The container vessel shouldered her way through another massive wave, the crest curling angrily over her bow. ‘I am terribly, terribly sorry,’ O’Connor said simply. ‘The CIA has made some unconscionable mistakes over the years, and the campaigns in the Americas were amongst the worst. But thank you for telling me. It couldn’t have been easy.’
‘Time is a great healer, Curtis … but you never forget.’
‘Would you know the man with the red hair if you saw him again?’
‘Oh, yes. Even though it was years ago, that’s one face that’s indelibly seared on my memory. Why do you ask?’
‘Howard Wiley, the man who’s trying to kill us, is now in charge of all the CIA’s spy rings and overseas operations. In 1982 he was chief of station in Guatemala City – and his most striking physical attribute, apart from his lack of height, is his spiky red hair.’
Aleta’s eyes widened. ‘Short?’
‘Around five-foot four. Quite vertically challenged, is our DDO. I think this explains why he wants you out of the way.’
‘And it explains something else. Papa was asked to preach that day because Father Hernandez was supposedly going to be away in Guatemala City. But how could Wiley know I was there?’
‘The CIA have a file on anyone, anyone they think might pose a threat, either to their operations overseas, or to America itself. When you wrote that article in The Mayan Archaeologist linking the School of the Americas to the training of death squads in Central America, it would have rung alarm bells for Wiley. He can’t be certain you were at the church on that day, but he knows you were born in San Marcos and that Ariel was your father. People like Wiley don’t leave anything to luck. If he suspects there is the slightest chance you can link him to the killings, he won’t hesitate.’
‘So he’ll get me in the end … ’ Aleta shuddered.
‘Not while I’m around.’
Trust this man with your life. Aleta sipped her riesling, pondering the shaman’s words. ‘What I don’t understand is if Wiley is now running the CIA’s spy ring, why have you stayed so long?’
O’Connor didn’t reply immediately. It had been a long time since he’d been alone with an intelligent, beautiful woman, and even longer since anyone had been able to penetrate his outer shell. ‘I’ve always been grateful for getting a new start in America,’ he said finally. ‘When I joined the CIA, I just wanted to do my bit for my adopted country, a country I was proud of – or used to be, until the last administration came along.’
Aleta listened, trying to fathom O’Connor. To her, he was still an enigma. He was confident but unassuming. Hard as nails, yet possessed of a roguish sense of humour and a soft Irish brogue. She felt her attraction for this man growing. ‘I don’t even know where you were born, other than, I presume, Ireland,’ she said, her voice gentler now. ‘You now know a little more about me, but I still know very little about you.’
O’Connor refilled the wine glasses. ‘I’ve never tried to disguise my accent. I was born in a place called Ballingarry. It’s a small village in County Tipperary, near the border of Kilkenny in the south. My father used to work in the coalmines, but he died when I was ten.’
‘I’m sorry. I know how hard that must have been.’
‘Thank you, but don’t be. I was the last of five kids by a wide margin – my father referred to me as “the accident”. I used to hide before the drunken bastard came home because if he found me, he’d beat me up.’
‘Did things get better after he died?’ she asked, shocked.
‘Not much. We moved to a tenement house in Sheriff Street in Dublin, near the docks on the Liffey, which was a pretty tough neighbourhood. My mother worked as a cleaner at night, and got her kicks screwing her way through the day. Eventually one of her men friends paid for me to go to a Catholic boarding school in Dublin run by the Christian Brothers.’
Aleta noticed his face cloud as he took her back to the slums of inner-city Dublin in the late 1970s.
‘So, O’Connor. I’m told you’re in need of a bit of discipline. What have you got to say to that, eh?’ The head brother of Saint Joseph’s, Brother Michael, was obese, his round, pudgy face the same colour as the salmon walls of his sparsely furnished office. His sandy-coloured hair was thinning at the temples; his eyes an icy grey.
Curtis winced as Brother Michael lashed him across the face with a heavy leather strap.
‘I asked you a question, you little Dublin shite! Answer, boy!’ Brother Michael said more slowly and menacingly, ‘or bejaysus I’ll beat you within an inch of your life.’
