The Third Revelation (40 page)

“And Vincent Traeger?”

“He just left here.”

“Don't tell me he's staying in the convent, too?”

“Hardly.”

There were voices in the background. Laura talked away from the phone. Then she said, “Mr. Hannan wants to speak to you.”

And then she heard the authoritative voice of Ignatius Hannan. “Heather, I want you back here.”

“In just a little while.”

“What's the delay?” he demanded.

She decided that she could tell him something of what Vincent had told her. There was silence in New Hampshire, as he seemed to be digesting this.

“I'm coming over,” he said.

“Do you think that's wise?”

“It wasn't wise to send you there. Of course I had no idea what was about to happen. And I feel responsible for that.”

“You're not responsible.”

Now he was talking away from the phone. When he was back, he said, “We'll be on our way in hours.”

“We?”

“Laura and I. Probably Ray as well. See you soon.”

Heather put away her phone and went back inside, intent on enjoying what was left of her stay.

“A busman's holiday.”

Chekovsky stood before a painting by Paul Klee with his head tipped to one side as if sunk in aesthetic meditation. The man beside him studied the museum catalog.

“Childish,” Chekovsky grunted.

“Not quite.”

Chekovsky considered the response, a small smile on his lips. Ambiguous. Not quite as good or not quite as bad, take your pick. He moved slowly past other paintings that seemed intended to frustrate one's expectations of art. Perhaps that was a definition of modernity.

In the brightly lit cafeteria, he sat at a little circular table with a marble top and wrought iron legs, facing a wall that was a mirror. In a residence, such a mirror would have the function of increasing the apparent size of a room. Here its function was more difficult to discern. Given the setting, the Borghese Gardens just beyond, a windowed wall would have made more sense.

But it was because of the mirror that Chekovsky liked the cafeteria as a meeting place. His contact came into the museum restaurant, still holding the catalog, and came clattering among the tables toward him. Not that he joined him. He took the table next to Chekovsky's, the backs of their chairs not quite touching.

“A busman's holiday.” Chekovsky had spent his earliest years as a diplomat in the consulate in Birmingham, Alabama. It had always been his practice, wherever he was assigned, to move beyond competence in the native tongue into the richer colloquial world.

“Meaning?”

But before Chekovsky could give himself the pleasure of a pedantic explanation, Remi Pouvoir was interrupted by the waiter who posed for himself in the mirror. The waiter turned his head to one side, then the other; he shifted his feet. Ignoring Pouvoir, he also took his order. He glided to Chekovsky.

Pouvoir had ordered tea and made a ceremony out of pouring it, squeezing lemon into the brew, and adding several packets of sugar. He tasted it with a connoisseur's expression. The verdict seemed to be that it was passable. And then he reported.

Chekovsky felt a bit like the waiter while he listened, posing in the mirror, trying out expressions, not missing a word. Were such precautions necessary anymore? They were when one was dealing with a maverick like Anatoly. The man was a throw-back, an anachronism. God knows what he might do. What possible use could that assassination report be to an idiot like that?

“Traeger has it?”

“There will be an exchange,” Remi Pouvoir said, as if addressing his raised cup.

Chekovsky already knew this, from Lev. A plurality of sources was an elementary precaution. What Lev did not know was when the exchange would take place. There had been a trial meeting, with Traeger showing up at the North American College and cooling his heels on the rooftop for an hour before answering his cell phone and leaving. Did Anatoly suspect that the rooftop was under observation? The cryptic phone message had been picked up. “Later.” There would have been no need for Lev to lock the rooftop door once the two men met.

“Traeger got the report from Rodriguez?”

Pouvoir reflected on this, in the mirror. His shoulders moved. “Presumably.”

“The report is no longer in the archives?”

“No.”

So the exchange would be of two stolen documents. Traeger would obtain the famous third secret, and Anatoly would have the assassination report he lusted for. The former agent's quixotic purpose was to prove that the KGB had nothing to do with the attempted assassination of John Paul II. What would he do when he learned that was not true? Well, he would not have the report long enough to study it.

“You would have saved all concerned a good deal of trouble if you had delivered it to me.” Chekovsky tried not to sound petulant.

In this lovely setting, high above the Piazza del Popolo, the dome of Saint Peter's visible in the hazy distance, it was possible to ignore the angry mobs raging through the streets of the city below. Pouvoir had assured him that the passage made public by Jean-Jacques Trepanier was a fake. A fake so obvious only a fool would have been taken in by it. But it was the message, the longed-for message from heaven, that explained the credulity of Trepanier. What he and others had been agitating to see was apparently the foretelling of what was now going on in the streets of Rome, Paris, and Baghdad, the jihad now seeming to have the sanction of the Mother of God's prophecy.

“I thought he was one of yours,” Remi Pouvoir said.

“No longer.”

“You might have told me.”

Pouvoir had provided the information Anatoly had needed in order to move like a scythe through the Apostolic Palace, slaying cardinals as he went. The rampage had been pure terror, without rational purpose. And the bloodbath had been hushed up by the Vatican, making it even more purposeless. As purposeless as his chiding Remi Pouvoir and being chided in return.

When Chekovsky had been importuning Cardinal Maguire, seeking the release to his government of everything in the archives concerning the assassination attempt, he had not yet known that Pouvoir was their man within the walls. For decades he had been dormant, unused, an insurance policy against they knew not what. It had been so easy to imagine that such a mole, forgotten for so long, would have lost the youthful zeal that had made him apt for so prolonged and uneventful an assignment. The breakup of the USSR could have been taken to write finis to any loyalty he was supposed to have. For a time, Chekovsky had thought Brendan Crowe might be the mole.

