The Canary List: A Novel

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Crockett was grateful that McFarlane didn’t answer.

  “Greg Biette here,” Crockett said, staying in character. “Thought I’d tell you the only strange thing I can think of about the person’s DNA. Wearing a magnetic bracelet seems to positively affect her emotional well-being. I have no idea if that helps you, but I thought you should know.”

  The elderly couple turned off to a gated mansion, letting Crockett pick up the pace. He glanced at his phone. There was a voice mail waiting.

  He put the phone to his ear, and he heard Fish speaking: “Got more spy stuff to talk to you about. In person. Soon as you can.”

  Wind blew across his face. It felt good. He didn’t want to think about spy stuff. Just enjoy the wind and the drive and try to lose the feeling of defeat and sadness and worry about where life might go if he couldn’t be a father to Mickey because he ended up in a prison cell.

  Too quiet though. Back to the Eagles, bumping to a new song.

  “Welcome to the Hotel California …”

  The iconic song about the dark underbelly of the American dream. Crockett drove past the mansions along Mulholland, listening to the potent lyrics, wondering about the master’s chambers and the steely knives that couldn’t kill the beast.

  He decided the images of the song were too much for him to handle—“we are all just prisoners here, of our own device”—and turned down the volume again before he heard the night man say that he could check out any time he liked, but he could never leave.

  Forty-Two

  ’Hare watched Mackenzie pace the library room at Bright Lights. The day before, she’d managed to sit, holding a cup of tea. Now, two hours after Crockett had been in her office in Burbank, she was a totally different person.

  “I’m a little freaked here,” Mackenzie told O’Hare. Not that he needed her to explain. “Okay, a lot freaked. He’s in my office, talking about the DNA analysis and the genealogy report.”

  “Your computer is the only place I can think of where anyone might access the information,” O’Hare said, thinking of himself as a spider in the middle of the web, monitoring one of the strands.

  “You’re the one who made sure my computer was safe. Or at least your people in the Vatican. Are you saying it wasn’t safe enough?”

  “I’m going to check into it,” O’Hare answered. She was easily fooled, had been from the beginning. “In the meantime, obviously Crockett knows just enough to be dangerous. If he was in your computer, then he knows plenty, but he can’t put the pieces together. My guess is, he was trying to provoke you.”

  “This may surprise you,” she answered, “but I have a lot of sympathy for him.”

  “He deserves sympathy,” O’Hare said. “But this is much bigger than one individual. It’s only a matter of days, then all this is over.”

  “What if he finds someone to believe what he’s learned? To make something of the pieces? We need Jaimie. What we don’t need is to have her taken away from us.”

  O’Hare steepled his fingers. “I might have a solution then. You’ll need to visit him in the morning. Early. And you’ll have to make him believe that you need his help. Get him to trust you, and find out if he’s going to stop looking into this.”

  “If he’s not going to stop?” she asked.

  “Convince him to come back here with you. I’ll have something in place to take care of the rest.”

  “Any suggestions on how to convince him to trust me? Last two times, I’ve been cold.” She thought of his thermostat remark and how much it had stung. “Very cold.”

  “Turn his sword against him,” O’Hare said. “Tell him you just learned someone has been spying on you, to the point of getting access of your computer. Distract him. Make him believe whoever has been doing this to him is now doing it to you. Give him just enough of the truth that, if he’s not going to quit, he’ll come back out here with you. Think you can do it? Sympathy for him or not, we’ve got to rein him in.”

  Forty-Three

  lbino Luciani,” Catfish said when Crockett walked into the Fishloft. “Heard of him?”

  “Been a long day,” Crockett answered. “And it’s barely afternoon.”

  Crockett had not arrived as soon as possible. He’d walked the beach, barefoot, holding his shoes in one hand. Melancholy was a tough mood to shake. Worse, he was getting that feeling again. Like he was about to lose a child. A feeling nobody understood unless they’d been through it.