‘I’m here because my mother’s boyfriend paid for me to come here,’ Curtis responded defiantly. He fought back the tears as the strap again sliced into his cheek.
‘You sodding little gobshite!’ Brother Michael lashed Curtis again and shoved him headfirst into the wall. A silver crucifix of Jesus rattled against the plaster above Curtis’s head. ‘Get out of my sight!’ Brother Michael propelled Curtis out of his office into the corridor, where he crashed into one of the bigger boys.
‘What da fook? I’m gonna bleedin’ nut the fookin’ head of you, ya bleedin’ bollocks ya!’
‘Tell your mother to get married,’ Curtis responded, ducking deftly out of the way of the bigger boy’s swinging right arm.
Later that night, as the newest boy in the dormitory, Curtis had his first experience with Brother Brendan, the house master.
‘Lights out, you scum!’ The tall, sinister Brother Brendan walked silently down the middle aisle that separated the rows of bunks. He stopped at the bottom of Curtis’s bed. Curtis pretended to be asleep, watching through barely open eyelids. Brother Brendan silently approached the head of the bed, breathing heavily, beads of sweat appearing on his pallid face. He slid his hand under the sheets and onto Curtis’s thigh. In an instant Curtis clamped the brother’s skinny wrist with his left hand and wrenched Brother Brendan’s thumb back sharply with his right.
‘Aaggghhhh!’ Brother Brendan’s high-pitched yell reverberated off the darkened dormitory walls.
‘Touch me again, you fucking pervert, and I’ll break your fucking arm!’
Brother Brendan fled without a word.
Curtis waited nearly an hour. When he was sure everyone was asleep, he quietly retrieved his clothes from the locker beside his bed, dressed and crept out of the dormitory.
Staying in the shadows of the three-metre-high brick wall that surrounded Saint Joseph’s, Curtis made his way to a large oak tree where he paused and checked the dimly lit buildings behind him. Satisfied that none of the brothers were about, he flung the battered leather satchel containing the few things he owned over the wall and scaled the tree. Curtis glanced up and down but the laneway was deserted. He quietly grasped the top of the wall, slid down until he hung at full stretch and dropped to the ground. The traffic on nearby Thomas Road was light, but Curtis eventually hitched a ride to the docks area on a truck carrying a load of Guinness.
It was after midnight when he reached the tenement house in Sheriff Street, but the light was still on in his mother’s bedroom. Curtis pushed open the old wooden front door and climbed the stairs; but he stopped at the top of the landing. The door to his mother’s room was ajar and she was naked on the bed. A man Curtis had never seen before was astride her.
‘Give it to me! Give me that fat cock!’
Curtis crept into his old room and closed the door, numb to a world over which he had no control.
‘At least I had some very good years with my family,’ Aleta said softly. The Galapagos rolled and shuddered yet again, spume flying from the crests of the huge waves as the gale howled over the foam-covered containers. ‘What happened? Did you go back to school?’
‘I left the next morning. My aunt Shaylee lived on the other side of the city and she and her husband took me in, something for which I’ll always be grateful. Without them, I’d probably be driving a crane down at the docks.’
‘University?’
O’Conn
or nodded. ‘I won a scholarship to Trinity College and did my doctorate at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology. Worked for “big pharma” for a while in the States, but didn’t like their ethics, so I joined the CIA … and here we are,’ he said with a grin. ‘Prost.’
‘Prost.’ Aleta raised her glass to the man she was beginning to understand, although she knew she’d only scratched the surface. They clinked glasses, and O’Connor got up from the table and stood at the window, watching another wave explode onto the decks, tumbling over the containers before exhausting itself in the scuppers. The Galapagos shook herself free, crested the wave and charged towards the next.
Aleta joined him at the big square porthole. For a long while they stood close, watching the storm, finishing their wine.
