The Third Revelation (39 page)

Rodriguez had taken Traeger to a nearby building that housed the Augustinians, from the roof of which they could study the North American College. Traeger brought it all closer with the binoculars Rodriguez handed him, checking the doorway that gave entrance to the roof, moving the glasses along the low ledge bordering it. There were chairs and tables scattered about. Students must go up there to relax, for the view. There was no one on the roof at the time.

Rodriguez drew his attention to other buildings higher up the hill from the college.

“You'll be in view at all times.”

“No,” Traeger said. “I gave my word.”

“That you would come alone. And so you shall.”

“The man is a pro, Carlos. The first thing he would have done is make just such a survey as this. He would know if I'm not alone.”

Reluctantly, Rodriguez agreed that he would not have men on those nearby buildings. Traeger wished that he could believe him.

He had printed out the assassination report that had been on the hard drive of his laptop all along. The pre-edited report, from which Dortmund had excised all indications of their own involvement in those long-ago events before he turned it in. It was in exchange for that report that Anatoly would turn over the authentic third secret of Fatima.

“Wednesday,” Anatoly had said on Monday.

“Wednesday.”

“I will meet you on the roof.”

“What time?”

“Three.”

“Okay.”

“Three in the morning.”

Traeger smiled. Anatoly was a pro. The college would be asleep; it would be too dark for observers to monitor the exchange from nearby buildings.

“I'll be there.”

On Tuesday at two in the afternoon Traeger's cell phone vibrated.

“Yes?”

“Now.” It was the voice of Anatoly.

The connection was broken. The Three Little Pigs. Anatoly wanted to meet a day earlier than agreed. Traeger approved. Now he need not worry that Rodriguez would have people watching over the exchange.

Taken literally, “now” meant the time Anatoly had called. But Traeger had to get from the Casa del Clero to the North American College, a fair distance in the best of conditions, but now, with the city still erupting, public transportation shut down, and the whine of sirens as fire trucks tried to control conflagrations, it was like crossing a battlefield during a major operation. He could only hope Anatoly took into consideration the difficulties he faced.

He took a circuitous route, avoiding the Piazza Navona, crossing the Vittorio Emanuele through a crowd of demonstrators, cutting through the Campo dei Fiori to the river. The North American College was across the Tiber, and the bridge was jammed with abandoned cars, charred ruins that had gone up in flames on the first day of the riots. Traeger picked his way among them. In the backseat of one half-intact vehicle, a couple snuggled, love among the ruins.

On the far side, Traeger took out his cell phone and pressed buttons as he walked. The hope that he would find the number from which Anatoly had called recorded on his phone so he could tell him he was coming was rewarded. He punched and listened through a dozen rings, moving swiftly as he did.

“Pronto.”

“Anatoly?” Traeger asked.

“Eh?”

Traeger hung up. He had not reached Anatoly's cell phone. A public phone? Were they still working? Thanks to satellites, communication through cell phones was the one sure way left during this tumultuous upheaval.

Lev, the portiere, was apparently expecting him. He was an unshaven man whose eyes would not meet Traeger's. He let Traeger in without a word and pointed him to the stairway.

“Is he up there?”

Lev shrugged.

By the time Traeger got up the final staircase and was facing the door to the roof he was huffing and puffing. He paused to catch his breath. He was not as young as he used to be, no doubt of that. But who was? He pushed the door open and went out onto the roof. Immediately his eyes were drawn to the great dome of Saint Peter's to his left. It was so close that he felt that he could reach out and touch it. He looked around the roof, but there was no sign of Anatoly. Traeger crossed to the ledge and sat. Anatoly must have watched him enter the building and would be waiting to make sure he was really alone.

Traeger shook a cigarette from his package and lit up. A low animal roar lifted from the streets below. He could not see Saint Peter's Square but knew that, as it had been for days, it was filled with an angry chanting crowd. They had been calling for the pope to show himself at the window, as he did for the Angelus on Sundays. What would they do if they knew that the pope was not in the Vatican?

He finished his cigarette, checked his watch, and waited. Half an hour went by, and still he waited. Had something gone wrong? When he moved his arm, he could feel the printout in his inner pocket. He looked at the buildings higher up on the hill. Would Anatoly have observed him come onto the roof from a vantage point up there before coming to join him?

After an hour and two more cigarettes, impatience grew. And then he felt the vibration of his phone.

“Yes?”

“Later.” Anatoly.

“Later than what?”

No reply.

“When?”

But the connection was broken. He returned the cell phone to his pocket and went angrily to the doorway. Going down all those stairs was easier than coming up them, but he was now in a foul mood. When he got to the ground floor, there was no sign of Lev. Seminarians were moving up and down the hallway.

He tried to see the exchange through Anatoly's eyes. Anatoly would know the value of the document he had, how desperately it was wanted by the Vatican. How tempting it would be to overpower him, repossess their stolen property, to hell with any exchange. Grudgingly, he approved of Anatoly's caution.

Since he was so close, he decided to visit Heather.

Sub specie aeternitatis.

Heather Adams was told by Father John Burke that Laura had called, anxious about her. She wanted to send a plane to bring Heather home.

“Has Vincent contacted you, Father?”

“No.”

“I wouldn't want to just go off and leave him.”

The difficulty lay in knowing how long Traeger meant to stay in Rome. Returning to the States presented difficulties for him, of course. After all, he had been a hunted man when they flew off together in the Empedocles plane. The truth was that Heather was looking for an excuse to prolong her stay.

