The Aztec Heresy

by Paul Christopher

  The town was best known for being the place where the Benedictine order was established, although interestingly enough some of its other famous one-time residents included Lucretia Borgia, the famed poisoner, and Gina Lollobrigida, the film star. While everyone’s activities within the Vatican were monitored, it was almost impossible to keep track of anyone in the crowded tourist town.

  The group, known among themselves as the Twelve, came from all walks of life, from high-ranking members of the Church, like Rossi, to industrialists, politicians, communications moguls, and in one case a senior member of the Mafia. They had only two things in common: their fanatical devotion to the ancient form of Catholicism they espoused and an equally fanatical quest for ultimate power.

  At this particular meeting there were only five members of the ruling council of the order present, the fewest number able to reach a command decision under the ancient bylaws of Cavallo Nero.

  The five men were Enrico Rossi; Karl Hoffer from the Banco Venizia, the firm used by the Twelve for their covert expenses; Michael Fabrizio, a New York businessman and a Knight of Malta as well as one of the Twelve, better known in the American press as Mickey Rice; Sean O’Keefe, a longtime armorer for the supposedly defunct Irish Republican Army and now an independent and perfectly legitimate arms dealer living in Rome; and finally, Father Manuel Pérez, once the head of the Colombian Ejército de Liberación Nacional, the ELN, or National Liberation Army of that country.

  ‘‘El Cura Pérez,’’ or Pérez the Priest, had supposedly died of hepatitis in 1998, but in reality he had been living in exile for the last decade acting as liaison between the forces of the Twelve and his colleagues in the ELN. Pérez was the Twelve’s central representative for all of South America and provided a great deal of financial aid to the organization.

  They met in a cavernous room in the convent that had once been the refectory, empty of furniture except for a long monks table with bench seating accommodating up to twenty people.

  ‘‘The situation in Mexico has changed somewhat, ’’ said Rossi without preamble. He was seated at the head of the table. ‘‘Too many cooks are definitely spoiling the broth.’’

  ‘‘You’d better explain that, Eminence,’’ said Hoffer, the banker.

  ‘‘Guzman has become too greedy.’’

  ‘‘I told you he’d be trouble,’’ grunted Pérez, a thin gray-haired man in the garb of an ordinary priest.

  ‘‘He’s no trouble,’’ said O’Keefe with a laugh. ‘‘He’s just mad as a bloody hatter, he is.’’

  ‘‘Mad or greedy, it makes no difference. He must be dealt with,’’ said Rossi.

  ‘‘Exactly what form has this greed taken?’’ Mickey Rice asked, cutting to the heart of the matter.

  ‘‘He’s involved the Cubans.’’

  ‘‘Feck! He’s crazier than I thought,’’ breathed O’Keefe.

  ‘‘How does this affect our deal with the Nobles? ’’ Mickey Rice asked.

  ‘‘That’s another matter. The two are connected, clearly, and the younger Noble has decided to take on the Ryan woman and her friend on his own.’’

  ‘‘A little initiative, is it?’’ O’Keefe said.

  Rossi frowned. ‘‘The Nobles are very high-profile. So is the Ryan woman. On two occasions now our paths have crossed, to our great loss, I might add.’’

  ‘‘So deal with them,’’ said Hoffer.

  ‘‘And if the Nobles interfere?’’ Rossi snorted. ‘‘Noble Pharmaceuticals represents a huge investment for us at the moment.’’

  ‘‘And I’ve got a lot riding on them myself,’’ said Rice.

  ‘‘We are in a very delicate position, playing Guzman off against the others. If we act precipitously we may wind up shooting ourselves in the foot,’’ said Rossi.

  ‘‘Then you’d better find a better shooter,’’ said O’Keefe.

  ‘‘My thoughts exactly.’’ Rossi nodded.

  ‘‘The young man you used in Paris?’’ Hoffer asked curiously.

  ‘‘No,’’ said Rossi. ‘‘Competent, but good only in urban situations, I would think.’’ The cardinal shook his head. ‘‘I have someone else in mind.’’ The cardinal smiled briefly. ‘‘An old soldier. One of our best.’’

