Once on-line, she went straight to the internet address given her by the young man who was hopeless upon stormy waters. The website was a blank white screen with a heading that read simply Trastevere. Beneath the heading was only one large boldfaced word. Go. She slid her cursor over to rest on the word, and when she clicked, a message box appeared. She wrote out a brief note addressed to the Boatman. After a second, the message departed, and the single word reappeared. Go.
“Jackie, did you hear? They just called our flight.”
“Coming.” She tried to cut the connection, only to find the service frozen in download mode. “Hang on, I’m getting new upgrades. It’ll just take a minute.”
Wynn waited with weary resignation. As soon as the download was complete, Jackie slammed the computer shut, stowed it away, hefted her bags, and scampered.
She let herself be guided to the front of the cabin, where she took in the smiling flight attendant, the deference, the overwide seat, the silver tray of drinks, the space. Wynn sat there beside her, a tired smile on his face, saying nothing. He observed her with the glassy-eyed stare of a starving man watching another dine. The smile only touched his eyes once, when just after takeoff the plane did a serious dive-and-swoop, and Jackie could not help but laugh like a kid on a roller-coaster. Once they were through the turbulence, Wynn sank back inside himself, put the seat on full tilt, closed his eyes, and said, “Enjoy.” End of tale.
Except for the fact that she was flying first-class across the ocean. Dining on roast tenderloin in a truffle sauce, fresh asparagus tips, chocolate mousse, all the silverware and linen she could hope for. Seventeen television channels, a stewardess there for whatever she might want, and up ahead lay Rome.
20
Tuesday
FOR WYNN, the drive from the airport into Rome passed in a golden blur. Normally he was more than willing to go along with Sybel on her do-good journeys, watch her back, feed the poor, let his remorse pour out with the heat. He could not say he had ever looked forward to these trips, but they did him good. He always returned with a sense of having cleaned out a multitude of wounds, albeit temporarily. Yet this voyage was different, of that he was certain. And the difference did not lie in the fact that Sybel had left Grant. His only hope was to rush in, do whatever was needed, and depart. Before he was hooked and dragged into whatever soul-wrenching maelstrom loomed just beyond the next turning.
Jackie spent the journey into town switching birdlike from one window to another. Wynn had never been to Rome before but could see nothing outside that would warrant such fascination. The city was just buildings and grime and noise. And traffic. Roman drivers did not steer, they hurtled with horns used as weapons of combat. Jackie seemed oblivious to all but the wonder of sunlight upon old stone. Wynn found himself vaguely jealous. “Did you get any rest on the plane?”
She spared him a single glance. “I’ll never sleep again.”
When they arrived at the Hassler, Wynn was completing his check-in before he realized Jackie was nowhere to be seen. He returned outside to find her staring over the steep-sided piazza fronting the hotel, out to where the rooftops of Rome gleamed from just another dawn. She watched the light and the day with shoulders hunched and hands folded across her chest, an awestruck penitent.
He had no time to indulge her veneration. “I have to go. The hotel car is taking me to the church where I hope I can find Sybel.”
She turned reluctantly. “I can’t believe I’m here.”
“Stick around, why don’t you. I’ve booked you into a room down the hall from mine. Enjoy the day. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I really should come with you.” But she did not move.
“Believe me, Jackie, there’s nothing going on here except a brother looking for answers. Get some rest.”
JACKIE TRAVERSED the hotel’s public areas so fast she could almost hold her breath. Moving quickly was her best defense against the rich surroundings and these people who actually looked like they belonged. Upstairs, she showered and changed and spent a long moment staring out her window. The French-style doors opened onto a tiny balcony, not more than a foot deep and railed by ancient iron balustrades. The view looked straight onto the dome of the neighboring church, but off to the left there was a drop and then the whole of Rome, or so it seemed. She looked for just an instant, then forced herself to close the shutters. If she remained the bed would claim her, and that could not happen, not with Rome beckoning.
