Raiders

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

“You’re sure he bought it?” Mason asked Ella.

“Hook, line and sinker, Jed. You should have more faith in my skills.”

“It’s not your skills I have the problem with, it’s Virgil’s crazy plans.”

They were walking across the center of St. Peter’s Square in the heart of the Vatican City and approaching Bishop Francisco Zurla. He was surrounded by a small coterie of advisors.

“And you’re sure Milo got the password right?”

“He worked at Flowdox until the US Government shut them down, Jed. He has Julian Assange’s personal email address. If he hacks the Vatican and says he has the password, he has the password.”

“Let’s hope you’re right.”

“He hacked the BBC website and got my picture on there easily enough, didn’t he?”

He had done that, it was true. Milo’s dubious past at Flowdox, a long-time rival to Wikileaks was well documented in the world of hackers and government intel agencies, and the skills he had learned there had brought the Raiders’ bacon home on many occasions.

Mason knew all about Flowdox. Milo had narrowly escaped arrest after the US Government had made a deal with Denmark and done a little raid of their own. They planned to shut down the servers and arrest as many hackers and journalists as they could get their hands on. Fortunately, a Washington insider had tipped off Absalon Mortensen, the enigmatic founder of Flowdox, about the raid and when they got there they found nothing but an empty building.

After that, Milo had gone to ground for months before resurfacing in Thailand where he used his hacking skills to make a living on some questionable day-trading. He’d racked up a good six figures before he ran into Ella Makepeace on a beach on Phuket one day, and the rest was history. Mason knew there was much about the young man’s past he had kept to himself, but that was part of the Raiders’ code — no awkward questions and no awkward answers. “I guess,” he said doubtfully.

“And fucking hell, this thing weighs a ton!” Virgil grimaced as he repositioned the TV camera on his right shoulder.

“It was your idea, so you get the donkey work,” Mason said. “And where the sodding hell did you get a TV camera and sound boom from?”

“One never questions the genius and creativity of The Virgil, Jed,” Virgil said. “One simple appreciates.”

As they approached the Bishop, Mason felt a wave of uncertainty. The feeling was followed by a flashback of the day he’d led his brother to his death in Kenya. He’d felt the same thing then, too. The decisions he made on that mission cast a long, dark shadow over his life, and he worked hard to shake it away as he smiled and shook the bishop’s hand.

After a round of pleasant introductions, and the presentation of Milo’s hastily created fake news media ID cards, Ella said, “It’s so good of you to speak with me today. Do you mind if my cameraman films some close-ups for the show?”

“Not at all,” the Prefect said. “I’m only too happy to help.”

Ella settled in opposite Zurla and gave him a broad smile, which he warmly returned. Behind her, Virgil was doing his best impression of a professional cameraman and filming non-existent footage of whatever he could to pass the time.

Mason stood beside Ella and pretended like he knew what he was doing with a sound boom, holding it vaguely over the top of the bishop as Ella started to interview him for the BBC.

Watching her at work like this always blew him away. The rest of team each brought tangible skills to the table — Caleb and his connections, Zara and her fighting prowess, Milo and his technical ability, Virgil and his polymath knowledge, but Ella was different. How did you put a price on the crazy mind games she employed to get what she wanted out of people?

He didn’t know how to quantify her skills because he couldn’t begin to understand them. He’d watched people like Derren Brown doing things like this to people but always dismissed it as TV fakery, but seeing Ella Makepeace playing people like violins in this way had converted him. He was a believer. Watching Signor Zurla open up like a flower and give Ella exactly what she wanted was like watching a witch work magic on a child. He reminded himself never to let her do it to him, but then, he thought with mild concern, how would he ever know if she had?

Ella flashed her famous smile. “Just one more thing — you mentioned that His Holiness is visiting the Shrine of Our Lady Fátima.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Zurla said.

“When is that?”

“May.”

“I see.”

“And the repair work you’re doing on the Basilica — do you think you can do it before the end of the year?”

“Yes, I think we can do it. That’s the plan, anyway,” he said with a forced smile.

“And did that cost you more than the previous work on the Sistine Chapel?”

“Yes, it cost us a great deal of money and aggravation. It’s been a very long interview. Shall we end it here?”

“Of course. Thank you so much, Signor Zurla,” Ella said. “You have no idea how helpful you’ve been today.”

They walked slowly away from the Prefect and crossed the yard on their way back around to where the others were waiting for them. “All right, we got it.”

“You got it?” Eva said.

Ella nodded and pretended to chalk a mark in the air. “Works every time.”

“How did you do it?”

“Simple,” Ella said. “The password was — what was it, Virgil?”

“The password was actually the first four words to Angele Dei, or the Guardian Angel prayer, spoken in Latin, and then only by Zurla,” he said. “Qui custos es mei, me tibi commissum pietate superna, hodie, hac nocte, illumina, custodi, rege, et guberna, amen. It means, ‘My Guardian Dear, to whom his love commits me here, ever to this day, this night, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide, and obey’.”

“And you got the Prefect to say that?”

“Just the first four words.”

“I can’t believe he would say the passwords out loud like that, when he knows they activate the archives.”

“Oh, he doesn’t know he said them,” Ella said.

“I don’t understand.”

“We needed him to say the first four words in Latin,” Virgil said. “Qui custos es mei. The voice recognition system is a computer, and they’re remarkably unfussy when it comes to things like this. All the computer wants to hear is the phonemes, so Ella worked out a way to have the bishop express them and now Milo here will reconstruct them into the correct sentence.”

“That’s right,” Milo said. “If anyone knows how to make a computer satisfied, it’s me.”

Zara raised a hand. “What happens in your bedroom, stays in your bedroom.”

“Funny.”

“So how did you have him say the right words?” Eva asked.

“Qui — I can build it from when the bishop said I think we; custos, I can get from it cost us dearly; es was easy — less; and mei was even more straight forward — I had the bishop confirm the Pope’s trip overseas was in May.”

“Now all we have to do is break in,” Milo said as he shared a high five with Virgil.

“Yes,” Mason said with less certainty. “Now all we have to do is break in.”