The Canary List: A Novel

by Sigmund Brouwer

  She saw him flinch, as if she’d physically jabbed him, and she caught the hurt, trapped animal look in his eyes. Even when his shoulders began to shake, she couldn’t comprehend that he was beginning to weep, until the sobs became audible.

  It took him awhile to compose himself. The entire time, Madelyne held both his hands in hers but didn’t say anything.

  Some things you never get past.

  Tears were still streaming down his cheeks, but he managed to speak clearly.

  “I want to tell you something. I haven’t told anyone else. Not even Julie, because it hurts too much. The last words that Ashley said to me were, ‘Daddy, don’t cry. It’s okay. I get to go to heaven. I’ll see you there. Right? Daddy?’ ”

  She didn’t remove her hands from his.

  “I lied to her,” Crockett said. “I told her yes, that Daddy will see her in heaven. That’s what a daddy’s supposed to say when his little girl is slipping away.”

  Some things you never get past.

  “Where I’m going with this,” Crockett said, using the top of his shoulder to wipe away tears, “is that I need to thank you. For the first time, I’m thinking that maybe I didn’t lie to my little girl. It’s hard not to believe in demons at this point. It gets me thinking about what you said. If demons exist, then God must exist. Maybe dying is not the end of it. Maybe I’ll get to see my little girl again.”

  Seventy-Eight

  ather O’Hare ducked his head as he stepped through the doorway of the private jet. He saw Crockett on a couch, holding a copy of USA Today.

  Crockett glanced at his watch. He’d been expecting Jaimie and Madelyne.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll leave on time,” O’Hare said. “You won’t leave without Jaimie and Madelyne. Hard habit to break. Flying commercial, you think everything is on a schedule. I just need five minutes with you.”

  There was another couch at the back of the jet. No scrimping here.

  O’Hare sat, and then pointed at Crockett’s newspaper. “Enjoying the headline?”

  The pope’s death dominated the front page, but the particular headline that O’Hare referred to was the one about Cardinal Ricci’s announcement that health reasons precluded him from any consideration of the papacy.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Crockett said. “I’m just an American tourist. A free man. Happy to go home and see my kid and enjoy my summer. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “Excellent. Excellent.” O’Hare really hoped this was true. Crockett had made his decision to keep silent. But O’Hare wasn’t certain himself if Entity intended to honor the offer, or if the organization was running a bluff, with the intent to remove Crockett if he had decided to go to the L.A. Times. Either way, O’Hare wanted to add some insurance.

  “I’m here,” O’Hare gave a significant pause, “because I owe you the truth. With Cardinal Ricci effectively out of the way, I am able to set your mind at ease about demons. In that video, Jaimie was not with the pope.”

  Crockett frowned, an expression of total bewilderment that O’Hare found encouraging.

  “It wasn’t difficult to set up the scene. A hospital room and an actor made up to look like the pope. Phenomenal, actually, the latex mask. Made from an impression of the face of the real pope. The impression was taken, of course, while the pope was in his coma. That exorcism was elaborately acted out. Think of it as a Hollywood scene, done in one take. Not difficult at all to accomplish.”

  Crockett’s frown deepened.

  “Perhaps, though, you should hear my story from the beginning,” O’Hare said. “Which started, sadly enough, with a slow and gradual erosion of my own faith. It came to the point that I no longer wanted to be a priest. Exorcisms? As Vivaldo said, superstition. The rituals are merely placebos for those who want to blame their ills on a third party. The sad thing, Mr. Grey, is once you no longer embrace the faith—well, you still need a business. The only business I knew was Vatican business. Some men leave the cloth because they can no longer embrace celibacy. I don’t have those needs. I’m content with the life of a man of the cloth, just not the beliefs of a man of the cloth. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes. No. This is a lot to track. All I wanted to do was sit and read the paper until I could watch Italy disappear below me.”

  “How best to secure a good position within the church? The answer was plain. Ensure that the new pope favored me. Six months ago, it was impossible to choose a winner. What helped was that first phone call from Dr. Madelyne Mackenzie, wondering if I, as chief exorcist, knew of anyone with the ability to detect demons. I’m glad I resisted my first temptation to dismiss her. As I learned more about her own background, I also learned about Cardinal Saxon. I brought what I knew not to Ricci first, but to Vivaldo, who was both disturbed and happy to have this information about one of his rivals. Extremely disturbed, of course, to discover a cardinal like this among us, and equally disturbed at the possibility that this man—a Satanist in his deluded beliefs—might actually become pope. You can understand, Mr. Grey, how important it was to find a way to bury this problem completely. Vivaldo and I coldly planned a way to take advantage of Saxon’s delusions. Dr. Mackenzie had given us the seeds of an idea. Indeed, what if a girl could detect demons? Thus began an elaborate con job that drew three people together. Saxon, Mackenzie, and the girl. Vivaldo authorized Entity to do as I needed, including having Richard Leakey pretend to work with Saxon. You saw the results. It was important to get rid of Saxon, and we succeeded in that. Having a Satanist as the next pope could have destroyed the church.”

