New Rome Rising

by Rene Fomby

  “You’d think so. And I’m pretty sure they’re looking into it, privately. But the Church has never been all that interested in getting to the truth of anything, and they’ve been especially good about at not sharing any unflattering information with the outside world, whatever it might be. Look at how they’ve moved heaven and earth to try and cover up the child molestation issue. If they’re willing to look the other way about all that, just because it’s a public relations problem, why would you think they’d want to blow the lid off the innermost secrets of the papacy itself?”

  She paused to pull her tablet out of her purse, turning it on and handing it to Mehmed. “Check this out. From what I read on the way down here, at least ten popes have been assassinated over the years. And that’s just the ones we know about, the ones that weren’t covered up. There’s an awful lot of evidence that pope John Paul I was murdered back in the seventies, just thirty-three days into his papacy. The guy was found sitting up in his bed, his reading light still on and his reading glasses perched atop his nose, with the documents he was examining the night before still clutched in his hands. The Vatican doctor was called in and immediately announced that the cause of death was a heart attack—without making any effort at all to actually examine the body—and then he sent the body off to be embalmed. Afterward, the Vatican proceeded to release a long series of incorrect and contradictory statements about the circumstances surrounding John Paul’s death, and then finally reassigned everyone who had shared the papal apartment with the pope to unknown locations elsewhere in Europe. Do you really think he could have had a massive heart attack and still be sitting there peacefully in bed, reading? And all that time not even putting down the papers he was holding in his hands?”

  “Hmm, yeah. Sure makes one wonder.” Mehmed had finished skimming through the article and handed the tablet back.

  “And get this, within the two months both before and after John Paul’s death, eight other liberal church leaders also met their Maker under circumstances consistent with being poisoned. Including his predecessor, pope Paul VI.”

  “So what’s happening now? What is the Church saying about this one?”

  “They’ve put a complete lid on any news. The Swiss Guard has sealed up the entire area around the papal apartments. I walked past some of them on my way over here, and I swear every one of them kept a sharp eye on my every movement the whole time.”

  Mehmed studied his hands for a moment. “Okay, the pope is dead, nothing we can do about that. So where does that leave us?”

  “Gavin thinks we need to slap a lid on the Project for now, just to be safe. Until we can get a good handle on who the next pope is going to be, and whether he’s going to honor our standing agreement.”

  “Right.” Mehmed reached into the file drawer of his desk and retrieved a bright red folder. “And Gavin being Gavin, he already has a contingency plan drawn up for just this occasion.” He opened the folder and pulled out a single sheet of paper, pushing it across the desk toward Sam. “There’s a lot more to this, of course, but here’s the top-level outline.”

  Sam picked up the sheet of paper and quickly scanned its contents. “I’ve been paying your salary all this time?” she asked incredulously. “Good to know, I guess, even if the news is a little on the tardy side.”

  “Sam, if that’s a problem—”

  “No, no, it actually makes a whole lot of sense, now that I think about it. So, if I’ve got this right, my daughter’s trust has been bankrolling all of the costs of the Project, other than any rent on the laboratory, which the Vatican is just giving us for free. That way, nothing you’re doing shows up on any accounting ledgers at the Vatican, so there’s nothing to draw attention to what you’re actually up to down here.”

  “And, officially, the Project is just a routine outgrowth of the work Dr. Hall is doing down in Stabiae,” Mehmed added. “I’m just processing some ancient Roman amphorae he found buried under all the volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Interesting from a historical point of view, but ultimately of no real value to the Church.”

  “So then that’s our cover, Mehmed. And if anyone raises any red flags in the near future, we simply agree to go our separate ways, and relocate the amphorae to another laboratory.”

  “Right. Unless something major changes in the meantime, I think Gavin’s plan will work. As far as we’re concerned, really, nothing has changed. It’s just business as usual.”