At the convent, she followed the routine of the nuns, the office in chapel, Mass, periods of silence, but also the usual housekeeping chores, laundry, keeping everything spotless. For several hours in the afternoon, they sat in the common room, sewing, painting, reading, the happy babble a contrast to the bracketing silences. How innocent they all seemed, how untouched by the world. Did they realize what was going on just outside the Vatican walls, in Rome, in cities throughout the world? In college, Heather had seen a performance of Bernanos's
Dialogues of the Carmelites
, set in a convent during the time when the French Revolution turned bloodiest and the decision was made to stamp out religion. All those nuns were eventually guillotined and Heather remembered the singing as they mounted the scaffold, going out of sight of the audience, the number of voices diminishing until there was only one singer. Then silence. What a dreadful thought that these happy, holy women faced a similar fate.

The seed of Heather's conversion had been planted by that play.

In the convent, the point of life was brought into brilliant focus. Our few years on earth are given us so that we might prepare for eternity. Yet most lives are passed in distraction, in busyness, in fretting and worrying about things of only passing importance. It is as if most lives are lived in order to obscure the point of it all, to become forgetful that all our joys and sorrows here must end in death. Once, in a philosophy class, the professor had asked them what they thought of death. As little as possible, would have been the honest answer. And then he had asked whether, in the light of all the advances in medicine, they thought a cure for death would be forthcoming. Most of the students had thought so! As if mortality were a flaw that could be remedied by medicine. Postponed, surely, and made more tolerable, but eradicated? And Heather realized that she, too, had some such thought, insofar as she thought of it at all. These cheerful nuns with whom she was staying lived their lives
sub specie aeternitatis
. Once, she might have thought it morbid to have the constant reminder that this is a vale of tears, that we are meant for something incredibly greater, union with God himself. Heather came to dread the thought that she must eventually leave this community and go back to her old life. She thought of her oratory and it seemed such a poor substitute for the routine of the convent.

Was that a temptation? She scarcely dared think that she had a vocation to the religious life. Her job at Empedocles awaited her, with all the time-consuming tasks that made up her day.

In the convent library she found a book,
Fatima in Lucia's Own Words
, the memoirs of the surviving seer of Fatima, after she had become a nun, a Carmelite. Interleafed with the printed pages were facsimiles of the original document, in Sister Lucia's handwriting. Reading the book, Heather realized how weird it was that the handwritten document recounting the so-called secrets of Fatima had ended up in Empedocles, brought there by Father Brendan Crowe. It must have been to get possession of that document that the man who had broken into the guest residence had killed the Irish priest, and then, surprised, fled without the thing he had come for. Heather had taken it home for safekeeping in her oratory and later gave it to Vincent Traeger. He had put it in the safe in his office. His secretary had been murdered, the safe broken into, and the document stolen. Where was it now?

Most horrifying of all was the forged document that Gabriel Faust had bought with millions of dollars of Mr. Hannan's money and that Father Trepanier had made public, using it as a weapon in his strange crusade. As a result, the world had erupted in such a way that Heather was reminded of the madness that had swirled around the Paris convent that provided the scene for
Dialogues of the Carmelites
.

Later that day, in chapel, the Mother Superior had come to Heather and whispered that she had a visitor. Heather left the chapel with reluctance. The Mother Superior had asked her earlier to speak to a reporter who wanted to do a story on the convent, Angela di Piperno. Heather could see that the young woman regarded the contemplative life the nuns led with fascinated dread.

“Are you a postulant?” she asked Heather.

“Good heavens, no. I'm just a guest.”

“Tell me about yourself.”

The young woman's question had so surprised Heather that she obliged.

Now Vincent Traeger was waiting for her in the visiting parlor.

“You've shaved off your beard.”

“It looked too much like a disguise, Heather. Father Burke tells me that his sister Laura thinks you should get out of here and go home.”

“Will you go, too?”

He paused. “There is something I have to do first.”

“The third secret?”

“Yes.”

“I can wait.”

He thought about it. “You're safe here, in any case.”

Vincent told her that he had made arrangements to exchange a report he had written for the authentic document.

“You know who has it?” Heather asked.

“He contacted me.”

“Who is it?”

He looked away, as if trying to think of a way to say it. “A killer. A former Soviet agent.”

“A killer.”

He nodded. “He killed Father Crowe, for one. Beatrice, my secretary, for another.”

“Good Lord. Vincent, you must be careful!”

“I am dealing with a careful man.”

“What on earth does he want that document for?”

“It is what I have that he wants. We will trade.”

“And then we can go home?”

“Things should settle down once it can be shown that the passage Father Trepanier made public is a forgery.”

He did not sound very hopeful of that result, at least as an immediate consequence of allowing representatives of those who had been enraged by what Father Trepanier had made public to compare it with the original document.

“When will you make the exchange?” she asked.

“I'm waiting to hear.”

“God bless you, Vincent.”

He seemed startled by the sentiment. Heather was a bit surprised herself that she had uttered it. It was a phrase that lost its meaning by repetition, like “good-bye.” She had some inkling of how Vincent had spent his life, from their conversations while she was putting him up in her house. Was the man he was to meet his counterpart? Had Vincent, too, killed?

She went with him to the door and watched him go down the pathway toward the basilica. One had no sense in Saint Peter's Square that the Vatican was indeed a hill, one of the seven hills of Rome, but within the walls the steep paths, the long ascent from the Domus Sanctae Marthae, made that inescapable.

Heather remained outside, using her cell phone to call Laura. It was still morning in New Hampshire.

“Is it as bad as it seems on television, Heather?” Laura asked.

“They've put me in a convent inside the Vatican where all is peace and quiet.”

“Heather, Mr. Hannan is very anxious about you. He feels responsible for letting you go there.”

“He mustn't worry, Laura. I am perfectly all right.”