After the call, Laura said to Ray, “We may be staying with the pope.”
“I thought he’d got out of there.”
“Out of the Vatican. He’s still in Rome.”
“He might consider Avignon,” Ray said wryly.
“Ho ho.”
With everything ready to go in the galley, she took a seat next to Ray.
“This is great scotch. Want to try it?”
“Maybe later.”
He passed her his glass. She took it and sipped. It confirmed her belief that scotch was a man’s drink.
When Nate joined them, he just shook his head at the suggestion of a drink. It was the first chance Laura had had to tell him of the Villa Stritch. It was only when she added that the pope was there that he reacted.
“I want to meet him.”
“We’ll see.”
“I want his blessing on Refuge of Sinners, Laura.”
“I told John you’d like an audience.” And so she had, weeks ago.
“Good. Good.”
She went on to tell him of Traeger’s thus far unsuccessful efforts to retrieve the third secret of Fatima file.
“I hope he’s careful,” Nate said. “The man who has it killed for it.”
“More than once. Traeger has something the man wants more.”
Nate had been involved in enough business negotiations to realize that many things could go wrong with even the most carefully planned deal. A quid pro quo could look pretty good until one began to think of getting the quid without giving up the quo. But what would that assassin want with the third secret of Fatima?
“Did you ask about Heather?” Nate asked.
“She’s fine.”
“She can fly back with us.”
Laura fed Laurel and Hardy first, and then the three of them settled down to their meal.
“There ought to be some wine back there,” Nate said.
“Red or white?”
“Not for me.” He was on some kind of ascetic kick but wouldn’t talk about it. He had found a spiritual director at Saint Anselm’s, a Father Fortin, in whom he was well pleased. So pleased, he had talked with the abbot about assigning Fortin to Empedocles as resident chaplain.
“He said the college would fall apart without him.”
“Father Fortin said that?”
Nate frowned. “No. The abbot.”
After the meal, they dimmed the lights. Nate kept the light over his seat on so he could read The Soul of the Apostolate. Laura cranked back her seat and closed her eyes. Who would have thought when she went to work for Ignatius Hannan that she would get swept up in a one-man religious revival? She and Ray were celibate for the nonce, their form of wedding preparation. Nate had not seemed surprised when they told him their plans.
“You’ll have to find your successor, Laura.”
“Are you firing me?”
“But you’ll be resigning.”
“Marriage and resignation go together like a horse and carriage,” Ray said.
The weather got choppy as they approached the Continent. Nate went forward again and Ray dozed, thanks to the single malt scotch. The sun had been coming to meet them throughout the flight, and it was a clear bright morning as they came down the coast of Italy. They landed at Ciampino and John was there to meet them.
“We all set at the Villa Stritch?” Laura asked.
“All set.”
As they drove to the villa, John said, “Traeger was there when I left, talking with a man named Dortmund.”
“Who’s Dortmund?”
“A former colleague, apparently.”
III
“No one is more ruthless than a zealot.”
“I still have the floor plans you drew for me,” Anatoly said, increasing Remi Pouvoir’s surprise at finding him at his elbow in the Vatican Archives.
“How did you get in here?” the little priest asked.
“I just followed your directions.”
Pouvoir looked left and right, beyond Anatoly, then took his arm and drew him off behind a row of cabinets. “What you are looking for isn’t here,” he hissed.
“You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.” Pouvoir thought. “I can show you where the reports should be.”
“And I will trust that you are telling me the truth.”
Fear is a remarkable aid to honest reactions. He could almost see the thoughts sliding through the little priest’s mind. This was the man who had killed the secretary of state, Buffoni his aide, and then Cardinal Maguire. What restraint could be expected of a man with that kind of bloody record? Anatoly recalled the almost eager complicity with which Pouvoir had drawn up the floor plans and given him directions. Had he imagined that Anatoly would burn those sheets after they had served their purpose?
“I know the reports are not here. I have arranged to get them.”
Pouvoir nodded. “I know, I know. You will make the exchange at the risk of your life.”
“Explain.”
Pouvoir’s mood of eager complicity was back.
“First of all, there is Rodriguez and his people. They will have an excellent vantage point to the proceedings.”
“And you think they will try to take me out?”
“There are others,” Pouvoir said.
Others from the CIA were in Rome, their mission to apprehend Traeger. “He is wanted for a murder committed in the States.”
Anatoly smiled. He took pride in the way he had neutralized Traeger after they had played their cat and mouse game in New Hampshire. Of course the pursuit of Traeger would continue once they knew he had escaped to Rome. But that meant Traeger was at risk, not him.
“You could be a target of opportunity.” But Pouvoir simply said it, laying no stress on it. “The Confraternity of Pius IX will give anything to get hold of the third secret of Fatima.” He peered at Anatoly. “You have it?”
“I have it.”
