by Gregg Loomis
Francis watched her retreat toward the kitchen. “Riches may make the man, but think of the good that man could do if he shared some of them with people like those guys.” He nodded to the window where two shabbily dressed men were panhandling passersby.
“So they could buy a better brand of wine by the pint?”
Francis’s reply was a snort. “You can be quite difficult, you know.”
“Be thankful this is one of my better days. I can also be impossible.”
Francis shook his head. “OK. Moving past our disagreement on social and economic issues, I repeat: how was Venice?”
“You wouldn’t believe what happened.”
“Try me.”
Lang waited for their salads to be placed in front of them before beginning his adventures.
When he finished speaking, Francis was silent for a moment, thinking. “I read about the theft of the relics from Saint Mark’s in Venice. I should have known if there was trouble within a hundred miles, you’d be involved in it somehow.”
“Dessert, gentlemen? We have some freshly made peppermint ice-cream cake.” The waitress was hovering again.
Lang looked up. “My spiritual advisor here will no doubt take whatever you offer. He gets only bread and water in his monastic cell.”
Francis rolled his eyes. “And you?”
“As a normal human being whose natural aging process has produced a metabolism that manufactures a hundred calories for each one consumed . . .”
Francis looked up at the bewildered young woman. “He means, no thank you. As for me, yes indeed, I will have the peppermint ice-cream cake. And add a dollop of whipped cream, could you, please?”
A few minutes later, Lang watched Francis dig into a concoction that would have stilled the most demanding sweet tooth. “How is it I bust my ass working out and put on a pound if I even look at sweets and you never gain weight, yet you eat anything that isn’t nailed down? Can you pray off calories?”
“ ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.’ First Psalm. For you heretics, there isn’t a lot of hope.”
Lang sipped a cup of coffee as Francis used the edge of his fork to scrape the last of the confection from his plate. “You can have seconds, y’know.”
Francis looked up, not quite successful in hiding a smile. “I couldn’t do that to you.” He seemed to think a moment. “Back to that excitement in Venice. You know, there’s a good chance what was taken weren’t Saint Mark’s bones at all.”
Lang was debating if the extra caffeine in another cup of coffee would make him jumpy all afternoon. “Really? And whose bones might they be?”
Just then the waitress handed Lang the check for signature and member number. He scribbled both.
Lang gave his friend a look that said he knew his leg was being pulled. “OK, I’ll bite, even if I see another of those ‘who’s buried in Grant’s tomb’ jokes. Who’s buried in Saint Mark’s?”
Francis lifted his arm, checking his watch. “I’d tell you but you’d want an explanation, and I have a meeting with the bishop. Gurt was kind enough to invite me for dinner Friday night. I’ll explain then.”
Both men got up from the table, Francis reaching to shake Lang’s hand. “Thanks for the lunch. I’m a little embarrassed I can’t pick up my share of the tab here.”
Lang grinned. “Why? In all the time we’ve tossed a coin for the check, I don’t recall you ever losing. Sooner or later you will. This way, I’m spared the suspense of guessing when.”
Outside, wind was chasing trash down the sidewalk between canyon walls of glass and steel. Lang had left his overcoat at the office and was glad his walk back to work would be less than a block. Everyone else on the street seemed to share his hurry to get out of the wintry blast.
He stopped long enough to wave as Francis drove out of the parking lot in the parish’s aged Toyota, crossed Peachtree and disappeared down the ridge, the spine of which forms Atlanta’s most famous street. Turning back toward his office, he stopped. Across the street was one pedestrian who was in no hurry. His coat collar turned up concealing most of the face, the man seemed to be staring at Lang. Perhaps suddenly realizing he had been noticed, he hurried into the revolving door of a nearby hotel.
Lang’s first impulse was to follow. He took a couple of steps and stopped. Overactive imagination? Had the stranger been looking at him or simply taking in what meager sights the city had to offer? He looked around, spotting no one who showed any particular interest in him, not even a street bum. Still, ingrained paranoia wouldn’t let go, a paranoia that had saved his life more than once.
Once he was back in his office, Sara was waiting for him with another stack of messages. He soon forgot the man on the street.
Beijing Olympic Tower
267 Beisihuan Zhonglu
Haidian, Beijing
The day before
Less than a week after the end of the 2008 Summer Olympics, the space occupied in the new sixteen-story building by the committee that had organized and operated the games was vacated. The colorful posters and photographs of the athletes that had festooned the walls were replaced by officially sanctioned pictures of the holy trinity of Sun Yat-sen, Mao and Chou En-lai. China’s burgeoning bureaucracy, ever hungry for more room, now filled the building overlooking the Birdcage, the popular name for the unique Olympic stadium.
Not that the view from the fourth floor this afternoon was one that might adorn the cover of a magazine, thought Wan Ng. Beijing’s brownish haze had reduced the landmark to a mere chimera even though it was less than a quarter of a mile distant. A combination of coal-fueled industry, vehicle emissions and lethargic natural circulation rendered Beijing’s air among the most foul on earth. A system of alternating days when the massive number of government employees might drive into the city, a lottery for license plates to restrict the number of vehicles on the roads and a requirement that all autos and trucks must have an “environmentally friendly” sticker to enter past the Fifth Ring Road had done little to ameliorate the air quality. The fact a thriving black market dispensed the stickers to anyone willing to pay was only part of the problem.