  Sam pointed toward his computer. “Okay, now that that’s settled, why don’t you show me some of what you’ve found out from the first amphora …”

  9

  Rabat

  Sam had considered calling Gavin during her train ride back to Grosseto from Rome, but one look around the crowded railcar changed her mind. The last thing she needed right now was to discuss details of the pope’s death surrounded by a trainload of eager ears. Instead she waited until she was pulling out onto the SS223 at the edge of Grosseto, using her cell phone in handsfree mode.

  Gavin’s cell phone buzzed next to his keyboard as he was working late at the office, waiting for Sam’s call and catching up on the latest dispatches from Washington. He snatched it up. “Sam! I’ve been sitting here restlessly all afternoon waiting to hear what you found out. Did you manage to hook up with Mehmed?”

  “I did. But you’d be amazed at the level of security they’ve thrown up overnight at the Vatican. Undercover Swiss Guards everywhere. I’m surprised they let me through.”

  “I’m not. The badge I ordered for you has a clearance level barely lower than the pope himself. And that’s a good thing, too. Things have really heated up over there. In fact, I’m surprised they’re letting any sunshine at all slip past the cover they’ve thrown up. But hey, we can talk about all that a little later. Are you in a secure place right now?”

  “Yeah, I’m on the road back to Siena. And I’m already late getting back home before Maddie’s bedtime, so I can take things a little slower than I did earlier today. I’ve got the top down, the windows up and the heater blasting, enjoying the drive.”

  “Good to hear. But first, watch what you say, anyway. You’re on an open cell phone …”

  “Gotcha. Don’t trust anyone over thirty. Look both ways before crossing. Don’t forget to put on clean underwear.”

  “Look, make fun all you want, but remember, this is my line of business. If the FBI can listen in on private conversations, don’t think you’re in any way immune to all that. There are apparently some pretty major plays afoot right now, by some pretty major players. So let’s keep any details on the down low for the moment, okay?”

  “I hear ya,” Sam agreed. “But I think we’re okay, here. This phone has all the latest security tech, and should be able to pick up on any attempted eavesdropping. Getting back to what we were discussing, though, I managed to make it down to Mehmed’s lab in the basement warehouse where the Church stores all the good stuff. He was completely in the dark about what was happening just then literally right above his head, so I filled him in on what little I know. Which isn’t much, just the usual conspiracy rumors on the Internet that I picked up on my tablet during the train ride south.”

  “Right. And did you come to any conclusions?” Gavin asked.

  “Yeah, Mehmed and I looked over your contingency plan for the new pope, and it seems pretty air tight. I couldn’t find a single thing I disagreed with. You did a great job on that.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, remember what they say, no battle plan, no matter how well conceived, ever survives first contact with the enemy. So we’ll have to keep a close watch on things out there, just in case.”

  “Enemy? You think the Vatican might actually be our enemy now?” Sam asked, suddenly concerned.

  Gavin hesitated, considering just how much he should share with her. Finally, though, given how much was ultimately at stake, and given the fact that she was now fully embedded in the middle of it all, he decided to lay it all out on the line for her. “Look, Sam, I
’ve been brought into the inside skinny on our government’s private assessments of what’s really going on behind the Vatican smokescreen. I guess someone figured out that my special assignment at the Vatican might wind up being a useful asset at some point down the road. Anyway, it’s all top secret at this point, so—”

  “Sure, no, I get it, Gavin. You have to keep certain things close to the vest—”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying, Sam. What I mean is, what I’m about to tell you has to remain strictly between you and me, okay? Not even Mehmed for the time being. I’m breaking more than a few federal laws, here, but the Project has to take precedence over Uncle Sam’s interests in this case. And it looks like we may be wading into a sticky situation inside the Church where we need to consider even our closest friends as potential threats. And I’m talking life and death kind of threats.”

  “Like Akko life and death?” she asked, remembering the car bombing that she and Mehmed had survived by the narrowest of margins.

