Forbidden Sanctuary (19 page)

"I assure you that it is true," Ashanti replied, unruffled. "My usefulness is at an end in this job if people cannot trust me. To show my good faith in this matter, I will admit to you that there is considerable doubt as to whether the Numoi can do what they threaten. However, there is no doubt that news of their threat will cause considerable unrest, not to say panic, in the world."

"And you will be telling the world, I suppose?"

"Well, certainly it is my duty to inform the various heads of state whose nations might be affected by this. They must have a chance to take whatever steps they feel might be necessary."

"Including whatever persecution of the Catholic Church they feel might induce me to give in, I suppose."

"It would be duplicitous of me to say otherwise, your Holiness. They will do what they can to protect their people. That is the way of the world."

"Well, it was thoughtful of you to give us this news so quickly. It is much preferable to folding out from
L'Osservatore Romano."

"And may I ask if you intend to act on the information?"

"Not at present, Mr. Ashanti. We are not yet quite ready to yield our principles."

Ashanti smiled. "Very well, your Holiness. I am sure we will speak again."

Odd, he thought, as he stared at his list. Clement's behavior in this situation just could not have been predicted. Was there a new power behind the throne? Was the Pope perhaps becoming a bit senile? No, this was not a throwback to his childhood, but to—what?—ten, fifteen years ago.

Not too many men have ended civil wars single-handedly. They're not easy to end in any manner; Ashanti knew from experience. But Archbishop Herbert had done it, and all his actions since then had to be interpreted with that in mind. Of course it hadn't been a big civil war—a few hundred discontented blacks trying to stir the slumbering masses against a government slowly sinking under the weight of its own ineptitude. But the blacks were smart and desperate and well-armed, and their opposition was weary, tentative, afraid. Before a coherent policy had been formed, scores had been killed and the blacks had control of a ten-block area of East London. And, more important, they possessed a nuclear bomb, obtained somehow from the wreckage of the Soviet Union.

The siege that developed had paralyzed the nation and almost destroyed it. All attempts at negotiation had been fruitless, until one morning Archbishop Herbert walked into the blacks' territory and offered himself in exchange for a peaceful settlement. The offer was spurned, but somehow, through hours of discussions with Kuntasha, the black leader, agreements were reached, concessions were made. By the end of the day a set of proposals had been sent to the Prime Minister; by the end of the week the war was over.

These matters are never very tidy. Afterward, there were questions and recriminations on both sides. The Prime Minister's party was defeated in the next general election, a disaffected West Indian tried to assassinate Kuntasha. But the creaky mechanism of civilized discourse had started up again, and Herbert alone was responsible for that. Ashanti recalled someone asking the Archbishop on television how he had done it. Ill-at-ease, embarrassed, he had simply shrugged and said, "The Holy Spirit was with me."

Well, perhaps. Certainly there had been little evidence of great diplomatic skill since then. Ashanti himself had bested the Pope on one or two minor matters in the four years of his reign. But it would be dangerous to underestimate a man like Clement. Obviously he was the kind who rose to occasions when one least expected it. And this, evidently, was an occasion to which he was rising.

A foolish, irritating action. Ashanti's most basic instinct was to compromise, to placate, to pacify. And now Clement was forcing him to increase tensions, to anger people, to provoke bitterness.
God save us all from fanatics.

He picked up the phone and put through a call to the White House. President Gibson would not be very pleased. No one would be very pleased.

Chapter 18

Harry Stokes was tired and grouchy. More grouchy than tired: he didn't like being chewed out, especially when he hadn't done anything wrong. McMurtry was getting heat from the big shots back in New York, and was simply passing it along. Okay, no hard feelings, but you couldn't expect a person to be exactly jumping for joy over it.

Stokes had spent the previous evening tracking down cab drivers, limo drivers, bus drivers, anyone who might have picked up passengers from United Flight 407 out of New York City. No one could remember a big Italian-looking guy and a short something-or-other. Then he had checked the guest registers at a few grungy motels off the Strip. No way he'd get the fancier hotels. Up at the crack of dawn, and McMurtry has the bright idea: if we can't find those two, let's track down the rest of the passengers. See if they have anything to add.

So Stokes was trudging from hotel to hotel with a passenger list in hand, having absolutely no luck at that either, and every time he called in, McMurtry was getting nastier. Talk about your glamorous jobs.

At his fifth stop he got lucky. It was a second-rate place downtown, with a nosy desk clerk and faded carpeting. Sure enough, there was Mr. Arthur Hanson of Scarsdale, row 14, seat 9. With an asterisk next to his name on the list. Bernardi had been assigned seats 7 and 8. Well, all right.

Stokes zipped up to the seventh floor and knocked on Mr. Hanson's door. And again, loudly. Finally there was a shuffling of feet and a suspicious eye at the peephole. "Who's't?"

Stokes held up his ID. "I'd just like to ask a few questions, if you don't mind, sir. It won't take long."

"I haven't done nothin'."

"Yes, sir. This investigation has nothing to do with you personally."

"Well, okay."

The bolt slid and the door opened to reveal a rumpled-looking man in a terry-cloth robe. Stokes noticed an empty bottle of Canadian Club sticking out of a wastebasket.

"Had a little party here last night," Mr. Hanson explained.

"Yes, sir. I'd like to talk to you about your plane ride from New York."

