redRobe

Chapter Seventeen Vaya Con Dios

A week after Axl was carried unconscious from his audience with the Cardinal, a duty guard watched a small but overweight priest struggle up a steep flight of stone stairs towards the sea-facing terrace of the Villa Carlotta, carrying a leather bag in his arms. The sun was only just dipping into the horizon and every surface still shimmered with heat, even the flat silver expanse of ocean. A few boats hung on its beaten surface but they were static and desultory, dragging fat anchor chutes as the fishermen waited for nightfall. Then hurricane lamps would be lit and work would begin again as the hidden shoals swam up towards the light and their death.

The little priest was climbing the sea stairs because he’d been forced to cut through the gardens… The hours of audience were over and he’d been refused entrance at the front door.

Father Moritz was both hot and tired. Sweat had glued his soutane to his back. And the hours he’d spent travelling on a train from Mexico City had done little to improve his temper. He was so tired he could no longer say how tired he was. But that was lack of sleep not the journey. The journey had just irritated him. The tiredness ate at his mind like a parasite.

Two men walked behind Father Moritz. They were the Cardinal’s guards. Dressed in black silk suits and clerical collars, but definitely guards. Their suits were lightweight and Italian, cut loose under the left arm, to allow room for H&K .38s. The wrapround sunglasses featured self-adjusting lenses that could instantly throw up a floating-focus overlay of information. It would have been simpler, neater and altogether less fuss for both men to use replacement eyes to route incoming data direct, but the Cardinal was a traditionalist.

Rich to be sure, CEO of two metaNationals, major shareholder in CySat/nV and sole proxy for the Catholic Church in Mexico ... all of which made him a traditionalist almost by definition.

Father Moritz smiled. Rome might have run a reverse-takeover on the Church of Christ Geneticist, but that didn’t mean the Vatican or her representatives approved of all the genetic, medical and surgical patents they’d acquired. Merger, of course, wasn’t a word the Cardinal would use in relation to Church affairs; ecumenical was. But it meant the same, and what it meant was that Vatican shares had their biggest rise on the Dow Jones for as long as anyone could remember.

So why was Declan so worried?

‘Moritz.’ At the top of the steep stairs a tall man stood smiling as the fat little priest struggled his way up the last few steps.

‘Your Excellency,’ the man tried to kneel to kiss the ring but got no closer than dipping a knee before he was stopped by the Cardinal.

‘Don’t. You’ll never get up again…’

The little priest tried not to scowl and the tall man laughed, loudly. Grabbing a glass of white wine from a wooden tray balanced nearby on the balustrade, he thrust it at his visitor.

‘Drink it and take a seat,’ said the Cardinal.

Father Moritz opened his mouth and the Cardinal held up his hand, the setting sun glinting from the blood-red cornelian in his ring. ‘Whatever brings you to Villa Carlotta can wait,’ he said firmly.

Father Moritz and the Cardinal went back a long way, definitely longer than either of them would admit. No one was left alive to know how long, the Cardinal thought sadly, though there was nothing sinister in the fact. On his side, his people lived longer than most and the little fat man in front of him was germ-cell wired for longevity. It was the least his parents could have done for a child cocooned so tight by money that anything in the world he wanted was his, except poverty.

Quite apart from patents inherited by Moritz’s father, his great-grandmother had owned the gameSoft company LearningCurve GmB. She was on ice, pending revival, while Dad now functioned as the houseAI of his family’s mansion outside Seattle. It was years since he’d been home.

The first thirty years in the life of Moritz Alvarez y Gates had been spent trying to spend money faster than it accumulated. To that end, most of China’s collection of Imperial mutton-fat jade got stacked up on the shelves in his New York condo, he bought the original of Da Vinci’s smiling girl and he still hit thirty tired, bemused and unquestionably richer in real terms than when he started.

The money was spending him faster than he could spend it. At thirty-three, the age at which Alexander the Great died having conquered the known world, he was too frightened most days to leave his room.

Around that time the Cardinal was still a street priest from newVenice doing mission work in Spanish Harlem. Seeing a CySat broadcast about Moritz’s billions he’d written to the man—pen and ink, envelope and FedEx—never expecting a reply. The amount he received by return was ten times larger than the priest had even dreamed of asking for.

