by Rachel Lee
Margarite’s reply was sarcastic. “Merde, are those not the same questions we have been asking while we awaited you? Was he good?”
“He was Italian,” Renate answered, annoyed anew by Margarite’s tone and question, and by the cringe she saw in Lawton’s eyes.
“Not bad,” Margarite said. “My countrymen are good, but sometimes a little hot-bloodedness…” She smiled, clearly aware that she was discomfiting the men.
Something in Margarite’s eyes softened Renate’s anger. There was more there than mere playfulness at the expense of the men. There was a hint of…approval, as if Margarite understood what Renate had been searching for when she had gone to that bar.
“Yes,” Renate said to her, ignoring Lawton’s look of distaste. “Sometimes we need to feel the blood rush in our veins, to feel our hearts pound and our legs quiver, just to know we are alive.”
“Enough,” said El Jefe, obviously as uncomfortable as Lawton with the subject. “Let’s get back to business. We don’t know much, but we know something is wrong. Renate, we have a BKA source, but it’s secondhand from Washington. The news is only saying that part of the dome collapsed and the chancellor has been injured. The German government hasn’t announced it yet, but they know it was cyanide poisoning.”
Renate nodded. She was not surprised that her old colleagues at the Bundeskriminalamt were investigating so quickly. They knew that the first hours were the critical ones, and that trails quickly grew cold. It bothered her that Office 119’s knowledge of what was happening within the BKA was limited to what they received from Washington, however. Secondhand information was always suspect.
“Who is our contact in Washington?” she asked.
“Miriam Anson,” Lawton said. “After the mess with Phillip Bentley, President Rice made Grant Lawrence his National Security Advisor. Miriam is now Director of National Intelligence. Chief Spook.”
“And she knows where we are,” Renate said, suspicion in her voice. “We’re supposed to be invisible, or did that change while I was out this evening?”
“Okay,” said El Jefe, the one English word that was the same in every language the world over, “everyone calm down. We all have contacts, Renate. And as contacts go, Miriam Anson’s as good as anyone could hope for. Let’s look at what we have instead of quibbling over where it came from. Whatever is going on here, I don’t think we’re looking at a lone gunman.”
“Vögel publicly renounced Soult’s proposed legislation about security zones for the Muslims,” Renate said. “My sources say he was going to pull Germany out of the EU if it came to that.”
“You think Soult did it?” Margarite asked.
“You know he’s capable of it,” Renate replied. “He wants an ethnic cleansing, and Chancellor Vögel was standing in his way.”
“‘Ethnic cleansing’ is a strong term,” Margarite said.
“So dress it up with a different euphemism,” Renate replied, her voice dripping sarcasm. “Call it whatever you want. His Europa Prima Party is blatantly racist. Blame the bad foreigners for all of your problems. All they’re missing is the swastika.”
“Oh, we are in a mood,” Lawton said.
Renate turned to him. “The Chancellor of Germany is dead. Your friend Miriam says it was murder. Soult is going to tear Europe apart. Paris is burning. And yes, you dragged me out of a warm and pleasant bed to get this news. What, exactly, am I supposed to be cheerful about?”
“Nothing,” Lawton said. “But venting your spleen on us isn’t going to change anything. I’m sorry I interrupted your liaison. But we have a job to do here.”
“Yes,” she said bitterly. “The job. Always the job. So what do we know?”
“Too damn little,” Jefe said. “And that’s the problem. Get in touch with your sources in Germany, Renate. We need to know what they know and what they suspect. And I’d like to be ahead of the curve on this one, instead of constantly playing catch-up.”
Renate drew a breath and forced herself to relax. Lawton was right. It was wrong for her to snipe at the people in this room, when the trouble was happening out there. She let the breath out slowly and nodded. “What have we heard out of Frankfurt?”
“Assif has a team working decryption around the clock,” Jefe said.