Pouvoir stepped back to study Anatoly. The little archivist’s fear was waning. He and Anatoly were allies, were they not? Had he not awaited him through the years, and helped when his help was asked? Of course, Pouvoir had thought he was acting in an official capacity, that Chekovsky had run out of patience pursuing the reports in a diplomatic way and had decided on direct action. Anatoly had encouraged that inference; it had got him the floor plans, the incriminating floor plans, as Pouvoir must now realize they were.
“And Chekovsky?”
Pouvoir was surprised. “You would know more about that than I.”
He let it go. “What about the confraternity?”
“I know their minds. They would not consider the use of force in taking that file from you as a breach of morality. No one is more ruthless than a zealot. Jean-Jacques Trepanier has come to join forces with Catena. He is a greater zealot than any of them. Think. You have stolen a message from the Mother of God. What moral prohibitions could protect you?”
“They know where the exchange is to take place?” Anatoly did not like this.
“They have heard.” He passed a thin hand over his sunken cheek. “There could be others there as well, I think. The electronics billionaire Ignatius Hannan has come to Rome with his staff.”
Anatoly was not surprised that the proposed exchange should have drawn such attention. One of the reasons for drawing Traeger to the rooftop on what he did not realize was a trial run was to give the planned exchange a chance to be more widely known. There were too many people too deeply interested to expect that it could have been kept secret. He didn’t want it to be a secret. He wanted many rival and competing interests to be represented there. Traeger he trusted. He doubted that Traeger had divulged the plan for the exchange. Obviously Anatoly had not been the only one to observe him come onto the rooftop of the North American College. If no one else, Rodriguez would have kept himself informed of what Traeger was doing.
But it was not from such people that he felt danger would come. Chekovsky’s interest in the reports of the assassi
nation attempt on John Paul II had been too intense, too persistent, to be merely a diplomatic interest, the activity of a man representing his country. His country! With that animal Putin in charge of the government. The others Pouvoir mentioned were interested in the document he was willing to exchange. Only he and Chekovsky seemed interested in what he would receive for it. No, if there was to be danger for him, it would come from Chekovsky.
“I appreciate your help,” he said to Pouvoir. “As always.”
“Is that why you came here?”
“In part. But also to remind you of your helpfulness in drawing up those floor plans.”
“Then you will know your way out.”
“First, another favor. Where is the apartment Rodriguez will use for observation?”
Pouvoir told him. “I don’t think he would harm you.”
“You might want to tell them to be on the alert this afternoon.”
Anatoly moved easily through the angry mobs that thronged the streets. They would consider him one of them. Perhaps he was. He crossed the Tiber, sat on a ledge, and telephoned Traeger.
“Two thirty.”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“This afternoon. Come alone.”
IV
“It’s a priest.”
Neal Admirari had just settled himself for forty winks when Donna Quando called.
“H hour approaches.”
He actually had to think before he understood. “When?”
“I’ll meet you in the penthouse apartment.” She gave him Ladislaw’s address.
“I’m on my way.”
And on the way, unbidden thoughts came. The realization that the gap between his age and Angela’s precluded any of the dalliance that, for better or worse, characterized his professional life, invited speculation about Donna. There was no impediment of that sort with her, but that seemed a remote premise for anything amorous. Was he wrong to think that she enjoyed his company? It had been a pleasant surprise when he first met his contact in the Vatican. He had kept that first appointment with the fear that he would be meeting some nunnish lady who would see him as simply a conduit for favorable publicity. But the meeting had been like a date.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing working in the Vatican?” Neal had asked the second time they met, outside the Vatican.
“Who said I’m a nice girl?”
“I just did.”
Her smile formed slowly, revealing a lovely row of teeth, one at a time. “You even look like a journalist.”
“It’s the lighting here,” he said.
“Here” was Ambrogio’s in the Borgo Pio. Cats slithered around among the tables, and birds perched, defying the cats as they swooped in for fallen crumbs. A carafe of the house red was on the table before them, better than he expected, and they were doing justice to it. She sat across from him with the air of a woman who had the afternoon before her. When they exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses, to facilitate their arrangement, there seemed to be more than business involved.
“What’s Mr. Quando do?”
“The same thing Mrs. Admirari does.”
“There is no Mrs. Admirari.”
“I know.”
Well, well. But it had turned out to be just a get-acquainted meeting. He decided that she was simply the kind of woman who could not help being a woman. She reminded him of Lulu van Ackeren, of unhappy memory. Well, not entirely unhappy. The trouble with Lulu was that there had been a Mr. van Ackeren, something he only learned when he had proposed. They lay side by side while Lulu told him the sad story. She had been turned down for an annulment. She might have been providing him with a way to get off the hook. He had been devastated. As soon as he had gone to bed with Lulu, he regretted it. She was not, he told himself, that kind of girl. He was eager to make an honest woman of her. Instead, he had got the story of her first marriage, still undissolved in the mind of the Church.
