He climbed out the bedroom window, closed it behind him, shifted the duffel onto his shoulder, and reached down for the paper bag.
It was gone.
For an instant, Mitch froze, then carefully eased out his gun. He stared down into the alley. He couldn’t see any movement. In weather like this, not even the cats were on the prowl, and, from this height, the rats were invisible.
Who had taken the bag? Kids? Had to be. If someone was after him, they wouldn’t dick around with a six-pack and a carton of smokes, but he wasn’t in the mood for testing theories. He decided to go up onto the roof, where he could step across to another building and work his way down to street level a hundred yards away. He’d done it before, but not with the rooftops wet with rain.
He began to climb slowly and silently upward until he reached the roof. He was nipping敏捷地走, 飞快地跑 around a ventilation shaft housing when his foot slid on one of the dozen or so lengths of tubular steel scaffolding left there by a careless maintenance crew. It sent him flying forward to land, facedown, in a pool of rainwater. Scrambling back to his feet, he raced for the thigh-high parapet. Reaching it, he swung one leg up, then felt a sharp pain as someone suddenly kicked him behind the knee on his other leg, which promptly gave way.
He dived for his gun but the man grabbed his arm and twisted it. The gun flew from his hand and he heard it clatter down the sloping roof. He jerked against the grip with all his strength, felt himself break away from the man, and experienced a moment of elation before he overbalanced and went over the far side of the parapet.
Fingers desperately grasping for anything within reach, he managed to latch on to the rough stone capping with both hands. Then his attacker clasped his arms, just above the wrists, holding on and preventing him from slipping away to certain death. Mitch stared upward, saw the man’s face, and didn’t recognize him.
Whatever the guy wanted, he decided, he could gladly have.
“Pull me up,” he wheezed out. “Pull me up!”
The man slowly did what he asked, until Mitch was sprawled, facedown, half on and half off the capstone (stone placed at the top of a wall or other structure). He felt the man release one of his arms, then he saw something reflecting the light. For an instant, Mitch thought it was a knife, then he realized what it was: a hypodermic needle.
He didn’t know what the hell this meant and tried to squirm free but, before he could move, he felt a sudden sharp pain in the taut muscles that stretched up from his shoulder toward his skull.
The man had just jabbed the needle into his neck.
Chapter 31
As he stared at the vidcap print before him in the privacy of his room, De Angelis fingered the golden, diamond and ruby encrusted statuette of a rearing horse.
Privately, he thought the antique was quite vulgar. He knew it was a gift from the Russian Orthodox Church to the Holy Father on the occasion of a papal audience in the late nineteenth century, and he also knew that it was priceless. Vulgar and ugly, but nevertheless priceless.
He studied the image more closely. It was the one Reilly had given him at their first meeting, when the agent had inquired about the importance of the multigeared encoder. The sight was still one that made his heart race. Even this grainy print managed to reawaken in him the sheer exhilaration he felt when he first witnessed the moment on the surveillance footage he’d been shown at Federal Plaza.
Knights in shining armor pillaging a Manhattan museum in the twenty-first century.
Such audacity, he thought. Truly remarkable.
The picture showed the rider, who De Angelis now knew to be the fourth horseman, holding up the encoder. He stared at the man’s helmet, trying to burrow through the ink and the paper and into the horseman’s thoughts. The image was a three-quarter view, taken from the rear left side. Smashed display cabinets lay all around the knight. And in the top left corner on the shot, peeking out from behind a cabinet, was a woman’s face.
A female archaeologist who overheard the fourth horseman say something in Latin, De Angelis thought. She had to be close enough to hear him, and, staring at the picture, he knew it had to be her.
He focused on her face: taut with fear, frozen. Absolutely terrified.
It had to be her.
He set the picture and the jeweled horse down on his bed next to the pendant, which he now picked up. It was made of rubies and set in silver, a gift from the Nizam of Hyderabad. Worth a prince’s ransom, which is what it once had been. As he twirled it, he scowled at the dead end he had reached.
His quarry had covered his tracks well; he would have expected no less from a man of such daring. The gang leader’s minions, the desperate lowlifes that De Angelis had found, questioned, and dispatched with such ease, had proven useless.
The man himself still eluded him.
He needed a fresh tack. A divine intervention of sorts.