Poisonous air was the least of Ng’s concerns this afternoon. The tone of the call he had gotten from Undersecretary Chin Diem summoning him here had lacked the congratulations for a job well done. True, Ng had lost the men assigned to him and had made international news for the chase through the canals of Venice. But he had brought the object of the mission back with him even though its theft had caused a worldwide uproar.
So what?
The men he had left behind could hardly be identified as Chinese nationals. Even if the Italians possessed the technology to compare their features with scans of their American passports, it would be months before the authorities realized the papers were forgeries.
Still, Diem was unhappy for some reason. Not knowing that reason made Ng nervous. One thing was certain: meeting the undersecretary here rather than in Diem’s sumptuous office with a view of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City beyond, haze permitting, meant there would be no record of either the meeting itself or the subject to be discussed, a rarity in a society where the affairs of the lowest citizen were subject to scrutiny.
Uneasily, Ng watched a procession of three Shuanghuan CEO’s, midsized SUVs, pull up to the building’s entrance below. Four dark-suited men got out of both the leading and trailing vehicles, scanned their surroundings and nodded to the driver of the second car. Crime in Beijing was almost as nonexistent as political dissent. The number of cars in the caravan of a high-level official was more a testimony to his importance and current standing in the governmental hierarchy than his need for security. Should a bureaucrat who had formerly rated three cars appear with a single-car escort, his status was clearly waning. Decline to a lone SUV augured an immediate and involuntary retirement from government service.
Ng could see the
portly figure of Diem below as one of the men held the door open. He was carrying a thin attaché case.
Ng turned around, facing a double bank of elevators. The one on the far left whispered open and four black suits stepped out, followed by Diem.
The undersecretary glanced around, fixing an expressionless stare on Ng. “Follow me.”
He led the entourage down a short corridor and opened a door at the end. Motioning his men to remain in the hallway, he ushered Ng inside.
Here the walls still bore Olympic posters. A metal desk and chair faced two uncomfortable-looking seats. The office was devoid of the normal photographs of wife and the single child allowed each family, or any other personal effects. Clearly, this office had been borrowed just for this meeting.
Ng was pondering the significance of that fact as Diem rounded the desk, sat and snapped open the attaché case. Wordlessly, he motioned Ng to be seated. Reaching into a jacket pocket, he produced a pack of American cigarettes—Marlboros—and then a gold lighter, a knockoff of a world-famous jeweler’s design. He shook out a cigarette and lit it without offering his guest one, not a good sign.
His head circled in blue smoke, he removed a thin folder from the attaché case, opened it and began to read. Ng would have bet the undersecretary had the few pages memorized. It was a common tactic among the Party’s elite. The theatrics enforced the fact the subordinate did not rate the time it would take for his superior to read the file in advance.
From somewhere behind the desk, Diem produced an exceptionally ugly porcelain ashtray and set his smoldering cigarette down. “How did the Americans know you were in the church?”
Ng felt his throat go dry. The implicit accusation could be career ending. In fact, if he was even suspected of revealing his mission, prison or worse was likely.
“I do not believe they did, Comrade Secretary.”
The use of the honorific, though passé, showed respect.
“Explain.”
“Had they known my men and I were in the church, I doubt they would have entered so obviously. They made no effort to conceal themselves.”
Diem picked up the cigarette, took a puff and returned it to the ashtray. “Do you not find it coincidental that two members of American intelligence would just happen by late at night when the church would ordinarily be closed?”
“Do we know they were American intelligence?”
Diem snorted, smoke erupting from his nose. “The woman obviously had military training, did she not? And if she had the capability to not only defeat but kill one of your armed men, we must assume her companion did also.”
“Comrade Secretary, my subsequent investigation of the credit-card records shows the man, Langford Reilly, is some sort of lawyer living in the southern United States.”
“An intelligence operative would have such cover, would he not?”
Ng had no answer.
The undersecretary was studying the short stack of papers in front of him. “Intelligence or not, the man and woman could well have seen the faces of you and your men. They could have told the police the men robbing the church were Chinese.”
“The interior of the church was too dark to see faces.”
Diem was reading from the file again. “You are Yi, are you not, from a small village in Yunnan?”
Ng hoped his face didn’t show what he felt. It was no surprise his background had been duly recorded. A file existed on every person born in China, one of the reasons for the bloated civil service. There would be a more detailed dossier for those considered to be in sensitive positions. His uneasiness came from the mention of the fact he was a member of one of China’s fifty-five ethnic minorities, people the government viewed with xenophobic suspicion.
Ng recalled his childhood in the tiny village: the walled, plank house with a sod roof held on by stones shared with his parents, his grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. As well as a number of livestock far too valuable to be left out in the elements. Neither the Great Leap Forward nor any other proclaimed program of rural modernization had reached the place. The last time he had visited, there still was no electricity or running water. It had taken hard work from sunup till dark to wrest a living from the stony soil of each family’s single small field allotted by the local commissar. Army life had been luxurious by comparison. He felt nostalgia for the place along with a strong desire to never have to live there again, a real possibility if he failed to follow whatever agenda the undersecretary had in mind.
