Pallabos’s face dropped, his features taking on the sudden looseness of a rubber mask.
Reaching behind him, the Arab withdrew a Sig. with an attached suppressor from the waistband of his Dockers and fired the weapon three times in rapid succession, dropping Pallabos to the desert floor.
Returning the weapon, the Arab, who was tall and lean and walked with a mild limp that served as a vestige after combating American troops in Iraq, moved toward the aluminum case and placed his palms flat against the container. Even under the hot desert sun the shell was cool to the touch. Undoing the clasps, the Arab lifted the lid.
Everything was in its place beneath the Plexiglas shield, the circuitry secured, the spheres undamaged, which the Arab worried about over the course of the rough terrain. The Russians had manufactured well.
After closing the lid and clamping it shut, the Arab stood and surveyed the distance toward the American border. “We will take the van as far as we can, and then dump it.”
With a sweeping gesture of his hand, his comrades lifted the aluminum case and returned it to the van.
Less than five minutes later they began to traverse the difficult terrain in the van. And less than half mile from their launch point the vehicle became mired in sand, the van going nowhere.
Juan Pallabos was right after all.
On the western approach to the American/Mexican border from the Baja, California route, a separate team of three Middle Easterners crossed over into American territory undetected. The aluminum case they carried was safe and secure, the spheres inside undamaged. And in the end no one could believe how simple it was to maneuver over to the other side. There was not a single border agent, helicopter or roving patrol vehicle in sight. There were no dogs or fences or obstacles to act as a deterrent. Getting the aluminum case and its cargo into the United States proved to be less of an adversity than initially planned for; there was absolutely no challenge from the opposition, absolutely no one to stop them.
It was that simple.
Team Three also managed to slip undetected across the American border from the New Mexico point, a part of the 2,000 mile stretch with Mexico that was habitually thin when trying to keep a vigilant eye out for those who cross over illegally. Now with the second device easily into New Mexico, the team had received word that Team Two had crossed over from the Baja route unchallenged.
All that was left to do was to rendezvous with Team One, which had yet to be heard from on the Arizona front.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Papal Symposiums began in Washington D.C. a day after Pope Pius XIII arrival at Dulles, and ended up at the Rose Bowl in California twelve days later, the circuit sometimes grueling and contentious, the topics discussed before the masses numbering into the millions about the need for Christian conservatism over the desire of Christian reform.
For years congregates had been abandoning the traditional, if not antiquated, mores of the Roman Catholic Church with growing liberalism and a call for change. Pius, however, served to unite his dwindling flock by rekindling the spark of religious hope, sermonizing that certain liberties can only summon the beginning of the end, if traditions of old were not maintained with discipline. The rebuttal, of course, was the Medias stance regarding the Vatican’s unwillingness to conform to the wishes of its Catholic citizenry, citing there could be ‘no progress without evolution. The Church, on the other hand, judiciously retorted with an aphorism stating that ‘the price of progress is destruction.’
Fighting an undeclared war to resurrect a waning faith by marshalling a new crusade, Pope Pius realized that the Church had survived numerous insurrections in the past and would continue to do so in the future. How to promote unity, however, had proven to be a huge undertaking which had sapped the old man to a state of near exhaustion. Although he found his inner strength on several occasions, he realized that it, too, was in decline and found it far more difficult to summon as the days wore on.
Releasing an exhaustive breath, the pontiff crossed the Berber carpeted floor of his hotel suite and poised himself before a chair made of soft leather and let his knees buckle, which allowed him to fall back with ease into the comfort of its cushion. At the moment the man was feeling every bit of his seventy-two years of age. Nevertheless, a smile formed at the corner of his lips.
There had been 90,000 people at the Rose Bowl—90,000 souls seeking either salvation, redemption, or merely to glimpse upon a living icon having no clear objective other than to view the pontiff as a novelty. If he had reached some of them, no matter how small in numbers or how little they had taken the Lord into their heart, then he had succeeded.
For a long moment he gazed through the sliding glass doors that overlooked the west and soaked in the view, watching the delicate shades of light combine subtly into a rainbow swirl of colors against the skyline. In time, as the sky became a blanket of darkness, the City of Angels became a dazzling display of lights reminiscent of a cache of diamonds spread over black velvet.
Closing his eyes, the pontiff realized that sleep would come early. On most evenings he would read from the Bible and gaze through its passages. But tonight he was too tired to flip back the cover of the leather-bound volume. However, in recompense, and in an attitude of prayer, Pope Pius placed his hands together and worshiped his Lord, thanking Him for raising him from the ranks of obscurity to that of prominence.
He had come from a family of eleven, all poor, some sickly, but none without faith or hope. Never in his life had he witnessed war or famine or the plagues of man by living in a small village sixty kilometers west of Florence. Nor did he have an epiphany to follow the Lord’s path. Amerigo was simply enamored as a boy who loved God and everything He stood for: The Good, the Caring, and the ability to hold dominion over others, and to lead them toward the world of Light and Loving Spirits.
He also dreamed of sermonizing and of passing The Word.
But his father would have none of it and obligated his son to work the fields of the homestead alongside his brothers knowing the true measurement of a man was calculated by the crops he yielded rather than the knowledge of academia, which in this remote village took a man nowhere.
So having been taught by his mother at home, having read and memorized the passages of the Bible, having learned the basics in rudimentary math tilling the fields with his siblings for nearly a decade, Amerigo Giovanni Anzalone had become a learned young man with calloused hands from driving the yolk, and came to realize that tilling the soils was not his calling in life.
Every Sunday he went to church with his mother and siblings. And for every day thereafter, as he worked the soil beneath a relentless sun, he dreamed of wearing the vestments of a priest and giving sermon. What Amerigo wanted, what he needed, was to be empowered by the Church to give direction.
Upon his eighteenth birthday, and against his father’s wishes — but with the aid of the village priest, which his father was unwilling to contest — Amerigo gave up the yoke and headed for Divinity School in Florence, his first stepping stone toward Rome.
In the years to follow, Amerigo was recognized as a cardinal and became a respected member within the Curia, which ultimately led the College of Cardinals, who chose him as the successor to John Paul the Second. Upon his acceptance, Amerigo took the name of Pope Pius the XIII.
And like his predecessor, Amerigo would offer a hand to every race and religion, leaving nobody out and nobody alone. He would embrace the world with love and tolerance, beginning with the European nations, and then following up with added appearances in South America and Mexico before concluding his trip in the United States.