Dominus

by Tom Fox

  There was no answer. The dossiers outlined public approaches and strategies for managing both mass-market appeal as well as consumer rejection and public negativity—just as they’d done for every major product launch in their history. The only difference was that this time, their purpose in utilizing public interest wasn’t to sell a product but to destroy an enemy. Though that wasn’t really all that new either. They’d done it before, countless times, just perhaps not on quite this scale or with such a high-profile target.

  “Things are going to move forward quickly from this point.” The CEO spoke matter-of-factly, fingers rapping lightly over the thick pages, printed as always on the highest-quality paper. Nothing was ever done on the cheap, Caterina insisted upon that. “The medical reports are now in the media. I’d thought we’d have a day or two before they got out, but one of the doctors was a little more pious than we’d anticipated.”

  On one of the television screens, the face of Dr. Marcello Tedesco moved in muted display. His revelation of the inexplicable healing of his entire study of terminal cancer patients was making the rounds of evening news coverage, adding to the sensationalism of the mass healing at a residential ward for the blind in Pescara.

  “This means the financial phases of the deception need to be firmly in place, and soon,” Caterina Amato continued. “Investigations are going to begin—they may be starting already. And what they find will decide whether our endeavor fails or succeeds.”

  The senior staff nodded their agreement. But the plastic man’s unease was showing through.

  “We should take more time. Think this through.” He was obviously the most hesitant of the group. “The consequences of what we’re doing need to be weighed carefully before we take any further steps. It’s time to pull back on the reins.”

  A heavy silence descended quickly upon the assembly. Everyone recognized that their colleague had gone too far. He had dissented, and dissension was never met well at this table. Even he recognized the gravity of his words, and his face blanched.

  Only Caterina Amato moved. She rose from her seat, straightened her blouse, and walked slowly toward the well-dressed man. The tension in the air increased tenfold.

  “Delays, delays,” she muttered as she approached him, “that’s all you’re good for, Alfonso.” She walked to his side, her air laissez-faire and almost preternaturally calm. Yet as Alfonso swiveled his leather chair to meet her, she suddenly wrapped her knuckles together and slammed a powerful fist into his jaw. The blow was forceful, yet the man didn’t react, except to wince in obvious pain. Then he drew in a breath as Caterina swung again, her second blow crunching against his nose. Blood immediately began to drip down on to the pinstripes of his suit. But still he didn’t react.

  He knew better.

  The rest of the board waited. They had been in these situations before. For the man to end this encounter dead would be perfectly in keeping with what they’d termed “past practices” on the part of their director. Board membership came with an accepted set of risks and responsibilities. One responsibility was never balking at difficult situations. The risk for dissenting was usually dismissal of a very final sort.

  But after her second blow, Caterina rubbed her fingers, wiped the blood off her right hand on the beaten man’s shoulder and silently walked back to her seat.

  “I am not interested in delays,” she announced calmly.

  “We can move the necessary funds between the companies and individuals within the next few hours,” another board member said, professionally, as if nothing had just happened. The beaten man whimpered quietly in his seat, sopping up the blood from his nose with his sleeve.

  “Not the next few hours, now.” Caterina’s left hand went up, signaling toward the televised reports. It bore a single gold band on her ring finger. Though she had never married, and had no intention of doing so, the image seemed to reinforce a certain authority. “People are already linking A and B: the arrival of this visitor in the Vatican and our subsequent miracles. But the plan works only if B is connected to A. The money has to be seen to move simultaneously. Visibly. Immediately. Without that, we gain nothing.”

  A finger-tap from the fashionless member confirmed the strategy. “We can have things in motion in a few minutes.”

  Caterina nodded. “Do it. Just be sure to keep the board out of the equation. There can be no association. And keep the rest of the firm in the dark. Best if they remain innocent as doves.”

  Her words were met only with a nod.

  “No one will ever know we were involved.”

  24

  Central Rome: 10:41 p.m.

  The tiny red Fiat 500 hatchback sped down the street with all the muscle its 101 brake horsepower could produce, the engine whining at the strain and the bodywork creaking with the sudden acceleration. Alexander pressed his foot all the way to the floor as he dropped the clutch, and the screech of tires burning against tarmac announced their departure to more than just their two pursuers.

  “Which way?” he asked, the noise of the engine magnified through the absence of a rear windscreen.

  “Turn down the first side street you can, then straight on to get us out of here.”

  The words were barely out of Gabriella’s mouth before another gunshot fired through the night, its round landing in the back bumper with a great thud. It was only a few inches above the rear tires.

  “There, Alex.” She pointed to a side street.

  Alexander wrenched the wheel to the left and pushed his foot down again. They were headed toward the Viale Castro Pretorio, which meant that in a few seconds they would be on a main road with plenty of traffic and the chance to put distance between them and their pursuers.

  “Are you all right?” Alexander finally asked, not taking his eyes from the road as he pulled around another corner and headed toward the main thoroughfare.

  Recognizing that they were out of range of the two attackers, Gabriella finally turned forward and sat down properly in the passenger seat. “I’m fine. You?”

