I should have been suspicious. I’ve got to admit that, instead, I sort of half thought that maybe Sam was getting tired of running away from me. Maybe he wanted me to be near him.
He did. But for his own reasons, of course.
When we ate dinner that evening it was with the President of Ecuador himself: Carlos Pablo Francisco Esperanza de Rivera. He was handsome, haughty and kind of pompous. Wore a military uniform with enough braid to buckle the knees of a Ukrainian weightlifter. Very elegant silver hair. A noble profile with a distinguished Castilian nose.
“It is an extremely serious matter,” he told me, in Harvard-accented English. “We do not sue the head of Holy Mother Church for trivial reasons.”
The fourth person at the table was a younger man, Gregory Molina. He was dark and intense, the smoldering Latino rebel type. Sam introduced him as the lawyer who was handling the case for him.
We sat at a sumptuous table in a small but elegant dining room. Crystal chandelier, heavy brocade napkins, damask tablecloth, gold-rimmed dishes and tableware of solid silver. Lavish Christmas trimmings on the windows; big holiday bows and red-leafed poinsettias decorating the dining table.
Ecuador was still considered a poor nation, although as the Earth-bound anchor of Sam’s space operations there was a lot of money flowing in. Most of it must be staying in the presidential palace, I thought.
Once the servants had discreetly taken away our fish course and deposited racks of roast lamb before us, I said, “The reason I came here is to see if this matter can be arbitrated without actually going to court.”
“Of course!” said El Presidente. “We would like nothing better.”
Sam cocked a brow. “If we can settle this out of court, fine. I don’t really want to sock the Pope if we can avoid it.”
Molina nodded, but his burning eyes told me he’d like nothing better than to get the Pope on the witness stand.
“I glanced through your petition papers on the flight down here,” I said. “I don’t see what your insurance claims have to do with the Vatican.”
Sam put his fork down. “Over the past year and a half, Ecuador National Space Systems has suffered three major accidents: a booster was struck by lightning during launch operations and forced to ditch in the ocean; we were lucky that none of the crew was killed.”
“Why were you launching into stormy weather?” I asked.
“We weren’t!” Sam placed a hand over his heart, like a little kid swearing he was telling the truth. “Launch pad weather was clear as a bell. The lightning strike came at altitude, over the Andes, out of an empty sky.”
“A rare phenomenon,” said Molina. “The scientists said it was a freak of nature.”
Sam resumed, “Then four months later one of our unmanned freight carriers was hit by a micro-meteor and exploded while it was halfway to our lunar mining base. We lost the vehicle and its entire cargo.”
“Seventy million dollars, U.S.,” Molina said.
President de Rivera’s eyes filled with tears.
“And just six months ago a lunar quake collapsed our mine in the ring-wall of Aristarchus.”
I hadn’t known that. “Was anyone killed?”
“The operation was pretty much automated. A couple technicians were injured,” Sam said. “But we lost three mining robots.”
“At sixteen million dollars apiece,” Molina added.
The president dabbed at his eyes with his napkin.
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with the Vatican,” I said.
The corners of Sam’s mouth turned down. “Our mother-loving insurance carrier refused to cover any of those losses. Claimed they were all acts of God, not covered by our accident policy.”
I hadn’t drunk any of the wine in the crystal goblet before me, so there was no reason for me to be slow on the uptake. Yet I didn’t see the association with the Vatican.
“Insurance policies always have an Acts of God clause,” I said.
“Okay,” Sam said, dead serious. “So if our losses were God’s fault, how do we get Him to pay what He owes us?”
“Him?” I challenged.
“Her,” Sam snapped back. “It. Them. I don’t care.”
President de Rivera steepled his long, lean fingers before his lips and said, “For the purposes of our discussion, and in keeping with ancient tradition, let us agree to refer to God as Him.” And he smiled his handsome smile at me.
“Okay,” I said, wondering how much he meant by that smile. “We’ll call Her Him.”
Molina snickered and Sam grinned. El Presidente looked puzzled; either he didn’t appreciate my humor or he didn’t understand it.
Sam got back to his point. “If God’s responsible for our losses, then we want to get God to pay for them. That’s only fair.”
“It’s silly,” I said. “How are you—”
Sam’s sudden grin cut me off. “The Pope is considered to be God’s personal representative on Earth, isn’t he?”
“Only by the Roman Catholics.”
“Of which there are more than one billion in the world,” Molina said.
“The largest religion on Earth,” said the president.
“It’s more than that,” Sam maintained. “Nobody else claims to be the personal representative of God. Only the Pope, among the major religious leaders. One of his titles is ‘the vicar of Christ,’ isn’t it?”
The two men nodded in unison.
“The Catholics believe that Christ is God, don’t they?” Sam asked.
They nodded again.
“And Christ—God Herself—personally made St. Peter His representative here on Earth.”
More nods.
“And the Pope is Peter’s descendent, with all the powers and responsibilities that Peter had. Right?”
“Exactly so,” murmured El Presidente.
“So if we want to sue God, we go to his personal representative, the Pope.” Sam gave a self-satisfied nod.
Only Sam Gunn would think of such a devious, convoluted scheme.
“We cannot sue the Pope personally,” Molina pointed out, as earnest as a missionary, “because he is technically and legally the head of a state: the Vatican. A sovereign cannot be sued except by his own consent; that is ancient legal tradition.”
“So you want to sue the state he heads,” I said.
“The Vatican. Yes.”
“And since an individual or corporation can’t sue a state, the nation of Ecuador is entering the suit.”
Sam smiled like a Jack-o’-lantern. “Now you’ve got it.”
I picked my way through the rest of the dinner in stunned silence. I couldn’t believe that Sam would go through with something so ridiculous, yet there he was sitting next to the president of Ecuador and a fervent young lawyer who seemed totally intent on hauling the Pope before the World Court.
I wondered if the fact that the present Pope was an American—the first U.S. cardinal to be elected Pope—had anything to do with the plot hatching inside Sam’s shifty, twisted, Machiavellian brain.
After the servants had cleared off all the dishes and brought a tray of liqueur bottles, I finally gathered enough of my wits to say, “There’s got to be a way to settle this out of court.”
“Half a billion would do it,” Sam said.
He hadn’t touched any of the after-dinner drinks and had only sipped at his wine during dinner. So he wasn’t drunk.
“Half a billion?”
“A quarter billion in actual losses,” Molina interjected, “and a quarter billion in punitive damages.”
I almost laughed in his face. “You want to punish God?”
“Why not?” The look on his face made me wonder what God had ever done to him to make him so angry.
President de Rivera took a silver cigarette case from his heavily braided jacket.