only other members of the Wrecking Crew to leave Rome. These sounds of distress had so alarmed the crew of their small Dalmatian gajeta that the first mate had rushed over to see who’d been injured.
The card-playing had also been an icebreaker for increasing interaction with the Irish Wild Geese. However, with the exception of Wadding, who had apparently learned the rules simply by watching a few hands, they became more perplexed as the play progressed. The earl of Tyrone had pronounced the game as a debased variant of primero and turned his back upon it. Owen Roe-a bit more congenial than his young earl, and far more even- tempered-unsuccessfully tried to understand it as a new form of the English game brag. The other Irish might have found some interest in the game, but, between being poorer than indigent church mice, and more interested in chatting up the up-timers, their focus strayed from the rules and the cards.
After that, the stormy Adriatic had kept them busy, scudding too close to the Dalmatian coast, beacons warning them away from headlands at the last safe minute on more than one occasion. Thomas suspected it was more the extraordinary competence of the crew-a mix of Croats, Ragusans, and Italians-that had saved them in these instances: their knowledge of the coast was uncanny, even at night.
The Venetian lagoon had marked the abrupt end of the crew’s collective navigational knowledge, but one of the Italians had shipped out from piers on the Lido on two prior occasions, and so was able to guide them to their destination: San Francesco del Deserto, a small islet just north of St. Erasmo. There had been some debate over that choice; Harry and North had wanted to head straight in to Venice itself, simply because they knew of no other way to contact Tom Stone and the embassy. Wadding, in his typically quiet way, had pointed out that if Borja was indeed guilty of all that he seemed guilty of, then the main island would be watched by his confidential agents and should be avoided. Thomas had been pleased, but not entirely surprised, at Wadding’s revised opinion of the political realities in contemporary Italy. The boat ride had provided ample opportunity to disabuse good Father Luke of his rather optimistic hopes that Borja’s worst atrocities were, in fact, simply malign propaganda.
Once apprised of the trail of evidence that connected the assassinations, disappearances, and almost capricious slaughter of civilians to Borja’s decrees, Wadding’s nimble and nuanced mind quickly became an invaluable asset. Their current billet was a case in point: only Wadding had known about the small Franciscan monastery on the islet of San Francesco del Deserto. It was a place that had few visitors, and all of those came for purposes of hermitage or induction. It had no commerce, the monks acquiring their scant needs from the smaller, rustic islands nearby. A perfect place to arrive in Venice and yet remain unobserved and quite comfortable.
Bog hoppers or not, North admitted, the Irish were masters of surreptitious activity; they had little choice, given the stern occupation under which they struggled. Not that North would ever say so aloud, but he was of the opinion that his own countrymen had really gone too far in the subjugation of Ireland, and that there was now no way to reverse the situation, much less undo the damage. Of course, the Irish weren’t exactly shining exemplars of Christian charity and restraint, either. North suspected that when the parable of “turn the other cheek” was read out in Irish churches, the priests half-leaned out of their pulpits and whispered sotto voce behind a confidential hand, “except when the barstard is a feckin’ sassenach, o’ course.” Such were the contextualized pieties of the Emerald Isle.
But also, such were its lessons in subtlety. At Wadding’s instruction, a sealed message had gone out yesterday at dawn, entrusted to the order’s youngest novice, who was traveling to nearby St. Erasmo for provisions. While there, he had sought and found a slightly younger childhood friend who was also an aspirant to the order. A brief chat after morning prayer, a blessing, and a lira, and that young aspirant was on his way to the main island to pass the ciphered message on to the couriers’ collective that handled afternoon deliveries to the USE embassy.
And apparently, the message had reached the desired parties. Hopefully, it had also avoided detection by Borja’s many agents. But even if they had intercepted the communique, it would do them little good. The cipher was a disposable code, and was only one of the ways in which the monks had protected the message. Only a priest familiar with the legends of St. Francis, who had reputedly made a hermitage on the islet where they were hiding, would understand the allusive and symbolic cant in which it was written.
