The Confessor

man?"
    "He's not doing so well at the moment. Would you like a word with him?"
    Gabriel placed the telephone on the ground a few inches from the dying man's mouth. As he stood up, he could see the lights of the Peugeot bouncing toward him along the track. Chiara braked to a halt a few yards from where he was standing. Walking back to the car, Gabriel could hear only one sound.
    "Casszzzz... Cassszzzzz... Zzzzzzzz...."
    ST. CEZAIRE, PROVENCE
    Gabriel searched the dead man's wallet by the jade-colored glow of the dashboard lights. He found no driver's license and no formal identification of any kind. Finally, he discovered a business card, folded in half and tucked behind a photograph of a girl in a sleeveless dress. It was so old he had to switch on the overhead light in order to make out the faded name: paulo olivero, ufficio sicurezza di vaticano. He held it aloft for Chiara to see. She glanced at it, then returned her eyes to the road.
    "What does it say?"
    "That there's a high probability the man I just killed was a Vatican cop."
    "Great."
    Gabriel memorized the telephone number on the card, then
    tore it to shreds and flicked it out the window. They came to the autoroute. When Chiara slowed for guidance, Gabriel directed her west, toward Aix-en-Provence. She lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter. Her hand was shaking.
    "Would you like to tell me where we're going next?"
    "Out of Provence as quickly as possible," he said. "After that, I haven't decided."
    "Am I allowed to offer an opinion?"
    "I don't see why not."
    "It's time to go home. You know what happened at the convent, and you know who killed Benjamin. There's nothing else you can do but dig yourself deeper into a hole."
    "There's more," Gabriel said. "There has to be more."
    "What are you talking about?"
    He stared absently out his window. The landscape was stark and windswept, red dust in the air. He saw none of it. Instead, he saw Sister Vincenza, sitting on the very spot where Martin Luther and Bishop Lorenzi had sealed their contract of murder, telling him that Benjamin had come to the Convent of the Sacred Heart to hear about the Jews that had taken refuge there. He saw Alessio Rossi, stinking of fear, fingernails gnawed to the quick, telling him how Carlo Casagrande had forced him to abort his investigation of missing priests. He saw Sister Regina Carcassi, listening to Luther and Lorenzi calmly discuss why Pope Pius XII should remain silent in the face of genocide, while a child slept with his head in her lap, a rosary wrapped around his hand.
    And finally he saw Benjamin, a boy of twenty, myopic and round-shouldered, brilliant and destined for academic greatness. He had wanted to be a part of the Wrath of God team as badly as Gabriel had wanted to be released from it. Indeed, Benjamin had wanted to be an aleph, an assassin, but his methodical brain did not leave him with the skills necessary to point a Beretta at a man's face in a darkened alley and pull the trigger. It did give him all the tools necessary to be a brilliant support agent, and never once did he make an error--even at the end, when Black September and the European security services were breathing down their necks. This was the Benjamin Gabriel saw now, the Benjamin who would never stake his reputation on the word of a single source or document, no matter how compelling.
    "Benjamin wouldn't have written a book implicating the Catholic Church in the Holocaust based only on Sister Regina's letter. He must have had something else."
    Chiara swung to the side of the autoroute and applied the brakes. So?
    "I worked with Benjamin in the field. I know how he thought, how his mind worked. He was careful to a fault. He had backup plans for his backup plans. Benjamin knew the book would be explosive. That's why he kept the contents so secret. He would have hidden copies of his important material in places his enemies wouldn't think to look." Gabriel hesitated, then added: "But places his friends would think to look."
    Chiara stuffed her cigarette into the ashtray. "When I was at the Academy, we were taught how to walk into a room and find a hundred places to conceal something. Documents, weapons, anything at all."
    "Benjamin and I did the course together."
    "So where are we going?"
    Gabriel lifted his hand and pointed straight ahead.
    THEY DROVE in shifts, roughly two hours on, two hours off. Chiara managed to sleep during her rest periods, but Gabriel lay awake, the seat reclined, hands