Father Nick shut off the television. “What do you think?”
“It’s different, all right,” said Daniel. “Very dramatic. Weird. I don’t know how he does it.”
“It goes way beyond just sounding weird,” said Father Nick. He put on his reading glasses and moved a thick file folder to the center of his desk blotter, then reached for the telephone. “Here’s where it gets really weird.”
Nick picked up the telephone receiver, punched a single button, and spoke to his secretary. “George, send Giuseppe in.”
As the door behind him opened, Daniel turned in his seat and nodded hello. The ODA’s top linguist, Father Giuseppe Sorvino had consulted on a handful of Daniel’s cases over the last decade. They only knew each other slightly, but he’d struck Daniel as very bright, and also deeply sad. He’d lost his left arm below the elbow five years earlier while working on something in Israel, but he never talked about it. Whatever the cause of the sadness, it was evident long before.
Giuseppe wore the left sleeve of his jacket folded, the cuff pinned to the outside of the shoulder. This always struck Daniel as strange. Why not just have the sleeve cut and cuffed at the elbow? It was as if Giuseppe were holding out hope that the forearm might suddenly grow back and sprout a new hand. Then he could just let down the sleeve and get on with life.
Father Nick gestured and Giuseppe sat in the empty chair next to Daniel.
“Tell him,” said Nick.
Father Giuseppe bobbed his head and let out an embarrassed smile. “Sometimes on my lunch breaks I like to watch the television evangelists who pretend possession by the Holy Spirit. They are very bad at it, always good for a laugh—”
Nick cut in. “Please, Giuseppe, we don’t need the lunch break. Just what you learned.”
The linguist’s face flushed a little. “Yes, sir. So I was watching Tim Trinity’s tongues act on my lunch break, and I suddenly realized his tongues had a definite linguistic structure. I recorded it and played with the tape, you know, speeding it up, slowing it down, noting patterns.” He rubbed his stump with the palm of his right hand as he spoke. It always seemed to itch more when he was nervous. “Then I remembered the rumor that went around the world when I was a kid. Remembered playing Beatles albums backward on the turntable in search of messages about Paul being dead. Backmasking, they call it. Putting those messages on records.”
Father Nick drummed his fingers on the desk.
“Yes, I’m sorry. Anyway, I played the Trinity tape backward. It sounded like English on Quaaludes. I sped it up by a quarter, then a third.” He stopped rubbing the stump and his hand swept up in a triumphant gesture. “And there it was! Trinity was speaking English backward at two-thirds normal speed. Amazing. I recorded every broadcast since. Whenever he does his tongues act, they manifest the same phenomenon.”
“Thank you, Giuseppe,” said Father Nick. “That’ll be all.”
The abrupt dismissal set Giuseppe to rubbing his stump even faster as he took his leave. Nick watched him go and didn’t look at Daniel until the door had closed behind.
Daniel shrugged. “So Trinity’s upped his game, learned a new parlor trick.”
“And he’s very good at it, which makes him dangerous,” said Nick, pulling a mini tape recorder from the case file. “Listen. This is what it sounds like.” He pressed play.
The crowd noise in the background was now strange, but Tim Trinity’s voice sounded natural. He was saying, “…on the south coast of Georgia, there will be an unexpected thunderstorm tomorrow in the late afternoon. So all you folks down by Brunswick, all the way up to Darien, be sure to pack an umbrella…”
Father Nick clicked the tape off.
“You have got to be kidding me,” said Daniel. “If this were anybody but you, I’d expect the door to fly open and the Candid Camera people to come in.”
“I told you it was gonna get weird,” said Nick.
“OK, weird. But a weather report?”
“Not exactly the kind of message you’d expect from God.”
“Not exactly. What else does he say?”
“He says a lot of trivial crap. A few bigger things too, things that are going to get him noticed. Nothing earth shattering. Thing is, he makes predictions. Sometimes he’s gonna be right—law of averages. He lucked out on that weather report, for example. We checked. And he guessed the winner of the Superbowl. He also gets things wrong, but it’s like reading your horoscope in the paper. You forget all the days it didn’t make sense and remember the times it resonated.”
