The Secret Cardinal

by Tom Grace

  “Beatings, rape, imprisonment, executions.” The pope’s voice trembled as he recited the litany of sins. “It is a war of faith against godlessness.”

  “Religious persecution is a way of life for people of many faiths in China,” Donoher continued, “and one reason so many Chinese Roman Catholics remain true to their faith is the bishop of Shanghai, Yin Daoming.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” Kilkenny admitted.

  “I’m not surprised,” Donoher said. “Bishop Yin is not widely known outside China, and he has been imprisoned almost as long as you’ve been alive. Yin was born into a Catholic family during the war, but after the Communist takeover, his religious education was conducted in secret. As an underground priest, Yin was instrumental in holding the Catholic community together during the Cultural Revolution. For his efforts, he became both a bishop and a target for Beijing. When the government was closing in on him, Yin was offered passage out of China. He refused to abandon his people and was eventually arrested and imprisoned. Bishop Yin was in the theater on the night of the fire. The government paraded him on stage and demanded that he renounce His Holiness and the Church of Rome.”

  “I take it Yin refused.”

  “You might say that his first sermon in nearly thirty years was a succinct expression of where he stood on the matter,” Donoher said with admiration. “Long live Christ the King. Long live the pope.”

  “Hwong told me the same thing.”

  “A profession of a faith that she and many others in China are willing to die for. Of the forty bishops in China loyal only to Rome, all are either in prison, under house arrest, or in hiding—and some have disappeared completely. Ironically, many of the bishops in the state church have at the same time quietly asked for and received the pope’s blessing before accepting their ordination. The tangled mess of church and state in China is simply a quagmire.”

  The pope had retreated into prayer as Donoher spoke. When the cardinal finished, he opened his eyes and placed a hand on Kilkenny’s shoulder.

  “There are two very important secrets that I now need to share with you. Can I trust you to keep them close to your heart?”

  “You can, Your Holiness,” Kilkenny replied earnestly.

  The hand on Kilkenny’s shoulder tightened, the pontiff’s grip surprisingly strong. The pope’s steely blue eyes locked with his, and Kilkenny sensed the true inner fire of this holy man.

  “Cardinal Donoher knows what he knows about the Church in China and elsewhere in the world because it is his duty to know. He is the head of the Vatican’s intelligence service.” The pope paused to take a breath and to let Kilkenny absorb the revelation. “Few people know that first secret, and up to this moment, only I have known the second. Yin Daoming is a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. I made him a cardinal in pectore,” the pope placed his other hand over his heart, “over twenty years ago.”

  “Nolan,” Donoher said gravely, “His Holiness has brought us into his deepest confidence regarding Yin Daoming. You can be certain that if this secret ever reached Beijing, it would be fatal.”

  “I will not endanger Cardinal Yin,” Kilkenny swore, his eyes still locked with the Holy Father’s.

  “I have revealed these things so that you may understand what is about to be asked of you, and to know that this difficult request comes from me.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Kilkenny asked without hesitation.

  “It is the wish of the Roman Catholic Church that Yin Daoming be free. I want you to help Cardinal Donoher devise a way to make this happen.”

  “I will find a way, Your Holiness.”

  The pope smiled as if a burden had been eased. He pulled his hand off Kilkenny’s shoulder and turned to face Donoher.

  “Cardinal, there is another matter we need to discuss. Our brother in Christ, Cardinal Mizzi, will reach his eightieth birthday in December. He has served the Church well, but I feel it is now time to relieve him of his last official post.”

  “A sad day for the Church,” Donoher agreed, “but he has earned a rest.”

  “The office of camerlengo is now yours.”

  Camerlengo . . . . If Kilkenny were not mistaken, as camerlengo, Donoher would assume control of the Vatican following the pope’s death until the installation of his successor. The position, an ancient and once-powerful title, held little power until that time, but elevated Donoher’s political standing in the Vatican considerably.

