A Pius Man_A Holy Thriller

by Declan Finn

  Abasi chuckled. “To do that, you’d need to be the Black Pope — no offense to Joshua.”

  The Pope waved it off. “None taken. I know what you meant.”

  Goldberg raised her hand. “I don’t.”

  “Ah.” O’Brien sighed deeply enough to blow out candles. “The Black Pope is the head of the Jesuits… Society of Jesus… and technically answers directly to the Pope — and he’s ‘black’ because that’s our societal color.”

  She nodded. “Ah. You make it sound like you’re so high up you can’t get out.”

  O’Brien’s eyebrows shot up, and he almost dropped his cigarette. “I’m doomed by my initials… I’m the Executive Officer of the Jesuits — the XO, which is what everyone calls me… But occasionally they make XOB sound like a disparagement.”

  “Funny, didn’t know the Jesuits had military-speak.”

  The Jesuit laughed. “We were founded by an ex-army officer. He called us ‘The Company,’ and he didn’t mean the CIA; they weren’t around in the 1500s.”

  His Holiness clapped his hands together. “Now, if everyone’s acquainted, we need to talk.”

  Goldberg nodded and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “For example, like why Frank and XO here have been dining with an old Leftist terrorist.”

  Abasi laughed aloud. “I believe Special Agent Goldberg has appointed herself the bad cop.”

  Giovanni Figlia cleared his throat, looking embarrassed at his guest’s brusqueness before his boss. “It’s an American thing.”

  The bishop shrugged. “She’s right. His Holiness here finally heard the rest of the details about the victims. After that, we knew we had information for you.”

  “So,” Goldberg asked, “why were you folks talking with a terrorist hitman?”

  Father Frank Williams stepped from whatever shadow of the room he had disappeared into. Goldberg had hardly noticed he had disappeared until he reemerged. “Because we have a different mission from you. Your job is saving lives; our job is saving souls. If we must talk with and convert an indicted-in-absentia murderer in order to possibly save him from damnation, then that is what we do. We do not arrest people, and I assure you, had any of us known that Clementi was still killing people, we would have called the police. Though, I, for one, would have been tempted to perp-walk him to the cop shop myself.”

  Goldberg raised an eyebrow. “And why didn’t you tell us this sooner, Frank?”

  The priest gave her an amused smile. “I could not recognize him after his face had lost the argument with Gianni’s windshield,” Father Frank lied.

  “And don’t worry,” Xavier O’Brien added, blowing out a ring of cigarette smoke, “it gets worse.”

  Figlia rubbed his temple before the headache emerged fully. “Certo. Of course it would.”

  The Pope looked at O’Brien and waved him out of the room. The Jesuit looked at him with a raised brow, curious if he meant it. The Pope nodded. O’Brien shrugged, and he waved. “I’m apparently being thrown out. I’ll talk with you later, then.”

  Father Frank watched his nominal boss leave the room, and then continued. “Apparently, there was another murder of someone else we’ve come across.”

  “We being who?” Wilhelmina asked, disliking the pronoun. It is starting to sound like an episode of The X-Files. Any more conspiracy crap, I’m going to start looking for black helicopters. Come to think of it, we already have a cigarette-smoking man, don’t we?

  “We as in the Church,” the Pope answered in a deep, resounding voice. “The fact is, we had entertained hopes for the soul of someone else with a less-than-sparkling reputation. In that case as well, the result was not good.”

  “Who? Jack the Ripper?”

  “Ashid Yousef, he’s a—”

  Hashim Abasi’s easygoing, relaxed stance and demeanor disappeared like summer lightning. Before Father Frank had finished the next syllable, Abasi grabbed the Jesuit by his shirtfront and lifted him off the ground.

  * * *

  “Papal hitmen?” Manana Shushurin asked, slightly amused. “Sounds like a John le Carre novel.” She thought a moment. “Actually, it sounds like something his brother might write.”

  Scott Murphy frowned, running through his memory. “And the brother is?”

  “John Cornwell. He wrote Hitler’s Pope, and a conspiracy theory about the death of John Paul I.” She tilted her head back ever so slightly, and let her eyes flicker over the al fresco restaurant. Her eyes never made contact with Scott Murphy, who was on the other side of the fenced-off area.

