Comes a Horseman (52 page)

Brady marveled at Ambrosi's ability to direct their thoughts away from the tasks of the day.

“IT'S SO beautiful,” Alicia observed.

The evening before, she had used the terminal in Ambrosi's study to reserve seats on the first flight of the morning out of Rome to Israel's Ben-Gurion airport. Now the three of them had come outside to wait for a cab.

The building that provided the housing needs of Ambrosi and several dozen of his fellow ranking Church officials had once been a papal palace. A fountain as spectacular as Brady had ever seen splashed and gurgled beside them. It depicted Samson, his mouth stretched in a cry to heaven, pushing over the pillars to which he was chained. Standing behind him was a winged angel touching one of the crumbling pillars with a sword, implying angelic assistance in Samson's final act, which brought the roof down on three thousand Philistines. Water sluiced from the top of Samson's head and ran through grooves in his long locks of hair, making them appear to shimmer and cascade into a pool at his feet. His blinded eyes gazed at a white dawn breaking over the Vatican walls. In the bleached-blue sky, a smattering of cumulus clouds moved sluggishly under the weight of platinum linings. The air was crisp and just a little chilly. The trees and bushes and lawns were green, wet from an early morning sprinkling.

Alicia turned to Ambrosi.

“I don't know how to thank you,” she said.

“Stay alive,” he said, staring hard into her eyes.

She hugged him.

He extended his hand to Brady and said, “Don't be impulsive. Be smart. If it gets too hot, get out of there. Live to fight another day.” He pulled a small card from his pants pocket and handed it to Brady. “As promised, a . . .
friendly
firearms dealer in Israel.”

A white van with a taxi light on its roof came around a building and curved onto a wide cobblestone drive toward them.

Ambrosi gave Brady's hand another tight squeeze. “Expect anything, absolutely anything,” he said. “Remember: volatile, violent, unpredictable.”

“I'll remember,” Brady said. He opened the rear door and helped Alicia in. He climbed in after her, slid the door shut, and gave Ambrosi a somber nod. The cab pulled away, bound for Leonardo da Vinci Airport.

BACK IN his apartment, Cardinal Ambrosi paused before an ornately framed mirror, supposedly crafted in 1841 by Justus von Liebig himself, the inventor of the contemporary silver-backed mirror, and presented to Pope Gregory XVI to commemorate the pontiff's tour of the papal states. He scowled at his reflection and shook his head sadly. He ambled to a white telephone on a wall in the kitchen. He picked up the handset and held it to his ear. Elsewhere in the Vatican, a switchboard light glowed red.

When the operator answered, he said in Italian, “Send my car, please.”

He listened and said, “The airport.”

Another question from the operator.

“No, no,” he said. “Ciampino Airport.”

He hung up and went for the carry-on of clothes and toiletries he kept ready in the front closet.

67

L
uco Scaramuzzi was at his desk in the Italian Embassy when his private cell phone began emitting the opening drumbeat of Basil Poledouris's score for
Conan the Barbarian
. He continued to scan his computer monitor. It displayed a list of non-Council Watchers scheduled to attend tonight's Gathering in Jerusalem. More than two hundred, and he hoped to have a word with each one. Nothing built goodwill like a big smile and a well-timed wink or slap on the back.

He picked up on the fourth bar.

“Yes?”

“Pippino Farago is alive.”

The words were filtered through an electronic voice changer. Luco leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs.

“Really?” he said.

“He has contacted the Americans.”

“Americans?”

“The two FBI agents. He has arranged to give them the file.”

Luco's heart began to pick up pace.

“When?”

“Today.”

“Where?”

“That was to be arranged later.”

“Here, in Israel?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“You have many friends. I am but one.”

“And how did you come by this information, friend?”

Silence.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

He clicked off, picked up his desk phone, and punched a button. Arjan answered on the second ring.

Luco said, “Find out where the FBI agents are.
Now.
”

He hung up. This was an intriguing turn of events. He tried to think of a reason one of his enemies would have placed the call and could not. Very few people knew that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had agents looking for him. And only he and Pip knew about the Raddusa case file, or so he had thought. He suspected Pip had found help in getting away from Arjan the other day. Perhaps the caller was one of those who had come to Pip's aid. But why betray him now?

Because he did not know until later the person Pip was running from,
he thought.
And I am not someone people want to align themselves against.

Luco
did
have friends. Many whom he was not even aware of. He was certain of it.

The caller's use of a voice changer concerned him. It meant that either he was someone whose voice Luco would recognize or he was an overcautious stranger. Luco laughed. If the roles were reversed and
he
wanted to convey a message about a powerful secret to Antichrist, he'd be overcautious too.

Ah, he was thinking about it too much. The call had been a gift. He should act on it accordingly.

An idea occurred to him. For all he knew, the caller was Father Satan. He had been wondering when and how Old Nick would appear to him—as prophecy said he would. The more he considered it, the more it made sense. The caller knew things he should not have, and he had offered the solution to Luco's most desperate concern. Friend . . . ?

“Father,” he whispered.

Maybe this was a test. Yes, a test. If it were, Luco would not fail it.

