Chapter Text
It started like these things so often did - with a trivial and almost random event, small and unimportant in itself, and yet as momentous as the fluttering of a butterfly's wings that unleashes a hurricane a thousand miles away.
The setting was equally unspectacular. Pope Innocent XIV had been paying a visit to the Vatican Library, as part of his efforts to get to know his new realm, to discover all the many different things that went on within the square mile of the Vatican City every day, and to meet the people who made them happen. He had been given a tour of the place. He had spent quite some time in silent contemplation of the Codex Borgia, a Mesoamerican pictorial manuscript from pre-Colombian times, showing a calendar and the rituals associated with each season. And he had spoken with the nervous students of the School of Library Science attached to the institution.
"We should talk more about this," he had commented on the ancient American treasure, and it was perfectly clear to his audience that he didn't mean the historical value or the artistic quality of the piece, but the fact that the Church considered herself its rightful owner and had monopolised access to it for five hundred years.
To conclude, he had also asked the young students very earnestly whether there was anything that they would like to see changed and improved about the place. But he was assured that except for the elevator's unfortunate tendency to get stuck, they were very content. That was how the Pontiff's private secretary related the matter to Thomas afterwards, at any rate. The Holy Father, some of the eyewitnesses later claimed, had even joked about the unreliability of the elevator when he got into it himself to make his way back up from the temperature-controlled basement that housed the Library's most precious volumes. When the doors had slid open, an aproned woman tasked with cleaning the floors had been in there already, her cart with the cleaning utensils filling half the limited space. But instead of accepting her mortified offer to remove herself and the cart immediately, the Holy Father had simply waved her back inside and joined her, together with the Chief Librarian, whom he had been engaged in conversation with at the time, and three of the students. His entourage had taken the stairs or waited for the next ride.
The next ride had never happened.
Thomas, on returning to his own office in the Apostolic Palace after lunch with Aldo Bellini at one of those hidden trattorias of the Borgo that only locals ever set foot in, was greeted by the news that His Holiness had managed to get himself stuck in an elevator.
"Fifteen minutes, twenty at most, and they'll be out, according to the technicians," Raymond O'Malley, the new Prefect of the Papal Household, informed Thomas on the phone. "Don't worry, Your Eminence. It's all under control, just a nuisance."
Twenty minutes became thirty, then forty. When they got to fifty, Thomas rang O'Malley back. The Monsignor didn't pick up until the seventh or eighth ring. Thomas could instantly tell from the hullabaloo in the background that there was something much more serious going on than a mere nuisance.
"I'm sorry," Ray apologised breathlessly. "I'd have updated you sooner, but we had to get a hold of Doctor Baldinotti first. We've requested a neurosurgeon from the Gemelli Hospital as backup just in case, too, and he's on his way, but - "
Thomas was already at the door by then, restraining himself from shouting down the phone. He had hardly ever heard Ray O'Malley make so little sense before, not even on the final day of the Conclave when the Church had been literally under fire. Or was that only the overwhelming dread clouding his own brain? How had they gone from elevator technology to neurosurgery in less than an hour?
"It's not a matter of life and death, Eminence, or nowhere near," Ray reassured him after some hastily exchanged words with another person at his end of the line. "Let me give you the facts, I'll be as quick as I can."
They met, like in one of those silly scenes in a movie, while still talking to each other on the phone. Thomas came struggling up the stairs to the third floor of the east wing of the Apostolic Palace that contained the Pope's private quarters, the skirts of his cassock clutched far too tightly in his hand, while Ray strode down the loggia overlooking the inner courtyard to meet him.
The dratted elevator had put up a big fight when the technicians had tried to wind the car back down manually. The metal box had jammed several times, and then submitted to the forces of gravity when the spring that was supposed to stop its supporting cables from uncoiling had broken outright. The result had been a sudden drop of the car of four feet or so to the bottom of the elevator shaft. When the doors were finally prised open, there had been a shocking amount of carnage. The cleaning lady, Ray reported, had been in a concussed daze, clutching a very bloody laceration on the side of her face. The Librarian had had his toes crushed when the cleaning cart became a loose canon. One of the students, who suffered from claustrophobia, had been in abject hysterics.
