The Sacred Blood

Donovan glanced out the window at the omnipresent freeway signboards for Paradise Valley before answering. “Conte’s dead, Charlotte,” he said with conviction. “It couldn’t have been him.”

This took Charlotte completely by surprise. “What? How?” A pause.

“I killed him.” His brogue grew stronger. “I had to kill him,” he stressed.

“There was no choice.”

“My God,” she gasped in repulsion. “How could you do such a thing?

You’re a priest.” Now she couldn’t dismiss the fear that maybe Donovan

was somehow baiting her.

His wounded stare remained on the approaching desert hills, dotted

with cacti. “Just before he tried to kill me, he told me he would come for

you, Charlotte.” He could still hear the mercenary’s words clearly in his

mind: “Did the cardinal tell you she skipped off with her laptop . . . loaded

up with all the data? . . . I’ve got to fix that too and her blood will be on your

hands ... if a freak accident should happen to befall the lovely geneticist . . . the authorities would be none the wiser... Of course, I’ ll be sure to show her a good time before she goes.” “I couldn’t handle another loss . . . after Dr.

Bersei . . . the Israelis.”

Mute, Charlotte couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“I had a gun,” he went on. “There was a struggle . . .”

For a moment, Donovan was back at the misty grove atop Monte Scuncole, peering down at the ossuary he and Conte had dropped into the pit

they’d dug. He remembered fixating on the crack that had snapped the

stone lid in two—wide enough to reveal the sacred bones beneath. Conte

intended to drop Donovan’s body in right behind the relic and use C-4 to

finish the job.

“I managed to run from him . . . out onto the roadway. He was right

behind me when the car came.” The images reeled through his mind,

making his pulse drum. He needed to take a breath before continuing.

“By the grace of God, it swerved and took him down—like the Angel of

Death . . . but even with that, he was still breathing.” He shook his head

in disbelief. “Only the devil himself could have kept him alive. But Conte

was breathing. Had he somehow lived, there’s no telling what—” Trembling fingers went to his lips to repress the surge of emotion. The next

words came fast: “So I took the gun and finished him.” He quickly crossed

himself. God, please have mercy and forgive me for these deeds. No matter what the consequences, airing the confession felt good—

cleansing. The Irish way of “stuffing it down” simply wasn’t good for the

soul. However, Donovan still wasn’t prepared to offer up that when he’d

stripped Conte’s body of its personal effects, he’d found a syringe filled with

clear serum, which he’d snuck past the Vatican metal detectors to eliminate what he thought had been the final threat—the Vatican’s secretary of

state. Otherwise Santelli would have stopped at nothing to complete what

he’d set out to do: eliminate any trace of the Vatican’s involvement in the

church’s greatest cover-up.

He allowed a few moments for the air to settle.

“Then Conte did kill Bersei?” She’d suspected that all along. Donovan nodded. “Many others too.” Though he felt he’d already said

too much, Charlotte would need to know the whole story. “There’s more,”

he said. “I suppose there’s nothing to lose now,” he said, and sighed. He went on to tell her how just weeks before she’d been summoned to

Vatican City, he’d been given a book by an anonymous contact (“The book

I showed you during our meeting with Cardinal Santelli,” he reminded her), how it had actually included a map showing the ossuary’s hidden burial vault beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. How when he realized the implications of what would happen if the ossuary was discovered by Israelis, he’d convinced Santelli to take action. Though he’d advocated a peaceful solution, the pragmatic cardinal immediately sent for Salvatore Conte. Upon assessing the job Conte had used untraceable Vatican funds to employ a team of men to forcefully extract the ossuary—an elaborate plan involving guns, explosives, even a stolen helicopter. Many Israelis had been killed during an ensuing firefight at the Temple Mount, Donovan