The Dead Saint (31 page)

Zeller's habitual patience wore thin as he followed the taxi. But he liked turning the tables on Peterson, stalking the stalker. He'd waited for the trio, first near a café and then near a hotel, glad it was a clear day and easy to keep their taxi in view from a safe distance. When they came out of the hotel and climbed back in, he took up the game again. The taxi stopped at an apartment building and let them out. Zeller drove on, turning right at the corner. He was ready for action, and the weather was perfect—plenty of sunlight and no wind. This neighborhood offered a strategic setting with few people on the streets. The windows had eyes, but their owners wouldn't talk. No. They were afraid to get involved. Besides, they were accustomed to gunfire and death. War helped aces. It desensitized people to violence.

He parallel parked skillfully in a too-small space. Casually, he carried his navy duffle bag down the street, just a harmless Austrian nephew from rural Tirol looking for his dear old aunt's address—should anyone ask. As he approached the intersection where he'd turned
off
to park the car, he noticed that a museum stood directly across from the apartment building. He ambled to the corner, scanning the museum for advantages and flaws. It looked vacant and rundown, pocked with old shellings from the last war. A good place to do business. The second story would be perfect. He searched for the best window. Wait! He caught a glint in an open one. He bent down and retied one of his running shoes to check it out. His opaque sunglasses hid his focus. Again, the sunlight glinted on metal. He got a nanosecond's glimpse of a furtive figure. Interesting. The window did indeed have eyes.

The museum would not do. No. Behind his sunglasses he scanned both sides of the street for a place with simple access and effortless escape. He decided the situation called for a triangle: himself and the other two points of interest—the apartment house door and the second-story museum window, both within range. He spotted an ideal building closed for repairs. No trees blocked his view. He rose from tying his shoe and moseyed down the street. So easy.

After snapping the cheap lock with a single blow that made a dull thud, he took the dank, scuffed stairs to the room with the best view of the other two points in the triangle. He popped his flash drive into his laptop and pulled up the Sarajevo research he'd downloaded in Vienna. A search for the apartment building revealed the list of tenants at that address. One was a woman named Rachel
Darwish!
Peterson was not innocent! No! He had just connected another Zeller dot—his final and fatal mistake!

Zechariah Zeller had no regard for a man who flaunted faith without practicing it. But Peterson was a new breed of pretender. He'd mastered the role of trailing dutifully and innocently after his wife while harboring unsuspected lethal plans of his own. Zeller had some ideas about the place of religion, and they did not include a higher power interested in his well-being. My own power, he thought smugly, is as good as it gets. Immediately he tempered his attitude. Confidence was a good thing; it freed his body, mind, and psyche for the task. But overconfidence was like a light that blinded. It could result in carelessness to details. Besides, he did not want to tempt any god that might exist to go against him.

He assembled his rifle and, curious about the glint he'd seen in the window, he looked toward it through his scope. Startled, he discovered a sniper rifle resting on a bipod, aimed toward the apartment building. Another shooter on the scene! Interesting. Probably fulfilling a contract. Who's the contractor? Who's the target?

As he continued his detailed preparations, he considered a silencer. He'd used one for Darwish and an altered one for Manetti. Today he dispensed with a silencer. He wanted the noise to throw people into panic and keep them hiding behind their blinds, assisting in an unseen escape. His excitement mounted like electricity building into a lightning bolt. He no longer minded that this was pro bono. The challenge itself was the reward.

Say your prayers and confess your sins, Galen Peterson. You are about to meet the god you've been pretending to know.

A gray-haired woman, her two braids twisted into a bun, opened the apartment door without hesitation. Her eyes were red and swollen.

"Mrs. Darwish?" asked Galen.

She nodded.

Lynn remembered her own eyes after Lyndie's death and knew that for Elie's mother the days were endless nightmares. Longing to reverse his death. To give her own life instead. Wondering how and why to go on living. There were moments when Lynn still wondered.

Galen introduced each of them by pointing and saying their names.

"Bubba Broussard," she repeated, smiling for the first time.

"English?" he asked.

