lecture was also having coffee in the museum’s restaurant, pretending to read a copy of the Osterreich Journal. O’Connor reached again for his high-resolution camera.
‘The brown rings… do they have something to do with the iris’s connection to the brain?’
‘Exactly,’ Dr Arana answered. ‘When you are first conceived, your eyes start as part of the brain, but after separation the nerves of the iris remain connected to a part of the brain known as the hypothalamus. The eyes actually reflect the condition of all organs, and we can detect a problem, such as cancer, long before the symptoms appear in the body itself. We can also detect depression, and if you are to be successful in finding and decoding the Maya Codex, that part of your spirit will need healing.’
‘You said I’m in grave danger?’
‘Because you have embarked on a quest to find out who murdered your family, especially your father and grandfather. Your grandfather was very close to recovering the missing Maya Codex when he was murdered by the Nazis.’
Aleta swallowed, her grief rekindled. ‘What does “close” mean?’
‘My father spoke with him many times when your grandfather visited Lake Atitlan and Tikal. Your grandfather eventually found two of the three figurines that are needed to recover the codex. He had begun to decipher the hieroglyphics that would lead him to the last figurine and the Maya Codex itself, but he was murdered before he could complete his task.’
Aleta sank in her chair, the past weighing heavily on her. ‘My grandfather made some notes,’ she confided, ‘and he mentioned that three figurines would be needed to unearth the codex… but I’ve never seen any figurines.’
‘I’m sure your grandfather took steps to ensure their safekeeping. There is a divine timing in these things, Aleta. Just as we can see the powerful warning signs that are now gathering in the natural world, the two figurines your grandfather found, the remaining one and the codex itself will all remain hidden until they are meant to be discovered – and that time is now close. Because of your quest to find those who have destroyed your family, you have come to the attention of both the CIA and the Vatican. There are two very powerful men who are determined you won’t succeed. Both organisations are also determined, for different reasons, to recover the codex and keep it from the public.’ Arana paused to allow Aleta time to reflect.
‘There are two more men, one of whom will deal with the other,’ he went on. ‘You will come to trust one of these men with your life. If you decide to go on, you must come back to the shores of Lake Atitlan to prepare for your sacred mission.’
30
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
