Finn nodded slowly and tried not to look at the huge stain on the carpet runner closer to the door. She didn’t think she was lucky at all, but at least she was alive. Not like Peter. She felt the hot tears welling up in her eyes again and swallowed hard. The sound she’d heard before dropping down the dark well into unconsciousness had been Peter dying, his throat opened up in a single slashing sweep that had murmured past her like the wing of a night bird and then turned into that final, horrible liquid gurgle.
The apartment was crowded. Two paramedics, packing up now, at least three uniformed cops and two detectives. A crime scene technician was covering everything with fingerprint powder and whistling softly under his breath. The paramedic was speaking to her again.
“Sure you don’t want to come to the hospital, let the docs take a look at you. You maybe got a concussion. I don’t think so, but still, you never know.” The paramedic frowned. “There’s the other thing too, maybe you want to have that checked.”
“I’d know if I’d been raped,” said Finn. “I wasn’t.”
“Okay then, sweetie-pie,” the woman said. She snapped her plastic equipment case shut. “We’ll be on our way then. Sorry for your trouble and your loss.”
“Thank you.”
“You bet.” The paramedics edged out the door, skirting the bloodstain. One of the detectives came out of her bedroom, and she wondered why he’d been there in the first place. He’d introduced himself as Detective Tracker, which she’d thought was hysterically funny when he’d first said it. And it had been just that-a matter of near hysteria. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her boobs and he had bad breath. He was tall, broad-shouldered and had greasy hair.
“You and this Peter kid friends for long?”
“A couple of months.”
“Sleeping with him?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“Sure it is. You were sleeping with him. Some other guy gets jealous, breaks in and waits, like that. You’re not sleeping with him, you got to wonder why, see?”
“I wasn’t sleeping with him.”
“So you didn’t know the guy who killed him.”
“No.”
“How can you be sure? You said it was dark.”
“I don’t know anyone who goes around killing people.”
“Anything taken?”
“I haven’t really looked.”
“Could have been a robbery then.”
“I guess.”
“Not much to steal.”
“No.”
“Student, right?”
“Yes. NYU.”
“Peter too?”
“Yes.”
“How’d you get together-same classes, mutual friends, what?”
“He’s… was in the fine arts program.”
“So? What’s that got to do with anything.”
“He took a life drawing class. I model.”
“Like, naked?” His eyes dropped to her breasts again. For the first time in years stares actually bothered her.
“Nude.”
“Same difference, sweetheart. You don’t have any clothes on.”
“It’s different, Detective Tracker, believe me.”
“You think maybe it could have been someone else in the class?”
“No.”
“Nuts everywhere in New York.”
Her head was pounding. All she wanted to do was curl up on the couch and go to sleep.
“It wasn’t anyone from the goddamn class, all right?”
“Slow down, honey, I’m not the bad guy here.”
“Then stop acting like it.”
One of the uniformed cops smiled. Tracker frowned. There was a knock at the door and it opened. A tall, very thin man stood there. He had dark hair that needed cutting and a pinched angular face with deep-set eyes that matched his hair color. He had a smear of five-o’clock shadow on his cheeks and chin. He looked Irish. The man stared down at the pool of blood congealing on the carpet runner and frowned.
“Who the fuck are you?” asked Tracker. “This is a fucking crime scene and you’re in the way.”
The thin man reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a small, worn leather folder. As he pulled it out Finn saw that he was wearing a shoulder holster. Tracker saw it too. The man flipped open the folder and pushed it into Tracker’s face.
“Delaney. Lieutenant Vincent Delaney, Special Action Squad.” He smiled. “You are?”
“Tracker, Twenty-third Precinct.”
“That’s nice. This is Miss Ryan?”
“That’s it, Loo.”
“I’d like to speak to her if you don’t mind.”
“I’m in the middle of an investigation here.”
“No, you’re not,” said Delaney. “Not anymore.”
9
Dawn was breaking over the Vatican, the secret city behind the high walls still deep in shadow, the trees along its winding paths and around its ancient buildings whispering between themselves in the faint morning breeze.
Lights were on here and there. The man in the long black soutane could hear the faint sound of chanting as he came out of the State Department offices in the papal palace and turned down the narrow gravel walkway that led between the Belvedere Palace and the old brick power plant.
He clutched the decoded message from New York in one hand and quickened his pace down the path, his plain black lace-up shoes making crunching sounds on the dew-damp gravel. Once, early in his career, he had been in awe of this place and saw it as the active seat of God’s will on earth.
Over the years his hair had thinned and his vision began to blur, but if anything, he now saw the Vatican with much clearer eyes. Once, he’d seen himself as a privileged priest, brought here for his piety and his love of Christ. Now he knew better; he’d been brought here for his facility with cryptography and his language abilities. If he’d gone to Harvard instead of Notre Dame he’d probably be working for the CIA right now.
Ah well, he thought, even God had need of spies, it seemed.
He continued down the path, then found a small entrance and went up into the library. It was not really the Vatican’s library, but rather a tourist showpiece with its dozens of frescoed arches and its display tables of manuscript artifacts that were more colorful than important. He found a second staircase and went up to the floor above.
A long hall led down to a heavy wooden door guarded even at this time of day by an ornately uniformed Swiss guard complete with pantaloons, helmet and halberd. The priest knew that underneath the puffy-looking jacket the guard had a Beretta S12 submachine gun on a quick release sling on one side and a Beretta M9 service automatic on the other. The secrets of the Prince of Peace were guarded with some very sophisticated ironmongery.
The priest dug his plastic laminated ID card out of the pocket of his soutane, held it up where the guard could see it and watched him snap to attention. The priest gave the young man a brief nod then opened the door marked ARCHIVO SE-CRETO, the secret archives of the Vatican.
The man he had come to see was in the first of a score of rooms in the archives, waiting patiently at a plain wooden table, seated on a plain wooden chair. Around him were deep wooden shelves piled with documents. There was a small window looking down into the Pigna Courtyard. The man in the chair was Carlos Cardinal Abruzzi, presently the secretary of state, the second-highest position in the Vatican next to the pope himself. The priest knew that Abruzzi was far more powerful than the slight old man who sat in Peter’s Chair. All the threads of power came to Abruzzi’s hands eventually, and he plucked them like a well-played harp. He was aware, as few Catholics, or even Catholic clergy were, that the Vatican was less a center of religion than it was a center of business and government. In point of fact it was the second-largest corporation in the world and had an international population of almost two billion to govern, at least spiritually.
“What have you got for us, Frank?” Abruzzi asked, using the diminutive of the priest’s first name. The priest handed over the decoded cable.
“Dear me, Crawley murdered,” murmured the cardinal. “How unfortunate.” The tone of his voice held no compassion or regret. “A Moroccan dagger?”