The Sam Gunn Omnibus (93 page)

“Aw,
shit, Jill,” he said, frowning. “Now she’s got you, too.”

It
hit me at last. Turning to Josella, I said, ”
You’re
an assassin!”

She
nodded, her face very serious.

“She
wants to waste me,” Sam said gloomily, not moving from the bed.

“But
why?” I blurted.

Josella
kept the pistol rock-steady in her hand. “Because the ayatollahs are unanimous
in their decision that this unbeliever must die.”

“You’re
a Moslem?”

She
smiled tightly. “Not all Moslem women wear veils and chadors, Senator Meyers.”

“But
why would the Moslems want to kill Sam? He’s suing the Pope, not Islam.”

“He
is making a travesty of all religions. He is mocking God. The Church of Rome
has yet to see the light of true revelation, but we slaves of Allah can’t allow
this blasphemy to continue.”

“It’s
Islam’s contribution to global religious solidarity,” Sam said, disgust
dripping from his words.

“I
had wanted to do it cleanly, professionally,” Josella said, “without any
complications.”

“That’s
why you let Sam into your room,” I said.

“Yes,”
she said. “To give the condemned man his last wish. Although Sam didn’t know he
was condemned when I granted his wish.”

“So
you made it with her, after all,” I said to Sam, angrily.

He
made a sour face. “She screwed me, all right.”

“And
now what?” I asked Josella. “You kill us both?”

“I’m
afraid so.”

“And
how do you get away?”

She
shrugged. Inside that sheer nightgown it looked delicious, even to me. “There’s
a shuttle leaving for Earth orbit at midnight. Passage on it has already been
booked for a young man named Shankar. By the time your bodies are discovered I will
be Mr. Shankar, complete with mustache and beard.” “It’ll have to be a damned
good disguise,” Sam groused.

Almost
smiling, Josella said, “It will be. Even my fingerprints will be different.”

“You
said you’re a professional,” I stalled for time. “You mean you’ve done this
kind of thing before?”

Josella
nodded slowly. “For six years. My job has been to assassinate policy-holders
whose estates would go to Islamic causes.”

“You’ve
worked for insurance companies and they never knew?”

“Of
course not.”

“She’s
a lawyer, for chrissake,” Sam snapped. “She’s trained to lie.”

The
phone rang. We heard Josella’s taped voice say sweetly, “I am not able to
answer your call right now. Please leave your name and I’ll call you back as
soon as I possibly can.”

“Josella?”
I recognized that bombastic voice. It was Frank Banner. “This is Banner. Haven’t
been able to sleep for the past two nights. This damned business with Sam Gunn
is driving me nuts. He’s actually going ahead with his suit in the World Court,
is he? Damned little pissant jerk! We can’t let him drag the Pope through the mud
the way he wants to. We just can’t! Tell him we’ll settle with him. Not his
damned half-billion, that’s outrageous. But tell him we’ll work out something
reasonable if he’ll drop this damned lawsuit.”

I
felt my mouth drop open. I looked at Sam and he was
grinning as if he’d been expecting this all along.

“And
tell him that if I ever see him in the same room with me I’ll break every bone
in his scrawny goddamned neck! Tell him that, too!”

The
phone connection clicked dead. Sam flopped back on the bed and whooped
triumphantly.

“I
knew it!” he yelled. “I knew that Francis Xavier Banner couldn’t let the Pope
come to trial. I knew the tightfisted sonofabitch would finally break down and
offer to settle my insurance claims!” He laughed wildly, kicking his bare hairy
legs in the air and pounding the mattress with his fists.

I
just stood there, dumbfounded. Had this whole
complex procedure been nothing more than an elaborate scheme by Sam to get his insurance
carrier to accept his accident claims? Yes, I realized. That was Sam Gunn at
his wiliest: threaten the Pope to get what he considered he was owed.

The
gun in Josella’s hand wavered, then she let her arm drop to her side.

“You
don’t have to kill Sam now,” I said. “There’s not going to be a court case
after all.”

“No,”
she said. “The blasphemer must still die.”

Sam
got to his bare feet, clutching the bed sheet around his middle like a Roman
senator who didn’t quite know how to drape his toga properly.

“You’re
a fraud,” Sam said.

Josella’s
dark eyes snapped at him. “Fraud?”

“You’re
about as professional a killer as that fat blonde Daughter.”

“You
think so?” Josella’s voice went hard and cold, like an ice-pick. She still had
the gun in her hand.

“You
said professionals do the job without hesitation,” Sam said. “No talk, just
boom, you’re dead.”

Josella
nodded.

“So
you’re an amateur,” Sam said, grinning at her. “You did a lot more than talk
before you hauled out your gun.”

“I
did that with all the others, too,” Josella said. It was a flat statement,
neither a boast nor an excuse. “It’s my trademark. Two of the older men I didn’t
even have to kill; they died of natural causes.”

“Bullshit
all the others. You’ve never killed anybody and we both know it.”

“You’re
wrong—”

“Yeah,
sure. I’m going to start believing what a lawyer tells me, at my advanced age.”

Josella
looked confused. I know I was.

But
Sam knew exactly what he was doing. “Put your gun back wherever the hell you
were hiding it and get out of here,” he told her. “Get on the midnight shuttle
and don’t come back.”

“I
can’t do that,” said Josella. “My mission is to kill you—or die. If I let you
go, they’ll kill me.”

