Valley of the Templars (19 page)

He’d spent an hour in New Orleans looking for the same model of Chrysler just to confuse things if it came to that. Finally he put the fourteen-day permit on the dashboard, locked the car and walked back to the hotel. He asked the concierge to get him a cab, tipped the man and rode to Orlando International Airport in time to catch a one-ten JetBlue flight to Nassau, which arrived an hour later.

In Nassau he switched from his authentic but bogus American passport to his Cuban diplomatic passport and caught the three-fifteen Compañía Panameña de Aviación Airlines flight to Havana via Panama City. The flight took a little less than five hours all told and he arrived back in Havana in time for a late dinner in the Comedor de Aguiar dining room at the Hotel Nacional.

With his dinner completed, he took out the pocket-sized Inmarsat satellite phone, pulled out the blade antenna and dialed the suitcases in Orlando. The suitcases immediately demanded his authorization code, which he sent. Following that, he ran a series of test numbers to the suitcases, which then informed him that everything was in order.

He ended the data communication function,
folded away the blade antenna and then had a look at the dessert menu. He chose the Copa Lolita crème caramel with two scoops of vanilla ice cream and a rum and raisin sauce. He ate his dessert slowly, savoring each bite, then had the waiter fetch him a Bolívar Petit Belicosos and a Havana club on the rocks. He lit the cigar and blew a swirl of the rich aromatic smoke into the air. He took a sip of his drink and leaned back against the banquette. He smiled happily. All in all, it had been an excellent day.

Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada contemplated the remains of his breakfast on the lap table lying over his thighs and wondered how it was that Thomas Brennan, a lowly parish priest, always found some way to disturb his digestion.

At his age the cardinal’s breakfast was not what it used to be—which had once been asparagus spears topped with two fried eggs, crumbled pancetta and bread crumbs seasoned with Parmesan, followed by sfogliatelli stuffed with ricotta and/or cannoli along with several cups of strong espresso.

Now it was what lay before him: a single soft-boiled egg, a piece of dry, whole-grain toast and tea with lemon. On occasion when he felt like living dangerously, he would add a small glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, more for the irony of the fact that the Vatican kitchen’s oranges were inevitably Jaffas imported from Israel than for the flavor. In fact,
he’d developed a taste for powdered Tang in the ’60s and still much preferred it.

Spada picked up his glasses from the night table and put them on. He looked around the bedroom and wondered if all the struggle had been worth it. He imagined that one day in the near future he would die here, hopefully in an undisturbed sleep.

The room was large, the tall French doors that looked out onto the Vatican Gardens covered by tasseled silk drapes in dark blue. The furniture consisted of a tall, freestanding armoire for clothing, a desk, a small table and several chairs. The bed was a four-poster fifteenth-century oak monstrosity carved and worked as ornately as a Botticelli masterpiece in gold. The walls were bare white plaster, the ceiling high and crisscrossed with heavy wooden beams as old as the bed.

Except for a simple wooden crucifix on the wall behind him, the only decoration in the room was a large painting by the Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli. The name of the painting was
Casting Devils out of Arezzo
, which depicted Saint Francis doing an exorcism outside the walls of an Italian city—fitting under the present circumstances, although in this case the city was Havana and the exorcist was certainly no saint.

Spada sighed. A man of his years should be dozing in his country garden listening to the bees hard at
work and smelling the ripening grapes on his vines, not contemplating his own descent into Hades for planning the assassination of a foreign head of state while trying to digest his mean and simple breakfast. He rang the small silver bell on his lap table and waited.

A few seconds later his steward, Mario, appeared, a dour-looking man in his sixties wearing a dark suit, a white shirt and a dark tie. The steward approached Spada, nodded briefly and removed the table from Spada’s lap. Spada pulled the lapels of his jade green silk dressing gown a little more tightly across his chest and pulled the light duvet a little higher above his waist. Mario waited patiently while the cardinal adjusted his bedclothes.

“Send him in,” said Spada. Mario nodded and turned away. Like most of the Holy Father’s servants, Mario was a member of Memores Domini, a lay brotherhood dedicated to a life of obedience, celibacy, silence and contemplative prayer. It wasn’t common knowledge but members of Memores Domini who served in the Vatican were chosen for their below-average IQs, their illiteracy and their unwavering loyalty. It was the same qualities that convents looked for in their acolytes. You didn’t want nuns who gossiped and thought for themselves; you wanted nuns who would work and do what they were told.

