“The agreement,” he said.
“I must not tell you.”
“Yes. You must tell me.”
Silence.
Tricks and deceits came to this in the end; the edge of naked fear and blinding pain must be shown. No one will bend or compromise or go back on his words until brute force and pain permit betrayal of any cause.
Devereaux removed the pistol from his belt. It was a casual act.
“A threat? You would kill me?”
Devereaux did not speak. He cocked the hammer. The black gun waited to give death.
“Why?”
“Because it is necessary. You have made it necessary.”
“But there is no need.” For the first time, there was just a trace of panic at the edge of the calm voice. But Devereaux was not bluffing; if the threat is made, they had taught as the first rule at that school in Maryland, be prepared to carry it out.
“If you kill me, it profits nothing.”
“The matter is simple, Cardinal. I want information from you. If you give it to me, you live because you are no longer a threat to me. Or to my side. If you don’t give it to me, you die because it is the only threat I can make to you and I must be prepared to carry it out.”
Cardinal Ludovico sighed.
The sigh was a wind breathing its last before moving on with the passing storm. In the moment of dead calm, they both heard the loud ticking of the small clock on the nightstand next to the untouched bed.
“You would do this, I believe,” Ludovico said. “And if you have penetrated my belief, then I must think it is so, that you would kill me for your reasons. Do I value my life too highly then? I have lived a long time.” He paused. “Let God judge me.”
Devereaux waited.
“I place too high a price upon my survival then,” Ludovico continued. When he resumed speaking, his voice was detached, coming from a great distance.
“It is to be called the Prague Concordance. The matter is quite simple. The Soviet Union and the nations of the Warsaw Pact — the Eastern Bloc, as you say — will agree in writing and in constitution to recognize the freedom of the Church in their countries. Freedom of the churches to be open, freedom to worship, freedom again to open our schools and to educate our young and to ordain priests.”
Devereaux stood perfectly still.
“And what will the Church do? We will recognize mere reality, what already is. We will recognize the political supremacy of the Communist Party as the ruling organ of the state. We will not take a side against it and we will not give comfort to the enemies of the state. And we will recognize that the Soviet Union has a legitimate sphere of influence in the world, especially in Southeast Asia.”
Devereaux made a sound then. Ludovico did not seem to notice it.
“The Soviet Union has a legitimate interest in Asia. And the Church, well, we have very little there. Do you see? We get much and give little. We only accept the reality of the political situation.”
“And the other religious? The Jews? The Orthodox Church?”
“This is only a first step. One step at a time. A dialogue will be opened.”
“It’s called covering your ass and to hell with the rest.” Any trace of civility was stripped from Devereaux’s last sentence. The tone startled Ludovico. But only for a moment.
“Christian charity is founded upon reality, too. The Church is to survive and that is important. What will communism be in a hundred years and what will the ideologies so important now matter then?
“Merely another system, another ‘ism’ that has been modified and changed, replaced, altered. Just as capitalism is now in its death throes, as it fades in the final light of its era. As socialism has become weakened by democracy, diluted, acceptable to neither the left nor the right because it is nothing. All things fade; all passes as the age of kings has passed and the age of the emperors. All must change and die, in the seasons of the world. The Church only remains and its mission: to save souls.”
“No matter what price.”
“To pay the price of survival. We render unto Caesar, as we have always done.”
Devereaux replaced the pistol. “Yes. The last refuge of the righteous for doing the expeditious thing. Find the appropriate place in the Bible to justify it.”
Silence again, as purposeful as a shouting argument.
“And now that you know all this, November, does it solve the puzzle of the journal for you any more than it did for me?”
“No,” Devereaux said, staring at the Cardinal. “Nothing is made clear without the journal. Not even this.”
33
Vanderglass held the computer printout in his right hand and stood at something like attention before the big rosewood desk in the corner office on the forty-first floor. Outside, gloomy morning greeted the millions pushing to work in Manhattan. Gray, leaden clouds swirled wetly around the ornate towers of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings; hard winds smacked down the cross streets and hats sailed into the air, stolen by the sudden gusts; umbrellas were whipped open and abandoned by their owners. Winter was coming; street life was buttoning up; delis that had open sidewalk windows a week ago were now shuttered tight against the winds.
“You’ve found her,” Henry L. Fraser said, his voice small and clear in the vast quiet of the office.
“Approximately,” said Vanderglass. “She went to ground in Green Bay, Wisconsin.”
Fraser made a tent of his fingers, stared at it, broke it. “Does she live there?”
“Worked there once, that was three years ago. Reporter for the Press-Gazette. We’re afraid she might make contact with the paper.”
“I see. You’re certain she’s there?”
“Yes, sir. We tapped into the computer at the credit-card reporting center in Roanoke, Virginia. She made a charge Sunday, one hundred fifty-six dollars one way American Airlines from Tampa to Chicago O’Hare. Last commuter flight to Green Bay was gone so she rented a car at the Avis counter in the airport; we double-checked the form, she wanted to drop the car in Green Bay and listed that as her destination. That gives us reasonable certainty to that point.”
“Go on.”
“We got this report from Roanoke, overnight. She must be low on money because she’s charging right and left. At the Ramada Inn on the west side of the city near Lambeau Field, she charged twelve sixty-seven for breakfast, including tip.”
“She was staying at the Ramada?”
“Negative, sir. We checked that right away. But they have no open billing or registration for her.”
“And the other—”
“Yes, sir. Every motel and hotel in Green Bay and for a distance of forty miles around. Little more difficult checking in Door County, that’s the peninsula northeast of the city. Some of the motels don’t have credit card facilities. We have five men on the peninsula and two at the two main roads leading down from it. She couldn’t get by us on a bet.”
“She’s done well enough so far,” said Henry Fraser.
“Sir.” Vanderglass took the implied reprimand without a change in his dark expression. “On the peninsula — it’s called Door County, as I said — the season is past and most of the hotels are closed. The check won’t take much longer. Sir, I want to say: The high level of cooperation with key Agency people has helped us”
“It’s a national security matter,” Fraser said, as though rehearsing a defense. “If it hadn’t been for the cooperation of the National Security Adviser and the Agency, I don’t think we would have known about the journal until it was too late.”
“Very low key” is the way the Adviser had termed the cooperation of the CIA through the office of the Assistant Director. From the beginning, the Agency had given the private corporation access to its information and to certain “need to know” documents that were turned over to Vanderglass at InterComBank security. The bank and the intelligence agency had a long, easy history of cooperation throughout the world — as Fraser had pointed out to the Adviser. And so InterComBank, through Rice’s reports back to Agency headquarters in Langley, had learned of the existence of a journal and of the Vatican’s keen interest in it. The information had pushed a panic button inside bank security and Vanderglass had decided to get rid of Leo Tunney by “overt” action. First, his men had tried to kill him in a confessional — and killed the wrong man. Finally, they had arranged the so-called “amp bombs” in the church on Sunday to create a panic.