Daniel Silva - The Confessor

He sat heavily in his chair. A copy of L'Osservatore Romano lay on his desk, next to a stack of clippings from the Vatican News Service. The Vatican's version of Pravda and Tass. With a heavy heart, Fó began to read, like a Kremlinologist looking for hidden meaning in an announcement that a certain member of the Politburo was suffering from a heavy chest cold. It was the usual drivel. Fó pushed aside the papers and began the long deliberation about where to have lunch.

He looked at Giovanna. Perhaps this would be the day her stoicism crumbled. He squeezed his way inside her cubicle. She was hunched over a bollettino, an official press release. When Fó peered over her shoulder, she covered it with her forearm like a schoolgirl hiding a test paper from the boy at the next desk.

"What is it, Giovanna?"

"They just released it. Go get your own and see for yourself."

She shoved him into the hall. The touch of her hand on Fó's hip lingered as he made his way toward the front of the room, where a fierce-looking nun sat behind a wooden desk. She bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a teacher who used to beat him with a stick. She handed him a pair oibollettini joylessly, like a camp guard doling out punishment rations. Just to annoy her, Fó read them standing in front of the desk.

The first dealt with a staff appointment at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Hardly anything the readers of La Repubblica cared about. Fó would leave that one for Giovanna and her cohorts at the Catholic News Service. The second was far more interesting. It was issued in the form of an amendment to the Holy Father's schedule on Friday. He had cancelled an audience with a delegation from the Philippines and instead would pay a brief visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome to address the congregation.

Fó looked up and frowned. A trip to the synagogue announced two days before the fact? Impossible! An event like that should have been on the papal schedule weeks ago. It didn't take an experienced Vatican hand to know something was up.

Fó peered down a marble-floored corridor. At the end was an open door giving onto a pompous office. Seated behind a polished desk was a forbidding figure named Rudolf Gertz, the former Austrian television journalist who was now the head of the Vatican Press Office. It was against the rules to set foot in the corridor without permission. Fó decided on a suicide run. When the nun wasn't looking, he leapt down the hall like a springbok. A few steps from

Gertz's door a burly priest seized Fó by his coat collar and lifted him off the floor. Fó managed to hold up the bollettino.

"What do you think you're playing at, Rudolf? Do you take us for idiots? How dare you drop this on us with two days' notice? We should have been briefed! Why's he going? What's he going to say?"

Gertz looked up calmly. He had a skier's tan and was groomed for the evening news. Fó hung there helplessly, awaiting an answer he knew would never come, for somewhere during his journey from Vienna to the Vatican, Rudolf Gertz seemed to have lost the ability to speak.

"You don't know why he's going to the synagogue, do you, Rudolf? The Pope is keeping secrets from the Press Office. Something is up, and I'm going to find out what it is."

Gertz raised an eyebrow--"I wish you the best of luck." The burly priest took it as a signal to frog-march Fó back to the press room and deposit him at his cubicle.

Fó shoved his things into his coat pockets and headed downstairs. He walked toward the river along the Via della Conciliazione, the bollettino still crumpled in his fist. Fó knew it was a signal of cataclysmic events to come. He just didn't know what they were. Against all better judgment, he had allowed himself to be used in a game as old as time itself: a Vatican intrigue pitting one wing of the Curia against the other. He suspected that the surprise announcement of a visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome was the culmination of that game. He was furious that he'd been blindsided like everyone else. He'd made a deal. The deal, in the opinion of Benedetto Fó, had been broken.

He stopped in the piazza just outside the ramparts of the Castel Sant'Angelo. He needed to make a telephone call--a call that. couldn't be made from his desk in the Sala Stampa. From a public telephone, he dialed a number for an extension inside the Apostolic Palace. It was the private number of a man very close to the Holy Father. He answered as though he were expecting Fó's call.

"We had an agreement, Luigi," Fó said without preamble. "You broke that agreement."

"Calm down, Benedetto. Don't hurl accusations that you'll regret later."

"I agreed to play your little game about the Holy Father's childhood in exchange for something special."

"Trust me, Benedetto, something very special will be coming your way sooner than you think."

"I'm about to be permanently banned from the Sala Stampa because I helped you. The least you could have done is warn me that this trip to the synagogue was coming."

"I couldn't do that, for reasons that will be abundantly clear to you in the coming days. As for your problems at the Sala Stampa, this too shall pass."

"Why is he going to the synagogue?"

"You'll have to wait until Friday, like everyone else."

"You're a bastard, Luigi."

"Please try to remember you're talking to a priest."

"You're not a priest. You're a cutthroat in a clerical suit."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, Benedetto. I'm sorry, but the Holy Father would like a word."

The line went dead. Fó slammed down the receiver and headed wearily back to the Press Office.

A SHORT distance away, in a barricaded diplomatic compound at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac called the Via Michle Mercati,

Aaron Shilo, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, was seated behind his desk, leafing his way through a batch of morning correspondence from the Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv. A compact woman with short dark hair knocked on the door jamb and entered the room without waiting for permission. Yael Ravona, Ambassador Shiloh's secretary, dropped a single sheet of paper on his desk. It was a bulletin from the Vatican News Service.

"This just came over the wire."

The ambassador read it quickly, then looked up. "The synagogue? Why didn't they tell us something like this was coming? It makes no sense."

"Judging from the tone of that dispatch, the Press Office and VNS were caught off-guard."

"Put in a call to the Secretariat of State. Tell them I'd like to speak with Cardinal Brindisi."

"Yes, ambassador."

Yael Ravona walked out. The ambassador picked up his telephone and dialed a number in Tel Aviv. A moment later, he said quietly: "I need to speak to Shamron."

AT THAT same moment, Carlo Casagrande was seated in the back of his Vatican staff car, speeding along the winding S4 motorway through the mountains northeast of Rome. The reason for his unscheduled journey lay in the locked attaché case resting on the seat next to him. It was a report, delivered to him earlier that morning, by the agent he had assigned to investigate the childhood of the Holy Father. The agent had been forced to resort to a black-bag operation--a break-in at the apartment of Benedetto Fó. A hurried search of files had produced his notes on the matter. A summary of those notes was contained in the report.

The Villa Galatina appeared, perched on its own mountain, glowering at the valley below. Casagrande glimpsed one of Roberto Pucci's guards high among the battlements, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The front gate was open. A tan-suited security man glanced at the SCV license plates and waved the car onto the property.

Roberto Pucci greeted Casagrande in the entrance hall. He was dressed in riding breeches and knee-length leather boots, and smelled of gunsmoke. Obviously, he had spent the morning shooting. Don Pucci often said that the only thing he loved more than his collection of guns was making money--and the Holy Mother Church, of course. The financier escorted Casagrande down a long, gloomy gallery into a cavernous great room overlooking the garden. Cardinal Marco Brindisi was already there, a thin figure perched on the edge of a chair in front of the fire, a teacup balanced precariously on his cassocked thigh. Light reflected off the lenses of the cardinal's small round spectacles, turning them to white discs that obscured his eyes. Casagrande dropped to one knee and kissed the proffered ring. Brindisi extended the first two fingers of his right hand and solemnly offered his blessing. The cardinal, thought Casagrande, had exquisite hands.