The shrink sipped her tea. An obvious stalling tactic. She was formulating what she wanted to say next.
“Can you do hypnosis?” Ellis asked.
“Sure, but in this case…”
“You want to help? Then I want you to hypnotize me.”
Piazza di Spagna
Nico woke to slushing and splashing sounds. He looked at the clock next to the bed. He had slept four hours, which was more than Carver had allowed him since this little adventure had begun. His body complained as he turned, aching all over from the bruises he had taken during the previous evening’s ordeal. There was a little blood on his pillow, too. He touched the ear that had been cut, not at all surprised to find that the scab had come off in the night.
He rose, shuffled into the bathroom and found Carver stripped down to his boxers, kneeling in front of the tub, rubbing a soaked garment with detergent.
“That shirt is dry-clean only,” Nico said in a mock-scolding voice.
“Hilarious.”
Carver stood, looking down at the tub full of submerged garments. He had been soaking them since daybreak with a bottle of stain remover and a packet of detergent that room service had brought up. Despite his scrubbing, those blood and powder stains hadn’t faded much. It wasn’t like they could just give them to the hotel laundry service. These clothes contained evidence that could put them in an Italian prison for a very long time.
“I’m ready to work,” Nico said. “What’s on the agenda?”
“I’m going to give you the names of two laboratory equipment manufacturers, along with the model numbers of some specialty items. Extremely expensive, completely custom, sold to a very limited number of customers. I want you to find out if either of them shipped equipment to Rome within the past two years. I don’t care how you do it. Hack into their billing systems if you have to.”
Nico leaned up against the doorframe and folded his arms across his chest. “Do I have to ask?”
“If my theory is right, a shipment from at least one of these companies should lead us to a lab here in Rome. And that is where we will find Adrian Zhu, Mary Borst and, if we are very lucky, Mr. Sebastian Wolf.”
Psychiatric Office
Washington D.C.
“Haley?” Jack McClellan’s voice startled Ellis as she emerged from the session. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” she answered without thinking. And no, she wasn’t all right. She had just been to a place in her memory that truly terrified her, and she didn’t even know what time it was. She had forgotten that Jack was even here. It seemed like days since he had driven her here from the safehouse in McLean.
There were a couple of young girls in the waiting room. Both lowered their magazines slightly to sneak a peek. They were sizing her up. That was the way it worked in these places. You hoped to spot someone who looked more damaged than you. At least then you could feel a little better about yourself.
“Jill called when you were in there,” McClellan said as he held the door open for her. “She wants to know if she could get lamb shawarma delivered. Said you know a good place. I told her nothing gets delivered to the safehouse, but we could get one of the guys to pick it up.”
Shawarma? Screw shawarma. Couldn’t he see her quaking? Couldn’t he see what she had just been through?
Her forehead throbbed, and she remembered the big sunglasses. She’d slipped them back on just before standing up. To hide the bruises. It had been the shrink’s suggestion. How had she put it? You might be more comfortable with those on.
A few seconds later they were outside, standing on 10th and G Street. St. Patrick’s Cathedral was across the street. It had been her regular church a few years back when she had lived in Chinatown. She hadn’t been there in a couple of years.
She darted between two cars and raced across the street.
“Where you going?” Jack called after her. “Haley? We have to get back.”
When she entered the 18th-century church, she wasn’t sure why she had come. The next mass didn’t start for another hour. She sat in a back pew, unfurled her scarf and used the end of it to wipe the tear tracks from her cheeks.
“My job is to keep you safe,” Jack said. He was standing in the aisle, looking down at her in a way that reminded her of her own father. “This kind of stunt stops now.”
Ellis looked down at the piece of paper in her hands. A transcription of what she had recalled during her hypnosis. At the bottom of the sheet of paper, circled in pen, was a 32-digit alphanumeric sequence. Vera Borst had used her last moments to reveal it to her. Now that the hypnosis had finally been purged it from her subconscious, her relief was tempered by the fact that she still didn’t know what the numbers meant.
“Haley, please.”
“Just a little time. That’s all I need.”
Jack sighed. “Ten minutes. Then we’re going, no arguments. Do we understand each other?”
A confessional booth came into focus along the western edge of the sanctuary. She recalled her first time in confession, as an eight-year-old child. She had been too shy to speak to the priest peering at her through the tiny veiled screen. After several unsuccessful attempts to start a conversation, he had simply laughed and given her a blessing. It was a good feeling that had stayed with her throughout her life.
Now she found herself on her feet, peering in through the open curtain.
“Have a seat.” The priest’s voice was more youthful than Ellis had expected. “Peace be with you.”
Ellis drew the curtain behind her and sat, making the sign of the cross. The screen disguising the priest’s face was closed. That was good. Ellis preferred it that way.
“Bless me Father,” she said quietly, “For I have sinned. It has been 11 days since my last confession. These are my sins.”
Her recap was automatic. Brief, lacking any real detail, and neatly categorized into several general areas: desire, envy, gluttony, greed and selfishness. As if the events of the past few days hadn’t really happened at all.
The priest was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “Why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you?”
The next sound from Ellis was somewhere between a cry and a laugh. She took her sunglasses off and held them in her lap. “Sorry.”
“No need to be sorry,” the priest said. “Would you like to do this face-to-face?”
“No offense, but no, I wouldn’t.”
“None taken. So what’s up?”
She tried to gather herself. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
“Just start with one word. The rest will follow.”
“What if someone asked you for protection? Someone with beliefs that were against everything you’d been taught?”
“Welcome to my world. Most of the people I help have no connection with our beliefs.”
“I’m not talking about the weekly soup kitchen, Father. I mean real protection.”
“As in mortal danger?”
Ellis nodded. “The person in danger is…someone that I don’t know at all. And her child.”
The priest hedged for a moment. “I would probably advise you to contact the authorities.”
“I am the authorities.”
“Oh. You’re with the police?”
“I can’t say more. But let me ask you another way. What if you knew that this child’s very presence would cause violence and death? Would you still protect that child?”
“God doesn’t ask us to make those types of decisions. For us, every life is precious.”
“He’s asking me, Father. What if the church itself was genuinely threatened?”
The youthful voice sounded weary now. “I have to ask…are you under the care of a doctor?”
“I’m not crazy. I’m asking for your spiritual opinion.”
“All right. I’ll tell you what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say on the matter. In short, those who hold authority have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the community entrusted to their responsibility. And furthermore, the literature says that justice does not exclude the death penalty, if this is indeed the only possible way of defending human lives against the aggressor.”