“Ah, ottagono,” he nodded. Tesla zipped up the body bag and rolled the cadaver drawer back into the wall. Then he led them into an office with plastic bins on shelves. Most had a name. The employee went to a shelf that had several bins that were labeled by number only. He pulled #51, which corresponded to the cadaver drawer they had just seen.
The octagon-shaped piece of cloth was on top in a plastic Ziploc bag, resting atop the bloodied tracksuit and sneakers the dead man had been wearing. To Carver’s eye, it looked exactly like the octagons at the Gish and Preston crime scenes. The inscription on the front was Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam — for the greater glory of God. He flipped it over to read the inscription on the back, Paratus Enim Dolor et Cruciatus, in Dei Nomine. Prepared for pain and torment, in God’s name.
“Where’s the other one?” Carver said.
Tesla shook his head and held up one finger.
“Only one octagon?”
“Pocket,” Tesla replied, opening his own jacket and pointing to an inside pouch.
“The octagon was in his pocket?” Carver said. “Not in his mouth?”
The priest translated. Carver understood Tesla’s response before Callahan interpreted. “He wants to know why you would expect it to be in his mouth. And that goes double for me.”
Carver could not say what he was thinking. An octagon in either dead man’s mouth might have indicated that they were victims of the same organization that had killed Preston and Gish. But the presence of the fabric in their pocket could mean the opposite.
But these men had not killed Gish or Preston. Their deaths had in fact come several hours before the assassinations in D.C. and Rome.
That meant that the organization they were up against was large enough, and sophisticated enough, to operate in three time zones simultaneously.
Sea-Tac Airport
It was past 11 p.m. Pacific time when Ellis’ plane touched down, waking her from a deep sleep. She was immediately self-conscious of her boozy breath. To calm her nerves, she had downed a couple of strong martinis in an airport bar prior to boarding. As soon as she disembarked, she would be searching for a can of Venom, coffee, anything. It was a vicious cycle.
She stretched as much as possible without encroaching upon the space of the elderly gentleman sitting next to her. Then she opened the window shade and peered out the dewy window. The thick airport fog reduced the airport buildings to hazy illuminations of yellow light.
She had no luggage except the backpack she had taken from Drucker’s condo. In it she had packed her weapon, Drucker’s manuscript and notes. The hotel situation had forced her to travel light. After her conversation with Vera Borst, Ellis had been left with the challenge of escaping Jack McClellan’s watch. After hearing nothing through the door the adjoining suite for several hours, she took a chance and forced it open. One look at the room told her it was still occupied, but the guests had apparently stepped out. Ellis rifled through the closet, looking for anything that might pass for a disguise. She quickly located a stylish long black trenchcoat that fit to a tee, and a furry hat with long earflaps and poms. A pair of sheepskin boots were a half-size too large for her, but she decided she could manage it. She bolted out of the adjoining suite with her back to McClellan’s position in the hallway, walking with purpose toward the elevators at the end of the hall. She never looked back.
Ellis had left the hotel before her new satphone had arrived from McLean. Traveling without a device made her feel both vulnerable and free. She was so accustomed to having the mapped world at her behest that the thought of finding Ms. Borst’s address — which she had handwritten on a piece of hotel stationary — seemed daunting. At the same time, she was grateful to be spared the inevitable barrage of demanding messages from Julian Speers. That went double for having her location trackable. She checked her watch again. It was 2 a.m. in D.C. With luck, she would be on her returning flight by the time Speers woke up.
Despite her eighth row window seat, Ellis managed to be the first one off the plane when the doors opened, elbowing her way past even the first class passengers.
Ellis quickly made her way through the tidy airport toward the signs for ground transport. Once she reached the outside, she stood for a moment on the curb, breathing in her first taste of Northwest air. Wet. Crisp. Verdant.
She jumped into a cab.
“Evening,” the driver said. “Just the pack? No other luggage?”
She handed the driver the Mayflower Hotel stationary on which she had written Borst’s address. She remembered watching her mother do the same thing once, when she was a child, before the age of smartphones.
The cab driver let out a hearty laugh. “Miss,” he chuckled. “Do you even know where this is?”
Ellis took it back. She saw nothing wrong with the address. “What’s the problem?”
“The zip code. It’s on Vashon Island.”
Crap. Ellis was vaguely aware that the Northwest was partitioned by lots of inlets, lakes and rivers, but she had no concrete knowledge of its actual geography. She had already spent a ton of her own money on the plane ticket, without any guarantee that Speers would ever agree to reimburse her for it.
“Okay. How much?”
“I can’t just drive there, if that’s what you’re asking. If it was Mercer Island, no problem. There’s a bridge to Mercer. For Vashon, you have to take a ferry, and the ferries stopped for the night already. You’ll have to wait until morning.”
That was out of the question. Vera Borst had said she was flying to Europe in the morning, presumably on UN business, although she hadn’t specified. She had said to come tonight.
“Are there water taxis?” Ellis said.
The cabbie chortled again. “There should be, right? Fact is that there’s a lot of people that want water service privatized, which would mean more jobs and service all night and all day, right? But no, the county protected the union jobs like always.”
“Is there someone else you can call? Someone with a boat?”
The driver shook his head.
Ellis reached into her pack, fished out one of the outdated NIC business cards she had shown Drucker, and handed it to the cabbie. “I’m not usually this pushy. It’s just that I’m here on a matter of national security. It’s important.”
Rome
The sun fell behind St. Peter’s Basilica just as Father Callahan turned his tiny Fiat onto Via della Conciliazione. Nico sat sideways in the car’s tiny back seat, watching as a group of tourists posed for pictures in front of the Santa Maria della Transpontina church. The car passed the embassies of Brazil, Iraq and Egypt. How was it that over the past two thousand years the Vatican had shrunk from a vast geographical empire of papal states to a tiny sovereign nation wedged inside Rome, and yet it influenced more people worldwide than any other government?
At last, the Fiat pulled up to the Palazzo della Rovere. “Buy you a drink?” Carver asked the priest, who was shaken from seeing the mangled corpses.
“I could use it,” he said. “I’ll meet you in Le Colonne.”
Carver and Nico unfolded themselves from the tiny car and watched as the priest pulled through the arched driveway in search of parking. The two hadn’t talked since Detective Tesla had shown them the bodies and the personal effects found on the dead Jesuits down at the morgue.
“In your estimation,” Carver said, “How accurate was Father Callahan’s translation?”
Nico scratched behind his left ear and rolled his shoulders up and down, as if to work the tension out of them. “Mmmm,” he said, “Detective Tesla talks a hundred miles an hour.”
Carver smiled. “I have a hard time believing that you, of all people, couldn’t understand him.”
“Of course I could understand him,” Nico quipped. “I’m just qualifying my answer first. The priest lives here, so naturally his comprehension is going to be a bit better than mine.”