God's Spy

by Juan Gomez-jurado

  • Agreeable personality, medium-to-high intelligence

  • Frequent lies

  • Total absence of guilt or feelings toward his victims

  • Complete egocentricity

  • Personal, affective disconnect

  • An impersonal and impulsive sexuality, harnessed to the satisfaction of egocentric needs

  • Antisocial personality

  • High levels of obedience

  DOES NOT AGREE WITH ABOVE!!!!!

  • Irrational thought integrated into his actions

  • Multiple neuroses

  • Criminal behavior understood as a means not an end

  • Suicidal tendencies

  • Mission oriented

  DICANTI FAMILY APARTMENT

  Via della Croce, 12 Sunday, April 10, 2005, 1:45 A.M.

  Fowler read Dicanti’s new profile of the killer as soon as she handed it to him. He was not sure what to make of it.

  “Dottoressa, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but the report is incomplete. You have just written a résumé of everything we already knew. In all sincerity, this isn’t going to get us very far.”

  Dicanti stood up.

  “You couldn’t be more wrong. Karosky presents a very complex clinical portrait, from which we can deduce that the increase in his aggression turned a sexual predator, clinically castrated, into a killer several times over.”

  “That is, in fact, what our theory is built upon.”

  “And it’s a complete waste of our time. Look closely at the characteristics in the profile, at the end of the report. The first eight constitute the definition of a serial killer.”

  Fowler went down the list, nodding his head.

  “There are two types of serial killers: disorganized and organized. Not a perfect classification but it works. The first corresponds to killers who commit spontaneous, impulsive crimes, with a high probability that they are leaving evidence at the scene. They often know their victims, who they tend to chance upon in their usual neck of the woods. They use weapons of convenience: a chair, a belt, whatever they can get their hands on. Sexual sadism appears postmortem.”

  Fowler rubbed his eyes. He was very tired, going on only a few hours’ sleep.

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “The other kind, the organized, is someone who has great freedom of movement, who captures his victims by a show of force. The victim is a stranger who fits a specific criteria. The weapons and restraints employed match a preconceived plan, and he never leaves them behind. The body is abandoned in a neutral spot, in exactly the manner the killer wants. Fine. To which of the two groups does Karosky belong?”

  “The second, obviously.”

  “Any observer could deduce that. But let’s go further. We have the dossier. We know who he is, where he comes from, what he’s thinking. Forget everything that happened in the last few days. Concentrate on the Karosky who entered the Institute.”

  “An impulsive character, who in certain situations exploded like a keg of dynamite.”

  “And after five years of therapy?”

  “A different creature entirely.”

  “Would you say that this change was produced gradually, or was it all at once?”

  “It was pretty sudden. I would pinpoint the change at the moment that Conroy forced him to listen to the tapes of his regression therapy.”

  Paola took a deep breath before she went on.

  “Padre, I don’t mean to offend you, but after reading dozens of the interviews between Karosky, Conroy, and you, I believe you are wrong. And that mistake sent us looking in the wrong direction.”

  Fowler leaned forward.

  “No offense taken. I have a degree in psychology, as you know— but I was only at the Institute as a kind of punishment. My real profession is something else entirely. You are the expert criminologist and I’m lucky to have your insight. But I don’t understand where you’re taking this.”

  “Take a second look at the profile,” Paola said, pointing toward it. “Under the heading, ‘DOES NOT AGREE WITH ABOVE,’ I have noted five characteristics which make it impossible for us to conclude that our subject is an organized serial killer. Criminology textbook in hand, any expert would say that Karosky is an organized anomaly, who evolved from the roots of his trauma, in this case the confrontation with his past. Are you familiar with the term cognitive dissonance?”

  “It’s the state of mind in which the actions and intimate beliefs of a person are at extreme odds. Karosky suffered from extreme cognitive dissonance: he believed himself to be an exemplary priest, while his eighty-nine victims would assert he was a pederast.”

  “Exactly. So then, as you put it, the subject, a committed Catholic, neurotic, impervious to all intrusions from the outside world, is in the space of a few months transformed into a serial killer, cold and calculating and without a trace of neurosis, after listening to a few tapes in which he comprehends for the first time that he was mistreated as a child?”

