The Second Saladin

“Sam—”

“Wait, Miles. Let me finish.”

He fixed Miles in his calm gaze, seeming to draw him in, to make him absolutely his. “Paul hates us. You have to understand, though I wonder if you’re old enough, the kind of man he is. The kind of grudge he’s capable of manufacturing. A certain kind of mentality can tighten, can fix, on a situation and turn it inside out. And come to believe — genuinely believe — his own version of it. It’s a lesson in the human capacity for self-deceit, the power of will over reality. Chardy has this talent; it’s a characteristic of the fanatic and it’s what makes them such potent, such powerful, such astonishing men. In a way I admire it, and wish I had a little of this power for myself. For these men, to admit any but their own vision is to doom themselves. Their strength is their will, their absolutism; their weakness is their inflexibility.

“Miles” — he looked especially hard into Miles’s dark, small eyes, nailing him back against the chair — “you’ve seen his file. The Russians turned him; they broke him in two. He gave them the Kurds, and the woman he loved, driving her from him forever, turning her against him in the cruelest of ways. And make no mistake, love is a very powerful, an almost magical force for a man like Chardy. You’ve no idea how a man like him needs it. So God knows what kind of construction he’s put on his own betrayal; and God knows what her death has now done to him.”

Miles nodded. He felt curiously full of faith; in his own Church, in the Agency, and in Sam. Some of Sam’s wisdom entered his soul, as if Sam had willed it there.

“Miles, there’ll come a time when he’ll test you. He’ll demand you make a choice. A choice between himself and us. And I warn you, he can be very attractive. He has that rough grace that commands. In a crisis he radiates energy and purpose. You’ll see it in his eyes. I’m convinced that the reason Speight was killed and Trewitt is missing is that they exceeded their instructions from Ver Steeg and were off on some crazy mandate from Paul. You saw what it brought them.”

Tell him, thought Miles. Tell the priest. Confess. He was in a dark booth and could only feel the power of the man’s love, his warmth, his infinite wisdom through the screen. He ached to tell. Tell him: Trewitt’s alive. He’s still on the case. You’re right, Sam Chardy the treacherous is working something.

“Miles, Chardy is not stupid. He seems stupid, he can play dumb better than any man I’ve ever seen. If you read through the transcripts on the Saladin Two inquiry, you’ll think you’re seeing a stupid man, a man so shocked and addled and fatigued that he is unable to defend himself. But I never laid a glove on him. It was a brilliant performance. I never got inside him. There’s something in that head of his, something he never even let us see. And now he’s got Danzig; he’s made some sort of pact with Danzig. The whole thing troubles me immensely. Yet I can’t get rid of him, as I’d want to. He bungled it terribly in Boston, walking out like that. I’d love to ship him to the North Pole, and I would too; but I can’t, because of Danzig. So Miles, only this warning: Watch Chardy, watch him carefully. All right? He’s much more than the man he’s letting you see.”

Miles nodded reverently. Yet he was befuddled by the passion in Sam. He felt he’d missed something somewhere; he was a little frightened. He realized now that Melman hated Chardy. Hated him, feared him: weren’t they the same?

Tell him, Miles thought. You have it in your power to please the cardinal, to bind him to you forever and ever. He will give you the Church; he will make the Church yours. You will move through its halls, through its hushed and purple rooms, to its most privileged sanctums.

Miles wished he could genuflect.

Yet he saw also there was a secret and dangerous game between Melman and Chardy — a game whose stakes were so high neither man would speak of them directly.

“Sam,” he heard himself saying, “you can count on me.”

38

When would the boy return?

“He should have been back hours ago,” Trewitt said irritably.

“He probably stopped to steal a chicken,” Roberto said. “The little snotnose.” Roberto had taken over the Beretta, his proudest possession. He sat under a scrub oak polishing as obsessively as he’d once polished the glasses behind the bar at Reynoldo’s. He had already fired three of the remaining seven bullets for practice.

Trewitt shifted uncomfortably beside him. As he moved he bumped into his own armament, which had been propped against a log in front of him. He’d had some practice too; with the scope, it was like shooting at the star of a drive-in movie.

“No,” he said, “he’s had plenty of time. They left yesterday — in the postman’s Jeep they could have been back by one. It’s almost five now.”

“Forget it. What does a little snotnose know? He don’t know nothing.”

“He knows enough to get back in time. Dumb kid.” The kid was important because he was a kid and Trewitt liked him, but also because he carried another telegram for Chardy, care of the Resurrection. If this try didn’t work, Trewitt had resolved to go out in the open, the hell with the risk. He was done with waiting.

“Don’t wet your pants. He’ll be back. Little snotnose.”

Trewitt picked up the rifle, slid it back against his shoulder. They were two hundred yards upslope from the stone shack. The move had been Trewitt’s idea, arguing that if they were at any moment apt to be jumped they couldn’t just be caught in the shack; they had to have a plan.

Ramirez looked upon this strategic innovation with great curiosity, and then went back to his smart-alecky maid and her comeuppance.

But Trewitt insisted, and ultimately prevailed. Still, some plan. The plan was to blow the brains out of anybody who poked around.

And what if Chardy showed up? Well, Chardy wouldn’t show up. There’d been some kind of screw-up.

But Trewitt was determined. He’d get this Ramirez back somehow, whether he wanted to or not, back to Chardy. There, Chardy, what do you think of that? You decide, Chardy. Trewitt had no other chart to work by. His head was still packed with confusion. All espionage tends to end in farce, Malcolm Muggeridge had said, and boy, he sure had this one figured out. Trewitt was not certain whether he’d decided on this course of action or whether it had been decided for him. Things just happened, and here he was, halfway up a dusty mountain in a hot sun on a clear day with a sniper’s rifle in his hands.

Above, a hawk pirouetted, slid on a thermal, high, remote, coldly beautiful. Trewitt watched the bird with idle envy: the grace, the power, the freedom, the dignity commandeered his imagination. The lovely thing skidded back and forth brainlessly on the currents, wheeling into the valley, then soaring upward again.

Trewitt wiped a drop of sweat off the end of his nose and studied its dampness on the end of his finger, and did not see the car.

But when he looked up, there it was, a Mercedes 450 SL, gunmetal gray, sitting before the shack.

Roberto was squirming into cover next to him.

“Jesus Mary, now we going to see some stuff.”

Oscar Meza got out from the passenger’s side, held his hands wide to show that he was unarmed.

“Reynoldo,” he called to the mountain, “can you hear me? These people here want to talk to you. That’s all, a little talk. They sent me ahead. Come, have a little talk, and we will let the little one go. Don’t be no fool, Reynoldo, it’s just a little talk.”

There was silence.

“Reynoldo, think it over. Take your time. You got fifteen—”

The shot rang out crisp and clear. Oscar Meza sat back on his expensive fender, holding his middle. He breathed deeply. His sunglasses fell off. His knees cracked and he pitched forward on them. Then he fell the rest of the way.

“Goddammit,” bellowed Trewitt, “he shouldn’t have—”

“Right in the guts! Reynoldo sure can shoot a gun.”

Trewitt stared stupidly at the dead man by the car. For a long moment nothing happened. Then the car began to gently back up, leaving its fallen passenger. It moved as though it were pulling out of any suburban garage into any sane, pleasant street, turning as its driver swung its nose to bear in the right direction. Then, slowly, it