Brennan entered the room. “Your Eminence,” he said, after closing the heavy door behind him.

“Sit,” said the cardinal.

Brennan pulled a chair away from the desk and brought it closer to the bed. He sat. Spada smiled. Brennan was a boor but he wasn’t a complete idiot; he knew better than to light one of his foul-smelling cigarettes in Spada’s private apartments.

“You wish to make a report at this abominably early hour?” Spada asked.

“It’s your friend Musaro,” said the priest.

Spada groaned inwardly; he’d known Musaro since the little upstart from nowhere had been ordained at the cathedral in Otranto and had kept his eyes on the man ever since. Even then he knew that Musaro was dangerous and he’d done what he could over the years to keep the man out of any key positions in the Holy See.

Somehow Musaro had managed to turn what amounted to exile from the halls of power into a career, becoming nuncio, or ambassador, to any number of countries experiencing problems within the Church. Long before anyone else had seen it, Musaro had recognized that Italy wouldn’t rule the Vatican forever and had gathered favors from outside the Vatican for years. Eventually, as both the Polish pope and Ratzinger had proven, the young priest from nowhere was proved to be correct in his judgment.

“Tell me,” said Spada.

“There’s been a lot of back chatter about him in the halls these days. It’s getting louder by the day.”

“Back chatter?”

“Spy talk for gossip, Your Eminence. Cries and whispers, you might say.”

“What kind of gossip?”

“Nothing specific at this point. It’s merely that he’s the subject of a lot of conversations. I’ve had this from a number of sources. He’s like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter. Calling in favors. In politics it would be called maneuvering for position. In military terms he’s enlisted his forces.”

“Against who?”

“Not quite sure,” mused Brennan. “But a lot of the talk appears to be originating in the college. Your colleagues.”

Spada nodded to himself. It made sense. There was no doubt that the most powerful man in the Vatican after the Holy Father was the secretary of state, but the position of dean of the College of Cardinals was a very close third. It was the dean, after all, who presided over the conclave to elect a new pope, and on a number of occasions—most recently Pope Benedict—the dean was elected to the position himself.

“He wouldn’t be campaigning on his own behalf,” said Spada thoughtfully.

Brennan nodded his agreement. “Not Musaro’s style. He much prefers to be the power behind the throne, not the power sitting on it.”

“Quite so,” said Spada. “Is there any idea who is most favored?”

“Not yet,” said Brennan. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Ortega.”

Spada stared at the rumpled Irish priest seated beside the bed. He felt a chill run down his spine. “That would be insane! There’s far too much scandal attached to him, not to mention our present situation. The Church has enough troubles without a…”

“A poof electing the Holy Father?” Brennan smiled.

“Indeed,” replied Spada, gathering his dressing gown even more tightly around his sunken chest, suddenly embarrassed. The Cuban cardinal archbishop wore jeweled slippers in Havana Cathedral, used perfume, had no one over the age of twenty-five in his household or office and had posed for photo opportunities with Castro wearing a red velvet beret with a gold communist star on the front. Red velvet!

Personally Spada had nothing against gays, but to have such an openly and flamboyantly effeminate man as Ortega in a position of power could be terribly damaging to the Church’s already tattered and battered image.

“On the surface it looks mad, of course,” said
Brennan. “But for Musaro it might be an excellent choice. Knowing what he knows would be enough to keep Ortega in line, and with Ortega as dean of the college it might provide Musaro with a way into the Vatican and into another seat of power for himself.”

“Mine,” said Spada, his voice flat. That
did
make sense. The Holy Father was the voice of God on Earth, but the secretary of state was the stick in His hand. “Are you sure about this information?”

“As I said, it’s only been gossip up to now, but if I was putting money on a pony to come in first at the sweepstakes, that’d be the one I’d choose.”

“If this is what Musaro’s up to, it must be stopped.”

Brennan stood up and Spada smiled briefly; the poor man’s desperate need for nicotine was almost palpable. “If you want it stopped, it only leaves you with one choice, I’m afraid,” said the Irish priest.

