The Third Revelation (20 page)

But before he got to the parking lot, the doors of the administration building slid open and Heather Adams appeared. She drifted toward him with widened eyes.

“I couldn't go back,” she said.

“I understand. Is one of these your car?”

She seemed to have to think before she nodded.

“The killer just escaped in my car. I have to go after him. Give me your keys.”

“They're in my purse.”

“You're holding your purse.”

This surprised her. The girl was still in shock from what she had seen in the residence building. She opened her purse and handed him two keys attached to a medal the size of a silver dollar.

“Saint Christopher,” she explained. “You've cut yourself.” She was looking at his hand.

“Which car is it?”

She pointed. He ran to the little Toyota and got behind the wheel. When he turned on the motor, he looked back to where Heather still stood. She lifted a hand dreamily, and for a moment Traeger thought she was going to bless him as she had blessed the body of Brendan Crowe.

Getting out of the Empedocles complex did not pose the same problem as getting in. Traeger lifted his hand to the guard and moved right on through, as no doubt the one who had stolen his rental car had done. And then?

 

 

He drove toward Boston because it was where the interstate led. The monotony of driving on the monotonously engineered interstate invited speculation on what had just happened. The thought that Crowe had fled to the States with John Burke in order to escape the questioning Traeger had put him through was not welcome. But when he brushed it aside to concentrate on what he was doing now, he had the sinking feeling that he was heading in the opposite direction of his quarry. North was the porous border of Canada.

Logic be damned, he had allowed an image of the killer to form in his mind, and the face was that of Anatoly. What Traeger needed now was access to the agency and its vast databases. He wanted a check run, an update on what Dortmund had already got for him. He pulled into an oasis and put through a call to Dortmund. His old chief reacted with impatient laughter when Traeger told him, trying to make it sound matter-of-fact, of the missing secret of Fatima.

“What the hell does some message whispered into the ear of a nun seventy-five years ago have to do with anything?” Dortmund asked.

“You'd have to be Catholic to understand.”

“I am Catholic!”

Traeger hadn't known this. No reason why he should. “I thought all the Catholics were in the FBI.”

“The Irish Catholics.”

“A man, a priest, has just been killed for the sake of getting hold of that secret. That makes it important right there.”

“A priest?”

“From Rome. He came here . . .” Traeger stopped himself. He hadn't called Dortmund to have a conversation, attractive as that suddenly was.

“Give it to me again,” Dortmund said. “All of it. Including what I already know.”

Traeger reduced the last several weeks to a crisp paragraph, suitable for framing. He had gone to Rome to see if the assassinations in the Vatican were connected with the report he himself had drawn up on the attempted assassination of John Paul II years before. The Russian ambassador had been pestering Cardinal Maguire to get access to the reports. In the course of the investigation, the third secret of Fatima turned up missing. Several groups and interests regard that secret as the key to modern history. It looked now as if the man who killed two cardinals, a priest, and a basilica guard in the Vatican had been after that third secret. He got it, at the cost of the death of Father Crowe.

“He could have had it easily if he had checked Maguire's bedroom,” Traeger added, a little ironic coda.

“Why didn't he?”

“He was surprised and took off.”

Dortmund spoke after a moment of silence. “He killed all those people and then panicked because of a witness?”

“He had no idea where the secret was.”

Was that true? Had the assassin been informed that the prefect, Cardinal Maguire, had removed the file from the archives?

In any case, when Brendan Crowe found it, he figured it was safer with him than in the archives. When he accepted the invitation to go to Empedocles he had taken the document with him. Dumb? Smart? Who could say? Minutes after he had gone to fetch it from his room in the residence hall, he had turned up dead, the contents of his briefcase missing. Having sent Heather to bring the bad news to the administration building, Traeger had gone on the chase.

“And you think you're chasing Anatoly?”

“It's a possibility.” How wan a hope that remark contained.

“Who may have a document you were told was in a briefcase in a residence room in Manchester, New Hampshire?”

“So I want a check run on him, okay? We haven't lost our curiosity about former KGB agents, have we?”

For half a minute, Dortmund's humming was all the answer he got. “Where will you be?”

“I better call you.”

“I thought you were the chaser.” Dortmund said.

And not the chased? He remembered Rome, where he had become aware that Anatoly was on his trail, but what reason would Anatoly have to trail him now, if he had the document he had already killed so many to get? How much simpler it would be if Anatoly were looking for him. If Anatoly was who he was looking for. If . . . Oh hell.

“Look, old friend and mentor, could we get it about that Crowe was killed for the sake of a facsimile of the secret? An incomplete copy. The real one having been left in the briefcase.”

Dortmund was humming again, not in an encouraging way.

“There was an unzipped zipper.”

Dortmund stopped humming. “That sounds like one of the proofs for the existence of God we were taught at Georgetown. Whatever is zipped is zipped by another . . .” His voice faded away. “It's a dumb idea but most ideas are. I'll see what I can do.”

“I'll be in touch.”

“I hope so.”

 

 

He thought about Dortmund's sign-off while he was in a hotel room in Cambridge.

As soon as he had hit the city limits, he pulled into the lot of a McDonald's and checked the glove compartment. He needed an address to enter in the GPS on the dash. He had told Brendan Crowe that his life might be in danger, because he could recognize the man who had killed the cardinals. In part, that had been to shake Crowe up and make him more cooperative than he was inclined to be. Well, his life had been in danger. Traeger's theory—theory, hell, call it a hunch—was that Crowe had been killed by the same man who had put the knife into Cardinal Maguire's chest.

