Approaching the police checkpoint, she felt a shiver run through her body that didn't have anything to do with the cold. Byron had told her that pilgrims were gathering for a memorial for the unfortunate snowboarder. They were also gathering out of fear from all the strange sightings.
As Annja got closer she could see the church was a conventional enough looking building in the Spanish Colonial style. It had a pitched roof flanked by two little square towers with belfries. A four-foot adobe wall surrounded it. An adobe-arched gate led into the courtyard. Its simplicity reflected the relative poverty and isolation of the area during the church's construction in the early 1800s. Yet, made of the local soil itself, with timber from local trees for its bones, it gave the appearance of strength, of enduring as the tiny community it served itself endured in the face of time and neglect and endemic poverty. As well as the encroachments of the modern world.
The light of candles danced above and among the gathered throng like fireflies. The effect would, under most circumstances, have put Annja in mind of a rock concert. But something about the mood of the crowd, the way everyone spoke in low, hushed tones as if in a church instead of outside it, gave it a far different feel.
No cars had been permitted to park within several hundred feet of the church. No new ones arrived, and no headlights shone. A few news crews stood off to the sides in isolated pools of glare, but otherwise very little artificial illumination was visible except a few lights from the village nearby. Annja saw a number of law-enforcement officers bundled in black fake-fur hats and dark bulky jackets with big reflective initials on the back.
The occasion itself enforced the mood. Even a group of mildly punked-out Anglo kids who had walked near Annja for the past few hundred yards, scoffing among themselves, paused to buy candles from a little card-table vendor set discreetly on the outskirts of the church grounds. Now they walked softly without speaking, their young faces showing mostly a sort of awed expectation in the lights of the fat little yellow or white votive candles they carried in gloved and mittened hands.
Annja approached the church through a grove of cruelly topped cottonwood trees, with thin shoots rising unnaturally vertically from the lopped-off stumps of once mighty limbs. Many leaves still clung to shoots and limbs, probably still colorful to judge by what she had seen of the rest of the river valley and its flanking mountains, where great stands of aspen had caught flame in autumn yellows and reds. The snow muted any color the dry leaves held, made them sodden and dull. On the outskirts of the little grove several ambulances and emergency vehicles were parked. The EMTs stood around or sat in open doors, chatting and smoking.
Annja's boots crunched in the new snow. Despite the solemnity of the setting and affair, and the overhanging sense of dread, Annja felt a certain schoolgirl's delight at walking through snow. It was still a relative novelty for her. Growing up in New Orleans she could remember seeing snow only twice, once during a freak dusting of the city, a second time during a field trip some of the girls unaccountably were taken on to Cleveland, Ohio around Thanksgiving.
"And how is our warrior maid this evening?" a voice called softly in French.
Annja turned quickly around to see the trim, erect form of Father Robert Godin standing beneath a tree with utterly bare limbs, his hands in the pockets of his scuffed leather jacket. She felt an urge to move away quickly, and another urge to walk right up and slap him.
What she did was sigh and walk toward him. She kept a hand discreetly ready to move for the butt of the compact .40-caliber Glock 23 she carried in a holster clipped at the small of her back. She was not going to be caught off guard again. It gave her range the sword lacked. Also, if she did have to defend herself its effects would be a lot easier to explain.
"I'm cold," she said. "I didn't pack for this weather. I wasn't really thinking of this as a skiing trip."
He laughed softly with that seamed hound's face of his. "Let us hope you don't find things too warm soon."
She recoiled slightly. He frowned and shook his head. "Ah. Forgive me. A careless choice of words, was it not? I intended no reference to your illustrious predecessor. But rather to the possibility of vigorous action. Please forgive a young, gauche Antwerp wharf rat grown into an old, gauche Antwerp wharf rat, if you will."
She laughed and shook her head.
She came and stood by him, all the while wondering why. Just seeking the comfort of familiar companionship, on such a strange and fraught occasion, she thought. Although the more cynical part of her wondered why she might take comfort from the presence of someone who'd recently tried, determinedly and skillfully, to disable or kill her. She was beginning to understand the complex connection between Roux and Garin a little better.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, still speaking French. It seemed a useful security measure. Many of the people she had overheard spoke Spanish, and most of the rest spoke English.
"The same as you," he said. He didn't look at her, but instead scanned the scene ceaselessly from behind his round lenses. "Something will happen here tonight."
He glanced at her then, with a hint of a smile. "Or do you pretend to yourself not to sense it?"
She shook her head, frowning. "I don't even know what the hell I'm doing here talking to you. Aside from the fact you tried to shootme – "
"A misunderstanding, shall we say?"
"I did a little online research on you. You have quite the résumé. Belgian paratrooper. Congo mercenary. French Foreign Legionnaire. Ph.D.s in history and psychology."
"Please don't leave out civil engineering," he said. "That was the hardest, by far."
"Globally renowned antiterrorism expert. And if I paid attention to conspiracy sites, what you've done the past twenty years has been a lot spookier than what you did in your mercenary days, and not a lot less bloody."
His smile was abstracted. He was scanning the scene again. His weight was rotated forward on the balls of his athletic shoes. He seemed tense as a hunting dog who's caught the first whiff of prey and is straining at the leash.
"You're well advised to ignore them. Their purported facts are absurdly mistaken. If not necessarily their take on the natureof what I am about."
She stared at him with mingled disbelief and horror. "You admit it? You're actually a hit man for the Vatican?"
Several Latino couples passing nearby, middle-aged and dressed in their Sunday best, looked sternly over at her outburst. Fortunately, they gave no sign of understanding what Annja had said.
"My niece apologizes," Godin told them in Spanish. "She finds herself somewhat overwrought by the occasion. She is an impressionable child."
The matronly scowls softened into smiles and nods. The men smiled, too, trying not to look too closely, much less too approvingly, at the leggy young gringa.
The youngest of the women noticed Godin's collar. "Your blessing, Father?" she asked shyly.
"To be sure," he said warmly. He blessed them. They crossed themselves and murmured thanks.
A shadow passed over Godin's face. He set his mouth, coughed behind his lips. To Annja's look of concern he gave a quick shake of his head.
"Sometimes I don't know whether to hug you or punch you," she continued in French.
"If you don't answer my question I'm walking away," she said. "Are you really a secret enforcer from the Vatican?"