Salvaged Nokias and Banksy's Cardinal Sin - Part 17
How Diez broke the story on pedo priests and came into possession of a famous sculpture
ὅτι οὐκ ἀδυνατήσει παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ πᾶν ῥῆμα.
Diez stared at the words, written in Greek, rolled up in the small piece of paper. He kept it all these years. The miniature scroll the Bishop handed him on the private jet on the way back from Paris after the cathedral was reopened was rolled like a small, homemade cigarette.
The angel’s message to the handmaid of heaven when she asked how it could be possible that she, still a virgin, could bear a child. “For not will be impossible with God everything,” was the direct transliteration.
Gabriel appeared in a small village in the backwater of the Roman empire in an overlooked outpost and brought forward the plan that would change history. A drop of glory from heaven that would shape the course of empires. The great kings and rulers, from Nebuchadnezzar to Alexander the Great, to the many Caesars whose infrastructure and dominance set in motion the way the world worked, built kingdoms that would not outlast the plan the angel promised.
Diez couldn’t count how many times he had revisited these words. He spent time in the original text, parsing the meaning of the Greek, obsessed over those last two words πᾶν ῥῆμα: pan rhēma.
A spoken word or command.
The utterance that is a plan.
What did the Bishop mean by it?
He could still see how the old man’s eyes twinkled as they watched Diez hide away the little hidden message.
The words were so strong, so pressed against his mind and soul that Diez had chosen them as the core text of his homily. Today he would unpack the words on camera for his recorded sermon that he would share later in the afternoon on his YouTube channel.
Diez stood in his study. Behind him were the floor to ceiling windows that gave him a view of the Rockies. In the reflection of the glass from the art on the wall, his head rested between the summits of Mt. Glasgow and Fisher Peak. Mountains that stood like witnesses to the plight and plotting of people over centuries. Tribal wars. Offworld aims.
We really are so small.
On the shelf by the desk lay the two crucifixes. One contained the rolled up note he’d kept for years. The other, newly in his possession, contained unknown data on a SIM card.
It was strange for Jonas, the man from the Game, to have such a thing in his possession. Especially in the Corridor. Was Jonas some sort of mule? Did he know what was on the SIM? Diez looked over his shoulder, toward the mountains. Information like this could be dangerous. To discover. Dangerous to hold.
Jonas’ story helped launch the world of The 49. Read the prequel to the series today! The page-turning thrill ride is now available on Amazon.
There were ways that information was passed between parties, secrets, even in the surveillance state of Corridor West. As the billionaire fiefdoms emerged around the world and the security state reached its peak, a new market of secrets emerged. The priesthood found a way around the invasiveness, became part of a flourishing, hidden network of ideas and communications that flowed around the world, between walled-off corridors, like a quiet, underground river.
There had been a resurgence of old tech, nostalgic devices before the blackout, when brains and feeds were flooded with so much messaging and information that people were hungry for a simpler day. And there was an entire black market of information that boomed outside the walls of Corridor Afrique where so many old, discarded devices lived in tech graveyards.
They were resurrected like an army of dry bones, brought to life through the rebooting of old Nokias and Motorolas. Flip phones with qwerty boards; pariahs that became desired. An order of African priests introduced the method of communication to Western priests, and an infrastructure of communication was christened.
Priests were good at secrets. The confession booth was a lair where they could flourish. While the method of communication was used to protect networks of believers from exposure, to relay messages of encouragement and scripture in areas where speech and ideas freely shared became dangerous to power-hungry despots, there were more nefarious priests who used the same tech.
Diez first got wind of these information networks when he first started writing Collars and Crimes. Pedo priests used the secret communication system too, hiding SIMs in crucifixes and rosaries. They salvaged old Nokias that didn’t connect to 7G, saved messages to SIMs. Read them on the off-network devices. It was outdated tradecraft that was a genius subversion.
Diez’s most viral article, before the blackout, detailed how the flow of information was passed globally, revealing guilty priests and politicians. Faithful bishops and priests shared scriptures of encouragement to a the remnant: which priests were trustworthy and which priests they should watch out for.
He, of course, never revealed names of the faithful priests. And he never disclosed how the SIMs were hidden. But every time he stripped before the guards and the cameras on set of the Games to meet a contestant and enter the confessional, he had himself to thank. The security precaution was meant to ensure information couldn’t be carried in or out of the room.
The strange veneration the Gov gave to the the cross—the almost superstitious honour among non-believers for sacred symbols because of the Phos and how the inexplicable power that God displayed on earth—allowed the secret delivery mechanism to continue to hide in plain sight. People in power like the Gov just didn’t want to mess with that power, especially since the Humbling.
Diez hung Jonas’ crucifix over the edge of the Banksy statue in the corner of his study. Keep hiding in plain sight, he thought. The owner of the modified 18th century bust–whose stone face was cut off and replaced with bathroom tiles had gifted Diez the piece as a thank you for his reporting on pedo priests.
The Cardinal of Sin bust was one of his favourite pieces in his growing collection. It was a constant reminder to Diez of who he was, where he came from, what’s possible when you speak the truth and what’s possible when you abuse the position given to you.
Diez hung Jonas’ simple wooden crucifix so that it laid over the stone cross on the sculpture, careful that it wasn’t in view of his webcam when he delivered his homily.
It had been years since Diez saw a SIM, back when he was a journalist. He himself had never received or delivered one as a priest. Even if he wanted to he didn’t have a device or a location to safely power up the old tech without detection.
Now he had some sleuthing to do.