  The two intelligence officers had the choice between eating together in private, to avoid being seen, or continuing surveillance. Murphy had sent a photo of the woman to his boss, and now knew she was Wilhelmina “Villie” Goldberg, of the Secret Service.

  “You must have very good intelligence,” she had told him.

  “That we do.”

  Right now, as they looked at each other across the open space, both of them had Bluetooth earpieces in their ears, and cell phones strapped to their belts. Scott Murphy had out his map, ran his finger over it, and spoke as if he were actually coordinating with another tourist. Manana simply talked, posing as the stereotypical cellphone user.

  “So, tell me about Mr. Yousef,” Murphy asked, even as he seemed to take a particular interest in the area around the Coliseum. “What do your people know about him?”

  “Not much,” Shushurin told him, leaning back in her chair. “I was told he was part of some al Qaeda think tank. Something about honey.”

  Murphy almost laughed. “Son of a bitch. Al Qaeda once used honey to smuggle weapons, drugs, and scumbags. Ashid came up with the idea? Oy. Anything else?”

  “He also wrote the al Qaeda training manual,” she told him. “And that’s even more impossible.”

  He nodded, and spared her a glance. Even from a distance, she looked spectacular. The way her hair looked was breathtaking. How was it she had lasted as a spy for so long? He dismissed the thought, and focused on Yousef. “Considering the amount of translation from other military manuals, not to mention cobbling together concepts from different military and intelligence circles, I’d say so. Now here’s my problem. If he was one of the great brains, why did he risk coming out of hiding? He’s got to be on dozens of watch lists.”

  “Better question,” Shushurin countered. “He walked in through the front door of the Vatican. Why didn’t they turn him in? They had to know he was there.”

  “Murphy’s Law of spying – no pun intended: Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity,” Murphy said aloud into the Bluetooth as a waiter drifted by. Once the waiter left, he lowered his voice slightly. “You’re assuming they knew he was here, had his name on file, that they have facial-recognition software, or… actually, wait, how would he get into the archives without backing from another institution? Do you know offhand where was he educated?”

  “Oxford or Cambridge, perhaps both, studying geopolitical science.”

  Murphy grumbled. “He would. The Middle East has ejected so many of their nutcases, half of the terrorists are recruited after they leave the region. But still, even if he was Doctor Yousef, why risk being out in the open? We’ve got nothing.

  * * *

  Sean A.P. Ryan opened the door, and blinked at one of the oddest sights he’d seen for quite some time. A collapsible dining table was on its side, the furniture separating the Pope and his head of security from the other side of the room — where Hashim Abasi held Father Francis Williams up off the floor, the neatly polished shoes dangling a foot above the marble.

  Sean smiled gently. “Did I interrupt?”

  Goldberg barely spared him a glance, and murmured, “Not at all, come right in.”

  “Where is he?” Abasi demanded, rattling Father Frank, ignoring everyone in the room. “Where is Ashid Yousef?”

  Father Williams gently laid his hand on Abasi’s bicep. “Please unhand me.”

  He closed his
eyes and let his usual temperament reassert itself before lowering the priest to the floor, but not yet unhanding him. “My apologies, but I’ve been hunting these bastards for years, and if you’ve been harboring him…”

  “He came to us a few months ago,” the Pope admitted, distracting Abasi from Father Frank. “He wanted to write a paper on why the Catholic Church and Islam should work hand-in-hand for our mutual goals. He wanted it read on Al-Jazeera.” The Pope bent down to put the table back in place. “Personally, I was confused, but working with other religions is the only thing everyone believes my predecessors and I do right, so what could be the harm?” The Pope straightened the table, then reached for the place settings on the cart next to him. “Maybe he had retired from the field of death. Maybe he had become sane. Perhaps it was a chance to convert him — even if it was only in the sense of bringing him out of the darkness of an Afghan cave.”

  Before Abasi could follow up, Giovanni Figlia stepped forward and asked, “What parts of the archive did he want to look at, Your Holiness?”

