Vatican

The Vatican is both a powerful religious institution and a computer network that becomes the destination of Vísperas’s clandestine campaign. From Seville, the hacker tries to make the crisis surrounding Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas audible in Rome; the Vatican’s systems, in turn, expose the gap between reaching authority and persuading it to act. Its role in the novel is therefore not simply that of a remote center of decision, but of a guarded information space where local appeals meet institutional defenses and competing definitions of truth.

The distant center of authority

For the people around the threatened church, Rome represents the possibility that an appeal might be heard beyond the Seville institutions that have failed to respond. Macarena Bruner explains that neither the Archbishopric of Seville nor the Nunciature in Madrid had taken Father Ferro seriously. Cruz Bruner, acting without consulting either Father Ferro or her daughter, decided that a message sent into the Vatican system might reach sympathetic hands. She initially imagined leaving a simple note in the central system; only later, as she explored it, did she conceive of manipulating the Pope’s computer.

That choice gives the Vatican a double significance. It is the authority to which the church’s defenders appeal, but it is also a technological destination that can be approached without the ordinary channels of ecclesiastical communication. In Lorenzo Quart’s interpretation, Vísperas hopes that an appeal to the Pope will establish the truth and make it shine, as though truth cannot harm a just cause. Quart’s assignment, however, is to seek the kind of truth that matters in Rome, which may not coincide with the truth sought by the people trying to save the church. The same institution thus stands at the intersection of a local moral struggle and a separate investigation governed by its own priorities.

Entering the network

Cruz’s access begins not with an unexplained technical gift but through contact and practice. Six or seven months before Quart questions her, she encountered a Roman contact known as Deus ex Machina, whom she suspected was a seminarian or young priest playing around the edges of the system. They sympathized, and he gave her several useful clues. She then relied on tricks learned from more experienced associates, tested ways into the Vatican network, and spent a week visiting INMAVAT before understanding what it contained.

Her account also places this activity within a wider hacker culture. At nearly seventy, she had discovered the computer world through a friend using the nicknames Mad Mike and, at times, Viscount Valmont. His machine had a pirate BBS, introducing her to other devotees of advanced technology, often young people spending long hours alone in their bedrooms and manipulating computers belonging to others. The network’s appeal for Cruz lies in its routes of contact and exchange as well as in the transgression of protected boundaries. Her anonymous online life connects an elderly aristocratic woman to a dispersed community of technically curious outsiders.

Intrusion and countermeasures

The Vatican’s defenses make clear that the network is not an open channel. In Rome, Father Arregui and the other Jesuits construct what they call Sadducean Traps: computer areas arranged like nets at a river mouth, intended to disorient intruders or make them expose information that could identify them. Against Vísperas, the traps are elaborate electronic mazes whose false trails may reveal the hacker’s vulnerabilities.

One defense is built around INMAVAT and the Pope’s personal terminal, VOIA. The trap remains inactive when a user enters through the normal password-protected route; it is activated by an outsider. An intruder crossing the threshold of INMAVAT unknowingly carries a hidden code, which blocks access to the real recipient at VOIA and diverts the hacker to a fictitious terminal, VOIATS. There, the intruder can do no damage and may leave any new message believing it has reached the Pope’s computer. The deception turns apparent access into containment: the hacker’s own expectation of success helps preserve the real destination.

The novel shows the trap operating in real time. Arregui watches a cursor move through a list of eighty-four INMAVAT users. When it stops at VOIA, the three Jesuits hold their breath for ten seconds; after the cursor clicks, a waiting clock appears, and the young specialist Cooey quietly announces that Vísperas is entering. Elsewhere, the hacker’s movements are described as jumps through different telephone networks, using loops and programs that erase traces and confuse detection systems. These methods do not make the intruder invisible in any absolute sense: they produce a continuing contest between concealment, decoys, and tracing.

Messages from Seville and the limits of cooperation

The Vatican’s defenses redirect rather than prevent every message. After another intrusion, a faxed copy of Vísperas’s message reaches Quart through Rome. The message quotes First Corinthians on the temple of God: if anyone destroys it, God will destroy him, because God’s temple is holy. Father Óscar Lobato recognizes the biblical source. Although the message appears to address the Pope’s computer, the Jesuits have again diverted the intruder into a parallel file, leaving Vísperas under the impression that the message has been delivered to the Pope’s personal machine.

Tracing the signal leads the Jesuits to a telephone line at El Corte Inglés in central Seville, where the hacker has used an electronic loop to disguise the trail. The route makes the Vatican’s network a point of convergence: the action originates in the local struggle over Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas, passes through Seville’s communications infrastructure, and is intercepted by a Roman technical team. The message’s biblical language lends the local dispute a religious claim, while the false destination complicates any assumption that an appeal has actually reached its intended authority.

Quart’s informal police contact, Simeón Navajo, can offer only limited help. His inquiries find no one on Quart’s list who bought advanced computer equipment under their own name and tax number. A friend in Telefónica’s security department confirms that clandestine users enter networks to travel abroad, to the Vatican, or elsewhere, and that some are caught while others are not. The hacking trail appears to use complicated loops and programs designed to erase evidence and leave detection systems confused. Navajo’s knowledge establishes the practice as part of a larger underground activity, but it does not identify Vísperas.

The limits are institutional as well as technical. Navajo says his superiors allow only unofficial cooperation, on a personal basis; they do not want to become entangled with churches, priests, or Rome. The two deaths associated with the church have been ruled accidents by a judge, while a hacker in Seville annoying the Pope is not, in their view, a matter worth pursuing. The contrast is pointed: Vísperas can cross national and organizational boundaries through the network, but the authorities Quart approaches remain constrained by jurisdiction and institutional caution.

An appeal, a warning, and a moral reminder

To Father Óscar, the importance of Vísperas does not depend on the hacker’s identity. He describes the messages as a warning or an appeal to what remains noble in the enterprise in which he and Quart work: a reminder that honesty and decency still exist. Quart dismisses this hope as something that age will cure, but the exchange exposes a difference in how the two men read the Vatican connection. For Óscar, the intrusion makes an ethical claim on an institution; for Quart, identifying the person behind it matters less than understanding the warning and the mission that has brought him to Seville.

The network’s structure gives that claim a form suited to the story’s conflict. The hacker seeks an audience at the center of religious authority, while the center responds with a system of false doors and controlled destinations. Messages can be delivered as text yet fail to reach their presumed recipient; a trail can be masked yet still be followed; an appeal can invoke sacred authority without guaranteeing a hearing. The Vatican is consequently both the imagined endpoint of Vísperas’s intervention and an active participant in the struggle over who can communicate, what can be known, and whether truth will have consequences.