O’Connor put his arm around Aleta’s slim waist, half expecting her to take his hand away, but she nestled into him, resting her head and her now short blonde hair on his shoulder. Her perfume was a sensual mix of jasmine and caesalpinia; foxglove and vanilla; citron and cedar. It might be aptly named, he thought wryly, having spied the elegant red bottle earlier in the day: Trouble by Boucheron. A flash of forked lightning hit the sea barely two nautical miles from the ship; 120 000 amps travelling at 60 000 metres every second turned the strike point on the ocean into a boiling inferno. The deck and containers were bathed in a powerful and eerie blue light, and O’Connor momentarily reflected on the power of the transmitter at Gakona. The thunder crackled above them and shook the Galapagos’ superstructure. He turned towards Aleta. Their lips met, softly at first, and then more urgently. They held each other tightly, moving with the roll of the ship. O’Connor ran his hand slowly down the small of Aleta’s back and she responded, moulding herself against him.
47
GUATEMALA CITY
From her office inside the secure area of the American Embassy building in the tree-lined Avenida Reforma of Guatemala City’s Zone 10, Ellen Rodriguez scanned the latest satellite information on the position of the Galapagos. She fed the data into the computer and reset the calculation for the Galapagos’ arrival. At its present speed and course, the Galapagos would reach Havana in three days at 1135 local time.
Rodriguez looked at her watch. It was after 10 p.m. and still there was no word on getting an asset on board the container ship. For the moment there was little she could do but wait for her counterpart in the US quasi-embassy in Havana, the quaintly named ‘United States Interests Section’, to get in contact. She prepared to head home. ‘Home’ was the Howard Johnson Inn across the road, and was likely to remain so for some time. In the week since she’d arrived, she’d been in the office before dawn, and rarely left before ten, sometimes midnight. Finding a place of her own would have to wait, she thought ruefully. Rodriguez was preparing to shut down her encrypted links when an alert appeared on her screen.
TOP SECRET
NOFORN
OPERATION MAYA
CHIEF OF STATION EYES ONLY
Asset identified. Briefed re. Tutankhamen and Nefertiti. Galapagos scheduled to berth Haiphong Terminal, Maritima. Estimated duration of stay, no more than twenty-four hours but expect crew to take shore leave. Arrangements in hand to manufacture requirement for crew replacement. Will advise soonest.
COS. Havana.
Rodriguez shut down her computer, torn again between her duty to the Firm and her feelings about the plan to eliminate Curtis O’Connor. In her experience Officer O’Connor was one of the finest agents ever to walk out of Langley’s doors. Even if they got an asset on board the Galapagos, he would have to be good. Very good. Ellen Rodriguez prepared to leave. On the other side of the Atlantic in Rome, it was now very early in the morning.
Cardinal Felici acknowledged the salute of the Swiss Guard and entered the Vatican’s secret archives, adjacent to the Vatican library. If the guard found it strange that the second-most senior cardinal in the Vatican was up and about at 5.30 in the morning, his face was inscrutable. The archives contained more than eighty kilometres of shelving, but Cardinal Felici was only interested in reacquainting himself with one document. He made his way into the vault beneath the Cortile della Pigna, the massive Roman bronze pinecone in the courtyard of the Belvedere above.
Felici extracted the document from the crimson cover embossed with the gold coat of arms of the Vatican State. Sister Lúcia, just a child at the time, had handwritten her account of the third warning on a small single sheet of paper. Felici reflected on the public version of the third warning of Fátima released by Pope John Paul II. That, he knew, had been a mistake and had only fuelled the controversy. Too many people had seen the original warning, including Bishop Venancio, the auxiliary bishop of Fátima; and too many people knew this warning had been recorded on a single sheet of paper. Felici had been in Guatemala at the time, and had not been able to prevent the clumsy 26 June release, which the Vatican had committed to four sheets of paper, passing off the young Lúcia’s vision of a city in ruins as unremarkable. Had the real identity of the city in ruins been made public, the shock would have reverberated around the world. Felici adjusted his glasses and focused on Sister Lúcia’s original account.
I write in obedience to you, my God, who commands me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leira and through your most Holy Mother and mine.
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw Archangel Raguel, the Archangel of Justice with a flaming sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other. Seated on the scales were two younger angels, one a boy, one a girl, but the scales were out of balance, tipped in favour of the male. Archangel Raguel’s sword hilt was gold, embossed with the Greek letter phi.
