Chương 400: Chapter 10-398 – Show Me the Money!

Rome, 1999...

"The Church is extremely worried about their precious computers not updating promptly in the year 2000. I'm telling you, there's good money to be made solving the Y2K bug for the Church," Luigi told him over a glass of wine, puffing on a cigar. They'd just come off a long day of debugging a bank's financial hardware, all the puffed-up analysts goddamn useless with how they mucked up their own software.

'Jorg Falsetti' looked over at his friend through heavy eyes.

"I'm not the most pious of people. Would they put up with me?" he asked roughly.

"Feh, like the guts of the Church care about piety. When it comes to money, the Signors are every bit as tight-fisted as the fishermen on the docks," Luigi scoffed.

"We're the best at dealing with this new technology they've got no time to worry about with all their spell-flinging about." Falsetti had never had the potential to be Awakened, failing miserably on the testing when he came of age and being sent into the vocational schools, instead of the coveted magical high schools where all the elite Apprentice mages went.

He was at least smart enough to go into technology, and he had delved eagerly and quickly into the new computer technology that had been proliferating so much from out of America. Now, a good chunk of the world was run by computers, and to his grim satisfaction, the powerful people at the top of the world had no clue how to deal with them.

"I think I can come up with a decent proposal for them," he finally said to Luigi, nursing his beer, like his accent a sign of his Swiss roots.

"You aiming for something longer-term?" Luigi's face shifted slightly.

"Ilisa told me she was pregnant last week," he finally admitted, and Jorg both smiled and nodded, relieving his partner.

"If I could spin this into something a bit more stable and longer-term, instead of going from job to contract, it would be good for my family."

"Then we'd best make a very good presentation to them," Falsetti said, raising a mug with his friend.

Rome, 2006...

"Hans Gouldman?" The man called Falsetti froze on the park seat, unable to move as the tall blonde woman sat down next to him. Her eyes were as blue as the deep sky, and seemed to swallow the world.

"Do not bother to deny it. I have done my homework on you, Mr. Falsetti." Her hand reached out deftly, at first showing his horrified gaze one of the new 'thumb drives' that were rapidly replacing disks and cassettes in the computer systems.

"I think you will find the contents of this drive interesting. When you have made a decision," a business card flashed between her fingers, inserted into his pocket, and then she was rising and gliding away. He gasped for breath, fighting down the fear, turning to look after her... and he could not see her at all.

She didn't give him any files. She gave him passwords. Passwords to information about topics he had asked about online, in only the most circumspect manner. Then someone had tracked him down from those questions, with an accent so fluid and impossible to trace that she could have come from anywhere. Her business card said 'Schnellhund'. He knew of them, of course, experts in installing and debugging sophisticated computer technology, servicing many large businesses and keeping their networks going.

Those passwords went into places in the Church's information archives that he was most definitely not supposed to get into, using backdoors the Church had no possible knowledge of, with authority levels higher than the Pope himself! Someone had taken the time to completely suborn the Church's most clandestine systems, right under their own noses!

The fact so many of them were so antiquated did not, in the end, seem to make any difference, as the first interface he'd logged in with had somehow communicated with all the ancient programs and languages without any difficulties. There was no direction for him to go looking anywhere, which was only proper, as he hunted through the system deftly, hungrily, knowing what to look for, even building a couple macros on his own to help his searching on the fly. It only took him a few hours to find it.

The records of agents dispatched to Prague to put down a 'religious insurrection'. The payments to members of authority to look the other way as the Kabbalists were put down and their synagogue closed as a danger to the city. The Orthodox priests there quietly smoothed everything over and simply watched as the Kabbalists were silenced and slowly forced out of the city.

He saw the files on his mother's activity, trying to track down who was responsible for starting the rioting that had gotten his father killed, noting that she was getting too close to the truth, and something had to be done about her. He'd had no idea of her quiet obsession, but the final report that the target had been terminated confirmed what he'd always known.

He withdrew from the systems smoothly, his tracks covered by the programming, no registration that he was ever there coming from the monitoring programs. He fished out the card to Schnellhund. It was two AM in the morning, but he pulled out the temporary phone he'd purchased earlier, just in case, not about to trust the phone system, nor the fact a Sound Mage for the Synod's intelligence services might be listening to every word he spoke in idle interest.

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"I'll see you tomorrow," the unforgettable woman's voice said before he could speak, and there was a click as she hung up. Senior Computer Technician Falsetti looked at the phone in his hand, wondering what he was getting himself into.

Rome, the present... Operations Special Manager Falsetti's fingers danced over the keys of his terminal with superhuman speed and deftness, certainly faster than any non-mage was supposed to be able to type. The bits and pieces of the programs he'd assembled and spread throughout the system were assembled, pulled together into the greater whole they were made of, and began to access the underprogramming written through the computers of the Church with profound complexity that even he didn't understand.

And he was a Thirteen Expert, one of the most skilled non-mages on the planet. The hackers in the Church's intelligence division would have been in awe of him, had they understood his real skills. He hit a button, and watched the Church's finances go topsy-turvy, even as the world exploded beyond his offices. There was just the slightest displacement of air on his collar, but he didn't glance up.