  “Your Holiness—” Donoher protested.

  The pope raised his hand to silence Donoher. “I understand your desire to maintain the illusion that you are not a powerful man, but the needs of the Church must come first.”

  Donoher nodded, acquiescing to the pope’s decision. “I pray that I will be worthy of this sacred trust.”

  FOLLOWING THEIR MEETING with the pope, Donoher led Kilkenny back to his quarters where they could talk privately. The cardinal ordered a simple meal and offered Kilkenny a bottle of Vernor’s from his refrigerator.

  “You can get this in Rome?” Kilkenny asked, amazed to see the regional soft drink so far from Michigan.

  “The cardinal in Detroit keeps my pantry stocked.” Donoher settled down in an old leather recliner and motioned Kilkenny toward the couch. “I can only imagine you are filled with questions.”

  “Vatican Intelligence?”

  Donoher laughed. “Sounds quite sinister when you say it that way, but it’s nothing of the kind. Contrary to what some fiction writers and conspiracy theorists would have you believe, the pope does not have the world’s most formidable spy organization at his beck and call. There was a time, back in the days of the papal states, when the pope had need of spies and armies, but not for over a century now. When I took over, Vatican Intelligence was an underfunded and understaffed minor office within the Vatican bureaucracy. Pope Leo tasked me with building an organization that could gather and analyze information effectively in this day and age.”

  “So you’re the pope’s spymaster?”

  “Far from it,” Donoher said with another laugh. “We’re more of a think tank than a Catholic CIA, and that’s why you’re here. I understand that during your time in the Navy, you garnered a reputation as someone who could properly plan something on the order of what His Holiness has asked of us. Which reminds me, I have something for you.”

  From a pocket inside his cassock, Donoher produced a small external hard drive.

  “What’s this?” Kilkenny asked as Donoher handed him the drive.

  “That is the fruit of Miss Hwong’s sacrifice this morning.”

  “But those men took what she had on her.”

  “That they did, and they returned to Beijing believing they had prevented the Vatican and the world from learning what truly happened inside that theater. What you hold there is a recording of that tragedy and a great deal more. I pray that it’s all you need to plan Yin’s liberation.”

  Kilkenny tasted the bile rising in the back of his throat. “You used her. She was nothing more than a decoy.”

  Donoher nodded slowly. “I grieve her death as much as you, more perhaps for the part I played in it. In the end, the decision was hers, and she felt the risk was critical to the deception.”

  “Was I part of that deception?”

  “You were an afterthought. I knew Hwong was placing herself in mortal danger and felt certain she would be attacked on her morning run. I crossed her path with yours in hope of improving the odds of her survival. I apologize for placing you at risk without your knowledge, but it was absolutely necessary.”

  Kilkenny stared at the hard drive, trying to imagine what information could be so valuable that acquiring it cost a human life.

  “If we now have the proof of what happened in the theater, why not announce it to the world and use international pressure to demand Yin’s release?”

  “As damning as the clip is, it provides us no leverage,” Donoher explained. “The international outrage that followed the Tiananmen Square mass
acre had no effect on the Chinese government. They won’t bow in this matter. Better we act as though we don’t know the truth to conceal our intentions. And when Yin is free, he can unveil the truth to the world.”

  5

  October 12

  Kilkenny carefully studied the holographic image of a building that looked like a long, nearly windowless block of concrete. The solitary wing of Chifeng Prison was part of a complex of buildings that housed a large population of inmates. These buildings comprised only a third of the structures on the prison grounds. The brickyard, where inmates were reformed through hellish hard labor, accounted for the remainder.

  “Display at two-hundred-meter radius,” Kilkenny said.

  The computer controlling the imaging chamber responded to Kilkenny’s voice and zoomed out to bring the rest of the penal facility and some of the surrounding countryside into view. The prison stood in the grasslands just north of the city whose name it shared. Also known as the Xinsheng Brickyard, the laogai’s kilns produced most of the masonry used by the nearby city of a half million people.

