A Pius Man_A Holy Thriller

by Declan Finn

  “Anything interesting?”

  She pulled herself away from the television, and nodded. “They’ve figured out that Williams was in Special Forces and is in Vatican intelligence.” Shushurin snatched her phone off the nightstand. “I’ll hook this up to the TV so we can both see the darned file.”

  Murphy nodded. “Thankfully, the Secret Service agent is Jewish, and the Office has long reserved the right to call upon the assistance of Jews abroad to aid any of our actions.”

  Shushurin nodded. “I heard her say something about being Orthodox.” She plugged in the last connection to the computer and looked up, tightening the connection.

  “But I can’t exactly go around introducing myself as Scott ‘Mossad’ Murphy, I’d like you to aid a foreign government, even if you’re already working in your own government. Yeah, sure, that’ll go over well. If she tells me to stuff it, we’re blown; I’ll be taken off this case, and worse, maybe even taken off field duty until we can be certain she’s not going to report my face to the CIA. If she’s Jewish Orthodox, that may not even work — some Orthodox see Israel as anti-theological, more nationalistic than religious. It becomes more of a risk to approach her.”

  The brunette glanced around the room for the remote control, swept it off the tabletop and sat on the bed. “Why not offer her something in return, then?” she asked.

  The television went on, and Father Frank Williams’ life history went up on the screen.

  “Nice picture,” he noted. “What do you suggest?”

  Shushurin turned to him. “Offer her resources. It’s not like she has access to the CIA at the push of a button.”

  Murphy’s phone beeped with a text message. He looked down at it. It beeped again, and he flipped it open. “Oh dear. This should be fun. My boss finally sent me her full bio — she is Orthodox. I guess that’s something to come in handy should we get desperate.”

  Shushurin allowed herself to smile. “Define desperate?”

  “When we can’t find out everything they know. All we’re missing is what the Pope told them over lunch.”

  “I think we know that already.” She tapped the earpiece tuned into Goldberg’s room. “They know about Yousef, and apparently the Italian assassin was a target for conversion by the Pope… or so the Pope says.”

  Murphy sighed. “I’m sure someone’s suggesting that the Pope was more interested in assigning targets to the assassin. Oy vey.” He looked back at the screen. “Anyway, scroll down. He might have been dishonorably discharged.”

  Shushurin turned back toward the television screen and scrolled down. “Does that help?”

  Not being able to see through her head, Murphy frowned a little before scooting up the bed next to Shushurin, side by side as though they were seated next to each other on a bus or train, thighs and arms touching.

  “Honorable discharge with no reason attached.” Murphy glanced at Shushurin. “Sounds suspicious to me. Wouldn’t they have put a reason if it were honorable?”

  She smiled. “Do you really think they’d want to put ‘he left us for a better offer’ on the work form? Especially since he became a priest?”

  “Point taken.” Murphy frowned, looking off into space, not seeing anything as he pondered the options. They were spies, not detectives, both of them with non-official covers; there was nothing to be done aside from following Abasi and company in the hopes that they would find something. As long as Father Frank remained their guide to the Eternal City, all of them could be kept track of. Once they split up, then it would get tricky. Priority would have to be given to Abasi and the priest …

  “Can I help you?” Shushurin asked.

  Murphy blinked his way back to reality. “No. Why?”

  “You were staring right at me.”

  He frowned around his pipe and looked off to the side. “Oh, sorry. Just assessing the situation. It’s amazing how good James Bond makes us look — walk in, order drinks, kill people; seduce someone over a game of glorified blackjack, slip in witty comments, kill yet more people. I wish my job was that easy. Change the details, and I’m set.”

  “Why, are you gay?” Manana said with a smirk.

  Murphy looked at her sideways. “I don’t play cards, and I have no time for seducing women.” He glanced around the hotel room, and her equipment. “Although your budget is bigger than mine.”

  She shrugged. “Yousef made it easy to get the money.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Ah, the joys of spy work. Although I’m still surprised your guys didn’t install a bug in the room large enough to broadcast to a remote, off-site location.”

