by Tom Fox
“You’re late.”
The words came in a cold, almost robotic tone. The CEO didn’t look up at the brothers as they entered. Umberto and Tommaso, who was always known as Maso and had the servile habit of calling his elder brother “boss,” were familiar figures.
“We came when we’d finished our task. Tosi is out of the picture. So is the other one.”
The two men stood before the vast glass desk in the thoroughly modern office, but—as always in these meetings—only Umberto spoke. He, like Maso, was dressed in a sleekly fitted black Armani suit, and was cleanly shaven and groomed to an impeccable degree. His chin was heavyset but not obtrusive, giving his face the angular proportions of a Soviet statue, bold and sleek and strangely disconcerting. His eyelashes were so thick they risked appearing fake, and behind them were blue eyes that seemed to glisten, even in the dim professional lighting of the office.
“The academics can’t be the full extent of things,” the CEO answered. “The list we gave you was only a beginning.”
“We’re following your instructions. We’ll get to the other names, and we’ll add more if we turn up new individuals who might pose problems.”
“How many are on your list now?”
“As of this moment, four,” Umberto answered. “But Tosi and his counterpart were the most vocal threats. The others are minor, at worst.”
A long silence. The firm’s chief officer still hadn’t looked up.
“Don’t delay with them, all the same. And don’t report back until they’re all finished. If you need more men, you only have to say the word.”
“We’ll manage ourselves.” There was an edge to Umberto’s voice. He and Maso were considered amongst the most elite killers for hire in all of Italy; indeed, they were known beyond the borders in that strange, dark, illicit circle of people who knew about such things. They’d been all but exclusively contracted to this new employer for over four years now, but their propensity for not having others involved in their work clearly hadn’t settled fully in to their employer’s mind.
At last the CEO’s eyes lifted upward and bore directly into his. They were somewhere between blue and hazel, but he’d never been able to look directly into them long enough to satisfy himself with a final determination. Despite his years of service and the blood in which he routinely soaked his hands, Umberto found the stare intimidating and quickly averted his gaze. He knew the reputation for brutality that lay behind it.
“I hope it’s understood,” the CEO said slowly, “that the reputation of this ‘Messiah’ must be preserved at all costs. Now that this has begun, nothing must be allowed to interfere with that directive.”
“Understood.”
Another long pause, then the CEO’s eyes fell back to the papers on the desk.
“Then there’s no more to say. Go and do your jobs.”
Umberto departed the office, Maso behind him, with the mixture of emotions he always felt when he left the CEO’s presence. There was work to be done, starting with making a call into their contact with the State Police to ensure that their handiwork from the morning was handled discreetly. His employer’s contacts gave Umberto powerful friends, and he enjoyed wielding influence over them.
And there was the general anticipation he felt with his job as a whole. He’d worked with his brother his whole life, and though Maso was eight years his junior and far more a ruffian than a clone of Umberto’s brand of sophistication, they both regarded their occupation with devotion. But this project was something special. He could sense wonders in the air. Their tasks were, he’d been told, going to generate miracles. It wasn’t every day that kind of language came along in his line of work.
But there was disgust—and more immediately, annoyance—mixed with that pleasure and awe. Even after four years in the firm’s employ, having taken care of work that had sent him across Italy and Europe, he still hated his meetings with the CEO. Something about them would never sit right.
It was not good for a man of his stature, of his purpose, to take orders from a woman.
The two men finally gone, Caterina Amato at last sat back in her chair, folding her hands across her lap. The firm she ran was an empire, which she had crafted from the ground up. And while the chair of any major corporation always held power, the CEO of Global Capital Italia had a kind of power few could ever dream of.
Like every empire, there was far more that went on here than met the public eye. To all outside appearances, her company was a multinational conglomerate that dealt in capital investment and finance, just like a hundred others in Italy. And ninety-nine percent of the people who worked for Global Capital Italia itself did so without any awareness of anything darker beneath the veneer—legitimate businessmen and women engaged in legitimate business.
Precisely as she wanted them to be seen. Caterina had learned the importance of covering vice in the fine veneer of legitimacy from her parents in the youngest years of her childhood. They’d taught her by example. Covering their own vice—a propensity for controlling and domineering her and her brother Davide’s every move—with the outward appearance of fine culture and just the right level of class had been their chief skills.
Her father had barely noticed their existence. Her mother, an abusive woman with an internal fire fueled by an uber-religious zeal, had wanted them around only long enough to gain the image of being a good mother amongst her socialite friends. Caterina and Davide had been sent off to boarding school as soon as the image had been attained, when she was eleven and her brother fifteen. “As good Christian parents of our station have always done.”
Terrible parents they may have been, but they’d taught Caterina a valuable lesson: a person can get away with just about whatever the hell he wants, so long as what he shows the world is proper, well-formed and shines with the factory-standard trappings of the legitimate.
So ninety-nine percent of Global Capital Italia was Caterina Amato’s factory-standard show: the equivalent of the social club membership held by her mother to conceal the fact that when she wasn’t at the club she’d hurl wine bottles at her children and steal funds from the charities she so kindly ran. A cover.
