Headquarters of Global Capital Italia, Rome: 2:48 p.m.
The two assassins walked through the head office with impunity, a right reserved for a select few. None of the three secretaries en route to the corner suite so much as spoke to them as they approached, the third only pressing a small red button at her desk, illuminating a light in the room beyond, which gave indication to its inhabitant that visitors were imminent.
“You’re late.”
The words came in a cold, almost robotic tone. The CEO didn’t look up at the brothers as they entered. Umberto and Tommaso, who was always known as Maso and had the servile habit of calling his elder brother “boss,” were familiar figures.
“We came when we’d finished our task. Tosi is out of the picture. So is the other one.”
The two men stood before the vast glass desk in the thoroughly modern office, but—as always in these meetings—only Umberto spoke. He, like Maso, was dressed in a sleekly fitted black Armani suit, and was cleanly shaven and groomed to an impeccable degree. His chin was heavyset but not obtrusive, giving his face the angular proportions of a Soviet statue, bold and sleek and strangely disconcerting. His eyelashes were so thick they risked appearing fake, and behind them were blue eyes that seemed to glisten, even in the dim professional lighting of the office.
“The academics can’t be the full extent of things,” the CEO answered. “The list we gave you was only a beginning.”
“We’re following your instructions. We’ll get to the other names, and we’ll add more if we turn up new individuals who might pose problems.”
“How many are on your list now?”
“As of this moment, four,” Umberto answered. “But Tosi and his counterpart were the most vocal threats. The others are minor, at worst.”
A long silence. The firm’s chief officer still hadn’t looked up.
“Don’t delay with them, all the same. And don’t report back until they’re all finished. If you need more men, you only have to say the word.”
“We’ll manage ourselves.” There was an edge to Umberto’s voice. He and Maso were considered amongst the most elite killers for hire in all of Italy; indeed, they were known beyond the borders in that strange, dark, illicit circle of people who knew about such things. They’d been all but exclusively contracted to this new employer for over four years now, but their propensity for not having others involved in their work clearly hadn’t settled fully in to their employer’s mind.
At last the CEO’s eyes lifted upward and bore directly into his. They were somewhere between blue and hazel, but he’d never been able to look directly into them long enough to satisfy himself with a final determination. Despite his years of service and the blood in which he routinely soaked his hands, Umberto found the stare intimidating and quickly averted his gaze. He knew the reputation for brutality that lay behind it.
“I hope it’s understood,” the CEO said slowly, “that the reputation of this ‘Messiah’ must be preserved at all costs. Now that this has begun, nothing must be allowed to interfere with that directive.”
“Understood.”
Another long pause, then the CEO’s eyes fell back to the papers on the desk.
“Then there’s no more to say. Go and do your jobs.”
Umberto departed the office, Maso behind him, with the mixture of emotions he always felt when he left the CEO’s presence. There was work to be done, starting with making a call into their contact with the State Police to ensure that their handiwork from the morning was handled discreetly. His employer’s contacts gave Umberto powerful friends, and he enjoyed wielding influence over them.
And there was the general anticipation he felt with his job as a whole. He’d worked with his brother his whole life, and though Maso was eight years his junior and far more a ruffian than a clone of Umberto’s brand of sophistication, they both regarded their occupation with devotion. But this project was something special. He could sense wonders in the air. Their tasks were, he’d been told, going to generate miracles. It wasn’t every day that kind of language came along in his line of work.
But there was disgust—and more immediately, annoyance—mixed with that pleasure and awe. Even after four years in the firm’s employ, having taken care of work that had sent him across Italy and Europe, he still hated his meetings with the CEO. Something about them would never sit right.
It was not good for a man of his stature, of his purpose, to take orders from a woman.
The two men finally gone, Caterina Amato at last sat back in her chair, folding her hands across her lap. The firm she ran was an empire, which she had crafted from the ground up. And while the chair of any major corporation always held power, the CEO of Global Capital Italia had a kind of power few could ever dream of.
