‘But, sir,’ the officer in charge said, ‘what about the people from the CCPA?’
‘They won no converts today. Burn it down!’
The order went out, and the soldiers quickly retreated to predetermined safe areas. The transport followed Liu’s car, then parked behind the Audi a short distance up the street. Liu sprang from his car and pounded angrily on the side of the transport.
‘Bring him to me now!’ Liu ordered.
The soldiers rushed Yin out of the transport, half-dragging the manacled Bishop.
‘You hypocritical piece of filth!’ Liu shouted, looking down on Yin. ‘You have led your precious flock to their deaths.’
‘I do not wish for them to die any more than I wish for my own death, but to live a life without faith, without hope, is a far more terrible thing.’
‘What you did in there condemned those people.’
‘What I did was ensure they understood the choice being offered them.’
Bright flashes erupted from several points inside the building as the pyrotechnicians detonated the incendiaries. As the fire grew in strength and began to roar, a second wave of sound rose from the doomed building — the sound of human voices.
‘Do you hear them?’ Liu shouted. ‘With their dying breaths, they curse you and your imaginary god.’
Yin ignored Liu’s ranting and listened to the distant voices. What he heard wasn’t screams but a familiar melody.
‘They’re singing,’ one soldier said incredulously.
‘What?’ Liu hissed.
From the raging fire, the song grew as those inside the building added their final breaths. Yin, humbled by the display of faith, added his voice to the chorus.
‘Tu es Petrus et super hane petram aedificabo Ecclesiam mean.’ Yin sang, though his heart heard the words: You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church.
Liu punched Yin in the stomach to silence him. The Bishop staggered back and fell but continued to sing.
‘Return him to his hole in Chifeng,’ Liu commanded.
As the transport pulled away, Liu pulled out his cell phone.
‘Tian direct,’ he said clearly.
The phone matched Liu’s voice command to a digital file and dialed the direct number for Tian Yi, the Minister for State Security. Tian answered quickly — he was expecting Liu’s call.
‘Does Yin Daoming remain unbroken?’ Tian asked as calmly as if inquiring about the weather.
‘Yes,’ Liu replied.
‘I see.’
‘You don’t seem surprised, Minister.’
Tian sighed. ‘Not at all.’
‘He is a stubborn fool.’
‘Yin is neither,’ Tian said, ‘and it is a mistake to underestimate him. What about the fire?’
‘It’s spreading to adjacent structures. I have been assured the entire block will be razed by morning.’
As Liu spoke, the theater roof collapsed, and the song inside was at last silenced.
‘Good. Then the clearing of the district will get back on schedule.’
In preparation to host the Olympic Games, Beijing was undergoing a spate of urban renewal that rivaled London’s following the Great Fire of 1666. With a hard deadline and the nation’s international prestige at risk, Beijing was removing anything and anyone that detracted from the beauty and harmony of the Chinese capital.
‘I should have been permitted to kill him,’ Liu said.
‘Yin has never feared the loss of his own life. It would have given you no leverage.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about leverage.’
‘Ah, but you forget that a live prisoner is far less trouble than a dead martyr.’
The officer in charge of the theater and the audience wore a concerned look as he briskly approached Liu. He stopped a few feet away and stood at ease, waiting for his presence to be acknowledged.
‘A moment, Minister,’ Liu said into the phone before covering the tiny microphone. ‘Yes, Captain?’
‘Sir, our technicians have detected a brief transmission originating from the theater.’
‘What kind of transmission?’
‘Internet access from a cell phone, specifically a file upload.’
‘Were my instructions on searching those people not explicit, Captain?’ Liu asked.
‘Your orders were clear, sir.’
‘Yet someone still managed to smuggle a cell phone past your men. Were your technicians able to intercept this file?’
‘No, but they are actively tracing the data packets to determine the intended recipient. The delays we have set on international e-mail traffic will allow us to trap the file before it can cross the border. If the destination is inside China, we will attempt to capture the file while it is still on an e-mail server, before it can be retrieved. We have since lost contact with the cell phone and it is presumed destroyed, but while the phone was still active, our technicians extracted all the information stored on its SIM card. That information should prove useful in the recovery operation.’
‘Do your technicians know what was sent?’
‘Based on a few captured packets, we believe it’s a video clip of what happened inside the theater.’
‘Captain, this lapse in your security is inexcusable, but your failure to quickly contain that file could prove fatal. Keep me apprised of your progress.’
Dismissed, the captain nodded, turned on his heel, and strode away. Liu pressed the phone to his ear as the man moved out of earshot.
‘Minister, I apologize for the interruption,’ Liu said calmly, ‘but I have just been notified of an unfortunate development.’
2
This is where it ends, Liu thought as he stared at the front entry of the opulent Residence Barberini in the heart of Rome. Although it had been days since he slept, Liu felt his exhaustion give way to the excitement of the kill.
He sat in the back seat of a dark blue Alfa Romeo 166, watching from behind tinted glass as slivers of early morning sunlight advanced against the shadows in the narrow streets of the Ludovisi District. In the weeks following the theater fire, Beijing’s greatest fear was the prospect of having news services worldwide broadcasting Yin Daoming’s pro-Vatican outburst and the deadly aftermath. The Tiananmen Square massacre paled in comparison with the wanton immolation of five hundred people, and it was Liu’s responsibility to ensure that this political and public relations nightmare never materialized.
After the fire, Liu was certain the damning video clip would swiftly find its way onto the Internet. Of course, Beijing would denounce the clip as a hoax, but the damage would be done. Still, the underground Catholics he’d interrogated were consistent in their belief that for the deaths of the five hundred martyrs to have any meaning, the world must first learn of the tragedy from the Vatican.
Their strategy of keeping the video clip off the Internet initially served to protect the small group of conspirators, but it also provided Liu with the time he needed to conduct his search and for Beijing to take counter-measures. In addition to establishing a massive data filtering program that all but slowed China’s domestic Internet traffic to a halt, the elite hackers working for the Ministry of State Security mounted a denial of service attack against the Vatican that forced the Holy See offline.
Deprived of the instantaneous connectivity of the Internet, the conspirators had only two options. The first was simply to mail a disk to the Vatican, but in an era when packages from unknown senders and data files of unknown provenance were treated with grave suspicion, there was high probability the Vatican would discard the disk upon receipt. The other option was the oldest in the history of espionage: a courier.
A pair of swarthy Italian men filled the front bucket seats of the Alfa — men employed by one of China’s main partners in the lucrative trade in arms and heroin. Their associates held strategic positions in and around the hotel and near all the entry points to Vatican City. In the rear seat of the sedan beside Liu sat a stone-faced man named Chin. Chin was a trusted intermediary between the Chinese government and the Italian mafia, and his fluency in both languages provided clear and accurate communication between Liu and the Italians.