The Third Revelation (44 page)

“What's Mr. Quando do?”

“The same thing Mrs. Admirari does.”

“There is no Mrs. Admirari.”

“I know.”

Well, well. But it had turned out to be just a get-acquainted meeting. He decided that she was simply the kind of woman who could not help being a woman. She reminded him of Lulu van Ackeren, of unhappy memory. Well, not entirely unhappy. The trouble with Lulu was that there had been a Mr. van Ackeren, something he only learned when he had proposed. They lay side by side while Lulu told him the sad story. She had been turned down for an annulment. She might have been providing him with a way to get off the hook. He had been devastated. As soon as he had gone to bed with Lulu, he regretted it. She was not, he told himself, that kind of girl. He was eager to make an honest woman of her. Instead, he had got the story of her first marriage, still undissolved in the mind of the Church.

They tried to think of ways around the problem. They both knew priests who would be delighted to defy the Church's marriage laws. Lulu knew a canon lawyer who told her she could grant herself an annulment. He sounded like a Muslim. I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you. But neither of them could bring themselves to be such scofflaws. At the time Neal had been writing for the
NCR
, and so had she, except in her case the
R
stood for
Register
and in his for
Reporter
. God knows orthodoxy was not part of his job description there. His stories had echoed the angry dissent from official Church teaching. But in his heart of hearts he was the Catholic boy his parents had raised. So he and Lulu were stymied. Their love withered on the bough, flaring up from time to time, but each time bringing them to their insoluble problem. And then Lulu had solved it by marrying Martinelli.

“Sad,” Donna said, when eventually he told her all this. But she was smiling as she said it. “Is that what you call a line?”

He was hurt. Of course she was right. Lulu might very well be the way past Donna's defenses. Maybe hers was a delayed reaction. Maybe this invitation to the penthouse allegedly to observe from on high the exchange to take place on the roof of the North American College was at least partially a ploy.

And so with a light heart he entered the building, found there was no elevator, and climbed what seemed ten thousand stairs to the penthouse. He had called from below. She was waiting in the open doorway. All business.

“Come.”

She led him across the room to where open windows gave onto a balcony. He started out and she stopped him.

“No, no. Not yet. We don't want to scare them away.”

He stepped back.

“I have two thirty,” Donna said. “What do you have?”

He pushed back his sleeve. “The same.”

And then a bell sounded.

She looked at him, he looked at her, they both checked their cell phones. The second time they realized it was the doorbell.

“Would you see who it is?”

Neal went to the door, looked through the peephole, and turned. “It's a priest.”

“A priest?”

She came across the room and pulled open the door.

He was tall, taller than the cassock he wore. When Donna opened the door, he pushed it in, shut it behind him, and said, “You're coming with me.”

He was holding a gun.

He toppled backward into the yielding air.

Dortmund tossed
Sense and Sensibility
onto the little metal table beside his lawn chair under the trees on the grounds of the Villa Stritch. He had just ordered Traeger to call off the exchange with Anatoly and Traeger had refused.

“With all respect, you're not my boss any longer.”

“I'm not anyone's boss! I thought you considered me a friend.”

Traeger nodded. A tender moment. But he intended to keep his appointment with Anatoly. He explained to Dortmund that, bleak a hope as it was, getting possession of the missing third secret was the Vatican's only possible way of lifting the siege.

“It won't work, Vincent.”

“What else is there?”

Dortmund reached for Jane Austen, then withdrew his hand. He looked as if he wished he had a basin of water in which to wash it and his other.

“Everyone knows of the planned exchange,” he said.

“I know.”

“Vincent, the two of you will provide target practice for a number of competing forces.”

