“You’re a Moslem?”
She smiled tightly. “Not all Moslem women wear veils and chadors, Senator Meyers.”
“But why would the Moslems want to kill Sam? He’s suing the Pope, not Islam.”
“He is making a travesty of all religions. He is mocking God. The Church of Rome has yet to see the light of true revelation, but we slaves of Allah can’t allow this blasphemy to continue.”
“It’s Islam’s contribution to global religious solidarity,” Sam said, disgust dripping from his words.
“I had wanted to do it cleanly, professionally,” Josella said, “without any complications.”
“That’s why you let Sam into your room,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “To give the condemned man his last wish. Although Sam didn’t know he was condemned when I granted his wish.”
“So you made it with her, after all,” I said to Sam, angrily.
He made a sour face. “She screwed me, all right.”
“And now what?” I asked Josella. “You kill us both?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And how do you get away?”
She shrugged. Inside that sheer nightgown it looked delicious, even to me. “There’s a shuttle leaving for Earth orbit at midnight. Passage on it has already been booked for a young man named Shankar. By the time your bodies are discovered I will be Mr. Shankar, complete with mustache and beard.” “It’ll have to be a damned good disguise,” Sam groused.
Almost smiling, Josella said, “It will be. Even my fingerprints will be different.”
“You said you’re a professional,” I stalled for time. “You mean you’ve done this kind of thing before?”
Josella nodded slowly. “For six years. My job has been to assassinate policy-holders whose estates would go to Islamic causes.”
“You’ve worked for insurance companies and they never knew?”
“Of course not.”
“She’s a lawyer, for chrissake,” Sam snapped. “She’s trained to lie.”
The phone rang. We heard Josella’s taped voice say sweetly, “I am not able to answer your call right now. Please leave your name and I’ll call you back as soon as I possibly can.”
“Josella?” I recognized that bombastic voice. It was Frank Banner. “This is Banner. Haven’t been able to sleep for the past two nights. This damned business with Sam Gunn is driving me nuts. He’s actually going ahead with his suit in the World Court, is he? Damned little pissant jerk! We can’t let him drag the Pope through the mud the way he wants to. We just can’t! Tell him we’ll settle with him. Not his damned half-billion, that’s outrageous. But tell him we’ll work out something reasonable if he’ll drop this damned lawsuit.”
I felt my mouth drop open. I looked at Sam and he was grinning as if he’d been expecting this all along.
“And tell him that if I ever see him in the same room with me I’ll break every bone in his scrawny goddamned neck! Tell him that, too!”
The phone connection clicked dead. Sam flopped back on the bed and whooped triumphantly.
“I knew it!” he yelled. “I knew that Francis Xavier Banner couldn’t let the Pope come to trial. I knew the tightfisted sonofabitch would finally break down and offer to settle my insurance claims!” He laughed wildly, kicking his bare hairy legs in the air and pounding the mattress with his fists.
I just stood there, dumbfounded. Had this whole complex procedure been nothing more than an elaborate scheme by Sam to get his insurance carrier to accept his accident claims? Yes, I realized. That was Sam Gunn at his wiliest: threaten the Pope to get what he considered he was owed.
The gun in Josella’s hand wavered, then she let her arm drop to her side.
“You don’t have to kill Sam now,” I said. “There’s not going to be a court case after all.”
“No,” she said. “The blasphemer must still die.”
Sam got to his bare feet, clutching the bed sheet around his middle like a Roman senator who didn’t quite know how to drape his toga properly.
“You’re a fraud,” Sam said.
Josella’s dark eyes snapped at him. “Fraud?”
“You’re about as professional a killer as that fat blonde Daughter.”
“You think so?” Josella’s voice went hard and cold, like an ice-pick. She still had the gun in her hand.
“You said professionals do the job without hesitation,” Sam said. “No talk, just boom, you’re dead.”
Josella nodded.
“So you’re an amateur,” Sam said, grinning at her. “You did a lot more than talk before you hauled out your gun.”
“I did that with all the others, too,” Josella said. It was a flat statement, neither a boast nor an excuse. “It’s my trademark. Two of the older men I didn’t even have to kill; they died of natural causes.”
“Bullshit all the others. You’ve never killed anybody and we both know it.”
“You’re wrong—”
“Yeah, sure. I’m going to start believing what a lawyer tells me, at my advanced age.”
Josella looked confused. I know I was.
But Sam knew exactly what he was doing. “Put your gun back wherever the hell you were hiding it and get out of here,” he told her. “Get on the midnight shuttle and don’t come back.”
“I can’t do that,” said Josella. “My mission is to kill you—or die. If I let you go, they’ll kill me.”
“Oh shit,” Sam muttered.
“You mean that your own people will murder you if you don’t kill Sam?”
Josella nodded. “I must succeed or die. That is what I promised them.”
With a disgusted frown, Sam clutched his bed-sheet a little tighter and reached for the phone with his free hand.
“Don’t!” Josella warned, raising her gun.
“I’m not calling security.”
“Then who … ?”
Sam called Pope William. The Pope looked shocked, even on the tiny screen of the Picturephone, and even more surprised when Sam told him what his call was about.
“Sanctuary,” he said. “This lady here needs your protection.”
Blinking sleep from his steely eyes, Pope William said, “Maybe you’d better come over here to explain this to me.”
It was almost comical watching Sam and Josella get dressed while she still tried to keep her pistol on us. Then the three of us trotted down the nearly empty corridors, back to the Pope’s quarters. Two of his own security men, Swiss guards in plain coveralls, were waiting for us.
They brought us to a kind of sitting room, a bare little cell with four chairs grouped around a coffee table. Nothing else in the room: not a decoration or any refreshments or even a carpet on the stone floor. Josella sat down warily, put her pistol on her lap.
Pope William entered the room a few moments after we did. He was wearing a white sweatshirt and an old pair of Levis and he still filled the room with a warm brilliance.
It was long past midnight before Sam got the whole thing explained to the Pope. Josella didn’t help, insisting that she wanted no help from unbelievers.
“I won’t try to convert you,” William said, smiling at her. “But I can offer you protection and help you create a new persona for yourself.”
“A kind of witness protection plan,” Sam said, trying to encourage her. “See, we’re bringing the Vatican into the twenty-first century.”
Me? I was stewing. The two of them were falling all over themselves trying to help Josella and ignoring me altogether.
Josella was starting to nod, seeing that maybe there was a way out of the blind corner she’d trapped herself in. She took the gun from her lap, popped open its magazine, and laid the pieces on the coffee-table.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go along with you.”
“But what about those other killings?” I heard myself blurt out. “She’s admitted to murdering God knows how many men!”