The Julian Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers) (26 page)

The Germans had occupied Rome, filling the vacuum left by the collapse of Mussolini’s government and the flight of King Victor Emanual. Shortly thereafter, over a thousand Jews had been arrested in the ghetto barely a mile from the Vatican. The only remaining true descendants of ancient Rome had been trucked off to the railway for deportation, many of the vehicles actually stopping long enough for guards and drivers to snap photographs of St. Peter’s.

Pius had said nothing publicly. He could not. The fate of the Jews was deplorable, unthinkable, but to provoke the planned kidnapping and certain discovery of what the archaeologists had uncovered by opposition would be even worse.

Occasional bombing of Rome continued despite the prior Fascist boast that not even a swallow could fly over the city without permission. The Germans parked their tanks and trucks in the most historic piazzas, their anti-aircraft weapons on the roofs of many of the four hundred–plus churches. They also raided one of the Vatican’s extraterritorial properties, a monastery, taking prisoner several Jews as well as men evading the orders for conscriptive labor.

Pius, outraged, sent a mild protest to the German ambassador. His reply was that the Italian Fascists had committed the sacrilege, a fiction the Pope was forced to swallow. He forbade the future use of Church properties for sanctuary to persons evading the Germans, although he suspected his orders were widely ignored.

In March, an SS police company was ambushed in the Via Rasella. Thirty-two Germans died along with two Italian civilians. Within twenty-four hours, by direct order of Hitler, three hundred twenty Italian men and boys were taken to the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome and shot, five at a time.

The papal newspaper, widely read as the only non-Fascist source of news, prepared an editorial expressing outrage. Pius changed it to blame the resistance for their attack on the occupiers. It was a bitter cup from which to drink, but the Pope could not risk provocation of the Germans. Not now, not with . . .

Another knock at the door, this time the meeting. Cardinals Rossi, Pizzardo, and Canali, the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State, the entity charged with the security of the Vatican. Pius extended his hand for the kissing of the papal ring. He was still unsure exactly where to begin, but at least he would no longer have to bear the secret alone.

Nimes, France
L’Hôpital de Nimes
A week earlier

She had no idea how long she had been here, but this morning was the first she had awakened aware that she was, in fact, here.

In the days (or weeks or months) previous, she had roused to the sound of her own screams more often than not, screams provoked by the same, unchanging dream. It was so real, she thought she must have experienced it rather than dreamed it.

That, of course, was impossible.

The sun, a brilliant orange light in a cloudless sky, exploded, hurling her out into space like one of those jets of solar gas she remembered seeing somewhere. She seemed to hang motionless in space for a long time before she began to fall, her velocity increasing as she saw
an inhospitable earth rushing up to meet her at an impossible speed.

That’s when she began to scream, both in the dream and in real life.

Sometimes she thought maybe at least part of the dream was real, the falling to earth part.

Her earliest memory was of aching all over and being partially covered by bits of jagged rock that could have come from another planet, for all she knew. And she didn’t know much. For instance, she had no idea where she had come from, what her name was, nor why she was lying on a hillside covered with stone fragments.

At first she had thought her face was bleeding heavily. Putting a hand to her brow, she touched something both wet and furry. That’s when she realized her eyes were shut. Opening them, she looked right into a shaggy face with big brown eyes. A dog was caressing her forehead with a very wet tongue, a not entirely unpleasant sensation. And not a totally unfamiliar one, either, although she could not remember when a dog had last licked her face.

As her eyes began to focus, she saw a man—a boy, actually—peering at her with a worried expression. He had said something to her, but she could not hear. The only sound her ears perceived was a soft whisper like gentle rain falling through heavy foliage.

She touched her ear with the one hand free of rubble. This time it wasn’t the dog’s licking making the side of her face wet. The hand came back dripping crimson. From some place she could not remember, she knew facial wounds, even superficial ones, bled heavily. Still, she wasn’t exactly comforted by the knowledge.