  The model, which appeared atop an imaging table six feet in diameter, revealed elements of Chifeng Prison at an extraordinarily fine level of detail. From local topography and roads to door swings and light switches—anything that could be gleaned from architectural drawings, satellite images, and even the recollections of released prisoners had been painstakingly assembled into a computer-generated simulation. Kilkenny could view the prison at day or night, study the patterns of guard patrols and deliveries, even watch stacks of bricks grow in time-lapse fashion, only to disappear into railcars every Thursday.

  After combing through the information gathered by Donoher’s people in China, Kilkenny found he lacked only two things: the location of Yin’s cell and a recent photograph of the man. Of the two images he had of Yin, one was a photograph taken in the early 1950s when Yin was a young man, and the other was a very grainy image culled from the Beijing video clip.

  Kilkenny stood braced against the hologram table, the palms of his hands pressed onto the thick black ring of rubber-coated steel that encircled the base of the imaging chamber, puzzling over how to safely breach the laogai’s security. At a nearby console of multi-screened Mac Pro computers sat Bill Grinelli, Kilkenny’s friend and MARC’s resident computer guru. Grin held a frothy cappuccino in one hand while the other danced across a keyboard, working his technological wizardry.

  A keen intellect and a mischievous sense of humor had earned Grin his nickname, and he wore the appellation as a badge of honor. A few years Kilkenny’s senior, Grin still viewed life with the youthful enthusiasm of a college freshman. What remained of his receding hair dangled from the back of his head in a brown-gray ponytail. The goatee that encircled his trademark smile grew down from his chin into an often-stroked point. On his forearm, Grin sported a tattoo of an impish elf seated on a crescent moon scattering pixie dust.

  Kilkenny had little trouble enlisting his friend’s aid in the effort to liberate Yin Daoming. Just one viewing of the Beijing video had put Grin on the next flight to Rome. He admitted a twinge of envy over Kilkenny’s private audience with the pope, despite the fact that his personal religious stance lay somewhere between lapsed Catholic and agnostic. The pair divided the work between them, with Kilkenny tackling operational planning while Grin dealt with technical issues.

  Grin’s only disappointment with the new project came when he discovered that Vatican Intelligence did not occupy space in any of the historic structures owned by the tiny nation. But what it lacked in dramatic views and Renaissance grandeur was more than balanced by the quality and dedication of its analysts and the tools the Vatican provided for them to do their job. The underground facility, located beneath the building that housed the Vatican Mosaic Studio and known as the catacombs by those who labored there, was both stylish and modern, and Kilkenny and Grin had the necessary space and equipment to do their work.

  “So, how are you coming?” Kilkenny asked.

  “I’ve tickled the laogai’s computer network as well as its link to the mother ship in Beijing, so I’m pretty sure we can keep them out of the loop when your team goes in. And if Donoher can provide me with a few people who speak Chinese like natives, I’m pretty sure I can wreak six kinds of havoc with their emergency responders. You asked for a smoke screen, and I think I can deliver.”

  “Well, at least one of us is making some progress.”

  “Still banging your head against the wall?” Grin asked.

  “With lumps to prove it. There are really only two ways to do this: Hard or soft. Going in hard means guns blazing and a lot of people ending up dead. And to take on a place this size and successfully pull off a snatch-and-grab, I basically need to turn a couple platoons of Chinese volunteers into commandos. On top of that are the twin problems of quietly moving that many armed men into position and then getting them out with Yin after all hell breaks loose.”

  “How do you think the pope would feel about killing in order to get Yin out of jail?”

  “His stance on war has been very consistent,” Kilkenny replied, “so I’m pretty sure he’d veto any plan that includes the words acceptable enemy losses.”

  “Got any soft ideas?”

  “I’m still toying with their regular delivery cycle, but part of the problem is that it is regular. Same guy drives up in the same truck at the same time every week. He knows the guards, and they know him.”

