‘Mr Dulac undoubtedly,’ said the voice after the fifth ring.
Dulac recognized the nasal, clipped accent of his compatriot. In an instant, Dulac felt all of the frustration and bottled-up anger he’d accumulated over the three years of chasing down his enemy, his nemesis, come to the surface. Dulac sat down on the edge of the bed, and reached for his pack of Gitanes on the night table.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m quite surprised you returned the call. I wasn’t expecting such courtesy from the man trying to get rid of me.’
‘You’ve got it ass-backwards, de Ségur. It was your man who tried to kill me last night.’
‘Wrong again. I’m talking about Roquebrun. Did you really think that I wouldn’t find out about your silly plan to—’
‘What the hell is this about then?’
‘Dulac, your polemics won’t get us anywhere. Just so you know where I’m coming from, I have the latest news concerning the state of health of the Pope.’
‘You mean your impostor from Benghazi.’
‘As you wish. According to my informant, he won’t make it. That is why I decided to call you.’ There was a moment of silence. ‘It was going so well, until….’ De Ségur started to cough uncontrollably. ‘Sorry. I—’
‘Until your plan to control 1.6 billion Catholics went sour?’
‘As always you oversimplify, Dulac. But as much as I hate to admit it, I’ll give you credit for the voice analyzer. We thought the larynx operation had gone perfectly.’
‘It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out what you’re up to with this impostor.’
‘We checked his medical records, but we hadn’t foreseen a stroke. Always risky, the business of impersonation. Everything was going according to plan, until then.’
Dulac lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. ‘For how long did you think you could get away with this? A couple of months? A year? Someone else was bound to find out. The Vatican would surely—’
‘Attack his reforms? On what grounds? Merely because they would eventually doubt the Pope’s legitimacy? Look at it even now. The Curia doesn’t know what to do. They don’t dare reveal the truth.’
‘You seem well informed on the Curia. Gonzales?’
‘Of course.’
‘Beside Gonzales and Romer, who were the conspirators on the inside?’ said Dulac.
‘That’s irrelevant now. No, I called, much to my dismay and distaste, believe me, to meet you and to quote the hackneyed expression, “make you an offer you can’t refuse”.’
‘What offer could I possibly refuse from a kidnapper and a murderer?’
‘Ah, sarcasm, the easiest form of humor and the trait of an ordinary mind. Your predictability never ceases to amuse me, Dulac. Classifications aside, I’ve arranged for us to meet in Belize City, tomorrow evening. I’ve reserved a ticket in your name for the morning flight to New York. The connecting flight to Belize City gets in at 4 p.m.’
‘Why in hell’s name would I go anywhere to meet you?’
‘Because I have something here that you want.’
‘If you’re talking about the diary—’
‘Dulac, trust me. I guarantee you will accept my offer. Oh, and don’t bother calling Roquebrun. I’m told he’s enjoying the Vatican’s money in a five star brothel in Kuala Lumpur.’
‘Bastard. Out of curiosity, who ratted? Garcia?’
‘Must be, although that’s also irrelevant now.’
‘Not to me. If you didn’t, Garcia must have ordered the contract to whack me.’
‘Why don’t you ask him? By the way, I booked your room at the Hotel Mirador and I’ve deposited $10,000 USD in your Paris bank account, for incidentals. You’re probably thinking you’ll need company. Shall we meet in the hotel restaurant, say at 7 p.m.? Oh, and Dulac, time is pressing. Don’t disappoint me.’
The line went dead.
‘Go for it,’ said Karen over the phone. ‘What have you got to lose?’
‘Try two miserable days flying half way round the planet on a quack call from a murdering psychopath.’
‘Like it or not, in one way or another, he’s always kept his promise.’
‘That’s a strange way of looking at it,’ said Dulac. ‘At first, I thought he wanted to sell me the diary, but why go through all that trouble? He can send it directly to the Vatican. There’s something else, but why me?’
‘Bizarre as it may seem, you’re probably the only one he can trust.’
