To Kill the Pope (19 page)

Tim knew, for instance, that Agca Circlic was a twenty-three-year-old Turkish citizen of Muslim religion with a strange record and a mysterious past. Italian investigators had established that Circlic had once belonged to Gray Wolves, a fascist terrorist
organization in Turkey. He had murdered a newspaper editor in Istambul for unclear reasons, then escaped from prison under unexplained circumstances though he had clearly been helped by someone in authority. Then Circlic had written a letter to a Turkish publication threatening to kill the pope, within a year of his election, just before Gregory XVII visited Turkey in order to display his friendship toward Islam. Actually, it had been a rather ill-conceived gesture inasmuch as Turkey was a completely secular state and, even though most of the population were of Islamic persuasion, a quiet one.

In any event, no evidence had been found to show that Circlic had pursued the pope in Turkey or, during ensuing years, anyplace else. Besides, Tim thought, the Gray Wolves were a right-wing outfit with no involvements with Islamic fundamentalists anywhere and therefore it would have been senseless to have Circlic, one of their “soldiers,” kill the Catholic pope. His own threat to assassinate Gregory XVII in Turkey made even less sense, but Tim was curious as to what had made him do it. Circlic, of course, may have been deranged—his subsequent behavior seemed to confirm it—with a psychotic obsession about the pope.

On the other hand, Tim reasoned, Circlic's personal hatred of Gregory XVII, whatever demented causes filled his brain, did make him a perfect choice for assassin-for-hire on the part of whomever was aware of his disposition. With his criminal record, if captured, Circlic could easily be disavowed by the instigators of the plot—should he have named who had hired him—or, preferably, liquidated. Tim recalled that Lee Harvey Oswald was shot to death by Jack Ruby two days after he had murdered Kennedy in Dallas and that, in turn, Ruby died under strange circumstances, possibly of cancer.

In Circlic's case, however, his “employers,” if they actually existed, had abandoned him to his fate. Nobody tried to do away with him and the Turk was easily arrested. That one or more Bulgarian officials, who may or may not have been their regime's secret police agents, were detained in the vicinity of the square shortly after the shooting proved nothing. The Bulgarian secret service was a dependency of the KGB, but Tim was inclined to accept the CIA's in-house conclusion that Soviet leaders were not
mad enough to wish to have the pope assassinated. Thus Circlic either acted on his own or was “thrown to the wolves,” as Tim had noted in his ledger before realizing that it was an involuntary pun on the Turk's erstwhile Turkish associates.

The Italian judiciary system proved no help, either. Although it had swiftly convicted Circlic, the Rome Court of Assizes had failed to go beyond the simple fact of proclaiming his guilt, which never was in dispute. The Turk had eagerly admitted to the police that he had shot Gregory XVII, then recanted and, most perplexingly, refused to testify at his trial. Italian law provides for trials even when defendants admit their guilt beforehand in order to determine the punishment to be meted out. Circlic had also undergone successive psychiatric tests, but, as Tim learned with dismay, Italian experts disagreed on the degree of his psychosis; some in fact did not find him to be psychotic.

There were only questions and no answers, and Tim was faced with the depressing discovery that each question arising in his mind served to raise additional questions. Why, for instance, Sainte-Ange had omitted to tell him about de Marenches' warning? And why he made a point of telling Tim that a “Muslim connection” must be envisaged? Only because Circlic was a Muslim? It was like being lost in a labyrinth.

Taking a deep breath, Tim started a new section in his ledger with three headings: SOVIETS—ISLAM—UNKNOWN. His instinct told him that the key to his investigation was under UNKNOWN. But where did UNKNOWN lie? All that Tim knew for sure was that the trail was turning cold. People were dying and people were lying.

*  *  *

The afternoon sun was beating down harshly on Santa Maria in Trastevere Square, one of Rome's most famous piazzas, as the thin, youngish Frenchman in his usual gray suit slid behind a small, round table of the crowded outdoor café and sat down in the chair next to Jake Kurtski.

“I see that you always like to be the first to arrive for a meeting,” the Frenchman remarked in the form of a greeting.

“Right,” Kurtski said, “I don't like surprises, like the wrong people awaiting me . . . So what's on your mind this time?”

