Arturo Perez-Reverte - The Seville Communion

T HE S EVILLE C OMMUNION

Arturo Perez-Reverte was born in Cartagena in 1951. He has been a journalist and television reporter specialising in covering the world's trouble-spots. Since the publication of his first novel, The Fencing Master, Perez-Reverte has become one of Spain's best-selling authors. The Flanders Panel was awarded the Grand Prix Annuel de Litterature Policiere. The Dumas Club has been made into a film entitled The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp.

Sonia Soto is half Spanish and was educated at the French Lycee in London and at the University of Cambridge. She is a translator from Spanish, French and Russian and is the translator of The Ages of Lulu by Almudena Grandes.

ALSO BY ARTURO PEREZ-REVERTE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

The Fencing Master

The Flanders Panel

The Dumas Club

Arturo Perez-Reverte

T HE S EVILLE C OMMUNION

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY Sonia Soto

VINTAGE

Published by Vintage 2003

2468 10 9753

Copyright Arturo Perez-Reverte, 1995 English translation Sonia Soto, 1997

Arturo Perez-Reverte has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published with the title La piel del tambor by Alfaguara S.A., Madrid in 1995

First published in Great Britain in 1998 by The Harvill Press

Vintage

Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 www.randomhouse.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 09 945396 7

Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

To Amaya, for her friendship, To Juan, for keeping at me, And to Rodolfo, for doing his bit

Clerics, bankers, computer hackers, duchesses, and scoundrels - the characters in this novel are all imaginary. And any resemblance to real events is entirely coincidental. Only the setting is true. Nobody could invent a city like Seville.

Contents

I

The Man from Rome

i

II

Three Villains

III

Eleven Bars in Triana

IV

Seville Oranges and Blossom

V

Captain Xaloc's Twenty Pearls

VI

Lorenzo Quart's Tie

VII

The Bottle of Anis del Mono

VIII

An Andalusian Lady

IX

It's a Small World

X

In Ictu Oculi

XI

Carlota Bruner's Trunk

XII

The Wrath of God

XIII

The Lovely

XIV

Eight O'Clock Mass

XV

Vespers

The hacker broke into the central Vatican system eleven minutes before midnight. Thirty-five seconds later, one of the computers triggered the alarm. Rapid changes on the screen tracked the progress of the automatic security protocols. The letters HK appeared in a corner, and the duty officer, a Jesuit inputting data from the latest census of the Papal State, picked up the telephone to inform his superior. "We've got a hacker," he said:

Father Ignacio Arregui, also a Jesuit, came out into the hallway buttoning his cassock and walked the fifty metres to the computer room. He was thin and bony, with shoes that squeaked as he passed the frescoes in the dimly lit corridor. He glanced out of the windows at the deserted Via della Tipografia and the dark facade of the belvedere Palace, muttering to himself. Being woken bothered him more than hackers in the system. They got in quite often but their forays were usually harmless. Generally they kept to the outer security perimeters, leaving only slight traces of their presence - a message or small virus. Hackers liked attention. They were mostly teenage boys surfing the Net for ever harder systems to crack. Microchip junkies, tech addicts, getting their kicks trying to break into Cliasc Manhattan Bank, the Pentagon, or the Vatican.

The priest on duty was Father Cooey, a plump young Irish Jesuit with glasses. Bent over his keyboard, he frowned as he followed the hacker. He looked up, relieved, when Father Arregui came in.

"You don't know how glad I am to see you, Father."

His superior stood beside him, hands on the table, watching the blue and red icons blinking on the screen. The automatic search system was keeping in constant contact with the intruder.

"Is it serious?"

"It might be."

In the past two years there had been only one serious case, when a hacker had managed to slip in a worm program that multiplied inside the system until it crashed. Decontaminating and repairing the network had cost half a million dollars. The hacker was tracked down after a long and complicated search. He turned out to be a sixteen-year-old boy from a small village in Holland. Other serious attempts to corrupt the system with killer viruses - by a Mormon from Salt Lake City, a fundamentalist Islamic organisation based in Istanbul, and a mad priest who opposed celibacy - had all been stopped before they could do too much damage. The priest, a Frenchman, working from the computer of his lunatic asylum by night, had pestered them for six weeks and managed to infect forty-two files with a virus that filled the screens with Latin insults.

Father Arregui pointed at the cursor, now flashing red:

"Is this our hacker?"

"Yes."

"What have you called him ?"

They always gave them a name - it made identifying and following them easier. Some were'like old friends. Father Cooey pointed to a line on the screen:

"'Vespers' " he said, "because of the time he appeared. It was the first name that came into my head."

On the screen, files appeared and disappeared. Father Cooey watched them intently. He moved the cursor to one of them and clicked twice. Now that his superior was there to take responsibility, he was more relaxed, expectant even. Any hacker was a challenge to his expertise.

"He's been inside for ten minutes," he said, and Father Arregui thought he heard a tone of admiration. "At first he just looked at the different entry points. Then he suddenly slipped in. He already knew the way. He must have visited us before." "What do you think he's up to?"

Cooey shrugged. "I don't know. But he's pretty good, and he's quick. He's using a three-pronged approach to get past our defences. He starts by trying simple permutations of names of known users, then tries names from our own Dictionary and finally a list of four hundred and thirty-two passwords." As he said this, the Jesuit twisted his mouth slightly, as if suppressing a smile. "Now he's probing the entrances to INMA VAT."

Father Arregui drummed his fingers anxiously on one of the computer manuals littering the table. INMA VA T was a confidential list of the high-ranking members of the Roman Curia. Access was possible only with a secret personal code.

"Signal tracker?" he suggested.

Cooey jerked his chin towards the monitor at the neighbouring table, as if to say, "I've already thought of that". Connected to the police and to the Vatican's telephone network, the system recorded all information on an intruder's signal. It even contained a trap, a series of paths that slowed intruders long enough for them to be located and identified.

"This won't get us very far," said Cooey after a few moments. "Vespers has hidden his entry point by jumping between different telephone networks. Every time he makes a loop through one of them, we have to trace him right back to the exchange. He'd have to be here a long time before we could do anything about him. And he'd still be able to do some damage, if that's what he wants."