“What did she say?” Ari asked him.
“She saw the disturbance across the piazza, and she called in—but so did others. She saw no shooter. No one but police up here.”
Ari frowned. “No one but police. Do you personally know all of these people up here?”
The Commendatore immediately saw where Ari was going. “No, of course not. They are mostly Roma police, Bevo’s special detail.”
Ari ran to the end of the colonnade and began photographing each agent with his GeM. As he flashed his ID he pulled down the smoked-plastic mask on each face. The Commendatore did the same, moving up the aisle from the center. No one resisted.
“These photos are going to Bevo,” Ari shouted as he clambered down the stairs behind the Commendatore.
“Do you recognize everyone in these files?” Ari asked Bevo as they reached the van. Bevo turned to one of the viewscreens and studied the faces as they flipped past. He nodded at each one.
“Yes, I know them all. They are members of my detail.”
“Then how many are there?” Ari took control of the viewscreen and rapidly counted. “Forty, forty-one, forty-two.”
The Commendatore intuited what Ari was doing and commandeered one of Bevo’s technicians. They muttered in rapid Italian at each other, and soon a video was flying backward across another of the flatscreens.
“This is a camera sweep of the colonnade only minutes before the shooting,” the Commendatore grabbed Ari and they counted together once. They counted again to make sure.
“Quaranta tre?”
“Forty-three.”
They stopped the recording and studied it for a moment. “Zoom in on that one,” Ari shouted. The Commendatore translated.
The screen narrowed and swooped in on a figure in nebulous black, a lean, helmeted shadow resting against the pedestal of a saint.
“Our missing man,” Ari whispered.
“Aquila?” asked the technician.
“Possibile,” the Commendatore said. “Eagle. Could be.” Then he turned to Bevo, who was examining the image curiously, and spoke in a short burst.
“There are police in the Basilica with the papabili. I go to check on them. I will ask Bevo to put out an alert,” he told Ari. “And I want to talk to everyone on the colonnade again.”
But Ari was already on his GeMphone.
“Maryse. He’s disguised as a policeman. Don’t let any police near Mortimer…or you.”
Policlinico Gemelli, Rome, 1500h
Maryse was not watching the medical team. They were agitated, yelling at each other in an Italian she couldn’t follow—a word that sounded like maglia over and over—but she was satisfied that they were mostly grandstanding. Mortimer’s breathing was regular and his heart rate robust; she could tell that much from the monitors that clinked and beeped overhead. She was keeping her eyes on the curtains, on the black shapes of the police motionless beyond the glass walls of the surgery.
It had all come back to her. That day in Dublin, looking down from the top of a building outside the National Museum, the day the Ardagh Chalice burglar escaped her trap. Five years had passed since then, but she still couldn’t think about that day—she could only see it, hear it, hold her breath over it until she felt like never breathing again.
She had been unconscious of it, of the same mad cycle repeating itself all over again. She missed her own father so badly that she had set Mortimer in his place—and then watched helplessly as another bullet had nearly taken Mortimer. Now he lay on a hospital bed with a broken chest because of her. Because of her. She had tried to quit, to put the whole business behind her, but now it all came round again like a returning nightmare.
It was to have been the summit of her career—catching the perpetrator of the most notorious museum robbery of the decade. The Ardagh Chalice, Ireland’s national treasure, a cup made holy by early Celtic Christians, discovered by two farmers in a potato field centuries later. It had simply disappeared from behind carefully designed security barriers in the Museum’s Treasury. The robbery had required extreme agility and timing to the nanosecond, and it was only by luck that she had stumbled on the thief’s method of operation and enticed him into a meeting.
The day after the robbery, she and Kane had been working through a digicam recording of the adjacent hallways. After a tedious two hours watching nothing happening, she noticed a tiny, grainy light on the wall that she had not seen before. An obscure tracking thermostat next to the Treasury had lit up in the minutes before the robbery. They both ran to look at it to find that it had recorded a dramatic drop in temperature; thirty minutes of freezing cold had come and gone without notice in the night. The thief had wired the air-conditioning system and had rendered the hall so cold that a mist generated by a simple CO2 aerosol can would hang visible in the air at ceiling level. In turn, the mist would reveal the exact path of each of the random laser firings that secured the room.
A thief this shrewd would not have been stopped by the window alarms, but it remained to work out how he had made his way from the window along the ceiling of the Treasury. Even if he could see the laser beams, he would still have to dodge them while crawling along like a spider in defiance of gravity.
She knew about burglars who could walk on walls and ceilings—wearing boots carpeted with carbon nanotubes a thousand times stickier than a fly’s foot—but she had never heard of one so agile. Still, she followed up with the few manufacturers who could produce this kind of nanotechnology. Strangely, she now thought, they were mostly Israeli firms. It was one of these that had given her the lead: a search of their orders turned up a single oddity—an order phoned in on a telephone-card number and charged to a Chinese import company that no longer existed.
In the end, it came down to a simple telephone call. She left a message at the number on the chance that the thief had not simply thrown the phone card away. In retrospect, she should have known better when he returned the call. It had been too easy.
There’s a pub near the National Museum.
Bring the money and I’ll tell you where it is.