"Oh, uh, okay. Good flight. I forget the movie."

"That's all right. I'd like to know if you can remember anything about the people who sat next to you."

Hanson ran his fingers through his thinning hair and scrunched his face up to show how hard he was trying. "Next to me... um... okay. Nice couple. Italian, I think. First time they'd taken a plane. That was kinda odd."

Stokes shook his head. "Perhaps on the other side of you."

"Other side?" Hanson asked, thinking even harder. "I don't... I mean, I had a window seat. There
wasn't
another side."

Stokes digested this. "Perhaps you had better describe this Italian couple."

"Well, the guy was, you know, middle-aged, regular height, kind of Italian-looking. The woman was, I don't know, shorter. Italian-looking too. I think."

Stokes produced a picture. "Is this the man?"

Hanson studied the photo. "Well, the guy wasn't a priest, you know."

"The face, though."

"Oh well, I don't know. I don't think so. Could be."

Stokes sighed. "This couple sat next to you for the whole trip? No changing of seats?"

"No, I don't think so. I mean, it was a couple of days ago, you know?"

Stokes nodded. "Thank you, Mr. Hanson. Will you be staying at this hotel for the next few days?"

"Yup. I'm on vacation. I'd be stayin' in a better place, you know, but—"

"Yes, sir." Stokes departed quickly, not eager to hear anything about the guy's life.

Back in his car, Stokes immediately called in and got hold of McMurtry. He reported what Hanson had told him.

"That's really odd," McMurtry said. "We got a positive ID from a travel agent in New York. Bernardi bought the tickets."

"Well, Bernardi had no way of knowing when we'd be onto him," Stokes pointed out. "Maybe he figured he'd better get himself and the alien into disguises as soon as possible."

"All right, but where does that leave us? We've already checked the hotels for Bernardi."

"What about we check all the
couples with Italian names?" Stokes suggested. "Maybe he's using a friend's credit card."

"Worth a shot, I guess," McMurtry responded. He didn't sound enthusiastic. "We'll get the names from the hotels. Probably won't be more than ten thousand or so."

A while later Stokes found himself with a huge list of names to check out. McMurty was right; this was probably a waste of time.

Still, he gave it a shot, along with all the rest of the agents in the area.

Hours later, exhausted and bored, he found himself at a Holiday Inn, knocking on the door of a room registered to Peter and Cynthia Cerullo of New York City.

A man answered. Fat and bald, obviously not Bernardi. Cross one more off the list. "What do you want?" the man demanded.

Stokes routinely held out his identification out to the man and said in a reassuring tone: "My name is Henry Stokes, special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Just doing a routine check. There's nothing to be—"

"Is that the police, Pete?" a woman's voice demanded from inside the room.

The man looked worried. Why should be look worried?

"Mind if I come in, Mr. Cerullo?" Stokes asked.

The man shook his head and stepped back. Stokes looked around. An open suitcase, open bottle of wine, clothes on a chair, a short, sharp-looking woman with big blond hair. She was looking at her husband, a disgusted, aggrieved expression on her face. Why?

"You and your friends," she muttered under her breath.

Okay. "Were you folks by any chance on United Flight 407 out of New York City the day before yesterday?" Stokes asked.

There were beads of sweat on Cerullo's forehead. "What if we were?" he asked with halfhearted belligerence.

Could he make it any easier? "Would you be acquainted with a priest by the name of Albert Bernardi?"

"Oh, for God's sake, let's stop all this nonsense," the woman said. "We didn't do anything wrong. There's nothing you can arrest us for."

"Perhaps you'd better tell me exactly what you've done, Mrs. Cerullo."

"It's him," she replied, gesturing contemptuously at her husband. "He gets a call from this old friend. 'Hey Pete, you've never been anywhere. Why don't you take a few days off, you and the wife go anywhere you want and I'll buy the plane tickets?' So what if the guy's a priest? There's gotta be a catch, right? Don't do it, I tell him, you'll just get mixed up in something. But no. Pete here has to drop everything and go to Las Vegas so he could lose money at blackjack."

"I didn't see you stayin' at home," Mr. Cerullo remarked.

"And before you know it," she went on, ignoring him, "this priest is on the front page of every paper in the country, and the FBI's after Petey here because Bernardi's name is on the tickets. Some friend."

"Don't you knock Bernardi," Cerullo said hotly, advancing toward his wife. "I've known him a hell of a lot longer than I've known you, and he's done a hell of a lot more for me. And just to set the record straight, he told me exactly why he wanted me to take this trip, and I was happy to help him out. I didn't bother telling you because then you wouldn't have come, you'd have blabbed to the police like you blabbed just now."

"Well this is all very interesting," Stokes said, cutting off what he was sure would have been a savage retort from Mrs. Cerullo. "However, my job is to find Bernardi. Would either of you happen to know where he is?"

The husband and wife glared at each other. "I'd tell you if I knew," the wife said.

"Even if I knew I wouldn't tell you," the husband said.

Stokes nodded. "Maybe you'd both better come with me." He'd bring them down to the office and make it all formal, but he doubted that there was more to be gleaned from these two.

He wondered how McMurtry would react. They'd cracked their part of the case, but it hadn't exactly given the big shots what they wanted. He didn't really envy those big shots; this guy Bernardi was not going to just turn up on their doorstep.

That was their problem, though.