Stealing God (29 page)

‘There are plenty of convents, Mr Costello. I don't think anyone would find anything.'

‘But if someone tells the intelligence community she's there somewhere they'll start looking. I don't say they'll find her. I'm sure your nuns will be as good as the monks were when they moved Nazis around after the war. But she'll have to give up any idea of a settled religious life. Is that what you want for her?'

She wasn't so pleased with herself any more.

‘No.'

‘Then tell me about her, where she fits in.'

‘She's not part of this; she wasn't ever in Rome.'

‘You made her part of this, not me, and if you made her a part of it I want to know what that part was.'

‘Why, Mr Costello? Why is it so important for you to know? It's all over now.'

‘I need to know where I stand in all of this. If what you've told me is true then there's been some very powerful people involved and my guess is they wouldn't think twice about what happened to one individual they thought had information they didn't want shared with anyone else. You got me involved so I want you to tell me what I was involved in, which means you tell me about Anna.'

It didn't take more than a couple of seconds for her to decide.

‘Eva and Anna were chalk and cheese. Eva was wild from being a teenager, Anna was always quiet. Eva's parents hoped her going to university would help her settle down, as we know it did the reverse. Anna was pious, wanted to be a nun. She was waiting until she was old enough and was sure she had a vocation. She used to go and stay at a convent and talk to the other nuns and the mother superior. She was pretty close to being admitted when Eva and her friends did what they did and went on the run. Eva turned up one day and got Anna on her own. She demanded her help and gave Anna no choice. Help or I'll kill Mummy and Daddy and then I'll kill you. What could she do? She helped. She got the men places to stay and got herself and Eva into a retreat house. It was perfect. The men didn't know where the sisters were, and who would look for a murderer in a Catholic retreat house? Then that idiot Geisller tried the bank business. Eva realised at once that if he tried again without her, they'd be taken. They met up and she planned the supermarket robbery. Once that was over they had enough money to travel so they set off to find the real strong men, the ones who were organised and ruthless. Anna went home and her parents arranged for her to go into a convent. They realised they'd effectively lost one daughter, they didn't want to lose the other to a long prison sentence so they pretended she was on the run with her sister. In the convent she was safe and they could visit her if they were very careful.'

‘And the mother superior agreed to take her?'

‘Of course; Anna had done nothing wrong.'

‘Nothing wrong! She acted as transport officer for a gang of murdering thugs.'

‘I mean she had committed no sin. No doubt under criminal law she could have been charged with complicity after the fact in a murder and for actual complicity in armed robbery. But she had been given a choice between two evils: help her sister or see her parents murdered and be murdered herself. She chose the lesser of two evils. To do that is not a sin. She may have been guilty according to the law but to the Catholic Church she had not sinned.' Jimmy the policeman would have laughed at such reasoning, but Jimmy the Catholic could see how it worked, if only for a truly Catholic mind. ‘The Geisller Group dropped out of sight and Anna settled down to a life in the convent but she never felt safe. At any time Eva might have turned up and demanded her help again. Then Eva was shot outside a railway station and the threat was gone. For Anna and her parents the nightmare was over.'

‘Do you know who did it, the shooting?'

‘No, but given who she was running with it could have been anyone.'

‘But with Eva dead Anna could pick up the threads?'

‘That's right and when the mother superior felt that emotionally and spiritually she was ready she agreed to let her begin her training.'

‘And she was to hand when you needed a known terrorist for your piece of drama.'

‘Yes.'

‘And that's all of it?' She didn't answer. Jimmy waited, but she still didn't answer. ‘Only the thing is, I got a phone call as I was coming here from Inspector Ricci. He's been following up on things. The two men, it turns out, were British Asians, one from Manchester and one from Luton. Both were students at Birmingham University and both sang like canaries as soon as they were questioned. Yes, they were would-be suicide bombers and yes, they had tried to detonate the bomb when they were stopped by the police. But the bomb didn't go off.'

