To Kill the Pope (24 page)

*  *  *

The room assigned to Tim at the Jesuit Residence on Rue St. Jacques on the Left Bank, not far from the Sorbonne, was spacious, pleasant, and comfortable. He had told the Jesuit brother
who showed him to the room that he was not certain how long he would stay in Paris—perhaps a few weeks, he said—and was smilingly assured that he was welcome to remain there even for a few years.

“If you stay here until the middle of September,” the brother remarked, “you will catch the visit of the Holy Father. I'm sure that you see him often in Rome, but you might find it interesting to observe him on his home turf. Parisians will be back from the holidays and we expect a huge turnout of the faithful. You speak French so well that you will not miss a word, not a nuance of the visit.”

“Yes, that would be quite interesting,” Tim replied, actually meaning it. Would the “French Brethren,” whoever they might be, try to kill Gregory XVII in Paris, having failed in Rome? There was so much Muslim unrest in France these days, as had just been emphasized in
Le Monde
that morning, that one could not feel safe about anything, especially if it touched on religion.

In fact, the pope seemed to face new dangers even at the Vatican. Thus just before he left for Paris, Tim had been told by Sister Angela, on Saint-Ange's instructions, that a bomb had been discovered several days earlier in the Bernini Colonnade on St. Peter's Square, directly below the Papal Apartments. And that same week, the CIA Director had flown from Washington to inform the Cardinal Secretary of State during a most discreet visit that the Agency's networks were picking up signs, imprecise as they were, that unidentified terrorists were plotting to kill the pope. Unlike five years ago, Tim thought, the CIA was now paying serious attention to possible new conspiracies. He wondered whether the Agency was aware of any actual warnings, from whatever quarters, similar to de Marenches' warnings last time around, the ones that went unheeded by the Holy See.

The message from Sainte-Ange that Angela had delivered to Tim included a reference to the information communicated by the CIA Director. But, Tim noticed, there was no suggestion that an attempt against the pope would necessarily be made during the approaching visit to France. Yet, it could happen, he reasoned, particularly in the light of what he had learned in Istambul about the “French Brethren.”

His discovery, of course, just happened to coincide with the bomb found in the Bernini Colonnade and the signs picked up by the CIA. Tim, after all, had gone to Istambul at a time of his own choosing and he had sought out the Gray Wolves—so it was a matter of luck, if that was the proper way of putting it. But then there was the uncanny coincidence of Tim's newly acquired knowledge about the “French Brethren,” which forced him to pursue his investigations in France without delay, and Gregory XVII's visit to his homeland, just three weeks away.

It was all vague, elusive, and confusing. But Tim Savage suddenly experienced, on that first day in Paris, the eerie feeling that his efforts to unearth the truth about the assassination attempt were turning into a life-and-death race against new conspiracies directed at the pope. His investigation, Tim sensed, no longer was the exercise in historical sleuthing he had thought it to be at the outset, when Sainte-Ange had told him that Gregory XVII desired to know the “truth.” There was sudden urgency about his endeavor, he startingly realized, and he knew he was back in action. As in Vietnam. Tim was now determined to remain in France for the duration of the papal visit, even without the encouragement of his Jesuit hosts on Rue St. Jacques, and, if all went well, to stay on as long as necessary to follow the Istambul leads and all the new information until he made real progress. It could not wait long, and there was much spadework to be done in France.

*  *  *

The private office of the Minister of Interior, facing the presidential Elysée Palace on deserted Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, was filled with France's top security officials at the eight o'clock morning meeting. The tourists were not yet out in the street to admire the powerful black automobiles inside the courtyard and lining up along the sidewalk outside.

The minister, a fastidious and meticulous politician, had concluded that time had come to review all the imaginable security aspects of Gregory XVII's September visit. Planning security measures for such an occasion was a standard law enforcement procedure that in the past had not required the minister's personal involvement. This time, however, there was acute nervousness at the highest levels of the French government about the
pope's safety, and the president had assigned the interior minister—in effect, France's top police official—to assume personal responsibility for the visit.