All right.
It usually worked out that way. Art thieves were mostly extortionists; a famous item could not be easily disposed of, and only rare eccentrics intended to keep the valuables they stole. Mostly they just wanted cash on delivery.
She had invited her father to stay with her in the city after a mild crisis with his blood pressure, although his uncharacteristic depression provided her real motive. He had resisted going, but she had come to the door of the Priory, packed him up, and brought him down to Dublin. Packing had been simple: only his cardigan and a book or two. That day she drove him to the doctor and should have taken him back to their flat, but secretly she wanted him to take part in her triumph—to be near when she potted the headliner crook of the decade.
The plan was to meet, find out where the chalice was, then tag the financial transaction with a code hidden in the GeM beam. The thief would not be able to access the money without revealing his exact location. She would park the car in Molesworth Street near the Museum and leave her father safely behind for the few minutes it would take to complete the transaction at the pub.
But it didn’t happen that way. A sudden laser sight: a bullet pierced the windscreen at a high angle and her father was dead before she let out the involuntary scream that still resounded in her head five years later.
Afterward, she had climbed to the roof of the Museum with Kane. They both stood exactly where the killer had stood. “That bullet was for me,” she remembered saying again and again. Numb, dizzy from vertigo, staring down at the rectangle of police tape that surrounded her car, she cursed the lethal trap she had set for her father and the career she had never wanted. Until then she had dealt rationally with people in a business that was unorthodox but still operated according to the basics—opportunity, risk, investment, profit,
sometimes loss. It had never occurred to her that a thief would come after her. It was irrational. Where was the profit?
The thief had never been found and the chalice remained lost. David Kane had pleaded with her to stay in the service, but the entire concept of a career with its vectors of success now was meaningless to her. Her father with his art books: she would now live that life out for him.
Or so she had intended. Recovering the Acheropita—it had to be done. But also there was David Kane. And Fatima Chandos. And Jean-Baptiste: the laser sight on his cloak had hit her heart like frozen lightning. She looked at him on the bed and knew she needed now to stay well away from him, for his own safety.
And Ari Davan. She had not realized how bitterly cold the world was until she had felt his arm on hers.
A nurse came up and spoke to her in bemused English. “The gentleman is awake and resting now. He is very clever. If you would like to speak to him.”
The medical team withdrew from the room, smiling at her and congratulating themselves—and Mortimer. She waited until the door was firmly closed behind them. Keeping her eyes on the windows, she walked around the bed and glanced down at Mortimer, who was grinning like a child.
“It works!” he whispered, starting from the pain in his shoulder.
“What?” She shook her head, uncomprehending.
“My new vest! La maglia!” He opened the neck of his gown to reveal a thin web-like fabric underneath. “Latest in protective clothing. Made of nanotubes—catches a bullet at the first pressure. Light as cashmere, but relative to weight, much stronger than steel. Still painful when hit, though. Be quite dead without it.”
“Why? Why were you wearing a protective vest?”
Mortimer’s grin dissolved. “Oh, my dear, I’m sorry—you thought the bullet was for you. As with your father. Probably upset you awfully. No, I can assure you…the bullet was for me.”
Interrogation Room, Queen Helena Street, Jerusalem, 1600h
The blonde woman answered every question in a graceful monotone.
“I don’t know anything else. I was paid—that’s all I know.”
Two thousand euros had slid out of nowhere into her bank account for a simple half-hour’s work. An electronic transaction with only one end. The other end was not only untraceable, it didn’t even exist. Even the money tracker from the Institute was baffled, which impressed the unimpressionable Toad.
An employee of one of the higher-toned, unadvertised escort services in Tel Aviv, the woman had taken an “order,” as she called it, by telephone. She would be paid two thousand to walk into an empty reception hall at noon Thursday, greet a certain Mr. Tempelman on behalf of a Mr. Luel, put him off for a few minutes, and then leave immediately after allowing the man into the office. That was all.
Everything about the woman indicated that she was telling the truth. The telephone call was easily traced—it had come from a public telephone at the bus station, paid for by a nondescript telephone card never used before or since. The woman was considerably older than she looked, Toad thought after she had peered at him uncertainly for twenty minutes. Myopia, he decided. She probably wouldn’t be able to identify her employer even if she had seen him. He let her go.
“I’ve seen a few transactions like this,” the money tracker had said. An accountant with a big belly and old glasses from the 2000s, he was nevertheless highly respected for sniffing out criminal sources of cash. “The sort of thing high-end arms dealers or art thieves do. Or have done for them. Odd, though—such a big maneuver for such a puny sum.”
The money tracker waddled off in search of arms dealers and art thieves. Toad suspected the man’s reputation was based on persistence rather than intellect, as was his own. Toad had solved many tough problems for the service and been praised for his brain; his own view was that mental focus and a closed mouth—along with a quiet place to think—were more important.
“Ari’s lost the Eagle,” Miner announced as he shuffled into the interrogation room. “Disappeared from view, and then a few minutes later someone took a shot at someone from somewhere.”
Toad gave him a look that meant he would like to hear more particulars.
