The Bergamese Sect (55 page)

‘
So why do they want to silence you?’ Walsh asked.

The woman’s eyes had closed. Walsh thought she hadn’t heard the question, but she opened them again with confusion on her face.

‘
You’re threatening to reveal a deception of which they’re a victim,’ Walsh said. ‘Why would they want to silence you?’

‘
They couldn’t accept a deeper deception hid behind their own. They didn’t believe it. I tried to convince them, but they became intransigent. I escaped before they had a chance to turn against me, before they realised I had decided to confess what I knew. Once I’d disappeared, they knew that by exposing the fraud I’d be revealing their own agenda. That’s why they want me dead.’

‘
But why tell the world? Why not break ties with those benefactors and protect yourselves?’

‘
It’s a way out. A way of stopping the deception without destroying the faith.’ The woman paused, shuddering violently. She was losing the path of her words. ‘If I wait for the Sect to be discovered… I invite the collapse of Christian faith… if I reveal the Islamic deception… vilification will be lessened.’ She closed her eyes again, appeared to be sleeping, but they opened quickly, bulging with trauma. ‘If you tell a Christian that a Muslim has deceived him… he will defend his faith… not turn against it.’

Walsh could feel the woman slipping away, her consciousness ascending and descending rhythmically like a ship on the ocean. The severe blood loss was beginning to sap her faculties. He leant over her, looked into her eyes. They were grey, almost completely dry but not yet lifeless.

‘
Why are Islamic fundamentalists funding a programme to strengthen Christian faith?’ Walsh whispered.

She didn’t respond. Her eyes flicked across the ceiling, her breathing gruff. Then she forced hoarse words from her throat. ‘It’s very simple,’ she whispered. ‘They see the West as undisciplined… immoral… ruthless… arrogant… aggressive… and they’re probably right… they want to make the West disappear… without bloodying their hands… they can’t do it politically… nor with weapons… they’re not believers in the
Jihad
… they can’t attack its religion… because Christ is one of their prophets… so they find an element of Christian fanaticism… feed its paranoia… give it the means to perform gross acts in the name of its beliefs.’

Her body jolted with a violent spasm as a bloody cough erupted from her throat. Walsh cushioned her head, looked at the eyes that were fading fast. The eyelids were dropping again.

‘…
they make sure some of the fanatics are men in power…’ she went on, ‘… in the government… sit back and wait… eventually the West learns not only politicians deceive them… but its Church too… they believe the confusion will destroy the West… again, they are probably right…’

Walsh was agape at the confession. ‘That’s evil,’ he whispered.

The woman was silent and still. When she next spoke, her eyes remained shut and her voice was almost inaudible. ‘Do you think so?’ she said. ‘The insurgents have deceived their enemy… the Sect has deceived its flock… which do you think is worse?’

Walsh quickly glanced at Lewis who was standing by the two men at the back of the shack. ‘This revelation is more dangerous than I imagined. This could lead to war. Global war. A religious war of colossal…’ He stopped, his face pale. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

The woman writhed beneath him, reacting to his words. She inhaled slowly. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘No government would wage war… solely to defend its faith… we’re not living in the middle ages.’

Walsh shook his head. He looked at Castro whose face was blank as if he’d just been informed his mother was dead. Emotionless but awaiting the coming torment.

Castro stared back at Walsh. ‘The world has a right to know,’ he said.

‘
The world has a right to know a lot of things,’ Walsh said solemnly. ‘But that doesn’t mean we should tell them.’

Castro bit his lip, stood and glared at Walsh briefly. The woman was dying but there was no concern in Castro’s eyes. He turned and slowly walked out the door.

‘
Lewis,’ Walsh called. The agent stepped over, knelt and took the woman’s head gently from Walsh’s cradling hands.

The Assistant Director went to the door. ‘Castro?’ he shouted, but the lawyer was already half way across the clearing. Through the rain-dimmed distance, Walsh saw Linsky scrambling toward them. The agent paused as Castro came by. But not a word passed between them as Castro disappeared into trees made ominous by the dim twilight.

