Technical Services. He hates Benedetto as much as he hates the devil himself, perhaps more. The last interaction they had was a shouting match several months ago that almost ended up as a boxing match; let me assure you, Kowalcyzk didn’t lend a pair of his precious trucks to Benedetto. Those trucks are proof that Benedetto did have help.”

  Marco inspected the key one last time, as if close scrutiny might discover a clue engraved into the metal, then stood up and walked over to the pope, handing it back.

  “I should tell you that Cardinal Lucci is also friendly with Cardinal Kowalcyzk.”

  Marco stared at the pontiff, but his round face was impassive.

  “It doesn’t make any sense, Holiness. If Cardinal Lucci wanted to kill you, why did he go to all that trouble to assassinate the prince in Austria?”

  “Let’s assume for a minute that Lucci is the traitor, that he wants to kill me because he disagrees with everything I have said and done … because he wants to be pope himself … because he believes deep down that I am destroying the Catholic Church to which he has dedicated his life.”

  Marco felt a chill settle in his spine; perhaps the air conditioner had been switched on?

  “As Secretary of State, Lucci worked with Benedetto all the time; he would be aware of the man’s hatred of me, and possibly also know about his dire financial situation. Again, as Secretary of State, with full responsibility for our relationship with the Middle East, he would be cognizant of Prince Kamal el-Rayad and his desire to avenge his ancestor and fulfill his destiny to destroy Vatican City.”

  The pope looked up fr
om the floor and gazed at Marco instead.

  “Do you understand what I am saying?”

  Marco nodded, understanding very well; he grabbed a tissue from the box on the desk and wiped away the cold sweat from his face.

  “I am sure Lucci—or whoever il traditore is—did not intend for the prince to actually destroy Vatican City, but when five vanloads of plastic explosives were found in that warehouse, he realized he had made a grave error.

  “And that, Marco, explains why the traitor went to all the trouble of killing the prince in Austria.”

  Fifty-Two

  Vincenzo Lucci had been living inside the walls of Vatican City for over a decade. It was rumored there wasn’t one square meter inside the forty-four hectares of grounds that hadn’t been trod over by his Sicilian sandals. But it was a rumor without merit—although Lucci had never done anything to put it to rest. In truth, there were several areas he had never visited, most due to happenstance and the vastness of the area inside the ancient walls, but only one he had purposely avoided.

  He slipped out of the side door of the Holy Office, where he had been having yet another meeting with Cardinal Garcia, and started working his way up Vatican Hill. The spot he had intentionally never set foot on was an intimate corner of a tiny garden attached to the Ethiopian College, a spot widely regarded as the current pope’s favorite place to reflect and pray—which was the sole reason Lucci chose never to go there.

  He shivered in the growing breeze that hinted of boxwood and a storm blowing in from the Tyrrhenian Sea, and buttoned his black overcoat as he climbed toward the monument to St. Peter that rose into the gray September sky in front of him. He turned on to the Via dell’Osservatorio and walked past an Australian bunya tree. One of its massive pine cones lay on the cobbled path, and he gave it a swift kick, sending it flying into the air. A gust of wind caught it and sent it tumbling into the gardens of exotic plants adorning the rock that flanked the street. At the top of the road, he stopped in front of the building Pope Pius XI had commissioned to further the ecclesiastical studies of seminarians from Ethiopia. He had nothing against the place, per se, but its special significance to Pope John Paul III repelled him like the statue of the owl repelled the pigeons from roosting on its roof.