  Pius gave a small shrug with his massive shoulders. “He did not mention any specifics to me, though he is required to tell the archivists. They have to give authorization to look at a specific range of documents, and they will bring researchers individual boxes by month, date, and year. You can go to the archives and you can see all that he looked over.”

  Figlia nodded. “Why are you telling us this, Your Holiness?”

  The Secret Service agent glanced at him and smiled. “Thanks for stepping up.”

  “I have to work here in the morning,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

  Father Frank replied for the Pope. “Ashid Yousef, al-Qaeda terrorist, was also murdered.”

  Abasi finally relaxed and let go of Frank, leaning against the front of a bookcase. “In all likelihood, Mossad decided to end him.”

  “There is a problem with that theory,” Father Frank answered patiently. “Killing upper level terrorists is counterproductive. Better they are interrogated.”

  Sean Ryan nodded, stepping further into the room. He wasn’t quite clear on how anyone had brought the name of a high-level terrorist into the conversation, or how this had all began, but he picked up where Father Frank left off. “You’re usually better off to follow him up the food chain. Get to his boss, or kidnap him, or suck the information out of his head.”

  Goldberg looked at Sean askance. “And you’re a Hollywood bodyguard?”

  Sean shrugged. “Any good mercenary must have information to survive. Besides, it’s common sense …” He grinned. “Don’t you read spy novels?”

  Father Frank gave a small smile. “But he is correct. Why kill the devil you know when you defang him, and get to other devils? Even I cannot believe that Mossad would kill Yousef, unless they had first interrogated him. The romance of killing an entire terrorist group with assassination squads, I believe, went out of favor after Mossad avenged the athletes from the Munich Olympics.”

  Abasi narrowed his eyes for a moment. “But you’re assuming this is like the world of spies instead of terrorists.”

  Figlia interjected, hoping to cut off this train wreck of a conversation. “Thank you, Your Holiness, for telling us about this. I will definitely follow up.”

  Pius raised an eyebrow. “Glad to know this might be of some help. And, Mr. Abasi, to answer your question, the chief of Vatican intelligence had a conversation with Director Weaver of the CIA. He, in turn, talked to the Mossad — no one knows anything about Mr. Yousef’s untimely demise. In fact, the DCI was quite upset with me, but he goes to my Church, and I doubt he wants me to remind him about reformation, reconciliation, that sort of thing.”

  The table was just barely long enough for six people, two on either side, and one on either end. Goldberg was small enough to fit Sean Ryan in between herself and Father Frank. The Pope sat on one end, with Father Frank Williams on his left. Abasi was on the Pope’s right, and Figlia was to the Egyptian’s right.

  Once they were settled in, Goldberg leaned forward, around Sean Ryan, and asked. “So, what exactly is going on in Sudan, Josh? I know it’s one of your bigger issues, but I’m not exactly getting all that much in America. In fact, they don’t put it on any television stations unless they’re running a stupid charity concert.”

  The Pope leaned back in his chair, and it creaked. “That is because your media dislikes saying anything that might possibly offend someone, or get in the way of their secularism. During the Bosnia crisis of the 1990s, for example—”

  Goldberg raised her hand to cut him off. “You could just call it Bosnia.”

  Father Frank leaned over to her, and Sean Ryan leaned back to let the priest have more room. “Around here, we have an institutional memory that thinks in centuries — we remember that Bosnia was in crisis 500 years ago, when the Turks first invaded.”

  “In any event,” the Pope continued, “your media insisted on calling Muslims ‘ethnic Albanians,’ and Orthodox Christians ‘Serbs,’ framing it as a racial war instead of an ongoing medieval jihad. The U.S. only acted when it threatened to spill over into other countries.

  “In Sudan… since the 1980s, the Arab, Islamic north has killed or enslaved any black African Christians they can get. In 1983, they instituted sharia law — theft punished by amputation, armed crimes were capital offenses, and adultery punishable by stoning. What did the great and powerful United Nations do? They put Sudan onto the Human Rights Commission!”

  Goldberg saw how the Pope seemed to change color as the intensity of his delivery increased. “I’m sorry to say this, sir — and, sorry, I call everyone ‘sir’—but even ‘white’ slavery has been ignored, and they sell sex slaves. What makes sharia any different?”

