Authors: Rick Mofina
35
Romania-Ukraine border
“Again.”
The prisoner’s head was thrust into a steel tub of ice water and held there.
He was naked, on his knees on the cold hard floor.
At eight seconds without oxygen he struggled against his bindings, leather straps used to restrain the criminally insane.
At twelve seconds he bucked.
His interrogator was seated comfortably nearby, waiting. She was known only as “the Colonel.” A woman in her forties, who spoke six languages and was expert in interrogation techniques used by the Stasi, the CIA, Mossad and the SS.
Was her background Israeli, or German? Some guessed her as a Pole.
At sixteen seconds, she nodded to the handlers, who were contractors, and the prisoner’s head was pulled from the bucket. He gorged on air, his limp body trem bling. He had not been allowed sleep in four days. He’d
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been forced to stand naked in a cell while being drenched periodically with frigid water.
His condition was failing fast. He could not stand without being supported. As a military doctor checked his vital signs, the Colonel stood and drew her face near to the prisoner’s.
“Is there an operation underway?”
He was known as Issa al-Issa, a key operative, in visible in the world. Issa was an alias he had employed for longer than he should have. He may have been a former police official from the U.A.E. It was never de termined. Months of intelligence work led to his clan destine midnight abduction from an apartment for immigrant workers in Kuwait City. He’d been hand cuffed, and a sack was tied over his head before he was deposited into a private Gulfstream jet.
He was first flown to Jordan, then Nicosia. Then he was flown to a region established by Byzan tines where the Danube flowed in the Black Sea. Then he was driven in the trunk of a car to Building #S-9846.
A building once used by the KGB to harvest infor mation.
A building that did not exist.
In fact, for official purposes, neither did Issa al-Issa.
He was a ghost prisoner.
“Is there an operation underway, Issa?”
The doctor turned to the Colonel and shook his head. Issa’s condition had deteriorated, reaching a critical point. The Colonel nodded to the handlers to release him.
He crumbled to the floor, able to rest for the first time in one hundred hours.
As he lay there trembling, she bent over him. “What more can you tell me before you die, Issa?”
She waited with the full knowledge she would not receive an answer.
With an animallike groan the prisoner expelled a massive breath.
Then he was still.
The doctor knelt beside him and checked his heart, his eyes, waiting, listening, rechecking before pro nouncing the man deceased.
“Take care of it,” she told the handlers.
Swiftly and efficiently they moved Issa al-Issa’s corpse into a body bag. Then they carried it outside the building and deep into the dense forest, to the grave the prisoner had been forced to dig on the first day of his arrival.
As the handlers buried Issa al-Issa, the Colonel remained in Building #S-9846 and flipped through her logged notes. Issa had been one of the hardest inter views she’d ever conducted. She’d failed to extract as much as she’d hoped from him.
But what she had was vital.
She reached for her satellite phone.
She dialed the number for her contact at the embassy.
Issa’s information could prove valuable to some gov ernments, perhaps enough to warrant a significant amount of cash.
36
Vatican City
In the moments before sunrise, the pope stood alone at the window of the papal apartment in the top floor of the Apostolic Palace.
He watched twilight paint the Basilica, Bernini’s colonnade and St. Peter’s Square in pale blues and purple as a few police officers strolled the empty, silent piazza.
Weariness settled more heavily than usual on him because of his troubled sleep. Again, he had struggled to determine the meaning of his distraction.
It was the dream.
First light dawned.
He left the window for his private chapel and a
session of private prayer. He prayed for the world’s troubles and for the personal requests sent to him. The ten-year-old boy from El Salvador who had lost his family in the recent earthquake; the grief-stricken widow in Belfast afraid of losing her faith after the death of her husband; even for the little Swiss girl who had lost her kitten and included a photo and a little map, “so God will know where to look.”
He smiled at that one.
After prayers, he celebrated Mass with a small group then ate breakfast with a few invited guests, a delegation of nuns from Brazil. Then he went to his private office to study his draft texts for his upcoming visit to the U.S. They concerned the environment, human reproduction, abortion, the sanctity of family, the erosion of the numbers of priests and the role of women in the church.
