Francisco’S God

By C.K. Lawson

Mercenary Kenneth Scotts is apprehensive about taking on a new job. A former MI6 spy, he has already lived an adventurous life since graduating from the military academy. Two decades of an unusually turbulent existence has taken a toll on his spirit. He yearns for tranquillity. In his late thirties, he is too young to quit, let alone contemplate retirement.

Scotts accepts the next job, spurred on by a high pay out if the mission is accomplished. He is tasked to retrieve an ancient religious relic that has been stolen from the Secret Archive of the Vatican City. A missing priest is the prime suspect. Scotts and computer hacker, Ella Pritchard, follow the trail to Costa Rica, Haiti, war-torn Syria, and Spain.

During the mission, they discover the true intent of the heist. Can they stop Francisco, the errant priest, from using the ancient relic to awaken a dark force he can barely comprehend?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Apr 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543740769

Book preview

A PERSONAL HACKER

E lla Pritchard had been a delinquent girl when Kenneth met her. She had dropped out of school at age fourteen and roamed the streets in his neighbourhood. Her parents were both drug addicts and constantly went in and out of prison. When they were not in prison, they would either be indulging in their addictions or running errands for drug dealers to feed their habits. Seeing to Ella’s needs had never topped their priority list.

Kenneth was still with the MI6 at that time. He did not really take notice of her until one day, when he noticed her solving a Rubik’s cube. Her friends would randomize the Rubik’s cube, hand it over to her, and she would have it solved in less than one minute. They did it over and over, amazed at her speed. And so was Kenneth, who was watching from across the street from his bedroom window.

She doesn’t belong there, he thought.

Three weeks after that, he had gone to his neighbourhood supermarket when he saw her again. She happened to get caught for shoplifting while the rest of her accomplices fled. The metropolitan police was called to take her away.

He intervened.

‘Listen. I work for the government’, he said. ‘She’s my girl and you can’t take her away,’

‘And why should that be so?’ the police officer demanded.

‘Just wait and see.’ Kenneth called up the intelligence agency and said an informant of his had been arrested, and he asked that she be released. He was quickly hooked up to the police department.

‘What’s your informant’s name?’ asked the officer on the other end of the line.

‘What’s the name? You said?’ he deliberately repeated loudly, glancing at the girl while the police officer attended to the supermarket supervisor. She immediately knew what he meant and lip synced her name. ‘Ella’, he said into the phone.

‘All right, I’ll speak to the officer on the scene.’

Soon the police officer received a call from his communications device. After a short conversation and checking with the girl, the officer un-cuffed her.

‘It’s your lucky day’, he said. ‘You better hope you don’t see me again.’ Turning to Kenneth, he said, ‘She’s all yours now.’

The police officer drove off, leaving both of them by the side of the street.

‘What do you want from me?’ asked Ella. ‘I can tell you have powerful connections. But you can’t be doing it for free. What do you want?’

‘Come on to this address tomorrow, 8 p.m.’, Kenneth said, as he wrote his apartment address on a piece of paper, handing over to her. ‘I’ll let you know.’

Ella had heard rumours of such requests from some of her older street friends. The girls would sometimes have to pay back the people who got them out of trouble. She just could not believe it had come so soon for her.

‘Well … I don’t have any sexy outfits’, she said. ‘You will … have to provide them.’ She focused on the ground to hide her embarrassment.

‘Listen, Ella, I am not a pervert, and I am not interested in that’, said Kenneth. ‘I saw how you could solve the Rubik’s cube. You’re too smart to stray on the street.’

Ella sighed a huge gust of relief. She had been so tensed up for the moment, she was sweating even though the outdoor temperature was below 20 degree Celsius. At the same time, she felt a subtle bit of insult that Kenneth was not attracted to her. She was, after all, pretty, as some of her acquaintances kept emphasizing. On the other hand, she felt proud that someone had noticed her intelligence. Such was her complex feeling.

On the next day, Ella turned up at his apartment as scheduled.

‘Please come in’, said Kenneth. ‘Have a seat. Would you like to have some tea?’

Ella, for the first time of her life, felt uncomfortable at an invitation into an apartment. She rarely got a formal invitation. If she was at any of her friends’ or acquaintances’ houses, the invitation was very casual and there was no need to respect any house rule.

‘Er … no, I’ll just sit here’, she said awkwardly.

‘As I have said, I noticed that you’re very good with Rubik’s cube. I’m sure you can do a lot better than what you’re doing now’, Kenneth said in encouragement.

‘So … what do you want me to do now?’ Ella asked. Although she felt assured that Kenneth had no ill intentions, she still felt insecure as she did not know his purpose yet, especially when she was within his walls with little chance of escape should things go wrong.

