One of his attendants brought in the flan and after he’d departed a second priest appeared. He wasn’t familiar to Musaro and the papal nuncio frowned. Strangely the man had a limp and carried a heavy, old-fashioned root-wood cane, polished to an almost glassy shine.
“I don’t mean to interrupt your meal, Eminence, but I have an urgent message from the Vatican.”
Musaro’s frown became a grin. This was the news he had been expecting. He’d seen that bastard Spada’s medical files and he knew the timing was perfect. “Yes?”
Father Ronan Sheehan raised the head of the knobkerrie, its large upper handle weighted with an extra ten ounces of lead, and struck Musaro hard on the right side of his forehead at his temple, instantly crushing both the frontal and the sphenoid bones. He caught the dying cardinal by the scruff of the neck and dragged him to his feet. He gently kicked the man’s ankles out from under him, then let go of his collar. Musaro dropped heavily to the floor, striking the right side of his head against the corner of the table before he hit the Persian-carpeted floor. The hit on the edge of the table had opened the wound nicely so that blood from the corner of the table began dripping down on the body, more fluid, brains and blood oozing out onto the rug. Sheehan paused just long enough to take a breath of the ripening oranges outside, then turned and left. Half an hour later he was back at the Marina Hemingway, guiding the late Des Smith’s boat in the general direction of Key West.
30
After rounding Punta Brave, the Corazon de Leon puttered slowly southwest heading for the shallow channel between tiny Cayo Boca Chica at the end of its much larger brother, Cayo Fagoso, on the port side and Cayo Frances to starboard. Beyond was the open sea. Geraldo and his son, Ricardo, stopped the engines briefly beside an old wreck of a molasses ship, the SS San Pasqual, blown onto the reef in 1939.
The crystallized molasses still threw off a terrible odor, but the old concrete ship was exactly the kind of place where you caught the best lobster and it took less than twenty minutes for the father-and-son team to bring up several dozen of the enormous creatures. It also gave them a chance to see if anyone had shown any interest in their leave-taking.
Eddie and the two Cuban lobstermen met briefly on deck, and then Eddie reported back to the little galley aft of the wheelhouse. “They say that from here we can go two ways: to Key West or to Billy’s Cay in the Bahamas. If we go to Key West we have to travel along the coast for more than seventy miles, but Billy’s Cay is one hundred and seventy miles and almost due north. They are suggesting Billy’s Cay and ask for your thoughts on this.”
“How long before we’re beyond the twelve-mile limit?”
“From the wreck…perhaps forty-five minutes.”
“No sign of the Zhuk patrol boat?”
“Nothing. The sea is ours.”
“I agree with Geraldo and Ricardo. We head for Billy’s Cay.”
“Bueno.” Eddie nodded. He turned and left the galley.
“Time to get to work,” said Holliday.
Paul Smith, senior analyst and interpreter for the Central American Division of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, sat in his small office in the new Fort Belvoir complex. It was Saturday, Smith’s usual day for golf, but here he was, at the express order of Mrs. Leticia goddamn Long, director of the agency, to repurpose the new GeoEye 2 satellite as well as run a series of four overlapping and continuous RQ-170 drones over Cuba. The RQ-170 was tasked to fly at mid altitudes, but it was felt that although one had been recently brought down by the Iranians, the Cuban electronic defenses were not sophisticated enough to cause any problems. He had six computers running simultaneously on his workdesk and a huge eighty-inch monitor on the wall giving him a larger, high-definition view from GeoEye 2.
To make matters worse, not only was he to retask the satellite and oversee the drone flights out of Creech, but he was to personally maintain twenty-four-hour surveillance and see to it that there was always someone watching the screens. Under no circumstances was he to leave the gigantic building, which meant some kind of hideous dinner in the food fair mall in the Atrium and a night in one of the “suites” the agency maintained for just this kind of situation. The “suites” were somewhere short of a room at a Motel Six. It was worse than being an on-call intern in a hospital. Smith yawned and let his eyes flicker back and forth across the screens with an occasional glance at the big screen on the wall. His headache was getting worse by the minute. It was going to be a long day and an even longer night.
Father Thomas Brennan sat at one of the small tables outside the Osteria Dell’Angelo on the Via G. Bettolo, eating a small plate of ciambelline aniseed doughnut-style biscuits and enjoying a glass of sweet Vin Santo dessert wine after a pleasant dinner. Finishing the last of the biscuits, he lit a cigarette and watched the traffic squeeze down the narrow roadway a few blocks from the Holy City.
All in all, the Irish priest was feeling quite content. He had photocopied Spada’s personal medical file to those concerned and was now waiting for the almost certain results.
Spada had less than a year, and probably no more than six months, left to live, which would give Musaro plenty of time to establish himself to take over the position. He chuckled to himself; the pope was primed, so to speak. With Musaro in position—a much more aggressively active man in the role of Vatican secretary of state Soladitum Pianum and the entire Vatican intelligence apparatus would finally be used to assert its real potential.
The endless sex scandals, the Vatican Bank scandal and the cloud that still hung over the death of John Paul I—a plan Brennan had advised against from the beginning—had all conspired to lower the Vatican’s prestige and political power. Now, with Spada gone and the Holy Father seriously thinking of resigning, perhaps that would change. Within the next year or so, there was going to be a shift in power in the Vatican and Brennan was assuring himself a position on the winning side.
Finishing his cigarette, Brennan lit another, waved to Angelo, the retired rugby player and owner of the restaurant, and walked back to his little apartment on the Via Mazzini. He stopped off at the Caffè Della Rosa for a final espresso and made a quick call on his cell phone. Twenty minutes later he reached his building and trudged up the three flights of stairs to his apartment.
He quickly stripped off his clothes, took a quick shower and put on the old velvet robe and slippers that were his usual form of dress when he was at home. Fifteen minutes later, there was the shrill sound of his doorbell and without even switching on the intercom he buzzed the downstairs door open. A few moments later, there was a quiet knock at his door and he let his guest in. As usual it was Mai Phuong Thúy, his favorite, the compact portable massage table almost as big as she was.
“Bu
i t
i cha tôt,” she said politely.