They had talked on their mobiles, then sat face to face on Moritz’s roof garden. Later on, they would walk down to Washington Square to play chess badly and, later still, to play it well, with an audience of drifters around them. Everywhere Father Declan Begley was sent by his mission, Moritz followed, buying a house for himself nearby and letting the priest use Moritz’s money as his own.

Sexless. Unspoken. It was a love affair, never acknowledged. And there was nothing physical in it, ever. . . The Vatican had checked that out, more than once. But the inquisitors never made anything stick. Not even that Father Declan fed from the Latin Queens, taking only blood from the young girls, nothing more and never enough to be harmful. Moritz took nothing because there was nothing he wanted. He seemed so sexless he was almost neuter.

In the decades that followed, Father Declan became Santo Ducque, bishop in Bogotá, then archbishop of Havana and finally Cardinal of Mexico. Moritz had his circadian rhythms modified to reduce his need for sleep, but still couldn’t burn up his wealth fast enough. When he hit an income of five thousand dollars a second his mind went walkabout for a month, refusing even to acknowledge the numbers that flashed lightning-fast direct to his optic nerve.

So at the Cardinal’s suggestion, Moritz gave his wealth to the sole organisation with enough lawyers and knowledge of arcane banking back-history to be able to crack open the trusts. Only, even then, it wasn’t as easy as the Vatican Bank—in its arrogance—had thought it would be. Moritz’s wealth was vast, self-perpetuating, growing uninterrupted like cancer through the markets to touch everything. Water, steel, fusion, reclamation of the subSahal, reforestation of the Amazon… His money owned the very AIs that negotiated its own tax breaks.

And there was one big problem that the Vatican hadn’t been expecting. The money didn’t want to change owners, thank you very much. It was happy shuffling between shell companies, bouncing off orbitals, living dangerously.

It took a young nun in the St Peter’s secretariat to do what no one else had considered. Joan talked to the money direct. And her conversation was very short and simple and went as follows.

‘We wash whiter...'

And the money thought about it and realised that, by definition, the Vatican’s cash was self-laundering, not to mention zero-rated and tax exempt. Joan closed the deal and the Vatican walked away with credit lines worth trillions, a forty-three percent stake in LunaWorld, fifteen percent of CySat’s original holding company, an offshore datahaven in the Bahamas and a whole string of Panamanian orbitals, that turned out to be laundering sites for Cartel drug money.

They also—obviously enough—also got Moritz’s original Genome patents. Not to mention his character rights to LC/GbH’s Lucifer’s Dragon. Overnight, St Peter’s was richer than San Lorenzo, the Geneticists’ base in Megrib. The games income in North America alone was worth more than the entire GDP of Saudi, which was deep in recession, but still…

Joan was trustee. And inside Moritz’s head the numbers stopped spinning for the first time ever, leaving silence.

For the last four decades Moritz had quietly collected alms at the cathedral door and cleaned the relics in the Sangrario, that overdressed eighteenth-century fortress built next door to Mexico’s Catedral Metropolitana. The fat little man came and went as he liked and no one worried that he might steal, because no man had less interest in money than the one man who’d had the most.

Now, Moritz wanted something else, something even simpler. And the Colt had promised he would get it. What’s more, Moritz believed the gun.

‘Bonefish,’ the Cardinal said, pointing to gulls gathering over the reef. One of his bodyguards looked doubtful but, when the Cardinal raised one eyebrow, the man didn’t open his mouth to differ.

‘Maybe not,’ admitted the Cardinal, reaching for a fresh glass. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve been out there.’ He started to raise the Bohemian crystal to his lips, then paused as a liveried servant dashed forward to wipe a drop from its delicate base.

His Excellency Cardinal Santo Ducque shrugged, as if to say, you see how I have to live… And then behind his shades focused golden pupils on Moritz and the small talk was over.

‘I’ve come to say goodbye,’ Moritz said, ‘which brings me to this ...' He slid his hand into the leather bag on his lap and pulled out the Colt. Three things happened simultaneously. The Cardinal’s face slid straight from shock to resignation, bypassing fear, Moritz grinned and the gun uncloaked, cutting its fooler loops to trip every alarm in the Villa.