"Poor girl," Thomas commented distractedly. "That's not great, to lose it in front of the Pope."
"Well, better than the Pope losing it in front of a bunch of students. His Holiness got out last, one arm around the cleaning lady but the other dangling at a very weird angle. They asked him was he hurt, and he said 'I'm afraid I may be,' turned as white as his robes and all but threw up right on their shoes."
"Good God."
"He's dislocated his shoulder. But Baldinotti also suspects a neural component. He says it would explain the unusual intensity of the pain."
Thomas ran a hand over his face. A dislocation was, emphatically, not a life-threatening diagnosis, but that was also the only good thing that could be said about it. His own sheltered life had never so much as given him a broken bone, but he knew from other people's accounts that this type of injury was exquisitely painful.
"The students say that the spring snapped with a bang like a gunshot. The Holy Father brought up his arm and ducked, and just then whole structure tilted sideways and the cleaning cart careened into him and knocked him into the wall." Ray grimaced. The good man was clearly regretting piling more distress onto Thomas with each piece of information he revealed.
They passed the saluting Swiss Guards and arrived in the vestibule of the papal apartments, the anteroom of what used to be the inner sanctum reserved only for the most senior and deserving members of a pope's entourage, oppressive with splendour and quiet as the grave. It hadn't been like that again for a single day since Vincent Benítez had taken the place over. In the one short month since the beginning of his pontificate, the papal apartments had become the strangest combination of political incident room and spiritual commune that Thomas had ever heard of. People had quickly stopped talking in there only in whispers and came and went as they deemed necessary, without waiting for a summons or invitation. And there was always a place at the dining table for whoever had worked late at night, or just happened to be around and hungry.
This open doors policy had raised eyebrows among the traditionalists but earned applause from other quarters, not least from the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul at the Casa Santa Marta. They had loved the late Holy Father dearly, but they were also not all terribly sorry to no longer have to constantly adjust the running of their guesthouse to the needs and requirements of their most famous resident. Moving the papal household back into the papal apartments had of course raised a separate set of eyebrows among the liberals. But Vincent had explained patiently to anyone who asked that - quite apart from giving the Daughters of Charity at the Casa Santa Marta their breathing space back - sometimes it wasn't enough to just break with tradition and say no to the old ways. When one man had already done that, it fell to the next man to go beyond, and build something new. The argument had sufficed to convince even the most devoted defenders of the late Holy Father in the end. Vincent hadn't even had to threaten to use the place to house refugee families instead, as it had been whispered he was going to do if opposition continued. And it was a blessing now that they hadn't had to rush a badly damaged Pope all the way across the gardens and past the staring eyes of hundreds of Vatican staff and visitors to get him home. For the same reason, in contrast to the usual open doors, the suite of rooms had now been cleared of all its regular occupants who had no medical reason to be there. So the vestibule was filled with people united both by their inability to do anything useful and by their reluctance to leave and occupy themselves elsewhere until the crisis was resolved.
Vincent's private secretary was the first to spot Thomas and Ray when they entered. She came walking over to them, her steps firm as usual but her face clouded over with concern. Her shoes clicked against the marble floor. It would be a while yet until Thomas learned to no longer marvel at a woman in a business suit now filling the position usually held by middle-aged cassocked men. Marisol Yupanqui Garcia, a Peruvian sister from the Congregation of Jesus with a PhD in psychology, had been working in the Dicastery of Communications and had been part of an early meeting with the new Pope to discuss the future public relations strategies of the Holy See. Vincent had been so impressed with her efficiency and her quickness of mind, and had been so eager in his praise of her to Thomas at dinner that day, that Thomas had jokingly called her an ideal candidate for the then still vacant position of papal private secretary. Vincent had become very quiet, looked into the middle distance for a moment, and then smiled in a way that told Thomas that the Church was in for yet another upheaval that would be anathema to the traditionalists but greeted with jubilation by the progressives. There was, in fact, no law that said that the Pope's private secretary had to be a priest or even a man, so Sister Marisol transferred to the papal household within a week, and here she was.