‘I’ve checked the reservations and they’re confirmed and paid for. And I received ten grand in my account. I suppose if he wanted me dead, he would just hire another hit man.’ Dulac took a drag from his Gitane. First, I’ve got to call Gina again. Then I have some unfinished business in Belize.’
‘If you don’t mind, this time I won’t go with you. But do be careful, Thierry.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll have professional backup.’
Chapter 38
André Jourdan, the retired French Bureau operative working as a freelance bodyguard, had agreed to cover Dulac in Belize. At 6 p.m., they entered the Hotel Mirador’s lobby and went to the front desk.
‘Yes, Mr de Ségur has a reservation for four at 7 p.m.,’ said the clerk.
Dulac and Jourdan went to their rooms, and Dulac called Garcia. ‘Hello Juan.’
‘Thierry? Thierry, my friend.’ Garcia’s millisecond hesitation confirmed to Dulac he had his man. ‘How are you? You sound local.’
‘I am.’
‘You are proceeding with…?’
‘We have unfinished business, Juan. Meet me at the Mirador in the lobby in an hour.’
‘Why so rushed, my friend? Why don’t we have lunch tomorrow?’
‘Always “my friend” eh? Cut the crap, Juan. In an hour. In the lobby. I guarantee it’s in your best interest to be there.’
‘If you insist.’
Dulac flipped his phone shut. He took the envelope on his desk and went to Jourdan’s room.
‘Stay in the lobby, in the background until I signal you to join. I don’t want to tip my hand early.’
‘Understood.’
Four scotches later, Dulac and Jourdan stood beside the elevators, hiding behind a large tropical plant but with a clear view of the lobby. Dulac fidgeted nervously with the legal-size brown envelope.
A few moments later, Dulac saw Garcia walk in. ‘That’s him,’ he whispered to Jourdan. Garcia looked about, spotted the seated busty blonde busy powdering her nose, and sat down in the sofa facing her. When she confronted his stare, he gave her that lecherous, tooth-gaped smile of his. She turned away icily, and she resumed pampering her delicate appendage.
Garcia glanced about the lobby, then continued staring at the girl. She seemed oblivious to his very existence. Dulac recognized the bodyguards in Florence as two men walked in, nodded to Garcia, and looked furtively about.
Dulac waited for them to sit down then walked over to Garcia, breaking Garcia’s one-way connection to the blonde magnet. ‘Let’s go to the lounge,’ said Dulac, ignoring Garcia’s offered hand. Dulac glanced over in Jourdan’s direction and nodded almost imperceptibly.
‘Suit yourself.’ Garcia looked back at the men in the chairs, and they rose in unison, following Dulac and Garcia into the lounge.
Dulac and Garcia sat down in the wicker chairs and ordered drinks. As Dulac deposited the envelope next to him on the small table, from the corner of his eye, he saw Jourdan sit down discreetly behind Garcia’s men and reach inside his vest.
‘So, Juan, surprised to see me?’ said Dulac.
‘Yes, to see you in Belize so soon,’ said Garcia, looking unfazed.
‘Let’s stop the charade, Juan. In case you haven’t heard, your hit man is dead.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
‘And your mother gave virginal birth to an angel, right Juan?’
‘Keep this—’
‘But first, let’s talk about your asshole Roquebrun.’ Dul
ac stared at Garcia for any hint of reaction at the mention of the name.
‘Sure. You contacted him?’
‘You know goddamn well I contacted him. The Vatican paid him $11 million up front. That bastard has run to Kuala Lumpur with it and probably another couple of million from de Ségur.’
‘I just gave you his name, that’s all. I didn’t have any dealings with him.’
‘Bullshit. You got a nice fat payback from Roquebrun and that’s fine. That’s the price of doing business. But for you to sell me out to de Ségur, to try and have me whacked, that I take offence to.’
‘I, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You’d better do better than that, Juan. Way better.’ Dulac reached forward and took the envelope on the table. He saw Garcia’s men instinctively reach inside their vests. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to postpone leaking out to the other members of your sugar cartel the fact you have been screwing the head man Vic Baldoni’s wife Michelle, for the last six months. Here.’ Dulac reached in the envelope and threw the lurid photographs on the table beside the drinks. ‘These are for you. The best-ever shots of your Latin ass in action.’
