Curtis crept into his old room and closed the door, numb to a world over which he had no control.
‘At least I had some very good years with my family,’ Aleta said softly. The Galapagos rolled and shuddered yet again, spume flying from the crests of the huge waves as the gale howled over the foam-covered containers. ‘What happened? Did you go back to school?’
‘I left the next morning. My aunt Shaylee lived on the other side of the city and she and her husband took me in, something for which I’ll always be grateful. Without them, I’d probably be driving a crane down at the docks.’
‘University?’
O’Connor nodded. ‘I won a scholarship to Trinity College and did my doctorate at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology. Worked for “big pharma” for a while in the States, but didn’t like their ethics, so I joined the CIA… and here we are,’ he said with a grin. ‘Prost.’
‘Prost.’ Aleta raised her glass to the man she was beginning to understand, although she knew she’d only scratched the surface. They clinked glasses, and O’Connor got up from the table and stood at the window, watching another wave explode onto the decks, tumbling over the containers before exhausting itself in the scuppers. The Galapagos shook herself free, crested the wave and charged towards the next.
Aleta joined him at the big square porthole. For a long while they stood close, watching the storm, finishing their wine.
O’Connor put his arm around Aleta’s slim waist, half expecting her to take his hand away, but she nestled into him, resting her head and her now short blonde hair on his shoulder. Her perfume was a sensual mix of jasmine and caesalpinia; foxglove and vanilla; citron and cedar. It might be aptly named, he thought wryly, having spied the elegant red bottle earlier in the day: Trouble by Boucheron. A flash of forked lightning hit the sea barely two nautical miles from the ship; 120 000 amps travelling at 60 000 metres every second turned the strike point on the ocean into a boiling inferno. The deck and containers were bathed in a powerful and eerie blue light, and O’Connor momentarily reflected on the power of the transmitter at Gakona. The thunder crackled above them and shook the Galapagos ’ superstructure. He turned towards Aleta. Their lips met, softly at first, and then more urgently. They held each other tightly, moving with the roll of the ship. O’Connor ran his hand slowly down the small of Aleta’s back and she responded, moulding herself against him.
47
F rom her office inside the secure area of the American Embassy building in the tree-lined Avenida Reforma of Guatemala City’s Zone 10, Ellen Rodriguez scanned the latest satellite information on the position of the Galapagos. She fed the data into the computer and reset the calculation for the Galapagos ’ arrival. At its present speed and course, the Galapagos would reach Havana in three days at 1135 local time.
Rodriguez looked at her watch. It was after 10 p.m. and still there was no word on getting an asset on board the container ship. For the moment there was little she could do but wait for her counterpart in the US quasi- embassy in Havana, the quaintly named ‘United States Interests Section’, to get in contact. She prepared to head home. ‘Home’ was the Howard Johnson Inn across the road, and was likely to remain so for some time. In the week since she’d arrived, she’d been in the office before dawn, and rarely left before ten, sometimes midnight. Finding a place of her own would have to wait, she thought ruefully. Rodriguez was preparing to shut down her encrypted links when an alert appeared on her screen. TOP SECRET NOFORN OPERATION MAYA CHIEF OF STATION EYES ONLY Asset identified. Briefed re. Tutankhamen and Nefertiti. Galapagos scheduled to berth Haiphong Terminal, Maritima. Estimated duration of stay, no more than twenty-four hours but expect crew to take shore leave. Arrangements in hand to manufacture requirement for crew replacement. Will advise soonest. COS. Havana.
Rodriguez shut down her computer, torn again between her duty to the Firm and her feelings about the plan to eliminate Curtis O’Connor. In her experience Officer O’Connor was one of the finest agents ever to walk out of Langley’s doors. Even if they got an asset on board the Galapagos, he would have to be good. Very good. Ellen Rodriguez prepared to leave. On the other side of the Atlantic in Rome, it was now very early in the morning.