  “Exactly. And I think we need to start with not trusting our own phone lines and the Internet, regardless of how high tech you think it is. Look, you know that little burner phone I gave you last month?”

  “Sure. I’ve got it in the bottom of my purse, wrapped up in an old scarf.”

  “Good. Find someplace safe to pull over, then call me back on the number I have programmed into it. There should be just one contact, under the name Harley.”

  “Harley?” Sam asked. “What’s that all about?”

  “Long story. I’ll fill you in sometime when things are a little less chaotic. Just give me a buzz when you’re safe. I remember what you’re like on those narrow Italian roads with that flashy red sports car of yours. Handsfree is bad enough—and you have a certain reputation for attracting danger, you know.”

  Sam laughed. “That’s putting it mildly. Okay, I’ll get back to you in a few minutes.”

  Gavin hung up, and, glancing around the office at the handful of people still bent over their desks at the Embassy, decided to grab his own burner phone and head out for a short but very private stroll through the bustling streets of Rabat.

  ※

  Striding past a news stand where he often picked up day-old copies of the London Times on his way into work, Gavin turned right onto the Rue Bani Meskin, heading toward La Ceinture Verte, the Green Belt park at the heart of Rabat. At this time of day, it was reliably almost deserted, particularly by English speakers, so he could count on an extra measure of privacy for his conversation with Sam. His phone began to buzz just as he got to the Nasr Mosque, so he tucked in beside a clump of trees near the front entrance.

  “Sam, are you in a safe place to talk?”

  “Yeah. Snug as a bug in a rug. So, what do you know about the pope?”

  “Okay, the bottom line is, Washington thinks he was murdered.”

  “Like John Paul the First,” Sam suggested.

  “Hmm, yeah, pretty much a carbon copy of what happened to John Paul. The Vatican’s playing it as a heart attack, but as you know, people have heart attacks all the time, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they at least make it to the hospital. So here you’ve got a perfectly healthy pope, with an emergency call button a foot away, and he just goes home to God peacefully in his sleep? That just doesn’t pass the smell test. Especially since the Vatican spin doctors are clearly lying through their teeth about what they really found when they entered the papal apartment the next morning.”

  “Let me guess. He wasn’t lying peacefully in bed, with his glasses and teeth sitting on the night stand beside him.”

  “No. In fact, according to our sources, the end was anything but peaceful.” Gavin paused for a moment to look around to make sure he wasn’t attracting attention, but the street was almost deserted. “But get this, Sam. Evidently, there was a glass of milk on the bed stand, almost empty. So, the normal protocol would have been to preserve the scene, and have the milk tested for contaminants. Poison, right?”

  “Are you telling me—”

  “The first thing the Vatican doctor did was to dump out the rest of the milk into a bathroom sink and then rinse out the glass. Destroying any possible proof that the pope had been poisoned.”

  “Whoa. That’s major. So you think the doctor was in on it? Maybe he was the one who provided the poison in the first place,” Sam suggested. “After all, who would have better access to both the pharmacy and the pope?”

  Gavin shook his head, a motion lost on Sam over the phone line. “A possibility we can’t ignore, but not all that likely. Much more likely there’s a standing protocol for shutting down any possible investigation into why a pope has died. The king is dead, long live the new king, you know?”

  “But wouldn’t the police have a say in that? Maybe arrest the doctor and anyone else who could be pulling his strings for obstruction of justice?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah, but you’re talking Vatican police, not Roman. As you well know, Rome has no jurisdiction over what happens inside the Vatican walls, Sam. Their country, their rules. And they’ve been playing the whole deception game for almost two thousand years now, so they’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

  “But, like Mehmed says, if they’ve got someone running around the Vatican killing popes, for God’s sake, you’d think they’d want to know who the hell it is. We’re not talking your run-of-the-mill murder here. It’s the ding dang pope!”

  “Who’s one of the most carefully guarded people on the entire planet,” Gavin pointed out. “In fact, he’s the last absolute monarch left on that planet, a man surrounded by a security team that makes the Secret Service look like amateurs. And yet someone slipped past them. You can see the problem.”

