Dominus

by Tom Fox

  The plan she’d concocted the moment a contact within the Vatican had live-streamed the arrival of the stranger to her across a FaceTime connection had been thrust into motion immediately. All day, her men had been putting its various elements into play. Some of those elements were long in the works—resources her firm had built up over years, secretively and with unclear intention, which would be used today in ways she’d never before conceived. One of those was already out in the open, stirring the public imagination. Yet other elements were responses, worked out on the spot as the day’s possibilities had started to unfold.

  Life, healing and death, mingling together. It was almost like a symphony. A symphony of her conducting. For the spark that had started this day might not have been of Caterina Amato’s devising, but she was sure as hell going to make the flame it created her own.

  She pressed the intercom button and her secretary’s voice clipped to life almost instantly.

  “Yes, Ms. Amato?”

  “Gather the board,” she instructed. “An emergency meeting. Tell them to be here in two hours, no exceptions.” A project as big as the deception Caterina was crafting was going to take her whole inner circle. Most of the board of directors had already been called into action individually throughout the day, but it was time to bring them all together. To circle the wagons and make sure that every element of a plan that was still taking its final shape in Caterina’s mind was worked out and timed to perfection.

  “Yes, Ms. Amato. I’ll see that they’re here.”

  Caterina tapped her finger on the intercom button again, ending the brief conversation. Two hours. By that time, the next piece of earth-shattering news would already be in the public domain. The whole country would be singing the song she was writing.

  And the Pope would only dig himself more deeply into the pit she was preparing.

  16

  Rome: 8:50 p.m.

  Alexander began his phone call professionally, unsure how Ispettore Gabriella Fierro would take to hearing from him like this. Or hearing from him at all. That was the question that always hung over a relationship that had a past, and he was inexperienced enough with those to recognize that he simply didn’t know what to make of his own lingering feelings. They registered somewhere between embarrassment and shame, with an ample dose of disappointment. The easiest way to deal with them before had been to run away, which was essentially what Alexander had done when their short-lived relationship had come to its abrupt end. The question was whether he’d done so without burning his proverbial bridges behind him.

  “Inspector, it’s Alexander Trecchio.” Everything completely formal. He paused, waiting for a reaction, but nothing came. He opened his mouth again, his tongue noticeably drier and textured a bit more like sandpaper than it had been a moment ago. “I hope you don’t mind my ringing your mobile.” He hesitated at the end of the sentence. It wouldn’t be out of line if the first words he heard back were harsh, instructing him to call the station switchboard if he wanted to speak with the police.

  “Alex, my God.” Gabriella’s tone was surprised, but she didn’t sound angry. That was a good start.

  “I hope it’s okay that I’m calling.”

  “It’s been a long time,” she continued, and he noticed she hadn’t answered the question.

  “The whole affair at San Sebastiano. Two years ago.” They’d been assigned to a common case then, she to investigate and he to report, and it had been the only thing to bring them together since the strange whirlwind of a relationship they’d had almost two years before.

  Alexander hadn’t seen her since.

  “That seems like such a long while ago,” she said, her tone unreadable. Yet she referred to the case as a stand-alone item without any hint at the backstory they both knew it had. A slight pause. “Why are you calling me, Alex?”

  Traffic and the sounds of social life emerged behind Gabriella’s voice. Perhaps Alexander had caught her off duty. Suddenly he felt he was invading the woman’s privacy. He’d promised himself he would never do that. Not after she’d told him, her hand resting tenderly on his, that there could never be a return to what they’d had before.

  He abruptly exhaled a lungful of smoke.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve caught you at a bad time. We could speak in the morning.”

  “Don’t worry about the time, Alexander. Tell me why you’re calling.”

  He realized his eyes were closed. Funny how a man could lose his faith yet the old habit of prayer still rise automatically in him. And that was what he needed now: a prayer. A prayer that their past wouldn’t stop Gabriella from listening to him.

  “I need your help.”

  “My help with what?”

  The question was an opening. Alexander decided to get to the meat, fast. “I was witness to a murder this afternoon. Not to the murder, actually, but I discovered the body.”

  A lull, but no immediate reaction. He could hear a bus pass by Gabriella’s phone.

  “Did you report this to the police?” she finally asked.

  “Of course I did. They came out to investigate immediately.”

  “Were you involved in any way?” Gabriella’s questioning suddenly had an unmistakably professional intensity.

  “Only in finding the body. I walked into the man’s house and found him dead in the front room. Throat cut, almost decapitated.”

  She didn’t respond to the details. “What were you doing there?”

  “I was there to talk to him about a story. He was my sole source, and he’d asked me to come by this evening.” He relayed the events of his day in potted form, almost able to see the change in demeanor that he was sure came over Gabriella as he mentioned the stranger and the apparent healing of the Pope—events about which she’d clearly already heard. Alexander knew she was a woman of deep piety and that what had happened today would not affect her dispassionately.

  “I don’t know what to make of the Pope angle,” he added quickly, “but there’s definitely something questionable about the appearance of this stranger. The man I found dead, Marcus Crossler, was the only individual willing to give me some insight into what, and why.”