"I've cancelled all of today's appointments," she informed Thomas and Ray. "The neurosurgeon is here now, too, and we're waiting for the doctors' word on what to do with tomorrow's and the rest of the week's."
Doctor Baldinotti, a cardiologist, had made for a good private physician to the previous two popes, both very old men who had needed to watch their cholesterol and their blood pressure. But Vincent would hopefully still have years before anything like that became an issue. That was one of the reasons why they should have started looking for a replacement by now. Preferably someone a little less timid in emergencies.
Sister Marisol glanced at Thomas and read his mind. "Yes, I know, Your Eminence. I voted for an immediate airlift to the Gemelli Hospital, too, but Baldinotti didn't want to risk moving him all that way." She lowered her voice. "I can't speak to the medical wisdom of that decision, but from a PR point of view, I see where he's coming from. We probably shouldn't allow more people than absolutely necessary to hear the Pope howl with pain."
Thomas winced. "That bad?" Why was it so bad? Was that normal?
The secretary shook her head sadly. "I'm afraid he was barely keeping it together by the time they got him here. I tried to talk to him, but he wasn't making sense. Baldinotti explained that he'll be much better soon, though, once they've done some kind of manoeuvre that made me feel rather queasy to hear described. They've kicked us all out for that. Said we'd only be in the way."
"Popping the bone back into the socket, basically," Ray explained helpfully. A keen player of Gaelic football in his youth, he had seen his share of sports injuries.
Sister Marisol pulled a face. "Thank you, Ray. I really didn't need to hear that again."
These two had taken to each other immediately, very much like an older sister and a younger brother, never mind that Ray was actually Marisol's senior by more than ten years. But Thomas had no patience for their friendly bickering today. His own thoughts had already carried him into a different and very worrying direction. There was, after all, another reason why they should have replaced the grey-haired long-serving cardiologist by now, and brought in a private physician from a younger generation instead. Could that be the true cause of Vincent's extreme distress? Any medical emergency could be a threat to his secret - the secret that, as far as Thomas was aware, still only he himself and Ray were privy to in the whole wide Vatican. Had Vincent been trying to communicate anything about that to his confidants? Why hadn't they made the Holy Father's healthcare arrangements a top priority? Vincent hadn't mentioned it yet, and Thomas hadn't wanted to be pushy, but there was every chance that they were going to regret it bitterly now.
"What did he say that made no sense?" he asked Marisol.
"He said we should call the Pentagon."
Thomas gaped at the papal secretary. "The Pentagon?" he repeated stupidly.
"He also said we needed to talk to Martin. And then something about a French philosopher."
"Who is Martin?"
"I have no idea. There is no Martin in the papal household, that much I know."
"There's a Martin in the Swiss Guards, a corporal," Ray pointed out. "But I doubt His Holiness knows him by name yet. I only do because he narrowly beat me in the finals of the Pontifical Darts Championship last winter, the lucky sod. Begging your pardon."
In the what? Thomas was seized by a strange sense of utter detachment from reality for a moment. "That exists?"
Ray blushed rather endearingly. "Certainly, Your Eminence."
Thomas shook his head. "Better try and get a hold of him, just in case we're missing something here." He turned back to Sister Marisol. "And what French philosopher?"
"I can't even be sure of that part, Your Eminence. But I thought I heard the name 'Bergson'. Like Henri Bergson, you know. The Nobel Laureate we put on the Index for pantheism back in the 1930s."
"That doesn't seem very relevant."
"No, it doesn't," Marisol agreed with a sigh.
Maybe Aldo Bellini would have been able to see the connection between pantheism and a faulty elevator, but of course Aldo Bellini wasn't around. Thomas became aware again how much the rollercoaster of the Conclave had made him appreciate his old friend, and how much he had come to rely on him in times of crisis. But Monday afternoons were now reserved for the Secretary of State's weekly lecture at the Gregorian University on the biblical hermeneutics of Origen. This had been one of his conditions for resuming his Curial post after the Conclave, and Thomas did not have the heart to rob his friend of that pleasure just to swell the numbers of helpless onlookers on the Holy Father's plight.