He lay on the bed and propped himself up on pillows so he could see the Charles River slide majestically by outside his windows. When he had checked into the hotel, he had been carrying the briefcase. Hotels are no longer as curious as they were in the past. Once there were hotel dicks to make sure there was no unauthorized coupling taking place on the premises. Now one was routinely asked at the registration desk how many keys he wanted. And a pretty slim briefcase could count as luggage.

He had only the clothes he was wearing. Or not wearing. The first thing he had done was strip and take a shower, wanting among other things to get that blood off his hands. So he lay in his boxer shorts, staring at the river. Could all great Neptune's ocean wash that blood from off his hands? He told himself he was waiting, giving Dortmund time to scare up what he could on Anatoly. Information alone would be of no help. Traeger was hoping that inquiring about Anatoly would turn up something recent, very recent. Like where the hell he was.

But eating at the edge of his mind was the implication of Dortmund's questions. All Traeger had was Crowe's word that he had brought that document with him from Rome. But if he hadn't, why was he dead?

Well, two cardinals, a priest, and a basilica guard had died in vain in Rome. What was one more pointless murder? Bah. He got out his phone and called his secretary Bea.

“Well, thanks for staying in touch,” she said brightly.

Dear God, how good her voice sounded, like a sonar link with normalcy. Once he got through with this assignment, and back in his office . . . But in his present circumstances this was a fantasy not to be indulged.

“You know how it is on vacation, Bea.”

“Tell me about it. You know, I'll never get over how clear transatlantic calls are now.”

He let it go. “Any calls?”

“Any calls! You've been away weeks and you wonder if there have been any calls?”

“Recent. Yesterday, today.”

“Just your old golf partner, Dortmund.”

“Dortmund! When?”

“Yesterday. What a clown,” Bea added. “He was trying to speak in a foreign accent.”

“Didn't fool you, huh?”

“I never forget a voice.”

“What did he want?”

“He said he'd call back.”

“Tape it when he does,” Traeger said, keeping urgency out of his voice.

“Tape it?”

“I can be a joker, too.”

Again Bea marveled at the clarity of transatlantic calls thanks to satellites. “When will you be back?”

Back. If only he could just drop everything and go back to his usual life.

“I have one or two things to wind up first, Bea.”

“Toodle-oo.”

 

 

That had not been Dortmund, trying to disguise his voice. Anatoly? Who was the pursued? He had half a mind to call back and tell Bea to go on vacation, anywhere, stay away from the office. If Anatoly had the phone number, he would also have the address. He opened his phone, thought for a moment, then closed it. He did not want to alarm Bea, and how could he avoid giving her a reason to go on vacation?

Up until now, this assignment from Dortmund had seemed almost a nostalgia trip, a reminder of how it used to be. The murders in the Vatican, the theft from the archives, meeting Anatoly—none of it had spelled danger, not for him. Suddenly, everything was different.

As long as he was making logical leaps, why not imagine that Anatoly had just driven down the road in that rental car, away from the entrance to Empedocles, then parked and waited. He would have seen Traeger roar by in the little Toyota. Traeger on the chase? Traeger the chased? He didn't like it. He didn't like it at all.

He got off the bed and into his clothes, took Crowe's briefcase, and went down the back stairway to the parking lot to steal a car and get the hell out of there. From among the parked cars, he chose a nondescript Chevy, got it going, and got out of there. He kept his eyes opened and circled the block, checking the mirror. When he was sure he hadn't been followed, he went back to the hotel parking lot for Heather's car. He made a maze of Cambridge and then of Boston, going he wasn't sure where.

“One gets weary of caviar.”

Zelda clung to Gabriel Faust after Heather came running in with the news that something had happened to Father Crowe, something terrible. Laura calmed Heather down, got the story, and then she and her brother the priest and Hannan took off, the billionaire flanked by his staff. Gabriel Faust watched them go. Zelda was trembling in his arms. Heather, having brought the news, stood in the atrium of the building where she had found them, turning slowly around as if in search of true north. Gabriel moved toward her, with Zelda still in his arms. They might have been dancing.

Heather stopped turning and stared at them, still in a state of shock.

“What happened? Did he fall? What?”

“Oh, the blood, the blood,” Heather keened.

Zelda cried out empathetically in his arms. Gabriel patted her back, wondering what he had gotten into.

The negotiations had gone smoothly, the salary was the fulfillment of one of his mad dreams, they had a deal, Laura would write it up, and now this. Gabriel had the depressing thought that this was going to end like the rest of his high hopes over the past years. Excluding Zelda, of course. She was an unequivocal treasure. In several senses. He dropped his hand and patted her bottom. Heather watched impassively. She turned and walked out of the building.

“The poor girl,” Zelda shuddered.

“I think I shocked her, sweetheart.”

“How?”

He repeated the pat.

“What would I do without you?” she breathed.

As he held her, he saw Traeger come up through the shrubbery. He talked with Heather, urgently. After a moment, she handed him something, and a moment later he had run off to a car in the parking lot and driven away. Gabriel said nothing to Zelda about this odd little scene, nor to Heather when she drifted back inside.

 

 

That was the little lull before the storm. Hannan was back, hurrying through doors as they slid open. Soon there was a huddle between him and Laura and Sinclair. Hannan wanted the body removed and the whole thing treated as if it had never happened.

Laura said, “Nate, that's crazy. With all due respect. This is murder.”

“That's my point,” Hannan cried. “What will this do to Empedocles?”

“Nothing,” Ray Sinclair said. “Nothing bad,” he added.

It took Hannan some minutes before he was persuaded that this was a problem he could not wish away.

“Nate, he's a priest,” Sinclair said patiently. “He was working for you.”

Hannan thought about that. “God rest his soul,” he said absently.

“John gave him absolution,” Laura said.

Hannan nodded. He looked at Sinclair. “It could be the work of a competitor.”