The Secret Cardinal

by Tom Grace

  “All good men, but two bold moves are not good for the Church.”

  “You may be right,” Donoher offered. “Perhaps the Church needs a caretaker after a pope like Leo.”

  “Magni would be best,” Gagliardi agreed.

  “If that is God’s will. Is it yours?” Donoher asked pointedly.

  “Eh?”

  “Is it your will that Magni become the next pope? Is it your hand I see in the shadows deftly orchestrating his ascension?”

  “What are you talking about?” Gagliardi asked.

  “Motivation. You missed a wonderful sermon this morning. Cain really outdid himself—I wouldn’t be surprised if he won a few votes in the next round, despite his age. He asked each of us to question our motivation, to question what was truly behind our previous votes. He got me thinking. The Italian cardinals have always been a very loyal group, true both to the Church and one another. As a bloc, they’ve enjoyed the historical position as king makers in the Church. Then I thought about the papabili, how these five good men all found their way to this point in history, and it struck me that from the moment they became cardinals, you played a part in each man’s career. You guided their appointments on committees; you made sure they traveled and became known among the college. From your position in the Curia, you nurtured them, but your actions, when viewed through Cain’s lens, now seem calculated. Did you get your thirty pieces of silver?”

  “What are accusing me of?” Gagliardi gasped.

  “Betrayal. You conspired to interfere with the election. You broke your solemn oath to the conclave. And you betrayed Bishop Yin, endangering his life and the lives of those sent to save him. For what, money?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The mafia’s sole purpose is making money, and only Italians can be mafia. The Chinese learned about Pope Leo’s message to the conclave from the mafia here in Rome, and you are the only Italian cardinal to leave the conclave. Is making Magni pope so important that you would allow blood to be shed to see it happen? Bishop Yin and the people I sent to rescue him are at this very moment being hunted. Among those whose lives you’ve endangered is the son of my oldest and dearest friend. I baptized this young man, and in just this past year presided over both his wedding and the funeral of his young wife and unborn son. This brave young man is family to me.

  “And today, there are whole families of martyrs in China because of your betrayal,” Donoher continued. “People with faith far greater than yours and mine, people who gave their lives to protect the man you betrayed. Their blood is on your hands, and you will have to answer to the Almighty for their deaths.”

  Gagliardi closed his eyes tightly against the irate camerlengo’s condemnation. In his mind, he envisioned his impending day of reckoning with the Creator. He stood naked and alone before an unimaginably bright light, his hands soaked in blood.

  Donoher leaned back in his chair, flushed with anger and revulsion. His eyes followed the tubes and wires that connected Gagliardi to a phalanx of medical devices, and he wondered if pulling the plug on any of them would hasten the traitorous cardinal’s demise. For the first time, Donoher entertained a desire to kill.

  “Forgive me,” Gagliardi croaked in a whisper.

  “What?” Donoher asked, struggling to dispel the temptations of his homicidal fantasy.

  “Forgive me.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” Donoher replied, unprepared for Gagliardi’s request.

  “I admit it,” Gagliardi pleaded. “All you’ve said is true. Money, all for money. The IOR, money laundering.”

  Donoher recalled the Banco Ambrosino affair that rocked the Vatican Bank in the early eighties. The IOR had become entangled in the spectacular collapse of an Italian bank involved in money laundering for criminal syndicates.

  “Is Magni a party to your betrayal?”

  Gagliardi shook his head. “He knows nothing of this. He is a good man but with no head for numbers. It would be easy to hide the details from him.”

  Donoher knew Magni to be a pious man who couldn’t balance his own checkbook, and even the best accountants would find it difficult to ferret out a well-conceived scheme of financial chicanery in the Vatican’s complex account books.

  “How were your criminal associates informed about Bishop Yin?” Donoher asked.

  “My nephew. He is trusted. I know I don’t deserve it, but please, I beg you. Forgive me.”

