The League of Night and Fog

by David Morrell

  “As far as the police are concerned, we did them a favor,” Seth said. “Better than that, they suspect the wrong people. We can’t complain.”

  “But what happens when the blood tests on Medici show he died from an overdose of Sodium Amytal?” Icicle asked. “The police will compare that to the knife marks on Gatto and decide both men were interrogated.”

  “So what? They’ll never guess it was us or what kind of information we wanted.”

  Icicle was amazed at how much color his companion’s face now had. It was almost as if Seth gained life by administering death, and that made Icicle nervous. For him assassination was a profession, while for Seth it seemed a need. Icicle had never killed anyone he didn’t feel morally certain deserved to be eliminated—dictators, drug lords, communist double agents. Seth, on the other hand, gave the impression of not caring who it was he killed as long as the fee was sufficient. If Seth’s father had been anything like his son, Icicle didn’t wonder why his own father had hated the man.

  Granted, both fathers had been Hitler’s primary assassins. But Seth’s father had specialized in stalking leaders of underground organizations that protected Jews, while Icicle’s father had gone after Allied intelligence infiltrators and on more than one occasion had begged for the chance to try for Churchill. The difference was important. Racial extermination was heinous under any circumstances. Political assassination was justifiable if your country’s survival depended upon it.

  But what if your country was wrong? Icicle asked himself. What if your nation’s policy was based on racial hatred? Did patriotism require you to defend an immoral country? Or was national defense merely understandable self-defense?

  Was my father self-deluded?

  Icicle continued to watch the man he loathed. His eyes, Icicle thought. The more Seth killed, the brighter they became.

  “Something troubles you?” Seth asked.

  “We’ve got a great body count. Otherwise we haven’t accomplished a thing.”

  “Not true.” Seth lowered a newspaper. “We’ve narrowed possibilities. We’ve determined that terrorism and the cardinal’s disappearance aren’t related.”

  “I never believed they were.”

  “But the possibility had to be considered. Given Halloway’s involvement in black-market arms to terrorists—”

  “For Christ’s sake, what?” Icicle demanded.

  “You didn’t know? That’s how Halloway makes his living. Munitions.”

  “You’re telling me this is all about illegal weapons?”

  “And the cardinal’s insistence on a yearly blackmail payment. Surely you knew about that.”

  “I didn’t object.” Icicle told him. “I thought of it less as blackmail, more as an extended payment for services rendered.”

  “Well, some of us thought about killing the priest. Account paid in full.”

  “He did our fathers a favor.”

  “Yes, one that was in his own best interest. Or his Church’s best interest. After more than forty years, the payments amount to a fortune. Eight million dollars.”

  “If you want my opinion,” Icicle said, “the price was cheap, given the atrocities they committed.”

  “Including your father?” Seth asked.

  Icicle stood. “Not my father! He divorced himself from the others!”

  “Really? Sorry to disillusion you, but your father killed as many Jew-savers as my own father did. Their argument wasn’t about Jews but about a woman, about your mother! She chose your father over mine! I could have been you! And you would not have existed!”

  Icicle realized how deep their hatred was. He raised his hands in surrender. “It’s a stupid argument. There are too many problems we need to face.”

  Seth’s eyes dulled. “Of course. And we still haven’t found our fathers.” With effort, he reverted to professional control. “In that case”—he breathed—“in my opinion”—he breathed again—“the situation is as follows.”

  Icicle waited.

  “We’ve eliminated the theory that what Halloway calls the Night and Fog is a terrorist group that discovered what the cardinal knew, abducted him, and wants to take over Halloway’s munitions network.”

  “I agree,” Icicle said. “The theory isn’t valid.”

  “But the cardinal’s disappearance is related to the disappearance of our fathers,” Seth continued. “The Night and Fog couldn’t have found our fathers if not for the cardinal.”

  “Again I agree.”

  “So if the purpose of abducting them wasn’t to hold them hostage for money, that leaves the possibility that the Night and Fog are doing this for personal reasons. That the Night and Fog are Israelis. But to suspect the cardinal, to have discovered what he knew, the Jews would have had to infiltrate the security system of the Catholic Church.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “I do as well. And it makes me wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “Eliminate the possibilities. Could someone … or some group … within the Church be the Night and Fog?”

  BLACK JESUITS

  1

  Eight blocks to the east of Zurich’s Limmat River, Saul and Erika passed an Agency guard in an alley, opened a door, and entered a garage.

  The room was large, its overhead lights brighter than the morning sunlight they’d just left, its concrete floor immaculate. There was only one car, the Renault the three assassins had used. An Agency team had picked it up where Saul told them he’d left it—at the parking lot near Zurich’s train station. Overnight, a crew had been working on it, checking for fingerprints, dismantling and searching it. It was now a mechanical skeleton.

  “These guys were ready for World War Three,” a gravelly voice said.

  It belonged to Gallagher. Saul turned as the burly station chief came over, holding an RPG-7 rocket launcher. He nodded toward the munitions laid out on the floor. Plastic explosives, grenades, Uzis, AK-47s.

