“Think of the hundreds of millions of people who desperately need the church,” Cardinal Ricci said. “There was no intention for you to die. Only to buy time.”
“I will confess,” O’Hare injected. “We needed you so scared that when Dr. Mackenzie came to you for help, you would agree to go to Bright Lights. I won’t ask for forgiveness, but only for understanding.”
Anger had begun to displace Crockett’s weariness. “From an outsider’s perspective, I still understand that the Catholic Church is overwhelmingly a godly institution. I understand the unfairness that its reputation suffers because of the small minority of its terrible priests. But can’t you see the real obscenity here? It goes far beyond the abuse that has hurt the Vatican. The obscenity includes the ongoing efforts to cover it up. It makes you part of that abuse.”
“If that’s the case,” Cardinal Ricci said, “that is a burden I accept. For the sake of the church.”
“Because you want to be pope?” Crockett asked. “With Saxon out of the way, it’s now down to you and the other cardinal right?”
“Please,” Father O’Hare said. “Let’s keep this conversation civil and resolve what we need to resolve.”
“Mr. Grey,” Cardinal Ricci said, “tomorrow, you’ll be on a private jet to Los Angeles. The authorities won’t even know that you left the country. All charges will have been dropped by the time you step off the airplane.”
“Not good enough,” Crockett said.
“There will be a financial settlement as well,” Cardinal Ricci said.
“You’re going to pay me to keep my mouth shut?”
Crockett wasn’t ready to tell them yet about the glasses he’d worn the previous night and the video of Saxon’s reaction to Jaimie, because he hadn’t been able to access a computer or the Internet yet to download the data and e-mail it to himself and Catfish. Until then, it was his backup leverage. He hoped.
“Paying you is better than the alternative,” Cardinal Ricci said. “Because threats are next.”
“I don’t like this,” O’Hare said to Cardinal Ricci, standing. “I predicted he would react like this.”
“What choice do we have but a legitimate threat?” the cardinal asked O’Hare, who began to pace.
Cardinal Ricci turned his attention back to Crockett. “Mr. Grey, Cardinal Ethan Saxon died in his sleep last night. The press release has indicated it was a suicide, brought on by clinical depression.”
Crockett couldn’t help but gape, but had no chance to respond.
“Furthermore,” Cardinal Ricci continued, “given your responses, it seems crucial at this point that you meet with a friend of ours in Rome. Your answer to him will determine whether you get on that jet tomorrow.”
Seventy
’Hare and Crockett stood on a hotel balcony in central Rome, twenty stories above ground, less than two hours after the meeting with Ricci.
It was clear that Crockett was a prisoner. He and O’Hare had been escorted by three men from the Swiss Guard, who now waited outside the door of the hotel room.
The air on the balcony was humid and still and hot. A third man stood partially in the shadows. He had a thin face and a comb-over, just beginning to show the shine of scalp.
That’s how men ended up looking so ridiculous, Crockett thought. Early on, before too much hair is gone, the sideways combing ends up doing as hoped, adding fullness in appearance. But as the hair grew sparser, the habit became more entrenched, until a pitiful few strands seemed glued to the scalp, from one ear across to the other.
It wasn’t the time, however, for Crockett to offer any stylistic advice.
“Mr. Grey,” O’Hare said, “meet Raymond Leakey.”
Crockett thought of asking for some kind of identification but immediately realized the futility of it. As if spies carried identification. It ruined the whole spy thing. And even if Entity people had official badges, if Leakey wasn’t part of Entity and this was a scam, he’d certainly be prepared with fake identification.
The man in the shadows stepped forward. He leaned on the balcony and looked down at the traffic. He turned his head and with half-lidded eyes said to Crockett, “Long way to the pavement.”
Crockett hated heights. He took a chair and sat, crossing his legs to bluff that he was relaxed.
It wasn’t difficult to realize that Leakey had begun with a threat.
O’Hare sat beside Crockett and spoke to Leakey. “Move away from the balcony. We’re here to talk. Not play games.”