  “Looking at it like that . . . it seems a bit far-fetched.” Fowler was hesitant.

  “Or impossible. Conroy’s irresponsible act no doubt harmed Karosky, but it could never provoke such an overpowering change. The fanatic priest who covers his ears, infuriated when you read the names of his victims to him out loud, could not transform himself into an organized serial killer in the space of a few months. And let’s recall that his first two criminal rituals took place at the Institute itself: the mutilation of one priest and the murder of another.”

  “But the cardinals died at Karosky’s hand. He himself confessed it; his fingerprints were found at three of the crime scenes.”

  “No doubt. I do not dispute that Karosky murdered those men. That much is clear. What I am trying to say is that the motive that made him commit those crimes is not what we thought it was. The most important detail in his profile, the thing that led him to become a priest in spite of his tortured soul, is the one thing that has conditioned him to commit these terrible acts.”

  Fowler understood. He was extremely upset, and had to sit down on Paola’s bed to keep from losing his balance.

  “Obedience.”

  “Correct. Karosky isn’t a serial killer at all. He’s a hired assassin.”

  THE SAINT MATTHEW INSTITUTE

  Sachem Pike, Maryland August 1999

  Solitary confinement was utterly quiet. Which was why the urgent, demanding voice that whispered his name filled Karosky’s ears like an incoming wave.

  “Victor.”

  Karosky jumped out of bed hurriedly, like a child. There he was, once again. Once more he’d come to help Victor, to guide him, to light the way. To help him understand and to channel his strength and his needs. Now he was able to endure the cruel interference of Dr. Conroy, who examined him just as he would a butterfly pinned under a microscope. There he was on the other side of the iron bars; he was almost sitting with Victor in his cell. Victor could respect this man, he could follow him. And the man in turn understood Victor and could give him direction. They had spoken for hours about what he should do. About how he should do it. About how he should act, how he should respond to Conroy’s repetitive, bothersome interference.

  Over the course of the long nights he thought about his own role and waited for his visitor’s arrival. He only came once a week, but Victor waited for him impatiently, counting the hours and even the minutes one after another. While he went over their plan in his head, he had patiently sharpened the knife, trying not to make any noise. His visitor had gotten it for Victor. He could have given him a sharp knife, or even a pistol. But he wanted to temper his courage and his strength. And Victor had done what he asked. He had given the proofs of his loyalty and devotion. First he had mutilated the sodomite. A few weeks later, he killed the pederast, both priests. If he pulled out the weeds the way the man had asked him to, he would receive his reward in the end. The reward he wanted more than anything in the world. He would give it to Victor because no one else could
. No one else could give him that.

  “Victor.”

  He called out insistently to make sure that he was there. Victor crossed the cell with hurried steps and bowed down in front of the door, listening to the voice that spoke to him about the future. Of a mission, far away. In the heart of Christianity.

  DICANTI FAMILY APARTMENT

  Via della Croce, 12 Sunday, April 10, 2005, 2:14 A.M.

  Silence followed Dicanti’s words like a dark cloud. Fowler looked around, his hands gripping his face. He was both stunned and surprised.

  “How could I have been so blind? He kills because he’s been told to. Jesus Christ. And the messages, the ritual?”

  “If you think about it carefully, they don’t make any sense. The Ego te absolvo, written first on the ground and then on the victim’s chest. The hands washed clean, the tongue cut out: it’s the exact equivalent of the Sicilian practice of putting money in the victim’s mouth.”

  “The Mafia ritual that indicates the victim talked too much, is that it?”

  “Exactly. At first I thought Karosky was condemning the cardinals for some crime, something done to him or to their own dignity as priests. But the clues left in the crumpled pieces of paper never added up. In my opinion they were his personal contributions, his own finishing touches to a scheme dictated by someone else.”

  “But what’s the meaning of killing them that way? Why not just get rid of them?”

  “The mutilations are nothing more than an absurd disguise covering one crucial fact: someone wanted to see them dead. Just look at this.”

