by Sam Christer
CARDIGAN, WALES
The plate on the uniquely customized Mercedes Benz M Class reads SCV 1 – Stato della Citta del Vaticano – and even by the pace of country traffic, it’s moving disruptively slowly.
Slowly, but perfectly on time.
It takes exactly ten minutes for the armour-plated Popemobile to make the journey from the improvised helipad off the A487 into the crowd-packed streets of Cardigan.
The Holy Father watches the adoration from behind four walls of bulletproof glass and warmly acknowledges as many onlookers as he can.
Invisible rings of security are already in place as the famous white vehicle stops. The Vatican’s Swiss Guards are closest, the British secret service next and then Owain’s SSOA operatives. There’s a deafening cheer as the new Pope appears at the back of the vehicle and descends hydraulically operated steps into the cool Welsh air. He smiles and looks around before kneeling and kissing the earth.
As the pontiff rises, the cheering reaches a new crescendo. He walks towards a prearranged spot where a seven-year-old boy and eight-year-old girl are waiting in newly bought school uniforms.
The Pope bends to talk to them. There’s an explosion of camera flashes. He accepts a bible from the boy and a bouquet of flowers from the girl. More camera flashes. A tidal wave of cheers. Clapping sweeps him along a red carpet and into a protected entrance.
Owain takes out his phone and calls his wife.
She doesn’t pick up.
He leaves a message. ‘Hi, it’s nothing special. I’m at the church and about to go in, so will have the phone turned to silent.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘I love you, Jenny. Love you more than you’ll ever know.’
‘Touching,’ says a voice behind him.
Owain’s blood runs cold.
He turns, and sees Josep Mardrid barely a yard away. ‘What are you doing here?’
The suntanned face oozes a gleaming smile. ‘I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.’ He makes the sign of the cross. ‘I’m a very religious man.’
‘You’re the personification of evil.’
Mardrid looks pleased. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’ He studies the ambassador’s face. ‘I love churches and graveyards, don’t you? So much history and ritual. Secrets buried beneath ground. Hidden but so close to disclosure. You understand what I’m alluding to, don’t you?’ He smiles generously. ‘I have one of your knights’ crosses, Gwyn. The first of many that I plan to collect.’
‘I’ll take that as an admission of theft, though that’s the least of your crimes. By the way, they won’t let you keep a cross where you’re going.’
Mardrid laughs and fastens the middle button of his jacket. ‘Sorry I can’t stay and chat but I have things to do – history to make.’ He tips his head. ‘I’ll be sure to return the cross. When I bury you.’
Owain calls Carrie Auckland as he watches his old enemy drift towards a party of Spanish diplomats. ‘Josep Mardrid is here.’
‘What?’
‘He’s with the Spanish contingent around the front of the church.’
‘I’ll have eyes on him in a minute.’
Owain signs off and joins the flow of dignitaries filing into the church. As he walks down the centre aisle, he recognizes English, Welsh and Italian ministers, the deputy head of MI5 and the Oberst, the Commandant of the Swiss Guard. There are TV celebrities that he can’t put names to and by the look of it, there’s also a small block of local parishioners.
Mardrid.
He can’t take his mind off the man. He’s here to ‘make history’. He’d sought him out to brag about it. And mention the cross. Owain looks around and can’t see him.
He takes his place on the front pew. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Carrie Auckland briefing two of her undercover operatives.
The temperature in the church is becoming uncomfortably warm. He glances at his watch. Five minutes until the start of Mass. His attention drifts to the big bronze statue of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. When Pope Benedict blessed it, back in 2010 during his visit to London, it was designated as the Welsh national shrine. Today the new Pope will follow in the footsteps of Pope John Paul II by blessing a candle and inserting it in the taper holder in the Virgin’s right hand.
The phone in his pocket silently vibrates with a text message. He slides it out and discreetly reads the screen.
‘Jade Fallon shot in head. In surgery. Suspect Tess Wilkins now dead. Eve.’
Owain returns the phone to his pocket. The doors at the back of the church clunk closed. Organ music strikes up. People stand and straighten out their best clothes.
The greatest Mass that Wales has ever witnessed is about to begin.
176
CALIFORNIA
Chris Wilkins decides it’s time to ditch the Ford. He’s already run it longer than intended.
Stockton Airport lies less than fifteen minutes from the hospital. He’d hoped to have dropped the car there and been out of state before anyone even started looking for it. After the shootings, it’s too risky.
The road ahead offers nowhere for him to pull in and grab new wheels. He turns his burner on and calls Tess for the third time.
There’s no pick up.
They’ve been together for more than a decade and he’s never had to call three times to reach her. Wilkins turns off the phone, slides down the window of the Ford and tosses it. Through a side mirror, he sees it hit the blacktop and bounce into grass.
He’d put the first two unanswered calls down to the complication of killing the Fallon kid, torching the place and getting out of the area. Now he knows it isn’t that. Tess is a pro. She always understood the importance of following the plan and either phoning in or being around to take the call. He’s trying not to think the unthinkable, to imagine she’s been caught – or worse.