68

F
rom her seat next to a porthole window, Alicia watched Rome drop away.
Short and sweet,
she thought.

She regretted not finding Father Randall, but Cardinal Ambrosi's assistance had been a boon to their pursuit. In retrospect, his church-sanctioned mission to monitor global Antichrist activity was not surprising. Antichrist, after all, belonged to the realm of religion. As Ambrosi had explained, Antichrist's primary function was as Satan's emissary. His hatred for Jews and Christians, as well as his hunger for power and wealth, would eventually combust into the last great battle on earth. Believing that such a person might someday exist was a matter of faith. Whether by cultural influence or some innate understanding or who knew what, she believed it. Maybe it boiled down to cynicism: the world
deserved
an Antichrist.

Even if she did not buy into the Antichrist mythology, Scaramuzzi and his backers obviously did. And they were acting on their beliefs, which meant people were dying. And according to Ambrosi, Scaramuzzi's bloodletting was just getting started.

Brady leaned close to her.

“A hundred and twenty seats,” he whispered.

“What?”

“I counted them. A commuter plane. Strange, don't you think, seeing that Israel is esteemed by the world's top three religions?”

“Brady, the Jews and the Palestinians are fighting. People are dying. It's not the best time to visit.”

“That's the West Bank and Gaza.”

“Hamas goes where the people they want to hurt are. That's Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. When I booked the flight online, a window popped up saying that the State Department had issued a travel warning asking U.S. citizens to defer travel to Israel. There was a link to the complete warning.”

“Did you read it?”

She smirked. “What if there were no commercial flights to Israel at all?”

“I'd have chartered a jet,” Brady said firmly.

“Of course I didn't read the warning.”

She tried to imagine what it would be like living in a place as unstable as Israel. Knowing that any outing could be your last. Sitting in a café, sipping tea, hearing first the rumble of an explosion, then the scream of tearing metal, the shattering of glass, the rending of brick and concrete. Turning slightly to catch all of it tumbling through space toward you. Your brain refusing to acknowledge the sight or what comes next and thinking something ordinary and incongruous (“We'll need some bread for dinner tonight”). At the very last moment, you open your mouth to scream but never do
. Just imagine the dread mothers must feel every time their children go out,
she thought. The clamp of fear whenever the phone rings. Never knowing when or where or if terror will peel itself away from the shadows to engulf you.

She thought the feeling must be very similar to her own for the past three days.

A tone sounded, and the seat belt light over their heads went dark. Immediately, two men in separate sections of the plane stood up in the aisle. They were dressed identically, in black slacks, white shirts, and black jackets. They both wore yarmulkes. They raised their hands, palms out, and began rambling at high speed in an alien tongue. Slowly, they turned in circles, as if intent on exposing every inch of the interior and its passengers with an invisible substance radiating from their palms. Alicia saw that their eyes were closed. They were praying.

“Oh, that's comforting,” she whispered facetiously. “What do they know about the plane that we don't?”

“That it's in God's hands?” Brady suggested.

She lowered the seat-back tray and positioned her laptop on it. After it booted, she called up the file she had started last night to store Ambrosi's information about Scaramuzzi and Antichrist. She and Brady had reviewed them at the airport as they waited for their flight. From this, they had developed a plan of action. It didn't amount to much, she knew. Still, she was all right with it.

When she had been working investigations, before the R&D stuff, she had a partner who'd been with the Bureau something like thirty years. Fatherly guy, tough as a railroad spike, smart as Alex Trebek. Jerome Moyers was his name, and he loved to turn his advice into proverbs. One of his favorites was, “Conducting an investigation is like panning for gold. You might scoop up a fist-sized nugget, but most likely you'll build up flakes until it amounts to something you can take to the bank.” When Alicia complained about the legwork and phone calls and interviews that seemed to add up to squat, he'd say, “You're panning, girl. Just keep panning.” And sure enough, almost without her realizing it, her team would have accumulated enough bits of evidence to take to the bank, which in their line of work meant a U.S. attorney.

Just as a survey of the clues and the options available had sent them to Rome, it was now sending them to Israel. They had believed Father Randall was in Rome. Instead, they'd found Cardinal Ambrosi, whose information gave them a new target: Luco Scaramuzzi. She'd still like to pin down Father Randall, but Ambrosi was convinced Randall would lead to Scaramuzzi anyway. If they were lucky, they'd run into both in Israel.

She and Brady had agreed to treat Ambrosi's suspicions about Scaramuzzi and the Watchers as fact. At least until they learned otherwise. On the surface, everything Ambrosi had said lined up with what they had already known: the person behind the murders and attacks possessed power and contacts, enough to track relatively anonymous FBI agents and arrange for their executions. The Antichrist story was flat-out weird, no doubt about it. But so were the grisly beheadings of so-called endears, to use Father McAfee's term; a killer who pretended to be—or really was—a Viking and used war dogs; a would-be assassin who tormented priests and freaked out about Satan and child sacrifices; and an FBI division chief who was afraid of a shadow organization that monitored the bizarre from an ivory tower in the nation's capital. Flat-out weird. All of it.