The Key

5

Vatican City, Rome

Clementi swept from his office with as much speed as his large frame could manage.

‘When did they arrive?’ he asked, his black surplice flaring out behind him like ragged wings.

‘About five minutes ago,’ Schneider said, struggling to keep up with his master.

‘And where are they now?’

‘They were escorted down to the boardroom in the vault. I came to fetch you as soon as I heard they were here.’

Clementi hurried past the two Swiss guardsmen, hoping His Holiness would not choose this moment to emerge from his apartment and enquire about Clementi’s undue haste. As Cardinal Secretary of State, he had to work closely with the Pope — both literally and figuratively — discussing policy and getting his signature on important documents. The file in his hand did not contain any papal signatures or seals. His Holiness was not even aware of its contents or intent, something Clementi had worked hard to maintain.

He reached the end of the corridor and quickly barged through the door into the bare emergency stairwell beyond. ‘Do we know which of the Group is present?’

‘No,’ Schneider replied. ‘The guard wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to press him. I felt it better he remain vague on the details.’

Clementi nodded and descended into the gloom, brooding on what might await him at the end of this unscheduled summons.

The Group was a name he had given to the three as a means of turning them into a single entity, a mind trick designed to strike a balance of power in their arrangement: one of him, one of them. But it had not worked. They were far too powerful and distinctive to subsume into a homogenous whole and, try as he might, they remained as individual and formidable as when he had first approached them and laid out his scheme. The Group met as infrequently as possible, and always in secret, such was the delicate nature of their shared enterprise. With the calibre of people involved, arranging any meeting at all was a minor miracle of scheduling and they had not been due to meet again for another month; yet one or more of them was here right now, unannounced and unexpected — and there was only one viable explanation as to why.

‘This has to be about the situation in Ruin,’ Clementi said, arriving at a featureless metal door set into the wall of the first-floor landing.

He placed his doughy hand on a glass panel beside it, his cardinal’s gold ring clinking against the glass, and a pale strip of light swept across his palm, casting pale, shifting shadows across his face that reflected in the polished metal of the door. Clementi looked away. He had always hated his appearance, his moon face with its fringe of curly hair — once blond, now white — making him appear like an oversized cherub. A dull thunk sounded inside the door and he heaved it open, hurrying into the dark and away from the sight of himself.

A narrow tunnel lit up in a flicker of neon as he moved down it, the walls turning from smooth concrete to rough stone as he passed from the Apostolic Palace into the stone foundations of the squat, fifteenth-century tower built next to it. After ten or so steps he reached a second door that opened into a small, windowless room, packed with shelves and crammed with box files.

‘Go on ahead,’ he said. ‘Give my apologies and say I am cutting short another meeting and will be there directly. I will meet you in the lobby so you can brief me as to exactly who is there. I do not wish to enter a meeting of this importance without at least knowing who is present.’

Schneider bowed and slipped away, leaving Clementi alone with his churning thoughts. He listened to his chamberlain’s footsteps receding, his eyes fixed on the crossed keys of the papal seal and the letters IOR that adorned every file in the room. He was in a section of the fortified tower of Niccolo V, built into the eastern wall of the Apostolic Palace, that now served as the headquarters and only branch of one of the world’s most exclusive financial institutions. IOR stood for Istituto per le Opere di Religione — the Institute for Works of Religion — more commonly referred to as the Vatican Bank. It was the most secretive financial institution in the world and the prime cause of Clementi’s present worries.

Set up in 1942 to manage the Church’s huge accumulated wealth and investments, the bank had a little over forty thousand current account holders, no tax liabilities and the sort of unassailable privacy any Swiss bank would be proud of. As such, it had attracted some of the wealthiest and most influential investors in the world; but it had also courted more than its fair share of controversy.

In the 1970s and 80s the Institute had been used by the now disgraced financier Michele Sindona to launder Mafia drug money. After this Roberto Calvi, famously referred to as God’s banker, had been appointed to take a tighter hold of the Church’s vast resources; instead he had used the bank to illegally siphon billions of dollars from another financial institution, leaving the Church with an embarrassing and expensive moral responsibility when it eventually went bust. Calvi had been found dead a few weeks later, his pockets filled with building bricks and bank notes, hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. Much had been made of the ecclesiastical connotations of this location, especially in the light of Calvi’s membership of a masonic lodge known as the ‘Black Friars’, but no one had ever been convicted of his murder. The long shadow cast by these scandals lingered on, and for Clementi the rehabilitation of the Vatican Bank had become a personal obsession. What’s more, he had the perfect background to facilitate it.