Like every empire, there was far more that went on here than met the public eye. To all outside appearances, her company was a multinational conglomerate that dealt in capital investment and finance, just like a hundred others in Italy. And ninety-nine percent of the people who worked for Global Capital Italia itself did so without any awareness of anything darker beneath the veneer—legitimate businessmen and women engaged in legitimate business.
Precisely as she wanted them to be seen. Caterina had learned the importance of covering vice in the fine veneer of legitimacy from her parents in the youngest years of her childhood. They’d taught her by example. Covering their own vice—a propensity for controlling and domineering her and her brother Davide’s every move—with the outward appearance of fine culture and just the right level of class had been their chief skills.
Her father had barely noticed their existence. Her mother, an abusive woman with an internal fire fueled by an uber-religious zeal, had wanted them around only long enough to gain the image of being a good mother amongst her socialite friends. Caterina and Davide had been sent off to boarding school as soon as the image had been attained, when she was eleven and her brother fifteen. “As good Christian parents of our station have always done.”
Terrible parents they may have been, but they’d taught Caterina a valuable lesson: a person can get away with just about whatever the hell he wants, so long as what he shows the world is proper, well-formed and shines with the factory-standard trappings of the legitimate.
So ninety-nine percent of Global Capital Italia was Caterina Amato’s factory-standard show: the equivalent of the social club membership held by her mother to conceal the fact that when she wasn’t at the club she’d hurl wine bottles at her children and steal funds from the charities she so kindly ran. A cover.
That left the other one percent of the company. They were Caterina’s true colleagues. These were men—she’d always felt more comfortable around men—with the resources and power to do, and to get, what they wanted. And what they wanted was always money: incomprehensible amounts of money, but always more, however high the numbers rose. Some would call their attitude greedy, some obsessive. Caterina didn’t really care what others termed it. Money was power, and power was like a drug. That she was addicted to this drug did not concern her. Of course she was—of course she would be. That was what happened when the drug was so good. She had the power to get what she wanted, and to get others to do what she wanted them to do. She could influence politicians, she could buy police. She could hire security guards that constituted small armies. All were at her disposal. All hers.
But with power came enemies, and if Caterina’s company was an empire, then its enemies needed to be handled with brutal swiftness. Absolute destruction. Scorched earth and salted fields and bones left rotting in the street. You find an enemy and you crush him. And while certain foes couldn’t simply be eliminated in traditional ways, every enemy was destined to meet its fate.
That lesson, too, she’d learned from her parents. Her mother would go to the limits of her power to eliminate from her path those she deemed a threat to her way of life, and so would Caterina. Any enemy. Every enemy.
Including those that wore white zucchettos.
Caterina Amato sat back in her leather desk chair, swiveled and gazed out over the Roman landscape beneath her. In the distance, the massive dome of St. Peter’s rose over the rooftops, marking out the skyline as it had done for so many centuries.
Just the sight of it brought the familiar, biting flavor of bile into Caterina’s mouth. It was the monument to her greatest hatred—one far greater than that she harbored for her parents, both now long since dead. She’d learned to manipulate, to seek control, from her mother. But from the Church Caterina had learned evil. No, not learned: experienced. She would never forget what she’d seen that holy institution do to her brother, to his peaceful spirit . . .
She forced her memories to a halt. Hatred was the automatic reflex that rose within her at the sight of the ancient basilica with its attached palaces and halls. If her company was an empire, her offices her castle, then the Vatican was the other castle on the other hill: the one whose very existence was a thorn in her side.
But today, for the first time in her life, the sight of St. Peter’s didn’t disgust her. Today Caterina knew with an unspeakable certainty that she would finally have her way there too.
Even with all her power, Caterina Amato couldn’t just walk up and kill the Pope, an approach she’d taken with many others in her time. He was not an enemy who could be dealt with in such a way.
But sometimes there were better ways to eliminate a foe.