The heat had turned Kurtski's fleshy face redder than usual, and his chest was sweating profusely under his sports shirt. The beer on the table in front of him was already warm. Kurtski was decidedly in a bad humor, worse than most of the time. He had returned to Rome the previous evening for the meeting with the Frenchman, but he disliked the city and was anxious to get back to his little beach house on the Algarve coast in Portugal, where he now lived from spring to autumn. Sex was good there if one had enough dollars, which Kurtski did, even if one were an oldish man. Algarve maidens had a solid business sense.

“Well, Mr. Kurtski,” the Frenchman told him in a low voice, “my principals have thought it over and they wish you to proceed with the plan we discussed last time we met. And your price is acceptable. One million U.S. dollars, right?”

“Right. One million dollars, one half now and one half after the assignment is completed. If it fails, we each are out a half million: I don't get the second payment and you don't have to make a second payment. Of course, I keep the first half no matter what happens. In fact, I won't start the project without a down payment.”

“Yes, we understand it and I am prepared to make the first payment even today if we work out all the details,” the Frenchman said. “We think that the accident should occur, as I mentioned before, aboard the plane . . . We believe it's more likely to succeed.”

“I guess you're right,” Kurtski concurred. “Obviously, you can't try again to shoot him. It's too
focking
chancy. And we saw with the Turk how easy it is to get caught. It's a good thing he didn't know who was paying him . . .”

The Frenchman nodded. “How much time would you need to prepare what has to be done?” he asked.

“It's not easy,” Kurtski replied, “and I would imagine that I might need two or three months ahead of a trip to get everything in shape. Do you have any idea when and where he is going next?”

The Frenchman consulted a small notebook he produced from his coat jacket.

“Well, let's see,” he said. “Okay. He's off to France next month, but that would be too soon for you . . . In September, it's North Africa and in October it is the United States. What do you think?”

“I would prefer the trip to the U.S. because Alitalia would be laying on a larger plane with more people for the long flight, and it's easier to bring explosives aboard and conceal them on a 747 or a 707 than on a DC-9 or a 727 that would be used to fly to North Africa. And that would give me plenty of time to set everything in motion. We can blow him up over the Atlantic . . .”

“Fine,” the Frenchman said. “It's a deal. We trust you. I shall deliver the money tonight if you tell me where you want it.”

Kurtski gave him the name of a small hotel near St. Peter's Square and watched the Frenchman rise from his chair and walk away into the crowd of tourists massed in front of the exquisitely beautiful church of Santa Maria di Trastevere.

M
ONSIGNOR
S
AINTE
-A
NGE
may have been right—or not—about the “Muslim connection” in the attack on Gregory XVII, but Tim Savage had to pursue this lead if for no other reason than that Agca Circlic was a Muslim and nothing could be ruled out. And the next logical step was to learn more about the young Turk.

Pondering on a hot summer afternoon how best to proceed and to which of his Islamic contacts in Turkey and elsewhere he might turn for assistance, Tim heard a knock on the door of his Villa Malta room. Opening it, he was handed by the porter of the residence a bulky green manila package. Inside, he found a personal file of the type used by the CIA, marked simply, AGCA CIRCLIC. A hand-printed note attached to the file said, “From your old buddy!” For the Rome Station Chief, “see no evil, hear no evil” was a flexible doctrine, even if it violated Agency rules.

Glancing excitedly through the fat file, Tim saw that he must have been given everything the CIA and its Rome Station had on Circlic and the Gray Wolves. And the file provided him with some gruesome facts. Circlic, it seemed, was a born thug and bully from a peasant family in a destitute Anatolian village. Psychologically and emotionally unstable, he had turned up in Istambul before he was twenty. There, he became notorious as a daring smuggler, black marketeer in alcohol and weapons, small-time drug dealer, and enforcer for Turkish organized crime bosses. These qualifications attracted the attention of the leadership of the Gray Wolves. Circlic was just the man for them.

The Wolves were squads specializing for the past twenty years or so in assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings on behalf of well-paying “clients” or for their own usually unclear reasons. These “clients,” Tim read, included Turkey's secret service and
the Counter-Guerrilla Organization of the Army's Special Warfare Department, principally concerned with liquidating political dissidents and Kurdish separatists. The Counter-Guerrilla Organization, which occasionally supplied arms to the Gray Wolves, was largely funded by the Pentagon inasmuch as Turkey was a NATO ally of the United States. And there surely was a CIA link as well. The Wolves were, pure and simple, death squads. Tim Savage shuddered: shades of Phoenix, he thought.