“OK, so he’s got a new con,” said Daniel, “but I don’t see our interest here. We already know he’s a fake, and he’s not even Catholic.”
“Think about it, Daniel. Think about how it’ll play out if Trinity isn’t exposed as a fake. He’ll just keep going on like this, and soon he’ll have a pretty big record of correct prophecy. And when he does, he’ll reveal how to decode what he’s saying. People will go crazy. Not a few people, millions of people. Catholics, Protestants, Mormons—it won’t matter. People are hungry for miracles, and they’ll be led away from God—they’ll follow a false prophet. We need him debunked before that happens. Question is can I trust it to you? I know things ended badly between you two, and I don’t want you to take the case if you don’t think you can handle it. This can’t be personal. It isn’t about what happened between you and your uncle.”
Twenty years ago, when Daniel was just thirteen, Tim Trinity had been the closest thing to a father that Daniel had ever known. A lot of water under the proverbial bridge since then, but some wounds never fully heal.
“Personal involvement won’t be an issue,” Daniel said. “I have no problem exposing Tim Trinity as a fraud.”
Nick removed his reading glasses. “Then we may just be able to outflank Conrad after all. I can sell His Eminence on my need to assign the case to you, based on your knowledge of Trinity. And if you can nail this case shut fast, I think it’ll convince him that you’re indispensable to the ODA.”
“Thank you.”
“Just don’t make me look like an idiot for assigning it to you.” Father Nick pushed the file folder across the desk. “Transcripts are in the case file—you can read them on the flight to Atlanta.”
Daniel took the folder, stood, and walked to his boss’s four-centuries-old oak office door. Carved in the wood was Saint John, the Baptist, kneeling in the Jordan with his arms open, while Jesus instructed him to fulfill all righteousness.
And a voice came out of the heavens, “You are my beloved Son; in You I am well-pleased.”
After completing his morning prayers, Daniel skipped rope for fifteen minutes, working up a good sweat. Then he donned the gloves and worked out on the heavy bag that hung in the corner of his bedroom, enjoying the electric jolt that ran up his arm each time he landed a particularly vicious blow. The bag bucked and the chains rattled and the feeling of power spurred Daniel on. He put even more into his punches, employing his legs, his lower body, and the bag bucked harder and the chains rattled louder. He kept at it until his shoulders and wrists begged for mercy and the muscles of his arms began to twitch from fatigue.
As he pulled the gloves off, his gaze fell to the framed photo on the dresser. From the center of a boxing ring, eighteen-year-old Danny Byrne looked back at him with a prideful grin. The teenager wore silk trunks—purple and gold—and his bare chest, not yet as hairy as it was now in the mirror above the dresser, glistened with sweat. He held a Golden Gloves trophy above his head.
Sometimes it felt like yesterday. Sometimes, a hundred years ago. Daniel couldn’t decide which feeling was the sadder.
Daniel drank espresso in the first-class lounge, waiting for them to call his flight, thinking: One week, at most, and you can wash your hands of the man again.
Usually he was thrilled when a case brought him back stateside. He loved America, always missed it, occasionally ached for it, often fantasized about someday returning “back home” for good.
B
ut this case did not thrill him one bit.
One week, he told himself again. Get in, debunk, get out.
Turning toward the flight-status monitors, Daniel caught a glimpse of the pretty redhead from the check-in line, now sitting three tables away. She’d been standing directly behind him in line, and she’d asked to borrow his pen. The skirt of her Chanel suit stopped a couple inches above the knee and the jacket hugged her narrow waist. She looked about his age—thirty-three—but her manner suggested late thirties as she took the pen and smoothly launched into small talk. She was a buyer for a chain of upscale women’s clothing stores—twenty locations spread across the South—and she loved expense account trips to Rome but was happy to be heading home to her papillon and her yoga classes, both of which she missed terribly whenever she was away. She was clearly single, and interested, and he’d tried to be friendly without encouraging further interest.