"A little, please," she said modestly. "My sons moved to America. My big surprise for them." Under her breath she added, "Foolish."

"Not foolish at all, ma'am," said Bubba. "Elie appreciated it. He spoke of you often with great love and respect."

"Thank you." The heaviness of grief dulled her voice.

"We are his friends." He circled his hand to include Galen and Lynn.

"Yes, please. His letters name you, Bubba Broussard."

She invited them in, and they moved from the institutional green of the corridor to the institutional green of her three-room apartment. The south-facing windows brightened the small living room. Lynn noted the yellow flowers out her front window, dots of hope offered in the midst of despair. Neat and sparsely furnished, the living area took up the front half of the apartment. The back half was divided. The open door on the east side revealed a little kitchen with a table for two. She assumed the other room with the closed door was her bedroom.

Mrs. Darwish gestured to the two chairs. "Sit, please. I will bring more chairs." She started into the kitchen.

"I'll get them," said Galen, ever the gentleman.

Huge and sensitive Bubba followed him, eyes down, stooped by the weight of Elie's mother's incomparable pain added to his own.

"Tea, please?"

"No, thank you," said Galen, habitually prone to avoid inconveniencing anyone.

"Yes, please," Lynn said, knowing that all of them would feel more comfortable if their hands had something to hold.

Mrs. Darwish looked at Lynn and nodded with mutual understanding.

While Galen and Bubba shaped a square by adding the two wooden chairs across from the other pair, Lynn offered to help her hostess with tea. As they started toward the kitchen, Lynn noticed a small wall shelf displaying three pictures. She glimpsed the old photograph of a teenage boy and the newer one of a girl. But it was the one of Elie that caused her throat to catch. He smiled proudly in his Saints uniform. She paused. "I am so sorry, Mrs. Darwish."

"Yes."

The single syllable emitted an agony that Lynn understood. She shared softly, "I lost a child also. My daughter."

Elie's mother looked from the picture to Lynn, that terrible hurt in her eyes. Simultaneously, they put their arms around each other in the universal embrace of mothers who know what it is to lose what is most precious.

In time her trembling ceased. She straightened, gold-bar rigid, and backed up a step. Her gaze aimed toward the apartment door as though someone lingered there. After a moment she looked away. "I am sorry, please," she mumbled with a heavy sigh. "I lost both my sons, only one of them through death."

As Mrs. Darwish busied herself making tea, absorbed in her thoughts, Lynn stood nearby quite comfortable with their silence together. The space between them was filled with mutual understanding that didn't need words. But Lynn was terribly uncomfortable about the apology she must make regarding Elie's medal. Not now, she decided, putting it off. Tea first. They carried the steaming cups and joined the men sitting across from each other. Lynn sat beside Galen, Mrs. Darwish across from her beside Bubba. A briefcase stood between them. Bubba gestured toward it. "These things were Elie's. They are mementos of honor and important papers."

"I will see them later, please."

Lynn marveled at Bubba's gentleness and tenderness toward this woman he had never seen before. He was caring for her as if she was his own mother.

"Do you have someone to help you with the papers?" he asked.

"Vikolaj, my son-in-law. I practice English with him."

Bubba smiled the relief that Lynn felt, glad Mrs. Darwish had someone close. "I wrote you a letter." He placed the envelope containing his note and money on top of the white crocheted doily decorating a small table beside his chair. "You can read it later also."

But he can't give her the medal, thought Lynn. I didn't protect it. Time to begin the dreaded confession and apology. "Bubba did not know that he would be able to come here to see you. He asked me to bring you something else that was very important to Elie."

"It was lost from Lynn's pocket," Galen interrupted gently. She realized that he was being kind, not obstinate. There was no need to risk upsetting Mrs. Darwish by saying it was stolen.

Elie's mother frowned. "Lost, please?"

"Bishop Lynn couldn't help it," Bubba said with grace.

I should have helped it, Lynn thought. Somehow. "I am very, very sorry. We wanted so much for you to have Elie's medal."

"His medal, please?" Mrs. Darwish smiled.

