The Third Revelation

by Ralph McInerny

  Crowe introduced Traeger as a friend from Rome, and Hannan asked him to come along to the conference room.

  “Vincent!” Zelda cried when they came in, coming to Traeger and throwing her arms about him. Gabriel Faust watched this with an enigmatic expression. Hannan was delighted that Zelda knew Traeger.

  “She’s married,” he said, sounding almost as relieved by the news as Traeger himself had been.

  “This is Gabriel,” Zelda said triumphantly, beckoning him forward.

  “Hello, Doctor.”

  “One uses academic titles as sparingly as possible.”

  “Doctor,” Hannan repeated approvingly, and Laura directed his attention to the materials she had put on the table. “Good. That sounds impressive. Let’s get started.” He pushed the materials toward Crowe. “Everybody seems to know everybody.”

  “This is Heather Adams,” Laura said, indicating the third woman in the room. She smiled serenely and took her seat.

  During the next half hour, Traeger decided that Crowe asked questions better than he answered them. Crowe went through Faust’s credentials and asked about the various fellowships and commissions he had had.

  “And some academic experience as well?”

  “More than enough.”

  Hannan liked that and gave an account of his own truncated college career. Faust seemed unsure that he appreciated the parallel. As the interview continued, Traeger felt like God, knowing so much more about Faust than the others were likely to find out. But when Hannan mentioned the list of paintings that Crowe had made for him, adding that he had been persuaded that he was unlikely to be able to buy them, he asked Faust what he thought of the idea of having copies made. Faust thought a moment before nodding.

  “There are computer-made copies now. I wouldn’t recommend that. There are artists who can make copies infinitely better than such mechanical ones.”

  Traeger waited for Faust to mention Inagaki, but he didn’t. This turn in the conversation put Traeger at ease. There was seemingly no need to make known to Crowe Faust’s experience with the kind of copies he was recommending. He half expected Crowe to show that he somehow knew about Faust and Inagaki, but no allusion was made. It seemed merely a happy conjunction of a credentialed art historian and an art forger with a track record they needn’t know about. When the interview was over and Hannan and Sinclair took Faust aside to talk money, Crowe came over to Traeger.

  “I’ll bring it here now,” he said.

  Traeger stirred, but Crowe put his hand on his shoulder.

  “It will only take a few minutes.”

  Laura brought in coffee and she and Heather served it. “Laura tells me you and Father Crowe are saying Mass here,” she said when she handed John Burke his cup.

  “That’s right.”

  “Would you mind if I attended?”

  Struck by her manner, the young priest rose to talk with her. Traeger looked at his watch. The conference between Hannan and Sinclair and Gabriel Faust seemed to be going well. Zelda pretended not to be keeping an eye on the three of them. Ten minutes had gone by and still Crowe had not returned. Traeger interrupted Father Burke.

  “Where are you and Father Crowe staying?”

  “There is a residence for guests.”

  “Show me where it is.”

  Burke seemed surprised by the abruptness of the question. Heather said, “I’ll show you.”

  Traeger followed her along the path, through the garden, past the bench where he and Crowe had talked. The door of the residence building was unlocked. Heather, who had taken out some keys, seemed surprised. They went in.

  “Father Crowe was assigned 2B.”

  The door of 2B was open. Traeger looked in, put out an arm to prevent Heather from coming in, and went to the bed where Father Crowe lay on his back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. A knife was plunged into his chest.

  Heather screamed.

  Traeger turned. “Get Laura. Get Sinclair. Just bring them. Don’t say why.”

  She was staring with horror at the body. Then she composed herself and, surprisingly, made the sign of the cross over the body of Brendan Crowe.

  The briefcase was on the desk.

  It was empty.

  PART II

  CHAPTER ONE

  I

  He vamoosed.

  Having sent Heather to spread the alarm and having discovered that Brendan Crowe’s briefcase no longer contained Sister Lucia’s handwritten account of the secrets of Fatima, Traeger did what both training and inclination prompted him to do. He vamoosed.

  The situation was not one in which to become embroiled, not until he had some clearer notion as to what had happened.

  He took Crowe’s briefcase with him, on impulse, to make sure there wasn’t some unzipped zipper that would refute his immediate judgment that the document was lost, and then he left.

  When he came into the corridor, he realized that he had registered the layout of the residence building instinctively. If the one who killed Crowe had gone out of the building, it would have been onto the walkway he and Heather had just come along. No, he would have gone away from the main building where there were people who might see him fleeing.

  Across the corridor from Crowe’s suite was the door of another, and at the end of the corridor were the pale gray doors of an elevator. If an elevator, then a stairway. He ran toward the green exit sign beyond the elevator and pulled open the door. As it closed behind him, he stood very still. A stairway rose to the next floor, another descended. He looked up, he looked down. Then he began slowly to descend. He came to a metal door, put his hand on the stainless steel knob, and turned it slowly. He pulled. Locked. He turned and went up the stairs in great bounds, on up to the second floor. He came into a corridor like that below with an emergency exit at its end.