Assif Mondi, formerly of the Indian national police, was the computer wizard who had masterminded the Office 119 bugging of the communications network of the Frankfurt Brotherhood, the international banking cabal that Renate had first discovered during her time with the BKA. It had been intelligence from Frankfurt that had enabled Office 119 to capture the terrorist who had tried to bomb the EU Parliament building in Strasbourg.
That attempted bombing had catalyzed Jules Soult’s political career, after he had led EU security forces in finding and disabling the bombs. Most of Europe thought him a hero, but Renate suspected he had planned the entire event himself. She had no firm evidence beyond her gut-level revulsion at Soult and the policies he espoused. But bitter experience had led her to trust those instincts.
“Margarite,” Jefe said, looking at a yellow legal pad on which he had been scribbling, “I want everything you can get about Jules Soult, as well as this mess in Paris. Lawton, we need whatever Miriam knows or even thinks she knows. Get to work, people. Full reports in two hours.”
Rome, Italy
Father Steve Lorenzo was dining in a small restaurant with Monsignore Giuseppi Veltroni, his mentor and friend. Though he had been back in Rome for a while now, Steve was still having trouble adjusting to the change.
He had gone from Savannah, Georgia, to the jungles of Guatemala with little sense of culture shock. Now, having spent two years fleeing both the government and the rebels, hiding in the jungle with his small flock of villagers, he found it almost impossible to return to the First World.
Perhaps, he thought, life at its most basic, the life he had lived in Guatemala, felt more comfortable, more real, to the mind, heart and soul than white linen tablecloths and sparkling crystal. Certainly he had felt purer there than here.
“Steven,” Veltroni said, “you’re ignoring your pasta.”
“It’s more than I am used to eating, Monsignore.”
“And you look like it. We must fatten you again, at least to some semblance of health.”
“I am healthy.”
Veltroni leaned back in his chair, putting down his fork and spoon. His dark eyes studied his protégé with both concern and intrigue. “You have changed.”
“It’s hard not to change when you see innocent people gunned down and their families chased through the jungle, almost to the point of their extermination. It’s hard not to change when you are stripped of everything save one set of clothes someone has given you, and when each day is a search for survival. One learns what is truly important.”
“I quite agree. I hope faith was among those important things.”
Steve nodded. “Yes, Monsignore, it was. The women made tortillas for the Eucharist. I blessed rainwater rather than wine. Every day. It was the closest I have ever felt to our Lord, and I know many with me felt the same.”
Veltroni nodded, his gaze fixed on the younger man. “That’s an amazing story of spiritual heroism, Steve. Yet you will not move into the apartment I have secured for you in the Vatican. You will not take up the post the Stewards of Faith have found for you. Have you any idea how much good you could do in the Vatican? So many could learn from your experiences, as I do.”
“Could I?” Steve Lorenzo looked down at his plate, mounded with pasta, and shoved it away, trying not to think how many villagers it could feed in Guatemala. “I am not ungrateful.”
“What, then? What is going on in your head?”
“My head? Perhaps it is in my heart, Monsignore.”
The monsignore leaned forward, lowering his voice confidentially. “Tell me. I place the Seal of Confession on the rest of this conversation.” Veltroni was truly worried. He loved Steve Lorenzo as a son.
Steve gla
nced out the window at the rainy evening, watching as people hurried by beneath umbrellas or tucked deep within raincoats. Then he looked again at Veltroni.
“I am a Steward of the Faith.”
“Yes,” Veltroni agreed. “You are. You are pledged always to protect the Faith, and so far you have done an exemplary job.”
“But what is ‘the Faith,’ Monsignore?”
Giuseppe Veltroni leaned back in his chair and frowned deeply. “Do you doubt your faith, after all that you have seen and done?”
Steve’s expression grew even more somber. “I do not doubt my faith, my friend. But I wonder what the Stewards are protecting. What is the Faith—to you, Giuseppe? The Church? Or the Word?”
