The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  Kane shook Ari’s hand and looked at him as if he were a new car he was considering buying. “Thank you, Davan,” he said. “Thank you for saving a very precious asset.”

  “I’m not an asset,” Maryse grumbled happily. “I’m just glad to see you standing.” And she gave him a tentative hug. “Thanks from me, too,” she whispered in his ear.

  “This is Eagle’s GeM?” Kane asked, picking up the battered handheld. “Has it told you anything?”

  “They’re reading the files now at Queen Helena Street. It’s all in Arabic.”

  “Find anything else of interest on the dead man?”

  Ari nodded at the doctor, who held up the finger ring with triumph in her face. “A real mystery, eh, Signore Kane?” Malemanni was amused and excited.

  “Ah,” Kane grunted, and approached the examining table to take a closer look. Malemanni smiled broadly at this important man, and they spoke to each other in Italian. Maryse inspected the ring, but did not touch the dead hand.

  Then the Commendatore and Bevo came forward correctly to greet Kane.

  “How did you get out of there?” Maryse asked, turning to Ari.

  To Ari, her voice was like an echo. He tried to remember. “After you left in the taxi. It all ended. There was no more. So I watched the obelisk through the scope for a long time—the Tavor detects fire but didn’t pick up anything. I had called the Commendatore there and his people were on the scene in, ah, minutes…” He shook his head abruptly to clear it.

  “Ari, you’ve got to lie down.”

  He looked up at her questioningly. “Maryse, I didn’t know you would be at the Holy Stairs. What were you doing there? And Mortimer—I thought he’d been shot at the funeral.” But he could hardly keep his eyes open.

  “You really must.”

  As if he understood what Maryse was saying, the old orderly shambled over to them and pointed to a side door that was open. Just inside the door she could see a cot, probably kept there for long nights like this one. The old man smiled gently and led Ari away.

  ***

  When Ari awoke, he didn’t know how long he had slept. He had no idea at first where he was or if he had hallucinated being shot at and firing back into the night at a great Egyptian obelisk. His head seemed to be slowly rotating on his neck.

  He checked his GeM clock. 0123. Not quite an hour, unless he had slept through a whole day and into the next night.

  No, it had all happened. Eagle was dead. Whatever threat he posed was over. He heard Kristall’s voice in his mind: Why would a Muslim want to destroy the Dome of the Rock? Doesn’t it occur to you that the best way to push Israel into the sea would be to prompt ten million Muslim boys to wade through waves of their own blood to get at us?

  It was an ingenious theory—that Nasir al-Ayoub, on his own or on behalf of someone else—had wanted to provoke a cataclysmic attack on Israel.

  But, in sudden clarity after sleep, Ari realized the theory now made no sense. Why would Eagle hunt Maryse—an Interpol agent looking for a stolen Christian artifact? Or Mortimer, an old Foreign Legionnaire? Or was he more than that…this cryptic, poetry-spouting old man. Had he served in the Middle East at some point? Had he offended someone there? Ari imagined an obscure vendetta between Mortimer and some snarling Arab prince—no, it was laughable. And what had any of the day’s events to do with the murders in Israel? He couldn’t work it out.

  It wasn’t over at all.

  He opened his eyes again to a sharp crack of light from the door and the sound of Malemanni’s voice speaking staccato into her GeM recorder. Opening the door, he saw the examiner washing up at a basin in the corner and Maryse uncomfortably asleep in a metal chair. The others had gone.

  “She insisted. She waited for you,” Malemanni said. She had put on her white gown after all; it dripped yellow and red from the gruesome work she had finished. “Now you can go home with her.”

  “It’s not like that,” Ari replied drily. His mouth felt like sand.

  “Would you like a drink?” The examiner’s mood had lightened now that her work was done, and she produced glasses and a small bottle of Amaretto from a cabinet. He wanted the drink very much.

  The ringing of glasses woke Maryse; she smiled to see him and welcomed a glass of the liqueur. Ari looked around awkwardly for the Tavor, which he found cached in a large plastic evidence bag on the shelf.