Kenneth took out a Rubik’s cube. He randomized the arrangement and passed it to her. ‘Solve this.’

Ella took it, and looked at all sides. She then started twisting the cube. The same colours soon congregated on each side of the cube while she was working on it, and soon enough, she was done.

‘Thirty-two seconds. Well done!’ said Kenneth, as he read the time off the stop watch he held in his hand.

He went on to take up a thin stack of paper. It was the recruitment IQ test given to applicants for MI6. He had gotten it from a colleague. The test was specially formulated to highlight certain essential skills an applicant could have, such as language, spatial ability, pattern recognition and memory.

‘Now try completing this in thirty minutes.’ Kenneth handed the small stack of paper and a pen to her. For a moment, Ella imagined Kenneth to be the universally loathed math teacher in her previous school, but she looked at the test and then started writing, her momentum broken only by her questions to Kenneth on some words or terms she had never came across.

She scored well, for her age.

‘What do you think of learning a skill? Like programming?’ Kenneth asked Ella.

Ella had very little idea what programming was. She had seen people writing about it on the internet, but she could not care less. She was only interested in playing online games that allowed her to collect virtual items she could sell for real cash.

‘I’m sending you to a programming course’, he decided. ‘You’re smart, and you’ll pick up in no time.’

He could almost see the thought written on her face: What? Going back to school again? She frowned at the idea. For once, she thought perhaps a night in bed would have been a better deal. At least the debt would be paid by the next day. School was a long-term commitment. And she hated it.

‘All right, I can see it in your eyes you dislike that idea’, Kenneth said, grinning a little. ‘Think of it this way; after you have learnt the skills, you’ll have the tools to create your own games or write new software. The limit is boundless. Perhaps you can even hack some popular game site.’

She paused and thought thoroughly. Not such a bad idea after all.

‘I’ll pay for the cost for your course. I want you to learn the basic, advanced and eventually, become an expert. But there is one condition. Upon acquiring the skills, I’ll want your services.’

‘Er … what service do you mean?’ She simply could not get that lecherous thought off her mind.

‘I want you to do hacking’, he said. ‘I don’t have a specific target now, but I’m sure your service will come in handy in due time.’

Kenneth needed a personal hacker. In his course of duty, he needed to gather intelligence on his targets, and much of the time, that included reading personal emails or accessing the target’s bank account details. Sometimes it would also involve tapping the target’s internet activities as well. MI6 did provide hacking service to their agents, but it was non-personal, bureaucratic, and, there were limits which their internal hackers would simple refuse to cross. Requests to hack into their own or a friendly nation’s government officials’ email would require the director’s approval, which could often take weeks and lengthy written justification. The prime minister and the rest of the cabinet ministers’ official communication channels were simply out of bounds.

It had been twelve years since that day at the supermarket.

Kenneth knocked on Ella’s door at her apartment.

‘Hi, Kenneth, nice seeing you. How have you been?’ said Ella.

‘Hi, Ella, I need your help this time’, Kenneth said.

‘Oh … need my service again’, she replied, a seductive tone in her voice. ‘I am for hire.’

Ella, by now, was an attractive young woman blessed with a naturally long, silky blonde hair. She had a V-shaped chin and a face covered in smooth pale pink smooth skin. With a pair of blue eyes, an elevated small nose and a firm, deep pinkish pair of lips, describing her as merely pretty would be an understatement.

Wearing a white body hugging T-shirt and a pair of blue, loose fitting sport shorts, her appealing looks, even without makeup, would had been irresistible to most men. Had she been any taller, she might have made fashion modelling her career choice. She might have been in her own apartment by now, but her deliberate failure to find more decent clothing to cover herself in expectation of a male visitor suggested she intended to show off her sensual figure to him.

Kenneth looked at her teasing smile and gave her a disapproving look, bringing her back to her more serious sense. ‘I have a job. And I need your help. Do you happen to be busy with something else?’

‘Well, I got some jobs on my own, by some government agency, can’t tell you who’, she said, somewhat disappointed at his lack of attention. ‘It involves hacking the ISIS⁵ twitter accounts to thwart their recruitment efforts. How do you need my help?’

‘Look, I need you to help me get into the email account of this person’, Kenneth said as he took out the folder containing the dossier of Francisco Muriel. He showed her his details.

‘Oh, from the Vatican City. Their servers are not particularly hard to break. Easier than the CIA’, Ella said as her fingers ran through the documents.

‘How long?’ Kenneth stared at her with his eyes wide.