  Figlia winced, closing his eyes. He had never, not even once, felt uncomfortable questioning the Pope. He had never been discouraged from being anything less than candid in his conversations, But even he was a little less blunt.

  The Pope nodded. It was a question so familiar he had an automatic reply. “That is not the only issue. The north has old Soviet bombers, and they targeted churches — on Sundays. Some were bombed every Sunday. Once, as my plane left, the government bombed the airfield. This was shortly after government troops invaded Khartoum’s Anglican cathedral sending in grenades first. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury described their policy as ‘torture, rape, destruction of property, slavery and death, and forcible conversion.’ It is a case of Christians versus Muslims, but who does the American politician wish to offend? Aid the north and promote genocide, or aid the Christians and risk offending future terrorists?”

  Goldberg was about to answer, when Abasi said, “No one can profit. And no one wants to be bothered with a large potential mess over the long run. It’s not worth it.”

  Pius said “Correct. While it is quiet for now, another genocide will probably begin soon. And Sudan is merely one of over a hundred petty little wars on the same continent. I sometimes think I’m the only head of state that cares about people who aren’t politically ‘mine’, whom I can’t get anything out of. I’ve had to yell at, cajole, threaten, plead, beg, borrow and practically steal in order to do what I have. Food drops are hard to arrange, to say nothing of the cost. If the Italian banks ever decided to foreclose on us, we’d be broke.”

  Special Agent Goldberg couldn’t help but laugh. “Why? The Vatican has a deficit?”

  Figlia nodded, fielding this one. “In 2007, the Vatican had a deficit of over fifteen million euros. Not to mention one of the recent heads of the Vatican bank embezzling over thirty million dollars into his own private account.”

  The Pope nodded. “And since taking the position, I have not put us in the black.” The Pope smiled, looked at his hands, and laughed. “At least, not in monetary terms.”

  Sean chuckled. “You can say that again.” He glanced at Goldberg. “Let’s put it this way; my salary actually comes from one of the local noble families.”

  Goldberg arched a brow.
“You’re not doing this for free?”

  Sean shook his head. “As much as I would like, I can’t afford to — I have a company to run. My own personal share is purely expenses — my money is no good in this city. But I’m the head of an organization that does everything from bodyguard work to kidnap and rescue—

  “So you kidnap and recover? A full service, huh?” Goldberg snarked.

  “—if I’m not there, my employees suffer,” Sean continued, ignoring her. “I’m wanted… dead or alive, by some people.” He shrugged. “But the Pope has some good benefactors.”

  “True,” the Pope said with a wistful smile. “It is not enough for my purposes. But still …our Lord said the Earth belongs to the prince of this world, but I am not going to let him have it without a fight. Despite the policy of turning the other cheek, there are lines I will not see crossed. No matter the cost.”

  * * *

  Maureen McGrail’s pale green eyes flicked to her watch, hoping that the books she had picked up would at least be useful: she had grabbed several books on Pius XII at random in Keohane’s bookstore immediately before she went to the airport. Upon arrival, she discovered that she was in business class — the Vatican had paid for it, which was… odd.

  She shook away any suspicions and decided to get back to the case. There was only one real piece of evidence pointing to Father Richard Harrington’s killer: the swastika carved into his forehead. Calling card? Motive? Red herring? After all, Harrington’s heroics were over sixty years ago.

  She smiled at the thought of an eighty-year-old fellow priest doing Harrington in. But aside from that, there weren’t many options. Either a neo-Nazi punk had broken into the Markist rectory and killed Father Harrington as revenge for hiding Jews during World War II (ridiculous), or he had been killed by someone who knew him well…

  Or someone wanted to prevent him from telling what he had done during the war.

  Hmm… the priest who knew too much. All we need now is Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, and Jerry Bruckheimer to make the movie, and we’ll be set. McGrail shook her head. If Father Harrington was killed over something to do with the Nazis, it might help to know what he did. Now, who was it he worked with back in the forties? A Father Carroll-Abbing, that’s right.