  “We will need your weapon for ballistic analysis,” the examiner said in

  her thick English. Ari nodded and swallowed the Amaretto; it blazed in

  his throat.

  The doctor shouted for the orderly and, when he appeared, flooded him with Italian. He turned and left. “Now Ancona will call for a taxi, and you can go to your hotel.”

  Ari gave Maryse an embarrassed look, but she didn’t see it.

  “Dr. Malemanni,” she said, “I know it’s very late…”

  “It’s very early,” the examiner gestured at the clock.

  “We have the time-of-death data for Monsignor Chandos. Would it be possible to get the same for the Pope?”

  “I don’t understand,” Malemanni replied. “Everyone knows the time of death for the Pope. It was obvious.”

  “That’s true. Still, Interpol needs the data.”

  Malemanni snapped her head back, tossing her opulent hair to one side. “For that, Interpol will have to speak to il Vaticano.”

  She glared at Maryse for a moment, but then turned to Ari as she shed her tunic and pulled on her dress coat. “I congratulate you, Signor; you are tiratore magnifico.”

  Maryse smiled. “She says you’re a great shot.”

  Ari was surprised at this; he was competent with a gun, but no expert. In fact, before tonight he had never fired the Tavor except on the practice range.

  “Adequate, maybe.”

  “Oh, far more than that,” Malemanni waved her hand. “And at 170 meters, I hear. Esatto. What is your word? Accurato. Accurate. Precise. You see?”

  Malemanni swept the white blanket off the corpse on the table, and Maryse drew back. Ari could not believe what he saw.

  One puncture exactly in the center of the forehead. Three punctures, equidistant from each other, in a horizontal line across the chest.

  Palazzo Malta, Via dei Condotti, Rome, 0245h

  As if alone in a nightmare of beauty, Maryse and Ari dashed across the deserted pavement past the delicately luminous Spanish Steps, past Gucci and Fragonard and Versace, their gorgeous windows barred and darkened. For Maryse, they could not run fast enough. The Palace of the Order of Malta loomed up at the end of the Via de Condotti.

  She shook the iron gate, but it was locked. In the courtyard inside the gate, they could see a circle of light around a wall fountain pouring from a lion’s mouth and, above it, the spiked red cross of the Hospitallers. They both rattled the gate, and Ari pushed repeatedly at the bell.

  After a few minutes, a tall, efficient-looking man, all in black except for his brilliant white gloves, warily approached the gate.

  “Interpol!” Maryse shouted, waving her ID through the bars. “We telephoned. I must speak to Mr. Mortimer.”

  The man hesitated and then put a mobile phone to his ear. Soon a uniformed guard appeared. Ari pulled Maryse back as he advanced to unlock the gate, but he was short and fat—surely not the unknown policeman they feared.

  “There are uniforms everywhere,” Maryse panted to Ari as they entered. Then to the tall porter, “We’ve tried to ring Mr. Mortimer, but he doesn’t answer his mobile. This is Inspector Davan of Israel Security.” The porter carefully studied both sets of papers they produced. “We’re on official business!” Maryse barked. “Mr. Mortimer may be in danger.”

  “So you said on the telephone,” the porter declared in precise English. “I have taken the precaution of calling the police as well.”

  Ari cur
sed; the police were the last people he wanted to see—there was no way to tell if a uniform could be trusted. And he didn’t want to have to waste time explaining the situation to the Rome police. He extracted Bevo’s card from his pocket in hope of warding them off.

  “Would you please check on Signor Mortimer now!” Maryse asked.

  The elegant porter led them into a corner of the courtyard and disappeared; clearly, people of the street were not easily admitted to the Palace of the Sovereign Order of Malta. Ari kept his eyes on the gate, waiting for the Rome police to show up. At last a man and a woman in street clothes came out of the darkness beyond the gate and buzzed; the security guard let

  them in.

