“Right now, somewhere in Rome, that woman is typing out the story of the century.”
“And we have to know who she is. As soon as possible.”
Paola took the urgency in Fowler’s words to heart. They turned around and walked back to Bastina in the doorway.
“Mr. Bastina, tell us about the person who took the envelopes.”
“Yeah, sure. She was a pretty girl with blond hair to her shoulders, twenty-something years old. Blue eyes. A light-colored jacket, beige pants.”
“I can see you’ve got a good memory.”
“For the fine-looking chicks.” Bastina was a child of the streets and he was a little offended, as if they had questioned his worth. “I’m from Milan, Ispettore. Really, it’s better my wife is in bed right now. If she heard me talking like this . . . There’s a just a month to go before the kid is born, and the doctor says she has to take it really easy.”
“Do you remember anything else that could help us to identify the young woman?”
“Yeah. She was Spanish, that’s for sure. My sister’s husband is Spanish, and you can always pick them out, trying to imitate the Italian accent. You get the picture.”
Paola got the picture. She also knew it was time to take off.
“We’re sorry we bothered you.”
“Don’t worry about it. The only thing I don’t like is answering the same questions twice.”
Paola spun around. She went on red alert, and had to restrain herself from yelling at the man.
“Somebody has already been asking you questions before? Who? What did they look like?”
The baby was crying again. His father rocked him in his arms and tried to calm him down, without success.
“Get lost, both of you! You’re upsetting my kid all over again!”
“Tell us and we’ll leave,” said Fowler, trying to calm everyone down.
“It was one of your coworkers. He flashed the Corpo di Vigilanza badge at me. At least he had some identification. A short guy, thick shoulders. Leather jacket. Left here an hour ago. OK? Get out and don’t come back.”
Dicanti and Fowler looked at each other nervously. They took off at a clip for the elevator, trying to make sense of this new revelation as the elevator flew down to the street.
“Are you thinking what I am thinking, Dottoressa?”
“Exactly the same. Dante disappeared about eight o’clock tonight, using some lame excuse.”
“After getting a call.”
“Because over at Vigilanza they had already opened the package. And what they saw disturbed them. Why didn’t we put the two things together before? Fuck, the Vatican makes a record of every vehicle that goes in and out. Standard procedure. And if Tevere Express works with them on a regular basis, it is clear that they would be able to pinpoint all of the employees, including Bastina, by his license plate.”
“They followed the trail of the envelopes.”
“If the journalists had opened their packages at the same time, in the pressroom, a few of them would have slipped the disc in their laptops. And the place would have exploded. No way for anybody to contain it. Ten well-known journalists . . .”
“But this way just one journalist gets the scoop.”
“Exactly.”
“One is a very manageable number.”
Stories flashed through Paola’s mind. A whole bunch of them, the kind that street cops and others passed quietly among themselves, usually when they were hitting the third round at a bar. Dark tales of disappearances and accidents.
“You think it’s possible they—”
“I don’t know. Anything is possible. It would depend upon the journalist’s flexibility.”
“Padre, do you have to keep dancing around the subject? What you are saying to me is, they pay her off if she hands over the disc.”
Fowler didn’t say a word. An eloquent silence.
“Well, then, it’s better if we get there first, for her own good.” She gestured to him to get in the car. “We have got to get back to UACV as soon as possible. Let’s start to look in the hotels, check the airline companies.”
“No, Dottoressa, we have to go somewhere else.” And he handed her an address.
“That’s on the other side of town. What’s over there?”
“A friend. He can help us out.”
AN APARTMENT SOMEWHERE IN ROME
Saturday, April 9, 2005, 2:48 A.M.
Paola drove toward the address Fowler had given her, without knowing exactly where she was going. It was a long row of apartments and they waited in the doorway while Fowler pressed the buzzer.
“So this friend of yours . . . how exactly do you know him?”
“Let’s just say it was my last mission for my old employer. The kid was fourteen years old back then, a real rebel. Since then I have been, how to say, a kind of spiritual counselor for him. We’ve never fallen out of touch.”
“And now he works for your business, Padre?”
“Dottoressa, if you stop asking me tricky questions, I can stop telling you plausible lies.”
Five minutes later, Fowler’s young friend got up to let them in. He turned out to be another priest, and a young one at that. He led them into a small studio decorated with inexpensive furniture. It was very clean. There were two windows, both of whose Persian blinds were lowered all the way down. On one side of the room was a table some six feet long, with five hard drives and five flat screens sitting on top. Under the table, dozens of lights flickered manically, like an out-of-control forest of Christmas trees. On the other side of the room was an unmade bed. It was clear that its occupant had only gotten up a few minutes before.
“Albert, I want to introduce you to Dottoressa Paola Dicanti. We’re working on something together.”
“Padre Albert.”
“Please, just Albert.” The young curate’s smile was very nearly a grin. “Sorry about the mess. Hell, Anthony, what brings you around here at this hour? I have no desire to play chess right now. And in passing, you could have told me you were coming to Rome. I knew you were back in action last week. I would have preferred to hear it from you.”
