‘Can I help you, senor?’ she whispered.
‘Monsignor Jennings.’
Sister Gonzales shot to her feet, banging her knee on the heavy wooden pew.
‘Oh, Father. I’m so sorry, no one told us you were coming,’ Sister Gonzales stammered, her round dark eyes full of concern. ‘I’m Sister Gonzales,’ she added. The beautiful young nun was slim and petite, her long dark hair hidden under the hood of her habit.
‘I see,’ Jennings replied irritably. ‘Take me to my quarters.’
‘Again, I’m most terribly sorry, Father,’ said Sister Gonzales, hurriedly opening the blinds and windows of the tiny one-bedroom San Pedro presbytery, which commanded sweeping views over the lake. ‘The presbytery’s been vacant ever since Father Hernandez left, so it’s terribly musty. We were planning to give it a thorough spring clean before your arrival.’
‘The presbytery’s been vacant all that time?’
‘We’ve been without a permanent parish priest since Father Hernandez retired, although he lived here for many years until he left… ’ Sister Gonzales’ voice trailed off.
‘And what was the reason for his leaving?’ Jennings probed.
Sister Gonzales stared at the old wooden floorboards.
‘I’m waiting!’
‘No one really knows, Father. There are just rumours…’
‘Yes?’
‘Rumours of his past – that he might have been a Nazi. He left in a big hurry after the Israelis arrived,’ Sister Gonzales added uncomfortably.
‘You knew the Israelis were here?’
Sister Gonzales nodded. ‘Someone in Panajachel warned Father Hernandez the Israelis were coming for him, and he left in a truck before they could get here.’
‘A truck?’
‘There is a back road that connects with the highway to the south. He took a big crate with him -’
‘Containing?’
‘No one knows, Father, but it was very heavy. It had to be loaded by forklift.’
Jennings grunted.
‘Have you had dinner, Father? We’re having black beans and tortillas tonight.’ The young nun smiled enthusiastically.
‘I’ll eat out. That will be all.’
Jennings glanced around his new quarters, angry at the task he’d been given. San Pedro was a long way from the delights of the European capitals, and even those in Guatemala, he thought wistfully, remembering the previous night with Reynaldo. Perhaps some of the tuc tuc drivers held some promise. He unpacked his battered suitcase and placed his clothes in the oak wardrobe in the bedroom which was on a mezzanine floor, reached by a wooden staircase. The rest of the flat consisted of a downstairs sitting room with an old couch and a white wicker table and two wicker chairs. The kitchen had a small stove, connected to a gas bottle, and an old Kelvinator refrigerator. The bathroom was equally primitive. Several tiles were missing from the shower recess, which was screened by a yellowed shower curtain.
He walked back out into the sitting room, oblivious to the stunning vista of coffee plantations running down the sides of the volcanoes to a lake shore dotted with poinsettia trees, banana palms, Mexican honeysuckles, spiny yuccas and a host of other colourful palms and plants. Jennings opened a door under the stairs and switched on the light. The storeroom was dank and dusty; empty save for a pair of scuba tanks and a diving regulator. He lifted the tanks and underneath was an old diary. The Israelis had indeed forced von Hei?en to get out in a rush, Jennings thought, as he retrieved the diary from the concrete floor.
44
O ’Connor parked the Toyota in a side street near the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof and hailed a cab to take them within walking distance of the Hansehof, a two-star hotel on Simon-von-Utrecht Strasse. He booked just one room, not wanting Aleta to be any more vulnerable than she already was.
‘Bit of a comedown from the Imperial,’ Aleta said with a grin, unable to resist having a dig.
‘Yes, but this one’s nondescript, and it has one big advantage at this stage of our journey.’
‘And what might that be?’ she asked as O’Connor inserted the key to their room.
‘Twin beds.’
‘You’re incorrigible.’
‘I’ve got one or two things to organise,’ O’Connor said, stacking their suitcases on the luggage rack. ‘Don’t answer the door or the phone. I’ll be back in an hour – two at the most.’
Aleta flicked on the television and settled in for the CNN news. A young journalist was standing amid the ruins of Salebata village on the southern side of the Pacific island of Samoa.
‘Whole villages have been wiped off the map here, and the death toll will be high,’ she announced. The camera panned across boats tossed like confetti into coconut palms, mud-covered stumps of concrete where houses had once stood, cars smashed onto their sides, and the roofs of those buildings still standing hanging drunkenly on debris that stretched along the shoreline. ‘The quake, which struck at 3.48 p.m. eastern standard time, measured a massive 8.3 on the Richter scale, with an epicentre 100 kilometres south of Western Samoa. And in breaking news, another earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale has reportedly hit the Indonesian West Sumatra province, devastating the cities of Padang and Pariaman. The death toll is expected to be in the hundreds.’
The feed crossed to a seismologist at the Bureau of Meteorology in Sydney. ‘Eighty per cent of the world’s earthquakes occur around what is known as the Pacific Rim of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped series of trenches and tectonic plates that stretch for 40 000 kilometres.’ The seismologist ran his pointer over a map that showed the fiery rim stretching from the coastline of South America up to Alaska, across to Siberia and down through Japan to New Zealand. ‘It also contains over 450 volcanoes. In the case of Samoa the massive Pacific plate is now moving westwards at nearly a centimetre a year, thrusting under the Australian plate. Undersea earthquakes can trigger waves which move at speeds of up to 800 kilometres an hour. As they approach a shoreline, these killer waves can build to the height of a three-storey building, as happened in 2004 when a quarter of a million people lost their lives.’
For the next hour, Aleta watched the disasters unfold in Samoa and Indonesia, until the channel crossed to the Philippines, where a deadly typhoon was coming ashore near the north-eastern tip of Luzon. Depressed by the diet of destruction, Aleta started to flick through the cable channels. A preacher in a white suit from one of America’s southern Baptist mega-churches suddenly appeared on the screen.
A pull-through announced ‘The Jerry Buffett Hour – the hour that will change your life! – a weekly broadcast that goes to over 300 stations around the world’. The vision cut away to the 15 000-capacity auditorium of the Buffett Evangelical Centre. It was packed to the rafters, the congregation hanging on their preacher’s every word. The cameraman had been well tutored in catching Jerry Buffett’s best side, and he slowly zoomed in, capturing the tele-evangelist’s tanned face, the square jaw and the intensity in his deep-blue eyes.
‘As God’s warnings, in the form of ever-increasing numbers of earthquakes and tsunamis, continue to exact their toll of death and destruction, the end time is closer than you think, my friends!’ Buffett thundered. ‘There are those who are sceptical of the coming Armageddon, but if the American people don’t turn from their ways, if we don’t turn back to the Lord, the prophet Isaiah is very clear!’ Buffett grasped both sides of the massive lectern and began to read from the prophecies of Isaiah 24: ‘ “Behold… the earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and it shall fall!” That, my friends, is clear warning of the coming geographical pole shift from one of the greatest prophets of the ages. Everything Isaiah has foretold has either come to pass or will come to pass. A geographic pole shift will be God’s way of punishing a sinful world, just as he punished the ancient Israelites when they turned from the commandments and worshipped the golden calf. It’s right here in Isaiah 13: “Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place.” Those who focus on money, those who engage in sins of the flesh, those who have turned their backs on the Almighty God… His pole shift will swallow them in an instant!’