  Gagliardi held out a trembling hand to Donoher. Tears streamed from the stricken man’s eyes and trickled along the oxygen cannula tubing from his face down onto the bed sheets. The depth of Gagliardi’s remorse turned Donoher’s anger to pity. He wrapped Gagliardi’s hand in both his own and stilled the tremors.

  “Forgive me,” Gagliardi pleaded again.

  “I forgive you,” Donoher said softly, “but I cannot absolve you of your sins.”

  “You would deny me the sacraments?”

  “I am powerless in this matter. From the moment you betrayed the conclave, you were excommunicated latae sententiae. Only the new pope can absolve you of these grave sins.”

  Having engineered the conclave’s deadlock, Gagliardi knew it might be weeks before a new pope was elected—time he did not have. The monitor at his bedside began beeping frantically, and the display of lines monitoring the cardinal’s heart function lost their rhythm and became erratic. Gagliardi gasped, his breathing shallow and strangled as if his chest were in a vice.

  Three nurses and the physician on call rushed into the room with a crash cart. Donoher released Gagliardi’s hand and stepped back by the window, out of the way but still in the stricken cardinal’s line of sight. They checked his airway and vital signs, performed CPR, and applied increasing levels of electric shock to arrest the erratic fibrillation of Gagliardi’s heart, but the organ was past recovery.

  With each fluttering heartbeat, the blood circulating in the Sicilian’s body slowed until it finally stopped. When death came, Gagliardi did not sense the presence of loved ones who preceded him, nor did he feel drawn out of his body into a radiant light. Instead, his consciousness closed in around him, contracting tightly like a black hole. The darkness that enveloped Gagliardi felt infinite and in its vastness empty.

  The on-call physician noted the time of death, and the nurses began switching off the monitors.

  “There was nothing more we could do for him,” the physician told Donoher.

  “Thank you for making his last days comfortable. I’ll notify the Vatican of his passing, and if it is permitted, I wish to inform his next of kin.”

  “That is very gracious of you,” the doctor said. “This kind of news is best delivered in person.”

  51

  TIBET

  MESSAGE UPLOAD COMPLETE

  “Satellite uplink off,” Kilkenny said.

  The heads-up display disappeared and Kilkenny removed his helmet. Gates reclined beside him in the co-pilot’s seat, resting up for the final leg of their flight.

  “Think your buddy Grin will get that?” Gates asked without opening his eyes.

  “He’ll figure it out.”

  “I hope so ’cause it’d be mighty nice if there was someone friendly there to meet us on the other side.”

  “I’m more concerned about the unfriendly ones who are trying to keep us from getting there.”

  Kilkenny pulled himself out of the BAT and stretched, his joints stiff from two long flights. The temperature had dropped considerably as they ascended to the Tibetan plateau, and Kilkenny’s breath now billowed in steamy wisps as he exhaled. At a little over three thousand meters, the altitude relative to sea level here was ten times higher than where he lived in Michigan. The air was noticeably thinner, too, but Kilkenny found he had little difficulty acclimating.

  He left Gates in the BAT and found Tao in conversation with the team’s medic. The three pilots were clustered together around one of the BATs, reviewing the night’s flight plan over what qualified as their even
ing meal. Food was a traditional grumbling point among soldiers, and Kilkenny was certain that even a Memphis barbecue served by the Hooters girls would receive complaints by troops in the field. The remaining team members were either on watch, checking equipment, or, like Gates, trying to catch some shuteye.

  Yin sat back on his heels, his legs tucked beneath him, knees parted in a wide posture Kilkenny was familiar with from his years of martial arts training. Yin’s upper body stood tall, and his palms lay open on his thighs. He was alone on a grassy patch of ground facing the western horizon. The sun had just slipped behind the highest peaks, painting the entire range in a warm golden glow. A gentle breeze ruffled Yin’s white hair but did not disturb his meditation.

  “How’s he doing?” Kilkenny asked out of earshot of Yin.