If this information surprised her, she didn't show it.

‘Didn't it? Maybe the fuse or whatever it was failed.'

‘Do you want to know why I think it didn't go off?'

‘If you want to tell me?'

‘Because there was no bomb in the van. What they got at the airport was a case, a packing case marked machine parts but to them it was their bomb. The man who gave it to them had the right identification so they just took delivery. Then they set off for Rome and ran straight into the police who were waiting for them, just like you'd planned.'

‘So you think there was there no bomb?'

‘Oh yes, there had to be a bomb for this farce to have happened. And now you've got it.'

‘I assure you that …'

‘Wriggle all you like, piss me about with half-truths and fancy words. You personally haven't got it but the Vatican has it, or knows where it is.'

McBride let the thing go. If he'd worked it out he'd worked it out. Just listen to what he thought he knew and then find out what he wanted.

‘This only makes sense if you switched the bomb when it was picked up in Italy. After the bomb was safely in your hands you could let things go on because nothing bad could happen. The bombers would get caught and everything would be neatly wrapped up.'

‘Neatly wrapped up?'

‘You had the proof, the proof of who was really behind it. You had the bomb, you had the Chinese who had sold the plutonium, the Pakistani scientist who had put it together, and the Lebanese who was supposed to collect it and pass it on. You even had the men who were supposed to have done it. There was a beautiful trail from Pakistan down to Lebanon and on to Italy where a couple of radicalised, young British Muslims were to have carried out the actual attack. It comes out as a straight Al Qaeda-sponsored attack.'

‘But you think something else?'

‘I know it was. It was set up by to put the Christian world against the Muslim, to make everyone take sides.'

‘And who do you think might want such a thing to happen?'

‘The Americans. This was all a CIA operation so their War on Terror could be fought to a conclusion.' She was about to speak but Jimmy didn't give her the chance. ‘If I wanted to radicalise every Muslim you know what I would do? I'd bomb Mecca, preferably during the Hadj. That would hit every Muslim across the globe, moderates, secular, Westernised, the lot. Turn it round, make Rome the target, and you get the same result only with Christians, not Muslims.' She looked at him with genuine surprise as he went on. ‘You didn't get anything from the Chinese. Somehow you got wind of it, someone leaked the plan to you so you had to see that it never happened but you couldn't afford to point the finger at the American government. The only way was for you to let it happen and then step in at the last minute and take the bomb. Then you'd be in a position to say, “We know all about it and we can prove it, so don't ever try anything like it again, anywhere.” The Chinese choosing the Vatican to help out was just crap, like the target could have been in any European country was crap. The Vatican was the target from day one.'

The surprise had left McBride's face. Now there was a slight hint of worry. She had been right to find out what he thought he knew. He was indeed a good detective, but he had gone too far, he had overshot. He hadn't let her point his nose for him, he'd gone where he wanted to go, not where he was supposed to go. Now he posed a real danger.

‘I'm afraid you're quite wrong, Mr Costello. The American government, I assure you, through their intelligence services or in any other way, would never contemplate using a nuclear device against Rome, against the Holy Father.'

‘No lies, remember. Don't take to sinning at this stage of the game. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You said you started digging into my past when I resurrected my application. That was when you were looking to recruit. But that had to be wrong, the time-scale didn't fit did it?' He paused, he was just about sure. ‘You told the Chinese that an approach would be made to their man to get plutonium. You told them, they didn't tell you.'

Her reply was quiet.

‘Yes.'

‘And Cheng was acting for you both. He was your secure line of communication?'

She nodded.

Now was the time. Now he could tell her what he knew, what he had worked out.

‘It was the Americans, wasn't it? Unite the West against Islam. One billion Catholics world-wide baying for blood and the Americans leading the pack.' Jimmy was trying very hard not to let his anger take over. He wanted to be right more than he wanted to be angry. ‘For Christ's sake, it's like,' he struggled for words, ‘it's like stealing God. Only the Americans would be so fucking arrogant as to think that they had the right to …'

She didn't interrupt because of Jimmy's language. She interrupted because he needed to know the truth, the real truth, and he needed to know it now.