‘If we’re lucky, perhaps tomorrow. Else it may take up to a week’, she said, walking to the laptop computer on her desk. ‘What kind of job is that? Why do you need to peep into the life of a clergyman?’

‘The Vatican has lost something very precious, and it seems like he’s involved’, Kenneth replied as he followed closely behind her.

‘Oh, an errant priest’, Ella said. Sitting down onto a comfy office chair that she often needed to be glued on for hours, she began typing into her computer. ‘I wonder what he’ll say when he meets his maker’, she joked.

‘For all you know, perhaps he’ll go the other way’, Kenneth replied, pointing his right index finger downwards while giving Ella a funny looking face.

‘All right, the program is set. It’ll attempt to log into his account while fooling the security system into looking the other way. It’s brute force, so will likely take a while’, Ella explained. ‘So why don’t you wait here?’ Ella’s pair of deep blue tinted, innocent eyes pierced right into his, making a rejection to that request next to impossible.

‘All right. Perhaps I’ll go through his files with you’, Kenneth said as he sat down on her sofa. Ella rolled her eyes. That was not exactly what she had intended. She was hoping for a little more intimate bonding.

‘He’s from Costa Rica, ordained at age twenty-seven. Anything before that was not in the record. It also looked suspicious in that he seemed to know what he was going for.’

‘What’s the item?’ Ella asked.

‘I shouldn’t be telling you, but I’ll need you to work closely with me on this one, so I’m telling ya.’, Kenneth paused for a while. ‘It’s the Staff of Jesus.’

‘What?’ Ella said with surprise. ‘You mean the staff that Jesus carried?’

‘Yes, the Vatican had it and kept it in secrecy for centuries. Very few people knew of its existence. I looked through the files, and tracking the way he planned his own placement in the Church, I can’t help but suspect that he knew what he was looking for and where to look for it.

‘And it took him fourteen years of manoeuvring the church bureaucracy to do it,’ he continued. ‘It must have meant a lot to him. I wonder what value it has to him to warrant such sacrifice.’ Kenneth stared at the apartment wall as if it was not there.

‘So he can part the Red Sea? Again?’ Ella joked.

‘That’s Moses’, Kenneth corrected her sternly. It was such common knowledge that she should not have made that error.

‘Oops.’ She giggled.

‘That’s a pretty crazy plan, and no sane person would carry out such plan solely for financial gain; there are better way to make money’, Kenneth murmured. ‘What did you say just now?’

‘Oops’, Ella replied.

‘Before that.’

‘So he can part the Red Sea?’

‘You’re right!’ he exclaimed.

‘What? You mean seriously?’ Ella seemed even more confused now.

‘No, what I meant is sane people don’t do such crazy things. Therefore only insane people will. And what drives sane people insane?’ he asked, displaying his pride in gaining an insight that Ella could not follow.

‘Women?’ Ella joked. She had no idea what Kenneth was talking about.

‘Faith and religion. People martyr for it. Kill other people for it. They will defend it to their death. He could endure fourteen years only because he must have a strong belief in his heart for him to carry on. But your answer is right too. You drive me crazy sometimes.’

‘But how does your theory fit in here?’ Ella asked.

‘I don’t know yet’, Kenneth said, shaking his head slightly. ‘There is a lot about him that we don’t know. My information about him is very sketchy. I think we may have to make a trip to Costa Rica to find out more.’

‘We?’ Ella said excitedly.

‘Didn’t I just say I needed you to work closely with me?’

Kenneth had always worked closely with Ella. When he was with MI6, she would be his unofficial partner to gain access to digital information on his target. This relationship carried on after he left the intelligence service and offered himself as specialist to the Agent. But he had never offered to bring her along on field operations.

‘Just another question’, Ella asked. ‘How did he even know where the Staff of Jesus was, or even that it existed in the first place?’

‘Good question. I have no answer, but we’re going to find out.’

Kenneth was snoozing away on the sofa in Ella’s apartment. It was 9 a.m. in the morning. Neither of them had had a good night’s sleep, but Ella was already up and making breakfast.

Ella’s computer screen soon flashed, indicating something requiring their attention. She took a look, and then went to wake Kenneth up.

‘Look Kenneth, we’ve crack the password.’

‘‘Great! Let’s log into his account and check out his emails’, Kenneth said as he sipped on the cup of tea Ella had prepared.

‘Most of these are in Italian, some seems like Spanish, and a few occasionally in Latin’, said Ella as she browsed through the scores of emails in the priest’s account. ‘We’ll have to use a translator program.’

The emails were soon translated into English, a language they both could understand.

Ella downloaded all the emails onto her hard drive and logged off the account rapidly, in case any sharp-eyed system administrator noticed something was