by Andrew Mayne
“Crap. The Atomic Colombian scenario.” Carver sighs in frustration. He notices some blank stares and elaborates. “That was one of our fears in the ’90s. What would happen if a cartel got hold of a nuclear device? Obviously there’d be no profit in it for them. But if they wanted a bargaining chip in case of capture, a warhead would be hard to argue with. It turned out to be mostly an empty threat, because most of those guys didn’t even have high school educations and wouldn’t know an isotope from a popsicle. That said, it was a concern.” He looks to me. “Is a WMD a potential threat here?”
Oh, fuck.
My mind never even went there.
I think this through out loud. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t suspect that’s the case. Although she was able to arrange for a large amount of C4 to show up in my basement, putting over a hundred civilians in the line of fire. I think this is personal. This will likely be an attack on the pope directly. She has no problem harming bystanders, but they’re not her target. As far as I know. But let’s not rule anything out. I guess we need to at least make the CIA aware of this.”
“Why didn’t she take her shot before?” Carver points out.
I’d been trying to put myself inside Marta’s head. It’s one thing to dissect methods after the fact, like I had to do with the Warlock. This is different. The means aren’t as important as the motive. What does she want? “She wants something public. She doesn’t just want to kill the man, she wants to take out the entire concept of the papacy. She wants to destroy the idea. She wants to destroy his mind before she destroys his body.”
“I think you’ve lost us there,” Ratner interrupts. “Her people are Catholics for the most part. Why would any of them in X-20 support her in this?”
“First of all, I don’t think the bulk of X-20 knows what’s going on. Second, I imagine they feel a stronger allegiance to their gang than to anything else. Tixato, their biggest recruiting ground, feels very betrayed by the Church and the government. Believe it or not, Marta is one of the biggest benefactors there and in other areas. She’s won those people over with orphanages and schools. Not to mention buying off politicians. But third, these people are just as complicated as anyone else. Mexican socialists tried to drive the Catholic Church out of Mexico a hundred years ago. Wherever one group has power, another group resents that power. According to intelligence, many X-20 hardliners practice indigenous beliefs. A lot of them felt abandoned when an earthquake hit the region. X-20 is their religion.”
“So what’s she going to do?” Carver brings things back to the point at hand.
“I don’t know. This all has to be building toward something. Right now she has the pope questioning his own sanity. Inside the Vatican they’re actually debating if he’s possessed or not. Farfetched as that seems, even Mother Teresa once subjected herself to an exorcism. Even the Church’s most famous members believe they’re vulnerable. This is something Marta has worked on for years.
“If I had to take a guess, the method of murder she’s devised will be something dramatic, even biblical, in nature. When she can get someone else to do the killing, like Sheriff Jessup, or get Groom to kill himself, she’ll do that. But with the Pope, I think it’s about striking at his innermost fear. Right now he’s doubting himself. When it’s time to kill him . . .” I pause for a moment. “She’ll want him, and everyone who witnesses it, to believe God has passed judgment on him.”
“And not Satan?” Ratner asks half seriously.
I ignore his tone. “The attacks at the church and Groom’s suicide all have the overt implication that a demon was involved. The trouble with the Bible is that it’s hard to tell the difference between an angel and a demon from their acts alone. Archangel Gabriel is supposed to bring about the destruction of Jerusalem. Sodom and Gomorrah were visited by angels before God destroyed them.
“Rodriguez is toying with people who literally believe this. If she had just killed them outright, she wouldn’t have the satisfaction of them thinking in their dying moments that they are bound for hell. In a sense, she’s trying to destroy their souls. In the case of the pope, she wants him to think he’s finally experiencing God’s wrath.”
Ratner groans. “Oh, so we’re looking for a weapon of wrath.”
“Remember, it’s not about how we see it. It’s about what the pope experiences and what that means. She’s been very careful with her methods so far, so she can instill a sense of the supernatural. But, yes, it will be some kind of weapon of wrath.”
I look around the room. There are more than a few unconvinced faces. “Think about it this way: You’ve heard all the horrible ways that drug cartels torture and kill people. Even the extremes the mafia goes to. It’s not just for show. The people who run these organizations succeed by thinking of the most horrific and dramatic way to kill their enemies. It’s not just advertising. They enjoy this. Marta is very smart, very rich and about the most sadistic person you can imagine.
“We can do the standard security screenings, although I doubt our bomb sniffers or sniper lookouts can spot what she’s up to. This is going to be unconventional in the extreme.”
Carver shakes his head. “The White House has been very clear they want this visit to proceed. Unless we have a credible reason to think there’s going to be an attack at the festival, we can’t call off his appearance. Do you think we can find some shred of proof?”
We can’t wait for the evidence to be a dead man. “I don’t know. We can show that he’s been targeted, but there’s no clear proof that he’s going to be a target here.”
