The older man thought for a moment. 'See to it. See to the Greek, also. But do so without leaving a trail for the police.'
'And what of the Jew, the forger?'
'See to him also. We want no path for the authorities to follow. The American no doubt wanted papers of some sort. Watch the place against the possibility the American returns there. He must be eliminated quickly by any means other than violence in the Holy City. We cannot risk the gospel's message becoming known.'
'We have located the German woman and the American's bastard child. I should know shortly. If we can take them captive, we may have this Reilly come to us.'
The old man stood. 'You are doing God's work. In his name, bless you.'
'Thank you, Grand Master,' the man said, trying to suppress the resentment bubbling in his chest.
Today he had lost two good knights, one with burns that might cost him an eye, the other with a fractured skull. It had been bad enough to lose the hired help in Prague and the men in the United States who had mysteriously disappeared after finding Reilly's place south of Atlanta. But he had only a limited number of soldiers, knights, who were even remotely competent to deal with the American. Or who, for that matter, had even fired a gun.
It was easy enough to give orders; not always so simple to carry them out.
God's work or not.
X.
The Vatican The Next Morning
Notwithstanding taking the middle of the day off, offices in Rome generally open between 9:00 and 9:30 a.m. As far as Lang could tell, the Vatican was no exception.
After showing his pass to the Swiss guard still dressed in the uniform designed by Michelangelo, he was admitted to the scavi and walked a short way down the hall to Father Strentenoplis's office. The door was closed. Lang knocked briskly, waited a moment or two and knocked again without result.
He pushed gently. Like most of the doors here, it had no lock. It swung open. The space looked the same as it had the day before. Smelled the same, too. Whatever the good father smoked, it clung to the walls like paint.
Lang considered looking through the papers on the desk and decided against it. He had the remaining copy of the gospel, so there was no need to try to retrieve the one given to the priest and the priest hadn't expected to have a translation until now.
The problem, of course, was, where was the priest?
Lang shut the door behind him, went down the hall and stopped in front of an open office where a very short nun sat on a very tall swivel chair. Her feet barely touched the floor as she pecked at a keyboard with the hesitancy of someone not entirely comfortable with the machine.
Lang stepped across the threshold. 'Mi scusi, parlal' inglese?'
She spun around in the chair, bathing him in the most radiant smile he had ever gotten from a seventy-year-old. 'Of course I speak English, but thank you for asking! Most of your countrymen take it for granted that everything and everybody speaks English, and, if not, the problem can be cured by progressively raising the voice. How may I be of service?'
'Father Strentenoplis, I had an appointment with him…'
She sniffed disdainfully. 'You are early. He rarely is in his office before ten thirty.'
Lang's suspicions about the priest's drinking habits were confirmed.
'It's really important I see him. I'm leaving Rome this afternoon…'
She turned the chair to face the monitor. 'He is a visiting priest, staying in one of the apartments the Holy See keeps for such purposes. We have no phone number.' She scowled at the screen as though the omission were its fault. 'He must use a cell phone.'
Lang shifted his weight back and forth. 'Do you have an address?'
'Of course! We keep the scoop on all our visitors. Is not that what you say in America, 'the scoop'?'
Not in the last thirty years.
'Ah, here! Do you know the Via de Porta?'
''Fraid not.'
She pointed. 'As you leave St. Peter's Square, turn right on Porta Cavalleggeri. It's a main drag. Then left on Via del Crocifisso. De Porta will be on your left.' She wrote something down on a piece of paper. 'Here. You want apartment nine at number thirty-seven. A piece of cake, as you would say!'
Lang thanked her and left, wondering how she had acquired so many outdated American idioms.
There was nothing wrong with her directions, though. Father Strentenoplis's street was one of those Roman alleys so narrow Lang doubted the sun touched it more than a few minutes each day. The building was a former palazzo converted into apartments by the high taxes of the Socialist state. A massive arched wooden door could easily have accommodated a carriage and mounted outriders. A more human-scale Judas gate had been cut into one side.
Lang surveyed the list of doorbells mounted beside the entrance. He pressed number nine with no result.
The good father was probably sleeping off the night before, in no shape to hear the buzzer. And Lang had a plane to catch.
He pushed all the buttons.
He got two garbled responses he could not have understood even if he had spoken Italian.
'Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party,' he said.
The door's latch buzzed open. Someone had been expecting a visitor and the electronics were as unintelligible inside as they were out.
Lang stood in a vaulted stone vestibule even taller than the door. To his right was a shallow set of marble stairs that wound around an old birdcage elevator before disappearing into darkness above. In front of him was the private interior piazza that had once contained a garden secluded from the noise and smell of the street. Rather than fountains and flowers, it was now a parking lot for tenants' cars. Over a field of Fiats and Volkswagens, Lang watched a man in coveralls emerge across the courtyard, no doubt the servants' entrance in better days.
He acceded to joints already aching and took the elevator. He feared he might have made a poor choice as the contraption groaned its way to the third floor, the fourth in the US. The door creaked open and he could see the number nine in the dim light of low-watt bulbs in sconces.
A series of knocks were fruitless. Lang inhaled deeply as he tried the lock, remembering the blood-soaked apartment in Prague. He stepped back and visually checked the lock, its bolt visible where the door had shrunk from its frame. Less than a minute's application of a credit card and there was a gratifying click. He pushed the door open.
'Father Strentenoplis?' he called.
No response other than the wheezing of an overworked window air-conditioning unit.
A sagging curtain leaked enough light from the room's only window to see two weary club chairs facing a short sofa across a plain wooden table on which rested a Compaq laptop and a stack of papers. A crucifix over the sofa was the only effort at decoration. Two steps down a short hallway a door opened into the bedroom: a single bed, a small bureau resting on three legs on which a clean clerical collar and studs waited and a curtained alcove. If the priest had slept here last night, he hadn't made up the bed. Beyond the rumpled sheets was a doorless entrance to a small bath. On the sink was an open tube of Grecian Formula.
Father Strentenoplis cared about his appearance.
And Lang was feeling more and more like a burglar.
Recrossing the room, Lang slid the curtain back. Behind it was a single rod on which several cassocks hung beside two black suits, a pair of jeans and two golf shirts. Two pair of black wingtips, one each of brown loafers and Nikes paraded across the floor in a neat line.
Lang started to close the curtain when something on the floor gleamed in the dim light. He stooped and scooped up a cross on a gold chain, a cross with a third cross member. A Greek cross. He frowned. Not something Father Strentenoplis would leave behind. With it in his hand, he walked over to the apartment's second window, one