With Stockton no longer an exit option, he considers finding a small airport and paying cash to a hick pilot to get him out of State, but there’s a good chance the cops are going to be all over those kind of landing strips.
He rules out a run to Canada, even though Vancouver is only a fifteen-hour haul from Stockton and if he went a more roundabout route, he could hit Winnipeg in under a day.
As soon as he gets new wheels he’ll head south towards Mexico. Not down the fast lanes of the interstate where the cops might come hunting and the traffic cameras could pick him up. He has another route. One so windy and obscure, he’s certain God himself wouldn’t be able to find it.
177
NEW YORK
Joe Steffani drives across town to meet with the brass in the NIA. The radio is up high and so is the sun. It’s been a hell of a successful day and he should be happier.
Locking up five major terrorists should pretty much make his career, and that’s going to bring the kind of security, salary and pension that will set him up for life.
But he’s not.
What’s eating him is that if Gareth Madoc is right, there are going to be three terror attacks in the next twenty-four hours and one of them will be right here in New York City. That’s why the top brass want to see him in person.
From the checks he’s just done, al-Shibh, Korshidi, Tabrizi, Hussan and Iman Yousef Mousavi are still saying nothing.
The traffic in Lower Manhattan is worse than ever. Steffani’s Jeep grinds to a dispiriting halt part way down Wall Street. He shakes his head in dismay. There’s still enough time to get to his meeting but only just.
He stares around him, bored and impatient. A cute blonde in a Lexus to his left looks him over. Some idiot is trying to get a hot-dog cart through the traffic and is drawing horns. Down a side street looms a church an ex-girlfriend of his used to go to. Its neo-Gothic spire used to soar above everything. Now it’s dwarfed by the buildings around it. Such is progress.
The traffic finally moves and he loses sight of it.
Then something hits him.
And the jigsaw of clues comes together, almost like a miracle.
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nbsp; 178
CARDIGAN, WALES
No one does theatre better than the Catholic Church.
Not for them, understatement, nuance or humility.
The way Owain sees it, any Catholic Mass is a grand affair, but one including the Bishop of Rome is the religious equivalent of a Cirque du Soleil premiere.
There are so many lit candles Cardigan could put Las Vegas in the shade. The opening act, a central procession of the entire ecclesiastical cast, is breathtaking. Finest silk and cotton vestments. Priceless golden incense burners and chalices. Intoxicating scents of frankincense and elevated voices of heavenly choristers.
All a distraction from the most important thing of all.
The Holy Father’s safety.
An army of well-regimented altar boys in crisp, black-and-white cassocks and cottas is usurped only by a legion of lavishly robed priests, bishops and archbishops who have insisted that they too must have a place centre stage. But none compare to the sumptuous sight of the new pontiff.
He is dressed in layer after layer of antique vestments. Each drips with symbolism as old as Christianity itself. A uniquely designed pallium, ornamented with red crosses that represent the blood of Jesus, is fixed to his chasuble with three gold pins, representing the nails with which he was crucified.
Owain notices a fanon, a shawl of alternating gold and silver stripes and a subcinctorium, a strip of fabric embroidered with a cross and the same Agnus Dei, Lamb of God, as featured in The Ghent Altarpiece.
Over the Holy Father’s left arm is a maniple, a band of priceless silk made of intertwined red and gold threads, symbolizing the unity of Eastern and Western Catholic rites.
Most striking of all is the long, open-fronted cope that the Pope is wearing: red, fringed with green, deliberately evocative of the Welsh flag. The Holy Father walks to the lectern, raises his gaze to the packed and hushed congregation, then greets them in stilted Welsh: ‘Bendith Duw arnoch – the blessing of God be upon you.’
All hearts rise.
All except one.
The appearance of Josep Mardrid has shaken Owain Gwyn. Deep inside the house of God, he feels the force of evil stirring.
179
SSOA OFFICES, NEW YORK
The call from Joe Steffani leaves Gareth Madoc slack-jawed.
Being a foreigner, he simply hadn’t made the connection that his New Yorker contact has. Now it makes sense.
Perfect sense.
Madoc is gone from his desk in sixty seconds and gets himself down to Lower Manhattan via Metro rather than the car-jammed road.
At the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, he sees what had got Steffani excited. There, as big as big could be, is the explanation of what Mousavi had meant when he was secretly recorded at the al-Qaeda safe house saying, ‘…the Trinity will be no more.’
Everyone thought it was a reference to three separate targets, but it wasn’t.
It was just one.
A National Historic Landmark. A place where people took refuge from flying debris when the first tower collapsed during 9/11. A building connected to the ancient kings and queens of England.
Trinity Church.
The sanctified bricks and mortar represent the long-standing special relationship between the Church of England and God-fearing America. Forged when the first stone was laid in the seventeenth century and strong enough to survive two rebuilds and more than three hundred years.
New York’s finest, cops from the financial district, are out in force turning people away, setting up barricades and trying to push sidewalk traffic further and further back.
But it might be too late.
Madoc catches a glimpse of Steffani on a phone. He’s walking away from the church, towards the graveyard where, among others, lie Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, the first US treasury secretary, and Robert Fulton, developer of the world’s first steamboat.