And now she sat three tables away, watching him over the top of her Marie Claire, trying to be just obvious enough that he’d get the feeling of being watched, look over, make eye contact. This was the downside of not wearing his clerical collar. And, if he was honest, it was the upside as well. Daniel wasn’t devoid of ego and it was nice to be reminded that women found him attractive. But it was also a bitter reminder of the woman he’d left to join the priesthood, the love he’d cast aside and tried so hard to forget. And the truth was he didn’t need a reminder.
Because he thought of her, every damn day.
Daniel’s father confessor was the only other person who knew. They’d talked about it countless times, most recently just a month ago...
“God doesn’t expect you to be perfect, Daniel,” said the father confessor. “You’re supposed to emulate Jesus, not be Him. And as He was tempted, so are you. This woman is your temptation.”
“It’s more than just a passing temptation. I’m still in love with her.”
“So that’s your cross to bear. You love her, but you choose to love God more.”
The words rang hollow in Daniel’s ears.
Singapore…
Chulia Street was so perfectly paved the airport limousine seemed almost to float as it cruised along, the soft hum of its tires the only evidence of contact with the road. On either side, young trees rose from evenly spaced planters along spotless sidewalks. As the newly built Sato Kogyo-Hitachi building slid by on the left, Conrad Winter set his watch ahead to local time.
Seven hours ahead, twelve spent in the air, for a net loss of five hours. A negative way to frame it, no doubt, but Conrad was not looking forward to this meeting. At least he’d have a night in Singapore before flying out again.
Conrad loved Singapore for all the reasons he didn’t love Rome. Rome was a city that fetishized the past, lived in the present, and made no plans for the future. But Singapore was all about the future. Singapore tore down her outdated relics and built gleaming new skyscrapers at a furious rate, always thinking big, always looking forward. The seven-hour time difference between the two cities might as well be seven centuries. No wonder the council kept its headquarters here.
There were many good men at the Vatican but, like the city that surrounded them, they were not sufficiently forward-focused. They were wearing blinders that obscured the future. Most of them, but not all. Besides Cardinal Allodi, Conrad knew five other council operatives within the Holy See itself, although there were surely others as yet unknown to him. The council was not the sort of organization that published a list. The Church demanded undivided loyalty, and affiliation with the Council for World Peace was grounds for excommunication. But that was a rule made by the good men wearing blinders. Conrad’s loyalty was not divided. Conrad’s loyalty was to God.
And God would never leave the fate of the world to good men wearing blinders.
The council had operatives everywhere and introductions were on a need-to-know basis. So he couldn’t say who had alerted the director to the setback in Nigeria, but someone had and now he would have to explain himself. It was just as well, since he had other, more important news to report.
The limousine pulled to the curb and Conrad instructed the driver to take his bag on to the Raffles Hotel. He stepped out into the hot, muggy air and headed toward the entrance of UOB Plaza One, stopping briefly, as he always did, to look at the large Salvador Dali bronze, Homage to Newton.
The grotesque figure stood rigid, arms stretched out to its right, a sphere hanging from its right hand by a thin metal thread. This sphere was supposed to be Newton’s proverbial apple, the one that hit him on the head and taught him about gravity. There was another sphere, representing the heart, suspended in Newton’s wide-open torso, and there was also a gaping hole in his head. Art critics said this represented “open-heartedness and open-mindedness.”
To Conrad, it mostly looked painful.
Inside, the building’s atrium was all granite and glass and brushed steel and high ceilings. Conrad plucked the fabric of his shirt away from his chest, moist from the brief time outdoors, made clammy by the arctic air conditioning. Stepping into the elevator, he remembered his last visit, at the conclusion of a successful project. The deputy director had taken him to lunch at Si Chuan Dou Hua on the sixtieth floor—they’d ordered honeyed lotus root at the chef’s suggestion, and it was excellent—and the director himself had joined them for a drink at the end of the meal to thank Conrad personally for his work on the assignment.
