Relic of Time (4 page)

“Get it,” someone repeated.

Traeger could see that his companions had no idea how they were to carry out that barked order from the commander in chief. Through the car's tinted glass, Washington in the rain seemed to be melting as they sped through it. What the hell am I doing here? Traeger wondered. But he already knew. He had put essentially the same question to himself when he had been summoned by his old boss, Dortmund, to his new address.

“A retirement home?”

“Don't call it that.”

“What do you call it?”

“Third base. Maybe, stealing home.” With the plastic tubes feeding oxygen into his nostrils, Dortmund looked almost grotesque when he smiled. Good God, were they still relying on him?

The topic, of course, was the unpleasantness along the southern border. Traeger stirred in his chair. All this he could get from the media. Already he had the uneasy certitude as to why he had been summoned.

“Grady,” Dortmund said. It might have been a groan.

“Grady,” Traeger repeated.

Theophilus Grady. What a cowboy. Traeger had watched the El Paso press conference on television and the sight of the maverick who had been drummed out of the agency made all the commotion seem a farce. Did Grady really have the stolen image?

“He could just be taking advantage of the situation,” Traeger had told Dortmund.

“Someone has that image.”

Traeger nodded. If Grady was bluffing—and when wasn't he?—the real thieves would not be happy to have their thunder stolen. Dortmund was shaking his head, and the plastic tubes caught the sunlight. They were in a little patio reached through sliding doors from the living room of his condo in what he refused to acknowledge was a retirement village. Dortmund continued to shake his head.

“Not even Grady. I told them you were the man to track him down.”

Traeger lit a cigarette and Dortmund watched him enviously. Even with emphysema, he looked as if he were about to ask for one. It had been thoughtless to light up before the old man.

Now, across the river in a windowless room, the three who had accompanied him from the White House sat in silence. Who was in charge?

Boswell, the man in the glen plaid suit and polka-dot tie, his silvery hair falling across his forehead, looked at Traeger.

“You know this fellow Grady?”

“I knew him.”

Silence.

“Can you find him?”

It might have been a job interview. Why the hell, with all the resources at their command, weren't they already in search of Grady?

“I'll find him.”

“Get it,” the one with a paunch said. The others smiled at the quotation.

After a moment, Traeger nodded.

For the next several hours, he was taken from office to office and readied for his mission. The reason for using someone no longer connected with the Company became clear. The official view was that the little war raging on the southern border was just a minor dustup, no need to make a federal case of it. Better to have a trained freelancer remove the cause of the skirmishes.

“We'll get it back where it belongs when you recover it.”

Traeger remembered a rooftop in Rome when his old colleagues had become the enemy. He wondered if he could trust them now.

When he left, he was armed, briefed, provided with a variety of IDs. He was driven to Reagan by Boswell.

“How is Dortmund?”

“Old.”

Boswell nodded as if age was something that happened to others. “He's a legend.”

“That's what he tells me.”

“He praised you to the skies.”

No need to comment on that.

At the airport, he got out, having shaken Boswell's hand. He hurried into the terminal, past the baggage area, and into a men's room. Ten minutes later, he emerged and crossed the street and climbed the stairs to the Metro station. He was on his own and he would start now.

Back in the city, he went to Amtrak and bought a ticket to Chicago, a roomette for the overnight journey. There were several hours before his train would leave. He went outside, where, from a bench, he called Dortmund.

On the phone, the old man sounded vigorous and almost young. Traeger told him about his day.

“Thanks for recommending me.”

“What else do you have to do?”

Did Dortmund think that he, too, spent his days sitting in the sun on a patio?

“Watch your back” was Dortmund's final word of advice.

Traeger had dinner before boarding the train and once he was on, locked himself in his roomette. He let down the table and opened the laptop he had been issued. His own was in his briefcase. Before the train pulled out of the station, he was reading what the agency had on Theophilus Grady. The old stuff he already knew, but it was clear that Grady had been under surveillance ever since he organized the Rough Riders.

Grady was a throwback. He would have flourished under Wild Bill Donovan, but had rubbed the bureaucracy that had grown up over the years the wrong way. Grady had wanted war when the policy of the Company was truce. His last assignment had been in Albania, where he had led a band of rebels who descended from their mountain redoubts to raise hell and havoc. That an American was involved in those incidents had infuriated the State Department. Grady had failed to respond to orders to get the hell out of Albania and come home. In the end, they'd had to go for him, Traeger and others. He was metaphorically stripped of his epaulets and fired from the Company. Predictably, he had called a news conference to protest the lily-livered policies that were leading the country into ruin. After his five minutes of fame, he disappeared from public view. But not from surveillance.

“We have a man in his outfit,” Traeger had been told.

He waited.

“No need to know his name.”

“What has he said about the stolen image?”

There was a long silence. “We think he may have gone over.”