But in a far corner of his mind he thought of the dream.
At midmorning he held a series of scheduled audi ences in the public part of the papal apartment. They were followed by lunch with a number of newly arrived diplomats posted to Rome and the Holy See, from the Netherlands, France, Japan, India and Chile.
Later, he returned to his office and opened the locked pouch that had arrived from the Secretariat of State. It contained secret correspondence with world leaders and other important documents, such as a highly clas sified note pertaining to security for the U.S. visit.
The note was written by the U.S. Secret Service, with an attached analysis by the chief of papal security for the trip. It outlined a number of ongoing threats, sus pected sources, analysis, probability of success and ongoing counteraction.
Such analysis was done for all foreign trips.
The pope stroked his chin at the underlined portions, requesting that he wear “specially designed body armor” during all public events of his seven-city visit.
“Intelligence indicates the strong likelihood that
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an attack will be attempted to gain instant and world wide impact.”
Such threats were common and some were carried out.
The pope considered the recent and past history of attempted papal assassinations, including the shooting of John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.
The prospect of assassination lived in a pope’s shad ow. He was not foolish about this aspect of his office. Since the days of Peter, it was part of the job.
He accepted the risks.
A familiar two-beat knock sounded at the door.
The deputy chief of the Secretariat of State appeared.
“Apologies, Holiness. It is time to meet with the car dinals and others on the final preparations for the American trip.”
The pope took in a long breath, let it out slowly, then accompanied his trusted secretary, never tiring of the splendor of the Apostolic Palace as they walked along floors of sixteenth-century marble, lined by walls with ornate tapestries, gilding and Raphael frescoes.
The others, some two dozen in all, had been briefed by the deputy chief on the most pressing matter. The pope immediately raised his hand, the one with the Fisher man’s Ring, inviting those present to begin speaking freely.
“Your Eminence,” the first cardinal began, “the Americans are responsible for papal safety during the visit. They have provided us with intelligence suggest ing an assassination attempt is probable. But there’s nothing specific. And some U.S. church groups are growing vocal, openly urging the Vatican to abbreviate
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the visit. The U.S. Secret Service is asking us to make a decision on the visit’s final agenda.”
The pope acknowledged this as the cardinal continued.
“Eminence, to curtail matters now diminishes the importance of the papacy. It is out of the question.”
“It is simply too late,” another said.
And so it went from chair to chair to chair while the pope’s thoughts left the room for the photographs on his nightstand of the Buffalo Breaks in Montana. They were beautiful in conveying the vastness of what was known as “Big Sky Country.” Last week, he had re quested the Vatican library also fetch him the private journals kept by the Jesuits who first arrived there in advance of white settlers in the early 1800s.
He enjoyed reading the poetry of their descriptions at night before he fell asleep.
“This is a place like no other,” one had written, “where the earth meets heaven, where your relationship with God, your sense of self-importance, is either heightened, or diminished. I fear it is a place of reckoning.”
A place of reckoning.
Then there was the pope’s recurring dream.
He’d told no one.
It was more like a vision.
Sister Beatrice, incandescent, ascending above the prairie, telling him he must come, that his destiny was here.
Someone was speaking to him.
“Excellency?”
“Yes.”
“As the date of your visit to America draws near, we are requested to give a prompt response to Washington.”
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The pope nodded thoughtfully.
In his own private assessment, he looked to the history of the church. In carrying out their work, priests and nuns had been murdered and had faced every threat and danger imaginable.
In many parts of the world, this remained true today.
And in many parts of the world it held true for the congregation as well.
The pope, above all, was a priest.
If God had decided these would be his final days, then he embraced the decision.
He was not afraid to die.
Your destiny is here. A place of reckoning.
“Your Excellency?”
The pope sighed.
“We need to examine this a bit more,” he said. “Meanwhile, original preparations should continue. We’ll provide our response to Washington by the end of the day.”
37
Washington, D.C.
Daniel Graham worked at his hotel-room desk mining Tarver’s files for a lead.
Anything.
He’d been up since dawn.
