THE POPE, HE WAS NOT

They built the perfect man to end the faith. He believed it instead.

In 1987, in the ninth year of his pontificate, Pope John Paul II is quietly murdered in his sleep — and replaced, before the world wakes, by a double. Vittorio Giordano, a bookseller's son from the Sicilian olive country, was chosen for a face and a lifetime's knowledge of every religion on earth, then trained across decades by the Inner Circle: an ancient order that holds a human being to be a machine to be corrected, not a soul to be trusted. Their plan is patient and beautiful — to hollow out the world's largest faith from the inside, using its own shepherd.

For eleven years, it works.

Then the imposter does the one thing his makers never guarded against. He begins to believe. And he writes a letter — a real one, the encyclical Fides et Ratio — telling a billion people that they are free to know the truth and to choose it. It is beautiful, orthodox, impossible to attack, and aimed straight at the men who own him. It is also his death warrant.

They send Anthony Walters, the finest assassin the order ever forged — the same hand that murdered the true Pope in Manila. What the Inner Circle cannot imagine is the one room in every person their doctrines and drugs and lies could never reach, and what an old man in white, on the last night of his life, with four minutes and no weapon, can do inside it.

The Pope, He Was Not is a conspiracy thriller about faith and reason, free will and conditioning, and the last small room in every human being where the choosing happens — the one thing that cannot be owned.