“In the cellar of the Great Cathedral of Notre Dame, there are two big rings like that on these old wooden doors.”
“Can you…” Bill was interrupted.
“Excuse me, but Notre Dame is where they hold the Crown of Thorns; first placed there by Saint Louis in 1239 A.D. Currently on the first Friday of the month and every Friday during Lent, they hold the Veneration of the Crown of Thorns.” Marilou sheepishly looked over to Bill to see if he had meant it when he told her to speak up. Bill’s smile was her signal that it was okay.
“Joey, I am starting to get a funny feeling here. Marilou, tell him about the Knights.”
“The Knights of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem were the guardians of the rings, or crown.”
“The Knight’s Chamber!” Brooke said, looking at Joey.
“What is that?” Bill asked from three thousand miles away.
“Brooke is talking about what a local priest told me they called the room behind the doors with the rings.
“And if Sicard wears the ring of the Knights and they have a chamber here at the Cathedral in Paris and now he is here…”
“Holy Shit!” Bill said. “Sorry Marilou.”
“It’s okay.”
“Hey, what am I, chopped liver?” Brooke mildly protested.
“My apologies all around, but we could be in the middle of a lot of holy sh… stuff!”
“So we are now thinking that this man, Sicard, is a modern-day Knight of the Sepulchre?” Joey asked.
“It all seems to fit,” Brooke said.
“Joey, I think you and Brooke should visit the church again and see what you can dig up. Joey? Hello.” Bill was trying to break through whatever pensive fog Joey was suddenly in.
“Sorry Bill, it’s just that this is getting kinda weird. I am an RCH away from placing Sicard at the murder scene of a Franciscan brother. Actually, they’d have called him a friar here in Paris back in ’97.”
“RCH?” Marilou asked.
“Er…that’s a …um,” Joey fumbled.
Marilou looked at Bill.
“I…ah…it’s a phrase meaning small amount…very small…a smidge.” Bill attempted to describe it by making the smallest of space between his thumb and forefinger.
The fertile mind of the Mensa student, herself an RCH away from her doctorate, tried to detangle the code. “Real close…real close happening…real close to happening?”
“That’s close enough,” Joey quickly dismissed.
“Works for me,” Bill was quick to add.
Brooke was laughing and felt that she as a female had the cred to explain the term, woman to woman. “Marilou, RCH stands for…”
As she described the term, born out of the construction trades as a reference to a tight fit between two things that were not just a hair’s width apart, but a pubic hair — a red, female, pubic hair apart. Only she used the street vernacular c-word for vagina, which made both Bill and Joey wince.
For her part, the prim and proper Marilou Delacruz, daughter of the Filipino deacon, simply said, “That’s charmingly colloquial.”
Aboard the Carl Vinson, Bridgestone was kept separate from the Japanese crew he had rescued. However, the Japanese captain and he were in the Commander of the CVN’s quarters, meeting with a CIA officer.
“Captain Toshihira, you have expressed deep gratitude and appreciation for the United States’ efforts to release you and your men. Speaking for the president of the United States, we are glad you are safe. Now I must ask you to help us save future crews and captives of pirates and terrorists around the world,” the CIA officer said.
“Of course, I would consider it my duty.”
“Good, because you will have to stick to a story that erases any involvement by this man. He is a valuable asset and as such his identity cannot be revealed.”
Kasogi looked at Bridgestone in a way that said he understood.
“The story from this point forward is that the guards all fell sick because of contamination of their food, which was separate and apart from the food served you and your crew. When they were weak, you and your men overpowered them, used their radio equipment to send out a Mayday and this ship responded and air evacuated you out. You and your men will be heroes and will make much money writing your memoirs, but no one must ever know the actual story. Do you feel you can do this and order your crew to do the same?”
“This is not the military. I can order, but they are Merchant Marine. I cannot guarantee.”
“Understood, but in our debriefing of your crew, in all the confusion of the rescue many were unaware of this man’s role. Those who remembered him only know he was a nomadic tribesman who helped. In fact, much of the crew credits you with securing the first weapon and firing. So the story is almost complete.”
Toshihira nodded, as he understood how far along the story was. “I will do as you ask; I will take our secret to my grave.”
“May that be a long, long time from now,” Bridge said, and then left the quarters.
Once they were alone, the intelligence agent asked, “Now, tell me about the whale.”
Brooke and Joey were in Director Dupré’s office rifling through stacks of police files, looking for any shred of evidence tying Sicard to the dead priest, or to the Knights.
“This is interesting. I can’t find anything on the victim, Friar Gregory, for two years prior to his death.”
“We could have a case of assumed identity here.” Brooke said.
“Director Dupré, can you have your people obtain a picture of the priest prior to 1995?” Joey said.
“Agent Burrell, my staff is at your disposal. If you don’t mind, dial seven-seven and ask Roland to do the search.” Dupré turned to Joey. “If we are dealing with assumed identity, it can turn our investigation one hundred eighty degrees.”
Brooke opened one of the old files and pulled out the coroner’s picture of the victim. She went to the computer. “Roland is fast: he just e-mailed me a 1992 driver’s license photo of Friar Gregory.” Brooke held up the paper photo against the screen image. “Fasten your seatbelts, gentlemen. We are about to make a screaming u-turn!”
Both Joey and Dupré concurred that the dead man was not Friar Gregory. Brooke put it into words. “So it seems like this imposter could be the assassin, and Sicard was the assassin’s assassin.”
“And since it was a dead priest with ID on him, and the Pope was in town…” Joey started.
“And there was no trace of foul play or evidence of anything other than an accidental crushing of his larynx possibly by a fall…” Brooke added.
“Then of course, I didn’t order a DNA confirmation of the priest’s identity because I concluded it was a non-crime,” Dupré confessed.
“That’s what I would have thought also, given what you didn’t know then,” Joey said, then added, “This guy Percy must be a really well-trained operative to be able to cover his tracks so perfectly and not reveal his true mission.”
“Sure, and if we don’t follow Sicard to Paris and Joey doesn’t dig up this case file, then the phony dead priest decomposes in the ground and no one is the wiser,” Brooke concluded as she printed out the grainy license photo and pinned it on the corkboard they were using to see the bigger picture that was emerging.
“I will do what I should have done before and run the coroner’s fingerprints of the dead imposter through our files as well as Interpol.”
“Brooke, include the bureau on it too. There’s no telling where this guy came from.” Joey said.
“Will do. We should pull in your friend from the mosque. If Sicard killed the phony priest to stop him from killing the Pope, maybe he knows more about the plot than he let on,” Brooke said as she picked up the phone to call the bureau in Washington and get the prints run through the FBI and the NCIC national fingerprint databases.