Traeger knew that. At first, Anatoly had seemed the great danger. The disenchanted former KGB agent was determined to expose the role Chekovsky had played in the assassination attempt on John Paul II. When he had asked Traeger if the now ambassador of Russia had been involved in that plot, Traeger had looked him in the eyes and said nothing. There are many ways to respond to a question. Anatoly saw in this some vindication of his life, pursuing a logic Traeger could not follow. What he did understand was the sense his old foe had that the world had passed him by, moved into another and madder phase that rendered the lives they had both led absurd. To what end all the killings and subverting and maneuvering with an adversary for domination in a black-and-white world? The world had become gray. The world was colorless. Mindless mobs took to the street, no longer the convenient dupes of higher purposes, but possessed of religious zeal. It was one thing to risk one's life for what one considered a great cause, but what can you make of people who voluntarily blow themselves up in crowds, fly airplanes into high-rise buildings, and are willing pawns of a heaven promised to the terrorist zealot?

Anatoly would see their meeting on the roof of the North American College as a Götterdämmerung, the twilight of all their former gods. It would be in a way his manner of making a bomb of himself. In that scenario, Traeger was merely a supernumerary, expendable. He had known that.

But he also knew that what Dortmund said was true. How had the exchange become so widely known? Heather had known of it. Piacere knew because Rodriguez would have told him. And the agency knew. Dortmund had been approached at the Villa Stritch by three clean-shaven and cold-eyed men who had thought Dortmund had been kidnapped and was being held prisoner, somehow the victim of Traeger.

“They want you,” Dortmund said.

“When this is over, I'll turn myself in. There's no case against me.”

“But will you live to stand trial?”

He was accused of murdering Brendan Crowe. More painfully, he was accused of murdering Bea!

Like Anatoly, he was on his own. Then the call came and he headed for the rendezvous.

 

 

Lev was in his little windowed gatehouse. Traeger looked a question and received his answer with a glance. He entered the building.

The doors of the chapel were open and the sound of organ music swelled and then the seminarians began coming out, two by two, wearing cassocks and surplices, the music making them seem on parade. Traeger pressed against the wall and they went by him. There seemed to be hundreds of the young men. And then they were gone, dispersed, to their rooms, wherever. Traeger continued down the hall to the elevator and soon was rising toward his meeting with Anatoly.

On the top floor, he went up a half flight of steps to the closed door to the roof. He grasped the knob and pulled it open. After the dimness of the building, the sunlight momentarily blinded him. A great ball already settling west. At the far end of the roof were three figures, a man and woman and a priest. What were they doing here? Something must have gone wrong.

He turned to go, but the priest hurried toward him. “Wait!”

The priest was Anatoly. And he held a gun.

“Come meet our witnesses. Do you have it?”

“Do you?”

Anatoly reached beneath the buttons of his soutane and produced a large envelope.

“Come.”

“You shouldn't be here,” Traeger said to Donna Quando when he got to her.

“We were forced to come here,” the man cried. “I am a member of the press. This is outrageous.”

Anatoly looked at him with contempt. Neal Admirari then identified himself as Rome correspondent for
Time
.

The noon Mass at the North American College was a pontifical of sorts, of the newer sort, said by a visiting bishop, but Trepanier in cassock and surplice among the seminarians and student priests in the facing choir stalls that filled the nave of the chapel in the North American College offered up the pain he felt at what had been done to the liturgy since Vatican II. The best that could be said for it was that the Mass was valid and licit—he had no sympathy for those who condemned the Novus Ordo as a breach with tradition as decisive as had been the alteration of the ordination ceremony by the Anglican Church. But finally, mercifully, it was over, and Trepanier joined the procession that filed from the chapel. The sight of Traeger pressed against the wall as they went by made his heart leap. How easily he might not have noticed the man.

Trepanier dropped out of the procession when it turned off toward the refectory, letting the files of clerics go by him while he looked intently toward the corridor from which they had turned. He saw Traeger hurry away, as if he had been freed from the procession by a kind of Crack the Whip. Trepanier scampered back the way he had come and rounded the corner just in time to see Traeger enter the elevator.