“Albert was ordained last year. An impulsive kid, but a wizard with computers. And now he’s going to do us a favor.”
“What kind of mess have you gotten me into this time, you old screwball?”
“Albert, please. Try to show a little respect for the lady here,” Fowler said, putting on a show of being offended. “We want you to supply us with a list.”
“What sort of list?”
“The list of every authorized reporter working at the Vatican.”
Albert looked serious.
“Not so easy to do.”
“Come on, Albert. You’re in and out of the Pentagon’s computers the way some guys go to the bathroom.”
“Baseless rumors,” Albert said, but his smile betrayed him. “Even if it were true, one thing has nothing to do with the other. The Vatican’s information system is like the land of Mordor. You can’t get in.”
“Then let’s get going, Frodo26. I am certain you have already paid them a visit.”
“Ssssh. Don’t say my hacker handle out loud, ever, you nutcase.”
“Sorry.”
The young priest turned serious. He scratched his chin, where a few red zits had taken up fleeting residence. He turned around to face Fowler again.
“Is it really unavoidable? You know I’m not authorized. Goes against all the rules.”
Paola resisted the temptation to ask who exactly gave permission for something like this.
“Someone’s life is in danger, Albert. And we have never been men who played by the rules.” Fowler shot a look at Paola that said, Help me out here.
“Could you give us a hand, Albert? You managed to get in before?”
“Yes, Dottoressa Dicanti, I’ve been there before. Once, and I didn’t get very far. And I swear I have never been so scared shitless in my life. Excuse my language.”
&nb
sp; “Relax. I’ve heard the phrase before. What happened?”
“They caught me trespassing. That automatically activated a program which set two guard dogs sniffing at my heels.”
“What does that mean? Remember, I know nothing about the subject.”
Albert lit up. He loved talking about his job.
“There are two hidden servers which are just waiting for someone to slip past their defenses. At the moment I entered, they put all their resources on the job of finding me. One of the servers was going all out to locate my home base while the other started to put clips on me.”
“Clips?”
“Imagine you’re on a trail that crosses a gully. Your route is a series of rocks with surfaces above the water. What the computer does is to delete the stone I am about to rest my foot on and put spurious information in its place. A many-headed Trojan horse.”
The kid brought his guests a chair and a small serving table to sit on. He clearly did not have visitors very often. He then took a seat in front of the computer.
“A virus?”
“A really powerful one. If I had taken just one step more, its lines of code would have erased my hard drive and I would have been in its hands completely. It’s the only time I have ever used the panic button.” The young priest pointed to a harmless-looking red button that sat to one side of the largest monitor. The button had a cable that descended into the thickets below.
“What is it?”
“It’s the button that cuts the electricity to the whole floor of this building. Ten minutes later, the power comes back on.”
Paola asked him why he had to cut the power for everyone on his floor and not just unplug the computer from the socket. But Albert was no longer listening. His gaze was directed at the monitor, while his fingers flew over the keyboard. Fowler answered for him.
“The information is transmitted in seconds. The time Albert loses in getting on his knees and unplugging the line could be crucial. Follow?”
Paola understood about half of what the men were talking about, and was interested in less. What mattered at that moment was to find the young Spanish journalist, and if this was how they did it, then so much the better. The two priests had obviously been in situations like this before.
“What’s he going to do now?”
“He’ll pull up a screen. I don’t know exactly how he does it, but he routes his computer through hundreds of others, in a sequence which ends up in the Vatican network. The more complex and more widely spread the camouflage, the longer it will take them to find him, but there’s a buffer zone that should never be crossed. Each computer only knows the name of the computer before it, the one which asked permission to connect. And it only knows that name while the connection lasts. In that way, if the connection is interrupted before they get to him, they won’t come up with anything.”
The rhythmic clicking of the keyboard went on for about a quarter of an hour. Every minute or so a small red dot appeared on a map of the world that filled one of the monitors. There were hundreds of these dots, covering the greater part of Europe, the north of Africa, the United States and Canada, Japan. Paola noticed that there was a greater density of red dots in the wealthier countries, and barely one or two in Africa, and a dozen or so in Latin America.
“Each one of the points you see on that monitor corresponds to a computer Albert is going to utilize, in sequence, in order to penetrate the Vatican’s system. It could be the computer of a young man working at a university; it could be in a bank or a law firm. It could be in Beijing, in Austria, or Manhattan. The farther flung the geographical nexus, the more efficient the resulting sequence.”
“How does he know that one of those computers won’t be accidentally turned off, interrupting the entire process?”
“I keep records on each computer.” Albert’s voice was very distant. His fingers continued to fly over the keyboard. “I try to use computers that never get turned off. These days, with all the programs for file sharing, many people leave their computers on day and night, downloading music or porn. Those computer systems are ideal to utilize as links in the chain. One of my favorites is . . .” He mentioned a well-known figure in European politics. “The old fart likes pictures of young girls with horses. Every once in a while I slip in a photo of some golfers. The Good Lord forbids that kind of perversion.”