  Gabriella’s tone remained unaffected and professional. “Alex, there’s no obvious reason that his willingness to speak with you should have placed his life in danger. You said yourself, the whole internet is buzzing about it.”

  “That’s what I thought at first, too. But from the little he told me on the phone, Crossler was convinced there was more going on than people realize. Then, a few hours later, the man is killed in his home—before I can meet him and take down the details. Now I discover that he’s not the first voice suddenly to have gone silent.”

  Gabriella seemed quietly to consider the material before her voice crackled back across the line.

  “I’m not sure what I can do for you, Alexander. This all sounds pretty tenuous. I’m sure the investigating team will look through the details and pursue all the possibilities.”

  “They won’t,” Alexander answered flatly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “They won’t even hear me out. I tried to talk to them, but I was dismissed out of hand. The man in charge was a right ass about it. Someone called D’Amorio, or D’Ambrogio . . . I can’t quite remember. I’ve got his card somewhere. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”

  Alexander could hear the sudden intake of breath from Gabriella’s end of the line.

  “I know him well,” she answered. “The name you’re looking for is D’Antonio, and he’s my supervisor.”

  Alexander brightened. “Then maybe you can talk to him. Get him to listen to you, because he sure as hell won’t listen to me. You’ve got to admit, from everything I’ve told you, something untoward is going on.”

  There was another pause. Gabriella’s voice was hesitant when it came. “It sounds . . . unusual. But I don’t know any of the details. There may be a good explanation for it.”

  “I was given a pretty cold shoulder, Gabb
y.”

  Ignoring the familiarity, she simply answered, “That’s the only kind D’Antonio has to give.”

  A long silence overtook their conversation, and in the midst of it Alexander realized that that was it. He’d said his piece, there was nothing more to add. If Gabriella wasn’t willing to push further, there was little place else he could think of to go.

  It was long in coming, but finally she spoke.

  “Alexander, I’ll have a word with some people downtown, but I need you to know I’m doing this as a professional courtesy.”

  “Of course, I’m not—”

  “Anything else that might have happened between us . . .” She cut him off, then hesitated. “The only way I can go forward with this is if we agree that nothing ever happened.”

  He paused. Suddenly there were more emotions in his chest than he’d remembered feeling there for a long time. But Gabriella was right. It was the only way.

  “Agreed,” he said. “Nothing ever happened.”

  Inspector Fierro sighed her relief. “In that case, give me until the morning.”

  17

  Central Rome: 8:53 p.m.

  There is no cure for mantle cell lymphoma.

  Of many things in Dr. Marcello Tedesco’s life and career he was uncertain, but this was not one. It was a fact, and it had propelled him into his field. He had watched his sister, when they were both still teens, begin to wither, the life disappear from within her as if sapped from some unknown, hidden tap. Lisa had been diagnosed when she was only eleven—an extraordinary phenomenon in its own right, given that the cancer normally struck those in their fifties and sixties. He, the fifteen-year-old elder brother, had watched as her spirit simply ebbed away. First her play and then her singing had become less spirited. Soon she had become housebound, then bedridden. Finally they’d moved her to the hospital.

  The last memories Dr. Tedesco had of his beloved sister were stained with the antiseptic teal colors of hospital sheets and slick-painted walls, with the pinching smell of floor cleaner and the ashen, drawn face of the little girl he’d once raced up trees, with whom he’d gleefully arranged the pillows of their parents’ bed into a palatial fort. All the joy and sunshine of her features had been stolen by the disease. At the end, her eyes had barely moved. She’d looked frozen, like some mournful porcelain doll.

  They had done everything they could for her—the doctors, his parents. Lisa had been given every treatment, she had undergone every therapy. But there is no cure for mantle cell lymphoma.

  That statement, coupled with the forceful evidence of his sister’s death, had changed Marcello’s life. A zeal for medicine had developed before he’d left secondary school, and he’d gone on to degrees at one university, then another, then specialist studies in oncology and research protocols for MCL. He’d poured his whole life into his work—all his training, his emotion, his heart, his loss. He’d attracted funding for his research, and after sixteen years at the helm of what he’d named the Lisa Tedesco MCL Research Unit had become one of Europe’s most notable authorities in the field. They had developed new chemotherapy regimens that were sixty percent more effective than their predecessors while being half as destructive to the body’s other organs. They had worked to refine robotic radioimmunotherapy deliveries that allowed for higher-intensity aggression against certain tumor types. They were working on some of the newest biologic agents and therapies.

  But there was still no cure, and he had sixty-three patients in his core test group, and over two hundred in the secondary phase group, to prove it. All were living a little better, but still on their way to certain death.

  Which was what made the CT scan image results he held in his hands an utter impossibility.

  It was the third image he’d been passed since being called into the imaging center, each as incomprehensible as the last. Each showed a lymph node under a focused exposure, highlighting the traditional regions of mantle cell expression. Each was earmarked with the name of one of his patients. Patients who had advanced-stage MCL.

  And each CT scan was clean.