  “But—”

  “Mr. Grey, that was the original intent, but it evolved. Yes, the primary purpose was to remove Saxon. But we—Vivaldo and I—saw that this con job might also serve a secondary purpose. If we could make Saxon believe in the existence of a canary list, then perhaps, too, we could convince Cardinal Ricci. Once we realized this, we first only intended to use it to discredit Ricci in the eyes of the Sacred College of Cardinals. If Ricci sounded the alarm about a so-called list, Vivaldo would benefit greatly. But then we recognized the plan could actually go one step further, in convincing Ricci that the danger was so great, only his noble self-sacrifice would save the church from a demon-possessed pope.”

  “Hang on,” Crockett said. “Just so I’m clear on this. You and Vivaldo were working together?”

  “Masterful, wasn’t it? You saw how Vivaldo pretended outrage, accusing Ricci of trying to make him look a fool by reacting to the danger of demons. How could Ricci ever suspect that Vivaldo was the one setting up a game, using the threat of demons to convince Ricci to give up the papacy? The more skeptical of demons Vivaldo appeared to be, the more Ricci would try to prove it. When all along, Vivaldo’s secret goal was to utterly convince Ricci the danger was real. All of this has been carefully manipulated, and your role proved very helpful in disguising that it was simply a scam. A Machiavellian con job, designed for only one person. Cardinal Vicar Eduardo Ricci.”

  “A con job.”

  “Think back, Mr. Grey. Every step was rigged. Hypnosis sessions with Jaimie to convince her that her own problems were demon problems. Forged documents planted all through the Vatican archives. When you became an accidental casualty, someone Saxon wanted out of the way, I began to work that to our advantage. Tell me … how much help did you get from our attorney, Sarah Rinker, as you began to uncover the genetic reports and genealogy searches? Wouldn’t you say she pointed you in the right direction to uncover the so-called evidence that Ricci would end up believing was real? Didn’t she point you to the hacker who uncovered this convenient information?”

  O’Hare watched Crockett’s face, seeing that Crockett’s mind must be whirling, seeing the puzzle pieces all tossed into the air again. O’Hare wasn’t going to give him much time to think.

  “And finding someone like Dr. Mackenzie, easily swayed to misdiagnose a child like Jaimie?” O’Hare continued. “Poor children. Both of them, each unaware they
were pawns in a complicated chess game.”

  “I’m trying to make sense of this,” Crockett said.

  “Then consider this. The expense and complication of running a scam like this is nothing compared to gaining the papacy. Ricci has no idea, of course, who I truly serve in these politics. Nor any idea of my reward. I will become Cardinal O’Hare within months of the election of Vivaldo as pope. What a wonderful retirement.” O’Hare crossed his arms and smiled wryly. “I’ll not end my days as a rum-soaked priest.”

  “Will Jaimie and Dr. Mackenzie ever find out?”

  “I doubt they’d believe you if you told them what you’ve just learned from me.”

  “So Jaimie and Dr. Mackenzie were not part of this con job?”

  “Never. For it to fool Ricci, they had to believe it as much as Ricci did.”

  “I won’t keep secrets from Dr. Mackenzie. I’ll tell her about this conversation.”

  “Will you? She’s at peace now, believing she’s conquered her demons. Saxon is dead. Do you want to take that away from her? Someday, she’ll have a chance to publish a paper. It won’t have details about the Vatican or the canary list, but it will link family trees with genetic sensitivity to electromagnetism and witchcraft. I think the paper will be quite believable, don’t you?”

  Crockett kept his stare fully on O’Hare, again his emotions obvious to O’Hare.

  “Don’t be too disappointed, Mr. Grey,” O’Hare said. “Much more has been done by other men to gain much less. Getting the ring of the papacy is far greater than becoming American president. Vivaldo will be declared infallible. He has the job for the rest of his life, with a billion people in his power. And I will always be his right-hand man.”

  “When we were lost in the catacombs,” Crockett said, “Jaimie used her sense of magnetism to find our way out.”

  O’Hare shook his head, smiling. “Lost? Hardly. While the apparent threat of our deaths helped convince Ricci this was a serious situation, we were never in danger. The three of you were told we had been taken into an unexplored area, but I’d been there many, many times to prepare for this. In the dark, always. I knew where we were. I guided Jaimie with subtle pressure until she found the door.”

  “Jaimie’s mother’s birth records? You had the wrong genealogy until I gave you her real mother’s name.”