  “So if anything changes, the guards’ Spidey-senses start a-tingling.”

  “Soft is clearly the way to tackle this beast, but finding a vulnerability that we can exploit . . .” Kilkenny’s voice trailed off as he stared at the long prairie grasses surrounding the laogai. “If I can just figure out how to get Yin five hundred yards outside the perimeter, the odds of getting him all the way out jump to sixty percent. And they increase with every additional mile the team covers after that.”

  “If regular deliveries are a problem, what about irregular deliveries?” Grin asked. “They know the guy who makes the rice and gruel run, and the guy who picks up the bricks, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about prisoners?”

  “Those are scheduled as well,” Kilkenny said.

  “Most, but not all. According to the records, Yin’s last road trip wasn’t scheduled.”

  Kilkenny had read the report and realized that Grin was right. Yin’s trip to Beijing and back was a unique event and not a normal prisoner transfer. Suddenly Kilkenny found himself pondering how to manufacture an event that would allow movement in and out of the prison without arousing suspicion.

  “Did you ever see Troy?” Kilkenny asked.

  “The movie, or the suburb of Detroit?” Grin asked with a straight face.

  “The movie,” Kilkenny replied, ignoring the bait.

  “The book was better, but I read it in the original Greek,” Grin remarked without a hint of braggadocio.

  “The Trojans accepted the horse from the Achaeans because they believed it was a peace offering. We have to give the folks running that prison something they will accept, no questions asked. That’s the only way this can work.”

  6

  October 13

  Three days after his audience with the pontiff, Kilkenny returned to the Redemptoris Mater Chapel, accompanied by Donoher and Grin. Archbishop Sikora announced them and, on the pope’s signal, retired from the chapel. In preparation for this private audience, three chairs had been placed in a semicircle in front of the papal throne.

  “Sit here,” the pope said to Kilkenny, indicating the chair directly in front of the throne.

  Kilkenny sat with Grin on his right and Donoher on his left. The pope studied the three men for a moment, then focused his attention on Kilkenny.

  “Cardinal Donoher believes you have found a way to free Bishop Yin. Please, tell me what you have in mind.”

  “Your Holiness,” Kilkenny began, “the plan I’m proposing hinges on a single fact:
Beijing will not let Bishop Yin out of prison until after he is dead. And although Beijing appears content to let him live out the rest of his days in a cell, the bishop was actually sentenced to death for his crimes. The Chinese justice system rarely executes condemned prisoners immediately after sentencing. Instead, it allows these doomed individuals the chance to reform themselves through a few years of hard labor. If, after this probationary period, the court feels progress toward reform has been made, the death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. If not, then the prisoner is executed. No attempt has ever been made to reform Bishop Yin, so his original sentence still stands. A man in his situation could be executed at any time—it’s simply a matter of paperwork.”

  “You propose a deception,” the pope said keenly.

  “Yes, Your Holiness.”

  The pope smiled conspiratorially. “Continue.”

  “Until recently, Chinese executions were carried out with a bullet to the back of the head. But in an effort to be more efficient and appear more humane, China has begun using lethal injection,” Kilkenny explained. “Most Chinese prisons are not equipped to perform this type of execution, so the Chinese employ a fleet of mobile execution trucks. I propose to field our own execution truck and to drive right up to Chifeng Prison with all the correct paperwork authorizing the execution of Yin Daoming. The bishop will be brought out to the truck, apparently executed, and then smuggled out of the country.”

  “But what of Beijing?” the pope asked. “Won’t they know your execution order is false?”

  “Eventually, but to paraphrase an old Irish blessing, ‘May Yin be across the border two hours before the Chinese know he isn’t dead.’ Like any bureaucracy, it’ll take a while for the paperwork to move through the system. I’m counting on that lag time. And my associate, Mister Grinelli, has a few tricks to ensure Beijing remains blind to what’s happening in Chifeng.”