by Rene Fomby
“You said that all of this is well understood by religious scholars. So did you find something that would change any of that?”
“No, Sam, quite the opposite. You see, while academics have long asserted Islam’s lineage, it is widely denied within the religion itself. Muslim scholars insist that the religion goes all the way back to Adam and Eve, and that all of Islam’s art and traditions have their roots in the original creation. But what I found in the unsealed amphorae, in Islamic manuscripts dating back to the first two centuries after Mohammed, is incontrovertible proof that the Western scholars were right, that much of Islam is actually rooted in the Nestorian Christian traditions. In fact, if you take Nestorian beliefs and map them into Islam, it is pretty much a perfect fit. In the end, then, Islam is simply another name for Nestorianism. Islam is the long-lost church of the Eastern Christians!”
a resumed innocence
134
Venice – Monday, One Month Later
Gavin poked his head into Sam’s office, grinning like a dog with a new bone. “Got a minute for an old friend?”
“Gavin! I thought for sure I’d missed you before you two took off.” Sam charged around her desk and enveloped him in a huge bear hug. “When are you and Andy leaving for the airport?”
“We take off this afternoon. A few days in Barcelona, an intimate wedding on the beach, then we jump on a ship and spend the next two weeks cruising from one ancient adventure to the other, blissfully disconnected from all of the world’s problems for a change.”
“I’m so glad for you two. We all are. But are you sure you don’t want me to throw a blowout wedding for you two here in Italy, send you off in style? Sanders even suggested he might be able to pull off booking the National Cathedral back in D.C., pack the place with all of your buddies from back home.”
“Honestly, Sam, after everything that’s happened over the past several months, we just want to be alone together. No offense.”
“Of course not. Of all people, I’m the one who should understand that. But I wanted to make the offer nonetheless. So, after the wedding, what are your long-term plans?”
“I’ve finally decided to ditch my job with the FBI. After what we pulled off with capturing Tulley, my marketability in the law enforcement business suddenly took a one hundred eighty degree turnaround, and the Director himself started yapping about chaining me to some high-level desk job. But that’s not for me. I’m a field agent, can’t stand the kind of politicking that got me banished to Morocco in the first place. So Sanders made me an offer I think I’ll take him up on, setting up some kind of boutique private investigator service, taking on jobs that for whatever reason the regular line folks can’t handle. I’ve even asked our old friend Randy Martinez from back in Blair County to go in halfsies with me. He should have an answer for me on that once we get back from our honeymoon.”
“What about Andy? What are her plans?”
“Sanders is moving her to a special assignment desk, where she’ll oversee development of our next-generation systems for signals intercept and processing. And that work out perfectly for us if we manage to line up some new little Andies to come fill out the old Larson team.”
Sam laughed at that. “Are you sure you can handle more than one Andrea Patterson in your life? She’s quite the handful.”
“She is indeed a handful, Sam, and you’re clearly the one to understand all about that. But, while we’re on that subject, what about you? Still committed to moving back to Texas? I couldn’t help but notice the looks you’ve been getting lately from Carlo Rossi. He’s quite the catch, you know. Almost as good looking as me.”
“I’d say you’re more the, let’s say, ruggedly handsome type, emphasis on the rugged. But yeah, I leave for Houston in just a few days. I’ll be back and forth a little bit here and there over the next year, dealing with the fallout from my father-in-law and the Southern Italian secession, but I don’t really seem to have any kind of long term fit or affection for this place. Europeans are way too slick, too sophisticated. They’ve been playing the old back-stabbing game so long they can do it in their sleep. I’ll take your garden-variety Texan any time. When a Texan’s about to stick a knife in you, he’ll let you know up front, no pussy-footing around, mano y mano. Then he’ll just do it, like the old Nike slogan. That way, standing face-to-face, he can enjoy watching the surprised look on your face as he slides the old blade in all the way to the hilt. But I know that game, grew up with it. And I figure I can play it as well as anyone.”
“You play it very well, indeed, from what I’ve seen over this past year. Better than pretty much anyone alive.”
Sam smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” She pointed toward a small sitting area next to her desk. “You in a rush? I’ve got a few other things to catch up with you about, mi mano.”
“Actually, Sam, I’ve got pretty much all morning free. Andy is out running all over town picking up a few last-minute things for the trip. And I just got a long report from Sanders on the William Tulley thing I think you’ll be interested in hearing about first hand.”
“Yeah? Like what?” Sam settled herself into an uncomfortable-looking Victorian-era chair and motioned for Gavin to take the more inviting loveseat across from her.
“To start with, the Turkish connection to the plane incident has now been completely debunked. Even the pilot who flew the plane most likely had no idea who was really pulling the strings. Although we still don’t understand how he was ever radicalized in the first place. Maybe we’ll never understand that part.”
“But what I can’t figure out about all that is, why? Just to create a wedge between the West and Turkey?”
“No, not just that.” Gavin stopped to glance around, subconsciously checking the room for eavesdroppers. Old habits die hard. “Based upon Tulley’s emails and other documents we found on the servers, it appears that the pope was in on it the whole time. Not the first pope. The one who got elected at the very same moment the plane crashed into the Vatican.”
