The incursion into the home of Ridolfo Passerini had not led Hans Heinrich to an automatic trove of new information. He’d been so sure of success, following their solid ping on his identity from the CCTV footage, the failure to find him at home – or indeed, any signs of him having been there in weeks – had proven a confidence-fracturing frustration. Their first solid lead, cut short and dead.
Though obstacles were never to be accepted as the end of an inquiry. It was something Heinrich had learned early on as he’d ascended the ranks of the Guard, and it was a principle he held to closely.
For the past few hours, his investigations team had been engaged in what they innocuously referred to simply as ‘networking’. It was in-house lingo for tracing out connections on suspects of interest – figuring out who they knew, who they called, where they went; everything they could find, seize or hack their way into.
Ridolfo might not have been home to capture and interrogate, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a whole lot more they could know about him.
‘We’re not exactly the NSA here, as you know,’ one of Heinrich’s team reported as the Major loomed over him at his desk, ‘but we’ve got a few tricks in our arsenal.’
On the screen before them, as on multiple screens around the open-plan office space, data was being traced out and accumulated. Passerini’s physical address had been tied into phone records, which had themselves been linked to national identity numbers. Those opened the gateways to mobile and financial records, travel documents and a host of additional personal information.
More importantly, interpersonal.
Ridolfo Passerini’s email and phone records revealed a connection to an individual called André Durré that went back years. The two men were obviously long acquaintances, and the content of their correspondence revealed that the two had in fact become personal friends. André’s emails were often reflective, even emotional, and Passerini’s replies, if less emotive, were nevertheless the fruit of an intimate closeness. And never had their digital interactions been more active than over the past eighteen months.
Just who was this André Durré?
A search paralleling that undertaken on Ridolfo was begun on him as a new person of interest, and before long André’s own record of networking had linked him to a name of an altogether different calibre in Heinrich’s mind. André’s father. Emil Durré.
The dossier that they began to assemble on Emil registered red flags from almost its first moments. The first, the most compelling, was a single fact: Durré had once worked for the Vatican. He’d been an employee of the Secret Archives, sacked four years back for ‘gross ethical and professional violations’.
Red flag number two.
The more details that emerged on the monitors, the more Heinrich felt the hairs on his neck stand at attention. Inwardly, with a rapidly increasing confidence, he felt he’d found his man. The man at the heart of all this.
‘I want to know everything there is to know about Emil Durré,’ he announced in a loud voice to the whole room. ‘Focus your energies on him. I want his full employment portfolio and personnel record from his time at the Archives, and everything you can get about what he’s been doing since. Liaise with the Polizia di Stato. Get them to trace out whatever connections you can’t get on your own.’ Then, firmly, ‘Find me everything.’
He walked through a glass dividing wall into his small office and picked up his phone.
Cardinal Giotto Forte answered two rings later. Within a few minutes, Heinrich had brought him up to speed on what they’d discovered.
‘Do you remember this man at all, Excellency?’ he asked the Cardinal. ‘Did you ever have any dealings with him?’
‘Only when he was sacked,’ Forte answered. ‘His work at the Archives wasn’t anything to do with me, but a firing from a Vatican post always gets reviewed by the Curia.’
‘What kind of man is he?’ Heinrich questioned. ‘I know his formal details, but I need to know what kind of personality we’re dealing with. A religious zealot? A fanatic?’
‘If anything, I remember him being exactly the opposite,’ Cardinal Forte replied. ‘When he came before us for the tribunal hearing, he struck me as a man who believed in nothing at all.’
Heinrich tried to absorb what this meant for his profile.
‘If he’s your man, Major,’ Forte continued, ‘then it’s not the Church’s power or spirituality he’s out to attack. He’ll want something else entirely.’