Thomas put a hand in his pocket, clutched the bag of fabric that formed it and twisted it tight around his fingers. Just a few doors down the corridor, the Holy Father was in agony for all they knew, and they were just standing here, his closest friends and assistants, utterly useless.
Doctor Baldinotti reappeared just then, saving Thomas from voicing his frustration aloud. But the doctor did not have the air of a messenger bearing good news. His eyes searched for the most senior person present in the anteroom to report to, and Thomas realised only when the crowd parted to make a lane for him that he himself answered to that description. He went to join the doctor. Sister Marisol followed. Ray, as instructed, had turned away, busy on his phone, trying to contact the Swiss corporal for whatever it would be worth.
"I would like your advice, Your Eminence," the doctor muttered when Thomas reached him, careful not to make it a public announcement. He eyed even the private secretary suspiciously. "In a spiritual matter."
Which of course a woman was not allowed to be privy to, and certainly not capable of handling, in his eyes. The man was definitely getting replaced after this, Thomas resolved. "Then should we retire to the chapel?" he proposed. He had to make an effort to keep his tone civil. "We can talk in private there." He tried to signal to Sister Marisol with his eyes that he was not approving, just acquiescing for the sake of a quick result. She let him go without protest, acknowledging that this was not the time to put up a fight.
The Holy Father's private chapel with its stunning stained glass ceiling was empty and quiet. The rug and matching hassock that had been put down in its centre in place of the former cushioned chair drew Thomas's eye, as always when he walked in here now. They were embroidered with long-beaked tropical birds in a burst of colour. Thomas assumed the style was Mexican. They made for a pleasant counterpoint to how full of discomfort and pain the place was otherwise. From the ancient crucifix above the altar to the modern frescoes on the walls depicting the fate of Christian martyrs, the room brimmed with suffering.
"I'm worried," the doctor began, stating the obvious. "Doctor Ariyaratna and I need to attempt reduction as soon as possible, but it's a delicate manoeuvre, and His Holiness just… can't keep still. And Doctor Ariyaratna is extremely concerned that we will do more damage than good if we employ force. Besides, it hardly seems… dignified."
"Isn't there medication to make that easier?" Thomas suggested. "Numb the pain, make him relax?"
"Of course. A sedative and a strong analgesic would be best practice in the situation. With that, the procedure would be routine. But he's refusing. We've explained it to him several times, that it's an established treatment, it's safe… but he's still signalling no. Oxygen and fluids are all we've been able to give him. And that is not much."
Thomas nodded.
"I'm not an expert in trauma care, as you know," the cardiologist continued. "But the prolonged experience of acute pain on this scale puts strain on the whole body, especially the heart. Eventually the body may even go into shock, as an effort at self-protection. We're already seeing the first signs. Elevated heart rate, irregular breathing, excessive sweating… And there's also a real danger of necrosis or permanent nerve damage if the injury is left untreated. But we're at the end of our usefulness as medical men at this point, unless the Curia were to authorise compulsory treatment. Which, as you also know, is a lengthy and complicated process, not to mention the reputational damage."
"What do you want me to do?"
The doctor glanced at the crucifix above the altar and cleared his throat awkwardly. "I don't want to trespass on your territory, Your Eminence. But is it possible that His Holiness is taking his devotion to Our Lord and Saviour a little too far, and is trying to emulate Him to a degree that is not advisable for a man of his responsibilities?"
Nor was it likely for a man of Vincent Benítez's genuine love for life to put spiritual self-perfection before the needs of his Church and his flock. But then again, the history of the Church was full of people attaining sainthood through self-inflicted suffering and, ultimately, self-destruction. And even today's Church, as Thomas knew from his own lifelong struggles, was not great at promoting a healthier approach. He felt anger rise inside him. If this wasn't a case for expert input from a trained psychologist, then what was? And yet Thomas was as guilty of leaving Sister Marisol out of this conversation as the dratted doctor was. "You want me to talk him out of it?" he asked aloud.
"I would not like to fail my patient, that's all. Or lose him, God forbid."
Thomas's grief for his friend's pain notwithstanding, that last comment seemed like a gross exaggeration – but only until there was a knock on the door, and one of the Vatican's paramedics looked in, gesturing urgently to the doctor.