THIRTY-SIX

‘We were told very early in the planning. But it wasn't as you think.'

‘What is it about you Americans, why is it never your fault? Why can your people never be the bad guys?'

‘I assure you, Mr Costello, it is not some patriotic, blinkered view which makes me say it was not America.'

Jimmy sneered at her. His anger was taking over. He wanted it to.

‘America, always banging on about being leader of the Free World. America doesn't want to be leader of the Free World, it wants to be the bloody owner of the Free World, to do anything they like with the Free World so long as it suits their interest.'

‘Mr Costello.' There was a sharpness in her voice that stopped Jimmy. ‘Mr Costello, it was not the Americans.'

Jimmy shut down his anger. This woman was hard to call. She said she'd told him the truth and in a way she had, in a twisted sort of way. Was she telling the truth now or was she still trying to give him a run-around? No, he was sure. It had to the Americans.

‘Prove it to me. If not the Americans, who? And don't try to give me terrorists.'

‘Just as a matter of interest, why not?'

‘Because from start to finish no real terrorists were used. Real terrorists would have used their own people. They would have to buy the scientist but they would have used their own to move the bomb from Beirut to Italy, not some freelancers. The two British students were probably why the bomb sat in Beirut for so long, while they were given some sort of training. They were new recruits, stooges, who only needed to collect the crate, drive it to Rome, then sing the right song when they got picked up. And why target the Vatican? If terrorists had a nuclear device and could move it they'd send it to an American port and let it off as soon as the ship docked. They wouldn't even have needed to unload it. They would have made their point. We can get to you, nowhere is safe now. For terrorists the target would have been America, not the Vatican.'

‘Very well, Mr Costello, not terrorists, at least not what people call terrorists in the current sense.'

‘So if not America then who?'

‘I can't tell you, Mr Costello.'

‘Can't or won't?'

‘Can't and won't. I am not allowed to tell you. I have undertaken to keep that information secret. There is no way I will give you a direct or indirect answer to the question. I'm afraid it is something you must work out for yourself.'

The awful part, she thought, is that now I have to make him believe me. He only has my word for it that it is not the Americans, but he has to believe me enough to work it out. And please God he's good enough to work it out. She waited.

‘OK, I have to ask you a straight question and I have to have a straight answer. Maybe then I'll know enough to decide what I might do, if I do anything.'

She nodded. She knew what was coming. If she answered his question properly, he might finally accept he had made a mistake. Although whether that was better than how things stood at the moment was very much a moot point.

‘Were the Americans involved?'

McBride was ready for it.

‘There are extreme Christian groups in America who believe that the Second Coming of Christ can only take place after Armageddon. They would welcome anything that brings that day closer. They might very well view the prospect of the Middle East conflict going nuclear as one way of bringing about Armageddon, thereby bringing the Second Coming. There are also elements on the American Right who would welcome any action which polarised opinion between the Muslim and non-Muslim world and allowed the War on Terror to be waged without restraint to a conclusion. This is all common knowledge, Mr Costello, you do not have to have spent a lifetime watching the international political scene to know that these realities are at work, but any unholy alliance between military hawks and Christian fundamentalists would not be supported in any way by the government.'

‘Or the intelligence agencies?'

She knew it had to be the truth this time, just the truth.

‘One cannot rule out that within the intelligence community such an option has been discussed.'

‘So?'

‘So, yes, there were almost certainly people in America, important, influential people who would not have been party to planning such an operation but could have known about it and done nothing to stop it. Such people would have been ready and waiting to persuade the American government that, if it had happened, it should be used to the benefit of America, that what was done could not be undone and the best use should be made of the situation on the ground. It would have been a powerful argument but, as it is, we will never know what might have been the ultimate outcome.'