‘Oromo,’ Ranaletti announced, the name rolling smoothly off his Italian tongue.
As the cardinal electors made note of the name inscribed on the first ballot, Ranaletti pierced a needle through the letter ‘o’ in eligo and drew a length of thread through the tiny hole — the first of what would become a string of counted ballots.
Like most of those present, Donoher wrote down each new name as it was announced and kept a running tally as the counting progressed. As expected, each papabile was making a respectable showing with roughly half the votes counted, yet an election with five viable candidates all but guaranteed that none would garner the necessary two-thirds required to win. Then it happened.
‘Yin,’ Ranaletti called out.
A ripple of conversation had followed the reading of each previous ballot. This time, there was none. Ranaletti strung the ballot and received the next one.
‘Yin.’
The imprisoned Bishop of Shanghai received five consecutive ballots before another name was called. As the counting continued, it became clear there were now six papabili in the running. Donoher tried to fathom what had drawn so many cardinals quixotically to Yin. The five papabili were all good men, any of whom would make a fine Pope. Why, Donoher had to ask himself, were so many electors looking beyond these five — and for what?
It was in the pendentives framing the upper corners of the Last Judgment that Donoher found his answer. There, Michelangelo painted angels carrying the symbols of Christ’s passion: the cross, the nails, the crown of thorns, the pillar of the scourging. Jesus Christ suffered and died for what he believed in, and His example had inspired followers for two millennia. To lead, one must inspire.
In the conclave that elected Leo XIV, the cardinals had moved past cardinals who could govern and elected instead a man who could inspire the faithful. Donoher knew that any of the cardinals in this conclave could administer the Holy See, but who among them could inspire? And wasn’t that what the Church needed?
After Ranaletti read the last ballot — another vote for Yin — he pierced it with needle and thread, then tied the ends of the thread together. The scrutineers reviewed their totals and officially determined what everyone in the chapel already knew — a new Pope had not been elected. The revisers rechecked both the ballots and the notes, ensuring that the scrutineers had performed their duties exactly and faithfully. Donoher’s totals perfectly matched the official tally.
‘If everyone will please hand your notes either to me or the cardinal assistants,’ Donoher called out.
As most of the cardinals rose to hand over their notes, Gagliardi remained seated, staring at the final count. Magni garnered twenty-four votes — a decent showing in the initial ballot and roughly where the Sicilian expected his man to be. Totals for the other original papabili ranged from the mid-to high teens. But right behind Magni with twenty-three votes was Yin — a man no elector was even considering a few hours earlier.
Madness. Gagliardi shook his head. To pluck an Asian out of thin air and name him supreme pontiff? It was madness.
Gagliardi paid little attention to the tightness spreading across his neck and shoulders or the chill of a cold sweat as his olive skin turned ash-gray.
‘Your notes, Eminence,’ a cardinal assistant said.
As Gagliardi stretched out his left arm to hand over the papers, a burning pain ran up the limb. His muscles from fingertips to shoulder contracted into quivering knots of pained tissue that throbbed with each increasingly erratic heartbeat.
‘Are you all right?’ the cardinal assistant asked.
Those were the last words Gagliardi heard before the pain in his chest overwhelmed his senses and he toppled forward. The assistant dropped his sheaf of collected papers and slowed the Sicilian’s fall to the marble floor.
‘The doctors, quickly!’ the cardinal assistant shouted as he cradled Gagliardi’s head and shoulders.
Donoher ordered the doors to the chapel unbolted, and the two on-call doctors rushed in with a gurney and an emergency cart. Prior to the conclave, both men had studied the medical histories of the cardinal electors and were familiar with the Sicilian cardinal’s ongoing struggle with cardiovascular disease.
The doctors lifted Gagliardi onto the gurney and, after a quick assessment, cut open the top of the cardinal’s cassock down to his navel and applied a defibrillator to his chest. It took three jolts to return the Sicilian’s heart to a normal rhythm. The doctors rushed their stabilized patient to a waiting ambulance.
‘Close the doors,’ Donoher ordered as soon as the doctors had departed with the stricken cardinal.
The chapel was once again sealed off from the outside world. The cardinal assistants collected the remaining notes and put them on the long table with the official tallies and the ring of ballots. Donoher placed his ballot tally in a leather folio — later, he would prepare a document declaring the results of the voting. He would do this after each ballot until a Pope was elected. Then the collection of documents would be handed to the new pontiff for placement in the archives in a sealed envelope that could not be opened without the explicit permission of the Pope.
The ballots and the other records were taken to a small stove and burned with a handful of chemicals. In Saint Peter’s Square, the waiting crowd saw wisps of black smoke emerge from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel.
22
‘—no word yet as to who was taken by ambulance from the Vatican, but unconfirmed reports indicate it was one of the cardinals.’
Grin muted the sound on the broadcast. Two of the monitors on his workstation displayed feeds from Fox and CNN, and both networks were covering the breaking news at the Vatican but with little to report. Almost as an aside, the reporters mentioned the black smoke billowing from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. He left the feeds silently running and cranked up his music again. The remaining monitors on his workstation displayed images from the security cameras at Chifeng Prison.
‘Any word at all from China?’ Donoher asked as he entered the catacombs workroom.
Grin swiveled in his chair and noticed immediately that Donoher was clad in black clericals trimmed with amaranth-red details. From a distance, the cardinal Camerlengo looked like a Bishop, which was apparently his intent. With reporters and cameras on the ground and in the air around the Vatican, footage of a scarlet-robed cardinal outside the secured areas of the conclave would definitely have drawn unwanted interest.
‘Nolan’s in the belly of the beast,’ Grin replied, his voice somber with concern.
‘Now we wait to see if he can get himself and the good Bishop out.’ Donoher sighed. ‘Heaven help him.’
‘Your lips to God’s ears.’
Roy Orbison’s falsetto soared from the computer’s speakers into the final chorus of his famous paean to the fairer sex. The final note hung in the air a moment, and then faded, to be replaced by a thunderous ode from Joey Ramone to CNBC business anchor Maria Bartiromo.
‘That’s quite a leap from “Pretty Woman”,’ Donoher opined as he sat down. ‘Whatever is that you’re listening to?’
‘A weekly radio show called Little Steven’s Underground Garage.’ Grin leaned back and tapped the pause button on a psychedelic jukebox floating in the corner of the Mac Pro’s thirty-inch video display. ‘Little Steven is rock ‘n’ roll’s answer to James Burke, thematically connecting songs, history, and cultural trivia. Just before Roy and Joey, he played cuts from The Charms, Nancy Sinatra, The Pipettes, and a clip of Al Pacino at his best from ‘Scent of a Woman.’ I needed something cool to clear the cobwebs. A session in the Underground Garage usually does the trick. What happened up there today?’