"Time to go," that unforgettable voice told him. His fingers danced through a hundred keystrokes in under five seconds, free of error, and Hans Gouldman muttered two names under his breath as he finished up.

"We're good." A hand rested on his shoulder, and an instant later, space rippled and they were no longer there. Five seconds later a Thunderbolt ten feet thick plowed a devastating line through his division, obliterating his office in passing. Luigi had moved on ten years ago, finding a good job up north in Germany with Schnellhund after a lucrative offer.

It turned out Luigi's uncle had crossed a Monsignor of the Church and been crippled for life, and one of his grandmothers had been raped by a Bishop of the Church, paid and threatened to keep the matter silent. It was all in the files. Luigi had no problem being his contact there, as well as the Church's liaison with Schnellhund.

Smoking, charred, careening wildly on his shattered Wings, Archangel Uriel crashed to the surface, driven from the area by wildly backlashing magic and force effects he'd never seen before, exploding through the defenses of his Wings and destroying his spells even as he wove them.

The former Archangel Gabriel, now the Avenging Heavens Sage, came down after him, coldly sending out razored feathers spun of Void, Air, and Sound Magic that shattered his defenses even as he raised them, the last of his Wings' magic splintering from perfectly-attuned Thunder ripping them apart like brittle glass, and he was vulnerable.

In his last moments of life, as the vengeful eyes of the young woman who'd been meant to become host to the Avatar clenched her fist, raised it high, and a great silvery sword rose above her, gleaming with energies he did not understand nor recognize, he realized that he'd fallen into the computer division of the Synod, and he automatically glanced towards a familiar door there.

A door blasted away, revealing only a line burned through the entire building where had been the office of Operations Special Manager Falsetti, who he knew would have been at his desk up until the end, as were many of the technicians whose blasted corpses were now scattered around him, the familiar smell of electrocuted meat in the air, dead by fallout from the Thunderbolt that had torn this place apart. It appeared another stroke of vengeance from Heaven above was going to send him to meet the technician.

Uriel looked up, consigning his soul to the Lords of Light as that great silver sword chopped down on him.

The Ice Disaster, the most powerful Ice-Element user in the world; the Goddess of the Acropolis, wielding the Silver Magic of the Argent Element; and the Sevenfold Sage, the most powerful Elemental Mage in the world, had the Avatar caged and were hammering her down relentlessly.

Her vast Mana reserves were depleting rapidly, and her increasingly frantic and desperate spellcasting, trying to match the incredible speed, unbelievable coordination, and devastating raw power of the three Sages taking her, was quite obvious to everyone watching. Not many were watching, however. Most were concerned with tearing the place upside down and burying it and its secrets from the skies forever. We could dig out precious things later.

As it was, every enslaved and enthralled soul in this city who'd given their spirits over to the Light was going to die, and that meant every man, woman, and child. Buildings were leveled by earthquakes and tornado-force winds. The ocean rose up to slam into the city time and again, sweeping miles of the city under the waves. Infernos blazed and cooked everything to slag, while Lightning smashed down and eliminated points of resistance.

All that, and the fallout from monstrous Beasts clashing and scrabbling as they rolled through the ruins of what was once the center of all magic in the human world added to the end of days for the great and glorious city of Rome. I watched it all, Humming in the background a sad and yet determined Song that set the tone for everything we had to do here.

There were magical defenses activated here and there that some of the hundreds of Thunderbolts hadn't managed to destroy ahead of time, but between the Song I was using and the numbers on our side, the annihilation of this abomination of a city was a foregone conclusion.

Hans Gouldman, whisked away to the Broom Closet and never to use the name Falsetti again, had been taught some nasty psychic defenses that had inured him to even Psychic mages examining his thoughts, to the point where he couldn't even think about his real mission without prior activation codes.

He'd passed every loyalty test of the Church with flying colors and his background had been developed and hardened with agents and carefully manipulated records, enabling him to get to the beating heart of the institution that had taken both his parents from him. He had executed a billions-dollar revenge.

The many, many scattered accounts of the Church of Light, still sequestered in other banks and places, even if they were frozen, had now had all their authority transferred over to various investment vehicles that were, in the end, the Church of Heaven.

A small legion of coders was now busy changing the ownership of those accounts, unfreezing them, and sliding them out from under the banks that thought they'd be able to hold onto those funds for years and soak a whole lot of extra income off of them while lawyers wrangled over who got what. Nope. They were going to wake up in the morning to find those monies vanished into the currency exchanges, their destinations completely lost, and the Church of Heaven was going to find itself very solvent, indeed.

As for the dispensation of the Church's many properties, they had already been seized by various governments and were being sold off, almost always after being razed to dirt and stone first. Operations Special Manager Hans Gouldman was going to be Awakened and start his magical studies tomorrow. He'd been waiting over a decade to do so, and was finally going to become a Wizard and Typeless Mage. It was a great way to retire, and with his first Wizard Class Level he'd be a young man again as a Thirteen already...