  He emerged onto a balcony enclosed by a wrought iron railing. The rungs of a ladder were embedded in the walls of the building. He gripped the railing, looking over, and immediately pulled back his hand. It was sticky with blood. So this was the way the killer had escaped. He looked out over the luxuriant mown lawns, toward the road that led to the gate. He dropped the briefcase to the ground and went over the railing, handing himself down the rungs, conscious of his sticky hands, when he heard a car start. He stopped, still six feet above the ground, and turned.

  His rental car was disappearing down the road toward the gate.

  Traeger dropped to the ground and picked up the briefcase. Logic is an inexact science. The move from the known to the unknown is ever mysterious. Traeger was certain that it was the killer who was driving off in the car he had rented, in which he had driven here to Empedocles. The logical thing to do was to continue the pursuit. And now he knew what he was pursuing.

  He came around the building, then stepped back when he saw a group running toward the residence hall. John Burke, Hannan, Sinclair, Laura. He gave them time to get inside the residence and then sprinted away toward the administration building. The parking lot was just in front of it. Once he got in among the parked cars, he could select a car and go after the killer. The killer and the missing third secret of Fatima.

  But before he got to the parking lot, the doors of the administration building slid open and Heather Adams appeared. She drifted toward him with widened eyes.

  “I couldn’t go back,” she said.

  “I understand. Is one of these your car?”

  She seemed to have to think before she nodded.

  “The killer just escaped in my car. I have to go after him. Give me your keys.”

  “They’re in my purse.”

  “You’re holding your purse.”

  This surprised her. The girl was still in shock from what she had seen in the residence building. She opened her purse and handed him two keys attached to a medal the size of a silver dollar.

  “Saint Christopher,” she explained. “You’ve cut yourself.” She was looking at his hand.

  “Which car is it?”

&n
bsp; She pointed. He ran to the little Toyota and got behind the wheel. When he turned on the motor, he looked back to where Heather still stood. She lifted a hand dreamily, and for a moment Traeger thought she was going to bless him as she had blessed the body of Brendan Crowe.

  Getting out of the Empedocles complex did not pose the same problem as getting in. Traeger lifted his hand to the guard and moved right on through, as no doubt the one who had stolen his rental car had done. And then?

  He drove toward Boston because it was where the interstate led. The monotony of driving on the monotonously engineered interstate invited speculation on what had just happened. The thought that Crowe had fled to the States with John Burke in order to escape the questioning Traeger had put him through was not welcome. But when he brushed it aside to concentrate on what he was doing now, he had the sinking feeling that he was heading in the opposite direction of his quarry. North was the porous border of Canada.

  Logic be damned, he had allowed an image of the killer to form in his mind, and the face was that of Anatoly. What Traeger needed now was access to the agency and its vast databases. He wanted a check run, an update on what Dortmund had already got for him. He pulled into an oasis and put through a call to Dortmund. His old chief reacted with impatient laughter when Traeger told him, trying to make it sound matter-of-fact, of the missing secret of Fatima.

  “What the hell does some message whispered into the ear of a nun seventy-five years ago have to do with anything?” Dortmund asked.

  “You’d have to be Catholic to understand.”

  “I am Catholic!”

  Traeger hadn’t known this. No reason why he should. “I thought all the Catholics were in the FBI.”

  “The Irish Catholics.”

  “A man, a priest, has just been killed for the sake of getting hold of that secret. That makes it important right there.”

  “A priest?”

  “From Rome. He came here . . .” Traeger stopped himself. He hadn’t called Dortmund to have a conversation, attractive as that suddenly was.

  “Give it to me again,” Dortmund said. “All of it. Including what I already know.”

  Traeger reduced the last several weeks to a crisp paragraph, suitable for framing. He had gone to Rome to see if the assassinations in the Vatican were connected with the report he himself had drawn up on the attempted assassination of John Paul II years before. The Russian ambassador had been pestering Cardinal Maguire to get access to the reports. In the course of the investigation, the third secret of Fatima turned up missing. Several groups and interests regard that secret as the key to modern history. It looked now as if the man who killed two cardinals, a priest, and a basilica guard in the Vatican had been after that third secret. He got it, at the cost of the death of Father Crowe.

  “He could have had it easily if he had checked Maguire’s bedroom,” Traeger added, a little ironic coda.

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “He was surprised and took off.”

  Dortmund spoke after a moment of silence. “He killed all those people and then panicked because of a witness?”

  “He had no idea where the secret was.”

  Was that true? Had the assassin been informed that the prefect, Cardinal Maguire, had removed the file from the archives?

  In any case, when Brendan Crowe found it, he figured it was safer with him than in the archives. When he accepted the invitation to go to Empedocles he had taken the document with him. Dumb? Smart? Who could say? Minutes after he had gone to fetch it from his room in the residence hall, he had turned up dead, the contents of his briefcase missing. Having sent Heather to bring the bad news to the administration building, Traeger had gone on the chase.

  “And you think you’re chasing Anatoly?”

  “It’s a possibility.” How wan a hope that remark contained.

  “Who may have a document you were told was in a briefcase in a residence room in Manchester, New Hampshire?”

  “So I want a check run on him, okay? We haven’t lost our curiosity about former KGB agents, have we?”