She walked and walked and walked. To merely look was a sacrilege. Jackie wanted to dine upon the day, devour everything she saw. Even the profane was bejeweled. She strolled the length of a grimy cobblestone street, where graffiti was scrawled upon palaces of ocher and age and stone. She stopped to admire a gated courtyard trapped in sunlight and medieval silence. Across the street and up two floors she spied a portico from which Juliet could have yearned for a Roman lover. From the handwrought railing hung plastic buckets filled with blooming daisies. Jackie felt an urgent need to pound on the nail-studded door and order the inhabitants to cultivate something extraordinary. An Italian lotus perhaps, or jasmine and lavender and plants for royal purple dye. Beyond the rooftops rose a hill crowned with trees and convocations of Roman doves. Higher still hung a painter’s sky.
When her hunger became strong enough to resonate over her fatigue, she stopped at a streetside restaurant and ordered the lightest item on the menu. The Italian name was caprese, translated merely as a plate of tomatoes and mozzarella. What arrived deserved lines of verse. Tomato slices doused with oil so pungent it caught in her throat. Mozzarella balls little more than solidified milk wrapped in delicate skins.
A tiny espresso, a thimbleful of explosive flavor, then she was up and walking. It was lunchtime now, and she was surrounded by all the city’s impossible contrasts—fumes and wood-roasted lamb, grime and spices, and five thousand years of flowers.
The sky grew steadily darker as she wound her way down toward the Tiber. Next to a bridge sheltered by poplars, an old man scraped ice off a block three feet thick. Back and forth his arm swept, shaving the ice with a metal grip, before ladling the snowball and fruit juice into a paper cup. He was surrounded by trees and laughing children and ribbons of green-tinted sunlight. The children’s joy merely turned the man older still. Jackie bought an ice and let a tiny girl of perhaps six select the flavor and pay the old man from the money in Jackie’s palm. She walked on to the sound of children singing a Roman farewell, her mouth drenched with the flavors of pineapple and perfect afternoons.
As she approached the Pantheon, a sudden deluge chased her off the cobblestones. She joined a thousand others under Hadrian’s archway and relished an impromptu symphony of thunder and rain. She moved inside. The Pantheon dome was decorated with geometric designs that drew the eye ever higher up to the giant circular opening at its top. Through this central void fell a pillar of lightning-slashed rain. Down below, children danced about the watery border. Then the rain passed, and there came a single instant of metamorphosis, before the circle formed a pillar of light. The children danced on, transformed now into cherubs all. The crowded chamber halted to watch their flight.
WYNN SAT ALONE in the back of the hotel’s limo, an oversize Alfa Romeo designed like a Mercedes with Italian flair. As the sunlight gradually gave way to approaching showers, he reflected on how much he already hated Rome.
He loathed its beauty and its deformities with equal fervor, and not merely because he had been forced to come. Hardly at all for that reason, in fact. He hated this city and this journey for the lie they made of his life. Money and success had not resolved his inner conflicts. Rather, they had enveloped him in an opiate dullness, distancing him from the wounds he still carried. He stared out the window as the limo pass over the Tiber, caring for nothing, wanting merely to be away. Anywhere was better than a place of such horrid truth.
The limo halted by a narrow cobblestone lane. The driver turned around. “Please sir, from here you must wal
k.”
Wynn felt no great desire to enter whatever mission his sister had designed. “What is this place?”
“Piazza di San Callisto. Your church, it is down this street, but I cannot drive. Is permitted only at night.”
“Sant’Egidio is there?”
“The movement, yes, but not the church. The church of Sant’Egidio is down farther, that way. But the movement is here now. Two years ago, maybe three, it came here to Trastevere. The first eglise was too small.”
“You know about Sant’Egidio?”
“Everybody knows. All the city speaks of Sant’Egidio.” He smiled with impossible humor. “There is a saying, Rome is a holy city for all but Romans. You understand? But for Romans who believe, there is Sant’Egidio. They feed the poor. They pray. They work for peace. You know the war in Rwanda? They help to stop. Algeria, same thing. Colombia, Bosnia, Congo, Sudan, so many places. Now Sant’Egidio’s head priest, he is a bishop.”