“None of this is a game,” Leakey said, but he moved away from the balcony, back into the shade. Still standing, not sitting.
“First,” O’Hare said, “it’s important at this point for Crockett to get a clear understanding of what’s been happening and who is responsible.”
O’Hare nodded at Crockett to begin.
“Back in Los Angeles,” Crockett said, “I was framed. Someone put a hard drive with child porn in my attic. Planted false complaints about me in my work record. Kidnapped an old woman next door. This is something Entity could do if directed? Something you could direct?”
“Entity. CIA. Mossad. Name a spy agency. All of them are capable of this. With men like me in position to make it happen.”
“Entity, operating in the United States,” Crockett said.
“CIA operates in other countries. Boundaries don’t mean much.”
“Entity ever involved with assassinations?” Crockett asked.
“If you are talking about John Paul I,” Leakey said, “I’d give it a rest. Same with the Mafia banking deaths. That’s conspiracy stuff, decades old.”
Leakey gave a short laugh. “But seriously? If someone unknown, say you, was a big enough threat, it’s easier to avoid that if possible. Murders and accidental deaths when other police forces get involved draw attention. No sense in creating such a risk if there’s another way.”
“Too risky, huh? What about maybe it being morally wrong?”
“Don’t be an idiot. This is the real world. The Catholic Church is a bigger power than most countries, but Entity doesn’t like attention, and there are other ways of taking care of a problem. Bigger troubles to distract people. You maybe being a case in point. The stuff that happened was supposed to take you off the table.”
“Who wanted me off the table?” Crockett asked.
“Nice try. Next question.”
“No,” O’Hare said sharply enough for Leakey to snap his head to face him.
“No?” Leakey said.
“Saxon is dead,” O’Hare said. “I want Crockett to hear from you what brought Crockett into this.”
Leakey went to the balcony and looked down again, then wandered back to the shade. A restless man. A man who maybe needed a cigarette.
“I made a quick and bad judgment call,” Leakey said. “The girl had stayed the night. You had a complaint on your record. I thought it would be a distraction to build on that. Didn’t work out like I wanted. It’s why I’m on this balcony letting a priest order me around. Next question.”
“Did you arrange for something to happen to my neighbor? An old woman?”
“No. Saxon had a man we didn’t know about. He’s the one who started the fire at the foster home, then took the old woman. Saxon said something in passing that let us start tracking him. It took awhile to find him, but we did. That led us to her, and she’s alive. She’s stuck in a trailer park. Saxon’s man cut her with a knife to draw some blood and helped her immediately bandage it. The knife and the blood was supposed to make it look like you’d killed her. As you and I speak, we’ve sent one of our Los Angeles agents to deal with the situation. You’ve met him.”
“Cigarette smoker?” Crockett asked.
“That’s him. He’s going to take care of the Prince’s man, and I promise you, the old woman will be fine. The Prince’s man? Not so fine. It’s going to take you off the hook with the cops, too, once they have her testimony about her captor and about the girl’s presence during the nigh
t in question.”
Crockett felt immense relief. This was so unbelievable, and despite all the deception and insanity of recent days, he clung to this one piece of hopeful news.
“Thank you for the information,” Crockett said.
“No need. It’s payback. You did the Vatican a big favor, backing up O’Hare’s audio with your little spy camera. It was exactly what was needed to authorize last night’s actions. But I wouldn’t put too much hope in using it down the road. We’ve taken the glasses.”
Crockett’s relief dissolved. His surprise must have been obvious, because Leakey laughed.
“You really believed a pair of eyeglasses like that would fool us? Come on. We just let you play with them to see what you had in mind. Last night, while you were showering, O’Hare made a switch on you.”
O’Hare gave an apologetic shrug. “Didn’t have much choice. It did prove helpful, though.”
“Bottom line,” Leakey said, “you ended up helping us take out Saxon. The guy would have destroyed everything.”
“Take out Saxon?”
