“Think? I don’t think, I now know, my friend, that you are a member of a secret order that protects the Pope.” Dupré held up his left hand and tapped the inside of his ring finger with the tip of his thumb as he spoke. “You got wind of a plot to assassinate the Pope here in Paris. You found out that an extreme radical Muslim sect had a hit man posing as a Franciscan priest here to take part in the Youth Day ceremonies. You dispatched the killer with blunt force trauma to the throat, possibly with a pipe, then positioned the body over the edge of the staircase’s metal railing to seem as though he had slipped, crushing his larynx, and died unable to cry out for help. Spilling a cup of coffee on the step just above him and pouring some on the soles of his shoes was brilliant. You then discarded your backup weapon in a clothes hamper in the basement so you could leave light.”
“Assuming you might be right, how do you come to the conclusion that it was radical extremists?”
“A local Imam. He was persuaded to tell me everything that he didn’t tell me the first time I interrogated him when he was the deskman at the Sofitel. Although he didn’t know of the plot, he led me to a small fish in the plan, who years later had gotten on the bad side of the radical Blind Sheik. It was the Sheik who put out the fatwa and ordered the Pope’s assassination, and this minnow had somehow angered him. Once we offered him protection from the Sheik, the little guppy started talking and we couldn’t shut him up.”
“Look, for what it’s worth, I am a Catholic, and I am thankful you thwarted the plot,” Bill said.
“And I am pleased that a case I misjudged has been rectified,” Dupré said, as his physical stance relaxed from a purely defensive one.
“So, if I say you are both welcome, can I go now?”
“The Inspector has his answers; now I need mine.” Bill turned to Dupré and said, “Inspector, could you let us chat in private, please.”
Dupré reached around his back and produced a pair of handcuffs. He closed one end around the steam pipe next to Parnell’s chair and held out the open cuff. “If you would be so kind.”
Parnell reluctantly offered his wrist.
“Is that necessary?” Bill asked looking at the cuffs.
“I don’t want a hostage situation, Mr. Hiccock. Once I leave, this very capable fellow might find a way to change the dynamics of the situation. He gently tossed the key up and snatched it from the air. “I’ll be right outside with the key.”
Bill watched him leave, then turned to Parnell. “Sorry about that but it is his jurisdiction and you and I both know a man with your training and skill is not going to be thwarted by a handcuff.”
Bill watched and confirmed that this man was good at liar’s poker. He didn’t take the bait. Bill decided to be straight with him. “Parnell, since you disappeared I did a lot of digging. You were CIA, and then after Beirut you went off grid.”
Being well-trained, Sicard did not betray his shock or denial when his greatest secret was exposed.
“Only a few in the spook house totally bought your faked death. And they do not rule out the possibility that you were turned. But I looked at your record, and to me you don’t come up as someone who would work for the Chi-coms, the Russians, or the North Koreans. Then a little bird, as in full bird colonel, opened my eyes. A greater cause doesn’t have to be political, hence the ring. And you proved that by saving the Pope.”
Bill’s inference that a ‘colonel told him’ was a deliberate attempt to protect his line to Klaven and the Navy. “Look, I understand that religious patriotism can trump nationalism. I get that. And personally, I don’t care about any of that. Except I know I got you nailed, and your effectiveness as a stealth operative is now in my hands. I squawk, and you are done as an operative both to the Pope and to the order.”
For the first time since Bill started talking, Parnell stopped focusing on a spot on the wall and turned to him.
Bill upped the stakes. “Knights of the Sepulchre. I know all about them, the Monsignor and that judge, who got you sprung from Dupré the first time, is also one of you. You and they will be exposed and rendered ineffective if you don’t answer my questions honestly and without hesitation. Do you understand me?”
Parnell weighed the proposition. He looked at Hiccock.
“Look, Parnell. Don’t underestimate me. I run a top-secret operations cluster at the White House. You knew that when you came to me. So you know where my loyalties lie. I will not hesitate to destroy the five-hundred-year old order, or you, if you get in my way.” Bill could see he was running this over in his mind. “Just tell me what you know of the electro-dynamic fluid you brought to me and how or who is using it to attack ships.”
“I gave you the lead. It’s up to you to connect the dots, Doctor.” Parnell dropped the affluent Euro-trash accent and spoke like an American for the first time. It was a small nod to Bill’s information being correct.
“Here’s the last chunk for you to bite into. I have negotiated with the Vatican to back off on their opposition to the Super Collider. So I now have juice with the robes in Rome.”
“The ring?”
Bill nodded, “Yes the ring of thorns, the knights, I will blow the cover on all of it…”
“No, no, the ring, CERN!”
It was a ten-ton bucket of ice water that hit Bill in the back. “Holy shit!” The collider at CERN was a seventeen-mile ‘ring’ 574 feet deep in the ground. It was used to separate matter down to its basic elements. The next threshold would be to pierce the attraction force or “glue” that holds the sub-atomic parts of atoms together. “Are you telling me the knights have something to do with the supercollider ring?”
“Dr. Hiccock, we are the Knights of the Ring of Thorns. We think it a prophecy and our destiny to defend against this ‘ring of science’ that is the greatest threat to creation there could ever be.”
“You sound like my partner, ex-partner.”
“He’s right. You’re wrong.” Parnell summed up as he relaxed his body language.
“I tell you what wrong is; killing this man and almost me and my son.” Bill held up a picture of Roland Landau from his folio. He switched to the bloody photo of the dead priest from the trailer. “And this guy, one of yours, shooting surface to air missiles in the Maryland countryside.”
Bill noticed a slight show of surprise rippled across Parnell’s face. “You know this priest, don’t you?”
“He was a knight but left the order. He felt we weren’t aggressive enough.”
“Well, he got aggressive, all right. Let’s put the collider ring to the side for a moment. Tell me about electric ice.”
At first Parnell was confused, but then he reasoned it out. “Yes, I can see how it is like ice. We first got on the trail because of someone we know only as The Engineer. We were trying to find out who he is, but so far we haven’t.”
“Why were you after The Engineer?”
“We think he’s one of the leaders of a plot to blow up the collider at a critical moment and destroy not only the machine, but everything else.”
“So how does ‘ice’ come into it?”
“At first the plot seemed to involve infecting the supply truck of helium coolant with the same substance I showed you. We think their plan was to have the liquid helium cooling system crush the rings when they reached the speed in the rings to smash the protons.”
Bill digested the idea. “I have only been exposed to the substance for a minute but I don’t see how you could control that kind of attack. The electromagnetic fields associated with shaping the path of the particles as they accelerate would generate a current in the liquid helium well before critical speed. So it would be crushed before that point.”
“I think you are right, but it took them a lot longer to figure that out than you just did and they abandoned that approach.”