Their quarry was Hwong Yi Jie, a successful high-end clothing manufacturer from Zhejiang Province who was in Europe visiting her clients in the European fashion industry. Hwong exemplified the type of citizen Beijing saw as vital to the nation’s future, and in her twenty-nine years she had never aroused the interest of the Ministry of State Security. That had all changed a few days ago when a man suspected of handling the video clip broke down after several days of nonstop interrogation and identified Hwong as a member of the underground Catholic Church and his accomplice. Informed that she would present the clip to a representative of the Vatican during her stay in the Eternal City, Liu raced to Rome, arriving last night just a few hours ahead of Hwong. After checking into her hotel, Hwong had ordered a late meal in her room and retired for the night.
‘She’s in the lobby,’ Chin said, translating the report streaming into his earpiece. ‘The front desk reports no calls to or from her room.’
Hwong moved purposefully through the front doors of the hotel. Her long black hair was drawn back in a ponytail, and she was dressed in running shorts and a colorful long-sleeve T-shirt emblazoned with the graphics of the Hong Kong Marathon. A fanny pack around her slim waist held a water bottle, and an iPod was strapped to her left arm. After a few minutes of stretching against the wall of the hotel, Hwong started her morning run.
‘Search her room,’ Liu said, his eyes following the beautiful young woman.
As Chin passed the order on to the men inside the hotel, the driver slipped the Alfa into gear and initiated a loose pursuit of Hwong. Two other cars joined the surveillance, switching every few blocks to avoid detection.
Hwong wound through the narrow streets of the district before heading northwest along Via delle Quattro Fontane. She ran at a modest pace, warming up her legs and finding her stride. A little over a kilometer into her run, she stopped beside Bernini’s Fontana della Barcaccia in the Piazza di Spagna for a drink of water and a quick check of her pulse rate. Then with ferocious intensity, she stormed up the Spanish Steps toward the Sallustian Obelisk and the church of Sant’ Andrea della Fratte. At the top, she turned and descended the majestic staircase at a comfortable jog, allowing her legs and breathing to recover. She repeated the cycle five times before continuing up Viale della Trinita del Monti toward the Piazza dei Popolo.
The Tylenol caplets rattled like dried beans in a maraca, their hard gelatin shells tapping against the convenient travel-sized container whose compact form Nolan Kilkenny found decidedly inconvenient as he rummaged to locate it within the many zippered and Velcro-flapped compartments of the toiletries kit that hung from the back of the bathroom door. His search was not aided by the hangover-induced headache that made even the memory of pain relievers in his luggage a minor miracle. The black organizer and its thoughtful complement of grooming and health products had been a gift from his bride to replace the tattered wreck that had seen him through sixteen years of adult bachelor life. Out with the old…with love, Kelsey read the note he found tucked inside when she presented it to him. Ten months later, the note was still there.
Kilkenny located the bottle, its tamper-resistant seal still intact. He peeled off the skin of thick clear plastic in jagged strips, popped off the childproof cap, and quickly downed a pair of pills with a handful of cold water and a prayer for speedy relief.
This wasn’t his first hangover, nor was it the worst — those memorable events having occurred when Kilkenny was a newly minted high school graduate and later, while serving as a junior officer in the Navy SEALs, after the successful snatch-and-grab of a terrorist leader residing comfortably in Iran. Those and a few other painful mornings-after followed revelry shared with close friends and comrades in arms. Kilkenny rarely drank, and when he did it was typically in small amounts and on social occasions. But last night he had consumed a lot of red wine with dinner at a nearby ristorante, and had done so alone.
What the hell am I doing here?
The image staring back at Kilkenny in the mirror evinced the malaise gnawing inside him, and his futile attempt to marinate that unwanted sensation in Chianti both sickened and angered him. He knew men who had anesthetized their senses with alcohol and drugs for lesser reasons than his, and he vowed that his loss of faith, of hope, would not be his undoing.
After scrubbing the film from his mouth, Kilkenny splashed some water on his face and head, matting down the disheveled tufts of red hair. His hotel room was small but efficient and, most important, located within walking distance of the Vatican, where he spent most of his time. He had come to Rome at the behest of his father, to work with his father’s oldest friend, Malachy Donoher, the Cardinal Librarian of the Holy Roman Church.
Kilkenny’s job was to improve the flow of information between the Vatican Library and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, for it was through these two entities that the Church remained abreast of advances in science and technology while retaining an institutional memory that spanned a millennium. Donoher believed the academy and library, working in concert, could give the Pope a clearer view of advances that might pose moral or ethical problems tempered with a broad historical perspective, the goal of which was to provide the Holy Father with wise counsel when matters of science and faith seemed at odds.
Officially, the invitation to be a consultant to the Vatican drew on Kilkenny’s technical expertise at managing information — a fairly simple task to be remunerated with a modest fee. But Kilkenny suspected that Donoher and his father had conspired, creating an assignment that was merely a pretext to force him from an empty home in Ann Arbor, where his surroundings could only remind him of all he had lost. Kilkenny had buried himself in work in the two months since the deaths of his wife and unborn child, but grief remained his constant companion. He existed only in the present, his desired future obliterated by a cruel disease.
He appreciated the thought behind the invitation, even if the job demanded little of his mental energies. Kilkenny’s true work — as a venture capitalist with his father’s company, MARC (Michigan Applied Research Consortium) — kept him fully engaged with new and interesting challenges. Kilkenny oversaw the transfer of nascent technologies from academic research laboratories into the world of commerce — he was a trafficker in intellectual property. And not just any property. From quantum energy cells to strange organisms hidden for eons in dark waters beneath miles of polar ice, Kilkenny served as guardian and even midwife to innovations that would change the future. His profession was both exhilarating and lucrative, and on more than one occasion deadly.
Travel was part of his job, so living in Rome for a few weeks did not seem at all unusual. And he had to admit, the Vatican did offer a dramatic change of atmosphere, no doubt exactly what his father and Donoher had intended.
Several new garment bags hung in the closet above two boxes of new dress shoes. He had arrived in Rome two weeks earlier wearing jeans, sneakers, and an Ireland rugby jersey, carrying a briefcase and a small overnight bag, but the garment bag containing the rest of his clothing had gone astray. When it became apparent that the bag’s MIA status was likely permanent, Kilkenny took advantage of the opportunity to update his wardrobe at several of Rome’s finer clothiers.