  The signs of the aggressive systemic disease that had plagued them in the previous months were entirely absent. There were no signs of . . . anything.

  “I called you as soon as I processed the first scan,” Dr. Tedesco’s assistant said anxiously, “but I couldn’t wait. I called in these other two patients for imaging immediately. They live close by and didn’t mind being disturbed on a day of rest.”

  “You did well,” Marcello answered. His assistant, he’d long ago learned, had no comprehension of a day off.

  “Not a trace in any of them.” The assistant said the words with genuine awe.

  The observation was now being confirmed by a fuller PET scan, the digital images of the second patient scaling on to the hi-res display as they spoke. They were as pristine as the CT results, leaving only one possible interpretation. Whatever the causes or indications, all signs of the cancer were gone.

  “We need to get everyone in for complete scans and work-ups,” Marcello instructed. “Today, if possible. Those who are well enough.”

  “All sixty-three?”

  “Each of them. We have to see how widespread this—” He bit his lip before he could say “cure.” “We need to see how many others are showing these indications.”

  The assistant nodded and Dr. Tedesco retreated from the PET facility control room, clutching the original CT scan images to his chest. He navigated his way down the hallway silently, his mind in disarray. A few moments later, he was in his office. He closed the door behind him and threw the bolt. For a few minutes he needed to be alone.

  Marcello Tedesco was a deeply religious man whose faith had grown firmer through the fires that had refined it over the years. Trials, sorrows, challenges—these were the things that broke the fervor of some men. But Marcello had seen every one as a challenge God would use to see him through to new heights. And he had.

  And he was clearly doing so today.

  Marcello walked to the corner of his office, where a votive candle was kept burning constantly before a small statue to the Blessed Virgin he’d picked up years before on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. He took down his rosary and impulsively wrapped it through his fingers. Next to the statue was a small copy of William Holman Hunt’s famous painting of Christ knocking on a lamplit door, The Light of the World, and Marcello moved the image closer to the center.

  He glanced toward his desk. On his monitor was the frozen face of the stranger who’d visited the Vatican that morning. Before his assistant’s call had come through, Marcello had been reading about the man’s arrival. He’d watched the video of the Pope’s astonishing healing.

  And now . . .

  He turned back toward the image of Christ, then closed his eyes, clutching his hands and beginning his prayer.

  “O Lord, I know you have come again, and are here, working your miracles . . .”

  A few moments later, his prayer of thanksgiving complete, Dr. Tedesco reached for his phone. What he was witnessing was something about which the world needed to know.

  Headquarters of the Swiss Guard, Vatican City: 8:57 p.m.

  In the depths of the Swiss Guard’s operational headquarters, tucked a full two stories beneath the ground level of the Apostolic Palace, there were no ceremonial gowns decorating the officers or Renaissance frescos adorning the walls. Those embellishments were a required part of the ceremony above, ancient and worthy, but in the network of rooms that surrounded Oberst Christoph Raber’s office, such things were far from anyone’s mind. The walls were stained wood and glass, the desk surfaces a black sheen and the technology on tabletops and wall mounts as modern and advanced as anywhere on the globe. The force that Raber commanded might be perceived by the world as little more than a ceremonial guard paying homage to antiquated customs and heritage, but in reality it was one of the most highly trained, best equipped and fiercely loyal security forces the world had ever known, with a reputation well earn
ed over the centuries.

  Raber sat in plain clothes, his eyes transfixed on the right-hand display of a set of interlinked plasma-screen monitors on his desk. No fewer than fifteen camera feeds were thumbnailed on the left display, and as the playback from the morning’s Mass progressed, he clicked from one to the next, drawing the best angles on to the full-screen window to his right.

  He’d watched the recordings three times already and still couldn’t explain what he was seeing. And that made Christoph Raber intensely uncomfortable.

  Who is this man? Where did he come from? The stranger’s face was uniquely calm, almost serene, despite the opulence of the capital of Christendom and the awe of the people surrounding him. The cameras had caught the man entering into the basilica, walking through the central doors with the same resolved and dispassionate look upon his face. Raber had already checked the external recordings, looking for any sign of his approach, but the man was not to be found on any of the feeds from the Piazza San Pietro—a strange fact that he would need to explore more closely. That a man could hide himself within a crowd was not in itself unique. That he could do so well enough to avoid being picked up on any of the twenty-seven cameras that covered every square meter of the piazza was something rather more disconcerting.

  Raber watched the videos of the stranger’s progression down the aisle, toward the high altar. He was arriving at the point of the incident that perplexed him the most, and it wasn’t the healing of the Holy Father.

  He watched, silent, as the man approached his ring of guards. He watched as they looked into the man’s eyes, and he watched as they then fell in almost perfect synchronicity to their knees, necks bowed and faces reverent.

  Raber couldn’t explain his men’s behavior. There was no way they could have all been turned away from their duty. All men were corruptible, of course, but his were the most loyal in the world, vetted and picked by him personally. And they certainly couldn’t have been turned en masse. They wouldn’t be bribed or pushed into behavior that risked the safety of the Pope.