His hair was tousled. He wore a faded T-shirt, sweat
pants, and downed stale coffee as he scoured the articles
and reports Tarver had collected on immigration pol
icies, terrorist sleeper cells and technology for building
dirty bombs.
The file also had government records on civilian
contract truckers in Iraq that Tarver had obtained
through the Freedom of Information Act. Consequently,
under national security and privacy legislation, most
portions had been blacked out.
Whatever Tarver had been looking for, he’d been
looking hard.
But Graham couldn’t find a link to Tarver’s last story
and the tragedy in the Rockies.
The facts Graham knew firsthand gnawed at him:
The stranger. The missing laptop, Emily Tarver’s last
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words. Again, he reviewed the notebook he’d found at the Tarver campsite and Ray’s final handwritten entry on Blue Rose Creek.
Possibly in California.
What is Blue Rose Creek? He scratched his whiskers. What does it mean?
Is there a connection?
He hadn’t heard back from Walker. He asked Reg Novak and Carson, the FBI agent, to run the term through their systems. They’d found nothing. Graham had searched for it on the Internet but found nothing he could use, some obscure blogs, some poetry. Some results showed a suburb near Riverside County, Califor nia.
Maybe Ray’s father had found something. Graham glanced at the time, thinking that he needed to get cleaned up before their meeting, when the hotel phone rang.
“Nice work on keeping things low-key,” Inspector Mike Stotter said from Calgary. “Tell me why I shouldn’t haul your ass back here on the next plane?”
“I’ll explain what happened.”
“No, I’ll explain. The Secret Service called RCMP Headquarters in Ottawa. Ottawa called Edmonton, who called my boss, who had me spend much of yesterday defending you.”
“I can explain.”
“Tell me something, Dan. Why in the hell did you tell a senior Secret Service agent on the papal security detail that he’s a suspect in the Tarver case?”
“How is it that this agent is informed that the case,
my case,
has been officially cleared and closed?”
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“That’s not the issue here.”
“It damn well is, sir. It’s not only a breach. I was betrayed by somebody feeding him BS.”
“Likely came from Ottawa bureaucrats, making an assumption and making nice.”
“Making nice? What’re you talking about?”
“Look, right now, every U.S. security agency is strained by the pope’s visit because they have to check every single burp by every nut job who makes a poten tial threat. Add to that the fact the president is scheduled to visit Canada in one month. Throw in the fact U.S. Canada relations are chilly right now, means every body’s tightly wound.”
“So? What’s that got to do with me looking into Ray Tarver’s background?”
“Ottawa does not want any tension with U.S. security people right now. Especially with the president coming to Canada and especially over this sort of thing.”
“I’m dealing with multiple deaths and you’re talking politics.”
“What happened to this family was terrible. But they died tragically while camping. You’ve followed your hunch. There’s nothing criminal or sinister here. Noth ing concrete. It’s got the hallmark of a tragic accident.”
“What?”
The long-distance line hissed before Stotter resumed.
“Dan, you know I’m right. And I’m sorry but I’m going to cut your trip short. We’ve got other cases and I need you back here.”
“Don’t do this, Mike. Let me have the time you gave me.”
“Dan, listen, I let you go down there because I
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thought it might help you. You’re one of our best inves tigators. You’ve been through a lot. I need you at full strength and I thought you needed to do this.”
“What’re you saying, Mike? That this was a pity assignment?”
“Dan.”
“I don’t believe this. Tell me, Mike, have we found Tarver’s body yet?”
“No.”
“Did we find his laptop yet?”
“No.”
“So why is everybody but me convinced this was an accident?”
In the awkward silence Graham sensed an uneasy answer being formed.
“You’re the one who heard voices, Dan.”
“That little girl spoke to me, Mike. Before she died, she spoke to me.”
“Dan, are you sure it was the little girl you heard?”
Graham’s stomach quaked and he squeezed the phone.
“Sir, I request permission to complete my assign ment in the time you’d allotted.”
Graham knew he couldn’t justify staying in the U.S. but in some small corner of his heart, someone, or something, was screaming for him to keep investigat ing.
“You’re there at my discretion.”
“I know, sir.”
“You’ve got a few more days. That’s it. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”