By the time they entered the sickroom, it was too late for any kind of rational discussion about the reasonable limits of self-mortification.
"He tried to speak again," Thomas heard the paramedic explain to Baldinotti in an undertone. "But the effort brought on another bout of sickness, and now he's barely responsive."
The neurosurgeon, Dr Ariyaratna, turned back from the bed, where another paramedic was fiddling with the infusion bags, and beckoned Baldinotti closer. Thomas got a fleeting impression of a man much more modest both in terms of stature and of self-importance than the papal physician, but he noticed little more about the neurosurgeon than that. His eyes were fixed in too great dismay on the sight that had opened up before him.
Thomas had imagined that 'barely responsive' would mean calm and still, but he was wrong. What he was seeing was a beautiful mind losing the battle against the tyranny of matter, and it was more painful to watch than he could have imagined. They had unbuttoned both the white cassock and the white shirt underneath, then cut through both layers from shoulder to wrist for a quick access to the damaged joint. The cuffs of the sleeves were spattered with blood, which had to be that of the poor cleaning woman Vincent had been trying to comfort in spite of his own injury. His chest, dotted with the electrodes of an ECG machine, rose and fell in rapid, shallow breaths. His face was ashen grey. Were those traces of vomit on the sweat-soaked pillow, imperfectly wiped away? What are you doing, my friend, Thomas wondered desperately, to put yourself through this when relief is just the prick of a needle away?
Thomas felt the urge to pray, to ask both his friend and God for forgiveness for overruling them both, as he acknowledged he would have to do. But there was no time for such self-indulgence. The doctors had consulted together in an undertone, and now they turned to Thomas, waiting for a quick decision. The paramedic stood ready, too, holding another infusion bag.
"Please, go ahead," Thomas said to the doctors. "Do whatever is necessary."
He caught sight of the label on the bag as it was added to the drip. Oxycodone, an opioid, the strongest of the strong as painkillers went. They were not doing things by halves, now that they were finally allowed to do anything at all. Then Dr Ariyaratna stepped back and, with a gesture of his hand, invited Thomas to approach the patient. Was there a spark of recognition in Vincent's half-closed eyes beneath their heavy lids when Thomas went on his knees by the bedside? It was wishful thinking, nothing more. There was no response when Thomas said his name, either. Thomas took hold of Vincent's good hand as the medication began to flood his friend's bloodstream. As his breathing stabilised and the doctors started nodding in satisfaction at whatever exactly they could see on the monitor of the ECG, Thomas felt a tiny response from the limp, cold fingers. They were curling almost imperceptibly around his own. But Thomas would have been wrong to read that as approval. Doctor Ariyaratna broke the silence in the room to request the sedative from the paramedic next, and at the sound of his voice, Vincent's eyelids fluttered and then opened for just one moment. But there was no relief or gratitude in his dark eyes. There was only the deep sadness of defeat, and even - Thomas felt it like a stab - of reproach.
Forgive me, he wanted to say. I did what I had to do.
Instead, it was Vincent who moved his dry lips. No sound came out, but they formed a single word that Thomas was able to read only because he must have, subconsciously, expected it.
Martin.
His fingers twitched in Thomas's hand one last time, and then the chemicals nudged him over the threshold and even their feeble grip was gone.
Thomas needed to be reminded that the doctors' real work was only just beginning. He should not have been grateful when Dr Ariyaratna suggested that he might prefer to wait outside now, but he was. Besides, they hardly needed the distraction of a weak-stomached elderly cardinal fainting at the sight of a perfectly routine medical procedure.
When he turned the corner of the corridor, heading back to the vestibule, he heard raised voices from the chapel, or rather one single raised voice. It was Ray O'Malley's. What on earth was the Monsignor doing, making a racket in a house of God?
"Thank you, sir," Ray was saying. "I'll let them know at once. Please tell him to call back as soon as it's convenient." The door of the chapel was pulled open from the inside just as Thomas reached for the knob. Ray O'Malley stood there, phone in hand, and seemed as startled to come so suddenly face to face with Thomas as Thomas was by the Monsignor's strange behaviour.