Rising Muslim unrest in the country was, of course, one of the reasons, and everybody at the morning meeting remembered that Agca Circlic was himself a Muslim. Conventional police wisdom, shared with conventional historians, held that history tends to repeat itself almost literally. But some of the officials assembled in the ornate ministerial private office actually knew and remembered some other significant facts about the 1981 assassination plot that, they believed, should be considered at this meeting. The minister had obviously been informed of the discovery of the lethal bomb in the Bernini Colonnade—it had not been made public—and, as a matter of sharing intelligence, at least in some situations, he had been provided with the same information that the CIA Director had just presented at the Vatican.

“What should I worry about?” the interior minister asked his advisers. He was an old-line Gaullist with an impressive military background—Indochina, Algeria, and the command of the Foreign Legion's parachute strike force—and a very effective and skillful politician who had saved his president on a number of potentially embarrassing occasions. Right now, all the men gathered in the minister's office knew that averting a frightful embarrassment to his president and to the French Republic was of higher priority for him than the actual fate of Gregory XVII. The minister was an nonpracticing Catholic from an old noble Catholic family claiming direct descent from Charlemagne. Tim had come across this gem of knowledge when he read up on French leaders in preparation for his expedition to Paris.

“Do we know of any
actual
threats, plots, or rumors of plots against the pope during his visit to France, other than the usual garbage?” the minister pursued. “Do we hear anything unusual from Muslim communities, apart from their normal antisocial behavior?”

“No, we do not,” was the reply from Colonel Georges de Sainte-Ange, the red-mustached head of the SDECE, the French secret police, and first cousin of the papal secretary. He had replaced Alexandre de Marenches, who had died of a supposed
heart attack three years ago. “But there's some history in our files that you may wish to hear about. It's quite germain, I think.”

“So go ahead,” the minister said. “Let's move on with it.”

“According to our files,” the colonel explained, consulting a folder in his lap, “Monsieur de Marenches, my predecessor, had secured information that a conspiracy to kill Gregory XVII was in the making. He took it very seriously, and dispatched one of his deputies to Rome to warn the Holy See. As a matter of fact, de Marenches delivered personally this warning to the pope's secretary, who, as you may know, is my cousin. I was at the time the chief of the SDECE section dealing with Soviet affairs, and my own interest in our very compartmentalized agency only touched after the event on whether there was any Soviet involvement in the assassination attempt. I had no previous knowledge of the warning to the Vatican.”

“How precise was the warning?” the minister insisted. “Did de Marenches put his finger on somebody?”

“I cannot tell because sections of this particular file are mysteriously missing,” the colonel said. “I only became aware of it yesterday, when you called this meeting and I requested the file to bring myself up to speed on this whole thing. This is how I found out that de Marenches had gone to Rome to warn my cousin. But there are notations in the file to the effect that some Muslims, somewhere, were involved in the supposed conspiracy mentioned by de Marenches. Unfortunately we cannot ask him.”

“Did the SDECE actually discover the plot in France or elsewhere?”

“Yes, I believe it was discovered in France,” the colonel replied.

“Does it follow, then, that it was a conspiracy by Muslims in France?”

“Not necessarily,
Monsieur le Ministre.
We have a worldwide operation, and de Marenches' people might have picked up the scent elsewhere. As you know, we watch Muslim organizations everywhere so it might have happened this way. I just don't know. But France might have been a convenient transit route for the killer, this and no more. Like Carlos the Jackal, who kept crossing and recrossing the country. Still, this is important history, flimsy as it is, and we should keep it in mind as the date of the papal
arrival approaches. Believe me, my people have been working overtime on this subject since the visit was first announced, back in the early spring. And we are in constant touch with the security and intelligence people at the Vatican.”

