Krus Brunel

Cruz Bruner, duchess of Nuevo Extremo, is the secret behind Vísperas, the anonymous hacker whose intrusion into the Vatican’s computer system makes her a figure in the struggle over Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. Her identity overturns the expectation that the elusive operator belongs to the young underground computer culture she has entered: from a desk in her old family home, a woman in her seventies has challenged the Vatican’s security and intervened in a local church’s fight for survival.

Identity and Revelation

When Lorenzo Quart is brought into Cruz’s computer room late at night, she is seated before a complex PC setup, two high-definition monitors, a laser printer, and a telephone connection. Mozart’s The Magic Flute sounds from deeper in the room. Beside her computer lie a Romero de Torres fan, empty Coca-Cola bottles, and issues of Wired; Cruz wears a dark silk dressing gown and slippers, and her pearl necklace. She works slowly and intently, navigating screens of figures and symbols with the practiced ease of someone who knows how much depends on a keystroke. When the screen changes, she takes control, enters a key, and completes an operation before turning to Quart and Macarena Bruner with satisfaction.

Cruz does not disguise the revelation once Macarena has brought Quart to her. She tells him he now knows her secret. The room itself supplies the proof he struggles to accept: technical magazines, manuals, diskettes, and the equipment of a sustained private practice. The shock is not merely that an elderly duchess can hack. From this table, Quart realizes, a woman of nearly seventy has put the Vatican on the defensive.

Her underground identity is Reina del Sur, the alias she gives Quart after explaining the conventions of clandestine computer circles. The title Vísperas, by contrast, is the name attached to the hacker by those investigating the intrusions. Cruz’s candid disclosure makes the two identities meet: the celebrated, secluded duchess and the anonymous operator are one person, not separate figures or a deception by her daughter.

Learning the Underground

Cruz describes discovering computer networks late in life as an encounter with a new world. Her first guide was a contact known as Mad Mike, who sometimes operated as Vizconde Valmont. She never knew his voice or face. Through him she entered a pirate bulletin-board system and met other devotees of advanced technology, often young people spending long hours alone in their bedrooms, manipulating other people’s computers. Cruz speaks of this network with the pride of someone admitted to an exclusive club, though its membership depends on concealment rather than pedigree.

She explains the practical rules of that clandestine culture. A pirate bulletin board is a computer equipped with specialized software and connected by modem; a newcomer who supplies a real name and telephone number is rejected, while an alias and false number demonstrate the necessary caution. Cruz’s account presents anonymity not as magic but as learned conduct, sustained through pseudonyms, technical skill, and suspicion about who is asking for identifying information.

From bulletin boards she moved on to hidden sites on the Internet, which she compares to taverns where pirates meet to make friends and exchange tricks, games, viruses, and useful information. She gradually learned to navigate networks, disguise her routes in and out, travel abroad electronically, and penetrate protected systems. One of her happiest moments came when she entered the Seville City Council’s system to alter her property-tax bills. That episode establishes both the breadth of her activity and its mixture of play, transgression, and practical effect.

Vísperas and the Vatican Intrusion

The Vatican operation began with a local problem. Six or seven months before Quart hears her account, concern over Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas had become particularly acute. Cruz says that neither the Archbishopric of Seville nor the Nunciature in Madrid was listening to Father Ferro. She therefore thought a message to Rome might make him heard. A Roman contact using the name Deus ex Machina had offered her useful clues while exploring the Vatican system at its edges; Cruz suspects that contact was a seminarian or a young priest. She acted without consulting Father Ferro and without telling Macarena, who learned about Vísperas much later.

Her first plan was limited: leave a message in the Vatican’s central system and hope it reached sympathetic hands. As she explored further, she encountered INMAVAT, a heavily protected archive whose presence suggested that it contained something important. After testing ways into it and drawing on tricks shared by more experienced contacts, she got inside and spent a week visiting the archive before understanding what it was. She then discovered a route toward the Pope’s personal terminal, turning an attempt to call attention to the church into a more consequential intrusion.

