The Key Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself.
    A narrow tunnel lit up in a flicker of neon as he moved down it, the walls turning from smooth concrete to rough stone as he passed from the Apostolic Palace into the stone foundations of the squat, fifteenth-century tower built next to it. After ten or so steps he reached a second door that opened into a small, windowless room, packed with shelves and crammed with box files.
    ‘Go on ahead,’ he said. ‘Give my apologies and say I am cutting short another meeting and will be there directly. I will meet you in the lobby so you can brief me as to exactly who is there. I do not wish to enter a meeting of this importance without at least knowing who is present.’
    Schneider bowed and slipped away, leaving Clementi alone with his churning thoughts. He listened to his chamberlain’s footsteps receding, his eyes fixed on the crossed keys of the papal seal and the letters IOR that adorned every file in the room. He was in a section of the fortified tower of Niccolo V, built into the eastern wall of the Apostolic Palace, that now served as the headquarters and only branch of one of the world’s most exclusive financial institutions. IOR stood for Istituto per le Opere di Religione – the Institute for Works of Religion – more commonly referred to as the Vatican Bank. It was the most secretive financial institution in the world and the prime cause of Clementi’s present worries.
    Set up in 1942 to manage the Church’s huge accumulated wealth and investments, the bank had a little over forty thousand current account holders, no tax liabilities and the sort of unassailable privacy any Swiss bank would be proud of. As such, it had attracted some of the wealthiest and most influential investors in the world; but it had also courted more than its fair share of controversy.
    In the 1970s and 80s the Institute had been used by the now disgraced financier Michele Sindona to launder Mafia drug money. After this Roberto Calvi, famously referred to as God’s banker, had been appointed to take a tighter hold of the Church’s vast resources; instead he had used the bank to illegally siphon billions of dollars from another financial institution, leaving the Church with an embarrassing and expensive moral responsibility when it eventually went bust. Calvi had been found dead a few weeks later, his pockets filled with building bricks and bank notes, hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London. Much had been made of the ecclesiastical connotations of this location, especially in the light of Calvi’s membership of a masonic lodge known as the ‘Black Friars’, but no one had ever been convicted of his murder. The long shadow cast by these scandals lingered on, and for Clementi the rehabilitation of the Vatican Bank had become a personal obsession. What’s more, he had the perfect background to facilitate it.
    As an undergraduate at Oxford he had studied history and economics as well as theology, discerning God’s miracle at work in all three disciplines. In Clementi’s eyes, the power of economics was a force for good, creating wealth so that people could be lifted from the evils of poverty and relieved of their earthly suffering. History had also taught him the perils of economic failure. He had studied the great civilizations of the past, focusing not only on how they had amassed their great wealth but also on how they lost it. Again and again, empires that had been built over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, tipped from prosperity into rapid decline, leaving nothing behind but legends and ruined monuments. His economist’s brain had pondered on what had become of their great wealth. Inevitably some of it passed to conquerors and became the seeds of new empires, but not all. History was littered with accounts of vast treasure stores that had vanished, never to be found again.
    Once he had graduated and begun his rise within the Church, Clementi had served God in the best way he knew, by applying his learning and