A State of Corruption

📓 Antonia Strachan was not the Central Crimes Bureau director's first choice for the delicate inquiry that had landed on his desk. But Antrim could not wait. The prime minister had been warned that a major financial scandal implicating the wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was likely to break. Only days earlier Barralozzi, the brother of the chancellor's wife and a department head in the Vatican Bank, had died under suspicious circumstances. A day later an aristocratic young priest, a key informant in the case, committed suicide. And that was on the heels of the disquieting demise of the Curial Cardinal, whose mistress had the bad taste to make the gossip columns. With tremors of a new Roman scandal reverberating around the corridors of Whitehall and the Vatican, Antrim decides that in addition to Antonia he must en-gage the services of the legendary Ludovic Fender, recently retired from the Bureau but still a formidable investigator, and more important, a Catholic with connections in Rome. Antrim smiled when he asked Antonia and Fender, "Are we to suppose the pope puts out contracts on people nowadays?" Later in Rome they find Antrim's jibe no laughing matter. The manipulation of the money markets turns out to be no more