That left the other one percent of the company. They were Caterina’s true colleagues. These were men—she’d always felt more comfortable around men—with the resources and power to do, and to get, what they wanted. And what they wanted was always money: incomprehensible amounts of money, but always more, however high the numbers rose. Some would call their attitude greedy, some obsessive. Caterina didn’t really care what others termed it. Money was power, and power was like a drug. That she was addicted to this drug did not concern her. Of course she was—of course she would be. That was what happened when the drug was so good. She had the power to get what she wanted, and to get others to do what she wanted them to do. She could influence politicians, she could buy police. She could hire security guards that constituted small armies. All were at her disposal. All hers.
But with power came enemies, and if Caterina’s company was an empire, then its enemies needed to be handled with brutal swiftness. Absolute destruction. Scorched earth and salted fields and bones left rotting in the street. You find an enemy and you crush him. And while certain foes couldn’t simply be eliminated in traditional ways, every enemy was destined to meet its fate.
That lesson, too, she’d learned from her parents. Her mother would go to the limits of her power to eliminate from her path those she deemed a threat to her way of life, and so would Caterina. Any enemy. Every enemy.
Including those that wore white zucchettos.
Caterina Amato sat back in her leather desk chair, swiveled and gazed out over the Roman landscape beneath her. In the distance, the massive dome of St. Peter’s rose over the rooftops, marking out the skyline as it had done for so many centuries.
Just the sight of it brought the familiar, biting flavor of bile into Caterina’s mouth. It was the monument to her greatest hatred—one far greater than that she
harbored for her parents, both now long since dead. She’d learned to manipulate, to seek control, from her mother. But from the Church Caterina had learned evil. No, not learned: experienced. She would never forget what she’d seen that holy institution do to her brother, to his peaceful spirit . . .
She forced her memories to a halt. Hatred was the automatic reflex that rose within her at the sight of the ancient basilica with its attached palaces and halls. If her company was an empire, her offices her castle, then the Vatican was the other castle on the other hill: the one whose very existence was a thorn in her side.
But today, for the first time in her life, the sight of St. Peter’s didn’t disgust her. Today Caterina knew with an unspeakable certainty that she would finally have her way there too.
Even with all her power, Caterina Amato couldn’t just walk up and kill the Pope, an approach she’d taken with many others in her time. He was not an enemy who could be dealt with in such a way.
But sometimes there were better ways to eliminate a foe.
10
Quartiere San Lorenzo, Rome: 5:11 p.m.
Alexander shuffled slowly up the stone steps to 1118 Via Tiburtina, not far from the Roma Termini railway station. It was the location where the lone voice of any merit willing to speak about the recent events in the Vatican had indicated he was prepared to meet him, between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. He flicked aside the smoldering end of a cigarette as he approached.
One man. That was all Alexander had been able to pluck from a not unsizeable Rolodex and a lengthy search online. Not that he could blame the others. At this point the story smelled more like fodder for tabloid media than scholarly comment, despite the Pope’s apparent involvement. But it would become more, that much was certain, and Alexander had finally found one voice. Via Twitter, of all places.
The American-born Professor Marcus Crossler had a reputation for sitting at the edge of scholarly credibility, studying esoteric Christian traditions and fringe spiritual movements. His brief bio on the Sapienza University’s website listed him as Visiting Professor in Expressive Spirituality, a strange title that befitted the reputation Alexander had learned he had. Even the tiny headshot in his Twitter profile reinforced the impression. The thirty-something professor wore an inexplicable amount of tweed for a young man working in a Mediterranean climate. His tufts of yellow-brown hair shot out from an almost perfectly spherical head in random, disorganized directions. “Crazy” would have been the word used to describe the look in most social contexts. “Eccentric” was the accepted equivalent in academic circles.
When Alexander had phoned Crossler a few hours previously, the eccentric professor had seemed only too pleased to have his Twitter interactions lead to a telephone contact. Almost thrilled. He’d suggested he could “make a compelling case for the contours of this particular fraudulent show, which is more manipulative and perfidious than people might think,” which Alexander took as academic-speak for “prove it’s all a hoax.” He’d hung up the phone at the end of their conversation satisfied but annoyed. Alexander harbored a particular dislike of scholars and their unnecessarily elevated speech, but at least this one was saying something interesting. More importantly, he was willing to say it to him.
The fact that the door to Crossler’s town house was ajar was Alexander’s first sign that something was amiss. The professor was expecting him, but no one in Rome—even a foreign scholar, unfamiliar with local customs—left a street-level door standing open in the center of the city.
“Hello,” Alexander announced, his voice slightly elevated. “Professor Crossler? It’s Alexander Trecchio from La Repubblica.”
Silence. Alexander waited a moment and announced himself again. Nothing.
An innate sense of caution pressed him to depart, to phone the police or seek help. But then he felt the foolishness of premature suspicion. To call the police out for nothing . . . He didn’t need the conversations about cowardice and hesitancy that would bring on back at the office. Not when he could have at least checked for himself.