“Did I say that? What I meant was Saxon took himself out. It’s very helpful that the Vatican police are investigating this. Unlike in Santa Monica, we control the police here. That guarantees a verdict of suicide. Same thing if you jumped off this balcony right now.”
“No games,” O’Hare warned Leakey.
“Just saying,” Leakey replied from the shade. “Especially since someone needs to tell Crockett here why I’ve been allowed to take this meeting. It’s because I was told to let you know what happened to Saxon so that you’ll have a full grasp of how serious this is, enough grasp to convince you never to talk about this. Outside Vatican City, where we don’t control the police, what happens is, there’s a conversation or two and word gets out on the street. Mafia’s got connections in Los Angeles. Your cigarette man is just one of them. Keep that in mind if you want to stay safe. Or if you want your son to stay safe. Mickey, right? Likes naming animals at the zoo, gets to kindergarten every day at 8:45?”
Crockett stood so quickly his chair fell over. He lunged for Leakey, but O’Hare managed to get in the way, standing with impressive quickness for a man of his bulk.
“Don’t bother making a dramatic threat,” Leakey said as Crockett glared at him over O’Hare’s shoulder. “I’m just laying out the facts. When you get off the plane in Santa Monica, don’t bother opening your mouth about any of this. No one’s going to believe you anyway. And bad things would happen to people around you.”
Seventy-One
obody gave any notice to a tattooed man with dark, greasy hair grown into a mullet, smoking a cigarette as he sat behind the wheel of a battered air-conditioning repair van rolling through the trailer park. The van, with smoked glass windows, provided him necessary anonymity wherever he was sent.
He had a rifle on the floor between the bucket seats.
He parked a short distance from Nathan Wilby’s trailer. The dogs at the end of the chains began to bark, straining to get closer.
Nobody came out from the trailer, but he expected that. It was why he’d chosen to arrive at this time.
The barking dogs didn’t draw attention.
He’d expected that too.
The man with the mullet reached across and rolled down the passenger window.
He lifted the rifle, rested it on the ledge of the window with only a few inches of barrel outside, and aimed at the closest of the dogs.
When he pulled the trigger, the pfft of the rifle was lost in the background of the barking. The dart struck the first dog squarely in the hind end, and it arched its back sideways in a violent attempt to bite the source of pain.
In seconds, it was unconscious. The tiny dart had been loaded with tranquilizers. Quiet. Efficient. And wouldn’t hurt the dogs. The man with the mullet haircut believed animals didn’t deserve to pay for their owners’ mistakes.
The other dog went down the same way.
No way anyone could have noticed. The man with the mullet haircut set the rifle down between the bucket seats again.
He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a pistol and a silencer. He screwed the silencer onto the barrel of the pistol and waited for Nathan Wilby to arrive.
The man with the mullet hair was good at waiting too. He lit a cigarette.
He’d have to shoot sloppy. Couldn’t make it look like a professional execution, but a drug deal gone bad.
When all of this was done, he’d trash the wig, wash off his temporary tattoos and the suntan cream that had made his skin so dark. He’d become invisible again.
Crockett and O’Hare reached a sidewalk cafe and ordered espresso and croissants. Crockett looked past O’Hare, at the spires of St. Peter’s, continuing the silence they’d shared since leaving Leakey at the hotel.
O’Hare guessed that Crockett was trying to play it cool and cavalier. The man had not only been thrown onto a jet that took him to Italy, he’d been kidnapped at a cardinal’s instructions and left for dead in a catacomb. Then he’d learned that the very same cardinal had been assassinated by the same Vatican organization that had set up Crockett to be jailed back in Los Angeles. A lot to absorb, including the supernatural aspects of a perfectly possessed cardinal.
But Crockett was doing an amazing job of hiding whatever emotion and confusion he felt at this point, playing it this way from leaving the hotel meeting with Leakey, both pretending that they weren’t being shadowed by men from the Swiss Guard.