Conrad’s finger moved past the restaurant level and pressed the button for the sixty-seventh floor. Today there would be no celebratory lunch.
The director of the council stood behind a vast marble desktop. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the surface of the Singapore Strait glittered like a field of broken glass. He did not extend his hand or offer a chair. He said, “Your last report indicated the project was on schedule.”
“Yes, sir,” said Conrad. “I’m taking care of it.”
“But this investigator…” The director waved his hand in the air for a prompt.
“Daniel Byrne.”
“He refused to certify.”
Conrad nodded. “Any other investigator, we’d have been fine. Bad luck we got him. But it had to look like a routine case, Cardinal Allodi couldn’t insert himself without signaling an agenda.”
“The insurgents are getting smarter, targeting infrastructure. If we lose the town where that girl lives, the oil stops flowing. Unacceptable.”
“We’ll hold the town. I always had a Plan B in place, and it’s now in motion. A few days at most.” Conrad said it with enough confidence and the director seemed somewhat mollified. “But sir, a much bigger issue has come up. Another anomaly has surfaced—as strong as the one we had last year in Bangalore—and this time the Church knows about it.”
The director let out a long breath. “Where?”
“United States. Atlanta. A television evangelist named Tim Trinity.”
“He’s on television?”
“Yes, sir, it’s not good. And Nick has assigned the same priest to it.”
“Really? Is it possible that this Daniel Byrne is working for the foundation?”
“No sir, I’ve been keeping tabs on him. He doesn’t know the foundation exists, or the council for that matter. I’m quite sure he doesn’t even know the game exists.”
“All right, wrap up Nigeria ASAP and make Trinity your top priority.”
“Will do.”
“Top priority,” the director repeated. “If you need backup, call for it. Any sign of foundation involvement, you send up the alarm, straight to my office.”
Conrad had heard it said that the Fleur-de-Lis Foundation had almost as many operatives embedded in the Church as did the Council For World Peace, and he had suspicions about a few of the fathers, but he’d seen nothing conclusive. “Sir, I don’t think they—”
“Don’t make the mistake of underestimating your opponent, Conrad. The foundation threatens our very existence. And despite his genteel façade, Carter Ames is t
he most dangerous man you will ever meet.”
Atlanta, Georgia…
For years, Daniel avoided hotels like the one he was staying in now. The luxury had just felt inappropriate for a man who’d taken a vow of poverty.
The meth-lab fire in Detroit changed his mind.
Daniel had flown there to investigate a spontaneous cancer remission that turned out to be a misdiagnosis. At the airport, he rented a Toyota Corolla. He checked into a generic chain motel near the freeway. Late that night he sat in his motel room, reading his e-mail, when there came a muffled whump! and a flash of light outside his window.
The room directly across the parking lot was ablaze, black smoke pouring from the open door. A man staggered out of the burning room, carrying the porcelain lid of a toilet water tank, cradling it like a baby. Daniel ran to help. The man saw him coming, wound up, and heaved the lid at his head. Daniel ducked the flying toilet tank lid and it shattered on the blacktop. It was then he saw the wild look in the man’s eyes.
Fire—crappy motel—meth-lab fire—crazed junkie all raced through his brain in the moment it took for the man to draw a knife from a belt sheath and close the distance, slashing at the shrinking space between them. Daniel broke the man’s nose, dropped him with a kidney punch, and took the knife away from him.
After giving his statement to the cops, after the firefighters had come and gone, Daniel lay on his lumpy motel bed with the smell of burning chemicals lingering in his nostrils.
Thinking: Screw it.
Thus ended Daniel’s acetic rebellion.
In the three years since, he’d made peace with the luxury. It wasn’t as if the money he’d saved was being diverted to orphanages, he told himself. And he had to admit that his previous austerity had enabled him to indulge in that pesky sin of pride.
The Trinity Game Page 3