  “Albino Luciani was elected pope. Took the name John Paul I. Wanted to bring Vatican finances to light. Thirty-three days into his papacy, he was found dead of an apparent heart attack. There are so many inconsistencies in the reports about his death and a rushed burial with no autopsy. Many believe he was poisoned.”

  “Assassination by poison? Sounds medieval.”

  “John Paul I died in September 1978.”

  “Oh,” Crockett feigned interest. Catfish was jumping, had lots of energy. Crockett didn’t.

  “Among other things, John Paul I wanted to get rid of Vatican ties to a Masonic group called P2,” Catfish said. “The grand master of P2 had been a Mussolini fascist, a liaison officer for the Nazis, and organizer of the rat-line that helped Nazi war criminals escape to Argentina.”

  Crockett stared at Catfish, beginning to catch some of the vibrations. “You are going somewhere with this, right?”

  “That’s just the beginning. A year later, the judge investigating Vatican bank activities was murdered. Same with a journalist who had exposed the memberships and dealings of P2. A couple of months later, a key witness in the bank investigation was, wait for it, murdered. Four other key witnesses were also killed, including bank executives. Poisoned. Thrown from windows. Hanged by rope. I am not making any of this up.”

  Crockett tried to say something, but Catfish was rolling. “Get this. Bank shareholders then sent a letter to John Paul II that exposed connections between the Vatican Bank, P2, and the Mafia. The letter is never acknowledged by anyone in the Vatican.”

  “Urban myth?” Crockett said.

  “I spent all morning, reams of Internet research, solid sources. We’re not talking urban myth; we’re talking documented. The bank scandal goes back a few decades, when the Vatican made deals with Hitler and Mussolini. Remember I said every country has its own spy organization, maybe even the Vatican? It does. It’s called the Entity. People think Opus Dei is scary, but that’s not where the power comes from.”

  Crockett well understood the implications, thinking of their previous conversation the day before when Catfish made him take the prepaid. An organization just as good at computer hacking as physical intimidation. Again, the sense of surreal. This wasn’t the stuff that an ordinary schoolteacher should be facing.

  “Makes me sick,” Catfish said. “Things seem the same today. Abuse allegations and a history of cover-up. Latest I read on this, the new Vatican abuse rules still provide no sanctions for bishops who cover up abusers. Bishops are still not required to report abuse to police. But the new rules do state that the attempted ordination of women is considered a grave crime, subject to the same procedures and punishments given for sex abuse.”

  “I’m not a believing guy,” Crockett said, “but I don’t want to forget that the Catholic Church does a lot of good in the world. It’s a sad thing, then, that this one issue dominates the way people look at the church.”

  “They get no sympathy from me,” Catfish said, shaking his head. “It’s like living in a house and one room starts on fire. You drop everything to put the fire out. Vatican should handle this the same way. All-out fight until the fire’s gone. Then the rest of the house is safe. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s the weirdest and scariest piece I’ve found—there’s Satanism in the Vatican.”

  “Come on,” Crockett rolled his eyes. “The Vatican’s an easy target. That’s got to be Internet conspiracy stuff.”

  “Think so?” Catfish said. “Straight from the Vatican’s chief exorcist. He says—”

>   “Back up. Chief exorcist? Like that’s an official position?”

  “Not sure. But that’s how newspapers refer to him. And don’t think I’ve missed the relevance of it to your situation. There’s spyware planted on Mackenzie’s computer via a Vatican IP. Mackenzie has taken Jaimie to an exorcist. Yesterday I said we were in deep waters. Let me tell you, now it’s bottomless.”

  “And the chief exorcist? He says …”

  “Got the article here.” Catfish tapped a paper on his desk, and Crockett saw a photo of a bald man, late forties. “It’s about what they call ‘the smoke of Satan.’ During the papal conclave—election—black smoke is released after an inconclusive vote, white smoke when a pope is elected. I’ve found the chief exorcist quoted directly as saying the smoke of Satan is in the holy rooms, that there are cardinals who don’t believe in Jesus. This chief exorcist believes all the violence and pedophilia is part of Satan at work inside the Vatican.”

