Central Rome: 9:51 a.m.
“What was that about?” Gabriella asked impatiently. Alexander had sat silently for several long seconds since the call with his uncle ended. Something obviously wasn’t right.
Suddenly he reached forward and switched on the car’s radio. He scrolled through the stations disinterestedly, landing on the first with solid reception, as if he craved nothing more than background noise to distract him from his thoughts.
“Alex,” Gabriella persisted, “talk to me.” She reached out a hand and laid her soft fingers across his knuckles. The sudden human contact seemed to calm him.
“You know my uncle’s a cardinal,” he finally said, “so you know where he is right now, and what he’s privy to.”
“Has he met the man, the stranger? Did he share anything with you about him?”
“Nothing. He barely mentioned him. He only warned me about our investigation.”
Now it was Gabriella who paused. “How does your uncle know what you’re investigating?”
Alexander’s head was shaking. “I don’t know and he wouldn’t say. He only warned me that there are people out there who know what we’re looking for. People we don’t want to get on the wrong side of.”
“It’s a bit late for that. I’d take last night’s gunfight as a pretty solid sign that we’re already on their bad side.”
Alexander stilled at Gabriella’s words. As she’d often found she was able to do before, Gabriella could read the thoughts on his emotive face as if they were words printed on a page. Someone is obviously after us, but how could my uncle possibly know that? Was his warning just a hunch—a voice of general concern that happened to coincide with the most traumatic experience of my life? But she knew that Alexander didn’t like coincidences. Certainly not of this magnitude. How could he know what we’ve been investigating? How could he know who was after us? And more than that, why would anyone be after us at all?
Gabriella broke through his thoughts. “Did your uncle say who these people were?”
“I don’t think he could. It sounded like he was taking a risk to make the call at all. He wanted to keep it short.”
Gabriella peered down at the papers on her lap. “Then urgent or not, his warning isn’t a lot of help.” She glanced up again and saw the disconcerted expression on Alexander’s face. She was suddenly keen to divert him from a train-wreck of increasingly convoluted, speculative thoughts that would lead nowhere. Diverting the topic seemed her best option.
“Why don’t you drive, Alex? I’ve glanced through the list of institutional affiliations from the IOR. If it’s meant to provide us with anything, I’m not seeing it.”
Alexander put the car into gear and pulled forward, but his head was shaking again. “There’s got to be something in there.”
“Since I’m not sure what we’re looking for, it’s hard to know. On the surface it’s just a listing of client and partner corporations. I’d expect to see the same thing from any bank.”
“Marcus Crossler wouldn’t have had more insider information than this,” Alexander insisted, “but he was able to convince himself of illegitimate activity. Activity he linked to the stranger.”
“He also had more time and more of a background than I do,” Gabriella answered. “On first reading, the only thing these companies appear to have in common is that they’re big names.”
“Private clients aren’t in the IOR’s charter. The only individuals who can open accounts are members of the curia and high-ranking church officials. Otherwise, it deals only in the financial ventures of the state.”
“Well, when it comes to those ventures, the list of the Vatican’s investment partners looks like what you’d expect. Big corporations. Eurobank, the IMF, Celentis, Alventix, CygnaGen, Financia Italia, that sort of thing.”
Gabriella concluded her listing, rattling off the names. But when she looked up, Alexander was staring at her from the driver’s seat. His eyes lingered with a strange intensity before he switched them back to the road. She wondered, for a moment, whether her touch a few moments before had evoked memories in him that she shouldn’t have teased. But an instant later he swerved the car to the shoulder and pulled to a stop.
The look on his face wasn’t longing.
“Read those names again, the ones you just listed.” His expression was curious, and Gabriella turned back to the printouts without asking for an explanation.
“Eurobank, the International Monetary Fund, Celentis, Alventix, CygnaGen, Finan—”
“Stop there,” Alexander interrupted. He struggled beneath the safety belt but managed to turn more fully toward her. “Does that list explain the type of relationship the Vatican Bank had with each of the companies?”
“There’s no indication of euro or dollar amounts. Just the fact of institutional connections.” She gazed into his determined stare. “Alex, what are you on to?”
“There’s something that at least three of those firms have in common that goes beyond simply being large, rich companies.” His fingers rattled along the gray plastic of the steering column, then suddenly stopped.
“Let’s start with Celentis. You’ve heard of them?”
“Of course,” Gabriella answered. “They make the vitamin supplements I see in every supermarket.” See, and buy. Gabriella was a sucker for supplements, to a degree that even she found embarrassing to admit.
“Vitamin supplements, together with a lot of other things,” Alexander nodded in agreement. “The next was what . . . Alventix?”
“I don’t know anything about them.”
“Sure you do. They’re the company headed by the Russian tycoon. The one the protesters are always out to crucify, who fights back on primetime at every opportunity.”
“Kopulov,” Gabriella suddenly remembered. “I didn’t know the company, but I know the man.”
“And what was the next one?”
“CygnaGen. From the name, I’m going to guess it’s involved in some kind of genetic research.”
“I’ve never heard of them before,” Alexander said, “but I’d assume the same. Which means we’ve got three companies involved in medical research and pharmaceutical production.”
Gabriella considered the connection.
“Are there others?” Alexander asked.
Gabriella dragged a finger down the list of company names. “Europa MediTech . . . GenCore . . .”
Alexander’s head was nodding as if he’d predicted the answer. As the white noise of the car radio mumbled beneath them, Gabriella took note of the ongoing change in his expression. Where there had been curiosity a few moments before, there was now a mixture of resolve that seemed to merge with worry. His eyes danced a back-and-forth pattern between unknown targets somewhere between his knees. She remembered that expression. Something had him hooked.
“Alex, at some point you’re going to have to tell me what you’re thinking.”
He didn’t look up. “I’m not thinking, I’m listening.” He motioned toward the car’s minuscule stereo. At this point Gabriella no longer tried to conceal her confusion. His behavior was becoming bizarre.
“Alex, this isn’t the time to—”
“What have we just learned?” He cut her off. When Gabriella gave him only a wide-eyed shake of her head, he answered for himself. “We’ve learned that the IOR maintains ongoing financial connections with a whole suite of medical research firms. We’ve learned that this list of connections was at least in part what lay behind Crossler’s conviction that the events of yesterday are fraudulent and criminal.”
“And?”
“So listen,” Alexander said, waving again at the car’s speakers. A male newsreader’s voice tinned its way out of the low-grade equipment.
“. . . the sudden recovery of the sixty-three terminal cancer patients in Dr. Tedesco’s ongoing study marks the second mass healing, as they’ve come to be known, to make the news in the past twenty-four hours, following swiftly upon the recovery of the sight of over one hundred permanently blind children in a Pescara hospital ward suffering from a genetic condition for which there is no known cure.”
Gabriella was suddenly aware of the goose pimples standing at full rise on her arms.
The voice of the newsreader returned.
“These events follow the as-yet-unexplained occurrence at St. Peter’s yesterday morning, during which the crippled Pope suddenly stood upright, his lifelong condition apparently healed. Needless to say, in a nation of Catholics, the word ‘miracle’ is floating through the Italian vocabulary today with an unusual intensity.”
Gabriella peered up at Alexander. Suddenly her face was as white as his.