Maybe, O’Hare thought, Crockett was one of those rare soldiers who, when first thrown into combat, could act and think clearly as shells began bombardment. Or maybe he was so shell-shocked he was incapable of feeling or showing fear.
“Feel good about yourself?” Crockett finally said. “You took your vows so you could be part of death threats and all the rest of this?”
“I don’t feel good at all,” O’Hare said. “This is bigger than I am. I don’t have a choice.”
“Lots of Nazis said that too.” Crockett suddenly flared with the anger he must have been trying to contain during their stroll. “It’s one thing to threaten me, but Mickey? He’s just a kid. Why should you care, though? I guess the age of the victims didn’t matter to the guards at Auschwitz either. That would be that little thing the Catholic Church ignored awhile back?”
“I understand why you are lashing out at me,” O’Hare said evenly.
“No. You have no understanding at all. I’ve been framed for pedophilia, kidnapped, hung from a rope believing I would die, taken halfway across the world, abandoned in a catacombs, and I’ve just listened to a man calmly tell me that my son is in danger at any time in the future.”
Crockett leaned forward. “What you don’t understand is my single biggest priority is to be the best father I can be to my one remaining child. Nothing, I repeat, nothing is more important to me than that.”
He didn’t stop speaking as a middle-aged waiter set down the tiny cups and large pastries between them.
“There was a time once, on the water, when I had a choice between paddling to safety or going back for someone who’d been attacked by a shark. Later, when I thought about why I’d gone back, I realized it was because I didn’t want to live with myself, knowing I’d been a coward. I don’t see it any differently now. Part of being the best father possible is being a man the son can respect, but he’s not going to be able to respect me if I can’t respect myself. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen if I let myself be bullied into silence. Just like if I had left a guy behind to the shark. With me so far?”
Crockett didn’t give O’Hare a chance to answer. “Want to talk about a real shark? This was a cardinal. Into Satanism. Who’d abused kids, probably for decades. Burying what he did is unthinkable.”
“Mr. Grey—”
“You shut your mouth and listen. I haven’t heard anything from you about what’s going to happen to Dr. Mackenzie and Jaimie. You’ve arranged an apparent suicide to take c
are of a cardinal. How do I know you won’t take care of them like the pawns they were to you when—”
“I did not arrange Saxon’s death. It was done by—”
“I said shut your mouth. Are there any real guarantees of Jaimie’s safety?”
Crockett was speaking so vehemently that one of the Swiss Guard escorts started to drift toward them.
O’Hare waved away the Swiss Guard as he answered Crockett’s question. “She is of great value to the church.”
“Listen to yourself. I didn’t hear you say she’s a scared and lonely twelve-year-old-girl. Or that it’s unthinkable that she would be taken care of with the same discretion of a convenient suicide.”
“Mr. Grey—”
“Priest or not, I swear, O’Hare, I will punch you in the mouth if you interrupt again. Here’s what I’ve decided. I’m promising right now that you don’t need to use Mickey as a threat over me in the future, because I’m not waiting that long. When I arrive in Los Angeles—or even before if your Swiss Guard goons let me find a phone booth—I’m taking my story to the L.A. Times. Reporters there know how to dig deep. They’ll find something, probably plenty. I’m making you this promise right now because you can decide before I get on the plane whether I need to be pushed off a balcony or whatever method you and your Entity buddies decide is the right action to demonstrate that Jesus loves all of us. But don’t think it will end there. There’s a computer geek back in Santa Monica who will have plenty of questions if I don’t make it back. And you can bet that killing him won’t end it, because he’ll have squirreled away all he knows as backup and someone else will end up taking over and asking questions. And other people are going to wonder about Jaimie and Mackenzie, and in the end, even if I’m dead, my son will eventually know I was unjustly accused and died trying to clear myself and expose something really wrong and evil. Attempting to cover this up is going to be a nuclear bomb that you’ll wish you never detonated. So you’d better decide right now to kill me or to take away the threat. I’m not going to let you push me around, and I’m not going to be part of burying this mess. Understand?”
The Canary List: A Novel Page 25