The Trinity Game

sixty-seventh floor. Today there would be no celebratory lunch.

    The director of the council stood behind a vast marble desktop. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the surface of the Singapore Strait glittered like a field of broken glass. He did not extend his hand or offer a chair. He said, “Your last report indicated the project was on schedule.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Conrad. “I’m taking care of it.”
    “But this investigator…” The director waved his hand in the air for a prompt.
    “Daniel Byrne.”
    “He refused to certify.”
    Conrad nodded. “Any other investigator, we’d have been fine. Bad luck we got him. But it had to look like a routine case, Cardinal Allodi couldn’t insert himself without signaling an agenda.”
    “The insurgents are getting smarter, targeting infrastructure. If we lose the town where that girl lives, the oil stops flowing. Unacceptable.”
    “We’ll hold the town. I always had a Plan B in place, and it’s now in motion. A few days at most.” Conrad said it with enough confidence and the director seemed somewhat mollified. “But sir, a much bigger issue has come up. Another anomaly has surfaced—as strong as the one we had last year in Bangalore—and this time the Church knows about it.”
    The director let out a long breath. “Where?”
    “United States. Atlanta. A television evangelist named Tim Trinity.”
    “He’s on
television
?”
    “Yes, sir, it’s not good. And Nick has assigned the same priest to it.”
    “Really? Is it possible that this Daniel Byrne is working for the foundation?”
    “No sir, I’ve been keeping tabs on him. He doesn’t know the foundation exists, or the council for that matter. I’m quite sure he doesn’t even know the
game
exists.”
    “All right, wrap up Nigeria ASAP and make Trinity your top priority.”
    “Will do.”
    “Top priority,” the director repeated. “If you need backup, call for it. Any sign of foundation involvement, you send up the alarm, straight to my office.”
    Conrad had heard it said that the Fleur-de-Lis Foundation had almost as many operatives embedded in the Church as did the Council For World Peace, and he had suspicions about a few of the fathers, but he’d seen nothing conclusive. “Sir, I don’t think they—”
    “Don’t make the mistake of underestimating your opponent, Conrad. The foundation threatens our very existence. And despite his genteel façade, Carter Ames is the most dangerous man you will ever meet.”

Atlanta, Georgia…
    F or years, Daniel avoided hotels like the one he was staying in now. The luxury had just felt inappropriate for a man who’d taken a vow of poverty.
    The meth-lab fire in Detroit changed his mind.
    Daniel had flown there to investigate a spontaneous cancer remission that turned out to be a misdiagnosis. At the airport, he rented a Toyota Corolla. He checked into a generic chain motel near the freeway. Late that night he sat in his motel room, reading his e-mail, when there came a muffled
whump!
and a flash of light outside his window.
    The room directly across the parking lot was ablaze, black smoke pouring from the open door. A man staggered out of the burning room, carrying the porcelain lid of a toilet water tank, cradling it like a baby. Daniel ran to help. The man saw him coming, wound up, and heaved the lid at his head. Daniel ducked the flying toilet tank lid and it shattered on the blacktop. It was then he saw the wild look in the man’s eyes.
    Fire—crappy motel—meth-lab fire—crazed junkie
all raced through his brain in the moment it took for the man to draw a knifefrom a belt sheath and close the distance, slashing at the shrinking space between them. Daniel broke the man’s nose, dropped him with a kidney punch, and took the knife away from him.
    After giving his statement to the cops, after the firefighters had come and gone, Daniel lay on his lumpy motel bed with the smell of burning chemicals lingering in his nostrils.
    Thinking:
Screw it.
    Thus ended Daniel’s acetic rebellion.
    In the three years since, he’d made peace with the luxury. It wasn’t as if the money he’d saved was being diverted to orphanages, he told himself. And he had to admit that his previous austerity had enabled him to indulge in that pesky sin of pride.
    One of the seven deadlies. And one of the three to which Daniel remained vulnerable, the other two being lust and wrath.

    Daniel sat at the desk in his executive suite at the downtown Atlanta