The Cardinal's Sin

by Robert Lane

  Grabbing his leg, I burst up from my crouched position. We crashed into the back wall. His right hand held a knife. I reached out with my left hand and clamped his wrist. He brought his knee up into my groin, but I pivoted in time so my left thigh took the blow. I stuck my right hand into his throat. Like the osprey with the giant sheepshead in its talons, I squeezed.

  The knife inched closer. His right arm was stronger than my left arm. His left hand locked on my right wrist around his neck. My fingers dug into his throat. My right arm was stronger than his left arm. The knife came closer to my face. He would win by virtue of possessing a weapon.

  McCartney entered the middle eight.

  I released his right wrist and ducked. The knife swished wildly above my head. He was not expecting me to let go, and his weight followed his hand into the wall. I put him in a rear naked choke hold, wrapped my right leg around his legs, and tripped us both forward so that I fell on him. Now it was his face scrunched up against the phone box. His wig slid down over his left ear, and the glasses fell off. The back of his buzzed head looked identical to that of the man in the picture with Renée at the Valencia.

  He was nearly asphyxiated before I was able to wrestle the knife away. I pressed it tightly against his throat.

  “How did you know she was here?” I demanded. Blood dripped onto him from my face. I must have cut it on the phone box.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Where’s Paretsky?”

  Nothing.

  The knife drew blood. I needed him alive but wanted him dead. I’d fought that battle before. I put my mouth to his ear.

  “You will talk. The only difference will be the amount of pain you receive. Do you understand?”

  Nothing.

  He stared straight ahead at the carpet, which had a crown pattern, like a remnant from Windsor Castle. He started to roll, but I applied more pressure. I pressed the knife as hard as I dared. An ounce more and it would slice his throat. “Talk to me and save yourself. It’s Paretsky we—”

  He reversed his resistance and jerked his head forward—he had been holding it back and away from the knife. The sudden release, similar to how I had just freed my grip on his arm holding the knife, caught me by surprise.

  I wasn’t fast enough. The knife cut deep into his throat, and the blood surged out of his neck, running over the royal carpet like a river that had breached a levee.

  “No, no, no!” I shouted as I dropped the knife. I turned him over and applied pressure to his neck. I ripped off my silk shirt—the third one I’d put on and the second one I’d ripped that day—and tried to stem the bleeding. His legs danced as if he was being electrocuted. He smiled. Sir Paul sang. I was losing him. I didn’t want to give him the final satisfaction of imposing his will on me. I relinquished my effort. I picked up the knife.

  “This is for Donald Lambert.” I sliced the Guardian’s throat to the bone. “Beware, my ass.”

  The elevator bell gave a soft, cosmopolitan ring to signal that we had reached the ninth floor, or perhaps that the round was over. The door opened. My phone rang. I dragged the body into the war room.

  “What?” I said to Garrett as I hit the button.

  “They know. They broke the code, but that’s not it. They found the leak. Have reason to believe that our names—”

  “I just killed the Guardian on his way up to see Kathleen. Who else is on the list?”

  “She was it.”

  “Morgan?”

  “No. Word’s gone out. No doubt he has copies, but at least they can protect themselves and relocate. You OK?”

  “Fine. The leak?”

  “Didn’t get it from the drive, but they cuffed him today.”

  “Tell Morgan he sails in thirty. Understand that?”

  “Got it.”

  “And we need a cleanup in aisle nine.”

  I disconnected and dropped the body under a collection of Great War titles. Two monstrous olive-branch bookends squeezed a couple of dozen tomes. On the left was Tuchman’s The Guns of August. On the right, Toland’s The Last 100 Days. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front stood alone, propped up in the corner. It was the translated edition, but Last Letters from Stalingrad wasn’t. Were they from the same source? Why would I think of that now? A heightened state of alert is an inexplicable level of consciousness. Kathleen’s door opened.