And now this. An annoyance.
A distraction.
He looked at her face again. He picked up his cell phone and hit a speed-dial key. Two short rings later, a gravelly, hoarse voice answered.
“Who’s this?”
“Just how many people have you given this number to, exactly?” The monsignor fired back tersely.
The man exhaled audibly. “Good to hear from you, sir.”
De Angelis knew the man would now be putting out a cigarette butt, while instinctively reaching for a fresh replacement. He had always found the habit repugnant, but the man’s other talents more than made up for it.
“I need your help on something.” As he said it, he frowned. He had hoped he wouldn’t need to involve anyone else. He stared at Tess’s face again. “I need you to access the FBI’s database on METRAID,” then added, “discreetly.”
The man’s answer came quickly.
“Not a problem. It’s one of the perks (benefit, advantage (Slang) of the war on terror. We’re all in a caring, sharing mode. Just tell me what you need.”
Chapter 32
Veering away from one of the many winding roads of the cemetery, Tess was now walking along a gravel path.
It was just past eight in the morning. The spring bulbs were in bloom all around the headstones, and the neatly clipped grass around her was wet from last night’s rain. The small rise in air temperature had generated a coiling mist that shrouded the tombstones and trees.
Overhead, a lone monk parakeet鹦鹉 flew by, breaking the serene setting with a haunting call. Despite the temperature rise and the cover of her coat, Tess shivered a little as she went deeper into the cemetery. Walking through a burial ground was uncomfortable at the best of times, and being here today made her think of her father and of how long it had been since she had visited his grave.
She stopped and checked the map she had printed out in the kiosk at the huge, gothic entrance. She thought she was headed in the right direction, but now she wasn’t that sure anymore. The cemetery was spread out over more than four hundred acres. It was easy to get lost, especially as she wasn’t driving. She had taken the R from midtown to the Twenty-fifth Street station in Brooklyn, walked a block east, and entered the cemetery from its main gate.
She looked around, trying to get her bearings, and wondered if coming here had been such a good idea after all. It was practically a lose-lose situation. If Vance was here, she’d be barging in on a hugely private moment. And if he wasn’t here, then her trip would have been a waste of time.
She pushed her doubts to the back of her mind and kept on walking. She was now in what was obviously an older part of the cemetery. As she passed an elaborate tomb topped by a reclining granite angel, she heard a sound off to one side. Startled, she peered into the mist. She could see nothing except the dark, shifting shapes of the trees. Uneasy now, she walked at a slightly brisker pace, realizing that she was plunging even deeper into the recesses of the cemetery.
Checking the map quickly, she saw that she must now be close. Convinced of her current location, she decided to take a shortcut across a small knoll and hurried over the slippery grass. She stumbled on a moldy stone surround, her fingers clutching at a crumbling marker to save herself from falling.
And then she saw him.
He was about fifty yards away, alone, standing solemnly in front of a small headstone. A bouquet of carnations, dark red and cream colored, lay before it. His head was bowed. A lone gray Volvo was parked on the drive nearby.
Tess waited a moment before deciding to approach him. She walked toward him slowly, quietly, and glanced at the headstone, spotting the words “Vance” and “Martha” on it. He still hadn’t turned when she got to within ten feet of him, even though they were the only ones around.
“Professor Vance,” she said hesitantly.
He stood rigid for a moment before slowly turning to face her.
She was standing before a changed man.
His hair was thick and silvery gray, his face gaunt. Although he was still slender and tall, the athletic build had receded, even displaying a slight stoop. His hands were in his coat pockets, and he wore a dark overcoat, its collar turned up. Tess noticed that it was threadbare at the cuffs and had a couple of stains on it. In fact, she was embarrassed to notice, his whole appearance was rather shabby. Whatever it was he did now, it was clearly several rungs below the position he had once enjoyed. Had she passed him in the street today, a decade after she last saw him, she doubted that she would have recognized him, but here, under the circumstances, she had no doubt.
He looked at her, his expression cautious.
“I’m really very sorry to intrude,” she stumbled, “I hope you’ll forgive me. I know this is an extremely personal moment for you and, believe me, if there was any other way to contact you…” She stopped, noting that his face seemed to brighten ever so slightly with what seemed like recognition.
