The same day
Vatican City: 11:30 a.m.
In all his years serving in Rome, Cardinal Rinaldo Trecchio had never seen anything like the disarray currently consuming the most senior administrators of the holy mother church.
These were men, himself included, who were used to predictability. Having functioned continuously for almost two thousand years, the Church was an institution that rarely operated on the unknown. Non-believers and the secular world as a whole might regard the spiritual realm as something ethereal and void of concrete substance, but to the men who led the Church it was known territory, firm and absolute. They were comfortable with it and cherished it.
Rinaldo had known Pope Gregory for nearly nineteen years. They had been made cardinals within a year of each other, had concelebrated together more times than either of them could possibly remember. Rinaldo considered the new pontiff a close friend as well as spiritual brother and father. And that made the events of the past twenty-four hours all but impossible to understand.
Of the veracity of Pope Gregory’s healing there could be no doubt. He had been a cripple; now he walked upright. It was a miracle, as sure as any recorded in the Bible or in the centuries-long annals of church history. Even the skeptical bones in Cardinal Rinaldo’s body—of which there were only a few—could not fail to be persuaded of it.
But it was still a surprise, and surprises were never good. Moreover, it had come as the first of a chain of surprises that were threatening to destroy the peaceful equilibrium in which the Church preferred to operate.
And then the Pope had spoken to the press. What the hell was Gregory thinking? The conference had launched the curia and assembled cardinals into its current state of uncertainty. Why was the Holy Father speaking to the press, to the world, when so little was yet known about what was going on? Why was he speaking to cameras and reporters more readily than to his own bishops and advisers?
And why, in the Lord’s holy name, had he talked of resurrection? The angels in heaven might be able to see some good in the strange words of the Vicar of Christ, but Rinaldo could only see danger. The Pope had all but given ecclesiastical endorsement to the healings in Pescara and Rome. Before they’d been understood. Before they’d been investigated. God knew the media wouldn’t hesitate to stand in for the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints and the famous Miracle Commissions normally set to verify the seemingly miraculous. What if they should find something untoward, something scandalous?
All this, and without any public mention, yet, of the source of it all: the stranger whose arrival in the Vatican had been the catalyst for this worrying cataract of miraculous activity. The man remained within their closed walls, gathered together with the pontiff. A man that none of the princes of the Church had yet met face to face, though there were whispers that the Pope was planning to introduce them later in the morning. A man unknown, unexamined, just like the miracles.
Cardinal Trecchio was well aware that faith had once been defined as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen, but he had been in the Vatican long enough to know that what was unseen in this place was all too often sinister. There were forces at work who wore faith only as a banner under which to exercise their interests, and whose plottings in dark corners far exceeded the scope of the works they undertook in the translucent light of day.
The outward appearance of current events was all positive. Suffering was being alleviated, the sick were being healed. And this strange man, whoever he was, seemed to be at the heart of it, working not evil, but good.
It was perverse that the presence of such goodness brought Cardinal Trecchio no peace. It only made him nervous. It felt like the rise before the fall. And as every good Catholic knew, when man fell, he fell hard.
Two minutes later, he could sense the fall beginning.
A clergy assistant walked into his office carrying a single sheet of paper. A worried look stretched across the whole of his face.
“Your Eminence,” the young priest said, deferentially but in a voice plagued by anxiety, “the Holy Father has called for a meeting between the senior members of the curia in his study in five minutes’ time. I think he means to introduce you to . . . to . . .”
It was clear he didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Absolutely no one in the Vatican knew what to call “that man.” Rinaldo, however, understood his meaning perfectly. His heart raced. The meeting was not just a whispered rumor. He was at last going to meet the stranger. He stood abruptly, anxious and ready.
“But before you go, Eminence, I feel you should read this.”
The priest handed the single page to Cardinal Trecchio—a printout from his computer. Rinaldo, hardly the world’s most technologically literate ecclesiastic, nonetheless recognized the visual pattern of a blog entry.
“It’s from a site run out of Piombino by a teenager with an eye for local news,” the assistant explained. “Given its subject matter, I thought you’d want to . . . I thought you’d . . .”
Rinaldo barely heard him stumble his way to a mute, confounded halt. The cardinal’s eyes were on the page and his world was changing yet again. The headline of the blog entry ran in capitals along the top of the short text:
RESURRECTION: DECEASED DAUGHTER OF FILM LEGEND GIANNI ZOLA RETURNS FROM THE DEAD, MINUTES AFTER THE POPE SPEAKS ON LIVE TELEVISION OF THE DEAD RETURNING TO LIFE.