by William Kerr
Pastorelli laughed, guiding Matt and Park toward his office from the parking lot off St. Augustine Road. “Regardless of past misdeeds, I was deeply saddened by Mr. Shoemaker’s death. As for Mrs. Shoemaker, I do hope she and her brother will find peace.”
“Not unless the streets of wherever she ended up are paved with gold and named after her,” Park said with a sour laugh.
The bishop chuckled as he pushed through the door on the side of the building. “My private entrance. Leads directly to my office. Coffee, Mr. Park, Mr. Berkeley?”
“None for me, thank you. I’ve only a few minutes.” Matt said. “Got an appointment with a realtor about my aunt’s house.”
“Me neither,” Park said, “We just wanted you to know a few things that happened after your meeting with Starla Shoemaker and Eric Bruder. Kinda fill in some blanks not covered by the media.”
“I do appreciate that. So sad. So sad, also, the loss of your wife, Mr. Berkeley…And that Dr. Mason. What will happen to her?”
Matt shook his head slowly. “I knew her father in Vietnam and now Brandy, her daughter, and her brother for a number of years. A damn good woman, Bishop. Well respected by the archaeological community, but she got taken in by all the glitter surrounding the Shoemakers. I’ll try to help her all I can.”
“But the gold found on the Starla Alliance. It came from the sunken U-boat?”
“Yes, sir,” Matt answered. “Apparently gold taken from the corpses of prisoners at the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp. Their teeth, jewelry, whatever.”
“What will they do with it? Give it to Germany? Israel?”
“Good question, but the Germans killed several million Catholic Poles, along with thousands of Gypsies and Russians, as well as Jews at Auschwitz. Who gets it? Whoever makes that decision is way above my head, that’s for sure.”
“And mine,” Park added. “We understand that the State Department has contacted the German government about the U-Twenty-five thirty-seven, their ownership, and salvage rights.”
Bishop Pastorelli was silent for a moment, his eyes straying to the shelves of books that surrounded the office, then back to Matt and Steve Park. “History can sometimes be very cruel, but at the same time, a portent of the future. Certainly, it can have a great impact on men’s lives, for good or for evil.” The bishop gnawed momentarily on his lower lip before asking, “Was there anything else, anything of uhhh…of importance that might have come from the submarine?”
Matt smiled. “Yes, there was. Something I, for some reason, forgot to tell the police about.” He looked at Park and winked. “I think this might be the answer to your question.” Releasing the clasps on his briefcase, a suction-like sound was created as Matt lifted the lid and pulled out a brown leather pouch, its outer flap tightly wrapped around and folded over many times, the surface coated with a waxy substance. “One thing I’ll say about the people who first wrapped this thing, they certainly made it waterproof.”
Removing the pouch from the case, Matt held it up to the light and read, “‘Zweite Concordat zwischen der Heiligen See und das Deutsches Reich’ and the date. The so-called Second Concordat.”
Pastorelli crossed himself and asked, “How did you get it?”
“The briefcase. It’s waterproof. I pulled it out of the water after Starla’s boat blew up. Didn’t know what it contained until I opened it.” Matt held up the pouch. “Probably wouldn’t have known what it was if I hadn’t seen it on the U-boat.”
“You saw it?” the bishop asked, astonishment in his voice.
Park placed his hand next to his mouth and, with a conspiratorial whisper, said, “On the U-boat, where he wasn’t supposed to be.”
Matt smiled. “Held it in my hands until Eric Bruder took it away and tried to kill me.”
Bishop Pastorelli stared at the pouch in Matt’s hand, his mouth open. Matt knew the man wanted to ask, but something was holding him back.
“And I suppose you want to know what we’re going to do with it?”
The bishop smiled weakly, his head nodding up and down. “Well, yes, that question had occurred to me.”