  Paola pointed at the flexible lamp on her desk. Its beam was directed onto Karosky’s dossier. With the room in darkness, everything that did not fall inside its cone of light was in the dark.

  “Now I get it. They forced us to look at what they wanted us to see. Fine, but who would want something like this?”

  “The essential question when you want to find out who committed a crime is: who benefits? A serial killer erases the question with one swipe because he does it for his own benefit. His motive is the body. But in this case his motive is a mission. If he had wanted to give free rein to his frustration, his hatred for the cardinals, supposing that he possessed those things, he could have done it some other time when the cardinals were much more visible. And much less protected. So why now? What’s different now?”

  “Because someone wants to influence the conclave.”

  “So now ask yourself who would want to influence the conclave. And to answer that it’s essential to know who they killed.”

  “Those cardinals were preeminent figures in the Church. Persons of great standing.”

  “With a simple connection between them. And our job is to figure it out.”

  Fowler stood up. He was pacing around the room now, his hands clenched behind his back.

  “Dottoressa, it occurs to me who would be disposed to eliminate the cardinals and, furthermore, by this method. There is one clue which we have conveniently ignored. Karosky underwent a complete facial reconstruction, as Angelo Biffi took the trouble to show us. An expensive operation, one requiring a thorough convalescence. Done well, and with the necessary guarantees of discretion and anonymity, it could cost more than one hundred thousand dollars. That’s not the kind of money that a poor priest like Karosky has at his disposal. Nor would it be easy for him to enter Italy, or to pay his expenses after he gets here. These questions have been relegated to the back burner the whole time, but they’re crucial now.”

  “And they reinforce the theory that an unseen hand is in fact behind the assassination of the cardinals.”

  “Right.”

  “Padre, I’m not in your league when it comes to knowledge of the Catholic Church. Or the way the Curia works. In your opinion, what is the common denominator between the three dead cardinals?”

  The priest mulled it over.

  “Something that ties them together, something that would have been much more obvious if they had simply disappeared, or been executed. They were all ideological liberals. They were part of, how should I say, the liberal wing of the Holy Spirit. If you had asked me for the names of the five cardinals who most wholeheartedly supported Vatican Council II, those three would be on the list.”

  “I need more detail.”

  “Right. With the arrival of John XXIII to the papacy in 1958, it was obvious to everyone that the Church had to change course. John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council, a call to bishops all over the world to come to Rome to debate the pope about the state of the Church. Two thousand bishops responded to the call. John XXIII died before the Council was finished but his successor, Paul VI, finished the job. Shamefully, the initial reforms that the Council contemplated never went nearly so far as John XXIII had hoped.”

  “What are you referring to?”

  “There were enormous changes inside the Church. It was probably one of the landmarks of the twentieth century. You cannot remember it because you are very young, but until the end of the sixties a Catholic woman was forbidden to smoke or even wear pants in public. It was a sin. And those aren’t just random examples. It’s enough to say that the change was great but by no means far-reaching enough. John XXIII tried to throw open the doors of the Church to the revivifying air of the Holy Spirit. And he only pried them open a little. Paul VI turned out to be a very conservative pope. John Paul I, his successor, was barely on the job for a month. And John Paul II was an apostolic Pope, strong and media savvy, who certainly did much good for humanity but who in everyday Church politics was extremely conservative.”

  “So the great reform of the Church still hasn’t happened?”

  “There is still much work to be done, there really is. When they published the results of Vatican II, the most conservative sectors of the Church were almost up in arms. And the Council still has enemies, people who believe that anyone who isn’t a Catholic will go straight to hell, that women don’t have the right to vote, and other, even worse, ideas. Even the clergy expects this conclave to give us a forceful, idealist pope, a pope who dares to open the Church to the world. And the perfect man for the job would no doubt have been Cardinal Portini, a hard-core liberal. Of course, he would never get the votes of the ultraconservative wing. Robayra would have been something else, a man of the people but a brilliant one. Cardoso had similar backing. Both were defenders of the poor.”

  “And now they’re both dead.”

  Fowler’s expression darkened.