Soon after enlisting in the Gray Wolves, Circlic rose to a key position under their chief, Abdullah Catli, a convicted murderer and heroin trafficker who also was on the payroll of the Turkish secret police. It was unclear, however, on whose orders and why Circlic had assassinated the editor of the Turkish newspaper
Millyet.
It could not have been his own idea, Tim believed, because it simply made no sense—as so much in the investigation he had undertaken for the pope had not. But it was Catli who helped Circlic escape from prison, a significant detail, apparently dug up by the CIA, that Tim had not found in Italian investigatory reports, and supplied him with fake identity papers and money to travel around Europe prior to the attack on Gregory XVII. And Catli had testified four years later at a Rome trial of a group of Turks and Bulgarians accused of conspiring against the pope that he had provided Circlic with the pistol to fire at the pontiff. The world press had missed that story.

Tim was now virtually convinced that Circlic had shot at Gregory XVII on orders from the Wolves and had been paid by them. But there was nothing in the CIA file to suggest
why
they had wished the pope dead, and Tim was taking for granted at that point that the Wolves had acted on behalf of a “client.” Absent fanatic religious impulses against the head of another religion, they clearly had no interest in killing the Roman Catholic pontiff. They were, first and foremost, professionals. That Circlic himself had described the attack as “a desperate act to make history” in talking to the Italian police that afternoon was meaningless. Tim doubted very much that the Turk had the slightest notion why he had done the deed: someone must have told him that he would be engaging in a “desperate act” and would “make history,” and he simply repeated it—believing every word. And, for that matter, Tim
could not be certain that Circlic's letter threatening to kill Gregory XVII had actually been written by him. It might have been part of a carefully prepared disinformation effort, a subject familiar to Tim from his CIA days.

Whatever Sainte-Ange had meant by “Muslim connection,” Tim had to follow the thread—with luck it might lead him out of the labyrinth, like Ariadne's thread in mythology. The thread for now led to the Wolves and their friends.

*  *  *

Tim Savage was on a nonstop Alitalia flight from Rome's Fiumicino Airport to Istambul, looking for all the world like a conservative businessman in his well-cut gray suit from Brioni. He preferred not to call attention to himself on the plane though he felt pleasantly elegant with his silk blue shirt and dark blue figured necktie. Sister Angela, who disbursed funds for his expenses, did not bat an eye at the sky-high Brioni bill.

“Your vows of poverty do not preclude elegance when you are in quest of a greater truth,” she told him lightly. “You have to make a good impression.”

“Thank you,” Tim said just as lightly. “But I do try to remember my other vows.”

Angela blushed and averted her eyes. It had been the third time that Tim had visited her small office on the second
loggia
of the Apostolic Palace since he entered papal service to pass on his nonprogress reports for Monsignor Sainte-Ange, request special materials he did not wish to mention even over the secure telephone line, and collect operational money. Each time, Tim felt pleasantly ill at ease in her presence, suspecting that the French nun was not wholly indifferent to him—as a man. But now he damned himself for his flip remark about chastity. I am flirting with her in the house of the pope, he told himself. I am sinning. This must stop.

And it was about Angela more than about Circlic that Tim was daydreaming as the jet airliner crossed the Italian peninsula, the Adriatic, a slice of Albania and Greece, and the Aegean Sea, before landing gently in Istambul. Yes, these
were
impure thoughts. He sighed and disembarked on Turkish soil.

At the reception desk at the Conrad Istambul Hotel on the bank of the Bosphorus, Tim was greeted cheerfully as “Mr. Savage”
and assigned a room with a marvelous view of the straits, just east. Asia loomed across the waterway. Angela had made the hotel reservation through a Rome travel agent experienced in arranging sensitive Vatican trips. Paul Martinius had seen to it that Tim received a new U.S. passport with a photograph showing him in a civilian suit, shirt, and tie; his regular passport showed him in clerical collar. Details were essential in Tim's type of endeavor.