  His name was Francis Xavier Sears, just like the department stores. Born in 1949, Francis Sears volunteered for the United States Army on his eighteenth birthday. After basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he was sent to Vietnam as a member of Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division.

  Attached to several platoons during his first tour, Francis thrived. He was noted by several officers as being totally fearless and often volunteered for the most dangerous assignments and patrols. His first platoon leader, a captain named Rigby, was on record as saying that Francis seemed to have ‘‘a splendid appetite for killing.’’

  Achieving the rank of sergeant, he was eventually noticed by a Special Forces recruiter named Wizner. Wizner in turn handed him over to a Central Intelligence advisor named Joe Currie, who introduced him to the Phoenix Program. Murder in Phoenix was a recreation, a way of life, a family tradition that had nothing at all to do with ideology, north or south. Heads were collected like bowling trophies.

  There was another man after that, someone more remote than Wizner with the unlikely name of T. Fox Grimaldi. He said that he was a distant relation of Princess Grace’s husband, but Francis doubted that—more likely he was a descendant of a pizza chef from New Jersey. T. Fox Grimaldi had a club foot and a built-up shoe. He wore Brooks Brothers suits and thin suede ties. He looked like a rodent of some kind and had a five o’clock shadow that made him look like a liar, which he was. Francis discovered a long time later that his first name was Tim, and that was the reason he only ever used the initial.

  T. Fox Grimaldi used Francis long after the end of the war. Grimaldi ran the infamous Blowback Boys, kept on in Saigon after the fall to take out old allies left behind who knew too much. Embarrassments. Blowback took its toll and by the end of it Francis was the only one left alive. Almost a legend, on his way to becoming a myth. By then even he was aware that he was something less than human, but at the same time something more. When Blowback was finally over, T. Fox Grimaldi brought Francis Sears home. Grimaldi retired from the CIA, or most likely was retired by them.

  Whatever the case, he kept up his relationship with Sears and used him regularly for contract jobs with a number of clients in the private sector. One of those clients was Cavallo Nero, and on the sudden and somewhat mysterious death of Grimaldi in the late ’90s, Sears began to contract himself out. He had done more than satisfactory work for the Twelve in the past.

  At the present he was in the main square of Scobie, Indiana, the capital of Duchess County in the extreme southern portion of the state. Scobie had a population of a little over twelve thousand, many of them of German descent. The main industry in the small city was the manufacture of wood furniture, as well as education, Scobie being the home of a campus of Duchess College. It was also the hometown of Bishop Terrence Boucher. The bishop, who normally lived in Fort Wayne, where he taught history and was the headmaster of a local prep school, was back in Scobie to care for his dying mother. The bishop was a pedophile.

  Also in Scobie was a young man named William Huggins. Huggins, an ambulance driver and a devout Catholic, had privately mentioned his experiences with the bishop and announced his intention to make his abuse public. Unfortunately for Huggins, the ‘‘friend’’ he had mentioned the bishop’s predilections to was a low-level agent for Cavallo Nero. That agent had passed the information on to New York, which in turn had sent the information to Cardinal Rossi. The cardinal was already aware of Boucher’s sexual preferences. He was also aware that Boucher, who had once worked for the Vatican secretary of state’s office, a position Rossi had occupied at the time, knew of Cavallo Nero and would use that knowledge in an attempt to barter his way out of any charges brought against him. T
his, Rossi knew, could not be allowed to happen. Sears had been dispatched to deal with it.

  Francis Xavier Sears sat on a bench in the town square, the Jeffersonian county courthouse at his back. He was doing one of his favorite things as he sat enjoying the midday sun. He was thinking about murder, something he knew a great deal about. Killing was easy, of course. You could do it effectively with everything from a long-range sniper rifle to a piece of broken brick.

  Any hand tool on a carpenter’s bench had been used as a murder weapon once upon a time, as had every utensil in the average kitchen. But that kind of killing took no skill, had no style, and lacked finesse. Not to mention that most killers stupid enough to use a brick to bash someone’s brains were usually stupid enough to get caught.