Diem continued. “Major, People’s Liberation Army, transferred to Special Branch, Department of International Affairs three years ago, commendation for successful completion of unspecified mission eight months ago . . .”
Again Ng kept quiet.
Diem’s eyes flicked over the top of the file. “And I see you graduated from the American Academy.”
“That is all correct, Comrade Secretary.”
Diem nodded as though an issue had been resolved. “Yes, of course. Do you feel comfortable operating in America?”
“I have been so trained, Comrade Secretary, as you have just noted.”
The secretary paused long enough to put out his cigarette with an exaggerated stabbing motion. “Good. You are to choose such men as you think best fitted and travel to the United States, where you will observe this Reilly person and the woman. If you are convinced they have no connection with an American intelligence organization, you are to so inform me.” He held Ng’s gaze. “You will be certain before you make such a decision.”
“And if they are?”
Diem leaned across the desk. “If such is the case, we may be assured they have passed along the fact that the People’s Republic may have been involved in the Venice affair and change policy accordingly.”
“And if not?”
The undersecretary shrugged; it was a matter of no consequence. “Either way, what they might have seen presents a future risk. Eliminate them.”
472 Lafayette Drive, Atlanta
19:42 the next evening
Lang Reilly was sprawled into his favorite chair in the house’s paneled library/den, a Waterford crystal tumbler containing the remnants of a scotch and water on a leather-inlaid desk beside him. The flames danced across shelves of polished spines of leather-bound books Lang had collected and read. Works of Scott, Burns’s poetry . . . All were in English, not the Danish or Swedish popular for decorative purposes sold in antique stores. From the sound system, John Denver was extolling a Rocky Mountain high. The singer, dead these many years, had been a favorite of Dawn’s and a voice Lang associated with a particularly happy part of his earlier life. The music was more nostalgia than entertainment.
He was watching his six-year-old son, Manfred, seated on the muted Kerman rug in front of a fire crackling behind a brass screen. Opposite the boy, Francis sat splay legged, holding a deck of oversized cards. The priest dealt slowly, faceup, one on top of the one before. At the appearance of a jack, both attempted to be the first to slap an open palm on it as it hit the floor, thereby claiming not only the knave but the stack of cards beneath.
The disproportionate size of the piles accumulated by the competitors was attributable to Francis’s reluctance to slap the jack with full force for fear of hurting Manfred, plus the fact the latter’s shorter arms and unrestrained enthusiasm gave him a distinct advantage. Curled up touching Manfred, Grumps, the family’s dog of undetermined age and breed, opened an eye, either the blue one or the brown one, annoyed at each shriek his young master gave as he claimed another jack.
Lang stood up, crossed the room and stood at the built-in bar. “One more scotch before dinner?”
Francis looked up, card in midair. “No thanks. I’m afraid it’ll dull my competitive edge.”
Lang helped himself before nodding toward the relatively small stack of cards the priest had won. “What competitive edge?”
John Denver was imploring the country roads of West Virginia to take him home.
“Abendessen!” Gurt w
as standing in the doorway to announce dinner. When possible, she and Lang spoke German around their son in hopes of preserving his bilingual abilities.
“Aw, Mom,” Manfred protested in words and tone familiar to any American six-year-old’s parents. “I was beating the socks off Uncle Fancy . . .”
Francis slowly got up. “And I expect you will after dinner, too.”
Gurt shook her head at her son. “I will bet you did not whine so at coming to dinner while you were staying with Mr. and Mrs. Charles while your father and I were gone.”
She referred to their next-door neighbors, who had a son slightly less than two years Manfred’s junior. Even though the difference between four and six is large at their ages, the two boys had been fast friends since Lang and Gurt’s participation in rescuing the younger from kidnappers the year before. The Charleses, Wynton and Paige, were more than eager to babysit as a small return for Lang and Gurt’s efforts, a return both Lang and Gurt insisted was not due.
“But Mom,” Manfred said innocently, “Mrs. Charles is an awesome cook.”
Lang tousled his son’s hair, speaking English for Francis’s benefit. “Meaning from what I heard that you and Wynn Three had a steady diet of hot dogs, hamburgers and peanut butter.”
“And the best apple pie in the world!”
Smiling, Gurt led her son to his seat in the dining room. “Auf Wiedersehen apple pie and peanut butter; wie geht’s roast chicken and vegetables?”
Having outgrown his high chair, Manfred climbed up on top of two sofa cushions that got his head and shoulders above table level.
Sitting, Lang turned to Francis. “OK, padre, see if you can finish saying grace before dinner gets cold.”
When Francis had completed an admirably brief blessing, Manfred piped up. “Why does Uncle Fancy always do that, thank God for the food, when Mommy buys it at the store herself?”
Francis gave Lang an amused look. “Your son’s spiritual education seems to be somewhat lacking.”
Gurt and Lang exchanged glances before Lang looked back at Francis. “You said the blessing; you explain.”