  “Vitals are strong,” Jing reported. “His heart rate is good for a guy his age, and his rhythm is textbook. If there’s a glitch in his ticker, I’m still not seeing it.”

  “Is he having any trouble with the altitude?”

  “Actually, I think he’s handling it better that some of us. I’m keeping everybody hydrated and passing out the Tylenol as needed.”

  “Good.”

  Jing left to stow his medical supplies in the ebbing twilight. Kilkenny and Tao studied the man they had come to China to save, wondering if their actions might instead shorten the cleric’s life.

  “What do you think? Is he okay?” Kilkenny asked.

  “Something is wrong, but maybe it’s not physical. The shock of reentering the world like this after what he’s been through—I can’t imagine.”

  “An institutional man.”

  “A what?” Tao asked.

  “An institutional man. Morgan Freeman’s character used the term in The Shawshank Redemption. It refers to a man who’s been in prison so long that he can’t function on the outside—a man who needs the walls of the prison to feel safe. Looking at him now, though, I’d say he’s enjoying the great wide open.”

  “His sleep is troubled.”

  “I was in a box just like his for only one night, and it messed up my dreams. He’ll get the best treatment available for whatever’s bothering him once we get him out of China.”

  “I’m worried about him,” Tao said.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  YIN PRAYED AS THE SUN SET, his thoughts moving beyond scripted formula into a personal conversation with the Almighty. His prayers sought protection for those who risked their lives to free him, and forgiveness for their persecutors. He asked nothing for himself, knowing that each day was itself a precious gift.

  He felt a surge of warmth in his chest, swelling from his heart, embracing him, enveloping him. The sensation rushed to his extremities, and his mind seemed to expand beyond his body into the horizon. In that instant, Yin felt a small pair of hands touch his cheek and the cross on his chest, and he knew the child Ke Li was now with God.

  52

  VATICAN CITY

  Grin was deep inside the PLA’s Air Force network when the Rolling Stones logo reappeared in the center of the monitor, accompanied by the familiar opening chords of “Gimme Shelter.” As Jagger sang the opening lyrics, Grin tapped the window to retrieve Kilkenny’s latest message.

  MISTY MOUNTAIN HOP 111

  ZOSO BEST 41

  “Nolan, my man, you are really putting me to the test.”

  Grin wrote the message in block letters across the top of a legal pad, then allowed his mind to wander. The first thought that came to mind was the Led Zeppelin song “Misty Mountain Hop”—the wording in the message too exact to ignore. The song derived its name from the long mountain range that ran down the center of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, though the mountains figured more prominently in The Hobbit than in the epic on which Kilkenny had based his initial messages. Grin pondered Kilkenny’s last message that indicated the team was traveling west across China.

  “Imaging chamber on. Display Earth, wire frame with longitude and latitude.”

  The chamber glowed as it powered out of its sleep mode, and soon a skeletal rendering of Earth floated in midair. Land masses were defined with bright green lines, the navigational divisions in white with numerical markings.

  “Enhance region between fifteen and fifty degrees north latitude and sixty and one hundred twenty degrees east longitude.”

  A bright line appeared, defining the boundaries of the region Grin requested. The globe expanded in size and appeared to sink through the bottom of the chamber, and as it did so, the highlighted region spun into view. A domelike portion of the Earth’s surface now covered the bottom of the cylindrical chamber.

  “Display national boundaries.”

  Yellow lines raced across the visible section of Asia, tracing out the familiar puzzle pieces of the political map.

  “Display topography and render.”

  The computer controlling the holographic display assumed for the purposes of the rendering that the sun was directly over the equator, as it would be on the first day of spring or autumn, and that it was also solar noon above the center of the selected area. Mountain ranges swelled up where tectonic plates collided eons ago. Rivers snaked through valleys and splayed into deltas. Oceans flat and blue contrasted with the wrinkled green texture of the land. The curvature of the earth was still apparent at this scale, and Asia appeared without the cartographic distortion of flat maps.

