Read our exclusive extract from Nick Brucker’s White Smoke, a page-turning high-concept heist thriller set among a group of duplicitous conmen and thieves who are determined to steal the Vatican’s most remarkable treasures… Pre-order your copy today ahead of publication next May.
White smoke still rose like a ghost above St. Peter’s Basilica, the remnants curling into the dark sky. Over the last two hours, throngs from across the Vatican had pushed their way to the courtyard, urging themselves forwards to the barriers to catch a view of the balcony. The travertine square gleamed under floodlights, still slick from the evening’s drizzle. Pigeons flitted between the columns, startled into motion by the clang of bells.
Benito stood to the side of the sprawling media desk, filled with tech workers double and triple-checking screens and speakers. Around him, tourists and true believers jostled past, their upturned faces lit with expectation as they angled their phones and adjusted their zooms. The Cardinal Deacon had just delivered Habemus Papam, announcing the identity of the new Pope to the waiting world. Now, a sea of strangers waited for the man himself to appear, each desperate to be one of the first to say, I was there. I listened to the first sermon. Benito did not move forwards for a better view. He had been here for hours already, waiting.
Just thirty minutes ago, he had sent the message he had waited a lifetime to send. The fallout would come soon, and with it, the consequences.
Candle wax clung to the air, the faint tang of incense drifting from the procession on the steps. The press of bodies was relentless—sweat, cheap perfume, and the damp chill of evening radiating off coats and shoulders. Beneath Benito’s boots, the cobblestones were slick, worn smooth by centuries of feet. He closed his eyes and felt the ancient chill of this city, the thousands of footsteps rising through his soles like a pulse. Somewhere, nearby, a baby wailed.
His eyes opened and caught a small woman in black clothes, slipping her way through the crowd in the wrong direction. While others pushed and bustled, she skimmed—fishlike—cutting through people like a minnow through a stream. They had never spoken, but he knew her like an old friend: Rachel ‘the Rat’ Baffier. He’d watched her from afar for a long time.
When she saw Benito, she blinked, shaking her head like she’d seen an apparition. After a moment, she swore under her breath and made her way over to his side.
“You are fuckers,” the Rat said. “Both of you.”
Benito gazed out at the balcony ahead of them. “He didn’t make it, did he?”
The tightening of her lips told him the answer he already suspected. Benito bit back the pang of hurt that jabbed his heart. There would be time for grief, later. There would be a lifetime of it.
“Why?” the Rat pressed him. “All of this—when you already knew who he was?”
Benito’s lip curled in response. “To make the world open their eyes.”
The rusted groan of ancient mechanisms echoed across the square as the red velvet curtains parted high above. The crowd surged against the barriers, a wave of cheers swelling towards the heavens, even as they shifted their phones this way and that to capture the right angle. It was then that it happened, right on cue, just as he’d been told it would.
He saw it on the phone in front of him first: a Whatsapp message that the tourist swiped away, and then another, and another, until the urgency could no longer be ignored. One by one, across the courtyard, phones pinged and rang. Cameras were replaced by message apps, by breaking news articles, by shock.
The jubilant cheering of the crowd died, swallowed by a silent blanket of disbelief. A calm before the storm. Benito glanced up, for in that silence, the man he had been waiting for stepped forwards. The figure in white, upon the balcony, his hands trembling slightly as he raised them to greet the masses.
Benito could not see who shouted first, but it mattered little. Once the floodgates opened, more came: shouts exploded into screams of righteous fury, into protestations and arguments. Some cried. Others merely looked on, speechless, unable to understand.
And yet still, when the Pope spoke, his thin voice carried clear through the speakers across the square, rising over the building tide.
“Omnes peccaverunt et egent gloria Dei.”
Benito recognised the verse. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
The new Pope lowered his head, the pain in his furrowed forehead emblazoned across giant television screens for all to see.
“I ask God’s forgiveness…” he muttered, so quietly that Benito almost missed it.
“For all of us.”
A pause.
And then, with a quiet grace that defied the horror of it, the Holy Father stepped forwards and dropped from the balcony.
Gasps broke like waves against the basilica walls. Screams echoed. People fainted. Phones fell.
And in that flash of time that both lasted an instant, but also encompassed the full breadth of two long-cursed lives, Benito smiled.