Wynn reached for the door. “Sounds like my sister’s kind of place.”
“Please?”
“Nothing.”
“Sure, Vatican politics is big talk here in Rome. You know the Curia? They fight to keep Sant’Egidio priest out. Too many people not priests have power in Sant’Egidio. Too many not Catholics. But the Pope, he makes him bishop anyway.” He pointed down the lane. “I wait here, yes?”
Rain began speckling the cobblestones, turning them slick as old glass. The lane opened into a grand piazza, anchored at one end by a truly monstrous church. If Sybel had been able to design her own church, it would have been this one. Not beautiful, as so many were in this city. But vast and old, pitted with hard use, and very busy. The piazza was lined on two sides by restaurants and shops, with a high fortress wall and the church along the others. Beggars and homeless people claimed the shaded fortress and the empty fountain as their own. They hunched and huddled against the gathering storm, but did not move. The church’s tall iron gates were open and fronted by Gypsies selling flowers, pleading with toothless whines as he joined the chattering crowds and entered.
The interior was huge in the way of medieval halls, incredibly ornate, yet worn and faded. Even the ceiling’s gold-leaf mosaics were smoky and muted. The place was packed with people of every race. And not for a service. Groups used side chapels for quietly intense meetings. They gathered along tables at the back. They sat and knelt and prayed. Wynn walked the right-hand aisle, feeling utterly the outsider. Their talk and their laughter all seemed directed at him, speaking in an unknown tongue of all the mysteries he could not hope to fathom.
“Can I help, please?”
He turned to face a dark-haired pixie of a woman. She was tiny, certainly under five feet, with a smile big enough for three of her. A small girl in a filthy oversize frock held one of her hands. “Welcome to Sant’Egidio. You are new?”
“Yes.”
“Please to excuse the noise. We are building new rooms for meetings. Until they are done,” she waved an apologetic hand over the din. “You see?”
“I’d like to speak with Father Libretto.”
“The father is not here. I am Anna.” She smiled beneath dark ringlets. “Please return tonight. For the preghiere. You understand? The night prayers.”
“And Sybel Wells?”
“Who, please?”
“My sister. Is she here?”
“So sorry. The Father, he is busy with the poor. I do not think any Sybel is there, but perhaps.” She made a gesture towards the back. “You wish to come?”
“Not a chance.”
“Va bene.” Even at his refusal, she showed impossible cheer. “Otto é mezzo. Eight and one-half o’clock. Night prayers. You come back.”
Wynn had no choice but to retreat, defeated by the welcome that was not his and probably never would be.
JACKIE RETURNED to the Hassler when a taxi was her only hope of moving another inch. She found a terse note from Wynn waiting for her: his sister was not found. He had to return to the church that night, but would she join him for an early dinner beforehand? She scrawled a yes at the bottom, left it for him, then almost fell asleep in the elevator on the way upstairs.
She woke three hours later, feeling more fatigued than she had upon lying down. Jackie ordered up coffee and spent a long time seated by her open window, staring at the people and the late afternoon vista. She studied a map and named what she could see—the Trinita Dei Monti church, the Piazza di Spagna, Via Condotti, the Spanish Steps. Trying to anchor herself through the process of identification, and make all this real.
She spent more time dressing than she had in years, almost convincing herself it was for the place and not for Wynn. Her outfit was a smoky buff weave of cotton and silk with collar and belt of nail-polish red. Open-toed shoes to match. She stood for a long moment staring at herself in the full-length mirror, wondering if she could afford to hope once again. Even a little. Yet knowing she had already left the power of choice far behind.
21
Tuesday
COLIN WAS ALERTED to someone’s approach by a subtle shift in the backroom’s atmosphere. The constant hum of techie chatter diminished to faint whisperings of fear. Doom, Colin knew, would not arrive upon boots of iron and lightning. Annihilation’s tread would be softer than the breathless wait for thunderstorms. Like now. He wiped his work from the monitors and listened as the quiet expectation of dread moved along the central aisle.