Surprised, Lynn wondered how she could smile about the memento's loss. Evidently she didn't understand. "He wore it around his neck," she explained, demonstrating with her fingers and feeling terrible. "His name was on the back."

Mrs. Darwish rose, and they watched her walk stiffly to the kitchen table. She picked up a small box that stood on shiny purple paper, a glossy gold bow beside it. She carried it with both hands, pressing it to her heart. When she sat down with them again, she brushed her hand across the box in a gentle caress, as though absorbing the touch of the one who had touched it before her. She slowly removed the lid. With the reverence of a Catholic for a rosary, she took out something shiny and laid it tenderly on her palm. Still smiling, she held out her open hand. Two amazonite crescent moons overlapped vertically in the center of a silver circle. "You see, please? Elias's medal."

When Fillmore reported in as directed, the Patriot barely restrained hurling his cell phone across the synagogue. He learned that the elite had the target's destination, courtesy of the taxi driver, and was across the street within clear range. The information spewed hot lava into the tranquil synagogue. It was the address that slammed his world
off
its axis. His mother's apartment! Oh, Jahweh-Christ-Allah! Lynn Peterson had access to his mother! His
mother,
who knew too much and was not sophisticated enough to discern when to lie! This visit to his mother eradicated any remaining doubt about justification for killing this wayward bishop.

No collateral damage, he commanded and punched
End.
Fillmore would assume it was a cell phone malfunction and go back to his waiting. And now the Patriot must also wait, filled with trepidation until he received word that his nemesis, Lynn Peterson, was dead.

He rose and paced irately down the aisle, hands behind his back. The medal and his business card lurked in his mother's apartment, ready to expose him. Leaving his card had been a childish gesture of sibling rivalry. See how successful I am, Mother. She might even show it to these guests from America, a proud parent bragging about her son. One little visit could wipe out all his years of meticulous planning and progress for the sake of righteous justice. All put in jeopardy if Lynn Peterson saw Elias's medal and connected it to his shooter and his mother told her it was a gift from her son and showed her his business card. All he'd done—even the termination of his mother's other son—could prove pointless. All lost because of his compassion for his mother, a compassion that had impeded his logic.

He hated St. Sava with a passion that set his soul aflame. The ancient society had caused the problem originally with their present to him on his sixteenth birthday—the death of his father. The nightmare lingered even after all these years. His father's death cried out for the dimension of justice he valued most: vindictive retribution. He held no vendetta against the Israelis who committed the act, but against St. Sava for assigning his father to help the Christian Palestinians, an assignment that cost him his life.

St. Sava had also caused today's problem: assigning Elias Darwish to discover the Patriot's identity. The kicker should never have been born. His birth had always been a thorn in the Patriot's flesh. He faulted him on two counts: being born and committing suicide by joining St. Sava. He doubted that Darwish had any idea he was tracking his mother's son. "Irony gnaws at life with shark's teeth," she had said. His mother was wise. He had to give her that. What would Darwish have done when he put the last pieces in place, linking the Patriot to John Adams to Adam Ristich and discovering whom he was trapping? Would he have continued and broken her heart? Or backed off? Prudence forced the Patriot not to take a chance. Undesirable but necessary.

"Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue," his beloved grandfather had taught him from the Torah. He sought justice against St. Sava. Over the centuries the ancient society had always eluded official discovery. The CIA heard whispers, but without concrete evidence they gave its rumors the same level of credibility as the Loch Ness monster. St. Sava was as stealthy and smart as the CIA, but it operated from a code of honor rather than expediency. Honor kept secrets. Expediency sprang leaks. For the first time since entering the synagogue, he smiled. St. Sava eluded the world, but he eluded St. Sava.

John Adams sat back down, took some deep breaths, and focused on the synagogue's beauty, gradually calming himself. His thoughts turned to his own goodness. Despite his mother's betrayal through remarriage, he still protected her. No collateral damage, he'd ordered. He took pride in being a good son and a good man. Yet this very minute his mother might be learning that he was behind the termination of her other son. He dropped his head in his hands. "How could I bear it!" he cried out in despair. Elias dead was as much trouble as Elias alive.