  “It had to be an insider. Someone with intimate access to the pope—”

  “Someone with tremendous power and authority of his own. And remember, once you open up that little Pandora’s box of two thousand years of well-kept Catholic secrets, where does it ever stop? The Catholic Church’s authority over its parishioners is based almost solely upon a presumption of papal infallibility, of purity. That’s why the pope wears white. Throw a little dirt on those robes, coat them with even the smallest stain of day-to-day human existence, and what happens to the illusion? What happens when you pull back the curtain on the mighty Wizard of Oz?”

  “But he wasn’t like that,” Sam argued. “If anything, he was all about returning humility and fallibility to the church.”

  The front doors to the mosque had opened, and people were starting to stream out. A good time to end the call. “But now he’s dead.” Gavin shifted the phone to his right hand, turning away from the gathering crowd. “You know, Sam, as I recall from my kindergarten Bible classes, Jesus himself was crucified partly because he confronted the money changers in the Temple. It is never a good idea to be a disruptive force, particularly when you’re going up against two thousand years of inertia heading the opposite way. Jesus notwithstanding, the meek almost always get the short end of the stick. Look, I gotta go, but keep the burner phone handy. I’ll call you if I get any more information. And for now, at least, I think it might be a wise idea to ignore all the money changers and keep a low profile yourself.”

  “I’m one hundred percent with you on that, Gavin. For the time being, we’ll just let the money ride. Not like we have many other alternatives.”

  “Roger that, Sam. Oh, and by the way, thanks for blowing up a play date with your daughter to check in on Mehmed. With the Vatican putting up dense smoke screens all around their walls, it’s nice to have someone we can trust keeping watch inside those same walls.”

  “Yeah, well, unfortunately Mehmed’s about as naive as they come about this sort of thing. He’s laser focused on the Project, and not much else matters. But at the very least he gives us a legitimate reason to pass through the palace gates.”

  “And you know I hit my knees every night to thank God for that. If it wasn’t for what you did, getting me assigned to the Project, I’d p
robably be standing in an unemployment line somewhere in Cleveland right about now. Boy, I thought getting banished to Morocco was bad, but after Boucher disappeared, I think a posting to Antarctica was my next great hope short of being fired.”

  Sam laughed. “Well, Gavin, I guess the FBI is a firm believer in the mushroom school of management.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  “They keep you in the dark, feed you lots of shit, and in the end they can you.”

  “That’s about right, Sam,” Gavin chuckled. “That’s pretty much the way it is.”

  ※

  After hanging up with Sam, Gavin debated heading back into the office. But it was already getting pretty late, and other than solitaire he had very little drawing him back to his desk, so he turned to head home instead. He was just passing the entrance to La Ceinture Verte when his regular cell phone rang. He turned left and strode briskly into the privacy of the park as he answered the call. Glancing down, he saw the caller ID—Andrea Patterson.

  “Andy, oh my God! I’ve been worried sick about you. Where have you been? Why haven’t you called?”

  “Uh, Agent Larson, this isn’t Andrea,” said a gruff voice on the other end. “My name is Bob Sanders. I’m her boss, I suppose, although it’s kinda hard to imagine Andy ever having a boss.” Gavin could hear a nervous kind of chuckle on the other end. “Anyway, I was just going through some things at her desk, so I’m calling you from there.”

  Gavin stopped dead in his tracks. Andy’s boss going through her desk? “Is everything okay, Mr. Sanders? She’s not in any trouble, is she?”

  “Well, that’s a question I can’t really answer at the moment. Look, are you in a secure place? Nobody listening in?”

  Gavin thought about it. “No, but this call is in the clear, so if what we need to talk about is at all sensitive, I have an encrypted phone not ten minutes away. Okay if I call you back on that?”

  “Sure thing. And just use this number. It’s set up for encryption.”