Garcia looked down. His face went white. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘And in exchange, you’re going to deposit 11.1 million USD into a trust account of Hayes and Smith, lawyers in London before the end of the week. $11 million USD to the benefit of the Vatican, care of Cardinal Andrea Sforza, and $100,000 to my benefit, for personal damages.’
Garcia’s expression had lost all of its smugness and joviality. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘You bet your sweating Latin balls I would. And you’re going to tell me about my meeting with de Ségur.’
‘You’re meeting de Ségur?’ Garcia looked genuinely surprised.
‘At seven. He insisted that I have dinner with him. He says it’s urgent.’
‘Give me two weeks for the money. I don’t know anything about a meeting with de Ségur, I swear.’
‘Allow me to doubt that too, Juan. Two commissions are better than one.’
‘On my mother’s grave, I don’t know why de Ségur called you.’
‘I’m about to find out, and if you lied Garcia, your sweet sugar friends, I don’t want to even think of how they’ll kill you.’
‘Please, my wife, I have two children, please, for our fathers’ friendship sake.’
‘You should have thought of that before. Remember, Juan, one week.’
The nurse sat drowsily ensconced in her chair, reading, when suddenly the strident cry of an alarm at the console and the blinking red light pulled her out of her Danielle Steel dream, into urgent reality. In a split second, she was on the intercom. ‘Life assist in room 1047. Life assist, room 1047.’
Seconds later, two doctors hurried past her, followed by an assistant pulling a cart with a defibrillator and an oxygen tank. As they rushed past the Swiss Guard posted at the papal room and entered, what they saw confirmed their fears. The white pulse line on the gray backdrop of the monitor showed that he was on the verge of death.
The young doctor with the crew cut put the Schiller defibrillator’s paddles on the patient’s chest. ‘Contact,’ he ordered.
The torso heaved, with the spasm of 1,700 volts violently repulsing the doctor’s paddles. ‘Contact.’ The doctor looked at the monitor. ‘Contact. Again.’
All eyes focused intently on the dormant monitor. Nothing. Then suddenly, a small blip, then a second, then a third, interrupted the line. Soon, the vital signs became stronger and a look of collective relief appeared on the faces of the two doctors and the assistant.
‘Get the anesthetist,’ said the young doctor with the crew cut. ‘We have to pull him out of the coma or we’ll lose him.’
‘If he comes out of the coma, the intracranial hypertension will destroy the rest of his brain,’ said the short, red-headed female anesthetist, looking at the young doctor. ‘There’s a strong chance he’ll be a vegetable.’
The doctor opened his cellphone and called Cardinal Legnano. ‘We have to decide now, your Eminence. He won’t survive another attack.’
‘What do you recommend?’ said Legnano.
‘It’s not my call.’
‘I’ll convene the Curia.’
‘That’s your decision.’
‘Keep him in the coma’, said Sforza. ‘If he happens to—’
‘He could survive the operation,’ said Legnano.
‘And be a walking dead man,’ said Fouquet.
‘Your Eminences, why do I have the impression your decision is more influenced by political expediency than by his chances of survival?’ said Legnano.
‘That’s unfair, Cardinal,’ said Sforza.
‘You seem to forget,’ said Fouquet, ‘that some of the doctors already suspect the man in room 1047 is not the Pope. That suspicion will grow.’
‘If he stays a vegetable, we still have a problem,’ said Sforza. ‘The whole ugly story will eventually come out.’
‘On top of it, he is living proof of the—’
‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing,’ said Legnano, banging his fist on the desk. ‘The man will live if I can help it. Who are we to play God?’ He dialed the hospital’s number. ‘Doctor, Cardinal Legnano. We’ve decided. Pull His Holiness out of the coma and proceed with the operation.’
Belize City, Hotel Mirador, Château Caribbean Restaurant, 7.05 p.m.