As we watched, huge pyramids rose above the horizon. Warriors from the great civilisations of the past streamed from within them. The Maya, the Inca, the Egyptians, the Hopi Indians, the Cherokees, all of them formed up en masse behind Our Lady. Prominent amongst them were the Maya. The Mayan king was flanked by a Mayan prince and princess, each wearing a jade talisman in the shape of the Greek letter phi. Above them sat the prophets: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the last great prophet, Muhammad. Below them sat the seers: Cassandra, Saint Malachy, Hildegard of Bingen, Savonarola, Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce. Saint Malachy was the first to step forward.
Malachy, a bishop who was born in Armagh in Northern Ireland in 1094, had accurately predicted the reformation more than 300 years before it occurred. More astonishingly still, Malachy had arrived in Rome in 1140, accompanied by a number of monks. He had fallen into a trance on the Janiculum Hill above the old city, where he started talking in Latin. His scribe faithfully took down all his utterances; it was nearly dawn by the time Malachy had finished. When he woke, Malachy confirmed to his companions that God had given him a vision of the identity of every Pope until the end of time. The list was extraordinarily accurate, and Felici shivered involuntarily as he thought of the prediction for John XXIII: ‘Saint Malachy was holding a long scroll in front of him, and he continued to read in Latin: Pastor et Nauta.’
Shepherd and sailor. In 1958 the American Cardinal Francis Spellman had hired a boat and sailed up and down the Tiber with a cargo of sheep, in the hope that he might fulfil Malachy’s prediction for the conclave, but to no avail. Although it had indeed been a shepherd and a sailor whom God had chosen. The keys of Peter had been handed to John XXIII. Angelo Roncalli had previously been the patriarch of the maritime city of Venice.
The accuracy of Malachy’s predictions weighed heavily on Felici’s ambitions. Malachy had designated the second-last Pope before the end of time as de Gloria Olivae. Felici knew that ‘from the glory of the olive’ was a reference to the olive branch being a symbol of the order of Saint Benedict; Benedict XVI was the name Joseph Ratzinger had chosen. Aged seventy-eight at the time of his election, Benedict XVI was one of the oldest in the history of the papacy. Malachy had insisted that the last Pope would be known as ‘Peter the Roman’, bringing
to an end the rock upon which Peter had built the original church, as well as the end of the world itself. Felici took a deep breath and went back to the final part of the real secret of Fátima, to Sister Lúcia’s record of the Virgin Mary’s appearance.
The Archangel Raguel spoke in a voice of great authority. ‘Penance! This is the last of your warnings!’ Then came a series of visions. Immense, uncontrollable wildfires raged across great swathes of Spain and Italy. In Australia exhausted men and women battled impossible odds to try to save their homes but to no avail. In the United States California was ablaze, as were the Balkans and Africa. Hurricanes of enormous power pounded the coastlines of the continents. Earthquakes rent the ground from beneath San Francisco, New York, Tokyo and London. The earth trembled as her massive tectonic plates ground together.
An intense white light emanated from Our Lady but it seemed strangely blocked above the Basilica of Saint Peter. Great bolts of blue lightning crackled from the tip of Raguel’s sword, reducing Saint Peter’s and the rest of Vatican City to smoking rubble. Hundreds of children swarmed over the walls, chasing the priests from where they were hiding. The Pope appeared amongst the rubble, his white robes stained with blood, until he too was cut down by Raguel’s sword.
Beyond the walls of the Vatican, the Tiber had been reduced to stinking mud. Suddenly there was a vision of three enormous interlocking toothed wheels, each larger than the other, and each tooth was designated with a Mayan hieroglyph. The two largest wheels slowly turned until the teeth meshed in an enormous flash of energy, giving a date of 21 December 2012. Our Lady, the Archangel Raguel, all the prophets and seers and the old civilisations faded back towards the company of heaven, leaving planet earth wobbling in its orbit, the changing positions of the poles and the equator devastating the entire world.
THE MAYA CODEX Page 28