  “Paola, what I’m going to tell you now has to remain a secret at all costs. I’m risking my life and yours, and take my word for it, I am scared. This line of reasoning points in a direction I wouldn’t want to look at too closely, much less follow.” Fowler paused briefly to suck in some air. “Ever heard of the Santa Alianza?”

  Dicanti’s head filled up once again with stories of spies and assassinations, just as it had when they were visiting the messenger. She’d always thought of them as the sort of stories told by a drunkard, but at that hour, sitting in her room with a man whose background was, to say the least, unusual, the possibility that they were real acquired a new dimension.

  “It’s the Vatican’s Secret Service, or so they say. A network of spies and secret agents who don’t hesitate to kill. Old wives’ tales, used to scare rookie cops who just joined the force. Nobody takes it seriously.”

  “Dottoressa Dicanti, you can take the history of the Santa Alianza seriously, because it exists. It has existed for the last four hundred years, and it’s the right hand of the Vatican for those assignments that even the pope himself cannot know about.”

  “I find that very difficult to believe.”

  “The motto of the Holy Alliance, the Santa Alianza, is ‘La cruz y la espada.’ The cross and the sword.”

  Paola flashed on Dante in the Hotel Raphael, his pistol pointed at the journalist. Those had been his words exactly when he had asked for Fowler’s help, and now she understood what he wanted to say to the priest.


  “Oh, good lord. So you are . . .”

  “I was, a long time ago. I served two flags, my country’s and my religion’s. I had to let one of them go.”

  “What happened?”

  “I can’t tell you, so don’t ask.”

  Paola had no intention of pushing the point. What she was hearing came from the dark side of the priest, where a cold pain sank iron hooks into his soul. She suspected there was a great deal more there than he was letting on.

  “Now I understand why Dante loathed you so much. It has to do with that part of your life, doesn’t it?”

  Fowler said nothing. Paola had to make a quick decision because they were short on time. She couldn’t let them get sidetracked. She let herself listen to her heart, which she knew was in love with the priest; with each and every part of him, from the dry warmth of his hands to the afflictions of his soul. She wanted to rid him of all of that, to give him back the open smile of a child. She knew what she wanted was impossible: there were oceans of bitterness inside him, and had been for a long time. The priesthood was not only an un-scalable wall for him. Anyone who wanted to get near him had to cross those oceans, and they would most likely drown. She realized then and there that she would never be his partner; but she also knew that he would kill before he let anyone do her any harm.

  “It’s okay, Padre. I trust you,” she said in a whisper. “Go on.”

  Fowler sat back down. And he began to unfold a long and chilling history.

  “They’ve been in business since 1566. In those uncertain times, Pius V was consumed by the rise of the Anglicans, and with heretics. As head of the Inquisition, he was tough, inflexible, pragmatic. The attitude in the Vatican was in those times much more territorial than it is now, although they enjoy even more power today. The Santa Alianza was created to recruit young priests and uomos di fiducia, trustworthy laypersons of proven faith. Their mission was to defend the Vatican as a country and the Church as a spiritual entity, and their numbers grew with the passing of time. By the nineteenth century they had reached the thousands. Some were mere informants, dreamers, sleepyheads. . . . Others, around five hundred of them, were the elite: the Hand of Saint Michael. The group of special agents who, posted throughout the world, could execute an order precisely and rapidly. They would invest money in a revolutionary group when necessary, engage in influence peddling, fabricate crucial information which changed the course of wars. To silence, to deceive, and at the furthest extreme, to kill. Every member of the Hand of Saint Michael was trained in weapons and tactics. Originally, in population control, secret codes, disguise, and hand-to-hand combat. A Hand was capable of splitting a grape in two with a knife from fifteen paces. He could speak four languages. He could decapitate a cow, throw its decaying body into a well full of pure water, and place the blame on a rival group in an absolutely masterful fashion. They trained for years in a monastery on an island in the Mediterranean, whose name I won’t reveal. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the training evolved only to have the Hand of Saint Michael nearly pulled out by the roots during the Second World War. An epoch bathed in blood, in which many men perished, some of them defending very noble causes and others shamefully in the service of causes far less so.”