Superficial or not, she felt no pain other than the ache all over her body.

Gathering her strength, she stood, her legs as shaky
as a newborn colt’s. The dog ran in a circle around her, its mouth opening in what she supposed was a bark. The boy/man extended a hand, and she reached for it.

Then her world went dark.

Her next memory was staring at white walls seamlessly blending into white ceiling. It had been disorienting, not knowing how she had gotten here, where she was, or how long she had been here. She glanced down at a hand resting on a starched sheet. An IV needle was taped in place. From the smudges of old adhesive, she gathered the needle had been replaced several times. Without moving her head, her eyes traced the tube to a bag half full of transparent fluid hanging on a chrome stand.

From the visual clues, she guessed she was in some sort of hospital, although she had no idea how she knew this.

She had had no life before the sun exploded.

Through vibrations of the floor or some other means, she sensed someone else in the room.

Fully conscious of the effort, she refocused her line of sight from the IV bag and stand to the foot of her bed. The doctor was there again. At least, she guessed he was a physician. He was definitely a man in white—white shirt with white lab coat, topped by unruly shocks of white hair.

He looked up, noting her attention, and flashed white teeth at her, saying something she could not hear.

She knew what was coming and neither looked forward to nor feared it. After flipping the pages of her chart at the foot of her bed (how did she know what he was looking at?), he pulled back the covers, took the arm with the IV in it, and half-pulled, half-lifted her to a standing position on the floor. The tiles felt cool and soothing. With one hand on the IV stand and the other
resting lightly, if protectively, around her waist, he led her out into the hall.

After she had gone about halfway toward the end, the doctor surrendered her to a nurse before standing in front of her, smiling. He pointed to his ear, then to hers, before making a circle with thumb and forefinger, the universal OK sign.

But her ears weren’t OK. She could not hear. Perhaps he meant she soon would be OK. She hoped so. Not just because being deaf was a decided disadvantage. Without hearing, she had so much trouble speaking that she had all but abandoned the effort.

She could communicate by writing on the notepads they gave her. Unfortunately, she couldn’t convey the very information the doctor and nurses wanted most: her name, where she came from, and so on. She had no such data to give them.

Somehow, again from that reservoir of knowledge that seemed to have no source, she knew that it was likely at least most of her memory would return, although she had no idea when. Until then, she would have to be patient, let the cuts, bruises, and aches heal, and hope she would know who she was before much longer.

Flumicino, Italy
Leonardo da Vinci International Airport
The present

Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, Lang trudged down the concourse, cursing whoever had designed the airport so that nothing was near anything else. One of the newer passenger terminals in Europe, customs and immigration were nowhere near flights arriving from non–European Union countries, the flights that would need those services. Likewise, the train station connected to Rome was far closer to domestic arrivals, those passengers most likely to have left cars at the airport.

The Byzantine mind was alive and well in Italy.

In a rare moment of self-assessment, he realized he was simply in a foul mood, the result of plain bad luck combined with his own decisions.

First, he had decided to use the Couch identity provided by Reavers. No point in having his own name on a
passenger manifest, readily available to anyone who knew how to hack into the airline’s less-than-secure computer, or the charge appear on his own credit card, equally accessible. Let Reavers get “committed” by picking up the ticket.

Of course, the fictional Mr. Couch was not a frequent flyer and therefore was beneath the minimal notice given platinum, gold, or silver flyers. Ineligible to use the limited facilities of the preferred customer lounge, Mr. Couch had experienced the endless security lines reserved for nonprivileged passengers before spending an hour or so sharing the gate area with screaming children, blaring but unintelligible announcements, and overpriced fast food.

He had also been treated to passengers bellowing things like
“Dallas
, not
Dulles!”
or
“Tampa
, not
Tempe!”
into cell phones—a response to the airline’s mechanized-voice reservation system that made it difficult if not impossible to speak to a human being.