Trinity is the perfect target. It destroys history as well as lives.
‘Hey, Joe!’
Steffani looks up and acknowledges him.
Madoc wanders over and waits until he finishes the call.
The NIA agent clicks off his phone and turns on his smile. ‘We came up trumps, buddy.’ He points to the tower. ‘Up there are twenty-three of the biggest bells in the US. Half were replaced recently by a company from England. There was a service engineer in there yesterday, fit the description of Malek. The bomb squad just found several pounds of his handiwork packed beneath the decking boards.’
‘It’s defused?’
Steffani nods. ‘It certainly is.’
Madoc allows himself his first smile for a long time. ‘I’ve got someone to call, someone who’s going to be very relieved to hear that.’
180
CARDIGAN, WALES
The Gospel reading passes without so much as a stumbled syllable.
The pontiff ends by reminding everyone that in 1982, when John Paul II became the first reigning Pope to visit Wales, he called on the young people of Britain to begin ‘a crusade of prayer’. He adds, with almost passionate emphasis, ‘That crusade needs to be renewed. The enemies we face today are more insidious and demanding than ever. We must become increasingly united and devoted in our worship of the Lord, Jesus Christ, Our Saviour.’ He lets the message sink in, then adds, ‘Bendith Duw ar bobol Cymru! – God bless the people of Wales!’ The cheers of the crowds outside can be heard through the church walls.
The Pope leaves the lectern and heads towards the sacred statue for the final part of his heavily stage-managed Mass – the lighting and blessing of a new taper.
Owain’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He palms it so it can’t be seen as he reads the message. ‘Target was “Trinity” the church in NYC. Bomb defused. GM.’
Tension flows out of his shoulders. His worries about the Pope have been for nothing. He’ll call Gareth as soon as the service finishes.
Around him, expectation builds among the assembled congregation. A cherubic acolyte walks self-consciously across the altar. In his uncomfortably outstretched hands, he carries a long, narrow box fashioned from dark hardwood and fastened with a large clasp bearing the Papal insignia. It comprises the crossed silver and gold keys of Saint Peter, the triple crown of the pontiff showing his roles as supreme pastor, teacher and priest and most importantly, at the top of the clasp, a distinct cross on a globe, signifying the sovereignty of Jesus.
The Pope opens the box and removes a virgin candle, brought directly from Rome.
A second acolyte appears, somewhat older than the first and with steadier hands. He carries a long candle lighter, made of wood and brass. He waits patiently to one side.
Slowly, reverently, the Holy Father places the candle in the holder in the right hand of the Virgin Mary and then turns for the lighter.
Inexplicably, the acolyte drops it.
The clatter of brass sends a shockwave through the church. Security men tense. Hands dip into jackets.
But nothing has happened. Nothing but a dropped prop on the ecclesiastical stage.
The boy picks up the ceremonial instrument. A kindly priest moves towards him and beneath his robes, finds a lighter.
There’s a click and a hiss of an incongruous Zippo. Once more the flame intended for the ceremony is lit.
The Holy Father appears unperturbed. He waits patiently for the priest to retreat, and calmly takes the lighter from the red-faced young man.
All eyes are on the candle in the statue’s hand.
All except Owain’s.
He is scanning the church. He glances behind him and looks back to the altar.
The Pope ensures the candle is burning brightly. He hands the brass lighter back to the acolyte and blesses the shrine. There’s a reserved but definite smile on his face as he turns and addresses the congregation.
Owain doesn’t hear what he says. His mind is on the candle. It’s the only thing he didn’t personally check. He’s sure it will have been examined by the Swiss Guard, bu
t he didn’t check it.
He reminds himself of Gareth’s message. The attack was planned in New York and it’s been thwarted. The crisis is over.
Yet doubt remains.
He looks again at the candle and at others in the church. It’s thicker than some, longer than others, smaller than most. The flame is the same as those around it. There really isn’t anything unusual about the column of wax, except that it has just been blessed by a man Catholics believe is the holiest person on the planet.
The door at the back of the church creaks. Someone is trying to leave without disturbing the Mass. It’s an odd time to go. There are only a few minutes left of the service.
The exit is controlled by the Swiss Guard. They wouldn’t let anyone leave. Not now. Most likely one of them has stepped outside.
Why?
Owain fears he knows the answer.
The candle could contain a core of C4, a pliable and stable explosive that isn’t detonated by flame. Whoever is leaving may be about to trigger it remotely using a shockwave detonator. It’s the kind of play a military man, someone like a Swiss Guard, would make.
He hesitates. Tells himself to stay still, or he’ll just make a fool of himself.
But he can’t.
He breaks from the pew of dignitaries and rushes the altar. There’s an outbreak of gasps.
Two robed priests try to block him. He knocks them away. He has to get himself in front of the candle. At best, he’ll look an idiot. At worst, he’ll block the blast.
He extends a hand and shoves the Holy Father clean off the altar.
Outside, on the giant screens, and on televisions across the world, millions watch in horror.
The bomb goes off.
Stone, glass and flesh fill the morning sky.
PART FIVE