“What do we do? If you don’t think he’s going to be killed in any way we understand, how can we stop that from happening?” Ratner complains.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Despite the question of whether or not he was involved in Marty’s death thirty years ago, the pope is still a guest of the United States and it’s my duty to protect him, even if it means putting my own life on the line. I’ve had to do perp walks where the people we transferred were some of the most heinous you could imagine: child killers and serial murderers. Still, we’d put them in bulletproof vests because there was a chance someone might take a shot at them. Even for dirtbags like that, we’d form a human shield in open spaces to guard them. Our lives were used to protect theirs.
“I think we only have one choice.” I try to find the right way to express what I’m thinking. “We let her succeed.”
60
“THE DEAD MAN Walks,” I say out loud to the room of Secret Service agents. They’re looking at me like they looked at Ratner after his “monkey balls” outburst. “That’s what we have to do.” I’m speaking more to myself than to them as I frantically work out the details in my mind.
“We have to let Marta think she has a chance of killing the pope. Putting him inside some obvious bulletproof cage will only cause her to change her attempt to some other opportune time. While our lives would be easier if we knew this assassination attempt wasn’t going to happen on US soil, that only passes the buck on to some other foreign government who, I’m almost certain, will be even less equipped to stop it from happening.
“Paradoxically, the only way I can see us stopping her is by letting her proceed, but under conditions we carefully control, with safeguards that are invisible to Marta and her people.”
“‘The Dead Man Walks’?” Carver is still confused.
“My grandfather is a stage magician. He wanted to perform the most dangerous illusion in magic. Not an illusion that looks dangerous, like escaping from a straitjacket while dangling from a burning rope, but an illusion that’s actually killed more magicians than any other.”
“The bullet catch?” Carver asks.
“Yes. Precisely. Grandfather figured out a very dramatic presentation that, to this day, no one has replicated or even fully explained. Even the gunman had no idea how it worked. The curtains would go up on Grandfather st
anding off to the side of the stage, blindfolded, with his back to a post. Like a third-world execution. A paper target would be suspended a few feet in front of his body.
“The marksman he used for this illusion was a celebrated Korean War sniper who had something like two hundred confirmed kills. He would load and secure his own rifle. He brought the bullet himself. He would even sign it in front of the audience.
“Grandfather would stand there in his tuxedo, puffing away on his cigar, and count down from ten. You could see the beads of sweat on the sniper’s forehead. The entire theater was silent. Nobody even breathed.
“The marksman would aim and at the count of one, squeeze the trigger. The rifle would fire, the target would puncture, and Grandfather would stagger offstage as if he’d been mortally wounded. He did this every single night of a European tour. Each audience was sure they’d seen the last of him. The curtains would fall to the sound of their stunned gasps. Moments later, the curtain would rise, and he’d come back onstage unharmed. The crowd would leap to their feet, relieved he was alive. To prove the bullet passed through him, he’d hand his shooter a knife and ask him to carve the bullet out of the wooden post.
“Grandfather never touched the gun or the bullet. But somehow the bullet went through the target, and his body, to lodge in the post. It was in a sense, a perfect illusion.”
“Sounds dangerous as hell,” says Hamed.
“It was. But never for Grandfather. The one thing he counted on was the sniper not missing. Even then, though, Grandfather would have been fine.”
“Sounds like a great trick. How does that help our situation?” Ratner protests. He’s still fighting with me and unhappy with the attention I’m getting.
“The trick came about after my grandfather got into a discussion with someone about Lincoln’s assassination. He declared he could create the perfect bullet-catch illusion, one where even the man pulling the trigger would have no idea how it was pulled off. The rifle, the bullet, they really were all the sniper’s. He was more baffled than anyone else. He knew he’d shot my grandfather, yet every night, after the bullet was fired, Grandfather would stumble offstage then walk back on unharmed.
“I think we can adopt the idea behind the Dead Man Walks here. We want the illusion of vulnerability. Certainly we’ll need to make it look like we’re taking some precautions. If Marta doesn’t see some security people in obvious positions, proof that we’re treating this like a potential conventional assassination attempt, her suspicions may be raised, causing her to call off the attempt.”
“What would be so bad about that?” Trust Ratner to try and pass the buck down the line.
“She can get him anytime she wants. The safest thing is to let her try when we’re prepared. Remember, she was willing to kill a hundred people in my building to cover up her plans. If she can’t get the pope by himself, she might do something later when people aren’t expecting it, involving much more collateral damage.”
“So how do we set this up?” replies Carver. I’m glad not all the team leaders are like Ratner.
“We need to bring in the expert himself.” I had hoped to come up with a different solution, but there doesn’t seem to be any other choice. “I can get my grandfather to come in and help us out. If we show him the staging arrangements, I think he can give us some advice on how to pull this off.”
“Hold up,” Ratner interrupts. “You’re assuming the pope will even go for this?”
I’m sure Oberst will be onboard. “I think they’ll go along with this. I’ve already been contacted by someone affiliated with the Swiss Guard. They’d very much like an expedient end to this situation.”
I continue, “But even with this solution, we still have two more problems: protecting the crowd and catching Rodriguez. I have a hunch she’s going to want to be here for this. I think she wants to see this firsthand to get the closure she needs.