In his roomette, Traeger smiled. He realized he had more respect for Grady than for the well-groomed men who had briefed him. But what in hell was the guy doing stealing religious images? What he said, no doubt. Diplomacy and threats had not stemmed the tide of illegal immigration. It seemed doubtful whether the will to stem it existed. Sacrilege aside, Grady had hit upon a sure way to catch the attention of our neighbors across the border. Even if he wasn't behind the theft, he had turned it to his advantage.

Somewhere in western Pennsylvania, Traeger let down his bunk and lay on it fully clothed. With the lights off, the window no longer mirrored the roomette and he lay on his side and watched the country slide by, clusters of lights from time to time, the dim silhouette of farm buildings, and trees, trees, trees. Well, the state was Penn's woods, after all.

Would he be able to find the tree he sought in the woods he was about to enter?

Her father had been astounded when Clare Ibanez told him that she had taken a job as secretary to their new neighbor, Jason Phelps.

“The man's an atheist!”

“It's not catching.”

“What kind of work would you do?”

“He is trying to put order into his papers, his publications, a lifetime accumulation.”

“He would be wiser to burn it all.”

Jason Phelps had taught at Berkeley for most of his academic life. His renown as an anthropologist was all but eclipsed by the personal crusade he had undertaken a decade or so ago. It was one thing to encounter superstition in backward tribes and civilizations, but the fact that mad beliefs had survived into the late twentieth century and now into the third millennium stirred him to zealous debunking. His little book on the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius in Naples was scathingly dismissive. He had tried, without success, to obtain some small portion of whatever liquid was in the reliquary.

“Of course my request was refused,” he wrote. “It would be like a magician permitting you to see how he accomplishes his deception.”

So, too, at Nevers in France, he had sought permission to examine the incorrupt body of Saint Bernadette, the seer of Lourdes. He was given accounts of the several exhumations that had preceded putting the body in its glass case, on view to the faithful. The fact that he was given the accounts made him skeptical of them.

But it was Lourdes itself that had drawn his particular fury. There, scientists with undeniable credentials subjected supposed cures to just the kind of painstaking examination that Phelps himself advocated. And time and again they concluded that there was no natural explanation for the fact that a person suffering from a terminal illness had come to Lourdes, prayed to Our Lady in the grotto in which she had appeared, drank the water, and came away cured. Certified by scientists! It was too much to bear. To give the patina of objective truth to such preposterous claims! Of course there must be a psychological explanation, some psychophysical power that science had yet to identify, something perfectly natural, triggered perhaps by the visit to Lourdes, but scarcely the result of sending up a few prayers to a simpering statue. What could not happen had not happened; it was as simple as that.

Two years before, Phelps, a retired widower, had bought property in the Napa Valley, just a few acres from the vast estate of Don Ibanez, no great loss to the vineyards, and on it he had built the comfortable two-story house in which he intended to spend his last years, years after which he was positive that nothing but nothingness awaited him.

Clare's father paid a courtesy call on their new neighbor in his role as hidalgo of the locality. The Ibanez family had settled in California five hundred years earlier, the first arriving with the conquistadores, others attached to the Jesuit and Franciscan missions. It was early in the eighteenth century that the Ibanez family had come to the Napa Valley. Their real estate had embraced fifty square miles, much of it vineyards that produced the grapes from which their wines were made. Don Ibanez, as he styled himself, presented a dozen bottles of wine to Jason Phelps and welcomed him to the neighborhood.

Some days later, Phelps returned the courtesy, presenting Clare's father with signed copies of several of his books, all anthropology. Don Ibanez still had no inkling that Phelps was a crusading debunker of things religious. Nor did this come out when he took Phelps to the chapel some fifty yards from the house. It was a replica of the basilica in Mexico City, and within, as in the original, there was the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe high above the altar.

“No need for a moving walkway here, of course.”

“Moving walkway?” Phelps asked.

Clare's father was happy to explain.

“Why go to Mexico when they could come here?” Phelps had asked.

Don Ibanez laughed. “But this is merely a reproduction. The actual cape with the image on it is in the shrine in Mexico City.”

“Interesting.”

Thus civility and reticence got the two men through what might have been a testing encounter. It was not until a week later that Frater Leone, a Benedictine who lived in the hacienda and said Mass in the little basilica, identified their neighbor for her father.

“The man who wrote the book about the shroud of Turin,” the priest explained. The two men spoke Spanish when they were together.

“But he was obviously impressed by the chapel here!”

“That surprises me. He is a belligerent atheist.”

“Atheist!”

His book on the shroud of Turin was written to refute any suggestion that the tests that had been made, careful scientific tests, supported the legend that had made the shroud an object of veneration as the cloth in which the body of Jesus was buried and on which was found, like a photographic negative, an image of the body it had enclosed.