“Oh
shit,” Sam muttered.

“You
mean that your own people will murder you if you don’t kill Sam?”

Josella
nodded. “I must succeed or die. That is what I promised them.”

With
a disgusted frown, Sam clutched his bed-sheet a little tighter and reached for
the phone with his free hand.

“Don’t!”
Josella warned, raising her gun.

“I’m
not calling security.”

“Then
who ... ?”

Sam
called Pope William. The Pope looked shocked, even on the tiny screen of the
Picturephone, and even more surprised when Sam told him what his call was
about.

“Sanctuary,”
he said. “This lady here needs your protection.”

Blinking sleep from his steely
eyes, Pope William said, “Maybe you’d better come over here to explain this to
me.”

It was almost comical watching Sam
and Josella get dressed while she still tried to keep her pistol on us. Then
the three of us trotted down the nearly empty corridors, back to the Pope’s
quarters. Two of his own security men, Swiss guards in plain coveralls, were
waiting for us.

They brought us to a kind of
sitting room, a bare little cell with four chairs grouped around a coffee
table. Nothing else in the room: not a decoration or any refreshments or even a
carpet on the stone floor. Josella sat down warily, put her pistol on her lap.

Pope William entered the room a few
moments after we did. He was wearing a white sweatshirt and an old pair of
Levis and he still filled the room with a warm brilliance.

It was long past midnight before
Sam got the whole thing explained to the Pope. Josella didn’t help, insisting
that she wanted no help from unbelievers.

“I won’t try to convert you,”
William said, smiling at her. “But I can offer you protection and help you
create a new persona for yourself.”

“A kind of witness protection plan,”
Sam said, trying to encourage her. “See, we’re bringing the Vatican into the
twenty-first century.”

Me? I was stewing. The two of them
were falling all over themselves trying to help Josella and ignoring me
altogether.

Josella was starting to nod, seeing
that maybe there was a way out of the blind corner she’d trapped herself in.
She took the gun from her lap, popped open its magazine, and laid the pieces on
the coffee-table.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll go
along with you.”

“But what about those other
killings?” I heard myself blurt out. “She’s admitted to murdering God knows how
many men!”

Sam glowered at me.

Pope William smiled. “How do we
know, Senator Meyers, that this entire episode—Sam’s lawsuit, my coming to the
Moon, the various assassination attempts—how do we know that all of this hasn’t
been God’s way of bringing this one woman to repentance and salvation?”

“I won’t convert,” Josella snapped.
“I’m a Moslem.”

“Of course,” said the Pope. “I only
want you to change your life, not your religion.”

“All this,” I heard the disbelief
in my own voice, “just for her?”

“There is more joy in heaven over
one sinner who’s redeemed than there is over one of the faithful,” Pope William
said.

Even
God was concentrating on Josella, I thought, ashamed of my jealousy but feeling
it seething inside me nonetheless.

Sam
grinned at him. “So you think this whole thing has been an act of God, huh?”

“Everything
is an act of God,” said Pope William. “Isn’t that right, Josella?”

She
nodded silently.

Sam
and I left Josella with the Pope. As we walked back along the corridors I tried
to stop feeling so damned jealous. But the thought of her with Pope William
just plain boiled me. All of a sudden it struck me that Josella might be more
of a threat to William than she was to Sam. His soul, that is; not his body.

I
started to laugh.

“What’s
so funny?” Sam asked.

“Nothing,”
I said. “It’s just—everything’s turned upside down and inside out.”

“Nope,”
Sam said. “Everything worked out just the way I thought it would. Ol’ Francis
X. was an altar boy, y’know. Went to Notre Dame and almost became a priest,
before he found out how much he enjoyed making money.”

“You
knew that all along?”

“I
was counting on it,” Sam answered cheerfully.

We
were at my door. I realized I was very weary, drained physically and
emotionally. Sam looked as chipper as a sparrow, despite the hour.

“Tomorrow’s
Christmas Eve,” he said.

I
tapped my wristwatch. “You mean today; it’s well
past midnight.”

“Right.
I gotta get a high-g boost direct to Rome set up for Billy Boy if he’s gonna
say Christmas Eve mass in St. Peter’s. Even then it’s gonna be awful close. See
ya!”

He
hustled down the corridor to his own suite, whistling shrilly off-key. And that’s
the last I saw of Sam until Christmas.

POPE WILLIAM WAS
overjoyed, of course. He invited me
to breakfast that morning, just before his high-boost shuttle was set to take
off. Even Cardinal Hagerty managed to smile, although it looked as if the
effort might shatter his stony face. Josella was nowhere in sight, though.

“My
prayers have been answered,” the Pope told me.

“The
Lord certainly moves in mysterious ways,” I said.

“Indeed
She does,” said the Pope, with a mischievous wink.

More mysterious than either of us
realized at the time. Sam set up a direct high-g flight to Rome for the papal
visitors, so that Pope William could get back in time for his Christmas Eve mass
in St. Peter’s. But all of a sudden an intense solar flare erupted and raised
radiation levels in cis-
l
unar space so
high that all flights between the Earth and the Moon had to be canceled. All
work on the lunar surface stopped and everybody had to stay underground for
forty-eight hours. It was as if God was forcing all of Selene’s residents and
visitors to observe the Christmas holiday.