He almost missed now those sophistic exchanges with Maguire and Crowe. However frustrating, they had taken place on the far side of events, when gaining possession of that assassination file had seemed a diplomatic possibility. Oh, how he had dreamt of feeding it all to the flames once he had it. Whether or not his personal fears were borne out by the reports.

Chekovsky licked the cream of the cappuccino from his lips, then patted them with the absurdly small paper napkin. The waiter approached, watching himself in the mirror, and dropped the
conto
on the table. He dealt another to Pouvoir, with a flick of the wrist. The waiter was an ass, and doubly so because of the mirror. Chekovsky pushed back his chair. It made an unnerving screech. He did not rise.

The fat little priest who had taken a table near the entrance seemed to be making a point of not noticing Chekovsky. Or was it Pouvoir he pretended not to notice? The ambassador glanced at Pouvoir's reflection. Of course it had occurred to him that the little archivist had turned double agent, working with Rodriguez and Vatican security. Whatever his own anxiety to get and destroy those assassination reports, the anxiety of the Vatican to get back its Fatima file had a more global importance. Did they seriously think that they could call in the imams and pore over the documents, the false and the authentic, and then the rioting in the streets would stop? Well, Chekovsky thought with smug satisfaction, he would gain possession of both files.

“What would they give for it?” he asked Pouvoir.

“What you want.”

“But that is gone.”

“I think Rodriguez will be able to find it.”

Of course. Chekovsky rose then, ignoring himself in the mirror. Avoirdupois had once been a sign of eminence in the Soviet diplomatic corps. Chekovsky had been affected against his will by all the nonsense in the West about obesity.

He paid his bill, ignoring the fat little priest by the entrance. He felt a fleeting camaraderie with the overweight cleric as he went out the door and moved at a dignified pace toward his waiting car.

“To what end?”

When Jean-Jacques Trepanier showed Bishop Catena the photocopy for which he had paid so large a sum, the older man had studied it closely. He got out a book and compared the handwriting with a facsimile of Sister Lucia's.

“They are indistinguishable,” he murmured. He looked up at Trepanier. “The handwriting, not the Portuguese.”

“How so?”

“Would she have used
‘desagravar'
?”

“As a matter of fact, she does.”

As had been the case whenever he met with Catena, there was initial verbal sparring as each tried to establish his primacy in the matters that concerned them both. Jay would not sit still for the suggestion that he was anything but an expert on what Lucia had written. Hadn't he learned Portuguese in order to read her in the original? Catena was now studying Trepanier as he had the photocopy.

“And who is Gabriel Faust?” Catena asked.

Trepanier told Catena what he knew of the art historian.

“He seems to have disappeared,” he added at the end.

“With his ill-gotten gains.”

But Trepanier had no desire to dwell on what a dupe he had been. He had not come to Rome to be patronized by Catena. He told his old adversary of Vincent Traeger.

“I think he is working for Ignatius Hannan,” Trepanier said.

“To what end?”

Trepanier gave Catena a little word picture of the eccentric electronics billionaire who had regained his faith and was determined to put his vast wealth at the service of his beliefs. Catena nodded with approval when he told him of the replica of the grotto of Lourdes on the grounds of Empedocles Inc. He told him of Hannan's plans for Refuge of Sinners.

“He had hired Gabriel Faust as director.” It even sounded sarcastic.

“And he has disappeared?”

Trepanier stirred in his chair. “With Hannan's millions and my money.”

“You might have persuaded Mr. Hannan to support your efforts.”

“He proposed that I join my efforts to his!”

Catena's smile did not become him. Trepanier sat forward. It was important that he join forces with the confraternity. Catena had connections in Rome, in the Vatican. Surely he must see the unprecedented opportunity they had.

“Opportunity?”

Trepanier spelled it out for him. The document they had sought to have released in its entirety was still theirs for the getting. Didn't Catena understand the significance of what he had told him? Anatoly, the mysterious Russian, had the Fatima file. It was, one might say, in the public domain, no longer in the control of those in the Vatican with a vested interest in keeping the third secret a secret. There was of course no need to convince Catena that the supposed publishing of the third secret by Ratzinger in 2000 had been a ploy to damp down the continuing interest in what had not been made public.

“This faked message is a mere diversion. I can almost believe that it was engineered to discredit . . .” Jay was about to say “me” but stopped himself in time, saying instead “those of us with the interests of the Blessed Virgin at heart.”

Catena's brows lifted and the corners of his mouth went down. “Causing global chaos in the process?”

“Oh, they would have hoped for a quick exposure . . .” Of course Catena had a point. It had eaten deeply into Trepanier's self-esteem that he had been taken in by such an interloper as Gabriel Faust. Had the art historian any notion of what that message could bring about? It helped, some, to deflect his own sense of guilt onto the flown Faust.

“The third secret was intended for the People of God,” he said to Catena.

“Via the pope.”

“But the pope was to make it known in nineteen sixty! The Vatican has lost its right to Sister Lucia's document. We have to get hold of it.”

Catena had been subdued by the rioting, the sacrileges, the threats against the Church, no doubt of that, but under the effect of Trepanier's enthusiasm some of the old fire was rekindled.

“No one will believe anything the Vatican says anyway,” Trepanier assured him.

As Catena's old self took hold, Trepanier suggested that he bring in Father Harris.

“I have told you everything he has told me.” Catena sounded piqued.

“But I want to discuss what we must do.”

 

 

Catena sent for him and ten minutes later Harris shuffled in. He wore the kind of sandals once favored by Franciscans, but this was because of the condition of his feet, supporting all that weight. Harris seemed a most improbable contact with friends in the Vatican, but perhaps that was in his favor. Harris eased himself into a chair, expelling air as he did so. His hands moved from the arms of his chair to meet on the vast expanse of his belly.

“Tell me about Remi Pouvoir,” Trepanier urged.