“You mean the one who just retired? That pope?”
“Right. And it’s my understanding that there was some sort of—special arrangement—cobbed together inside the Catholic Church regarding his recent disappearance. Officially, he’s retired and has voluntarily left public life. Unofficially, there is very little chance of him ever being seen again.”
“You mean they killed him? But won’t someone at some point ask about whatever happened to him? Why there wasn’t some sort of papal funeral?”
“That’s why they have freezers, Sam. And flights over the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic.”
“Oh. I see.” With her mind now focused on her return to a simpler world back in Texas, Sam was having serious problems adjusting to that whole Machiavellian point of view, the idea that you could somehow off a pope and stuff him into a freezer, or toss him into the ocean. But maybe that was a good thing, a sign that things were finally returning to normal for her. Or some new version of normal. The events of the past year would probably never completely fade away. “S-o-o, that particularly light-hearted subject aside, what else do you know?”
“Well, to start with, the Turks sent a contingent into Göreme to clean up Tulley’s little operation there, and managed to corral several of our closest, dearest friends. Ramon Mendez, for one, and his family, who I hope to God are innocent in all this. His family, at least. Ramon—we’ll just have to see. But we also grabbed Andy’s missing analyst, who is most clearly not innocent of anything. And Bob Sanders has his own special corner of hell prepped and waiting for that sorry ass.”
“Wow. Okay. That’s a lot to uncover in one month.”
“There’s more. Have you heard what’s going on with William Tulley and his daughter?”
“No. Other than the two of them are going to be facing some kind of international criminal trial.”
“Well, that’s off for now, at least for him. He’s been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The docto
rs say they might have been able to save him if they had gotten to him earlier, but now the thing has progressed to the point that he only has a few months left to live. At most. Too short a time frame to put him on trial, plus there’s the whole question of whether the cancer affected his judgment, his sense of right and wrong.”
“And he never noticed something was a little off with him?”
“Supposedly he had Boucher’s people steal an ancient artifact called the Nanteos Cup, an object many believe to be the infamous Holy Grail. According to legend, drinking from it will cure any kind of illness, physical or mental.”
“So clearly that’s all bullshit. It didn’t work.”
“Hard to say, actually. There are some pretty interesting stories of people who have supposedly been cured by the Nanteos Cup in the past, if you can believe any of their tales. At any rate, the jury is still out on all that, because Tulley wasn’t using the real cup.”
Sam frowned, still not swallowing anything about a magical Holy Grail. “Yeah? How did that happen? Boucher gave him a fake cup?”
“Apparently, yes. You see, they had an exact copy of the real cup cobbled up by an expert woodsmith, thinking they could secretly swap it out to keep the theft from being discovered. The problem was, the thief apparently screwed up and left the real cup behind. Either that, or he never tried to make the swap in the first place, and conned Boucher into believing he had. Regardless of how that went down, carbon testing showed the fake cup was far younger than the original. Plus, of course, it didn’t work.”
“Wouldn’t Tulley have noticed that nothing was happening?” Sam asked.
“Normally, you would think so. But apparently, he experienced some short-term relief immediately after drinking from the cup. The doctors think it was all just the placebo effect. He believed in the cup so much that he somehow managed to suppress the symptoms of his brain cancer for a short while after drinking from it. Then they’d pop back up, of course.”
Sam shook her head slowly. “Well, I’m sure the cancer didn’t do him any good with his screwy mental faculties, but I can assure you he’s been carrying all that evil along with him for a very long time. Crazy as a loon as long as I’ve known him. But enough about him, what’s going to happen with Mary Ellen?”
Gavin shifted in his seat. “Not sure. It’s hard to tell just how much of all this she knew about, whether she was really all the way invested in the whole thing or just wound up being a patsy for her father. Regardless, she’ll end up either pleading or going in front of a jury. And my guess is she’ll see at least a minimum of five years for her role in this whole disaster.”
“And when she gets out—will she get Sophia back? If so, we’ll need to prepare Margaret for all that.”
“No, I can’t see any Italian judge taking a baby away from an heir to the famed Ricciardelli fortune and giving her to a convicted felon. Particularly since the heir is the baby’s grandmother. Ain’t gonna happen, trust me.”
“Good. Well, it looks like dear old daddy is going to get the death penalty after all, and hopefully he’ll suffer a great deal in the process. He deserves worse, believe me. Plotting to kill his own granddaughter, just for the money—”
“Uh, speaking of all that, I have something more to tell you, Samantha, but it may be something you’d rather not know about, something you’d rather keep buried. Actually, it’s really two different somethings.” He stared at her, waiting for some direction as to whether he should move forward or retreat.
She rubbed the lobe of her right ear, considering whether she should just let sleeping dogs lie, or stir up a new set of troubles that she would likely spend the rest of her life trying to forget. But after all the events of the past several years, she knew ignorance was never a good choice, even when it was a good choice. “I’m a big girl. Give it to me.”
Gavin reached into a portfolio he was carrying and passed over a single sheet of paper. “This is from the invitro-fertilization clinic that was handling Mary Ellen Tulley’s pregnancy. The official story was, they found some way to clone her, to create the first true immaculate conception in recorded human history.”