  “No time. Besides, we have one better than a laser mic.” Shushurin pointed over to the table. “The pen in the stand is the listening device, a directional microphone that can penetrate up to three feet of solid metal, and obviously, the floors aren’t separated by solid metal.”

  Murphy smiled. “Wish my boss would supply me with tech like that. Speaking of which …” Murphy opened his cellular phone and dialed a number.

  A moment later, his boss answered. “What?”

  “I need to look up something on a priest; you may know him. Francis Williams?”

  After a moment of silence, his boss said, “Don’t worry about him. He’s low priority.” Click.

  Murphy blinked. “That was odd. I almost feel like I got whacked over the head.”

  * * *

  “Nice whack on the head, Johnny,” Veronica Fisher said, examining Giovanni Figlia’s head wound.

  “It’s Gianni if you are going to shorten it,” he groaned. “Can you stitch it back together?”

  His wife smiled at him. She’d been teasing him like that for years. It never got old. “Of course, I was a pathologist’s assistant before I went into criminalistics. Give me a moment. I’ll get a suture kit.”

  Figlia smiled. “Just remember, I’m still alive.”

  “I’ll try to keep that in mind,” she called over her shoulder. “You sure you don’t want me to take you to the hospital? I checked for concussion, but I’m not an expert on people with a pulse.”

  “I’ve taken enough bumps in football and SWAT to know a concussion when I get one.”

  Fisher opened a medical cabinet.

  She grabbed the suture kit, rolling her eyes at the European word for soccer. “Got it,” she called. “Tell me, when you were playing soccer, why you didn’t kill any of those idiots with the vuvuzelas?”

  “They didn’t allow guns on the field.”

  She walked over, irrigated the wound with the spray used to wash down corpses, and readied the needle. Figlia’s wife was almost done stitching him up when Father Frank Williams entered the room, noting the stitching equipment. “Oh Lord, what happened?”

  Figlia looked up at the short man in black. “I was attacked.”

  Father Frank saw the stitching needle in Fisher’s hand. “Would you like me to look? I was a physician assistant in a former lifetime.” He glanced around the room, spotting the needles in the wall. “Did he cut you?”

  Figlia was about to shake his head when he remembered that his wife still had a needle at his scalp. “He missed.”

  Father Frank slipped the ring off his hand and reached for the penlight near Fisher. “Look straight.” He flashed the light in Figlia’s eyes. “What did he want?”

  “He took a copy of the forensics reports on this morning’s event,” Fisher answered.

  Father Frank nodded, then put the light down, checking the head wound and Fisher’s stitches. “You’re fine.” He straightened. “Do you have a description? I could ask around.”

  Figlia waved it away. “It wouldn’t matter. I couldn’t identify him if he were standing two feet in front of me. He wore all black — how many people does that fit?”

  Father Frank frowned. “Oh dear. Everyone.”

  “Certo. I am fortunate I avoided serious injury, otherwise there would be blood on the street, and it is hard to get blood out of marble.” Figlia sighed. “At l
east we have a backup on the computers… Is there something I can help you with?”

  “This might be a bad time, but there is an Irish detective coming from Dublin. She’ll be at the terminal in an hour. She’s a member of Interpol looking into the murder of a priest.”

  Figlia sighed. “Why is she coming here?”

  “The victim was to arrive here in a week to give a report on Pius XII. He was found with a swastika carved into his forehead.”

  Figlia closed his eyes even deeper. “Not again. What is this, a tourist convention? Who else is in town? The circus?”

  The priest smiled. “You mean the CIA?”

  * * *

  Sean Ryan sat in the police station, pulling out his newspaper again. Who knew that even the police wanted to take a break during siesta too? What was this, teatime in London? It was almost as if they expected criminals to be napping between the hours of noon and three in the afternoon.

  Then again, there’s no one around to rob half the time, he thought wryly. Except maybe tourists. He was half-asleep with boredom. Then he opened the newspaper.