  She wore tight jeans, a sleeveless white blouse, and a sweater. The sweater had no buttons in the front and was trimmed with lace. It nearly hung to her knees, and the sleeves were neatly rolled up to just past her elbows. It was a light, see-through, linen material. A gold-embroidered pattern of leaves and flowers. The back of the sweater came up high where a choker of aqua and brown—Sedona colors—clung to her neck. A matching bracelet was on her right wrist. Her hair was tied back, although some of it was free, I think by design.

  She had on high heels and was a good four inches taller than usual. We were nearly eye to eye.

  She glanced over at the Guardian’s body. It twitched. Her mouth dropped open.

  I said, “Bit of a skirmish in the war room.”

  She glanced back up at me. “Jake?”

  “We’ve got to go.”

  The color started to leave her face. Shock. I realized I didn’t have a shirt on and was smeared in blood.

  “I’m fine,” I blurted out. “It’s his blood, not mine.”

  “Jake?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Jake—”

  I didn’t want to touch her for fear of ruining her sweater. I moved into her foyer and shut the door behind me. “You’re not safe here. We leave in five. I’m rinsing under the shower and changing clothes.” I kept a few items in her closet. I started into her bedroom.

  “Where’s your shirt?” she asked.

  I pivoted back around. “Elevator.”

  “Which one?”

  “Eleva—”

  “No. Shirt.”

  “Blue one you bought me last spring.”

  “When I bought you two?”

  “Yeah. Ripped the buttons off the other one earlier this—this is nonsense. Go pack. You’re leaving.”

  “Leaving?”

  “Five minutes. You need to sit down?”

  “What?”

  “Sit down. You—”

  “I’m fine,” she snapped and abruptly collapsed on her leather recliner.

  “You need to pack.”

  “I thought you said to sit down.”

  “Do both.” I left her and bolted into her bathroom.

  I rinsed under her shower and changed into jeans and a T-shirt. As far as I knew, Kathleen’s elevator was the only one not operating, and everyone used the bank of elevators that opened into their respective units. Nonetheless, I needed the place cleaned. MacDill was less than thirty minutes away, and they had a team there. Garrett, as I’d instructed, would make the call.

  I finished dressing. Kathleen crammed semifolded clothing into a suitcase, much like I’d seen her do in London.

  “Who was he?” she demanded.

  “Man we call the Guardian.”

  Why not tell me the truth? she had implored me at the end of my dock. Think she can handle it? Fine, let her hear this cannon roar. “He was dispatched to kill you solely based on your association with me.”

  “I see.” She stood a few feet from me and blew her breath out. “I would expect you to perform such a task without creating such a mess.”

  Damn.

  OK, let’s see how she handles Fat Man. “It was only by luck that I was in the elevator with him. I didn’t know he was coming.”

  She nodded her head. “An honest and lucky man.”

  Double D.

  “For the record.” She turned and slammed shut her suitcase. She pivoted, took a step toward me, and stuck her face in mine. “What I don’t like is being kept in the dark by someone who thinks I’m a bibliophile incapable of reality.”

  “Let’s go.” I took a step forward and grasped
her arm. “You’re not safe here.”

  “I said, you un—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to hustle.”

  “Where to?”

  “Morgan’s waiting.”

  “I’m sailing?”

  “Pronto.” For all I knew, Paretsky was waiting for us. Her faux cavalier acceptance of my luck didn’t disguise her apparent shock and lack of comprehension of her immediate situation.

  “Wait a sec.” She dashed off to a dresser and bounded back into the room with two bathing suits, a wide-brimmed, floppy hat, and three paperback books. She unzipped the outer compartment of her suitcase and crammed them in.

  OK, so maybe I underestimated this woman.

  We hustled through the war room and into the bloody elevator. Kathleen sequestered herself in the far corner, away from the blood.

  “Bet this doesn’t happen,” she said, a corner of her thin lip curling up, “to Emily Brontë and friends.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Garrett confirmed a cleanup for 27B.

  Florida was the twenty-seventh state to enter the union. And B? That was Garrett and me. Must be a Group A out there. I often wondered if they were still operational. Still vertical.

