“Before they put me in the back of that car, Spagna told me to be ready to go. He said you’d come.”
“I was the one who alerted the Maltese to both of you,” Spagna said. “I used the attack on the water from earlier as the pretense. I wanted local resources to find you, but now we need to be alone.”
“That conversation I witnessed between the two of you didn’t look all that friendly,” he said.
“I tell my people,” Spagna said, “that sometimes an actor has to play, in a single room, what the script describes as forty rooms. He must make the audience believe all forty exist. To do that, he must change reality. That’s what a good spy does, too. Change reality. Ms. Price is a good spy.”
“Whose side are you on?” Luke asked Spagna.
“Always, my church. My job is to protect it.”
“And what about you?” he said to Laura.
He didn’t like being played. Not ever.
She stared him down. “The only side that matters. My own.”
They kept moving.
He tried to calm down and be the eyes and ears Stephanie needed on the ground. They were now sufficiently far from Republic Street that they could slow their pace. They stopped at the end of an alley, where it intersected with another busy thoroughfare littered with cars. The shops here were all closed for the night. Fewer people on the sidewalks, too.
“It’s nice to make your acquaintance, Mr. Daniels,” Spagna said, offering a hand.
Play the part. Be the gentleman.
He offered his hand in return.
“You both should be honored. I don’t usually work the field.”
“Why are you now?” Luke asked.
Spagna extended his arms in a mock embrace. “Because everything is happening here, on this ancient island. And being at the center of the storm is always the best place to be.”
This guy had style, he’d give him that.
“By the way, Mr. Daniels, do you have a cell phone?”
He nodded and found the unit. Spagna took it from him and tossed it into the street, where an oncoming car crushed the case.
Malone’s voice rushed through his head.
Dumb-ass mistake, Frat Boy.
You think?
“We don’t need to be tracked. I know the Magellan Billet’s standard issue contains constant GPS.”
“Aren’t you a wealth of inside information,” Luke noted. “I bet you’d be hell playing Spy Jeopardy.”
“You can keep your Beretta,” Spagna said, pointing to his exposed shirttail. “Call it a show of my good faith.”
Comforting. But not enough to alleviate his suspicions.
“Tell him what you told me,” Laura said to Spagna.
“I know what Cardinal Gallo is after.”
“That’s all great. But I need to check in with Stephanie Nelle,” Luke pointed out. “She gives me my orders.”
More thunder growled in the distance, signaling storms were coming.
“You can contact her,” Spagna said. “Later. I’ll make sure that happens. Right now she has her hands full trying to save a former agent named Cotton Malone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Cotton walked back through the refectory, past the empty workstations, and reentered the cloister. Pollux Gallo was gone, but it remained unclear if he’d fled alone. The two brown-robed brothers from the chapter house might still be somewhere on the premises.
He headed back their way with the gun ready.
His clothes were wet from the dousing of the sprinklers, and at the chapter house door he heard the faucets still spewing. He’d regretted the destruction to the manuscripts. All no doubt irreplaceable. But Gallo had brought him here to die. He’d had no choice.
The sprinklers shut off.
He came alert, wondering if that was automatic or by human hand. He peered inside. The tables with their glass domes dripped with water, the floor soaked and puddled. He slipped inside and made a quick run down the end aisle, looking for the guy he’d first taken down, but nobody was there. He fled the chapter house and headed back to the crypt and found the same thing. The robed brother he’d taken down there was also gone. Where were they? And why had Gallo not kept up the attack?
He needed to check the rest of the monastery. Grant had specifically wanted to know about anything on Mussolini. He decided that, so long as he was here, he’d see if there was anything to find.
He left the crypt and returned to the cloister, checking the metal doors, one after another, that lined its inner wall. All of them were closed and protected by electronic locks that required a code from a keypad. At a point diagonally opposite to the chapter