  On the other hand, with a moderate level of intelligence and skill, getting away with murder was relatively easy. Despite CSI, Law and Order, and all their various incarnations, television was not reality. A district attorney offered half a fingerprint and a scratch of paint from a passing car wasn’t likely to bring a case to trial. The truth about forensics had more to do with overworked departments and underpaid staff than it did with glossy labs and quirky bosses collecting bugs. All you had to do was remember the O.J. Simpson trial for proof of that. The prosecution of murder was a matter of money and bureaucracy. Avoid those and you were home free. The best way to commit murder, of course, was to give a cop even the vaguest opportunity to convince himself that the corpse in front of his face was caused either accidentally or by the corpse’s own hand.

  There were fifteen members of the local Scobie Police Department, twelve members of the Duchess County Sheriff’s Department, and thirty-four members of the district office of the Indiana State Police. The nearest forensic lab was in Indianapolis. That came out to sixty-four law enforcement officers across three eight-hour shifts.

  Of all of those there were only three full-time investigating officers. There was more money in the budget for trash burning violations than there was for violent crime. According to the statistics he’d read in the Duchess County Leader Post there had been only three murders in Duchess County in the last ten years, all of them a result of domestic violence. On the other hand, there had been more than two hundred and ninety accidental deaths in the same time period. It was more than likely that the bishop was about to become the victim of a tragic mishap. Either that or he was going to die suddenly from natural causes.

  Disregarding automobile wrecks, there were roughly a hundred thousand fatalities from accidents in the United States every year. Of those the majority came from machine accidents, falls, drowning, and suffocation, in that order. There were no large bodies of water nearby for the bishop to drown in, and besides, Sears’s research indicated that the cleric was a powerful swimmer, even at the age of sixty-nine. Given his occupation, there was also little chance of a death by machinery, which ruled that out as well. Suffocation was always a good bet, but in this case it would be difficult to arrange.

  Realistically it would have to be a fall. The question was, from where? Indiana was basically as flat as an IHOP waffle. There were several nearby limestone quarries and some tourist caves, but why would a Catholic bishop with a dying mother go to either place?

  The options were narrowing. The last time Boucher had visited his mother, Francis Xavier had done a quick reconnaissance of the dying woman’s home. It was the home Boucher had grown up in, a modest place. It was small, one and a half stories, with two bedrooms and a bathroom in an upstairs dormer, and a living room, dining room, back kitchen, and what passed for a den or study on the ground floor. A single flight of stairs led from the upper level to the lower. There was no landing. The hardwood steps were covered with an old paisley runner held taut with brass rails.

  It really was the only way. A little on the dangerous side since he’d have to be on the scene to remove the evidence, however. The key to it all, of course, was the fact that there was no landing and no padding under the runner. Francis Xavier estimated the bishop’s height as not quite six feet and his weight at something over one hundred and eighty-five pounds. A fall down thirteen steps to the uncarpeted foyer at the front entrance would almost surely break the man’s neck, and if it didn’t quite do it, Sears would be there to finish the job.

  He looked across Courthouse Square and read the old-fashioned sign on the window of the store on the corner: JOSEF KORZENIOWSKI; HARDWARE, STOVES & TINWARE—SINCE 1924. It was the kind of classic place that you’d find in a Ray Bradbury story, full of interesting and potentially lethal items. They’d have everything Francis Xavier needed.

  He glanced upward. Above the store there were windows in the redbrick building. A curious crossing of the fates. The three windows belonged to the small apartment occupied by Huggins, the potential whistleblower. Huggins would be easy, though. He drank too much and everyone knew he had high blood pressure.