“Why are you asking this? What is it that troubles you? Please explain so I can understand, Steve.”
“It’s very simple. I’ve given you a short account of what I endured in Guatemala, what my people endured, what I found and how it was lost. But now that I am back, I find myself remembering things from the Church’s past, things that trouble me.”
“For example?”
“You recall, I’m sure, when Pope Paul VI denounced so-called ‘liberation theology.’ He ordered socially active priests in South and Central America to stop speaking out against the atrocities of their governments. Those priests were demanding change, yet the Holy Father spoke of it as ‘fomenting rebellion.’”
“Of course I remember. He was concerned lest the Church be evicted from those countries, and the people thus denied the grace and sacraments of their faith. The Church cannot minister long distance, Steve. We must be on the ground, in a place, to offer the Eucharist.”
“I understand that,” Steve said. “But I ask you this. Did Jesus worry about offending the local authorities?”
Veltroni drew a breath.
Steve smiled faintly. “It makes you think, doesn’t it? Jesus spoke out for the oppressed in every instance. He was willing to die to save all those people who weren’t allowed to set foot in the Temple because they were deemed unclean. The Church did not decry the Holocaust when it was happening. I hear nothing from the Holy Father about Soult’s proposals for the Muslims living among us. And I suspect the reasons are the same as they have always been—those in the Vatican deem it more important to preserve the Church’s presence than to fulfill its moral duty to the weak and the voiceless in need of a strong voice. So again I ask you, am I pledged to protect the Word or the Church?”
It was an old and vexing question, and Veltroni took a moment before responding. “Some consider the Word and Holy Mother Church to be one and the same.”
“And you, my friend? What do you think?”
“Of course they are not the same, Steve. The Church is, for better or worse, an institution of human beings. We pray for spiritual guidance, and I believe that much of what the Church does and has done has indeed been led by the Spirit. But we are still human beings, prone to errors of fact as well as errors of motive.”
Steve nodded and once again looked out the window. “That’s why I can’t move into the Vatican apartment or take the job you have so kindly offered me. I am not rejecting my Church, Monsignore. She will always be my Church. But, for a time at least, my heart tells me that my duties here lie on a different path.”
Veltroni remained silent for a long time, not moving. Steve waited patiently.
Finally the monsignore spoke. “Take our food home with you. Give it to the hungry you meet along the way.”
“I will, thank you.”
“But, Steve—” and here Veltroni’s voice carried a wealth of concern “—please be careful. I can see the light of your soul in your eyes now. You have been purified in a way that I can only envy, were that not a sin. But please remember…those who become saints are often called to lives of horrible suffering. And while that might glorify our Lord, it would rend my heart.”
“I’m no saint!” Steve actually laughed.
“Then let me put it to you another way. There is darkness in the world, forces against which Holy Mother Church is perhaps the only steadfast bulwark. It is far easier to protect the sheep who are within the fold and very difficult to protect the one who must, for whatever reason, take his own path. Beware the wolves, Steve.”
Veltroni watched Steve leave with two nearly complete dinners. The food would not feed many, Veltroni knew. But the grace of feeding the multitudes had not been given to Steve or to him. They had to feed one man at a time and pray that the Lord would lead others to feed the rest.
Still, as Veltroni sat on the tram riding back to the Vatican, he thought about what Steve had said. What Jules Soult was proposing—however well-intentioned it might seem—was surely a spiritual abomination. It was a return to an Old Testament God, a God of wrath and war and separateness, a God in whom men could find orders to slay every man, woman and child in a Canaanite village.
And yet Christ’s first missionary had been not only a woman but a Samaritan woman, forgiven her sins and sent back to her village to spread the word of forgiveness and hope. And one of the most famous and beloved of all the parables was that of the Good Samaritan, the man who did not pass by in selfishness or fear, but who instead stopped to care for a wounded traveler.