Sam studied the document closely, then read it over once more to make sure she got it right the first time. “So the baby wasn’t a clone, after all?”
“No.” Gavin took a long moment to answer that question. “Sophia isn’t Mary Ellen’s clone. In fact, they used a rather routine off-the-shelf technology to impregnate Tulley’s daughter. They used a sperm donor.”
“Okay, so, who was the donor? Do we know? That’s my niece we’re talking about, and Margaret’s ward. We wouldn’t want that sort of information just popping up randomly somewhere down the road. Is there any way to identify who the father is?”
“Actually, we know exactly who the father is.” Gavin paused, considering the importance of his next few words. “It’s your father-in-law. Mary Ellen’s father. William Tulley.”
Holy shit. That is so fucking messed up! It took Sam almost a minute to recover. When she did, she looked squarely into Gavin’s eyes, her face set in stone. “Gavin, I think we can agree this is one piece of information that can never make it outside this room. Especially to Margaret.”
“Yes. Especially to her. Some secrets are best left buried.”
“Okay. So, of the two bits of information you said you needed to share with me, you inferred that Sophia’s parentage was the least consequential. And that was most definitely completely messed up. Which then leads us to your second revelation. I can hardly wait.”
“It does. And it is.” Gavin stared at his hands. “Are you sure you want me to continue? What I have to tell you—I mean, you have the right to know, but it won’t really change anything. Ultimately. In the end.”
“Stop dancing around. Spit it out, Gavin.”
“It’s just that—your husband’s car accident? The impact with the eighteen-wheeler, when he was driving the Boxster? It—it wasn’t truly an accident after all. William Tulley arranged it. He arranged the whole thing. To have his son Luke killed so he—Tulley—could take control of the Ricciardelli empire. To seize full command of your daughter’s empire while you lay immobilized with grief. And then they conned you into taking a bunch of drugs immediately afterward that kept you swimming around in that foggy state for months.”
Sam was holding a pen in her left hand, twiddling away, and the ink suddenly exploded across her plain white blouse.
135
Venice
Sam was shattered. Luke murdered? By his own father?
Gavin rushed to pour her a cold glass of water, placing it in front of her on the table. “Sam, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking, telling you—”
“No, no, it’s all right.” Sam fought to control her breathing, her pulse pounding hard in her temples. She stared down at the dots and swirls of blue-black ink staining the front of her white linen blouse like some sort of crazy Rorschach test. One of them kind of looked like Luke, from the side. Another one slowly morphed into his Porsche Boxster, a car she could never bring herself to look at after the wreck. Or at Luke’s body, for that matter.
Suddenly something seemed to come apart inside her, a dam holding back years of pent-up grief. Of denial, actually. She’d blamed him for the accident, all this time, even though she’d never said it out loud. Blamed him for leaving her behind with piles of bills to pay and a baby daughter to raise all alone. Blamed him for lying to her about the trust, money that could have easily paid all those bills a thousand times over, and spared her all those nights crying herself to sleep all alone in her bedroom, wondering how she was going to find the strength to face the next day. Blamed him for ripping her heart in two when the policemen came knocking at her front door.
As she poured out that heart in loud wracking sobs onto the front of Gavin’s shirt, she slowly came to realize that the blame wasn’t Luke’s at all. He hadn’t told her about the billions that lay buried within the trust for the very same reason she
was so eager to get the hell out of Italy and raise Maddie in a normal world, far away from the insanity of high finance and global intrigue. From the leeches that floated all around them, waiting hungrily for any opportunity to get inside their defenses and drain them dry.
And the Boxster—he was no more obsessed about that little sports car than she was about her Alfa. If anything, he was far more cautious. About everything. The last thing he would have ever dreamed of would be leaving her and Maddie all alone in this world to fend for themselves. It wasn’t Luke who did that. It was his father. And his sister.
So now she could finally let go of the anger, let go of all the bitter resentment she had welled up deep inside her ever since his death. Now she could finally make peace with his death. Even, for the first time, maybe take little Maddie to visit her father’s gravesite.
But the worst part was, not only was it her anger washing away down the front of Gavin’s shirt, but also one other emotion. Reaching down deep inside, she could no longer really feel the longing, the all-consuming passion that flooded through her soul every time she saw Luke, every time she thought of him. She still felt the sadness, the aching loneliness. But it was all now so shallow, like the way she would feel about the passing of an old friend, a feeling that seemed all too fleeting and ephemeral, disappearing from her heart even as the tears began to dry on her cheeks, leaving but a cool memory of the searing heat that had been there before.
Finally she pushed softly away from Gavin’s chest, wiping her face with the back of her hand.
He watched her carefully. “Sam, I—”
“No, it’s all right, Gavin. Just some things I’ve been holding back way too long that I needed to get out, that’s all. Thanks for just letting me cry.” She looked down at the glass of water, sitting ignored all this time on the table beside her. She laughed nervously. “And thanks for the water. I think I might actually be a little dehydrated now, after all that stupid boohooing.”