  Catfish put up his hand so Crockett wouldn’t interrupt his roll. “A little earlier, before his death, another top Jesuit priest described witchcraft ceremonies right inside the Vatican. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”

  “You’re not making any of this up?”

  “I’m not saying it’s one hundred percent true. I am saying that it’s all been documented. Thoroughly. Nothing’s been proven either way. But to me, where there is smoke …” Tight ironic grin. “Maybe it does come from the fires of Satan.”

  “Don’t go down that road,” Crockett said. “Demons don’t exist.”

  “Evil does. And there’s plenty of evidence of it in the Vatican. I mean, talking about a top-down organization. Priests don’t get away with pedophilia for years unless the Vatican lets it happen.”

  Plenty of links to Crockett’s own situation, he realized. Exorcists. Spyware planted from the Vatican. And pedophilia. Even with the links, there was that one big question that Crockett visualized in his mind in all caps. WHY?

  “You don’t think this kind of speculation about Satanism is pushing it?” Crockett said. It kept coming back to him. He was just a schoolteacher. Living in a small bungalow near the ocean. Crazy, to think he was someone mixed in with Vatican happenings.

  “Just consider what’s happened around here so far,” Catfish said. “Arson. Attempted kidnapping of Jaimie. Your old lady friend is missing. Computer espionage. Heck yeah, I’m worried. Double-checked to make sure nothing in my cyber tracks points back to me.”

  “Good,” Crockett said.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Catfish said. “I want you to take these glasses.”

  He handed the pair with a built-in video camera to Crockett and explained how to work them. “You never know when they’ll come in handy.”

  Crockett took the glasses. Was he really in the gun sights of a spook organization that most of the rest of the world didn’t know existed? The Vatican’s spy organization?

  “Want to crash here at the end of your day?” Catfish said. “If I were you, I’d be freaked out getting back in my own bed.”

  “I’m okay,” Crockett said. “What are they going to do next? Try to take me out?”

  On his way out, Crockett glanced at the article with the quote from the Vatican’s chief exorcist. A photo in the article caught Crockett’s eye. The chief exorcist was monkish looking, with a broad face and balding skull with fringes cut short.

  A man named Joseph O’Hare.

  Forty-Four

  he came to Crockett, again, in his sleep—the girl in a yellow dress, almost out of sight, moving forward and away from him, rustling through the reedlike, tall, dry grass, peering upward and ahead into the pale blue beyond, as if lost.

  He cried out for her, as always, but no sound, as always, left his mouth.

  He began, as always, to run to catch her, the girl with the long hair who needed help to find her way out of the tall grass, the girl who was so alone.

  But she slipped away, oblivious to him.

  And as always, he woke before he could reach the spot where she’d slipped through a curtain of the tall grass.

  This time, however, the dream was different.

  Usually the girl never looked back, and, awake, Crockett could only imagine, with certainty, it had been Ashley. In the moments after, he would inevitably wonder about the depths of sorrow that kept putting him into a place where she was so lost and he was so unable to reach her.

  This time, however, in his dream, the girl in the yellow dress had turned her head. Just enough for a tantalizing glimpse of her profile.

  When he woke, this time, it left him with the disturbing sensation that the lost girl might not have been Ashley. But Jaimie.

  When he woke, this time, he was not alone.

  In his bedroom, the darkness of a shadow stood over him and with it came the sensation of a triangle pressed against his face. He could not help his quick intake of surprise, from which he sucked in something that tasted cloyingly sweet.

  He realized the triangle was a mask over his nose and mouth, the kind that paramedics used to administer oxygen. But it couldn’t have been oxygen because he was growing fuzzy. He knew he had to breathe anything but the cloying sweetness. He held his breath and struggled with both hands to push away the wrists above him.