It wasn’t the bodyguards who took apart Moritz’s head, the first hollow-point full-ceramic-jacket punching a golfball size hole just below his hairline. The guards fired a split second after that first shot, their slugs adding a jerky rhythm to his dancing, already-dead body as it went over backwards. The initial shot came from the Villa’s AI, before soundwaves from the exploding security sirens even reached the Cardinal’s ears.

Moritz’s head had no exit hole at the back, largely because there was no back to Moritz’s head, too much of his skull was scattered in sticky white fragments on the flagstones of the terrace behind him. And the heavy stink of bougainvillea had been edged out by shit, blood and cordite.

‘Get a doctor,’ the Cardinal demanded. ‘Full mediSoft now. I want him chilled down, his heart preserved. While you’re at it, scoop out what’s left of his brain and chill that too.’

‘No way,’ said a voice. And then it went harsh, street-smart and heavily Brooklyn. ‘Stop exactly where you are and no one else gets dead…’

Both bodyguards were spinning like tops, combat ready with left hands gripping right wrists, H&K .38s held at forty-five degrees to the upper body as they looked for the newcomer. And then they all realised it was the gun talking.

‘Black Jack Hot.’ The Cardinal sounded vaguely surprised.

‘Yeah. Episode one, opening sequence. Didn’t know you were a fan. Hey. . .’ That was to the two hovering bodyguards. ‘Any closer and I’ll blow your boss to meatballs.’

‘Moz’ll die if we don’t help him,’ said the Cardinal.

‘That’s what he wants,’ said the Colt. ‘Besides, he’s already dead as dogmeat. And it’s time you got over this resurrection shit.’

Both bodyguards looked at the Cardinal, who looked at the Colt lying on blood-splattered slabs where Moritz had dropped it, tiny diodes lighting in sequence along its exposed side, fast and rhythmic, like the click-track on some mixing deck.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ The Colt sounded cross. ‘Death was what I promised him. You can patch him up, reload his brain, grow a new reverse to his skull. Fuck it, you could grow him a new head, couldn’t you? Or do a transplant…’

The Cardinal groaned. It had been the Vatican who did the first successful head transplant, back at the end of the twentieth century, and no one had ever let them forget it.

‘. . . but do you think he’ll thank you for it,’ demanded the Colt. ‘The fuck he will.’ The Colt was flipping lights faster now, opening dialogue not just with the houseAI but with the Villa’s titanium gate, persuading it to lock out the CCPD hovers that were tearing up the narrow blacktop towards it, demanding access.

The gate wasn’t making any decisions. That wasn’t its job. No matter what the CCPD reckoned they’d seen on satellite.

‘Chrysler Mark Three hovers, armoured and running in battle readiness,’ the Colt told the Cardinal. ‘You want to let them in?’

The Cardinal just looked at the gun.

‘It’s your Villa, your AI, your pet corpse ...' The Colt’s voice changed, becoming stentorian, overtly dramatic. To make the point he ran a chord crash ahead of the opening words. ‘Cardinal kills benefactor. Maximillia under pressure to act…

‘Or did the poor, muddled man try to kill you? After all, his fingerprints are all over the handle. I’ve got his neural patterns logged on file as owner. Fuck it, I’ll even go on oath in court if you want…’

The gun paused, its tone sardonic. ‘Oh, you lot don’t believe machines can take oaths, do you? A bit of a fucking pity really.’

‘Tell the house to let them in,’ the Cardinal told the gun. ‘And tell it to wipe any embarrassing vid-transcripts accidentally.’ His Excellency looked at the gun. ‘Presumably there’s a price for all this?’

‘Isn’t there always? But you can afford it.’

The Cardinal grunted. ‘You saw poor Father Moritz turn that gun on me?’

Both bodyguards nodded.

‘Good,’ said the Cardinal as he stood up and stretched, fingers interlinking above his head, thin lips pulling back over long yellow canines. CAT scans and lie detectors wouldn’t be involved. Hell, it wouldn’t even make the news. In fact, if the CCPD weren’t gone in thirty minutes leaving him to deal with the gun and the body, then he was losing his touch.

The Cardinal adjusted his tiny pebble glasses against the evening glare and glanced at the Colt, considering. He was the Cardinal. And the Cardinal could do what he wanted. That was what Mexico had always believed… Somehow these days it was the Cardinal who felt less certain of the fact.