Thoroughly.” The cardinal’s eyes were bright, eager.
Dolor nodded, accepting this lesser of two inadvisable evils. “It shall be as you say, Your Eminence.” He looked over at Ferrigno, who was literally trembling against the wall. Dolor gestured at him with a jerk of his head. “Your Eminence, is he a scribe or not?”
Borja followed the gesture, frowned, and snapped at Ferrigno as he might have spoken to a dog. “What are you doing over there, Ferrigno? Sit here, at my desk, and see to your duties.” He turned back to Dolor as the spare scribe shuffled toward the other chair facing Borja’s. “We are almost done, though, are we not?”
“Almost. I am grateful for the time Your Eminence has lavished on my review of what we have discovered about both the external and internal enemies who made possible the USE’s attack.”
Borja started to nod, stopped. “Internal enemies? You mean, the lefferti and the Jews?”
“No, Your Eminence. Although they are native to Rome, they are also our obvious enemies, and so, are external threats. I am speaking of traitors within our very ranks.”
Alongside Dolor, Ferrigno was scribbling furiously. Borja’s jaw swung open momentarily before he barked: “Traitors? What do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Dolor, reaching out a hand and placing it gently but firmly upon the back of Ferrigno’s wrist, “that my men observed a peculiar phenomenon shortly after every one of my meetings with you. They found that Signor Ferrigno was wont to pile scrap papers near the kitchen furnace.”
“For disposal. Secure disposal,” Ferrigno gulped out.
“Not secure enough, evidently. It seems that on each of these days, one of the boys who works in the stables invariably came into the kitchen for a snack. And being a tidy sort, he always wrapped the food in some handy paper. Oddly enough, the paper that was always handiest was that which had been discarded by Signor Ferrigno.” Dolor felt the narrow wrist beneath his hand grow very cold.
Borja’s face had grown bright red; his eyes were wide. “And there is more?”
Dolor nodded. “Oddly enough, the stable boy always had work to deliver to a saddler in the Ghetto, an immense fellow named Isaac, who, it is rumored, also had the USE embassy as a client before all the recent unpleasantness. But that is ultimately not as interesting as another piece of information: Isaac has another client who invariably showed up at his shop less than twenty-four hours after the stable boy had dropped off the leather- work from this villa. Isaac’s other client is a fellow named Piero-and has been identified by several of the surviving lefferti as one of their senior and most trusted members.”
Borja could not speak; he seemed ready to burst. Ferrigno appeared to have aged ten years within the past two minutes; it seemed impossible to imagine how such a small, spare man could have become more withered and bowed, but he had.
Dolor finished. “This is why the agents of the Wrecking Crew were able to immediately discern that we had Stone and his wife at the insula Mattei: they had inside information. The insula had no outgoing servants, and we did not parade the prisoners in plain view for several weeks. How then did they already know to have us under observation? We noticed their surreptitious observers easily enough, but it took weeks to trace it back to Signor Ferrigno; he made use of routine connections between this villa and the world beyond to pass his intelligence, and he himself seemed a most unlikely candidate.”
But Borja’s wrath now seemed to focus on Dolor. “And you did not see fit to inform me at each stage? You lied to me,” he hissed. “From the start. You misinformed me about the troop strength at the insula Mattei, you-”
“Your Eminence, when I first arrived, did I not ask for your patience and trust? Here you are reaping the benefits of that trust. I spoke lies to your face, yes, but they were not intended for your ears, Your Eminence. They were intended for your scribe’s.” Ferrigno’s skin trembled beneath Dolor’s palm.
Borja acknowledged Dolor’s explanation with a testy nod, and then stared at little Ferrigno. “Execution is not enough,” he asserted after three seconds. “A man may come to grips with the fear of death, but not the fear of agony. Particularly not long, excruciating, varied, hopeless agony that will end in not merely death, but witnessing the dismemberment of one’s own body, the uncoiling and dissection of one’s own guts.”