  He shot her a quick glance. “Fine.” But there was sweat on his face and a haggard look to his features.

  “Who were they?” Gabriella asked, but she was already en route to answering her own question. “From their marksmanship and movement I’d say they’re professionals.” She glanced backward to see if they were being followed, but there were no headlamps behind them or signs of other movement on the road.

  Alexander nodded. “I suspect they were responsible for Crossler’s death.”

  “No further argument from me,” Gabriella answered. “I’m sold on the connection. But that doesn’t tell us who they are or what their interest is in all this.” She forced deep breaths. The speed with which she’d regained her composure was a by-product of training and experience, and her face swiftly attained a hard resolve.

  Alexander kept the car at as close to full speed as he could manage as he navigated his way toward the Sottovia Ignazio Guidi and started to put considerable distance between them and his flat.

  Suddenly Gabriella lurched toward her handbag. “Our phones,” she said. “We have to get rid of them.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The way they rang before . . . you said it yourself,” she answered. “They’re how they tracked us to your flat. They must have done a little research, found our phone numbers, and hacked their way to our GPS coordinates. Or good old-fashioned triangulation. In either case it means they’re good, and hanging on to these phones is a very bad idea.” She was already rolling down her side window and a second later had tossed her mobile out on to the street. “Give me yours. Now.”

  Alexander could hardly protest and forced a hand into his pocket as he drove. He passed his phone to Gabriella, and without giving him a moment to react she tossed it out as well.

  “They’ll have seen this car too,” she added as she rolled her window back up, “and if they were good enough to track our mobiles to your apartment they’ll have no trouble tracing num
ber plates. We need to abandon Emilia as soon as we can.”

  “Emilia?”

  Gabriella gave a slightly embarrassed smile, but then tapped on the plastic dash with all her official seriousness. “Emilia.”

  “You named your car?”

  She shot him a look. “She’s cute, she’s reliable, and until this evening she was in tip-top condition. She deserved a name.”

  Her look was complete seriousness for all of a few seconds, before both she and Alexander burst into laughter. The tension of the chase, of the near-death encounter, finally broke in a flood of relief and smiles. And for an instant, the relief Alexander felt was more than just at having escaped a barrage of gunfire. He felt a relief at being back with Gabriella—the old Gabriella with her quirks and her ridiculously energetic laugh. Even if he knew that connection would only last a moment.

  “Fine,” he finally said, “we’ll ditch Emilia. But then we’ll not only not know where we’re going, but we’ll have no way to get there.”

  “Take the exit for Regina Elena, a few bends up this road. It’s only a couple of streets to the Policlinico metro station.” Gabriella gazed forward as the traffic moved in its flow with them. “I know a place we can go.”

  25

  The next morning

  Headquarters of the Swiss Guard: Monday, 6:44 a.m.

  Morning came too slowly for Oberst Christoph Raber’s liking. Work could be done during the night, of course, but the interrogations his investigation required demanded the light of day.

  There was no question about the identity of the man the commandant of the Swiss Guard had spotted in the video feeds from yesterday’s Mass. But the certainty of that identity provoked an almost endless series of new unknowns.

  The man in the feeds was Arseniy Kopulov, a Russian-born businessman who had made his home in Italy after escaping the Soviet imposition of “unfavorable hardships for capitalist-minded men,” as he’d famously called them in a television interview years ago. He had gone on to become one of the great and the good in the advancing field of medical enterprise in Italy. For the past few years he had been the head of Alventix Ltd., one of the two largest pharmaceutical manufacturers in the country and one of the top ten in Europe.

  All of which Christoph Raber knew, because Kopulov was notoriously anti-Church, and anti-Catholic in particular. Raber made it his business to know everything there was to know about anyone with that level of power and those opinions. Anyone who might be a threat to the Vatican, no matter where they were in the world.

  Arseniy Kopulov loved the press. Though his company spent millions of euros on media campaigns designed to boost consumer demand for the drugs it produced and investor interest in the research it constantly undertook, the head of Alventix seemed to cherish most of all the free press that came through creating controversy. He was always the first to volunteer for radio interviews or appearances on the panel shows that crowded Italian evening television. They were a pulpit to preach his pro-research positions in loud antithesis to the activities of “ethical protesters,” whatever form they took—whether they came in the shape of animal rights activists lobbying against his company’s proven research methods or anti-poverty campaigners claiming he had no right to sell a pill at twelve euros a pop, even after it had cost him 350 million to create.

  Or if the protests came from the Church. Kopulov’s disdain for religion was never hidden. Raber had watched at least two dozen recorded interviews in which the man had vehemently blasted the Roman Catholic Church—clearly his pet hate when it came to religious bodies—for its stance on contraception, the right to life, euthanasia, or as far as Raber could tell, anything and everything that the Church had a stand on. If the Church was for it, Kopulov was against it.

  Even when “it” had little or nothing to do with the realms of medicine or science in general. One particularly aggressive video recorded him lambasting, in traditionally animated terms, the Church’s Mass as “a ritual of ignorance to inspire the ignorant.” The words he had for the Pope were only mildly less offensive, though his characterization of the pontiff as “the lead alpha in a pack of blind, angry wolves” had garnered tremendous media play.