Dulac and Jourdan sat at the elegantly set table in the discreet room, to the side of the main dining room. In front of them, the sun’s rays caressed the shores of the outlying islands with their soft, diffuse light.
Suddenly, Dulac’s reverie was interrupted as three men in bad suits entered the room, opening an invisible path for the man behind them, dressed in a blue blazer and mauve shirt and smoking an expensivelooking cigar.
‘Welcome to Belize, Dulac,’ said Hugues de Ségur. ‘And this is?’
‘André Jourdan,’ said the ex-French Bureau operative, his face expressionless.
De Ségur nodded.
Dulac thought de Ségur appeared considerably thinner than when he last saw him, at the opera in Paris three years prior. He glanced at the bad suits, as two of them posted themselves on either side of the door, the third at the other end of the room. Dulac turned to de Ségur. ‘I thought this was a friendly meeting.’
‘Even in Belize, one can’t be too careful; you never know what silly moves Interpol might try. I hear you’ve been suspended.’
‘You heard right. What’s the offer?’
‘Always in such a hurry, Dulac. Take off your Interpol straitjacket for a while and enjoy the view.’ He took a puff from his cigar and blew away and to the side. De Ségur then took the wine list from the waiter standing beside him. ‘I’m afraid the selection here is rather limited. No good Bordeaux to speak of. How about a Penfold’s Shiraz?’
Dulac nodded in acquiescence. ‘Anything before? Dry martini?’
‘Scotch on the rocks,’ said Dulac.
‘And you?’ said de Ségur to Jourdan.
‘Mineral water.’
‘Two Glenlivets,’ said de Ségur to the waiter, who bowed and left the room.
‘By the way, I’m curious. Who is this, this impostor of yours?’ said Dulac.
‘You mean my Pope?’ said de Ségur, blowing a lungful of smoke away from the table. ‘A little respect please, at least for the function. I’m surprised your people at Interpol haven’t found out yet. Anyway, that’s all moot now. He’s an unemployed Israeli actor by the name of David Silverman, who had the good fortune for us to be the Pope’s lookalike, well, almost, and to owe a substantial amount of money to the Tel-Aviv Mafia. They were going to collect, rather permanently, so we had no trouble convincing Silverman that instead, it would only cost him a small replaceable part of his anatomy. In exchange, we erased his debt to the Mafia.’
‘And all this for?’
‘I don’t have time to go through with you the
years of planning, organizing and recruiting for this operation. We were so close to succeeding. So very close….’ De Ségur’s eyes became wistful, looking past Dulac into empty space. ‘The world would be a different place if—’
‘So we have, for the moment, a Jewish Pope?’
‘With a Cathar agenda,’ said de Ségur with obvious pride.
‘What happened to the real Pope?’
‘Most unfortunate. He became lost when the Bellerophon sank, outside of Benghazi. Shall we order?’
Dulac began to look at the menu when suddenly he saw de Ségur’s head start twitching uncontrollably, jerking de Ségur back in his chair, which began tilting backwards dangerously. One of the suits lunged towards the chair and caught it just as de Ségur was about to fall over backwards.
Clutching his throat with his right hand, de Ségur gasped. ‘Water, water.’
The guard grabbed the water glass and brought it to de Ségur’s lips and shaking head. Finally, the attack subsided, and de Ségur took careful sips. His head twitched again and sent half the contents of the glass down the front of his blazer and shirt.
‘Damn. At least it’s not the scotch.’
Dulac twisted slightly in his chair and looked uncomfortably at de Ségur, who had regained his composure.
‘Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, Dulac, commonly known as mad cow. Inoperable, incurable and deadly. It seems I inherited the defective gene from my late father. I had a twenty per cent chance of getting the prion mutation.’ De Ségur took another puff from his cigar. ‘Until recently, I thought I’d beaten the odds.’
They both sat in uneasy silence for a moment, as Dulac digested the information. ‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘You don’t have to be. Soon all your problems with me will be over, Dulac.’
‘How long do you have?’
‘Between two and four months, if these quacks don’t kill me first with their bloody drugs.’
The Chimera Sanction Page 28