O ’Connor returned to the Imperial Hotel for dinner and then retired to his room. He recovered his laptop from the wardrobe safe, dialled in a series of codes to connect with the vast database held in the CIA’s Cray supercomputers at Langley and waited while his request for access went through a series of encryptions and decryptions.
With access approved, O’Connor fed in the photographs he’d taken earlier in the day. Within seconds, a profile page for Antonio Sodano appeared, together with surveillance photographs provided by the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian financial and customs police: Antonio Sodano – executive summary. Born Corleone, Sicily, 14 August 1987. Rising member of the Cosa Nostra and suspected hitman, although young and inexperienced. Arrested in 2006 for the murder of a member of a prominent mafia family in Palermo in a dispute over protection money for quarries. Trial aborted for lack of evidence with a strong omerta surrounding the case. Moved to Rome 2007. Has connections with a black Masonic Lodge, Propaganda Tre, an offshoot of the infamous Propaganda Due or P2 Lodge, suspected of involvement in the Red Brigades’ assassination of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. Sodano has links to the Vatican Bank (see attached photo). Now under investigation and surveillance by the Italian Guardia di Finanza for suspected drug-trafficking.
O’Connor scanned the rest of the report, but stopped when he came to the surveillance photographs. Sodano had been snapped at a dockside in Naples, at Rome’s international airport, and at La Pergola, one of Rome’s finest restaurants, where he had been photographed at dinner with another man. The photo was grainy and O’Connor couldn’t quite place him, but he looked vaguely familiar. O’Connor knew the restaurant well. Located on Via Cadlolo 101 in the Cavalieri Hilton, with panoramic views of the city from Rome’s highest hill, La Pergola’s cellar held 48 000 bottles. O’Connor had dined there with Kate Braithwaite.
O’Connor felt the old anger and hurt return, and he fought to control his deepest emotions. Kate. He pictured her in her level four spacesuit, calmly working with some of the deadliest pathogens known to humankind. She had been a brilliant microbiologist. They had worked together on an assignment in Beijing involving the biggest biological threat the world had ever faced. Their love-life had been a sensation between the sheets; but just when O’Connor was accepting there was someone very special in his life, Kate had been brutally taken from him – a needle stick in a lethal hot-zone laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. From the moment the Ebola virus had entered Kate’s bloodstream, her fate had been sealed. Her agonising death was seared into his memory.
The coroner returned a finding of ‘accidental fatality’, but O’Connor hadn’t believed a word of it. He and Kate had made some powerful enemies in Washington and at Langley, and the needle had punctured the back of her arm. He had considered resigning, but decided against it, knowing he would have a better chance from within the Agency of discovering how Kate had met her fate. He still harboured a hope that the CIA might change course – back to the old agency that had once been run by honourable professionals.
O’Connor took a deep breath and made a conscious effort to put Kate at the back of his mind, concentrating on the image on his laptop. Suddenly he remembered where he’d seen the other man in the photo. The suit had distracted him, for the man dining with Sodano was none other than the man who’d been photographed with Wiley and Pope John Paul II: Archbishop Salvatore Felici.
Never put anything on paper you can’t afford to have someone read, and never be photographed, period, O’Connor thought. With a sense of rising anticipation he Googled the Vatican’s official website. He’d never known Wiley to cultivate people who were not either powerful or in a position to provide information. The photograph on Wiley’s desk had been taken nearly twenty years ago; there was every chance Salvatore Felici was now a cardinal.
Paydirt. O’Connor found his man on the biographical page of cardinals the Vatican thoughtfully provided for the faithful and the curious. According to his biography, Salvatore Felici had been the Pope’s ambassador to Guatemala in the early ’90s. Not only was Felici now a cardinal, but he was listed in the section for cardinal bishops, the highest of the Vatican’s three cardinal rankings. O’Connor matched the unsmiling official portrait with the photo from the Guardia di Finanza ’s surveillance. What would a nice boy like the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith be doing dining with a young thug like Sodano? What was the relationship now between Wiley and Felici?
O’Connor flicked back into his encrypted log-in and dialled up Wiley’s access code. While he and Kate Braithwaite had been working on the Beijing assignment, O’Connor had befriended and learnt from a brilliant young hacker whom the CIA had wisely put on the payroll at Langley. In his short life, Corey Barrino had worked under the pseudonym of ‘Byte Blaster’, hacking into the Pentagon’s and NASA’s classified networks. Byte Blaster had once hacked into the very bowels of Langley itself and left a little message for the Agency’s director. The dent in the wall from the director’s paperweight was still there.