  It was too late. The first lungful had been enough.

  He first felt a tingling. Not unpleasant. Waves, growing in frequency. A twisting and spinning, but he couldn’t decide whether his body was spinning or the world around him was spinning, and even as he was trying to decide, he couldn’t follow his thoughts to any conclusion.

  Was he standing?

  Or still in bed?

  Were the shadows moving around him, or was he moving through shadows?

  He was in his own home, but the way the place was spinning, he felt as if it was a carnival haunted house. He felt a strange euphoria that told him he was immortal.

  A dream. Unlike the dream that had just tortured him. A pleasant dream that he followed into depths of warm dark water in which he could somehow breathe. But his euphoria was interrupted by prodding.

  The prodding ended, and he rose from the depths of the warm, warm water. Then there was a binding sharpness.

  His next conscious thought was the awareness of a tight band stretching the skin on his throat.

  His brain began to process what his five senses were delivering. The binding sharpness, pressing against the nerve endings of his skin. A dry mouth. The ticking of a clock. Seeing the tops of picture frames on the wall, across the living room, bathed in moonlight. The acrid smell of cigarette smoke.

  Someone behind him. Silent.

  That’s when Crockett realized—without any way to judge how much time had passed—that he was in his bare feet on a chair, rope snug around his neck, hands bound behind his back.

  He froze, returning to a world that was not euphorically blurred but painfully real.

  The person behind him, silent, had formed with Crockett an unspeakable intimacy, a violation that seemed almost physical to Crockett. He was entirely helpless, totally vulnerable to the person behind him.

  This was a menace he’d never experienced, and he became paralyzed into silence, as if speaking the single question—why?—would acknowledge that he wasn’t alone. And to acknowledge the other person would be to acknowledge this terrifying intimacy. Better to pretend he had no awareness of the situation. Somehow, a subtle shift in his body must have signaled otherwise.

  “Welcome back,” the voice whispered.

  He would have begged if he thought it would help. But it wouldn’t. He was going to die. No one went to all this effort unless they were serious.

  No begging then. He would use the last moments of his life as well as he could. He pictured Mickey. Catching a baseball. Naming one of the bearded lizards in the reptile exhibit at the zoo. Jumping up and throwing his arms around Crockett’s neck.

  Crockett would die with the image of the only beautiful thing that remained i
n his life. The love he had for Mickey and the love that Mickey had for him.

  There was a small scrape of the person’s feet moving across the floor, and then the chair below him began to move.

  Slowly. So slowly. Inch by inch. As if the person was enjoying this. Still in silence.

  Useless as he knew the efforts would be, Crockett desperately tried to keep the weight of his body on his toes as the chair slid away and away and away. He couldn’t help but think of Ashley, how hard she had fought in the last week of her life. It brought him to tears.

  Then the chair was gone. The length of the rope had been measured so precisely that Crockett didn’t drop. He merely hung, with all his body weight on the rope at his throat and a roar of blood filling his head. It was the sound of a monster wave crashing over him. The water pounded his body below the surf and tossed him like the insignificant piece of the universe that he was. Crockett flailed his feet, uselessly trying to kick upward against the wave and break the surface of the water. The pain and roaring of sheer malevolent black closed in on him.

  All of this in silence, with the unknown intruder waiting for him to strangle to death.

  The roaring in his head began to calm and Crockett stopped kicking. The malevolent black filled with pinpricks of light. Ashley. He clung to that one word until it started to disappear. He didn’t believe in heaven, but maybe if he willed it enough, she would be on the other side, whatever it was. Ashley. Ashley. Ashley.

  Then the sensation of gravity returned, the cool wood of the chair on the soles of his feet. A loosening of the pressure on his neck. Air returning into his hoarse throat as his lungs sucked for life. The pinpricks of light gone. The malevolent black receded.