He leaned forward and nudged open the door. A tiny hallway led straight back into the narrow house. No lights were on.
“Dr. Crossler?” Alexander repeated, taking a tentative step inside. He silently wondered whether this constituted breaking and entering, if he hadn’t actually done any breaking.
Silence met his latest words, just as it had met his first. Alexander walked a little more boldly into the narrow corridor. It was lined with bookshelves, a few photographs in cheap frames on the wall. The professor’s former college friends, by the look of them. Evidence of a few world travels over the years. The face he recognized from the website bio was there, standing before the pyramids in Giza, then before the Eiffel Tower in Paris, looking just as out of touch and eccentric in its twenty-something-year-old version as it did today.
There was a familiar smell of cigarette smoke in the air and it had a soothing effect on Alexander’s nerves. Perhaps the young professor wasn’t all bad. Anyone who’d resisted the current social push to view smoking as a singular source of evil had to have hit at least one mark right. There were few days that Alexander didn’t arrive home to light up a smoke, collapse into a chair with a drink and nap for a good hour. Perhaps he’d find Crossler in that comfortably reclined pose he knew only too well. He supposed that university professors worked hard during the day, though for the life of him he couldn’t imagine how.
Ahead, a door opened to the right, and he could already make out a tired rug over the cheap wooden floor—probably the sitting room, by the location of it. At the very least, it looked to have the aura of a well-lived-in space. He turned through the door and stepped into the small, den-like retreat.
The blood covering the two-seater settee was a bold crimson, contrasting starkly with the otherwise pale colors of the traditionally decorated room. As Alexander’s stomach clenched and the shock of adrenalin burst into his system, he thought he could smell urine and bile over the sickening metallic scent of so much blood.
His eyes wouldn’t move. The body of Professor Marcus Crossler lay sprawled out, only half on the settee. His throat was cut from ear to ear, his expression terrified, and now, everlasting.
11
Pescara, Italy: 5:15 p.m.
Dr. Alberto Russo pinched a metal clipboard under his arm, striving to manipulate an overly hot mug of coffee in one hand and an overly full keychain in the other. He was not a nimble man, and his lack of coordination was showing.
The dim lighting of the Salvator Mundi Hospital in Pescara didn’t help. It always left the sanitized laminate corridors looking eerie, almost as if they’d been constructed for a bad B-grade horror film. Russo wasn’t sure he would ever grow used to the economically mandated dimness of the surroundings. He certainly hadn’t become any more comfortable with it over the seven years he’d worked at the facility.
But then, he knew, he was one of the few people within these walls who noticed.
He shook the keychain in his left hand, aiming for the small brass number that would open the glass doors to Wing C. Russo enjoyed the peace and quiet of Sunday evenings. The children needed looking after just like every other day, but most of the hospital employees had the day off. It was one of the few opportunities each week he had to make his rounds of the residential institution in solitude.
The brass key wasn’t cooperating, caught in the teeth of two others and refusing to shake free. The coffee mug in the doctor’s other hand lurched as he tried to manipulate his grip, slopping its scalding contents on to his white laboratory coat.
“Merda!” he exclaimed, too loudly. He regretted the word choice immediately. His patients here might not be able to see, but they could hear perfectly well, and Dr. Russo was a respectable man, raised in the good traditions of the old country. Profanities were for teenagers at football matches, and he didn’t want the children beyond these doors to think he was the sort who approved of such language. Or of football matches.
He fina
lly set down the coffee at his feet, used both hands to sort through his keys, and unlocked the door. Wing C was the first of two dormitories in the hospital. Twenty-six children slept soundly in beds that the Salvator Mundi’s staff made as comfortable and homey as their limited funding would allow. Russo smiled as he rose from collecting his coffee, gazing into the dark room with its three rows of beds. His ward—his wards—in the midst of a siesta following an afternoon filled with exercises and play. He was profoundly protective of the children his experiments were designed to help, even as he knew that such help would never directly affect these pre-teens. His research was longer-term than that. But these children were part of something greater, and one day their condition might not plague others as it plagued them. He felt a grandfatherly affection for each and every one of them.
Russo stepped into the dormitory. It was even darker here than in the corridor, but he knew his way to the wall panel by memory. The children still had another fifteen minutes to sleep before the bell sounded that would raise them for evening activities and supper, but Russo didn’t hesitate in flipping the switch. He knew the bright fluorescent lights would disturb none of them. The blindness caused by Leber congenital amaurosis was absolute and complete. These children had never seen light, and never would.
The long bulbs high above flickered to life and the dark room became a bright, electric white. The children were mostly sprawled out on their metal beds, sleeping soundly over teal blue and mauve blankets. Between the rows the floor was textured with ridges and bumps, designed and carefully positioned to help their sightless navigation of the space when they woke. Beyond the far wall, through a pair of automatic doors, the first scents of dinner—chicken with pasta and some sort of tomato sauce—could be made out drifting into the hall. The kitchen staff were the only others that stayed as late as Russo, Sundays the same as every day.