  For half a minute, Dortmund’s humming was all the answer he got. “Where will you be?”

  “I better call you.”

  “I thought you were the chaser.” Dortmund said.

  And not the chased? He remembered Rome, where he had become aware that Anatoly was on his trail, but what reason would Anatoly have to trail him now, if he had the document he had already killed so many to get? How much simpler it would be if Anatoly were looking for him. If Anatoly was who he was looking for. If . . . Oh hell.

  “Look, old friend and mentor, could we get it about that Crowe was killed for the sake of a facsimile of the secret? An incomplete copy. The real one having been left in the briefcase.”

  Dortmund was humming again, not in an encouraging way.

  “There was an unzipped zipper.”

  Dortmund stopped humming. “That sounds like one of the proofs for the existence of God we were taught at Georgetown. Whatever is zipped is zipped by another . . .” His voice faded away. “It’s a dumb idea but most ideas are. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  “I hope so.”

  He thought about Dortmund’s sign-off while he was in a hotel room in Cambridge.

  As soon as he had hit the city limits, he pulled into the lot of a McDonald’s and checked the glove compartment. He needed an address to enter in the GPS on the dash. He had told Brendan Crowe that his life might be in danger, because he could recognize the man who had killed the cardinals. In part, that had been to shake Crowe up and make him more cooperative than he was inclined to be. Well, his life had been in danger. Traeger’s theory—theory, hell, call it a hunch—was that Crowe had been killed by the same man who had put the knife into Cardinal Maguire’s chest.

  He lay on the bed and propped himself up on pillows so he could see the Charles River slide majestically by outside his windows. When he had checked into the hotel, he had been carrying the briefcase. Hotels are no longer as curious as they were in the past. Once there were hotel dicks to make sure there was no unauthorized coupling taking place on the premises. Now one was routinely asked at the registration desk how many keys he wanted. And a pretty slim briefcase could count as luggage.

  He had only the clothes he was wearing. Or not wearing. The first thing he had done was strip and take a shower, wanting among other things to get that blood off his hands. So he lay in his boxer shorts, staring at the river. Could all great Neptune’s ocean wash that blood from off his hands? He told himself he was waiting, giving Dortmund time to scare up what he could on Anatoly. Information alone would be of no help. Traeger was hoping that inquiring about Anatoly would turn up something recent, very recent. Like where the hell he was.

  But eating at the edge of his mind was the implication of Dortmund’s questions. All Traeger had was Crowe’s word that he had brought that document with him from Rome. But if he hadn’t, why was he dead?

  Well, two cardinals, a priest, and a basilica guard had died in vain in Rome. What was one more pointless murder? Bah. He got out his phone and called his secretary Bea.

  “Well, thanks for staying in touch,” she said brightly.

  Dear God, how good her voice sounded, like a sonar link with normalcy. Once he got through with this assignment, and back in his office . . . But in his present circumstances this was a fantasy not to be indulged.

  “You know how it is on vacation, Bea.”

  “Tell me about it. You know, I’ll never get over how clear transatlantic calls are now.”

  He let it go. “Any calls?”

  “Any calls! You’ve been away weeks and you wonder if there have been any calls?”

  “Recent. Yesterday, today.”

  “Just your old golf partner, Dortmund.”

  “Dortmund! When?”

  “Yesterday. What a clown,” Bea added. “He was trying to speak in a foreign accent.”

  “Didn’t fool
you, huh?”

  “I never forget a voice.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He said he’d call back.”

  “Tape it when he does,” Traeger said, keeping urgency out of his voice.

  “Tape it?”

  “I can be a joker, too.”

  Again Bea marveled at the clarity of transatlantic calls thanks to satellites. “When will you be back?”

  Back. If only he could just drop everything and go back to his usual life.

  “I have one or two things to wind up first, Bea.”

  “Toodle-oo.”

  That had not been Dortmund, trying to disguise his voice. Anatoly? Who was the pursued? He had half a mind to call back and tell Bea to go on vacation, anywhere, stay away from the office. If Anatoly had the phone number, he would also have the address. He opened his phone, thought for a moment, then closed it. He did not want to alarm Bea, and how could he avoid giving her a reason to go on vacation?

  Up until now, this assignment from Dortmund had seemed almost a nostalgia trip, a reminder of how it used to be. The murders in the Vatican, the theft from the archives, meeting Anatoly—none of it had spelled danger, not for him. Suddenly, everything was different.

  As long as he was making logical leaps, why not imagine that Anatoly had just driven down the road in that rental car, away from the entrance to Empedocles, then parked and waited. He would have seen Traeger roar by in the little Toyota. Traeger on the chase? Traeger the chased? He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.

  He got off the bed and into his clothes, took Crowe’s briefcase, and went down the back stairway to the parking lot to steal a car and get the hell out of there. From among the parked cars, he chose a nondescript Chevy, got it going, and got out of there. He kept his eyes opened and circled the block, checking the mirror. When he was sure he hadn’t been followed, he went back to the hotel parking lot for Heather’s car. He made a maze of Cambridge and then of Boston, going he wasn’t sure where.