Walsh turned back into the shack, but the woman was already dead.

Chapter 32

Leaves in a myriad of colours blew across the manicured lawns of Jan Radich’s suburban house in upstate New York. He stood among them, scraping the decay into piles with a long rake of thin spikes. Each time he pulled a pile together, a burst of cool wind would scatter them again, covering the patch of grass he’d just cleared.

But Radich was unconcerned. He often performed this penance. True, it wasn’t a painful penance, but to be out in the garden, alone with his thoughts, was often penance enough. It helped him find the Lord’s solace.

He looked up at the sky. It threatened rain, but the huge bulbous clouds were fast moving and, for the moment, subdued. Occasional beams of striped yellow sun burst through from above, like helicopter searchlights.

Turning toward the house, he caught sight of his wife in the window. She smiled at him and adjusted her dark-framed spectacles, then muttered something to herself. She was a good woman, thought Radich. Of good Ukrainian stock, tall and thin like him, but endowed with a sturdy frame and resolute strength of character.

But her strongest characteristic was her devotion to the Lord. She was a paragon of the Church community. The guiding light in the Ruthenian congregation of immigrant East Europeans dotted around Onondaga County. In fact, he believed her faith had no equal in the entire parish.

Apart from perhaps her husband’s. Radich thought fondly of how he protected her. She could never know the depths of
his
devotion, though he was sure it would make her proud. Yes, it would make her reverential even, to see the passion of
his
faith at work. If only he could ever breathe a word of it to her.

Perhaps she’d noticed the uncommon amiability he’d brought home of late. Recently, on returning from his frequent, weeklong business meetings on the Eastern Seaboard, he’d been agreeably sedate and restful. And that serenity was a symptom of his strengthening passion, a passion that now must surely be invincible.

His masters too had been calm. Now that the threat lay in cinders, they’d kindly overlooked his little mistakes. It pleased him to see how the Lord intervened repeatedly on his behalf. He’d let a godless infidel escape the Lord’s reckoning, but the Hand of God had moved swiftly across the skies of Arizona, with such a purifying fire. Such sweet and justified perdition.

And he will be tormented with fire and sulphur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.

Radich smiled contentedly.

He’d just managed to scrape together enough leaves to warrant their removal, when a gust of cold air whipped wildly along the street. It whined through the fences. When the gush dropped, another noise stirred the air. He looked around, searching for its source, but then he realised it was just a vehicle.

He watched a van come along the clean suburban street, avoiding the discarded children’s tricycles and the parked station wagons. The black body of the vehicle was windowless and gleamed in the ochre sunbeams that fought their way through the patchy cloud. The van slowed and came to rest by the curb in front of Radich’s house.

The man who exited was dressed expensively in a tailored grey suit of shiny cloth. He was muscular and unshaven. Closing the door quietly, he walked to the back of the van and tapped on the hollow metal. The doors opened and two other men exited. They stepped away from the vehicle to flank the back door. Also dressed in smart suits, each stood with an arm across their chest, as if in some kind of leftist salute.

Radich watched bemused, pretended to scrape at something on the grass as his eyes stared.

The heavy-set man then turned and came up the driveway. Stepping onto the grass, he approached Radich, stopped a foot in front of him. His eyes were detached but commanding.

‘
Mr Radich,’ the man said. ‘If you’ll come with me.’

Realisation spread across Radich’s face, but he didn’t speak. He gave the man a knowing look, eyed him contemptuously and looked up at the glowering, massing clouds.

But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.

But the tempestuous sky didn’t respond.

Radich frowned, looked back at the man’s cold stare. He dropped the rake onto the grass and looked toward the house. Standing in the window, his wife peered out with a questioning expression. She mouthed something, began moving toward the kitchen door.

But Radich stopped her with his arm, just waved at her, and followed the man to the waiting van.

