Arklight Camp
Outskirts of Tehran
June 16, 3:23 a.m.
Church stepped out of the warehouse to make a series of phone calls to get this rolling; the first of which was to Aunt Sallie. She was in the big Tactical Operations Center at the Hangar, which made NORAD look like an Internet cafe.
Bug called us just as Church rejoined me.
“I ran down every priest who chose the name of Nicodemus,” said Bug, “and either MindReader is having a senior moment or there is something mucho freaky about the Vatican database.”
“Why?”
“Well, there is a pretty tightly managed registry of priests. Names, personal data, photographs, the works. This goes back pretty far, to the point where paper records were stored and later scanned; and back past that to written records. All scanned now into their systems. Worldwide there have been a couple of hundred priests who chose that name, and a few for whom that was their birth name. Now here’s the kicker. About once every generation, call it twenty-five to thirty years, there is a record of another priest taking that name. Always from the same place, Verona in northern Italy. The thing is, we have dates of births and dates of deaths of each priest, but when I cross-referenced this with public records in Italy, they don’t match. In fact, there are no records at all of any of those priests. Either these guys lied when they applied to priest school or whatever it’s called, or there’s a conspiracy to hide the true identities of these guys.”
“Swell,” I said. “Another mystery. ’Cause I was just thinking that I wasn’t nearly confused enough.”
“Then buckle up, Joe,” said Bug, “because there’s one more thing that popped up. I added Verona to the general pattern search for this case and guess whose grandfather was born there?”
“Just tell me, Bug.”
“The family name is Verrecchia. But that’s not the name he uses now.”
“What’s the name?”
“Vox.”
“Wait-Hugo Vox’s family comes from the same town as Nicodemus?”
“More than the same town, Joe. Half of the men who adopted Nicodemus as their priest names were born as Verrecchias. Nicodemus and Vox are from the same family.”