  Twenty cc’s of insulin delivered by a twenty-five -gauge needle inserted into the posterior auricular artery under the jaw would deliver enough of the drug to instantly cause a fatal stroke. Personal observation told Sears that his intended victim had poor skin, was prone to razor burn, and had large, rather oily pores. Even if, for some reason, the medical examiner ordered an autopsy, the needle insertion point would be virtually invisible and the insulin levels would have long since dissipated. Not a perfect murder by any means, but under the circumstances and in this environment, not far from it. There was nothing to connect the deaths of an ambulance attendant who had once been an altar boy to a simple parish priest more than forty years ago and an aging bishop who’d sadly fallen down the stairs in his mother’s house. Problem solved.

  Francis Xavier Sears put his head back, closed his eyes, and enjoyed the warmth of the sun on his face, listening to the sounds of small-town life go on around him, the soft breeze rustling the leaves of the maple trees in the square. Death was good, but sometimes life was even better.

  16

  It was almost midnight. The Noble Dancer, all sleek 189 feet of her, rode easily in the small chop that ruffled the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The yacht had four decks, its own elevator, and accommodations for up to twenty-five people, including crew. She was powered by two fifteen-hundred-horsepower Caterpillar engines and could achieve speeds of up to eighteen knots.

  The massive ship was outfitted for almost anything, including cross-ocean ventures. Her amenities included every kind of electronic toy, ‘‘zero speed’’ stabilizers that gave the vessel enough stability to allow competition billiards in the dedicated games room, a Jacuzzi, a sun-deck, and a baby grand piano. The yacht was a plaything for a billionaire.

  The dining room looked as though it had come out of a Hollywood mansion, complete with cabinets full of crystal, Persian carpets on the deck, and an immense rosewood dining table able to seat fifteen guests. Tonight, instead of a sumptuous midnight snack, the table was set for armed combat. Military gear was spread out on the shining, heavily varnished marquetry from one end to the other.

  Four members of the incursion team were checking their weapons and survival equipment. They had the hard, practiced look of professional soldiers, which all of them had been at one time or another.

  All of them were dressed in jungle fatigues and none of the dappled uniforms showed any sign of rank. All had a small badge on the left breast pocket of their blouses that showed a black hawk on a yellow ground, piped in red.

  The symbol had been James Jonas Noble’s single conceit when he formed the security company to protect his many interests around the world. As a boy growing up during the war, Blackhawk Comics had been his favorite, so he had adopted the Blackhawk symbol as the logo for the company of the same name.

  Blackhawk Security Consultants had originally been intended as a private security force for Noble Pharmaceuticals, but it had been organized at a time when the use of contracted paramilitary groups was on the rise, and as a consequence the company had grown far outside the limits of a simple security
force to guard Noble facilities.

  Based in Georgia, it had a huge training facility and offices in every major country in the world, as well as several minor ones. Much of its business was concentrated in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America, including Mexico, where the company provided body-guards, transportation, and intelligence to foreign embassy personnel, as well as a number of high-ranking Mexican government officials.

  The four-man team now aboard the Noble Dancer were all Spanish-speaking and in previous lives had all taken part in at least one revolution or insurrection in jungle conditions. The leader of the group, Tibor Cherka, a tall, grizzled American in his fifties, had been a member of one of the first incursion teams in Panama and before that had supposedly worked closely with the National Guard’s so-called death squads in El Salvador, although nothing was ever proven. As Cherka’s men prepared themselves in the dining room, Harrison Noble had a final meeting with his father in the pilot-house, one deck above.

  ‘‘I still don’t approve,’’ said the elder Noble, staring out into the darkness. ‘‘Let Cherka do it—he’s a professional.’’

  ‘‘I’m not saying he doesn’t know his job,’’ said the younger man. ‘‘I’m just saying that beyond the military aspects he doesn’t know what to look for. I do.’’

  ‘‘True enough,’’ said Noble senior.

  ‘‘He’s got enough weaponry to fight a small war—that part of it I’ll leave up to him—but I’ve got to be on-site first. You know that, Father.’’

  ‘‘And if things go wrong?’’

  ‘‘They won’t,’’ said Harrison Noble. ‘‘I guarantee it.’’

  The older man turned to his son, his features grimly set.

  ‘‘Where have I heard that before? Screw this up and we’re all going to take the fall—you realize that, I hope.’’