As an undergraduate at Oxford he had studied history and economics as well as theology, discerning God’s miracle at work in all three disciplines. In Clementi’s eyes, the power of economics was a force for good, creating wealth so that people could be lifted from the evils of poverty and relieved of their earthly suffering. History had also taught him the perils of economic failure. He had studied the great civilizations of the past, focusing not only on how they had amassed their great wealth but also on how they lost it. Again and again, empires that had been built over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, tipped from prosperity into rapid decline, leaving nothing behind but legends and ruined monuments. His economist’s brain had pondered on what had become of their great wealth. Inevitably some of it passed to conquerors and became the seeds of new empires, but not all. History was littered with accounts of vast treasure stores that had vanished, never to be found again.

Once he had graduated and begun his rise within the Church, Clementi had served God in the best way he knew, by applying his learning and skill to update the Vatican’s revenue streams so that money started flowing in where once it had only flowed out. He knew that economics now ruled the world where faith had once held sway and that, in order to wield the sort of power and influence it had once held, the Church would have to become an economic heavyweight again.

The further Clementi rose, the more influence he had, and he used it to overhaul the outdated financial systems until finally his long service and deft stewardship was rewarded with the appointment to Cardinal Secretary of State and with it the keys to the main prize — the Vatican Bank itself.

His first act as Cardinal Secretary had been to amass all the bank’s various confidential accounts and then personally audit them so he could see the exact state of the Church’s finances. It was a task he didn’t trust anyone else to carry out and it had taken him nearly a year to painstakingly sort the false records from the true and unpick all the subterfuge and false accounting to reveal the full picture. What he had discovered, in a room identical to the one he now stood in, had made him physically sick. Somehow, through systematic corruption and hundreds of years of appalling management, all the vast reserves of money that had been accumulated over the preceding two thousand years had evaporated.

Trillions of dollars — gone.

The Church still held a huge portfolio of property and priceless works of art, but there was no cash — no liquidity. The Church was effectively bankrupt, and, because of centuries of complex deception and false accounting, nobody knew it but him.

Clementi recalled the desolation of that moment, staring into the abyss of what the Church had become and what would surely follow when the truth came to light. If the Church had been a publicly listed company it would have been declared insolvent and broken up by the courts to pay what it could to creditors. But it was not a company, it was God’s ministry on earth, and he could not stand by and allow it to be brought down by the mundane evils of greed and mismanagement. Instead he had relied on the things the Church had always fallen back on in times of need — its independence and its secrecy — and he had kept his discovery hidden.

Left with no choice but to carry on the dishonest practices bequeathed to him by his predecessors, Clementi had concealed the true accounts and set about maintaining the illusion of solvency by constantly moving around what little money there was and making what savings he could while he prayed for a miracle. But he did not despair, for even in the awfulness of his isolation and the great responsibility he alone carried, he could detect God’s hand already working. For had He not bestowed upon Clementi the gifts to understand the complexities of finance and then blessed him with the position of Cardinal Secretary of State?

But the amounts of money lost were too colossal to be recovered by mere economies and financial restructuring. In addition to balancing the books, he needed to find a way to refinance the Church. In the end he found the solution in the most unlikely of places. The key to ensuring the Church’s future, it turned out, was to look to its past — he had found his answer in Ruin.

Almost three years had passed since his moment of revelation, three years of carefully influencing world events by granting audiences and indulgences to presidents and prime ministers in exchange for favours only the Church could bestow. Like some papal legate of old, Clementi had nudged these modern-day Christian kings and emperors into war just so he could gain access to heathen lands the true church had once called its own. And now, just when his audacious scheme was on the verge of completion, it was being threatened by the same ancient and secretive place where the idea had originated.

He thought back to the newspapers on his desk, their headlines predicting the fall of the Citadel and salivating over the prospect of discovering what secrets lay within.

And one of those secrets was his.

If it were to be discovered, everything he had accomplished would be destroyed and the Church would be lost.

A sudden surge of anger welled up inside him and he cursed himself for his human weakness. He had delayed too long over the messy situation surrounding the Citadel. Wrenching open the door, he entered the blank corridor beyond, windowless and unexceptional save for its curved walls that followed the shape of the tower. He would demonstrate to the Group the true strength of his resolve by effectively signing four death warrants in front of them. Then they would see how committed he was; and they would be bound by blood, each to the other.

He burst through the door into the main lobby and stalked across the marble floor, past the ATMs that gave instructions in Latin, towards the steel-framed lift that descended to the vaults in the bedrock of the building.

The lift doors opened as he approached and Schneider jumped when he saw his master bearing down on him with fury in his eyes.

‘Well,’ Clementi said, stepping in and punching the button to take them straight back to the vaults. ‘Which one of our esteemed associates am I about to face?’

‘All of them,’ Schneider said, just as the doors closed and they started to descend. ‘The whole Group is here.’