  “Did you find any fingerprints?”

  “All kinds,” Gallagher said. “But this is a rental car—we can’t tell which belong to your friends and which belong to whoever used the car before them.”

  “You know where we hid the bodies. You could send a team to get their prints.”

  “I already have. My men should be back by tonight. Aside from the weapons, we didn’t find anything unusual in the car. But it was rented in Austria. They wouldn’t have risked bringing a trunkful of weapons through Swiss customs. They had to get the stuff in Switzerland.”

  “Right. And since they were following us, they wouldn’t have had much time to pick up the weapons without losing us,” Saul said. “Their contacts must be excellent.”

  “A network we don’t know about?” Gallagher said. “Maybe. I can buy that a lot more than I do your suspicion these men were priests. Just because of the rings they wore.”

  “An intersecting cross and sword.”

  “That still doesn’t make them priests.” Gallagher set the rocket launcher down beside the AK-47s. “Religion and violence aren’t exactly compatible with the meek inheriting the earth. When I spoke to Langley, I didn’t tell them about the religious angle. I’m waiting on that till I’m sure. Right now, our people are checking on the French IDs you took from the men. The passports and driver’s licenses are probably fake. Our contacts in French intelligence will let us know soon enough.”

  “But the credit cards,” Saul said. “They’re the key.”

  “No question. My guess is we’ll find the cards have a perfect rating. And I’m damned curious about who pays the bills.”

  A phone rang. Saul glanced at Erika as Gallagher went over to answer it. They couldn’t hear what he said. Mostly Gallagher listened, and when he came back, he looked excited.

  “The men whose names are on those passports died years ago. The addresses are rooming houses for transients. But the credit cards are three months old, and the bills were paid as quickly as they were received.”

  “Who paid
them?”

  “Each man had a different card. Each bill was paid through a different bank. But each bank has photocopies of the checks paid through each account, and the signature on the checks wasn’t the bogus name of each man you killed. No, the man who wrote the checks was an accountant. Unusual—don’t you think?—for someone whose address is a transient’s rooming house to have a need for an accountant. Even more unusual for three transients with separate addresses to have the same accountant. But it gets better. The accountant doesn’t exist either. His checks are good. But he’s in a graveyard in Marseilles. And he has a post office box instead of an office. So we go past the bogus accountant, and what do we find? You were right, Romulus. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The Catholic Church. The bills were paid through Rome. Through the Vatican office of a cardinal whose name is Krunoslav Pavelic. And here’s the kicker. The cardinal disappeared several months ago. So what does a missing cardinal have to do with three assassins who might be priests and the disappearance of—?”

  “My father,” Erika said. “A Jew, not a Catholic.”

  “But if the cardinal disappeared, who paid the bills?” Saul asked.

  “The cardinal’s assistant,” Gallagher said. “Father Jean Dusseault.”

  2

  Hunched over a wooden table in the muffled silence of a reading room in Rome’s Vallicelliana Library, Drew and Arlene examined the books a librarian had given to them. The half-dozen titles, all in Italian, were dictionaries of religious biographies, the equivalent of Who’s Who in the Vatican, the Curia, the Roman Catholic Church. They found the information they wanted and glanced at each other with dissatisfaction, returned the books, and stepped from the library’s vestibule to face the brilliance and noise of Rome.

  “Well, at least it was worth a try,” Drew said.

  Arlene’s response surprised him. “As far as I’m concerned, we learned a lot.”

  “I don’t see what. The biographical references in those books were little more than public relations for the cardinal.”

  “He doesn’t lack ego, that’s for sure,” Arlene said. “Most Who’s Whos base their citations on information supplied by the people listed in them. The cardinal apparently views himself as a saint on earth. He has medals and testimonials from dozens of religious groups. He even has a papal decoration. But a list of honors isn’t a biography. The cardinal didn’t supply many details about his life. Either he thinks his biography is boring, which I doubt given his willingness to let everybody know his various titles and honors, or else—”

  “He’s got something to hide?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Arlene said. “We know he was born in 1914 and raised in Yugoslavia. We know he felt an early calling to the Faith and entered the Church when he was eighteen. We know he received his religious training here in Rome. For a time, he served as the Church’s liaison with the Red Cross. He moved rapidly up through the ranks of the Church. At thirty-five, he was one of the youngest men to be admitted into the Curia. As a controller of the Church’s finances, he holds one of the most powerful positions in the Vatican.”

  “He must have had talent, all right,” Drew said. “The question is, at what? There’s nothing in his biography to indicate why he was promoted so rapidly. If you’re right, if he’s hiding something, it won’t be in any official biography. I doubt we’d find it even if we checked the Vatican archives. A member of the Curia has the power to make sure his past is sanitized.”

  “How do we get the unofficial version of Pavelic’s life?” Arlene asked.

  “I think it’s time to have an intimate conversation with the cardinal’s close associates,” Drew said. “In the newspaper accounts of his disappearance, I remember a reference to Pavelic’s personal assistant. Father Jean Dusseault, I believe the name was.”

