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 owner 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.