  Kathleen peppered me with questions on the first few minutes of the fifteen-minute drive from her condo. She gave up after she realized that she wasn’t going to scale my wall of silence.

  I wanted to tell her everything would be fine. Hadn’t she heard what I had said? It was only by luck that I was in the elevator with him. She might react with a calm demeanor, but it was unacceptable. I was unacceptable. I should not be in her life.

  Moon Child, at forty-two feet, extended well beyond the decking at the end of my dock. I assisted Kathleen onto the boat, and Garrett untied the bowline. I started to turn, but then reversed and hopped on the boat. I grabbed her and kissed her. At first it was a solitary act, but then she kicked in with everything she had. I pulled back. Our eyes locked. I stepped off the boat.

  Morgan said, “Anyplace in particular?”

  “Get her the hell out of my life.”

  The screened porch was quiet. No music. No cigars. No Morgan. No Kathleen. My life was more hole than substance. More of what I’d lost than what I’d accumulated. It felt good to feel sorry for myself. Cheered me up. All I needed was some whiskey, and I could crawl right into funky town. The bullshit thoughts are a dead-end street, but you need to visit that cul-de-sac sometimes to remind yourself that the only way out is to retrace your steps past everything that drove you there in the first place.

  No bullshit here—what good was finding the one of seven billion for me if all I brought her was danger?

  When I first met Lauren Cunningham, I overreacted, nearly got her killed, and brought about her new identity as Kathleen Rowe. Less than a year ago, while searching for a missing young woman, I again endangered Kathleen when the man who held the woman recognized Kathleen as the previous Lauren Cunningham. Now this.

  Screw it. I was lying to myself. She hadn’t flinched at any of that. That girl was solid oak. What she did blink at, what irked her, were my crass remarks that she should go back to her books. My insinuation was that she was better at observing life than living it. Not only was I astonishingly wrong—dead bodies, new name, no sweat—but what did she zero in on, what really got under her skin? Words.

  Incredible.

  No.

  Indelible.

  I went to the kitchen and built a drink. I plopped three cubes into a glass and drowned them with whiskey—a simple job, no blueprint needed. I dropped an LP on the Magnavox, returned to the porch, and tossed down two shots faster than you can take baby aspirin. Maybe Kathleen wasn’t rattled by what just happened, but I was. It was too close. I let one of the ice cubes slide into my mouth and gave it a crack. Garrett came in and sat beside me. Tony Bennett came over the Magnavox. “If I Ruled the World.” It was all props, but we need that sometimes. Sometimes it’s all we’re left with.

  “The flash drive?” I said.

  “Dozen or so names. More like a loose network. He might be one of many. By shutting down the leak, we eliminate any further damage. The exposed parties just need to cover themselves. Paretsky got lucky a few times, and that turned the battleship in his direction, but even if we sink him there are others.”

  “Kathleen?”

  “Address. Nothing else.”

  “How many people have that information?”

  “Not sure.”

  “The leak?”

  “Low-level, midcareer geek looking for money to pay off an underage girl who threatened to put him behind bars.”

  “A stiff dick has no conscience.”

  “Nor legal rights. Somehow Paretsky made contact with the source and traded money for names.”

  “Antinori,” I asked. “He on the flash drive?”

  Garrett’s eyes cut into me. “No. Whatever reason he was there that morning had nothing to do with compromised information.”

  It would be nice if, just once, things came easy.

  I thought of the colonel’s remark on my dock, that the leak or source that led to the demise of agents and their loved ones wasn’t necessarily related to Antinori’s early morning stroll. I had started to argue with him but pulled back, admitting that events that appeared related should not be assumed to be so. I was becoming convinced that the death of Cardinal Antinori wasn’t related to Paretsky’s official line of business. The picture he sent of me? My bet was that Paretsky took advantage of the situation—and why not? It made him look better than he was. Crafty little turd.

  I cracked another piece of ice. “Father McKenzie?”