  The woman looked genuinely put out; under a cheap furry hat she wore her hair in two stone-hard buns, and her lips were enormously red. “Polizia di Roma,” she snarled when Maryse extended her hand to her. They pumped hands once. Ari understood nothing as Maryse and the woman spoke soft and halting versus loud Italian. Silent, the man with her looked on sadly, his face unshaven and his overcoat wilted with wear.

  Ari checked the time. He and Maryse had been running for an hour, stopping taxis, trying to make their way through the unfamiliar maze of Rome at night to the Palazzo Malta, where Mortimer was staying. She had rung Mortimer’s mobile number at least twenty times with no answer, and a call to the palace operator had produced nothing but this officious porter.

  At the same time, he had been trying to work out what must have happened at the Piazza San Giovanni. Malemanni was certain: “Four bullets. No more.” Ari knew he had fired a good many more than four bullets at the target, spraying them at the target but certainly not in any elegant pattern. It was obvious that he had not brought down Eagle; someone else had, and that someone else was still out there and possibly still hunting.

  But hunting for what? For Mortimer? Maryse had said little; she was too breathless. Apparently, Mortimer feared for his life because of a threat he had received—something to do with his legionnaire days. He had been wearing one of the new nanofiber tunics that stopped even high-power bullets; Ari knew of the tunics from the Shin Bet special ops teams. Eagle could have used one tonight. What he couldn’t work out at all was—who besides himself would be hunting Eagle?

  His first reaction had been to ring Miner. It had been hard to make himself understood while loping along the pavement in Rome’s unending traffic, and Miner was sleepy.

  “Three across the chest and one in the head? Were they entry wounds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, um…obviously, if Eagle was facing away from you at the time, this unknown was firing from the opposite direction. If not, then he was either behind you or between the two of you.”

  “Obviously. What I need from you is ballistics. Get our people on with the Italians and work out where those shots came from. And another thing. We want a comparison of the time-of-death data on the Pope’s killer, Chandos, and on the Pope. You’ll have to get the Pope’s data from the Vatican.”

  “It’s 3:30 in the morning…”

  Ari hung up, then rang Toad and briefed him.

  “Here’s an anomaly for you. Eros-Z tracked Eagle into the Holy Stairs building, but didn’t track him out of it. He was almost 200 meters away from the building when he was brought down.”

  Toad was quick. “Then you weren’t following Eagle at all. You’ve been following an unknown subject since the funeral.”

  “That’s what I think too, so get on Eros-Z and see if we can still find the profile.”

  “They switched off the trace after you told us Eagle was down.”

  “Maybe they can pick it up again.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Another thing. I want everything—and I mean everything you can find—on this Jean-Baptiste Mortimer and his connections to the Middle East.” Maryse had glanced apprehensively at him. “Google’s worthless on this. You’ll have to go deep.”

  “Got you.”

  His third call had been to the Commendatore’s private number. “The Unknown might still be hiding in the building,” he told him. The man was fast and professional: “We will secure the Santa Scala immediately.”

  Now he was facing the Rome Police detectives, who wanted to know why they had been rousted from a warm station in the middle of the night to freeze in the courtyard of the Malta Palace. “Someone is in danger?” the woman asked, as if accusing Ari of causing the danger himself. He was showing them his credentials and Bevo’s card when Jean-Baptiste Mortimer appeared in the palace entryway with the attendant.

  His arm still in a sling, Mortimer wore an elegant black-silk dressing gown and slippers and wiped his eyes with one hand like a child awakened from sleep. Maryse threw her arms around his neck.

  “It’s all right, my dear,” he patted her on the hair. “I’m terribly sorry. I had turned off my mobile. Pain pills made me drowsy. Come in. Come in, both of you.”

  Following Mortimer inside, Ari shrugged at the porter, leaving him to deal with the police officers. The porter and the woman detective squawked at each other; then the two police officers made for the gate, the woman dragging the man by the lapel.

  “Like an old married couple,” Ari muttered.

  “Co-workers are often far closer to each other than married couples are,” Mortimer observed, leading the way through a darkened lobby into a side room filled with comfortable chairs. “ ‘With one sad friend, perhaps a jealous foe, the dreariest and the longest journey go.’ Shelley.”