While the Samaritans were of Jewish descent, they had different beliefs, and for those differences they were cast out, set apart, spat upon and reviled. Were not Muslims also children of Abraham? And were they not about to be cast as the Samaritans of this time, a maligned Them against which to judge the righteousness of Us?
Steve was right. The Word would not have stood by and watched this happen. And if the Church was indeed grounded in the Word, then it must follow His example, whatever the temporal cost.
Veltroni saw his own path illuminated in the light of Steve Lorenzo’s eyes. But could he walk that path? That, as always, was the deepest and most difficult question.
And one for which he had no answer.
As Steve approached the place where he now lived, he did not find it difficult to give the food away. In every city of the world, on the streets, often seen only at night, were the forgotten souls, all too many of them children. They were the people no one wanted to see and no one seemed to know how to truly help. They were the people among whom Jesus would have walked.
Steve passed out the food as best he could. The restaurant portions were overly generous, and each could feed the hunger of more than one child. When he was finally empty-handed, he ached with a desire to do more, much more. But he had no money, and his stipend had not yet resumed, most likely because he had refused the job he had been offered. Either it would resume soon or he would be on the streets himself.
In a town so overflowing with priests, Steve would not have been surprised if the so-called rabble had treated him with disrespect as he walked among them. Instead, many darted out of darkened alleys and doorways, often seeking no more than a blessing, a tangible symbol of a loving God who had not forsaken them. For each, he drew the sign of the Cross on their foreheads with his thumb and murmured words of encouragement. It was a small thing, and yet for so many it seemed everything.
His small hotel room in a run-down area of Rome was hardly luxurious, yet after Guatemala, it was so comfortable that he almost felt indulgent in staying there. He and his de facto aide, Miguel Ortiz, had spent most of the past two years living in the most primitive conditions imaginable. Many were the nights that he had slept on the wet ground, tossing and turning to relieve the incessant irritation of a stone or a tree root. Now he slept in a bed, warm and dry and safe, while the villagers he had led remained behind, fashioning their homes in a secret valley deep in the heart of the jungle.
Such thoughts had cost him sleep in the first days of his return to civilization. He had even slept on the floor until the patent absurdity of that practice made itself painfully apparent in the form of a persistent backache. God had not found a home for the people of Dos Ojos and then borne Steve Lorenzo safely to Rome so he could torture himsel
f needlessly by sleeping on a hard floor.
But now he was thinking about his vow to the Stewards, an oath to protect the Faith at whatever cost. That oath had taken him to Guatemala, but it was another oath that had returned him here. That was something he spoke of to no one, not even Veltroni.
For Steve was also a Guardian of the Light, and while he didn’t know the full extent of that pledge, neither did he doubt the purity or worthiness of that cause. He felt between worlds now, between oaths and realities, and needed time to sort himself out. Needed time for God to clarify his understanding of his path.
But not only God sought him out in the quiet hours of the night as he studied and waited for his heart to be filled with answers. The Guardians sought him, as well. And they came in his dreams.
Ur of the Chaldees,
c. 3500 B.C.E.
“Avram, my son,” Enlil said to the man who stood before him, “you have served me well, though it has not been easy. Now I must ask you for a greater sacrifice.”
Avram bowed to the terrifying but beautiful being before him. “I live but to serve.”
“It is a terrible thing I must ask. But you have seen how my fellows have taken advantage of many of the adama we have created.”
Again Avram bowed. Though he did not know the full story of creation, he knew that adama, known to some as Adam, were the race of men created from the earth and the breath of the gods.
“It is wrong that my kind have relations with your women,” Enlil continued. “The Nephilim are an abomination in my sight and a threat to all the adama. If their numbers continue to grow, they will destroy the adama.
“What is more,” Enlil continued, “there are troubles among us, a war in the heavens. It is time I take my rightful place and my own path. You will take the path with me, Avram.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“So obedient you are, my servant. Hear me now. You must abandon your granaries and all that you have achieved here. No longer will you be counselor to kings. But you and yours will be safe.”