Matt removed a jewel case containing a rewritable CD marked Concordat and a folder from the briefcase. He closed the briefcase lid, stood, and moved to the bishop’s desk. “After I left the Alliance Industries Building and before the police arrived, Steve found this CD and a folder. Copies of the concordat. One in German, one in Italian, and what looks like an English translation. I have no idea if any other copies were made, but we’re giving everything to you.”
Pastorelli exhaled his relief as he took the pouch, CD, and envelope from Matt. “Thank God. Do you know what these things contain?”
“Other than the title hand-printed on the CD and the titles on the copies in the folder, neither Matt nor I have read anything, if that’s what you’re asking,” Park answered.
“But from all the fuss over the first concordat between Germany and the Vatican,” Matt said, “we’ve got a damn good idea. We saw you and the priests coming out of the Alliance Industries Building. Starla Shoemaker was trying to blackmail the Church because of what’s in the folder, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, Mr. Berkeley. She was.”
“So far as we’re concerned, it’s up to the Catholic Church to determine if the document is authentic and, if so, whether it’s to be shared with the rest of the world.”
THE END
Other novels
by
William Kerr
Path of the Golden Dragon
The Red Hand
The Collector
Death’s Bright Angel
Judgment Call
BLOOD EAGLE
Robert Barr Smith
A single pistol shot in the night, and an attractive young woman is dead, a suicide. A passing thing in 1931 Munich. Except the dead woman was Adolf Hitler’s niece and mistress, the lovely Geli Raubal. The pistol was Hitler’s. And the location was Hitler’s sumptuous flat.
More than half a century later, despite the facts surrounding Geli’s death, surely no one should care. But western intelligence learns someone does care. Very much. Both the KGB and a well-financed neo-Nazi organization. And both are willing to murder to uncover a long-buried secret connected to Geli’s demise. A secret important enough to torture and kill to find three elderly Germans.
American Tom Cooper and Englishman Simon Berwick, agents of U.S. intelligence and British MI6, are given the mission to find the three before the Russians or the Nazis. Both men have scores to settle. Both lost their families to terrorist bombs. They have killed for their countries in the twilight war of espionage; they will kill again.
More than one person has already died in the desperate race across Germany. More will die before the search ends in a blinding snowstorm above Hitler’s former residence high on the Obersalzburg in Bavaria. And the only reward for the agent who makes a mistake will be a nameless grave.
ISBN# 9781933836102
Hardcover / Suspense
US $24.95 / CDN $33.95
Available Now
“Beres (Grand Traverse) goes one step beyond The Manchurian Candidate in this engrossing thriller, which sometimes seems too obvious but then foils expectations by twisting the reader’s mind along with that of the protagonist. Recommended for all popular fiction collections.”
—Library Journal
Stanley Johnson. An ordinary man, widower, early retiree, biding his time until Social Security kicks in.
An ex-prostitute, heroin junkie, just trying to hang on to life.
Her Sugar Daddy. Wealthy, powerful, mysterious.
The couple in the apartment across from Stan. His ex-employer. His landlady. His would-be girlfriend. The ghosts of his wife and son.
The upcoming presidential election.
And a plot so convoluted, so sick and twisted, it will rock the world. The President’s Nemesis. They will stop him…if they can.
ISBN# 9781932815733
Hard
cover / Political Thriller
US $24.95 / CDN $33.95
Available Now
www.michaelberes.com
Calvin Samuels is a public defender with a passion for sticking by the underdog. His clients are desperate men and women with desperate cases. Like John Rogers. Although Samuels saved him from a life behind bars, he couldn’t save his life. Within months of his acquittal, Rogers’ body is fished from the Ohio River, two bullet holes in the back of his head. Police speculate his death was the result of a drug deal gone bad.
Believing he failed a friend who depended on him, Samuels seeks redemption in the representation of Mark Alexander, accused of the brutal murder of two drug dealers. Needing to believe in his client’s innocence, however, Samuels is blind to clues that Alexander is not what, or who, he seems. Until he meets Allison Morris, Alexander’s former lover and the prosecution’s most damning witness. Could Alexander actually be Rogers’ murderer?