  There was a brief section on Cardinal Cannella’s religious order — the Markist Brothers.

  Sean smiled again. His fiancée was a talent representative for various talents — one of which was a young novelist who had a personal grudge against the Markist brothers, due to odd events in high school. As a result, Sean knew more about the order than he liked to admit.

  Sean popped open his phone, and dialed. After a moment, a lightly accented voice answered, “Sean?”

  “Hey, Inna, how are you?”

  “Good ... what is the matter?”

  Sean chuckled. “Does something have to be the matter?”

  There was laughter several thousand miles away. “What is it, Sean?”

  “Your man, the one with the grudge against the Markists? What was his theory on them again?”

  Inna sighed. “He will sometimes murmur a belief that the Nazis had created the order before they fell in 1945. But his only evidence there is that it had been founded in Berlin. It became recognized in 1958, the year that Pope Pius XII died and Cardinal Roncalli was made Pope John XXIII.”

  “That was the Italian peasant built like Santa Claus, right?” Sean asked. “They wanted him to be a ’filler’ Pope after Pius’s decades-long reign, instead he called Vatican II. Something about it ‘opening the windows to let in the fresh air,’ et cetera.”

  Inna chuckled. “You have something against fresh air?”

  “Of course not, I’m from Los Angeles. But let’s face it, when the train of the church is moving through the toxic gas cloud called the sixties, locking the windows would be better. But the Markists?”

  “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “in their mission statement, Markists were ’dedicated to education,’ and founded several schools in the United States, with others dotting the face of Europe. A few years ago, they became a defunct order in America, after their last stronghold of education had been destroyed.”

  Sean paused for a moment, restraining the urge to give an alibi. “Didn’t one of your authors have something to do with the place being blown up?”

  “I do not know,” Inna told him. “He has always been vague on the details.”

  He smiled. “Anyway, what else? They have a Boston Cardinal installed, and everyone thinks Rome was scammed. Maybe his installation was a Markist power play to get them back into the States?”

  “That is not something he has discussed with me,” Inna answered. “If you want my opinion, it is a good question, but why? Pope Pius XIII has nearly declared the United States missionary country …”

  “Could they want back on the front lines, become a real order?” Sean asked. “As opposed to, you know, an order lite?”

  “But why? I could think of better places to work,” she told him. “Rome? Paris? The Markists want Boston?”

  “Okay,” Sean conceded, “different track: this Cardinal guy received donations from a group of Wiccans; why? What could he have gained, aside from the money? Better question: why would they have benefited from giving him the money?”

  “Oh,” Inna answered, “so you have not finished the article. I will wait.”

  Sean blinked, glanced to the article again, then choked.

  “They used coffins to smuggle the drugs into the country, and Markists supplied both the coffins and the funerals. The Cardinal’s office refused to comment, citing the Cardinal’s recent departure for Rome just hours before warrants were issued. “One step ahead of the cops, huh? Lucky man.” He closed the paper, looking around the police station for someone to let him know if he should leave or not.

  “I guess it could be worse. I could be from Boston.”

  * * *

  “You’re from Boston,” Manana Shushurin said, “so you must be Catholic, yes?”

  Murphy looked up from the screen of Manana’s phone, and discovered her inside his personal space, looking right into his eyes. For some reason, it had only just occurred to him that he was on a bed, sitting next to a beautiful woman, and he hadn’t even thought twice about it. He was either very well-trained, very focused, or in desperate need of having his hormone levels checked.

  Murphy leaned back against the headboard. “You could say that.”

  “How did Mossad even let you in?”

  He grinned around his pipe. “You’re BND liaison to the Office, and you don’t know about the Goyim Brigade?”

  She tucked both legs under her so she could comfortably face him. “The what?”

  “The Goyim Brigade. We’re a collection of non-Jewish Israeli citizens, many of whom emigrated there after 9-11, like I did. Soon, the Office was so filled with Gentiles. They needed their own little subsection. Thus, the Goyim Brigade. Given the odd variety of us, they needed an intermediary between the head of the Office and the rank-and-file intelligence officers. They picked a Catholic, someone who had a relative in the intelligence business, like Cardinal Dulles of Fordham, the son of the CIA’s founder. Now, while it would look odd for a Hasidic Jew to walk into a mosque, or a Muslim to walk into a synagogue, there was one place either one could go without raising eyebrows...”