  Which led Raber back to the central question weighing on his mind. What was Arseniy Kopulov doing attending the papal Mass at St. Peter’s yesterday morning?

  And not only attending. The CCTV footage showed more than merely his presence: his demeanor had been . . . hell, the only word for it was pious. He’d crossed himself at various points throughout the service. He’d folded his hands, lowered his head and closed his eyes, as if in the depths of fervent prayer.

  Why was an avowed atheist and open enemy of the Church kneeling in its most sacred shrine and praying to the God he’d called “the greatest lie of all,” at the very moment St. Peter’s was being invaded by a man whose presence no one could explain?

  A knocking on his office door snapped Oberst Raber from his thoughts. A head was already poking through as he looked up and called out his usual “Ja, bitte.”

  The face of Hauptmann Heinrich Klefft looked pale.

  “What is it, Captain?”

  The younger officer was in his standard duty uniform of plain blue garb fixed with an unadorned brown leather belt, a broad white collar laid flat over his shoulders. The black beret he would normally have propped at an angle on his head was instead tucked under his arm.

  “You did not answer your telephone, sir,” he said, pulling the door closed behind him. “I thought to bring the news to you myself.”

  Raber looked down at the phone on his desk. The small LCD panel showed four missed calls, all within the past two minutes. I didn’t even hear them.

  “What news?” he asked, bringing his attention back to the captain.

  “The Holy Father,” the man answered, his throat seeming to tighten around the words, his body immediately in the stiff pose of formality. “He’s ordered the media to be assembled in the Sala di Constantino.”

  “The media?”

  “An invited group, with television cameras,” the young officer answered. “The Pope wishes to address the world.”

  Headquarters of La Repubblica newspaper: 7:02 a.m.

  In his editor’s office at La Repubblica, Antonio Laterza stared angrily at the twin television sets perched on a table opposite his desk. The damned television news media were like vultures. They circled over the city with budgets far in excess of anything a newspaper could pray for, and the moment a story fell to earth they swooped down and claimed it as their own, never mind who had actually done the work. They’d taken the story of the stranger’s arrival in the Vatican, of the Pope’s healing, as theirs from the moment it became interesting and hadn’t stopped running it since. Sixty minutes an hour, every hour of the day. There were cameras pointed at every gate, wall and window that led into Vatican City. They had whole troops of reporters standing in front of lenses reporting ad nauseam that there was nothing new to report, but that they’d keep on it until there was.

  And where the fuck was Alexander Trecchio, chief reporter for Church Life? Laterza had given him the assignment—one of the few real stories ever to come Alexander’s way, the man having built his farcical journalistic reputation on a single, accidental story a couple of years back—and he had simply disappeared. Vanished. Laterza had phoned him on every number he had. He’d sent emails. Hell, he’d even gone on Twitter and messaged him there, out of sheer desperation. But nothing. Alexander Trecchio had gone dark.

  Bastardo.

  And yet . . . Laterza let a smile play across his face. He’d already reassigned the story, of course. What had been page eleven news was now page one, top of the fold, and Trecchio wasn’t in that league even on his best days. The paper was covering the story, despite the attempts of the television media to claim ownership.

  What made Laterza smile was the fact that this, at last, was an inch too far. No matter how close Alexander’s relationship with Niccolò Marre, even the paper’s own
er wouldn’t keep him on staff after a fumble like this. He would be out. Laterza would have the joy of firing him himself. Maybe he’d do it by tweet, just to add insult. But however he did it, Trecchio would go.

  And that, more than anything else, threatened to make Antonio Laterza believe in miracles.

  26

  Northeastern Rome: 7:15 a.m.

  Alexander awoke with a start. His senses expected familiar sights: his minimalist bedroom decor, or the homey, masculine warmth of his sitting room. They didn’t expect the kitsch-and-doily wonderworld that was Isabella Fierro’s living room. The furniture pieces owned by Gabriella’s aunt were the kind of living antiques that screamed that the last time the owner of this house had gone shopping was in 1965, and there wasn’t a surface in the room that wasn’t covered in either scraps of lace or the floral drippings of daisy wallpaper and poinsettia lampshades. It was a brutally floral assault on his disorientated mind.

  But his memory quickly pieced together the surroundings, the chase of the night before, the 1:30 a.m. arrival at Gabriella’s aunt’s home after abandoning her abused Fiat and making their way to the northeastern edge of the city by metro. Isabella Fierro was away visiting her even more elderly sister, and as honorary caretaker and plant-waterer during her absence, Gabriella had full access to her house. Grannyland was their haven, and as the memories resurfaced with alarming speed, the antithesis of fashionable decor began to feel warm and reassuring.

  And so did the thought of action.

  Alexander plucked his laptop out of his rucksack, slid in the dongle and set himself to work. The image of their chief pursuer’s face wouldn’t leave him—haunting, calm, cold, unyielding. But Alexander knew he didn’t have anything to go on in terms of finding out who the man was. He’d only seen his face, and that on the run. Of the second man he’d barely caught sight at all. He had no place to begin.