  The attendant reappeared almost immediately, carrying a tray of cups and a pot of steaming tea. Maryse and the old man sat.

  “Mr. Mortimer, I have several questions for you,” Ari said stiffly. He did not like the old man’s cryptic smile, nor the ordeal he had caused Maryse.

  “Try to help if I can, my boy. I’m frightfully drugged, though.”

  “I’m asking as a police official, Mr. Mortimer, not as a tourist. My questions aren’t casual.”

  “As I said, I’ll try,” the old man replied, peering up at him through narrowed eyes.

  “Maryse told me you were the target today—of two attempts on your life. Because of something to do with your Foreign Legion days. Tell me about that.”

  “A very old story. Can’t it wait until morning?”

  “Mortimer, I haven’t slept in two days. Today I’ve pursued a criminal suspect from Tel Aviv to Rome, chased across this city two men who apparently wanted to murder you, and been shot at myself. I’m not waiting one minute more to find out why.”

  “All right. Have some tea. Sit, for goodness’ sake.”

  Reluctantly, Ari sat down and took the tea, which he drank thirstily.

  Mortimer sighed. “Twenty years ago. South of Lebanon. After one of the countless bloody little battles against your plucky little country, the French government sent me there to do a bit of administration. Through friends I met a Filistini—Palestinian—doctor named Adawi working there. Gifted fellow. Very pleasant.

  “Skirmish broke out between some villains and your lads. The villains had casualties and radioed for Adawi to come help them. I refused to let him cross the line of fire—for his own good, I say. A few died. PLO—Hamas—Hezbullah—whoever they were, they’ve been after me ever since.”

  “That’s it? They’ve sent a professional killer to Rome to take you down over a twenty-year-old grudge?”

  Mortimer shrugged, yawning broadly. “Twenty years is yesterday to them, as you well know. They renew their threats periodically, but I take precautions.”

  Staring at Mortimer, Ari shook his head. It didn’t fit. “It’s not enough. There’s got to be more to this. We were caught in the middle of a firefight tonight between a ranking Palestinian policeman and someone unknown—an incredibly skilled marksman.”

  “Perhaps the Palestinians are fighting among themselves. Been known to happ
en. One faction trying to stop the other?” Mortimer looked at Ari as if to ask were there any more questions. Maryse twisted uncomfortably in her chair.

  But Ari was not satisfied. “I notice you weren’t surprised just now when I said there were two gunmen in the plaza tonight.”

  “Actually three, including yourself. I knew about the one in the stairway—caught sight of the flashes from his weapon, despite the inhibitor. Gas-powered, I’d say, and silenced.”

  Maryse was stunned. “You said nothing to me.”

  “Thought you’d seen it too, dear.” Then to Ari, “Chap in the street wasn’t at all interested in us. Could have picked us off like pigeons. No, he was firing away at the person on the stairs, who evidently overmatched him.”

  “Who could it have been?” Maryse asked.

  Ari’s GeMphone beeped. He listened to Toad for a moment, said thanks, and rang off. “Our satellite lost track of him. No way to find him now, unless he’s still in the sanctuary.”

  “Doubtful,” Mortimer yawned.

  “One more question.”

  The old man closed his eyes and waved his hand; he was falling asleep.

  “There’s a red circuit on the dead man’s phone. It connected tonight to a number listed to the National Library in Paris—the same place you once sent us. Do you know anything about this?”

  “What’s a red circuit?” Maryse asked.

  “It’s a private global uplink,” said Ari. “Costs the earth, usually untraceable.”

  Mortimer’s eyes trembled open. For the first time, Ari thought, he looked unsure of himself. “The name of the dead man?”

  Ari checked the screen on his GeM. “His name was Nasir el-Ayoub.”

  Staring at his empty teacup, the old man shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “Mr. Mortimer?” Maryse asked gently. “Jean-Baptiste? Are you all right?” She glanced at Ari. “I think that’s enough—he’s exhausted.” And she coaxed the old man up and shuffled him off to the custody of the porter.