Ferrigno gulped back vomit; Dolor’s nose told him that the scribe had soiled himself.
Borja noticed as well and sniffed in disgust. “Senor Dolor, you have much experience in this area: what would you recommend?”
Dolor shrugged; he knew he could not press too hard if he wanted to change Borja’s mind. “I do not recommend torture as punishment. Even when the objective is to gather information, torture is only advisable when there is reason to suspect it will be effective.”
Borja looked disappointed. “I would not have thought you squeamish, Senor Dolor.”
“I am not squeamish, Your Eminence; among my many faults, this one certainly cannot be reasonably attributed to me. But if one acquires a reputation for torture, it often instills desperate courage in his remaining adversaries. An enemy who knows that capture means mortal torture often chooses certain death of the battlefield. That way, we lose more men. I prefer my reputation to be one of efficiency and undefeatability; I want my adversaries to despair of besting me, but not to fear capture. That way, they may despair of hope and yet safely surrender, rather than fear torture and sell themselves dearly.”
Borja looked at Dolor strangely. “There is some wisdom in what you say,” the cardinal conceded finally, “but it is the wisdom of the streets, of your particular ‘calling.’ The wisdom of Mother Church tells us that if we spare the rod upon the back of one treacherous, homicidal child, we shall surely spoil many of the other untainted innocents. Mother Church uses the carrot when practicable-but in this case, we have only the stick.”
Dolor nodded. “What kind of stick do you instruct us to use in this case, Your Eminence?”
Ferrigno moaned slightly.
Borja considered. “The greatest terror would come from not knowing what kind of agony to expect, and in what sequence.” He stared at Ferrigno, attempted to keep a flickering grin from troubling the left corner of his mouth. “Why select just one stick, Senor Dolor? Be creative. Indulge yourself.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Estuban Miro peered into the dark. By the light of the half moon, he could make out the fishing ketch that the embassy Marines had boarded only minutes earlier. According to the morse code message sent by their Aldis-rigged bull’s-eye lantern, the boat’s single enemy operative had surrendered without a struggle.
Miro sighed; it was unfortunate that they had been compelled to remove the observer that Borja’s local spymaster had sent to watch the island of San Francesco del Deserto. In intelligence operations, the only thing better than knowing oneself to be unobserved (a rare, and usually unprovable, circumstance) was to know where the enemy observers were. Such had been the case with this particular fisherman. Ever since Harry Lefferts’ rescue team had departed for Rome several weeks ago, this wiry fellow had been casting his nets in the vicinity of the island’s Franciscan monastery: sometimes to the east, sometimes to the west; sometimes closer, sometimes farther. But always close enough to keep an eye on any comings and goings. Which, since the rescue team’s last meeting there, had been entirely routine.
Miro’s response to this observer had been merely to observe in return. Using a well-concealed spyglass, the friars gladly complied with his request that they watch the ketch’s positions and maneuverings and keep meticulous record of them. Meanwhile, a few distant friends of the Cavrianis started taking intermittent strolls past the pier where the fisherman tied up and off-loaded his day-end catch; they discovered that he was pulling in scarcely enough to feed his own family, these days. However, he did not seem disposed to try fishing in a new spot, nor did he seem particularly worried about his presumably diminished income. Rather, in just the last two weeks, he had paid for a new stepsail and other useful bits of small-craft chandlery. Taken together, these indicators were almost all the proof Miro needed to confirm that the fisherman was indeed an enemy pawn. However, just to be sure, and in an attempt to detect if the fisherman himself was being watched by Borja’s Venetian spymaster, Miro had his own growing network of agents keep track of the seemingly trivial exchanges and activities of the fellow’s day. They observed where he got his breakfast loaf, who came to check his day-end catch, which boats (if any) he approached during the course of his profitless net castings. Ten days of constant, but distant, watching had produced no leads; if the fisherman was exchanging information with his handler, there was no obvious sign of it. Which presented Miro