But even if Borja’s agents somehow managed to decipher all of that, they would only have learned that Ambassador Stone and Don Estuban were requested to travel to San Francesco del Deserto this morning. How they would get there was a matter left to those summoned. They had no doubt employed a variety of precautions, probably involving a rendezvous of boats in the predawn, to defeat interception. And if Borja’s minions decided to land on the islet itself and attack Thomas turned around; Owen Roe O’Neill was inspecting his pepperbox revolver. Standing by his side, the earl of Tyrone was scowling at the weapon, muttering that a sword was the proper weapon of a warrior and a man. Harry Lefferts had just finished reassembling the shotgun he’d field-stripped after racing through his breakfast. More than half a dozen of the Irish, seasoned in the Low Countries campaigns despite their scant years, lounged about the kitchen door. Dangerous men in a fight, they huddled there like so many young boys, hoping for the favor of an extra roll or rasher of bacon from the indulgent friar-cook. Surveying this array of both mechanical and human weapons, Thomas North couldn’t help smiling at the thought of what a bunch of assassins would encounter if they foolish enough to attack this island. A fitting line from one of the up-time movies he had memorized suggested itself: “Go ahead; make my day.”
“Well, are you coming- sassenach?”
Thomas North looked up and found Owen Roe O’Neill looking at him. With a smile. “That would be ‘Lord Sassenach’ to you, cultchie.”
“And that would be ‘Lord Cultchie’ to you, Lord Sassenach.”
North couldn’t help smiling back. “It seems we have come to an agreement on the mutually odious nature of our relationship.”
“So it seems. Now, are you coming, or are you planning on sneaking off and stealing the sacramental wine when no one’s about?”
“You mean they leave it unlocked?”
“Only because they don’t know about you. Come along, then.”
Miro leaned back when North had finished giving his report. He looked at Tom Stone, who waved the four USE Marines out of the room to join the four already outside. He looked down the table at the O’Neills. John looked back, expressionless. Owen waited a moment for his earl to act, and then nodded at the Wild Geese, who joined the Marines. Miro nodded his thanks to Owen, who nodded back. John looked sideways at his much older cousin, annoyed.
Tom Stone cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to clear the room, but we’re going to start talking plans. Seems like the moment to minimize the number of people hearing them.”
John O’Neill crossed his arms. “I can trust my men. To the death.”
“I believe that, Lord O’Neill, but tell me this: do they ever get drunk? Talk in their cups? Do they keep track of who’s new in a shared billet and who isn’t? Do they remember that every innkeep, serving girl, farrier, stable hand, prostitute might be a potential informer? Because only people who can maintain that kind of highly suspicious frame of mind should be in this room.”
Which made Miro reflect, and not for the first time, that perhaps the earl of Tyrone himself should not be present. But such an exclusion was a diplomatic impossibility.
John seemed a bit mollified by Tom Stone’s explanation, but not much. It was Wadding who found a way out of the growing silence. “Ambassador Stone, we are grateful that you agreed to meet us here on such short notice. It seems we have a number of mutual objectives, and I thought it wise for us to confer on how we might best combine our resources to achieve them.”
Tom Stone glanced at Miro, thereby signaling that, as the ambassador, he was handing off the meeting to the acting chief of local field operations. Miro knew that Tom didn’t much like ambassador-ing, particularly not under these conditions. But protocol demanded his presence. John O’Neill, one of the two exiled princes of Ireland, had asked to meet him, and besides, any conversation that involved rescue plans for his son and daughter-in-law was a conversation Stone had insisted on being a part of, damn it.
Miro leaned forward. “Father Wadding, as I understand it, you were the objective of the Colonels O’Neill.”
“Technically, yes-but in actuality, that mission was just a stalking horse.”
“You mean, if the O’Neills were apprehended in Rome, they could honestly claim that they had been sent after you, without alerting Cardinal Borja to the fact that they were also attempting to rescue the pope.”
“That is correct. A venal sin concealing a mortal sin, as it were.”