  “French.”

  “We can narrow the range of our discussion with him. What I’m interested in—”

  “Is World War Two,” Arlene said, “and why the assassin sons of Nazi assassins would be determined to find our missing cardinal. Let’s go back to the Vatican.”

  3

  Father Jean Dusseault had an apartment in one of the many Renaissance palaces within the Vatican. The simplest way to contact him, of course, would have been to phone him and schedule an appointment at his office. But the subsequent conversation was unlikely to prove productive. Saul imagined the stony response to the questions he wanted to ask. “Do you know anything about a connection between Cardinal Pavelic and checks written out of your office to assassins who might be priests? Have you ever heard about a secret intelligence network within the Catholic Church? Absurd? Of course. I’m sorry I troubled you.” No, Saul thought as he waited in an alcove across from Father Dusseault’s apartment building. An interview in his office wouldn’t do. A private approach, an intimate—if necessary, forced—conversation: those were the only practical options.

  Saul had agreed with Gallagher that, despite the Agency’s new willingness to help, it was best for Saul and Erika to go in alone. They had no present affiliations with any network. If they were caught, the worst accusation would be that a man and woman who happened to be Jews had too energetically questioned a Catholic priest about the woman’s missing father.

  Besides, Saul thought, this really is still a personal matter. Erika’s father is all I care about. Gallagher gave me information I didn’t have—about the Vatican connection with the men who stalked me. In return, he learned about the possibility of a network, the existence of which no one suspected. It’s a fair exchange.

  Lights flicked off in several apartments. The night became blacker. The Vatican was closed to tourists after 7 P.M., but Saul and Erika had hidden in a basement of one of the office buildings, creeping out after sunset. From his vantage point, Saul glanced down the narrow street toward where Erika waited in a similar alcove. They had flanked the entrance to Father Dusseault’s apartment building. As soon as the light went off in his apartment, they’d go up. Or if he came out, they were ready to follow.

  As it was, he came out. Saul recognized the robust young Frenchman with his thick dark hair and his slightly weak chin from a late-afternoon visit he’d made to Father Dusseault’s office, pretending to be a journalist inquiring if there were developments in the search for the cardinal. The priest had been aloof, abrupt, dismissive. Saul wasn’t going to regret demanding answers from him.

  The priest paused beneath a light above the entrance to the palace, then headed toward Saul’s right, in Erika’s direction. His dark suit blended with the shadows; his white collar remained visible, however.

  Saul shifted from his hiding place, having given Erika a chance to go after the priest before he himself did. He concentrated on a dim light at the end of the street, waiting to see which direction Father Dusseault would take.

  The priest went straight ahead. His apartment building was to the right of St. Peter’s Square, near the so-called downtown area of the Vatican, where its supermarket, pharmacy, and post office were located. His route led Saul and Erika between the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica, past the Pontifical Academy of Science, and deep within the Vatican woods and gardens, the darkness of which was only partially dispelled by periodic lamps. Twice Saul had to stop and hide—once when two priests walked past him from one building to another, again while a Swiss guard patrolled a street. As soon as he entered the cover of shrubs and trees, he felt less uneasy. But he was troubled by two gestures the priest made. One was to remove his white collar and tuck it into his suitcoat pocket. The other was to push his right hand along the middle finger of his left hand as if he put on a ring.

  With an intersecting cross and sword?

  Is Father Dusseault connected with the three men who tried to kill me? Is that why their bills were paid through the cardinal’s office?

  The priest’s movements, formerly casual, now became wary. A man of the cloth on a late-night stroll became an operat
ive on guard against danger. He skirted the pale glow of a garden lamp. Without the white collar, his black suit blended perfectly with the darkness of shrubs.

  He disappeared.

  Somewhere ahead, among trees and bushes, Erika would be watching, Saul knew. Perhaps she was close enough to see where the priest went. But as she stalked him, would the priest be stalking her as well? Had Father Dusseault suspected he was being followed?

  Saul was sure of this. He and Erika thought so much alike, the same suspicion would have occurred to her. She’d take extra care. Silently he crept forward, past fountains, hedges, and statues. Marble angels had always reminded him of death. The scent of the plants was cloying, as in an undertaker’s parlor. He sank to the ground, squirming forward through a gap between shrubs, pausing when he saw a clearing before him. A large fountain in the shape of a Spanish galleon loomed ahead.

  At first he thought the priest with his back to the fountain was Father Dusseault. Then the emergence of a quarter moon made him realize that this priest wore a white collar. The man was taller than Father Dusseault. His strong-chinned profile made Saul tingle. In these gardens that reminded him of a cemetery, he had the eerie sensation he was seeing a ghost. For an instant, he would have sworn he was looking at his dead foster brother, Chris.

  Saul stared in shock. Had Chris somehow survived? Saul had never seen Chris’s body; he’d only been told about the knife attack that had killed him. But despite the longing in Saul’s heart, he knew in his soul that his hope was groundless. This priest, no matter the resemblance, was not in fact Chris.