“You’re in. Good.” Jim Burke actually wore a decent suit. A first. The Unabomber had traded in his polyester for linen pleats, but the railroad shoes were still intact. They had to weigh ten pounds apiece, their shine mirror-black, even the narrow shoestrings waxed. Amazing a man that skinny could even lift them.
And Burke was not alone. Another first. Burke had clearly learned that the solitary jungle beast moved more quietly and struck with less warning. Today, however, Burke was followed by a man of Colin’s age, as slender as Burke but far better groomed. A tiger in training, raised on the streets of some well-styled metropolis. The newcomer wore a double-breasted suit in seven shades of gray and silver, black high-collared shirt, a silver lotus clasp in place of a tie, and titanium sunglasses. Colin sat up straighter. Burke slid into the cubicle’s only other seat and declared, “I want to know what security arrangements you’ve put into our systems.”
Colin watched the second man drag a chair over from a neighboring cubicle and slouch into it. Colin replied, “I’m not certain that’s within proper bounds.”
“You’re questioning my authority?”
“Not yours, no.” The newcomer’s bug-eyed shades remained in place. Probably concerned about retina burn from the fluorescents.
“Never mind him,” Burke snapped. “Tell me what’s shielding us from outside attack.”
In truth, most of Colin’s responsibilities were basic null-level stuff. Chasing down the guy who called a hot-date service on company time, that sort of thing. For Colin, this meant merely designing a program that timed all overseas calls. Nine calls to Singapore and Tokyo of forty-five seconds each, no problem, the trader was checking with contacts on the state of other markets. But when the call lasted fifteen minutes and went to Manila, silent alarms were triggered. Kindergarten work. Yet when it saved the company a quarter of a million per annum, and nobody had thought of it before, the upper management tended to hand out kudos like candy.
Ditto for incoming traffic. Colin had lengthened the corporate access codes from four digits to nine and changed them quarterly. The traders grumbled and groused, until Colin pointed out that one phantom trader had been phoning in from Shilling Brothers’ Wall Street offices, accessing the Hayek research department’s morning market roundup. Then the senior traders adopted the security arrangements as their own and called Colin a prodigy. He could spend days talking such code and twaddle and give nothing away.
But as Colin lapsed into technobabble, the newcomer cut him off by telling Burke, “He’s playing mind games. Handing us his own per
sonal version of multidimensional trivia.”
Two signals came out with the words. One, this guy knew his stuff. Two, he was definitely a trader. He had the deadhead voice of a dedicated adrenaline junkie. Colin inched straighter still. A serious adversary.
Burke showed enough of a smile to change the creases around his marble eyes. “So tell him.”
The newcomer gave Colin a tight smirk. “People are being whipped into a paranoid frenzy by the specter of some rogues hitting us unawares.”
“Excuse me,” Colin said. Directing the words to both of them. “I seem to be missing something. This gentleman has joined the team?”
“As of today,” Burke confirmed. “Brant Anker, meet our very own Colin Ready.”
Brant Anker went on, “This new adversary might be the tip of an iceberg, one that could sink the company like the Titanic. Which means your passive surveillance is no longer sufficient.” When Colin did not respond, Anker said more slowly, “Go out there and find out who is behind the rumors, and how they are planning to use the information.”
“Systems infiltration,” Colin interpreted. “Sorry. Not my bag.”
Burke glared at him. “This could cost you your job.”
“Better than prison, which is where your request could very well land me.”
The two shared a quick communal smirk. Only then did Colin realize it was all a feint, a test. He should have been reassured, but something about the pair left him listening to steel fingernails scraping down a mile-long blackboard.
Burke said, “Tell us what you have in place to check out the Havilland woman.”
“Her security authorization is weak. Low grade defenses. Single port of entry. Good data trail, no question of false identity. On-line data capture is set up to retrieve as soon as I come in.”
Drummer In the Dark Page 16