―
§ ―

And they came for Sewell too. Swift mercenaries in the night. They spoke no words as they led the handcuffed man down the worn wooden steps of the beach-house. Down onto the soft sand of the Oregon coast.

A low moon reflected in a strip of wavering yellow on a calm ocean. The breeze was whispering through reeds sweetly, sounding like the dying breath of an organ concerto. From across the horizon, the beam of a lighthouse swept quickly along the beach. It flashed briefly into the face of the captive, but revealed no emotion in his weary features.

They marched him up onto the shore road where a dark van, its engine purring, waited by the wooden fence. In the glare of the headlights, a man checked his profile against a large photograph. Then he drew a swift line across a sheet of paper and folded it into his jacket.

He nodded and the others helped the captive mount the step into the vehicle, climbed in after him and quietly closed the door behind them.

As the van left the lapping ocean behind, unhurriedly, a tall man stood over the captive. A black ski mask shrouded his face, but his eyes were bright and fierce. Pulling the mask from his head, the man smiled at the captive and brushed his neat jet-black hair into shape.

―
§ ―

On that night, a thousand miles away across the mighty pillars of the Rockies, a group of men sat in awe of their new leader. The house in which they sat looked out toward Evergreen, Colorado, from a natural butte of rock above Bear Creek. It was large, proud and imposing; a vast and ancient lodge of wide wooden slats, conspicuous on the mountainside. An enormous porch ran the entire length of the building, the huge windows made stark by thick, white frames. Once, it had been a hotel welcoming summer walkers and winter skiers, but now it sat forlornly above the snaking road into town.

The locals thought the place was unoccupied, though some talked about men from back East using it as a winter fishing lodge. Some even said a Senator owned it, but no Senator had ever been seen shopping in downtown Evergreen. That much was certain.

But the locals were mistaken. Unknown to them, the lodge had a clandestine purpose they couldn’t have invented in their most disturbed imaginings. It was a meeting room for men whose lives were as ethereal as the gold diggers’ ghosts that haunted the lodge’s bedrooms. Men who arrived on the back of noisy Harley-Davidsons, in battered Chevrolets with Texas plates or brightly coloured telephone company vans. Men cocooned in secrecy.

They sat staring across a large rectangular table. Their leader had just finished summarising a hateful deception; one five centuries old, whose influence went far beyond anything they’d ever thought possible. And the faces of even the most immobile men at the table had cracked with the shock of it.

‘
Anyone else?’ Walsh asked the men. He eyed each one in turn, judging their reactions, asking with an upturned eyebrow whether they wished to leave the lodge rather than continue their quest for the fantastic. One chair was already empty; a portly security adviser had already resigned, his reasons unannounced, and was heading by limousine toward Denver. But the others were silent, unperturbed, as the leader’s eyes scanned across them.

‘
Very well,’ Walsh said after a moment. ‘Gentlemen, I’ve told you everything I know. The radical religious group of which Sewell was a member is at this moment being dismantled. We have many hundreds of names, and likely we’ll learn more as these people are debriefed.’

‘
Dante,’ said Icarus, the Californian. ‘I don’t agree with your assessment of the threat of these revelations.’

Walsh raised his hand to silence the man. ‘The threat is obvious. It could be as damaging as the secret the subversives thought we were hiding. We can’t let the people or the politicians know that their faith has deceived them.’

‘
I think we can. This is an opportunity to allow the world to live free of fear.’

‘
What do you mean?’

‘
Reveal the truth. Let people see how they‘ve been manipulated, that what they fear has always been harmless. It could be the rebirth of intellectualism, a release.’

Walsh smiled at the simplistic dream. It was based on sound reasoning, but was flawed by the absence of certain key facts. He’d been frank with Daedalus, but he hadn’t told them everything. It had been necessary, to ensure a religious outrage didn’t savage the world’s security. A rogue element of Catholicism wouldn’t worry the men of Daedalus, but Walsh was sure the Islamic deception would. And he was committed to preventing the pursuit of that trail of responsibility.