But the dark man waited without a word.
32
Dawn. Monday morning. Red filled the eastern sky, the buildings were colored purple in the shade.
Devereaux turned off the ignition of the rental car and waited in the stillness for a moment. Across the street was the entrance of the white hotel at the end of the beach.
He glanced at the battered bag on the seat next to him. He had checked out of his own hotel two hours before, after making sure that Denisov was delivered by the FBI agents to the airport. About now, he would be on the dawn flight to Washington. It was all over for the Soviet agent; but, as Denisov had said, Devereaux was still outside.
He removed his pistol from his belt and opened the chambers. Six bullets seated in six cylinders.
Would he kill this last man?
That was the only question, he realized; he had to solve the puzzle, he had to understand the third element that had muddied the operation from the beginning. He felt like a scavenger, pulling back pieces and pieces of rotting garbage, seeking the treasure that might be buried beneath the filth.
A dirty business. So he had described it to Hanley. He realized only much later that he had used the term because Rita had thrown it at him in her anger and hatred in his hotel room.
Yes. A dirty business in the end. It always was.
And where would she find safety now? he wondered. She must have the journal, everyone thought she had the journal. What would she do with it?
Would they kill her before she found a safe place?
He thought of Rita smiling at him on the beach that morning. He thought of her, naked beneath his hands, making love to him. He thought of her words, by turns naïve and telling; he thought of the simple sound of her voice in his ear, next to him, wrapped in intimacy with him.
He pushed the pistol into his belt and opened the car door. The interior light winked on. He stood up and slammed the door; it echoed down the empty, dawn street. He buttoned his corduroy jacket over the bulge of the pistol and began to limp across the street. In his hotel room, before checking out, he had taken two pills for the pain and a tumbler of vodka. He had rebandaged the small wounds in the flesh of his belly and side and thrown away the bloodstained remnants of the old bandages. When he had left the room at four A.M. — the bed still made and unslept in, the shower stall damp, a single used towel hanging over the shower curtain rod — he realized again that he had occupied the room like a faintly palpable ghost, leaving the barest traces that he had been there at all.
Through the side entrance of the hotel and up the back stairwell to the second floor. Along the quiet hallways to the room.
Dawn was the time for unplanned contacts and hard interrogation. The body was too tired for effective resistance; the spirit was at a low ebb. It was one of a hundred lessons he had absorbed long ago at the special school hidden in the Maryland mountains, the school where he had learned the arts of war and the science of death and the tricks of spies.
The door was simple. He slipped hard plastic between jamb and frame and pushed. The door swung open without a sound.
Cardinal Ludovico, fully dressed, sat in a chair at the window.
For a moment, Devereaux did not move from the doorway.
Ludovico, dressed in a black suit with a clerical collar, turned and stared at him.
Neither man spoke. Devereaux realized that neither had slept last night. Their pale faces reflected each other; the lines around their eyes and the drawn lines around their mouths were too similar not to suggest similar sleepless nights.
“Yes?” The Cardinal’s voice was calm when it came, the gentle Roman accent rubbing the single word as one would rub a cat’s body.
Devereaux stepped into the bare hotel room and let the door close behind him.
“Why do you come to me like this? Like a thief?”
“The element of surprise,” Devereaux said. “I didn’t know if it was necessary.”
“As you see,” Cardinal Ludovico said softly. He gestured to his garments. “I am waiting for morning. I do not sleep.”
“We have a problem,” Devereaux said.
“Who are you?”
“November,” Devereaux said. “You had sent a cable of inquiry about me. After you met with the Soviet agent here.”
“Are you certain?” Ludovico said it in the same, soft voice without concern. Yet Devereaux knew he was already guarded against his questions.
“We have Denisov. Our side.”
Ludovico did not move.
“Our man in Rome was able to… see your cable. You see, we are not without resources.”
“Yes.” The voice was tired but the edge of caution remained. “I see perfectly.” He made a gesture of dismissal with one elegant hand. “And you have arrested this Soviet citizen?”
“Agent,” Devereaux said. “Of the KGB. He has defected, rather than be arrested. But you are aware of this.”
For the first time, Ludovico raised his eyebrows. “I do not know what you are saying—”
“Signals were made yesterday,” Devereaux continued. “You expressed your awareness to the Congregation that Denisov had defected to our side. And now your people in Rome have been contacted by Moscow. The situation is not satisfactory for you. Or for Moscow. Or for whatever arrangement you have made between you.”
Ludovico sighed slowly, the elegant sigh of a tired prince weary of the world’s burdens.
“Should I be annoyed at the interference in the affairs of the Church by your agency? Or should I be flattered?”
“I don’t care.”
“November,” Ludovico said softly, caressing the word. He glanced out through the window blinds at the gathering light. “This place is so pleasant, so clean. I think of the whited sepulcher containing corruption inside.” The streets were empty; silence flooded the streets with the morning light. “You see what I am: a Prince of the Church of Christ. And yet I am come to this place as a common gravedigger, to bury the dead as my act of mercy. Three dead.”
“More than three,” said Devereaux. “And there will be more still.”
“It is a sad matter,” Ludovico said.
“Too sad for polite talk,” Devereaux replied.
“Poor Leo Tunney. To know so much worth killing for and to know so little in the end. I think he returned out of the jungle to a world more savage than any he had left there. He was too innocent to be permitted to live.”
“What did he know?”
Ludovico went on, ignoring the question: “And in the moment of his death, his one work which would restore him to his faith is revealed to be a fraud. There was no miracle.”
“There are no miracles.”
Ludovico smiled. “Do you lack faith as well?”
“What did Tunney know?”
Ludovico shrugged. “Do you mean the secret? What he kept in his journal? I do not know, I do not even know if it was worth these deaths.”
“Denisov was willing to kill for it.”
“Ah. Your Soviet citizen. Your defector. Perhaps whatever was in the journal, perhaps this Denisov knew and sought to stop others from knowing.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“You insist that we contacted—”
“Please. No lies, no poses. I know everything.”
“Then you do not need to ask questions anymore?” The voice was irritating in its calm measure. “Yes. We met. He presumed that I might be useful to him. That I might serve him. Do you know, it is a curious similarity between you and the Soviets. The Soviets play the servants who become the owners of the estate in the end. They scrape and bow and play the fool for the pleasure of the civilized world as they edge close to us with their poisoned plates, waiting for our moment of drunken weakness, our indiscretion that will be fatal to us.”