“Tess. Tess Chaykin. Oliver’s daughter.”
She breathed in deeply and let out a low sigh of relief. As his face relaxed, his piercing gray eyes brightened, and she saw hints of the charismatic force he had been when they’d last met, all those years ago. There was clearly nothing wrong with his memory, because he said, “Now I know why you look different. You were pregnant when we met. I remember thinking that the Turkish wilderness wasn’t a good place for you then.”
“Yes.” She relaxed. “I have a daughter. Kim.”
“She must be…” He was working out how long it had been.
“She’s nine,” she offered helpfully, then her eyes darted away in embarrassment. “I’m sorry, I… I really shouldn’t be here.”
She felt a sudden urge to retreat and slip away when she noticed that his smile faded. His whole face seemed to darken as he glanced toward the headstone. His voice soft, he said, “My daughter Annie would have been five years old today.”
Daughter? Tess looked at him, thrown, and turned to the headstone. It was elegant in its simplicity, white, with the inscription carved out in letters that were maybe two inches high:
Martha & Annie Vance
May their smiles brighten up
A better world than this
She didn’t understand at first. Then it hit her. His wife must have died in childbirth.
Tess felt her face flush, deeply embarrassed now at her thoughtlessness in tracking this man down to his wife and daughter’s graveside. She looked up at Vance and saw that he was looking at her, the sadness etching deep lines into his face. Her heart sank. “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled, “I didn’t know.”
“We had already chosen names, you see. Matthew if it had been a boy, and Annie, of course. We chose them the night we were married.”
“What… how did they…” She couldn’t finish her question.
“It happened just over halfway into her pregnancy. She’d been under close observation from the start. She was -well, we both were- rather old to be having our first child. And her family had a history of high blood pressure. Anyway, she developed something called preeclampsia. They don’t know why it happens. I was told it was pretty common, but it can be devastating. Which it was in Martha’s case.” He stopped and took a deep breath, looking away. It was clearly painful for him to talk about it, and Tess wanted him to stop, she wanted the earth to open up and swallow her and avoid having him relive it through her selfish presence. But it was too late.
“The doctors said there was nothing they could do,” he continued mournfully. “They told us Martha would have to have an abortion. Annie was too young to have any hope of surviving in an incubator, and Martha’s chances of surviving the pregnancy herself were getting slimmer with each passing day.”
“The abortion didn’t…”
His gaze turned inward. “Normally, it wouldn’t even have been an option for us. But this was different. Martha’s life was at risk. So we did what we’d always done.” His expression hardened perceptibly. “We asked our parish priest, Father McKay, what we should do.”
Tess cringed as she guessed what had happened.
Vance’s face tightened up. “His position, the Church’s position, was very clear. He said it would be murder. Not just any murder, you understand, but the most heinous (wicked, monstrous) of all murders. An unspeakable crime. Oh, he was very eloquent about it. He said we’d be violating the written word of God. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ He said this was a human life we were talking about. We’d be killing a human being at the very beginning of its life, the most innocent murder victim possible. A victim who doesn’t understand, a victim who can’t argue, who can’t plead for its life. He asked us if we would do it if we could hear its cries, if we could see its tears. And if that wasn’t enough, his closing argument clinched it. ‘If you had a one-year-old baby, would you kill it, would you sacrifice it to save your own life? No. Of course you wouldn’t. What if it was one month old? What if it was just one day old? When does the clock really start ticking for a life?’ ” He paused, shaking his head at the memory. “We heeded his advice. No abortion. We put our faith in God.”
Vance looked at the grave, a cocktail of grief and anger visibly swirling in his veins. “Martha held on until she went into convulsions. She died of a brain hemorrhage. And Annie, well… her little lungs never even got a chance to breathe our filthy air.”
“I’m so, so sorry.” Tess could barely speak. But it didn’t really matter. Vance seemed to be in a world of his own. As she looked into his eyes, she could see that any sadness had now been overwhelmed by a fury that was rising from deep within.
“We were fools to put our lives in the hands of those ignorant, arrogant charlatans. It won’t happen again. Not to anyone. I’ll make sure of that.” He gazed at the emptiness around them. “The world has changed a lot in a thousand years. Life’s not about the will of God or about the malice of the devil. It’s about scientific fact. And it’s time people understand that.”
