There was a momentary lapse of silence.
And then, with forced spirit, the cardinal smiled. “We must be patient by waiting to see how His will plays out,” he said. “If the good Cardinal Angullo excels to the throne, then so be it.”
“You know as well as I do that if he does, then the Church suffers greatly. It’s not only His will, Bonasero, but there’s a human element involved as well.”
“From where I stand I can do very little. But if my peers see me as a suitable replacement for Pope Gregory, then the SIV will be brought into play… as will the Vatican Knights.”
Essex and Auciello did not smile, nor did they betray their thoughts or emotions. But deep inside they wanted the cardinal to take over the papal throne and the privilege to protect the interests of the Church, its sovereignty, and the welfare of its citizenry, which could only be done with the Vatican Knights under his rule and the rule of the Society of Seven.
They hoped.
They prayed.
They needed.
And the only person who stood in Bonasero’s way was the all-powerful Cardinal Angullo.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Night had come to Tehran. And the old man lay on the ultra-thin mattress recalling the moments when such a luxury would have been a blessing in Vladimir Central Prison.
Just a simple item, he regarded, as he lightly brushed his fingertips over the coarse fabric. The little comforts that better a man’s life, he told himself, can be by the most minimum of degrees.
On that first day when the doors of the Vladimir Central Prison closed behind him, Leonid Sakharov couldn’t even begin to comprehend the meaning of hardship or fear or degradation, until the bodies of his comrades began to pile quickly at his feet.
After having his head shaved, the cuts and scrapes testament of a dull blade, he was then placed in a cramped cell with three other men. Two nights later, with the situation serving as a psychological breakdown as much as physical, they were ordered out of their cell to the showers, told to spread their legs and feet as they placed their hands against the wall, and beaten with a baton or rubber truncheon until they had little reserve left to drag each other back to their cell.
Those who later complained to the authorities of the brutality were singled out for worse punishment, which is why Sakharov remained submissively quiet by giving in to totalitarian rule that governed the system.
During the nights in his quarters when he froze and his bones seemed to be as fragile as glass, when not-so-alien screams sounded pained and distant, he kept his mind active and his eyes closed, drawing mental pictures of buckyballs and formulas in his mind before committing them to memory.
Often in the mud-laden yards, whenever possible, he would draw diagrams and formulas with the tip of his finger, finding it easier to actually see what his mind was conceiving, and then filing it away in his memory, if the concept was scientifically feasible.
The buckyballs, the formulations, everything was an escape in a world that was brutally harsh and unyielding. Cellmates came and went, always a different and interchangeable face on a seeming rotation to fill the gaps left behind by those who died by raging disease, torture or suicide. But Sakharov hung on while his body slowly caved to alternative sicknesses stemming anywhere from lung ailments to fever. And whereas his body began to regress, his mind continued to remain sharp.
On the climatic cusp of weather change, when the conditions were about to become abysmally cold due to the onset of fall and winter months, when the tines of his nerve endings began to ache in concert, redemption came to him in the form of a man he had never met before.
It began on a damp morning, the old man huddled beneath a threadbare blanket on his bunk, his knees drawn up in acute angles in a feeble attempt to keep himself warm. In the early morning light he could see the cold, wintry vapor of his own breath, causing him to pull the blanket tightly around him as though it were a second skin.
And when he heard the footfalls of the coming guards he closed his eyes, feigning sleep.
The door of his cell slid back, the un-oiled squeal of metal against metal as brutal as life inside Vladimir Central, and then the hard nudges against the old man’s side with the tip of one the guard’s baton.
“Get up and come with us,” he said in typical clipped Russian.
The old man learned long ago never to question a guard or to look him in the eyes. Laboring to his feet, shedding the blanket to one side, Sakharov stood and simply waited for the next command with his head submissively lowered so that his eyes were cast to the floor.
One of the guards pressed the baton across his backside and used it to usher the Old Man out of his cell. “Out and to the right,” he ordered.
Sakharov closed his eyes. ‘Out and to the right’ normally meant one of two things: either he was about to be beaten unmercifully with a truncheon, or he would be forced to act on behalf of the guards and beat another prisoner as they watched. He hoped it was the latter.
As they reached the far end of the right quadrant, the guard shoved the old man with the stick to drive him in another direction, towards the yard where inmates were allowed one hour of ‘outside’ time.
Once there, the old man was shoved into the yard and the door closed behind him. He was not alone. In a frozen muddied lot surrounded by twenty-foot concrete walls and a chain-link fence serving as a ceiling of sorts to prevent escape attempts, he stared at a man who was tall, dark and well dressed. His beard was perfectly trimmed, framing a thin face marked with the color and features of a man from the Middle East.
The man held his ground, appraising Sakharov with his hands deep inside the pockets of his jacket. His vapored breath came in equal measures. “Doctor Leonid Sakharov?” he asked in perfect Russian.
Sakharov looked immediately away, the man having been institutionalized long enough to be submissive at every encounter.
“Come, come, Doctor,” he said, taking a step toward the old man, “I’m a friend. There’s no need here to look away since we are equals, yes?”
Sakharov looked into the man’s eyes. “Why am I here?”
The well-dressed man circled Sakharov as if sizing him up, his hands remaining inside his jacket pockets. “You don’t look so well, Doctor. You look — what? Twenty, maybe thirty years older than when you first came here a few years ago?”
“What do you want?”
“I think the question should be, Doctor, is what we want from each other.”
The old man appeared small, the upper half of his body folding like the curve of a question mark, as he remained silent.
“You want what only I can give you,” the man added. “And in recompense, you give me what only you can give me.”
“And that would be?”
“Your skills, Doctor. What I want is your wonderful skills.”
“As you can see, I’m a broken old man. I have no skills.”
“I’m not talking about your body or soul. I’m talking about your mind.”
Now it was Sakharov’s turn to appraise the man, to size him up. “Who are you? What’s your name?”
The man smiled handsomely. “My name is Adham al-Ghazi.”
“And why would a man from the Middle East want with my mind, as you so pleasantly put it?”
“It is said that you possess the theories of a certain technology we are most interested in.”
“We?”
“The group I work for,” he answered.
“And what group would that be?”
The man’s smile diminished, but slightly. “A group that is willing to fund your way out of Vladimir Central Prison.”