  Garrett stood and walked to the screen, facing the dark. “We picked him up, took him for a ride. Questioned him hard on the cardinal’s schedule; you knew the man, kept his calendar, the usual muscle bluffing.” He turned to me. “Direct questions about Hoover and Paretsky.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing beyond that he knew the man as Mr. Hoover and that he was a generous donor. Said Antinori insisted on handling Hoover, kept him close, and that he, McKenzie, didn’t interact that much with him.”

  “They scare him?”

  “Pissed in his robe.”

  “Holy water.”

  Garrett snorted a laugh, which is as close as he ever got to the real thing. “The cleanup team should be at Kathleen’s place by now. Within a few hours, after they lift the Guardian’s prints, we’ll likely know his identity, and a whole new line of investigation should open up. Unless the fingerprints and dental records aren’t in any database.”

  “I’m going to forget you said that.”

  I called Binelli and told her that the man referred to as the Guardian was dead. She said she’d pass the information to Wayne.

  Garrett’s phone rang as I reached for my drink.

  “No,” he said. He listened some more. “No way.”

  His tone alarmed me. I stood. He disconnected.

  “Identifying parts of the body are gone,” he said. “Someone beat us to it.”

  “Gone, as in—”

  “Hacked off.”

  “That might be the best news all day.”

  “How so?”

  I drained the last drop of whiskey that wasn’t there. “Means Paretsky’s in town. Let’s find him.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Sometimes a cowboy can come in pretty handy. You’ll see what I mean—twice.

  Garrett and I discussed how we would dispose of body parts and unanimously agreed taking a boat into Tampa Bay with a few cinder blocks was a no-brainer.

  I took out my phone and hit Adam’s number. The harbor was directly across from his end of the front porch.

  “Any boats go out in the last fifteen minutes or going out now?” I asked him.

  “We’re hoppin’.”

  “Look now. Over your shoulder. Tell me what’s going on at the marina.”

  “OK. The babe you saw, you know, the one who digs nude sunbathing?�
�

  “The Southern Breeze.”

  “Roger dodger. She’s having a boat party. Smallish crowd. I don’t know what to tell you, man. Lots of people strolling in the park and—”

  “Forget the park. Focus on the marina. Any boat leaving? Just don’t look at the shore.”

  His voice faded, and he said, “Be right with you.” He came back to me. “What was that?”

  “The water, man. The mouth of the marina.”

  “That’s it, Jake. The boat party, nothing…the dweeb banker?”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the girl’s man who owns the S—”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s motoring out in his tender. Must not like his girl touching other—”

  “Say that again?”

  “The little intense dude, you know, her man. He’s heading out in the Southern Breeze’s tender.”

  My body shuddered.

  I saw it. I saw it like one of those pictures that’s an illusion because it’s two pictures, and try as you might to see the second image, you just can’t see it, and then when it pops into view you wonder how you could have not seen it.

  An indelible image.

  Alexander Paretsky had been under my nose from the beginning. Resided on boats. Rarely came ashore. The lady on Southern Breeze. I had thought she looked familiar when I spotted her from the front porch bar of the Valencia but dismissed her as just another blonde on a good-looking boat whose skin I wanted to massage.

  I instructed Adam, “Keep him in your sights as long as you can.” I disconnected, raced into my study, and retrieved my shoulder bag. I rummaged through the bag and extracted the picture. It was of Paretsky and the blonde on the boat that the colonel had shown me as we sat on my dock. I flashed it to Garrett on the porch.

  “I think she’s the same woman.”

  “Who?” He planted himself beside me, studying the picture.

  “I saw this woman on a boat downtown. Been there for days. Captain is described as a slight, intense man. I bet—”

  “Is it her or not?”

  Was it? I tried to recall what she had looked like that day, when I nursed Spanish’s Bloody Mary, the Fitzgeralds laughed, and the mimosa girl ordered another drink when her friend arrived. The blonde oiled her skin and turned on the chaise lounge. The letters SB embossed—