“Look! There’s the King of Spain,” Mortimer pointed like a child at a parade. “And over there, the Prime Minister of Palestine. Looks like a taxi driver. Directly across from him, the President of Israel. Lovely irony. And you have something for me?”
Maryse felt in her bag and found her handwritten notes from the Via Condotti, which she put in his gloved hand. He smoothly folded them into his breast pocket.
“The end of the papacy of Zacharias II—Zacharias, who died between the porch and the altar.” Mortimer gave her a knowing look. A delicate music rose and fell in the distance. “Pie Jesu from Fauré’s Requiem,” Mortimer sighed. “At least the late Pope had taste. And the spectacle begins.” He gestured up at the viewscreen.
The little drama taking place far away on the Basilica porch came into high definition. Surrounded by Swiss guards with lowered swords, a simple coffin lay on the steps. According to tradition, it would eventually be swallowed up in a coffin of lead and then a coffin of cypress. Old clergymen, magnificently robed, clustered together against the cold, stood behind the casket. There was not a woman among them, thought Maryse; they looked very much like the old church, except for the giant black figure of the Cardinal Archpriest, whom she recognized. He stood at one side of the company, Cardinal Tyrell at the other, an Irish curate’s fierce look on his face. A gaunt man known as the Cardinal Dean presided between them.
The choir began singing in Latin, which Maryse automatically translated in her head:
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel who has visited and redeemed his people,
And has raised up the horn of salvation for us in the
house of David his servant,
Just as he said by the mouth of his holy prophets from the beginning:
To save us from the hands of those who hate us;
To show mercy to our fathers; and to remember his holy covenant,
The oath he swore to Abraham our father, that he would grant to us
Liberation from the hands of our enemies, that we might serve him
Without fear and in holiness and righteousness all our days.
“Apropos,” Mortimer whispered loudly. “The Canticle of Zachary. Traditional for funerals. Particularly fitting for this one.”
At length they draped the coffin in red silk and intoned, “Usque ad sanguinem effusionem—even unto the shedding of blood,” and then it was slowly paraded around the plaza, a scarlet thread of cardinal priests and bishops following.
***
Buried in the crowd, Ari Davan was silently panicking.
“I’ve lost Eagle,” he said in a whisper to his GeM. The mass of people was overwhelming; he couldn’t see the man anywhere. “I need a better view.”
From various cameras hidden atop the gigantic elliptical colonnade, images flashed past his GeMscreen. A red rectangle showed Eagle’s last position, near one of the great columns. Ari cursed himself; Eagle had obviously slipped outside the plaza and all the cameras were turned inward.
He had followed Eagle without incident all the way from Ben Gurion Airport. The man had slept through the flight, walked carelessly through the da Vinci Airport, made one GeMphone call, and picked up an ordinary express bus. Then a slow progress through the crowds of souvenir shoppers and mourners toward the Vatican, finally joining the onlookers in St. Peter’s Square. When it became clear he was heading for the funeral, Ari had connected with the Vatican police and their surveillance system. Eagle had made it almost too easy.
There was only one thing: he had shown interest in the endless line of helicopters landing inside the City, following them through binoculars as they disappeared behind the great dome of the Basilica. But once the ceremonies started, he had stood quietly, respectfully, in one place near the edge of the crowd, Ari watching him at a comfortable distance. Then, without warning, he had darted out of view.
Ari made his way as fast as he could toward the colonnade, whispering vigorously into his GeM at the man on top. “Turn that north camera around. I can’t see outside the square.” He wished he had dropped a GPS tracker on the man while he had slept on the plane, but didn’t risk it. Eagle was obviously no play-actor.
Finally reaching the colonnade, he jumped a metal barrier that closed off the Piazza and found himself in an empty lane. This was where Eagle had disappeared. Ari scanned his GeMscreen and saw only himself looking around in a foolish panic. Another curse: by turning the camera, he would have missed Eagle re-entering the Piazza.
“Reverse the camera!” he shouted into his mouthpiece. The image staggered wildly and refocused on the crowd below. It was hopeless: a hundred thousand people had raised umbrellas as the rain splashed down again on the processional and on the blood-dark coffin that moved as if by itself through an ocean of black.
Ari began running helplessly along the colonnade, glancing at the GeMscreen and scanning the crowd at the same time.
***
Maryse watched the coffin as it passed. Like a bleeding trail, the cardinals followed, Tyrell among the first of them, almost parallel to the viewing stand. She wasn’t sure, but she thought those iron eyes were looking straight at her. The choir continued the Canticle of Zachary:
And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest:
For thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways:
To reveal the knowledge of salvation to his people,
of the forgiveness of their sin,
Through the heart of God’s mercy, from which the Eastern Star
from on high has come,
To enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to direct our feet into the way of peace.
“They’re singing about John the Baptist, you know,” Mortimer smiled. “My namesake.”
“Yes, I know,” Maryse replied.
“John the Baptist prepared the way of the Lord. I like to think I’m doing a little of my namesake’s work.”
It was a curious thing to say, but she let it pass. The cold was becoming uncomfortable, and she had work waiting for her at the hotel. “I think I’ll excuse myself now,” she said to Mortimer, who smiled, picked up her hand in his elegantly gloved hand, and kissed it.
