The First Apostle by James Becker Read Free Book Online Page A

centuries, an ancient text that must never be allowed to fall into the hands of anyone outside the Vatican.”
    “That was all?” Vertutti asked.
    “More or less, yes.”
    Vertutti felt a surge of relief. If that genuinely was all the information his predecessor had divulged, then little real damage had been done. The Vitalian Codex was certainly the darkest of all the multitude of secrets hidden in the Apostolic Penitentiary and it seemed that for now this particular secret was safe. But the crux of the matter was whether he trusted Gregori Mandino enough to believe him.
    “We’ve established you know about the Codex. But what I still don’t know is why you called me. Do you have some information? Has something happened?”
    Mandino appeared to ignore the question. “All in good time, Eminence. You’re obviously not aware that a small group of my people has been constantly watching for the publication of any of the significant words and phrases contained within the Codex. This is in accordance with the written instructions given to us by your dicastery more than a hundred years ago.
    “We have monitoring systems in all the obvious places, but since the arrival of the Internet, we’ve also focused on dead language translation sites, both the online programs and those supplying more professional services. With the agreement of your predecessor, we set up a small office here in Rome, ostensibly charged with the identification, recovery and study of ancient texts. Under the guise of scholarly research, we requested all Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Coptic and Aramaic translators we were able to identify to advise us whenever they received passages that contained the target words, and almost all of them agreed.
    “We’ve also approached the online programs, and most of these have been easier—it’s amazing what cooperation you get if people think you work for the Pope. We’ve simply supplied the same word list for each language service, and in every case the Web site owners have agreed to notify us whenever anyone requests a translation that fits the parameters. Most of the sites have automatic systems that send us e-mails containing the word or words, and any other information they have about the person making the request. This sometimes includes their name and e-mail, but we always get their IP address.”
    “Which is what?” Vertutti asked.
    “It’s a set of numbers that identify a location on the Internet. We can use it to find the person’s address, or at least the address of the computer they used. Obviously if an inquiry comes from an Internet café there’s no easy way of identifying the person who made it.”
    “Is all this relevant?”
    “Yes, just bear with me. We’ve cast our net wide and we’ve specified a huge number of words to ensure that nothing gets past us. We also have programs in place that scan the e-mails we receive and identify the most likely matches. They’re known as syntax checkers. Until last week, no expression scored more than forty-two percent.
    “And then two days ago we received this.” He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a single sheet of paper. He unfolded it and handed it to Vertutti. “The syntax checkers rated it at seventy-three to seventy-six percent, almost double the highest score we’d seen previously.”
    Vertutti looked down at the page in front of him. On it, typed in capital letters, were three words in Latin:

    HIC VANIDICI LATITANT

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    “And this came from where, exactly?” Joseph Cardinal Vertutti asked, still staring down at the paper in his hand. Below the Latin was a translation of the words into Italian.
    “An online translation program on a server located in America—Arlington, Virginia, to be exact. But the inquiry originated here in Italy, at an address only a few miles outside Rome.”
    “Why would they choose an American site?”
    Gregori Mandino shrugged. “On the Internet, geographical locations are irrelevant. People pick