THE NEXT MORNING Serena stared out through the tinted glass of another limo at the towering ancient obelisk in St. Peter's Square as Benito drove through the gates of Vatican City. She thought of Conrad and wondered if it was wise to have left him back at the secret safe house outside New York City before flying here to press their case.
There were a few police outside on the plaza, but no tourists or paparazzi this early in the day. More pigeons than people, really.
'Not like the old days, signorina,' said Benito, referring to the protestors and media circus that once surrounded her arrivals at the Vatican.
Back then she was only in her 20s but had already made a lifetime's worth of enemies as 'Mother Earth' in the petroleum, timber, and biomedical industries-anyone who put profit ahead of people, animals, or the environment. Today she was an older and wiser 31, but the damage was done: Those inside the Vatican who had ties to these outside governments, corporate CEOs, and other 'deep pockets' still didn't trust her and never would.
Which was why she had decided Conrad was better off back at the safe house.
'That was another era, Benito.'
'Another pope, signorina.'
They curved along a winding drive and arrived at the entrance of the Governorate. The Swiss Guards in their crimson uniforms snapped to attention as Serena walked in.
The old pope, by favoring her with his friendship, had protected her within these walls. In one significant way he still did. Before he died, he shared with her a vision he believed God had revealed to him about the end of the world. And he let others know as much. The halo effect ensured that at least some door would always be open to her here.
The new pope she hardly knew. He was a good man, although she had heard that he had voiced his displeasure at the special favor his predecessor had shown her. Which was reasonable, she concluded, given that the new pope knew her only by her nickname among his former peers in the College of Cardinals: 'Sister Pain-in- the-Ass.'
That included Cardinal Tucci, gatekeeper of the secret maps collections. She had called Tucci from somewhere over the Atlantic to demand access to the Vatican archives, an extraordinary privilege she had enjoyed under the old pope but which Tucci had revoked with the new pope.
'Sister Serghetti,' Tucci said flatly when she entered his office, which was tucked away at the end of an obscure hallway, reached only by an old service elevator. 'Welcome back.'
Tucci rose from his high-back leather chair, a pair of seventeenth-century Bleau globes on either side, and extended his hand. Only in his late 40s, Tucci was a 'secret cardinal.' That is, he was appointed by the pope to the position and nobody else was informed of it, although Serena was aware of two others besides herself who also knew.
A secret cardinal to hide the secrets of the Church.
Every Christian, Serena knew all too well, must wrestle with the tension of living in this world without becoming a product of it. But she suspected that Cardinal Tucci had lost that battle a long time ago.
'Your Eminence,' she said, and kissed his ring with the Dominus Dei insignia. Dominus Dei meant 'Rule of God' and was an order within the Church that predated the Jesuits and traced itself back to the first Christians who served in the palace of Caesar in the first century. Secrecy was their highest value, as it meant survival in the early days of Christianity. Serena didn't like secrecy. It had become an excuse over the centuries for a host of crimes, crimes that made the fictionalized evils of Dominus Dei's upstart cousins in Opus Dei look like acts of charity.
'To what do I owe this pleasure?' he asked suspiciously as they sat down.
'I want to see the L'Enfant Confession,' she said, just like that.
Tucci looked at her with undisguised disdain. He seemed tired of her already, and perturbed. Perturbed because she had pressed his aides to wake him up in the wee hours of the morning to take her call. Perturbed by her very existence.
If Tucci wondered how she got as far as she had within the Church, the feeling was mutual. He was boyish by Vatican standards and yet mature enough to sport the smile of a man who experienced enough of life to find it a bad joke. Even his name was ironic, implying he was some indigenous Italian bureaucrat when, in fact, his mother's side of the family came to America on the Mayflower and was Yankee through and through. He came to the Vatican by way of Boston, where he was known as a raucous but brilliant student at Harvard and an even more brilliant priest and professor of American history at Boston College. He had risen very far in Rome, very fast.
Even now, as she awaited a response, Serena couldn't help noticing, with some envy, the medallion that Tucci wore around his neck. In its center was an ancient Roman coin, a silver denarius with the image of the emperor Tiberius. Legend had it that this coin was the very 'Tribute Penny' Jesus held up when he told his followers that they should 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's.' It had been passed down through the ages, from one leader of the Dei to the next. Some argued it represented power greater than the papacy.
'The L'Enfant Confession?' Tucci repeated, as if he had never heard of it.
Serena said, 'The deathbed confession of Pierre L'Enfant, the original architect of Washington, D.C., to John Carroll, the first Catholic bishop of North America.'
Tucci looked mystified. 'What exactly did Pierre L'Enfant confess?'
'Something to the effect that the major terrestrial monuments of America's capital city are aligned like a map to the stars, as are Egypt's pyramids and South America's Way of the Dead,' she said.
'What do you mean the monuments are aligned like a map?'
She showed him a digital photo of General Yeats's tombstone at Arlington, of the side with the four astrological symbols. 'These are the zodiac signs for the sun and the constellations Bootes, Virgo, and Leo. Each celestial coordinate has a terrestrial counterpart in the city of Washington, D.C.'
'And you're telling me that George Washington had L'Enfant use these constellations to anchor America's capital city?' He inflected his voice in a tone to hint at just how ridiculous and a waste of time the idea was. He glanced at the antique clock on the wall to underscore his displeasure.
'Yes,' she said without flinching. 'And we can follow those monuments that correspond to the stars like a treasure map.'
'And where does this heavenly treasure trail lead?'
'To a specific place beneath the National Mall, or perhaps even a specific date in America's future,' she said. 'I was hoping you could tell me.'
'My forte is American history and cartography, Sister Serghetti, not eschatology,' Tucci said, amused. 'But, as a historian, I know that Pierre L'Enfant was a Freemason. And I don't have to refer to my Freemasons for Dummies book to tell you that his secret society-like all those who seek the light of God outside of the Holy Church-has had a long and tortured history with us. So you'll have to forgive my skepticism when I ask you why on earth would L'Enfant confess anything to a Catholic priest, let alone Archbishop John Carroll, about this alleged secret geography of the American capital?'
'You mean why under the earth,' Serena said, confident that Tucci knew full well what she was about to say. That's why she had come to him in the first place. 'It was Daniel Carroll, the Archbishop's brother, who owned Capitol Hill and sold it to Washington. All that land, by the way, once belonged to a Catholic named Francis Pope who called it Rome.'
Tucci tapped two fingers to his lips as he looked at her thoughtfully. Finally, he cleared his throat and sat back in his chair.
'There is no L'Enfant Confession, Sister Serghetti,' he said. 'Never was.'
'Like the Alignment?' she asked.
Tucci frowned, aware that she had him there. After all, the sole reason his own group Dominus Dei still existed was allegedly to fight the Alignment threat to the Church. Without the Alignment-fact or fiction-there could be no funding, no foot soldiers for Tucci's order coming from the pope.
'The Alignment is simply an umbrella term for all secret societies aligned against the Church and operating in the shadows of power around the world,' Tucci said. 'Don't tell me you sincerely believe it's an actual group of