“And you aren’t afraid to substitute one sin for another?”
The kid laughed at Fowler’s joke without taking his eyes off the instructions and commands his hands were bringing to life on the monitor. He finally took a breather.
“We’re almost there. But let me warn you, we won’t be able to copy anything. I’m using a system in which one of the computers is doing the work for me, but it erases the information copied to that computer as soon as a certain number of kilobytes have been used up. So you’d better have a good memory. From the moment they detect us, we have sixty seconds.”
Fowler and Dicanti nodded. The priest took on the role of directing Albert in the search.
“There it is. We’re in.”
“Go over to the Press Department, Albert.”
“Done.”
“Hunt around for authorized press.”
Barely two miles away, in the basement of a Vatican office building, Archangel, one of the Vatican’s security computers, sprang into action. One of the many routines it performed automatically had detected the presence of an external agent in its system. It immediately activated its location program. The first computer activated another, this one named Saint Michael. Both were Cray supercomputers, able to undertake billions of operations per second, valued at more than $250,000 USD apiece. Both began to run through their calculation cycles searching for the intruder.
An alert appeared on the main monitor. Albert pursed his lips.
“Shit. Here they come. We’ve got less than a minute. There’s nothing about authorizations.”
Paola tensed up. She watched as the red dots on the map of the world started to go out, one by one. At the beginning there had been several hundred, but they were now disappearing at an alarming rate.
“Press passes.”
“Nothing. Fuck. Forty seconds.”
“Media outlets?” Paola suggested.
“Here it is. Thirty seconds.”
A list appeared on the screen. A database.
“Shit, it’s got more than three thousand entries.”
“Arrange it by nationality and pull up Spain.”
“Okay. Twenty seconds.”
“Damn it, there aren’t any photographs. How many names are there?”
“More than fifty. Fifteen seconds.”
There were only thirty red dots left on the map of the world. All three leaned forward.
“Eliminate the men and arrange the women by age.”
“There it is. Ten seconds.”
Paola’s hands were balled into fists. Albert took one hand off the keyboard and placed it on top of the panic button. Large drops of sweat fell from his brow as he typed with one hand.
“Here you are! At last! Five seconds, Anthony!”
Fowler and Dicanti memorized the names on the screen as fast as they could. They were still not finished when Albert hit the panic button. The screen and the whole apartment went pitch black.
“Albert,” Fowler said in the depths of the darkness.
“Yes, Anthony?”
“You don’t by any chance have candles, do you?”
“You ought to know I never use analog systems, Anthony.”
HOTEL RAPHAEL
Largo Febo, 2 Saturday, April 9, 2005, 3:17 A.M.
Andrea Otero was very, very frightened.
No, sir, she thought, I am not afraid, I am fucking terrified.
The first thing she had done when she got to the hotel lobby was to buy three packs of cigarettes. The first pack of nicotine had been a blessing. Now that she was on to the second, things were a little less haywire. She felt a slightly comforting seasick
ness, something like a lullaby.
She was sitting on the floor of the room, her back against the wall, her arms clutching her legs while she smoked nonstop. Her laptop computer was on the other side of the room. It was turned off.
Considering the circumstances, she had acted correctly. Once she’d seen the first forty seconds of Victor Karosky’s film—if that was his real name—she was on the verge of throwing up. Andrea had never been the kind of person to hold things back, so she looked for the nearest trash basket at full speed, one hand over her mouth, and coughed up some macaroni and cheese, her breakfast croissant, and something she didn’t remember eating but that must have been yesterday’s dinner. She asked herself if it was a sacrilege to vomit into a trash basket at the Vatican, and concluded it was not.
When the world stopped spinning around her, she walked back to the pressroom door while thinking that she had really made a racket and somebody was sure to hear it. No doubt, by now two Swiss Guards were ready to arrest her for postal assault, or whatever the hell they call the opening of an envelope that obviously was not intended for you. Because none of those envelopes were.
OK, Mr. Policeman, I thought it might be a bomb and I acted as bravely as I could. Stay calm. I’ll wait right here while you go for my medal.
That wouldn’t be very believable. Decidedly unbelievable. But the journalist had no need for an explanation for her captors because there weren’t any. Andrea had put her things together calmly, left the Vatican as slowly as she could, giving a flirtatious smile to the Swiss Guards at the Arch of the Bells, the entrance journalists used, and then crossed Saint Peter’s Square, which after many days was clear of people. She stopped feeling that the Swiss Guards were staring at her when she got out of the taxi at her hotel. And she stopped believing that they were following her half an hour after that.
And no, no one had followed her and no one suspected anything. She had thrown the nine unopened envelopes into a trash can in the Piazza Navona. She did not want them to grab her with all the incriminating evidence. And then she had gone directly to her room, not before making a stop at the nicotine kiosk.
When she felt sufficiently at ease, after inspecting the pot of dried flowers in her room for the third time without finding any hidden microphones, she loaded the disc into her laptop and started to watch the film again.