The pursuit of Vísperas shows the technical countermeasures on both sides. Investigators built what they called Saducean Traps: electronic decoys arranged to confuse intruders or expose information that could identify them. The trap guarding the route to the Pope’s terminal remained inactive for ordinary, authorized access. An outside intruder entering through INMAVAT unknowingly carried a hidden code; at the threshold of the Pope’s terminal, that code blocked the real destination and diverted the hacker to a fictitious one, where any planted message could be received without damage to the actual system. Cruz’s expertise thus operates inside a contest of entry, concealment, detection, and misdirection—not as an unexplained power to pass through every barrier.

A police inquiry gives a second view of her methods. Simeón Navajo reports that no company on Quart’s list had bought advanced computer equipment under its own name and tax number, and that clandestine users routinely moved through telephone networks to reach the Vatican or other foreign systems. He describes Vísperas as using complicated loops and programs that erase tracks and confuse detection systems. The report broadens the picture beyond a solitary genius: the networks are populated by other hackers, and the tools of concealment are part of a shared underground practice.

Loyalty, Disclosure, and Consequences

Cruz’s intrusion is tied to an explicit choice between the church and Pencho Gavira. She admits that she obtained his security key from her son-in-law’s computer, adding that the key was not difficult to guess. She says she is genuinely sorry because Pencho had always been sympathetic to her, but insists that the church comes first. Her intervention therefore damages a relationship she does not describe with simple hostility: affection and regret remain, but they do not outweigh her commitment to Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas.

At the end of the computer-room scene, Cruz is transmitting a report by fax to every newspaper in Seville. The shift from hacking into protected systems to sending a document outward is decisive: she does not merely seek access or leave an anonymous message, but makes information public. Macarena, standing beside her, has withdrawn into silence as the family house’s old portraits and shadows surround the bright pool of light over the keyboard. In the scene’s imagery, the present action briefly seems to gather the past as well: Quart imagines Carlota Bruner’s ghost smiling in the garden tower and white sails moving upriver.

The revelation also changes the meaning of Vísperas within the investigation. Before Cruz’s confession, the hacker is approached through traces, decoys, and the assumption of an unknown operator. Afterwards, the network’s hidden identity belongs to a particular woman, whose route into the Vatican began not with an abstract assault on authority but with the failure of church officials to hear Father Ferro. Her methods are clandestine and unauthorized, yet their stated purpose is to force attention toward a threatened parish.

Later Life and Narrative Significance

Cruz dies in early winter while Quart is serving as third secretary at the Apostolic Nunciature in Santa Fe de Bogotá. He learns of her death through a short item in the international edition of ABC, accompanied by an obituary listing her titles and by Macarena’s request for prayers. A couple of weeks later, a Seville postmark brings him a small black-bordered memorial card repeating much of the announcement. It contains no letter, but includes the postcard from Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas that Carlota Bruner had addressed to Captain Xaloc and that Quart had previously found in his hotel room. The object links Cruz’s death notice to the older family history that continues to surface around the church.

Later information suggests that Cruz’s intervention formed part of a wider, lasting outcome. A letter from Father Óscar Lobato informs Quart that Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas remains open for worship and continues to function as a parish. Quart also learns from a business-page report that Pencho Gavira has resigned his executive powers as vice-president and managing director of the Cartujano Bank. The evidence does not establish that Cruz alone caused either outcome, but it places her actions within a story in which the church survives and Gavira’s institutional position changes.

Cruz’s character joins two worlds that the novel might otherwise keep apart: the old aristocratic household, burdened by inherited memory, and the anonymous, collaborative culture of electronic networks. Her computer desk becomes an unlikely instrument of public intervention. The duchess’s rank does not make her legible to the Vatican or the church hierarchy; the hacker’s alias gives her another route into systems that formal appeals have failed to move. As Vísperas, she converts secrecy into a means of forcing a message into view, then finally allows Quart to see the person at the keyboard.