At that instant she saw it—an almost microscopic point of red-hot light sweeping over her hand. Before she could warn him, Mortimer leaped from his chair, his eyes wide, and collapsed on the floor. Maryse fell on top of him and buried him under her own weight.
People crowded around her, shouting. “Fuori! Fuori!… Give him air.” “Heart attack!” someone shouted. A tall man with hands of steel pulled Maryse off Mortimer, a German doctor who had been introduced to her as head of the Order’s medical mission.
“It’s not what you think,” she whispered into the doctor’s ear. “He’s been shot.”
The man looked up at her in surprise, and then turned back grimly to his work. Two Order sisters knelt next to the doctor.
He murmured to the nuns, “Get these people away. There’s danger.” They seemed to understand intuitively and began to usher people away. Police had converged on the viewing stand and were moving the distraught members of the Order down the steps.
By this time Mortimer was blinking awake, and then almost as quickly his eyes fluttered shut. Puzzled, the doctor searched through his clothes and found nothing. He turned on Maryse, “What is this? He has not been shot. He is not wounded at all. Stroke or heart attack, it must be.” He motioned for the police to bring a stretcher.
Maryse was stunned. Had Mortimer really winked at her just now?
***
Across the Piazza, Ari noticed the disturbance in the viewing stand. It was his only lead. “Punch me up the camera on the south colonnade.” The picture came into focus. Black-clad police were clearing everyone off. Was it possible? And was that Maryse Mandelyn coming down the stairs?
Ari pushed his wa
y through the crowd. By this time, the processional was moving back toward the Basilica, and people had drawn back from it. He was across and following Maryse on his GeMscreen as she trailed behind a clutch of police who were carrying something—a stretcher?
The GeM fixed her face in a square white halo and then he was at her side. She was startled to see him. Her face was bloodless, trembling.
“What’s happened?” he asked, nodding at the stretcher.
“Jean-Baptiste Mortimer. He was just shot…I think.”
“You think?”
“The doctor couldn’t find a wound on his body. I want to go to hospital with him.”
“Who would want to kill Mortimer?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I was sitting next to him, he was…he was kissing my hand, and just then I saw a targeting laser.”
“Kissing your hand?”
“Look, I’ve got to go with him.” They had reached the edge of the crowd and an ambulance was backing toward them.
“Wait. I can’t leave here. Did you see anyone? Where did the shot come from?”
“It must have come from the other side of the plaza. Long-range, from the laser sight. Up there?” She pointed to the top of the northern colonnade, which was ringed with police, small figures in black alternating with giant white statues of saints.
“Maryse, they might not have been aiming at Mortimer at all. It might have been you.”
“I know that,” she whispered as he put his hand on her arm. “Stay. I’ll call you from hospital.”
He helped her into the ambulance and then whispered into his GeMphone. “I want to talk to everyone on the north colonnade. Now.”
Piazza Citta Leonina, Rome, 1315h
“Absurd. I have a hundred agents up there. No one without authorization was admitted. No one could have taken position on the colonnade without being seen.”
Staring over the shoulders of his technicians, Bevo never took his eyes from a bank of flat viewscreens. He had not once looked at Ari, who stood in the entry to the police van parked in a piazza beyond the colonnade. From here, Bevo could see everything: there were a dozen panels filled with umbrellas; on another panel, a purplish electronic grid surrounded St. Peter’s, which filled the screen like the stump of a black tree.
Ari insisted. “The shot must have come from the colonnade. The vector, the line of sight…”
“You don’t even know a shot was fired. The old man you speak of had a heart attack, I understand.”
“I told you. There was an Interpol agent in the box seated next to the old man; she saw the laser sight.”
Just then the Commendatore of the Vatican Police came breathless into the cabin. “I just heard. We’ve lost track of Eagle and a shot was fired?” He bent over one of the technicians who was rapidly entering data into a computer.
Bevo was fixated on the screens. “We’ll find Eagle, but only if we stay on the job. I’ve got every man in the square looking for him.” He muttered, “I wish you’d keep your Middle Eastern madmen to yourselves.”
“And the hospital? The ambulance?”
“My men are in the ambulance, and we’re securing the hospital as we speak. Your old Knight of Malta is in no danger now—if he ever was.”
The Commendatore broke in. “Your man here has just replayed the feed and analyzed the line of fire Mr. Davan described. The processional was passing at that instant, and several of the cardinals were under the shooter’s sights—including Cardinal Tyrell.”
For the first time Bevo looked up. “You’re saying someone shot at Tyrell and missed?” Relieved and disgusted at once, he thought of the headline that might have been: “Leading candidate for papacy dies under the eyes of incompetent police.”
“We’ve got to locate this Eagle of yours,” Bevo snapped, turning back to his monitors. “If he has been firing a gun, nothing’s to stop him from trying again.”
“I’ll get the Cardinals out of there,” the Commendatore sighed and left the cabin.
“There’s another possibility,” Ari spoke up. “The Interpol agent next to Mortimer. She might have been the target.”
