The Confessor

was furious that he'd been blindsided like everyone else. He'd made a deal. The deal, in the opinion of Benedetto Fó, had been broken.
    He stopped in the piazza just outside the ramparts of the Castel Sant'Angelo. He needed to make a telephone call--a call that. couldn't be made from his desk in the Sala Stampa. From a public!
    telephone, he dialed a number for an extension inside the Apostolic Palace. It was the private number of a man very close to the Holy Father. He answered as though he were expecting Fó's call.
    "We had an agreement, Luigi," Fó said without preamble. "You broke that agreement."
    "Calm down, Benedetto. Don't hurl accusations that you'll regret later."
    "I agreed to play your little game about the Holy Father's childhood in exchange for something special."
    "Trust me, Benedetto, something very special will be coming your way sooner than you think."
    "I'm about to be permanently banned from the Sala Stampa because I helped you. The least you could have done is warn me that this trip to the synagogue was coming."
    "I couldn't do that, for reasons that will be abundantly clear to you in the coming days. As for your problems at the Sala Stampa, this too shall pass."
    "Why is he going to the synagogue?"
    "You'll have to wait until Friday, like everyone else."
    "You're a bastard, Luigi."
    "Please try to remember you're talking to a priest."
    "You're not a priest. You're a cutthroat in a clerical suit."
    "Flattery will get you nowhere, Benedetto. I'm sorry, but the Holy Father would like a word."
    The line went dead. Fó slammed down the receiver and headed wearily back to the Press Office.
    A SHORT distance away, in a barricaded diplomatic compound at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac called the Via Michle Mercati,
    Aaron Shilo, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, was seated behind his desk, leafing his way through a batch of morning correspondence from the Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv. A compact woman with short dark hair knocked on the door jamb and entered the room without waiting for permission. Yael Ravona, Ambassador Shiloh's secretary, dropped a single sheet of paper on his desk. It was a bulletin from the Vatican News Service.
    "This just came over the wire."
    The ambassador read it quickly, then looked up. "The synagogue? Why didn't they tell us something like this was coming? It makes no sense."
    "Judging from the tone of that dispatch, the Press Office and VNS were caught off-guard."
    "Put in a call to the Secretariat of State. Tell them I'd like to speak with Cardinal Brindisi."
    "Yes, ambassador."
    Yael Ravona walked out. The ambassador picked up his telephone and dialed a number in Tel Aviv. A moment later, he said quietly: "I need to speak to Shamron."
    AT THAT same moment, Carlo Casagrande was seated in the back of his Vatican staff car, speeding along the winding S4 motorway through the mountains northeast of Rome. The reason for his unscheduled journey lay in the locked attaché case resting on the seat next to him. It was a report, delivered to him earlier that morning, by the agent he had assigned to investigate the childhood of the Holy Father. The agent had been forced to resort to a black-bag operation--a break-in at the apartment of Benedetto Fó. A hurried search of files had produced his notes on the matter. A summary of those notes was contained in the report.
    The Villa Galatina appeared, perched on its own mountain, glowering at the valley below. Casagrande glimpsed one of Roberto Pucci's guards high among the battlements, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The front gate was open. A tan-suited security man glanced at the SCV license plates and waved the car onto the property.
    Roberto Pucci greeted Casagrande in the entrance hall. He was dressed in riding breeches and knee-length leather boots, and smelled of gunsmoke. Obviously, he had spent the morning shooting. Don Pucci often said that the only thing he loved more than his collection of guns was making money--and the Holy Mother Church, of course. The financier escorted Casagrande down a long, gloomy gallery into a cavernous great room overlooking the garden. Cardinal Marco Brindisi was already there, a thin figure perched on the edge of a chair in front of the fire, a teacup balanced precariously on his cassocked thigh. Light reflected off the lenses of the cardinal's small round spectacles, turning them to white discs that obscured his eyes. Casagrande dropped to one knee and kissed the proffered ring. Brindisi