They tried to think of ways around the problem. They both knew priests who would be delighted to defy the Church’s marriage laws. Lulu knew a canon lawyer who told her she could grant herself an annulment. He sounded like a Muslim. I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you. But neither of them could bring themselves to be such scofflaws. At the time Neal had been writing for the NCR, and so had she, except in her case the R stood for Register and in his for Reporter. God knows orthodoxy was not part of his job description there. His stories had echoed the angry dissent from official Church teaching. But in his heart of hearts he was the Catholic boy his parents had raised. So he and Lulu were stymied. Their love withered on the bough, flaring up from time to time, but each time bringing them to their insoluble problem. And then Lulu had solved it by marrying Martinelli.
“Sad,” Donna said, when eventually he told her all this. But she was smiling as she said it. “Is that what you call a line?”
He was hurt. Of course she was right. Lulu might very well be the way past Donna’s defenses. Maybe hers was a delayed reaction. Maybe this invitation to the penthouse allegedly to observe from on high the exchange to take place on the roof of the North American College was at least partially a ploy.
And so with a light heart he entered the building, found there was no elevator, and climbed what seemed ten thousand stairs to the penthouse. He had called from below. She was waiting in the open doorway. All business.
“Come.”
She led him across the room to where open windows gave onto a balcony. He started out and she stopped him.
“No, no. Not yet. We don’t want to scare them away.”
He stepped back.
“I have two thirty,” Donna said. “What do you have?”
He pushed back his sleeve. “The same.”
And then a bell sounded.
She looked at him, he looked at her, they both checked their cell phones. The second time they realized it was the doorbell.
“Would you see who it is?”
Neal went to the door, looked through the peephole, and turned. “It’s a priest.”
“A priest?”
She came across the room and pulled open the door.
He was tall, taller than the cassock he wore. When Donna opened the door, he pushed it in, shut it behind him, and said, “You’re coming with me.”
He was holding a gun.
V
He toppled backward into the yielding air.
Dortmund tossed Sense and Sensibility onto the little metal table beside his lawn chair under the trees on the grounds of the Villa Stritch. He had just ordered Traeger to call off the exchange with Anatoly and Traeger had refused.
“With all respect, you’re not my boss any longer.”
“I’m not anyone’s boss! I thought you considered me a friend.”
Traeger nodded. A tender moment. But he intended to keep his appointment with Anatoly. He explained to Dortmund that, bleak a hope as it was, getting possession of the missing third secret was the Vatican’s only possible way of lifting the siege.
“It won’t work, Vincent.”
“What else is there?”
Dortmund reached for Jane Austen, then withdrew his hand. He looked as if he wished he had a basin of water in which to wash it and his other.
“Everyone knows of the planned exchange,” he said.
“I know.”
“Vincent, the two of you will provide target practice for a number of competing forces.”
Traeger knew that. At first, Anatoly had seemed the great danger. The disenchanted former KGB agent was determined to expose the role Chekovsky had played in the assassination attempt on John Paul II. When he had asked Traeger if the now ambassador of Russia had been involved in that plot, Traeger had looked him in the eyes and said nothing. There are many ways to respond to a question. Anatoly saw in this some vindication of his life, pursuing a logic Traeger could not follow. What he did understand was the sense his old foe had that the world had passed him by, moved into another and madder phase that rendered the live
s they had both led absurd. To what end all the killings and subverting and maneuvering with an adversary for domination in a black-and-white world? The world had become gray. The world was colorless. Mindless mobs took to the street, no longer the convenient dupes of higher purposes, but possessed of religious zeal. It was one thing to risk one’s life for what one considered a great cause, but what can you make of people who voluntarily blow themselves up in crowds, fly airplanes into high-rise buildings, and are willing pawns of a heaven promised to the terrorist zealot?
Anatoly would see their meeting on the roof of the North American College as a Götterdämmerung, the twilight of all their former gods. It would be in a way his manner of making a bomb of himself. In that scenario, Traeger was merely a supernumerary, expendable. He had known that.
But he also knew that what Dortmund said was true. How had the exchange become so widely known? Heather had known of it. Piacere knew because Rodriguez would have told him. And the agency knew. Dortmund had been approached at the Villa Stritch by three clean-shaven and cold-eyed men who had thought Dortmund had been kidnapped and was being held prisoner, somehow the victim of Traeger.
“They want you,” Dortmund said.
“When this is over, I’ll turn myself in. There’s no case against me.”
“But will you live to stand trial?”
He was accused of murdering Brendan Crowe. More painfully, he was accused of murdering Bea!
Like Anatoly, he was on his own. Then the call came and he headed for the rendezvous.
Lev was in his little windowed gatehouse. Traeger looked a question and received his answer with a glance. He entered the building.
The doors of the chapel were open and the sound of organ music swelled and then the seminarians began coming out, two by two, wearing cassocks and surplices, the music making them seem on parade. Traeger pressed against the wall and they went by him. There seemed to be hundreds of the young men. And then they were gone, dispersed, to their rooms, wherever. Traeger continued down the hall to the elevator and soon was rising toward his meeting with Anatoly.
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