As he watched the numbers above the door light one after the other, he sent up a prayer of thanksgiving for the inspiration that had led him to seek a room here at the North American College. At the time, it had been proximity to the Vatican that commended the switch from the guest room at the Confraternity of Pius IX. He was certain that he had been sent here to witness the repossession of the third secret of Fatima! He was on a mission.

The elevator stopped at the top floor, the very floor on which Trepanier's room was. Rather than wait for it to descend, he took the staircase. After two flights, he regretted this decision, but to alter it would have taken more time, so he pressed on.

When he emerged onto the top floor, he stopped. He listened. Nothing. He stepped forward and saw nothing but an empty corridor. Perplexed as to what to do now, he began to walk. That was when he noticed the door with “Roof” on it. With a certitude that defied all logic, he knew that that was where Traeger had gone.

He pulled the door open and went up another short flight, at the top of which was another door. His breath was coming in short, excited gasps. He could feel the proximity of Sister Lucia's document. He opened the door only wide enough to slip through. At the sight of the people Traeger had joined, he took up his vigil behind a table on which a collapsed umbrella gave him some concealment and a good view of the proceedings now under way.

 

 

Anatoly held up the envelope. “This is the famous third secret of Fatima, missing from the Vatican Archives. I am exchanging it with Agent Traeger for the report on the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.” The words might have been rehearsed. Anatoly spoke them loudly, as if others might be listening.

“Where did you get that?” Neal Admirari asked.

“Neal,” Donna Quando said. “Please shut up.”

The ceremony proceeded with great formality. Traeger extended his envelope, Anatoly extended his. Each grasped the other's with his free hand. It might have been a drill by a rifle squad. The two men stepped back, each in possession of what he had come for.

That was when Traeger felt the pain in his shoulder. He spun away from Anatoly, who turned toward where the shot had come from, holding his useless pistol. Then Anatoly began to run toward the doorway. Other shots were ripping into the stone floor of the roof, sending shards in all directions. The shots were following Anatoly.

 

 

Suddenly a soutaned figure sprang from behind a table, pushing it aside as he did so, and fairly flew across the roof toward the wounded Traeger. It was Trepanier, and he had eyes only for the envelope Traeger still held, the document he had longed to see for years, the object of all his hopes and fears. He picked up speed as he neared Traeger, who saw him coming. Just as Trepanier lunged for the envelope, the wounded Traeger stumbled to one side. The priest's momentum carried him on. He had turned and was facing them when he hit the ledge bordering the roof. It caught him behind the knees. His hands flew up, a look of terror took possession of his face, and then he toppled backward into the yielding air.

The sound of his dying scream was audible despite the noise of an approaching chopper.

 

 

Anatoly got to the door and through it without being hit and found Lev waiting for him. He pulled the roof door shut and began ripping off the cassock while hanging on to the envelope he had gotten from Traeger.

“Get me out of here.”

“Follow me,” Lev said.

They clambered down the flight of stairs and ran past the elevator, down a narrow corridor to a service elevator. Lev did not get in.

“It will take you to the basement. You can leave from there.”

The doors closed on Lev, and Anatoly descended. It was all he could do not to tear open the envelope. He felt triumphant. Soon all would be clear. He would be vindicated.

The elevator lurched slowly down. When it reached the basement, the doors slid open. Two men were waiting. Anatoly walked into their fire as he emerged from the elevator. As he fell, one of the gunmen grabbed the envelope and the two of them hurried off, leaving the dying Anatoly on the basement floor. The last thing he saw on earth was all his hopes disappearing out a door to the parking lot.

 

 

The white chopper lifted from the Vatican heliport, flew low behind the dome of Saint Peter's so as not to be seen by the mob in the square in front of the basilica, and within minutes reached the roof of the North American College, where it settled in a great rush of the wind it created, which sent buckets and chairs and tables and other loose objects scattering about the rooftop. Neal Admirari watched from where he lay, pressed against the ledge of the building. Some feet from him, Donna was tending to the wounded Traeger.