Sign of the Cross

done. He also told him to delete the fax’s memory. ‘Where can I reach you?’

‘My office. I be at my office.’

Payne groaned. That’s the last place he wanted him to be. Why did Frankie think he had him using a public line? ‘Go somewhere else but not your house. That’s too easy to trace.’

‘I can get hotel.’

‘Perfect,’ Payne told him. ‘Pay in cash and use a fake name, something you won’t forget, like… James Bond.’

‘Si!’ he shrieked. Obviously he liked the choice.

Frankie named the closest hotel he could think of, and Payne memorized its name. ‘Go there when you’re done. Your room and room service are on me, OK?’

‘Si,’ he repeated.

‘And don’t use your credit card for anything.’

‘No card. I promise.’

‘Thanks, Frankie. I’ll talk to you soon.’

Thirty-four seconds. Not too bad. Especially if his fax helped Payne figure something out. But he had his doubts. What in the world could Frankie know that Payne didn’t?

A few minutes later he got his answer. That little bastard was a lifesaver.

Boyd and Maria brought Prince Eugene’s journal into the cafe and took a seat in front of one of the computers. Maria manned the keyboard while Boyd, still wearing that ridiculous suntan lotion on his nose, told her what to type. Curious, Payne wanted to know what they were searching for but couldn’t leave the machines until Frankie’s fax arrived.

Jones joined Payne a moment later, right after finishing a twenty-minute call to Randy Raskin. He said, ‘Man, I love calling the Pentagon collect. Paid for by our tax dollars.’

‘A collect call from Austria? That’s like a thousand bucks.’

‘But worth it.’ He flipped through his notes. ‘So far there’s been four crucifixions, one each in Denmark, Libya, America, and China. All the killings were too similar to be copycat crimes.’

‘In other words, one crew.’

He shook his head. ‘Four different crews.’

‘Four? The murders were on separate days, right?’

‘True, but the abductions overlapped. Throw in the travel and the time zones and everything else, and the cops think there were multiple crews. If not four, at least two.’

Payne considered this for a moment, trying to figure out what anyone could gain by crucifying random people. ‘Any connections between the victims?’

‘Nothing obvious. Different homelands, different occupations, different everything — except for the fact that they were males in their early thirties. Just like Christ when he died.’

‘Jesus,’ Payne gasped.

‘Yep, that’s the guy. Anyway, I told Randy that the crucifixions might have something to do with our case, so I had him check all the phone records for Agent Manzak, i.e., Roberto Pelati. Remarkably, he made calls to Denmark, China, Thailand, America, and Nepal within the last six weeks. Either he’s planning one big-ass vacation, or he’s our man.’

‘Our man for what?’

Jones shrugged. ‘That seems to be the million dollar question.’

A million dollar question. What a joke. That term no longer had the same significance as it used to. Nowadays it seemed everybody had a million dollars. Game show contestants, dot-com geeks, reality show winners, third-string linebackers. Payne really doubted if Roberto Pelati would’ve gone through any of this for a mere million dollars. A billion, maybe. But certainly not a million. That was play money to the modern-day criminal.

Then again, who in the world had a billion dollars to spare? Bill Gates, Ted Turner, and the rest of the Forbes list. Probably a sheik or two. Maybe some royalty. Other than that, it would take a large country to toss around that much coin without having it missed by their citizens.

Unless… wait a second… unless…

Holy shit! Unless it was a country without citizens.

A country that had billions of dollars hidden away that no one knew about.

A country that stood to lose everything if this scandal was ever made public.

Good lord, that was it. This was about money. The Vatican’s money.

Everything that was happening — the Catacombs, the crucifixions, the search for Dr Boyd — was about cash. Pelati’s group wanted it and would do anything to get it.

That had to be it. It had to be.

The beeping of the fax ripped Payne from his thoughts. He had no idea what Frankie was sending, but he prayed it backed his revelation. Otherwise he’d find himself confused again before he even had a chance to tell anyone his theory. Anyway, he grabbed the first page and skimmed it for information. Somehow Frankie had figured out who had died during the chopper crash from Donald Barnes’s photographs, where each soldier had been positioned, and had tracked down their personal histories. Everything in his report was typed except for a handwritten note at the bottom of the page that said pictures and graphs were still to come.

Payne had to laugh at that one. He was kidding, right?

Nope, Frankie wasn’t joking. He included head-shots (pre-and postmortem) of all four victims, then used a line graph to illustrate where the three soldiers had received their training and how many months they had been stationed together before their fatal mission. In a side note, he mentioned that the pilot was an Orvieto cop who didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the crew because he wasn’t a member of the Swiss Guard like the others had been.

The Swiss Guard. That was the smoking gun, the one piece of evidence that couldn’t be denied. If the Guard were involved, then the Vatican had to be, since the Guard’s only job was to protect the pope. Unless, of course, Benito was behind the attack. Maybe he hired ex-members of the Guard to do all of his dirty work?

Payne said to Jones, ‘You know that missing piece of the puzzle? I think we just found it.’

He filled him in on everything: the money, the murders, and his theory on Benito. He knew most of it was conjecture, but that was the beauty of their role in this: They didn’t give a damn about the law. They weren’t cops, nor were they looking for a conviction. They were simply trying to get to the truth, no matter what it was.

Praying that they got the chance to punish the people who brought them into this.

Miraculously, their prayers would be answered less than an hour later.

68

Chang heard the phone and checked his caller ID. He muted the TV coverage of Beijing, then answered. From somewhere over the Atlantic, Nick Dial said, ‘Tell me about the fax.’

Chang flipped open his notes. ‘I went to the station where the fax came from and talked to their station chief. And, um, I think we were given some bad information.’

Dial leaned his forehead against the plane’s wall. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The fax couldn’t have originated from that number because that particular machine can’t make outgoing calls. It’s wired so it can only receive faxes, not send them. Something about too many cops sending personal faxes.’

Dial smirked, impressed. He realized technology was good enough nowadays for someone to alter the number on a caller ID. Maybe this was another red herring to throw off his search while the killer planned something else. ‘Tell me about China.’

Chang filled him in on the latest, including an unconfirmed report that the victim was Paul Adams, a man known around the world as Saint Sydney, due to his missionary work.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Dial mumbled. ‘They got the Spirit.’

In his mind this was the news he was hoping for. It proved his theory about the sign of the cross was accurate. Plus it also meant if the killers continued with their current pattern, they were going to be arriving in Italy about the same time he did.