But when the trial finally reaches its stunning conclusion, Samuels’ descent into the maelstrom has only just begun.
ISBN# 9781932815627
Mass Market Paperback / Suspense
US $7.99 / CDN $10.99
Available Now
“Fast, engaging — a fine debut.”
—Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author of One Shot
Sam Bass is tall and lanky, loves old western movies, wears cowboy boots and drives a beat-up Jeep Wrangler. He has a gorgeous girlfriend, Valerie, a Cherokee widow with a young son, and he’s a hot shot pilot. A hot shot pilot with a past. And when Sam makes a daring and dangerous rescue of a couple lost at sea in a storm, he gets publicity he definitely doesn’t need.
The Cowboy, as he’s known in certain circles, has finally been located and a hit team is dispatched to take care of unfinished business. A bomb is planted in the beat-up Jeep. But it isn’t Sam who drives it that day.
Grief stricken, Sam visits Valerie’s grandfather in the North Carolina mountains to tell him he plans to avenge Valerie in the ancient Native American way of members of a wronged family seeking justice — with no help from the law. With only the old man’s help, Sam trains his mind and body for the task ahead.
And then the bloody hunt is on…
ISBN# 9781932815597
Mass Market Paperback / Suspense
US $6.99 / CDN $9.99
Available Now
www.philbowie.com
Journalist Katherine Nikulasson’s father, Gustav, noted historian and archaeologist, has been killed in a plane crash. Some of his papers, now missing, lead Katherine to question the veracity of the accident report, and the loyalty of her father’s longtime friend, Sheppard Wilde.
A search for the truth takes Katherine to Wilde’s estate in England where she uncovers a conspiracy that shakes her to the core. Unaware she has now become a pawn in that conspiracy, an unwitting Katherine is kidnapped by Enrique Quisette, leader of an art smuggling syndicate, a man who will destroy anyone who stands in the way of what he wants.
Wilde knows what Quisette wants. And he knows he must find Katherine before she’s of no further use to Quisette. Using every resource, from the lush underworld of smuggling to the grimy back streets of Athens, Wilde begins a race against time. It is not his only challenge.
For three powerful people, each risking his life, once signed an extraordinary agreement. Its intent: Protect the heritage of an ancient people, one of the world’s richest remaining treasures. Now Wilde must not only rescue Katherine, but uphold the secret he has sworn to protect in The Gold Covenant.
ISBN# 9781933836010
Mass Market Paperback / Suspense
US $6.99 / CDN $8.99
Available Now
1985, a year before the Chernobyl disaster. Hidden away in a wine cellar in the western Ukraine, Chernobyl engineer Mihaly Horvath, brother of a Kiev Militia detective Lazlo Horvath, reveals details of unnecessary risks being taken at the Chernobyl plant. Concerned for his brother and family, Lazlo investigates—irritating superiors, drawing the attention of a CIA operative, raising the hackles of an old school KGB major, and discovering his brother’s secret affair with Juli Popovics, a Chernobyl technician.
When the Chernobyl plant explodes scores of lives are changed forever. As Lazlo questions his brother’s death in the blast, Juli arrives in Kiev to tell the detective she carries his brother’s child. If their lives aren’t complicated enough, KGB major Grigor Komarov enters the fray, reawakening a hard-line past to manipulate deadly resources.
Now the Ukraine is not only blanketed with deadly radiation, but becomes a killing ground involving pre-perestroika factions in disarray, a Soviet government on its last legs, and madmen hungry for power as they eye Gorbachev’s changes.
With a poisoned environment at their backs and a killer snapping at their heels, Lazlo and Juli flee for their lives—and their love— toward the Western frontier.
ISBN# 9781933836294
Hardcover / International Thriller
US $25.95 / CDN $28.95
Available Now
www.michaelberes.com