Cardinal Felici acknowledged the salute of the Swiss Guard and entered the Vatican’s secret archives, adjacent to the Vatican library. If the guard found it strange that the second-most senior cardinal in the Vatican was up and about at 5.30 in the morning, his face was inscrutable. The archives contained more than eighty kilometres of shelving, but Cardinal Felici was only interested in reacquainting himself with one document. He made his way into the vault beneath the Cortile della Pigna, the massive Roman bronze pinecone in the courtyard of the Belvedere above.
Felici extracted the document from the crimson cover embossed with the gold coat of arms of the Vatican State. Sister Lucia, just a child at the time, had handwritten her account of the third warning on a small single sheet of paper. Felici reflected on the public version of the third warning of Fatima released by Pope John Paul II. That, he knew, had been a mistake and had only fuelled the controversy. Too many people had seen the original warning, including Bishop Venancio, the auxiliary bishop of Fatima; and too many people knew this warning had been recorded on a single sheet of paper. Felici had been in Guatemala at the time, and had not been able to prevent the clumsy 26 June release, which the Vatican had committed to four sheets of paper, passing off the young Lucia’s vision of a city in ruins as unremarkable. Had the real identity of the city in ruins been made public, the shock would have reverberated around the world. Felici adjusted his glasses and focused on Sister Lucia’s original account. I write in obedience to you, my God, who commands me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leira and through your most Holy Mother and mine. After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw Archangel Raguel, the Archangel of Justice with a flaming sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other. Seated on the scales were two younger angels, one a boy, one a girl, but the scales were out of balance, tipped in favour of the male. Archangel Raguel’s sword hilt was gold, embossed with the Greek letter phi. As we watched, huge pyramids rose above the horizon. Warriors from the great civilisations of the past streamed from within them. The Maya, the Inca, the Egyptians, the Hopi Indians, the Cherokees, all of them formed up en masse behind Our Lady. Prominent amongst them were the Maya. The Mayan king was flanked by a Mayan prince and princess, each wearing a jade talisman in the shape of the Greek letter phi. Above them sat the prophets: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the last great prophet, Muhammad. Below them sat the seers: Cassandra, Saint Malachy, Hildegard of Bingen, Savonarola, Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce. Saint Malachy was the first to step forward.
Malachy, a bishop who was born in Armagh in Northern Ireland in 1094, had accurately predicted the reformation more than 300 years before it occurred. More astonishingly still, Malachy had arrived in Rome in 1140, accompanied by a number of monks. He had fallen into a trance on the Janiculum Hill above the old city, where he started talking in Latin. His scribe faithfully took down all his utterances; it was nearly dawn by the time Malachy had finished. When he woke, Malachy confirmed to his companions that God had given him a vision of the identity of every Pope until the end of time. The list was extraordinarily accurate, and Felici shivered involuntarily as he thought of the prediction for John XXIII: ‘Saint Malachy was holding a long scroll in front of him, and he continued to read in Latin: Pastor et Nauta.’
Shepherd and sailor. In 1958 the American Cardinal Francis Spellman had hired a boat and sailed up and down the Tiber with a cargo of sheep, in the hope that he might fulfil Malachy’s prediction for the conclave, but to no avail. Although it had indeed been a shepherd and a sailor whom God had chosen. The keys of Peter had been handed to John XXIII. Angelo Roncalli had previously been the patriarch of the maritime city of Venice.
The accuracy of Malachy’s predictions weighed heavily on Felici’s ambitions. Malachy had designated the second-last Pope before the end of time as de Gloria Olivae. Felici knew that ‘from the glory of the olive’ was a reference to the olive branch being a symbol of the order of Saint Benedict; Benedict XVI was the name Joseph Ratzinger had chosen. Aged seventy-eight at the time of his election, Benedict XVI was one of the oldest in the history of the papacy. Malachy had insisted that the last Pope would be known as ‘Peter the Roman’, bringing to an end the rock upon which Peter had built the original church, as well as the end of the world itself. Felici took a deep breath and went back to the final part of the real secret of Fatima, to Sister Lucia’s record of the Virgin Mary’s appearance. The Archangel Raguel spoke in a voice of great authority. ‘Penance! This is the last of your warnings!’