Wiley must have changed his access codes, O’Connor thought, momentarily frustrated as Access Denied flashed on the screen. He knew that Wiley would have added a ‘salt’ to the DES, the Data Encryption Standard Algorithm. Corey’s tutelage on Hacking 101 had taught O’Connor that two characters added to either end of a password – characters that could be chosen from upper- and lower-case letters of the alphabet, or the numbers zero to nine or a full stop or a forward slash – gave a choice of sixty-four different characters at either end of a password. That, in turn, provided a possible 4096 different salts. Even though Barrino had provided O’Connor with access to Langley’s supercomputers, it might still take some time to crack Wiley’s sophisticated encryption. The way this assignment was shaping up, time might not be on Aleta Weizman’s side, O’Connor thought grimly.
Acting on a hunch, but one born of countless operations in the field, O’Connor dialled up one of Barrino’s simpler but nevertheless devastatingly effective programs. The hacker had based it on a program which phishers used to acquire hundreds of thousands of email addresses. Criminal gangs used a similar system to dupe people into releasing bank account numbers by posing as Technical Services from Bank of America, Citibank or any of a hundred other financial institutions in order that ‘a problem with the records might be fixed’. Unwary Americans lost more than $3 billion a year to email scams, and for someone like Corey Barrino, it would have been child’s play to secure the cardinal’s personal email address. Using standard Vatican email addresses, O’Connor typed in five possible email combinations for Felici and set the program to ‘run’.
Corey’s program would have seized most networks, but the Cray supercomputers in the basements at Langley were capable of 400 000 million calculations a second. It took less than ten seconds to confirm the email address and Felici’s password. Felici@vatican. va; password: ‘pectoralcrossmauthausen’. The password was unusual, O’Connor thought, as Welcome Eminence appeared on the screen. He scanned Felici’s inbox without finding any emails from the CIA. Quickly he flicked to the sent box. The Cardinal had obviously not given much thought to anyone getting into his system. O’Connor opened an email to Wiley’s personal address that revealed a whole thread of previous emails, including one that Felici had sent to Wiley a month earlier.
O’Connor read through the correspondence, quietly cursing himself that he had even contemplated carrying out the DDO’s orders. But the CIA instilled and demanded loyalty, and that loyalty had but one direction: upwards. O’Connor read Cardinal Felici’s initial email with a rising sense of anger. Clearly Wiley and the then Archbishop Felici had both been involved in the disappearance of Weizman’s family, but it was the last part of Wiley’s response that rocked O’Connor to the core. I plan to be in Rome on the 24th, and I’d be delighted to brief you personally on the situation in Central America, and perhaps we can discuss this missing Maya Codex that Weizman has raised in her article. For reasons I will explain, the codex poses a threat. If Weizman is searching for it, it will be important to get to it before she does. The Weizman issue is in hand, but I need a back-up plan. I understand that Sodano is back in Rome. If you can get me his contact details it might help me with an internal problem as well as the Weizman case.
O’Connor took another deep breath. Suddenly his mission had become personal. He had no doubt who the ‘internal problem’ was, and any lingering loyalty evaporated, replaced by a gut-wrenching realisation that he no longer had a future in the Firm. Worse still, as long as Wiley held the appointment of DDO, the mostly decent men and women who every day put their lives on the line for the CIA and the country were now at risk. Abraham Lincoln had abolished slavery. Thomas Jefferson had authored the Declaration of Independence and championed a separation of church and state. Theodore Roosevelt had been the first to recognise the need to conserve natural resources. But now, the debacle in Iraq had damaged the reputation of the US around the world and the country was losing its way. With the Vice President protecting him, Wiley was a loose cannon. O’Connor knew it was time to act, even if that meant being on the run until he could find a way to bring Wiley to justice.
O’Connor quickly made a copy of the correspondence and locked his laptop away in the safe. He took the lift to the lobby and then walked purposefully but calmly towards the nearest U-Bahn. The hacking operation had taken longer than he’d planned and there was no time for a leisurely tram ride tonight. Wiley had broken his own rules and those of the Agency, O’Connor thought, as he leapt aboard the train for Schwedenplatz.
Out of habit, O’Connor scanned the half-full carriage then returned to his thoughts, recalling the DDO’s explosive burst of anger when he’d advised him against going ahead with the Weizman assassination. Wiley’s email had been sent not long after that interview, which might explain his lapse in revealing Sodano’s name. It was now very clear that Wiley had given Sodano the same mission as O’Connor, breaking another of the cardinal rules. Aleta Weizman had stumbled onto something far bigger than the ruthless murder of her family. What had Wiley and Cardinal Felici been up to in Guatemala that was so damaging, Wiley was prepared to have an archaeologist murdered? And what was in this mysterious Maya Codex that had caught the attention of both the Vatican and the CIA? Would it perhaps enable O’Connor to expose Wiley and Felici? He resolved to find out. Weizman undoubtedly held the key to discovering it, and if he was to get to the codex before Wiley or Felici… suddenly it became very important Aleta be kept alive. O’Connor looked at his watch. Ten p.m.
He had a sinking feeling he might already be too late.