  O’Hare chuckled. “Mr. Grey, it was almost enough to restore my faith in the existence of God! A good con job becomes a great con job when there are a few difficulties for the conned to overcome. If, at first, Jaimie’s genealogy had shown witches in her family tree, it would have been too perfect, too smooth, like someone had set it up. If you only understood how much work went into this. Almost from the beginning, Vivaldo and I were aware of the discrepancy in the hospital records. He and I agreed it would work better, at first, if the genealogy didn’t fit the profile we wanted to prove. And how the report would ring perfectly true to Ricci if it was a later discovery that showed how the genealogy fit. When it was you who exposed it for us, it was a wonderful bonus. Why else would I have let you be so involved in every moment of the last week? Once Ricci heard from you, not from me, about Jaimie’s real family tree, all of his remaining doubts disappeared. I owe you a huge debt of gratitude.”

  “Do you?” Crockett glanced at the headlines again. “I’m not so sure.”

  “You can be sure.”

  Crockett didn’t say anything for a while. O’Hare gave him time to stew.

  “Father O’Hare,” Crockett finally said. “You know I’m a skeptic by nature. So I’m wondering where the real lie lives. You’re telling me this was a con job. But that might be the smartest way to stop me from ever suggesting, beyond Vatican walls, that the papacy was held for the last few decades by a demon-possessed man.”

  O’Hare laughed again. “It would make for a terrific bestseller. Dan Brown tried convincing the world that Jesus married and had children.”

  “Careful, Father,” Crockett said. “Don’t oversell this. We both know that given the decades of sexual abuse and systematic cover-up by the pope during his time with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, more than a few influential people might give the accusation serious consideration. It would be interesting if Dr. Mackenzie extended the scope of her paper to give scientific and historical credibility to all of this, backed up by documents from the Vatican Archives. After all, the genetics and genealogy convinced Ricci.”

  “She wants to publish, true,” O’Hare said. “But Dr. Mackenzie wants to protect the church even more.”

  Crockett gave a grim smile. “Maybe that’s your real motivation for visiting me this morning. Protecting the church. I’m one of the few who know the truth behind the headlines. I’ve already told you I have no intention of ever speaking about this. Maybe you want more than my promise. If you can get me to believe that what I witnessed, revealing a demonic presence in the pope, was part of a Machiavellian con job, then you’ve succeeded. You’ve buried secrets about centuries of witchcraft in the Vatican and a long lost canary list. In essence, presenting it to me as a scam would be an elegant way to hide the real truth behind your lie.”

  O’Hare stood. Although there was no hint of untidiness about his appearance, he dusted off his cassock.

  “Come on, Mr. Grey,” O’Hare said. “Why would anyone want to believe in demons?”

  Afterword

  “When one speaks of ‘the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true—including these latest stories of violence and paedophilia.… Cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon.”

  —FATHER GABRIELE AMORTH, the Vatican’s Chief Exorcist, author of Memoirs of an Exorcist, as quoted in The Times of London, March 11, 2010, www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/

  article7056689.ece

  “The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI], the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere … More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy … The Vatican, moreover, has never made it mandatory for bishops around the world to report molesters to the civil authorities, or to alert parishes and communities where the abusive priests worked.”

  —The New York Times, July 1, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/world/europe/

  02pope.html

  “Most frighteningly for [Pope] John Paul [II], he had come up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chancelleries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan, which has entered the Sanctuary’—an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican. Besides, the incidence of Satanic pedophilia—rites and practices—was already documented among certain bishops and priests as widely dispersed as Turin, in Italy, and South Carolina, in the United States. The cultic acts of satanic pedophilia are considered by professionals to be the culmination of the Fallen Archangel’s rites.”

  —MALACHI MARTIN, the late Jesuit priest and former professor, the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, ex-Secretary of Cardinal Augustin Bea, quoted from the 1990 nonfiction bestseller, The Keys of This Blood

  Further Reading

  An overview of the workings of the Entity:

  Frattini, Eric. The Entity, Five Centuries of Secret Vatican Espionage. New York: St Martin’s, 2004.


  Reflecting the discussion in chapter 43, a more thorough treatment of twentieth century Vatican intrigue, including claims of Catholic Church links to murder, Nazi Germany, Mafia, and the evidence presented for the theory that John Paul I was assassinated:

  Jeffers, H. Paul. Dark Mysteries of the Vatican. New York: Kensington, 2010.

  On the politics and mechanics of papal election:

  Pham, John-Peter. Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

  Reflecting the skeptical view in chapter 35 toward demons and exorcisms:

  Wilkinson, Tracy. The Vatican’s Exorcists: Driving Out the Devil in the 21st Century. New York: Warner Books, 2007.

  Selected volumes on the modern Catholic Church that argue for the existence of demons and exorcisms:

  Baglio, Matt. The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist. New York: Doubleday, 2009.

  Amorth, Gabriele. An Exorcist Tells His Story. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999.

  Martin, Malachi. Hostage to the Devil, The Possession and Exorcism of Five Contemporary Americans. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

  On Satanism ceremonies in the Vatican:

  Martin, Malachi. The Keys of This Blood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

  Martin, Malachi. The Windswept House. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

  Final note:

  The state of “perfect possession” has been coined and described by the noted Catholic Church exorcist, the late Malachi Martin.