“They think the shooter was disguised as a Rome policeman. Looks like he was aiming at a group of higher-ups, but he hit an old man instead—one of the public. How did the blonde work out?”
“Nothing new there,” Toad replied.
“So you think the Eagle’s just a contract killer? One of those jet-setters you see in films? I’ve always wanted to run into one of those—I never thought they actually existed.”
“No, I don’t think he’s just a contract killer.”
Miner was surprised at the quickness of Toad’s answer. His partner usually gave noncommittal shrugs at questions like those.
“I’ve been doing a little reading about our Eagle,” Toad said quietly. “Adopted out of a Lebanese orphanage. Mother dead, father a very big name in the PA, but also a very private one. Everybody defers to him, but you never hear about him. He’s never held any particular office, but he’s in the background of lots of official photos. ‘Hafiz al-Ayoub.’ Never anything else. Just a name in a hundred photo captions.”
Miner was impressed. Toad was the only one he knew in the Protective Service who had bothered to learn Arabic—for Miner, the little squiggles of their writing held no interest whatever, but Toad could read it as easily as Hebrew or English.
“Maybe he’s just a well-connected contract killer.”
Toad shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about what Ari told us. About the Temple Mount. There’s any number of people with the motive to do some damage there; they all want to bring on the Apocalypse. We have cranks of our own—starting with the Mishmar—and then there are fringe Muslims and even Christians. Years ago, some religious nut from Australia tried to burn down al-Aqsa. And a cracked little Jewish-Christian cult got awfully close to blowing up the Dome back in ’84.”
“Ages ago.”
“Well, we’re not the only Protective Service. They’ve got one too.”
“You mean, the Waqf? You mean that maybe we and the Eagle are on the same side?”
“Look at what was done with Bukmun. We know he had some connection to the blow-up this summer, the hole in al-Aqsa and the Synagogue fire. Maybe Eagle liquidated him for that.”
“Then why is Eagle shooting up Emanuel Shor? And that lot in Rome? He makes far more sense as a contractor. Shoot anybody for a reasonable fee.”
Now Toad gave his noncommittal shrug. He couldn’t deny Miner’s logic.
“And there’s more.” Miner held up a silver GeM in his long bony hand. “This is Catriel Levine’s. Nothing much of interest here—except for a boarding pass for a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth via Paris—scheduled for departure yesterday at 1700 hours.”
Toad’s eyes focused hard on the GeMscreen.
“When she didn’t show up, they gave her first-class seat to an American exchange student flying standby. He probably enjoyed it very much. By the way—there’s no return ticket.”
“I don’t suppose Tempelman had a ticket.”
“No. Tempelman’s GeM is boring.” Miner produced another handheld, this one battered and black. “Golf scores. Links to restaurant reviews, porn vids. However, there are also scans of patent documents regarding a certain nano-something-or-other and the rights of the Technion.”
“I suppose you’ve got the lawyers onto those.”
“As we speak. Here’s how I figure it: Catriel knows all the paperwork. Now she’s got hold of the technology and she’s running off to the USA to sell it to the highest bidder. Tempelman finds out about it. He either wants to stop her or cut himself in on it—the latter, I’d say, based on those choice gems on his GeM. And someone decides to put them both out of the way. Who stands to get it all in the end? My bet’s on Luel.”
; “You figure Luel bought Eagle’s services to get the technology in the first place and then get rid of Catriel and Tempelman?”
“Voilà.”
“It’s very neat,” said Toad. And he meant it. A neat, conventional solution to a very conventional problem. Follow the money—the first principle of criminal investigation. “But wasn’t he in love with Catriel? Wasn’t he going to marry her?”
Miner held up the silver GeM. “No texts in the last three months? No phone calls from him? Believe me—it’s all pure business. She wasn’t taking any messages, thank you.”
Toad smiled, which surprised Miner considerably. “Then let’s get Luel down here for another talk.”
Miner shuffled off. Toad waited, then picked up the titanium shell of Catriel’s GeM and scrolled avidly through its contents.
Miner was right: the digital leavings of her life were uniformly impersonal. Not a note of music, no history of videos or games. No apps, whimsical or otherwise. The remnants of obscure e-mailings back and forth to lawyers’ offices, nothing to or from Luel. A mass of legal documents, a contact list consisting almost exclusively of other attorneys.
With one very interesting exception.
He switched on his GeM and spoke into it a name from her contact list. L. Sable.
Salah-eddin Street, Jerusalem, 1915h
“The child’s name was Yusuf bin-Ayoub. Joseph, son of Job, born in Tikrit, now in Iraq. He was surrounded from birth by power, although he was not born to it himself. His uncles were generals who quarreled among themselves while the infidels held the holy places.
“Now, like Joseph of old, he was sent into Egypt as a boy and by a miracle became sultan. When the great king Nureddin died, he became also master of Syria. And thus he held the holy land between his hands, like this.”
Hafiz held up both hands, trembling, as if to clap at a fly. Amal sat close to him in the darkness of the kitchen, his head on the old man’s shoulder. Against his forehead he felt the old man’s beard, and he could smell warm blood on his breath. As a child he had listened to his father’s stories, but it had been years; this story, he sensed, would be different from those.
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