“And what choice is that?”

“The choice of which piece you want to have removed from the board: the bishop or the queen.” Brennan smiled at his pun.

“Do you have someone who could complete the task on short notice?”

“Certainly,” said Brennan. A small but vital group within the Vatican intelligence apparatus had been in existence since the middle of the thirteenth century when a French Templar grand master named
Guillaume de Sonnac had organized the first secret society of Vatican
assassini
.

“Let me think about this,” said Spada. “We don’t want to act precipitously.”

“Don’t think too long,” warned Brennan, and with that he nodded, turned on his heel and left the cardinal’s bedroom.

Joseph Patchin stood in the large living room of the house in Georgetown, D.C., and listened to the cocktail party chatter all around him. For a Georgetown soiree like this, it was surprisingly free of bureaucrats and politicians. Most of the guests were well-heeled supporters of the Athena Foundation, a philanthropic organization in the arcane and confusing business of supporting other, less connected and smaller charity groups around the world.

So, why on earth was he standing here in a tux with a glass of Midleton Very Rare Irish in his hand? He wasn’t wealthy, he wasn’t particularly well connected politically, at least by most of the guests’ standards, and he was certainly no philanthropist. He was a divorced man in late middle age who’d taken a beating from his ex’s lawyers as well as the markets and was one administration away from being unemployed.

The CIA operations director went through his
mental address book and tried to remember the names of anyone he knew who was directly or indirectly involved with the Athena Foundation, but he came up empty. When he’d received the invitation, he’d asked Becky, his secretary, to discreetly find out if the invitation had been sent to him rather than to his ex-wife by some sort of oversight, but she’d struck out, as well. In the end he’d decided to attend the party just in case; turning down any social invitation in D.C. could be fatally dangerous to your career, while accepting cost nothing more than a wasted hour or two on a weekday evening and gave you the chance to drink someone else’s expensive booze.

After an hour the only thing Patchin had discovered was that the house he was in was a Washington pied-à-terre belonging to the recently retired U.S. ambassador to Brazil and his wife, heiress to an old Florida sugar fortune as well as being on the board of directors for the Athena Foundation. From what Patchin had overheard at the party, the ambassador and his plump, dark-haired wife spent most of their time in Palm Beach or on their Mediterranean-based yacht in Monaco. None of it was ringing any bells in Patchin’s mind, but he assumed that if he stayed long enough he’d find out why he’d been invited.

He was right; halfway through his second glass of the honey-smooth Irish whisky, he felt a light tap on his shoulder. He turned and found himself staring at
the leonine, white-haired and statesmanlike figure of Max Kingman, CEO of the Pallas Group and father of Rufus Kingman, Patchin’s own deputy director.

Max Kingman shook Patchin’s hand warmly in a solid grip and simultaneously squeezed his left biceps with the other hand. Kingman looked like a shanty-Irish version of the Godfather: white hair swept back from a broad forehead, mustache neatly trimmed, cheeks and jowls freshly shaven and rosy with the unhealthy glow of a little too much alcohol and blood pressure sneaking up into the dangerous numbers. He was bucking the trend wearing a decades-out-of-date but perfectly tailored three-piece, dark blue pin-striped suit, a Valentine red bow tie and old-fashioned wing-tip brogues.

“The library is on your left at the end of the hall. Ten minutes,” said Kingman. He released Patchin’s hand and his arm, then turned, making his way though the crowd, glad-handing men and giving the women courtly little bows as he maneuvered his way across the room like a shark swimming through a swimming flock of penguins.

Ten minutes later Patchin went down the hallway and stepped into the library of the ambassador’s house. It was a large room with a huge mullioned window looking out on a very private, stone-walled rose garden. The ceiling was high with plaster
moldings and there were three walls of floor-to-ceiling bookcases crammed with volumes that appeared to have been actually read rather than purchased by the yard by an expensive Washington decorator who gets to spend other people’s money to give them good taste that his or her clients don’t have. There were a number of old, well-worn leather club chairs gathered around a glass-topped, wood-strapped steamer trunk, a small but elegant wood fireplace and an eighteenth-century Chippendale desk that was doubling as a bar. Kingman poured himself a drink as Patchin entered the room and closed the door behind him.