"I sec you don't think much of Saint Peter either."

The old priest laughed. "No. He should have let himself be killed in Gethsemane, when he drew his sword to defend his Master."

It was Quart's turn to laugh. "If that had happened, we wouldn't have had our first pope."

"That's what you think." The old priest shook his head. "In this business there are plenty of popes. But none with balls." He looked through the eyepiece. He turned the wheels, and slowly the tube of the telescope moved up and left. "When you look at the sky," he said, "things occupy a different place in the universe. Did you know that our little Earth is only a hundred and fifty million kilometres from the Sun, whereas Pluto is almost six billion kilometres away? And that the Sun is a tiny dot compared to an average star like Arcturus? Not to mention Aldebaran, which is thirty-six million kilometres across, or Betelgeuse, which is ten times bigger than that." He moved the telescope to the right. He pointed out a star to Quart. "Look. That's Altair. At three hundred thousand kilometres per second, its light takes sixteen years to reach us. It might have exploded in the meantime, and we could be seeing light from a star that no longer exists.

Sometimes, when I look towards Rome, I feel as if I'm looking at Altair. Are you sure everything will still be there when you get back?"

At Father Ferro's invitation, Quart looked through the eyepiece. As he moved away from the brightness of the moon, between the stars appeared myriad points of light, clusters and nebulae that were red, blue, white, flickering or still. One of them gradually moved and then disappeared in the glare of another – a shooting star or maybe a man-made satellite. Quart looked for the Great Bear, following the line through Merak and Dubhe upwards, four times the distance, if he remembered correctly. There was the Pole Star, large, bright, confident.

"That's Polaris," said Father Ferro, who had followed the movement of the telescope. "The tip of the Little Bear, which always indicates the Earth's zero latitude. Always but not immutable." He told Quart to point the telescope to his left. "Five thousand years ago the Egyptians venerated another one, the Dragon, as the guardian of the north. It has a 25,800-year cycle, of which only three thousand have passed. So in another two hundred and twenty-eight centuries the Dragon will be the pole star again." He drummed his fingers on the brass tube. "I wonder if there will be anyone on Earth then to notice."

"It gives one vertigo," said Quart, taking his eye away from the lens.

The old priest clicked his tongue, nodding in agreement. He seemed to enjoy Quart's vertigo, like an experienced surgeon seeing medical students go white during an autopsy. "Funny, isn't it? The universe is amusing. Polaris, the star you were looking at a moment ago, is four hundred and seventy light-years away. That means we're orientating ourselves by light that comes from the beginning of the sixteenth century." He pointed at another spot. "And over there, in the Cat's Eye Nebula, concentric shells of gas are all that's left of a star that died a thousand years ago." He walked over to another window and his features were more visible in the moonlight. "What are we?" he asked. "What part do we play in this great scene spread out above our heads? What do our miserable little lives and desires mean? Your report to Rome, the church, the Holy Father, you and I, what does all this matter to those lights?" His grating laugh rang out again.

a world that guided itself by starlight five centuries old, the litde boy's shadow was cast on the wall that protected him from the bitter cold outside. His shadow moved closer to the other shadow waiting beneath bougainvilleas and orange trees, until he could breathe in her fragrance and her warmth, and her breath. But a second before he ran his fingers through her hair to escape loneliness for one night, the shadow, the boy, the man watching the naked body in the sunlight filtered through the blind, the exhausted Knight Templar, they all turned to look up at the dimly lit window of the pigeon loft, where an old priest, unsociable, sceptical and brave, deciphered the terrible secret of a cruel sky, in the company of a ghost searching the horizon for a white sail.

The Wrath of God

He has disappeared before our very eyes and we have no idea how.

Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

Through the pipe smoke, the archbishop of Seville looked exultant. "So Rome's giving in," he said.

Quart put down his cup and wiped his mouth with a napkin embroidered by a local order of nuns. He smiled and sighed. "That's one way of looking at it, Your Grace."

Monsignor Corvo blew out another cloud of smoke. The two men sat facing each other across a coffee table. It was the archbishop's custom to have breakfast with his first visitor of the morning. The coffee and toast before them had been intended for the dean of the cathedral, but the archbishop offered it to Quart instead when Quart arrived unexpectedly to take his leave, disrupting the schedule. The archbishop hated his coffee to get cold.

"I told you, didn't I, that this business wouldn't be easy to resolve," said His Grace.

Quart leaned back in his armchair. He would have preferred to deprive the archbishop of this opportunity for sarcastic remarks and smiles wreathed in pipe smoke; but form required that he pay his respects before leaving. "I would remind Your Grace," he said, "that I didn't come here to resolve anything. I came simply to inform Rome of the situation. And that's exactly what I will do now."

Corvo was delighted. "You never learned who Vespers was," he said.

Quart glanced at his watch. "No. But Vespers is not really the problem. The hacker getting through to the Pope is a trivial matter; they'll find out who he is sooner or later. The important thing is Father Ferro and Our Lady of the Tears. With my report, whatever decision is made will be made with full knowledge of the situation."

The yellow stone in the archbishop's ring glinted as he raised his hand. "Don't give me your Jesuitical waffle, Father Quart. You've failed." The pipe smoke could not hide his glee. "Vespers has made fun of both you and Rome."

"Neither I nor Rome would have intervened," Quart said coldly, "had Your Grace nipped things in the bud. Father Ferro and Our Lady of the Tears are in your diocese. And you know the saying: straying sheep, shepherd asleep."

Corvo clenched his teeth over his pipe, indignant. "Listen, Quart," he said, his voice hard. "The only straying sheep here is you. Do you take me for a fool? I know about your little visits to the Casa del Postigo. And all the rest of it, the walks and the dinners."

His Grace, whose talents in the pulpit were well appreciated by the diocese, proceeded to vent all his scorn and spleen in a harsh homily that lasted several minutes. His main point was that the IEA agent had allowed himself to be taken in by the priest of Our Lady of the Tears and his own personal pressure group made up of nuns, aristocrats and devout old ladies. Quart had lost his sense of perspective and betrayed his mission in Seville. And the daughter of the duchess of El Nuevo Extremo – who was still, by the way, Gavira's wife – had played no small part in the seduction.

Quart listened impassively to the tirade but stiffened at this last remark. "I'd be most grateful if Your Grace would put any allegations concerning this last matter in writing."

"I will indeed." Corvo was delighted to have touched a raw nerve at last. "I'll send it to your bosses in the Vatican. To the nuncio. To all and sundry. I'll do so by letter, by telephone, by fax, and to the accompaniment of a guitar." He took the pipe from his mouth and leered. You'll lose your reputation just as I lost my secretary."