Good goes around, but nobody at the airline wanted to talk about it.

The fact that it had been his decision to keep a low profile by entrusting himself to the uncaring hands of Atlanta’s dominant carrier rather than arrive by Gulfstream did nothing to diminish his temper.

Even before arriving at the airport for the Washington leg, he had had signals that this was not going to be an enjoyable experience.

Since the Porsche’s destruction, Lang had let Park Place’s attendants park and retrieve the Mercedes, both from an assumption that another potential assassin would see the futility of a second car bomb and because he simply didn’t care how the young men treated what he viewed as simple transportation.

This particular morning, the Mercedes had chosen not to respond to the electronic device that unlocked the
car. His call to the dealership, one of several owned by the same company, had left him with the impression that the service department viewed his continuing problems as somehow his fault rather than designer-induced over-sophistication.

Mercedes-Benz CLK: the revenge of the Third Reich.

It had been no surprise that the Dulles–Rome flight had been delayed three hours for a mechanical problem the pilot described as “a minor glitch.” The tone of the man’s voice said it was no surprise to him, either.

Time to spare, go by air.

Forgetting life’s sharper points for the moment, Lang set down his single bag to buy a cup of espresso at the coffee bar in the rail terminal. A large, barnlike structure with a glass roof, the airport station contained a few shops and four tracks, all of which went to Termini, Rome, departing at approximately twenty-minute intervals. The only question was whether to take express or local. Lang took the first departure.

Staring out of the window at the weed-covered switching yards and intermediate stations, Lang wondered how many times he had taken this ride. Shortly before leaving the Agency, he had brought Dawn here. Her first trip outside the United States, she had taken delight in even the dreary scenery that surrounds most rail right-of-ways. Before arrival at the final stop, she had become radiant at the sight of the first antiquity, a bland section of ancient brick that had been part of the city’s wall.

Lang had always heard Rome was a city of churches, but he had never realized how many. Dawn had insisted on seeing the places of worship of the Jesuits, the Dominicans, and the Capuchins. They visited churches boasting sculpture by Michelangelo and Bernini and paintings by Caravaggio and Raphael. Before the first
morning was over, Madonnas, martyred saints, and incidents from the Gospels melded into a religious blur. Never had Lang been so thankful for the three-to four-hour afternoon period when museums, businesses, and especially churches were
chuiso
, closed.

But he had never let Dawn know, feeding on her delight like a starving man presented with a banquet.

Only last year, he had been on this very same train, unknowingly about to revive a relationship with Gurt dormant since he had met Dawn. He and Gurt had made wild love in a small pension in the Trastevere District, ridden her motorcycle into the countryside, and hidden in an Agency safe house just across from the Villa Borghese, Rome’s largest park.

Now Gurt, like Dawn, was gone.

He could take no vengeance against the cancer that had stolen his wife, but he could, and, by God, would, make those responsible for Gurt pay. Only the apprehensive look on the face of the woman seated facing him made him aware that his teeth were grinding. At the same time, he noticed the pain of fingernails digging into the heel of each hand.

An hour later, he was unpacking at the Hotel Hassler, a slightly past-its-prime, very American-style hotel at the head of the Spanish Steps. It was the sort of place Couch might stay, particularly if he was on business and, like most Americans, more than willing to compromise quality for the certainty he would not be confronted by people speaking only the native tongue.

Lang had requested a room on the side facing away from the steps, fully aware that those flights of marble constituted the place for younger tourists to congregate, play loud music, smoke, and photograph one another.

Finished unpacking the small bag, he stepped into the hall, looking both ways. He saw a maid’s linen trolley
but no maid. Bending over to shield what he was doing, he pulled a hair from his head, ran a saliva-moistened finger along it, and stuck it to the top of the doorknob. Once dry, that hair would fall at the slightest touch. Unlikely the telltale would be needed, since no one in Rome knew who Mr. Couch really was, but old habits died hard.