  Shushurin nodded. “A Catholic Church, preferably one that’s a tourist trap.”

  “Bingo. It—”

  She suddenly held up a hand. “Abasi’s about to move. I can hear him. Let’s go.”

  Murphy slid off the bed, checking his watch. It was a quarter to three.

  * * *

  At three o’clock, Hashim Abasi and Wilhelmina Goldberg arrived at the section of the Vatican infirmary that had been converted into an interim forensics lab.

  Goldberg furrowed her brows as she noted the sharp objects lodged in the office door. She glanced at the damage to Figlia’s head. “What happened here?”

  “It was not a great miracle,” Figlia replied. “Someone stole the report from this morning’s crime scene.”

  Abasi cocked his head. “Why? No one has said that Yousef’s report had been stolen from the carabinieri. Why steal one and not the other? Either Yousef and Gerrity were killed by two different groups of people, or the thief was independent of them.”

  Figlia rubbed his temple, feeling a headache on approach. “What do you mean?”

  “Yousef was more important than Gerrity, I would think,” Abasi said. “With Gerrity, they should know exactly what we have, because everything in the room was left by your corpse — everything except the bomb. If someone used gloves, is there a possibility someone might have left something inside the bomb that’s useful?”

  Fisher, coming out of her office, shook her head. “Not a chance. Everything was generic, and a hair sample would have been fried. Unless there’s something so obscure that we haven’t found it yet, I can only tell you what was used to make the bomb, little else.”

  Figlia blinked. “By the way, Hashim Abasi, Villie Goldberg, this is my wife, Veronica Fisher, originally a crime-scene analyst from America.”
/>   Abasi bowed slightly. “Charmed.”

  Ronnie nodded. “Ditto. Now, if you’re right, there are only two real options. They might be interested solely in the computer findings… but if that’s the case, why not just destroy the computer? He didn’t seem interested in anything other than the report.”

  Figlia nodded, confirming the statement. “He went right for it.”

  Abasi frowned thoughtfully. “Then one other possibility is that someone merely wanted to increase his own knowledge, not impede us. Otherwise, if the computer was the only thing that could contain evidence, why not take that?”

  Fisher nodded. “Makes sense. Clementi, the gunman, was probably there to destroy the computer as well as kill Gerrity. He may have been looking at the screen when he was blown up, talking on his cell. If that’s so, he was probably killed because he saw the computer. If I set off the bomb, my first priority wouldn’t be to find out what we know — it would be to keep us from finding something we haven’t already. The computer was in plain sight; why not take it? It was closer to the window than the book… a fact I’ll have to discuss with my computer guys.”

  Abasi and Goldberg shared a glance. “You want to bring it up or should I?”

  Figlia looked from one to the other. “I’ve already got a splitting headache, just tell me.”

  Goldberg inquired, “First of all, where’s Father Frank?”

  “He just left.”

  Abasi slid into a chair opposite Figlia. “We think he’s part of Vatican Intelligence.”

  Fisher put away the suture kit. “What makes you say that?”

  Goldberg shrugged. “Well, he managed to take down four guys using the parts of a handgun he field stripped like a pro, after he disarmed the one waving that gun at him.”

  Figlia raised an eyebrow. “If you’re implying he attacked me, why would he steal the book? He could have asked; it’s not like we have anything to hide.”

  Veronica Fisher came back from shelving the suture kit. “Maybe he does.”

  Figlia raised a hand. “He’s also—”

  “Getting the car.”

  Abasi and Goldberg turned toward the door. Father Frank stood there, holding a set of car keys in his hand. “Signor Figlia is taking out a field expedition to pick up a new arrival, taking the train into Rome from the airport. I take it you would wish me not to drive?”