“We’re going to need to evacuate people as quickly as we can if something happens. And if we don’t catch her entering the stadium, finding her as she leaves will be a nightmare. Ideally, we find her beforehand.”
“We’ve got almost nothing on her,” Carver complains.
“True, but we’re working on getting more information from someone who was inside her organization. One thing I think we should track down is the whereabouts of her yacht. It was registered under the name Marty, but likely has a different one by now. This could be her base of operations. It’s mobile and can go out of jurisdictions quickly. Find the yacht, we might find her.”
“I’ll get someone on it,” offers Ratner. Like it, or not, advance work is his wheelhouse. I just hope he takes it seriously.
“That brings us back to the crowd. We need to protect a quarter-million people from whatever takes place. If we save the pope but lose one life to a stampede we could have prevented, we’ve failed.”
WOLVES
“SOMETIMES THEY’RE NAKED,” the odd little girl confided to me as I sat at her play table reading The Marvelous Land of Oz, which I found on her shelf. Two years older than me, she was eager to tell me all the things that happened under that roof.
She whispered this to me, revealing the strange world of adults as one child does with another. My house had its own secrets, although nothing as sensational as naked moonlight rituals on the lawn.
Grandfather was in the study with Dad, Devalo, Basso and several other men who’d come for the spiritual session. I was squirreled away in the attic room with the mysterious girl. We both were happy to have someone to talk to who was close to our own age. But we were also equally shy around strangers.
Her hair jet black like my own, she had pale skin and seemed thinner than I was. Her room was immaculate, with each doll and book in its precise location on her shelf. I would find out much later she was Father Devalo’s illegitimate daughter, presented as his niece.
“They go into the room and place their hands on the table and hold hands. Even the men,” she continued. “They dim the lights and light a candle. That’s when it happens.”
“What happens?” I wasn’t sure if this was play mysterious, like the dancing skeletons in our stage show, or like the spooky stories kids shared at sleepovers.
“Voices. Lots of funny voices.”
“What kind of voices?” I asked, in my head conjuring up cartoon voices.
“Dead people. They go in there to talk to dead people.”
This was definitely the spooky kind of story, but even at seven I was a hard scare. I focused on the part of the story that was more disturbing to me. “Naked?”
She gave me a knowing look. “Not when it’s just the men. That’s the other times.” She points out of her window. “They form a circle out there in the dark under the stars. They all get naked. And then they do stuff.” She smirks at the ridiculousness of adults.
I didn’t want to know what kind of stuff. “Have you ever been there when the voices spoke?”
At that age, ghosts were more interesting to me than naked, cavorting adults. Now that I think of it, they still are.
“Lots of times. Sometimes they speak to me when I’m all alone,” she replied in a hushed tone. “They often bring me presents. Want to see?” She walked over to a shelf and pulled down a small, colored-glass teddy bear. “You like?”
I took it from her hands and pretended to admire it, but even as a kid I didn’t have much patience for silly toys. A bookshelf contained far more treasures for me.
“Do you have one like it?” She watched my face for envy.
“Like what?” I replied as I vanished it from my closed fist. I’d mastered the red sponge ball trick when I was five. I was not expert at seven, but I was good enough to fool a nine-year-old.
The girl’s eyes widened and she took several steps back, mouth gaping. “You have the gift,” she murmured.
“No, I don’t.” I thought she meant t
he bear.
I stepped toward her to complete the trick, but she flung her hands out to protect herself. “Don’t touch me!” she hissed.
I reached behind her ear to produce the bear. “It’s just a trick.”
She jumped back into the corner of her bed, staring down at me like I was a giant spider. I tried to hand her the bear, but she wouldn’t take it. I walked over to her shelf and returned it to where it came from. Her eyes followed me all the way, waiting for something else to happen.
“It’s just a magic trick,” I explained again as I sat down at the small table.
She remained cowering on her bed. “It’s black magic. It’s evil.”
“No, it’s not. There’s no such thing.” I was getting tired of defending myself. I’d seen strange outbursts before and was beginning to think she might be “special.”
The girl made a strange hand gesture with her outstretched first finger and pinky in my direction. At that same moment the lights flickered. Someone downstairs let out a loud scream. She pulled herself even more tightly into the corner.
Footsteps came pounding down the hall and the door flung open. “Jessica! We’re leaving,” shouted Dad as he grabbed my arm.
From outside I heard tires squealing as a car raced away. In the house below there was yelling. Grandfather’s voice was loudest, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
Dad led me down the stairs and into the hallway. Devalo was yelling at Grandfather and pointing to the séance room, his hands contorted into the same frantic gesture the little girl had made.
“You swore to me you wouldn’t bring your black magic here!” he roared. “Now! Now! Look what you’ve done!”
Grandfather swore under his breath and turned toward us. “Let’s go.”
Inside our car, he gunned the accelerator, tearing down the driveway. I turned to look back, and saw the silhouette of the little girl watching from her attic window.