“Why? You mean…” Bevo glanced at the contact list on his Gemscreen, “Mandelyn? The woman who speaks Latin? Why her?”
The story was far too long and delicately woven to tell this man. “It’s only suspicions. She’s chasing the Acheropita. Maybe she’s getting too close.”
“That thing? The frame has been melted down by now—why would they risk killing her for thirty kilos of silver?”
“There are precedents,” Ari murmured.
Bevo turned on him. “Ebbene, Mr. Davan. Since you are close with Miss Mandelyn, I suggest you contact her again and find out the truth about this shooting.”
***
“I am so surprised to be included.”
“Be quiet, Manolo. Stop acting the fool,” Tyrell whispered.
Six cardinal princes of the Church sat on benches in a darkened alcove of St. Peter’s Basilica. Before them, behind a blue and gold illuminated window, Michelangelo’s Pietà shone like a white diamond—the Virgin cradling her crucified Son in her arms.
“I had forgotten how beautiful she is,” Estades said, smiling serenely at the view. “Years since I really looked at her.”
Several Vatican police officers stood around the small group, watchful, waiting. Chanting from the funeral outside filled the nave with echoes.
“How long will we be kept here?” asked the elderly archbishop of Zaragoza of no one in particular.
“The Commendatore said to wait until he came back for us,” Tyrell called loudly; the Archbishop was notoriously deaf. “Ridiculous, if you ask me.”
“I agree,” said John Paul Stone, who stood and then paced around the columns of the alcove.
“We’ve lost one Pope. Let’s not lose another,” murmured the ambitious Archbishop of Manaus. He looked around at the others, who were giving him disapproving glances. “It will be one of us—we all know it. That is why they are hiding only us in here.”
Little LaSalle of the Ivory Coast stretched up to speak in Tyrell’s ear: “And it must be you. And soon!”
Stone glared at them both.
“It will be as the Holy Spirit chooses,” sighed Manolo Estades, who was still admiring the grand Pietà behind its thick veil of bulletproof glass.
Tyrell stood and approached Stone. Quietly, he said, “I’ve talked to the others. There will be a conclave, and it will be tomorrow.”
“Impossible.”
“The Secretary of State and the Dean have agreed on the grounds of cost. Since the time of Pope Francis, budgets matter. The Camerlengo has no objection, as I anticipated.”
“I’ve been talking to people myself. You’ll be facing a fight, I promise you.”
“Unseemly, Brother Stone.”
“Unseemly! What did Hamlet say about serving funeral-baked meat at a wedding? Your conclave is an insult.”
Cardinal LaSalle’s round face came up between them. “It was God who removed Zacharias, and God will put Cardinal Tyrell in his place,” he hissed. “Zacharias was a heretic.”
Repulsed, Stone turned his back on them both. Tyrell followed and spoke low in his ear.
“Listen, Brother Stone. I don’t know how this will go and neither do you. But, in a few days, you may be Pope yourself.”
Stone snorted with contempt.
“Promise me,” Tyrell’s voice turned to a plea, “promise me that if that happens you will reconsider the Encyclical. That you will let the Council re-open the issue. If you will promise to do that, I will do my best to follow you.”
Stone turned to him with a tight smile. “ ‘The Church must no longer withhold its blessing from those whom God has blessed with love.’ That motto hangs by a silken thread over my desk. You must understand this,
Tyrell. I believe in this motto, I believed in Zacharias II, and I believe that In Salutem Ecclesiae is of the Holy Spirit. I do not believe that the Holy Spirit ‘reconsiders.’ ”
“Then I will be against you.”
“Your Eminence, there’s nothing new in that.”
In the silence that followed, they could hear the mournful tones of the Cardinal Dean’s voice echoing through the doors of the great Basilica, but they could not make out the words.
***
The Commendatore spoke to Ari in urgent, twisted English. “I have arranged. We talk to Bevo’s men on the colonnade.”
Bevo sat watching as the computers continued to scan suspect faces in the crowd, automatically comparing images to a ghostly template of Eagle’s face. “Go. Talk. But I think they would already have reported a shooter standing by their side. In any event, keep quiet, please.”
Ari had at last got through to Maryse, who told him that the left side of Mortimer’s chest was black with a heavy bruise.
“What’s wrong with Bevo?” Ari asked the Commendatore as they walked quickly to the stairway that would take them to the top of the colonnade.
“He is terrified. The shooting of the Pope—it was his job to prevent. Now another shooting? You see?”
“What did you do with Tyrell?”
“I put him in the Basilica with the other papabili.”
“The other what?” Ari called as they took the staircase two steps at a time.
“Papabili. The cardinals most likely to be elected Pope.” He panted, laughing. “I would like to be in that room right now.”
As they reached the top, the great funeral mass was continuing in the square below. The two of them moved as discreetly as they could down an aisle overhung with titanic statues of apostles and saints. There was a police officer in nearly every alcove. Ari checked his GeMscreen for the point where he estimated the shot had come from, but the nearest policewoman couldn’t help. She pulled off her helmet with its glassy mask, revealing a torrent of blonde hair, and answered the Commendatore in quick, gruff Italian.
The Flaming Sword Page 11