  He studied China’s western border and discovered that nearly its entire length ran through mountainous terrain. China’s Misty Mountains ran more than two thousand miles and included some of the world’s tallest peaks. Somewhere in all that jagged topography, Kilkenny intended to exit China.

  “Mi hermano, you’ve got solid brass cojones the size of grapefruit.” Fairly confident of what Kilkenny meant by “Misty Mountain Hop,” Grin set to work on the number that followed.

  “Display one hundred eleven longitude east.”

  A white line shot through the eastern half of China, north to south, just a few hundred miles from Beijing.

  “About three time zones off, if China had more than one. Delete one hundred eleven longitude east.”

  The white line disappeared. Grin sat back with the legal pad and played around with the numbers, trying to ascertain their significance. He recalled that Lord of the Rings opened with the celebration of Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday.

  “Eleven-one,” he said, breaking the digits apart. “One-eleven.”

  He drew a backslash between the second and third numeral—11/1—and he saw it.

  “November the first. They’re crossing the border sometime tomorrow.”

  Satisfied he had cracked the first line of code, Grin went to work on the second. He took the word ZOSO as another reference to Led Zeppelin and sketched the logo associated with the band’s lead guitar player, Jimmy Page.

  It took him a while to recall the logo exactly—he’d last drawn it in the margins of his notebooks in high school. As he doodled, the phone purred and he answered it.

  “Gagliardi was our Judas,” Donoher said, sounding tired and depressed. “It was all a scheme to get the mafia’s tentacles back into the Vatican Bank. What a mess. Before I return to the Vatican, I plan to pay a visit to Gagliardi’s nephew to inform him of his uncle’s passing and perhaps send a message of my own.”

  “Gagliardi is dead?” Grin asked.

  “He passed while I was with him,” Donoher replied. “I went to the hospital this morning mad enough to kill Gagliardi, but in the end, I could only pity the man.”

  “Want some good news?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “I’m pretty sure Nolan plans to cross out of China sometime tomorrow, which from his point of view starts in just a few hours.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “I’m still working on that—the second part of his message is trickier than the first. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something.”

  “God willing, tomorrow will be a bright and glorious day ind
eed.”

  “Speaking of good news, I hear this day off has been a real boon for the environment,” Grin offered. “All that black smoke billowing out of the Sistine Chapel really jacked up the city’s smog index, not to mention global warming.”

  Donoher laughed, forgetting for just a moment the burden he carried. “Now I see why you and Nolan get along so well. You’ve got a wicked sense of humor.”

  “Between Nolan and me, all puns are intended.”

  “Keep at that message,” Donoher said. “Once Nolan and his team are across the border, I want to be ready to move them as far from China as humanly possible.”

  53

  ROME

  Donoher’s driver dropped him off in front of a four-story townhouse in the Trastevere District of Rome. Like its neighbors, the building was well maintained for its age. The ground floor was clad in a rusticated base of cut stone blocks; the upper floors were dressed in tan stucco with smooth limestone trim decoratively framing the windows. An arched opening in the center of the symmetrical facade provided entry into the building. At shoulder height next to the opening was a polished bronze sign:

  G. CUSUMANO

  LIBRAIO ANTIQUARIO

  He rang the bell and waited. A small closed-circuit camera mounted off to the side of the door about twelve feet off the ground relayed Donoher’s image to a monitor inside the townhouse. A moment later, Guglielmo Cusumano appeared at the door.

  “Your Eminence, what can I do for you?” Cusumano asked.

  “I am afraid I come bearing sad news.”

  “My uncle?”

  Donoher nodded. “He passed just a short time ago. I was with him at the end.”

  Cusumano withdrew into his thoughts for a moment, then collected himself once again. “My manners, please, come in. Can I get you anything?”

  “A glass of wine perhaps.”

  “I think I can find something suitable to toast uncle’s memory,” Cusumano said.