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“Don’t make this mistake.” He pressed a button on the side of the desk.
“Too many of them have already been made. I’m just here to clean up the mess.”
“You know we’ll never have an opportunity like this again.”
“No, you’ll never have an opportunity like this. The rest of us have always been very good at waiting for the right moment. It’s making sure we get beyond the surprises along the way. The loss of focus.” She paused. “And the sacrifices.”
The door to the room opened. A guard entered, his gun out.
The contessa aimed and fired.
“This way, Father.” A man stood waiting at the open car door. Pearse had no choice but to step out. Forty-five minutes in darkened silence to arrive inside a garage, five identical cars in a row, the smell of gasoline and oil. He glanced through what few windows there were-trees, a drive disappearing into the hillside-as he was led to a door at the far wall, a second escort now behind him. Neither said a word.
When they reached the door, the first man turned and started patting Pearse down, arms and legs, a flat palm across his back and chest. He then produced a small box from his jacket pocket, flipped a switch, and ran it the length of Pearse’s body. The box remained silent. He turned and opened the door. A staircase. They headed up.
Two minutes later, Pearse sat in a rather formal library, a fuller view of the countryside through two high oriel windows. Everywhere else, bookshelves and paintings climbed to the ceiling some two stories above, a narrow balcony extending along three of the four walls. Access to the books. Except for the somewhat modern desk situated between the two windows, the room might have passed for a Vatican gallery. The men waited by the door. Still, no word of explanation.
Pearse sat patiently. He was long past even a mild apprehension. It wasn’t quite resignation. He knew that. But the mechanism to shock had shorted out sometime in the last hour. In its place, he’d found a numbing fatigue, a kind of heaviness he couldn’t quite shake. But also a calm, a token gift from a psyche beyond the saturation point. It had been over thirty hours since he’d last slept, but he knew that wasn’t it, either. He placed his hands in his lap, his head against the soft cushion of the chair, and stared out at the trees. And waited.
When the door finally opened, he didn’t bother to look around. Only when Cardinal Peretti took a seat behind the desk did Pearse shift his focus.
Peretti looked much older than he had on television, older than Pearse recalled from the one or two times they had met over the past few years, large functions, little chance to remember a young priest. He was dressed in simple clericals, only the purple shirt beneath to distinguish his office. Pearse saw a kind face, gentle features, olive skin with a hint of a tan. The eyes alone betrayed the strain he was under.
“I’m sorry for all the precautions,” Peretti began, “but we had to make sure that you hadn’t been forced to wear a wire, that sort of thing. You understand. There’s so much going on right now.”
Pearse continued to stare at him.
Peretti nodded, then said, “Something to drink, Father? Or eat?”
Pearse shook his head slowly.
Peretti let out a long breath. “You’re wondering what’s going on.” He waited, then said, “Maybe I’m not the best person to do that.” He looked past Pearse to one of the men at the door. A quick nod. Pearse heard the door open, then close. Peretti tried a smile. “You’ve been put through a great deal in the last week. I know. I wish …” He seemed genuinely concerned. “I wish I could have stepped in earlier. But until I knew you had the scroll-”
“I’m going to give it to Blaney,” said Pearse, no emotion in his voice. “I thought you might want to know that. I don’t really care what he does with it after that.”
“Yes, you do.”
The voice came from behind him. Pearse turned.
There, in the middle of the room, stood Cecilia Angeli.
“You know you do, Ian,” she continued.
Without thinking, Pearse stood and moved to her, their embrace immediate, her viselike grip around his back enough to begin to shake some life into him.
“It’s good to see you, too, Ian,” she said.
Pearse spoke. “I wasn’t sure if you-”
“For a little while there, neither was I.” Letting go of her, he returned to his chair, while she sat on the edge of the desk, arms folded at her chest. Same old Angeli. “The cardinal was nice enough to come and get me.” Before Pearse could ask, she pressed on. “Actually, the men at my flat were quite pleasant. A little threatening at first, but after that-or at least after you called-they let me get down to my work without too many distractions. Having them there actually forced me to take the time to finish that piece for the English journal. I really should thank them. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to leave, but I sometimes stay in for days anyway. It was rather nice to have someone to cook for.” She looked at Peretti. “Of course, there’s still the matter of those broken windows. And I’m going to need an entirely new front door.”
“Yes. I know,” answered Peretti. “As I said … we’ll take care of all of that, Professor.” He leaned across to Pearse. “So I take it Blaney doesn’t have it.”
“Of course he doesn’t have it,” answered Angeli, waving her hand to quiet Peretti, her eyes on Pearse. “Ian’s too smart for that.” The glint in her eyes was growing. “So … what is it?”
Pearse’s gaze, however, remained on Peretti: “How did you know to find me at Blaney’s?” he asked.
“Trieste,” he answered. “That’s where we caught up with you.”
“You were at the airport?” Pearse said, his head clearing. “Then why didn’t you just pick me up? You could have gotten your hands on the scroll then and there.”
“Yes, but we wanted to see where you were going, whom you were getting in touch with. We needed to know who was involved.”
“And if I had been involved, I would have been delivering it to them.”
“By that point, we knew you weren’t.”
“‘By that point?’” Pearse repeated.
“About three days ago, we began to link you to what was going on: a priest missing from the Vatican, his name on a ferry manifest to Greece a day before the theft on Athos, then at a camp in Kosovo. We tracked down your friend Andrakos a day later. He was rather surprised to hear you were a priest.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“He told us about the professor, whom we found two days ago and brought here. It was only then that we realized the extent to which you had been involved. Even then-”
“You thought I was one of them.”
Reluctantly, Peretti nodded. “You never answered the notices we placed in the newspapers. And, given the way you handled the men at Kukes-men who we’d sent to help you-yes.”
Pearse thought for a moment. “The boys with the yellow boots.”
Peretti nodded.
“Salko must have known,” he said to himself.
“What?”
Pearse looked back at Peretti. “Nothing.”
“Not to mention,” Peretti added, “we’d pieced together your co
“So you knew he was involved?”
“Yes and no. We had our suspicions. We knew von Neurath and Ludovisi were meeting a great deal.”
“Who?” asked Pearse.
“The link to the Vatican Bank. Blaney’s name had come up as well, but there was nothing substantial.”
“So you must have known about the Manichaean co
“To tell the truth, no. The most we knew was that the ‘Perfect Light’ prayer was floating around, but we had no idea what it meant. That information, unfortunately, died with Boniface. At first, we assumed it had to do with the bank. We thought that maybe von Neurath was using the specter of the Manichaeans as some sort of diversion while he ferreted away the funds to ensure his election. We had no idea that this was something far more … I don’t even know the right word to use.”