SUMMARY:

A"diabolically good" hacker puts a message on the pope's computer, pleading for him to save a seventeenth-century Spanish church-a church that is killing to defend itself.Although Our Lady of the Tears is but a crumbling baroque building in the heart of Seville, it is also the center of a multilayered mystery-one that will force ecclesiastical sleuth Father Lorenzo Quart to question his loyalty, his vow of chastity, and his faith itself.

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.