“Well, I do worry about Muslims, the pope or not,” the minister declared. “I got to know them in the Algerian war. And I've just seen a report that of the twelve or fourteen million Muslim immigrants in Europe, most live in Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, and Berlin. A total of five million are permanently in France—that's ten percent of our population! The Muslim ghettos keep growing. We're sitting on a time bomb, gentlemen. Gregory XVII may come and go—and I pray that he gets back home safely—but the Muslim threat will continue to hang over us. So when we think about security for the pope in France, let's be sure we think in broader terms of Islam. Nobody else in our country poses a danger to the Holy Father . . . Incidentally, did de Marenches have a history of heart disease? I was really taken aback at the time by his death. . . .”

T
IM
S
AVAGE TOOK
the
métro
from the St. Michel station on the Seine to an apartment building on Rue de Ménilmontant, where he was awaited by Professor Ahmed Al-Kutas, an Egyptian anthropologist from Alexandria who had come to see him in Rome several years ago as part of his research on a scholarly project. Both of equal age, Tim and Al-Kutas liked each other, keeping in touch through occasional letters after the Egyptian returned to Paris where he taught at the famous École des Sciences Politiques, the Sciences-Po as the French called it. Al-Kutas invited Tim to tea when the Jesuit telephoned him to say that he was in town and wanted to get together to chat.

Speaking in French, they exchanged pleasantries and comments about their respective health and families. Al-Kutas inquired about Tim's current work after telling him he was completing a book about social structures in Saudi Arabia and Islam's role in them.

“Basically, it's the same work I was doing when we first met,” Tim said, “but right now it's a bit more political—my bosses are fascinated by the politics of Islam—and this is a little field trip.”

In a literal sense, he was telling Al-Kutas the truth, smoothly skirting the specific nature of his mission. Tim had not expected the Egyptian to provide him with leads in his investigation or reveal to him the identity of the “French Brethren”—there was no imaginable reason for him to know anything about it—but he was hoping that Al-Kutas could share his knowledge of the mood and the politics in Parisian Muslim ghettos.
That
was the anthropologist's professional field. Like the best intelligence officers, though by no means all his former CIA colleagues, Tim deeply believed in absorbing as much as possible about the environment in which he was operating before making any serious moves. It would help him,
he thought, to understand better
contemporary circumstances,
whatever they were in this case.

“What the Vatican wants to evaluate,” Tim told Al-Kutas, “is the degree of religious and therefore political power developing in great Muslim communities like Paris. This is obviously a significant new phenomenon, and my people aren't quite sure they know what it means in the long run. On the one hand, they worry about fundamentalism and terrorism, rightly or wrongly. On the other hand, as you know, Gregory XVII is very keen on maintaining a constructive dialogue with Islam, and he doesn't want to make any mistakes, especially as he is about to visit France again. And, as you also know, the Holy See, along with the majority of the French Church, has been quite outspoken in the defense of human rights of the Muslim immigrants here. It keeps protesting, for example, the deportations of Muslim refugees from North Africa by the French government. So, in a way, I'm something of an informal advance man for the papal trip.”

This was a slight exaggeration, but Al-Kutas took it on face value. He poured them more of his exceedingly sweetened tea, reminding Tim of Cairo, and picked up a folder from a table by his armchair.

“Yes, I understand,” he said, pulling pensively on his short, black beard. “It makes sense and it's a good approach. So I'll try to be helpful. What I have here are family statistics of Muslims in the Paris region. I was interested in the contrast between them and the data covering the traditional, conservative families that I'm studying in Saudi Arabia. What do they tell me? Well, first and foremost, that unless something is done about the horrifying unemployment among them, the ghettos will explode sooner or later, and I think rather sooner. You know, overall unemployment in France is around twelve percent of the labor force, which is a drama to the French, but among the Muslims here it is well over fifty percent, which is a veritable tragedy. And the overwhelming majority of adolescents and young people are almost entirely without work. There is no decent education, there are no social services to speak of, no health services—and no future. What there is in abundance, however, are drugs, alcohol—yes, our young Muslims
do
drink—and more and more crime. What you
therefore have here is a recipe for absolute disaster. Does that answer your question?”