"Where are the doctors?" Ray demanded, even forgetting to add an honorific. "They need to know right now."
"Need to know what?"
"Martin. I've found Martin. And - " Ray looked up and down the corridor to make sure they were alone, then dropped a bombshell. "And Martin says, 'Whatever you do, don't give him opiates.'"
Notes:
The discussion in the comments section of this chapter about the use of AI has been amicably resolved behind the scenes. The question was not meant in an aggressive or accusatory way, and apologies have been offered and accepted.
Chapter Text
It was quiet again in the Holy Father's private chapel, but only to the ears of an outside observer. The pain and anguish depicted in its artwork paled compared to the unvoiced wails that now echoed around Thomas's soul. The colourful birds on the prayer rug would have taken flight in the blink of an eye if any of them had been audible.
Of course Vincent had not rejected the pain medication in order to relive the suffering of Christ, like the idiot doctor had assumed. Unbeknownst to anyone around him, he had been battling a demon of a very different sort. And when his strength had failed him, instead of stepping up to take charge of his defence, Thomas had delivered him right into the demon's hands.
"You couldn't have known, Your Eminence," Ray O'Malley repeated for the fourth or fifth time. "It's not your fault." They were sitting side by side on one of the benches around the walls, close enough that their sleeves and their skirts brushed. Thomas didn't know how exactly he had got here, and he also didn't know how long he had been sitting here, back bowed, his face in his hands. He was glad of the Monsignor's presence, and touched by his attempts to provide comfort, but somehow his brain was still building up a stronger resistance to every iteration. "Nobody could have known," Ray said again. "How likely - "
"Afghanistan is the world leader in opium production," Thomas pointed out, speaking to the marble floor. "How did we not make the connection?"
"It's not like His Holiness looks like – you know - "
No, His Holiness did emphatically not look like those hollow-eyed, emaciated wrecks hanging around the train stations and sleeping under the bridges of Rome. But how could Thomas be sure of anything anymore, after this blow?
"I just mean," Ray clarified, "if he really has a history that way, then it must have been a good while ago."
O'Malley was right. Why else had Vincent struggled so desperately against having that poison forced on him again, unless he had managed to escape its pull before? Why would he have been willing to die from the strain on his heart, if the worst came to the worst, unless he feared that the stuff would suck him back down into an abyss worse than death?
Thomas felt an urge to laugh hysterically. The Pope as an ex-junkie? It was an open secret that many priests struggled with addiction, whether it was to alcohol or gambling or online pornography or whatever else the devil might throw in their path to make them stumble. Even the Vatican itself wasn't safe from this evil, with Janusz Wozniak – currently booked into a discreet private clinic somewhere in Piedmont - as the most prominent and recent case in point. But there was a limit to what both the system and the faithful would be able to accept in a pope.
In how many ways could a single person shake the Church to its very foundations without bringing it crashing down irretrievably? And what was the use of the Church's senior guardians like Thomas himself, if all he was good for was to make a crisis infinitely worse, convinced that he knew better when he actually knew nothing at all?
"Can we be sure it is actually true, Ray?" Thomas asked, but with little hope. "Who exactly is this Martin? Not our Swiss Guard, I assume?"
"No." The Monsignor's hands that rested on his knees curled into fists. "I should have put two and two together the moment Sister Marisol mentioned the clues." He punched his knees in frustration. "What am I saying, clues. They were plain facts, a name and address. I just didn't connect the dots before it was too late."
"What do you mean?"
Ray took a deep breath and flexed his fingers in a conscious effort at releasing their tension. "There is a Martin Bergson at the Pentagon. He's a high-ranking officer in the US Army, a Major General, and a Delta Force veteran with decades of active duty under his belt. His last foreign deployment was in 2021."
"Afghanistan?"
"Exactly. He was one of the commanders tasked with winding down the NATO mission, you know, when they'd decided to pull out and were handing back control to the Afghan authorities. And then when the Taliban seized the chance to fill the vacuum and began to take over again, and the Western powers had to step on it to get themselves and their protégés out of the country in time, he was one of the people in charge of the evacuations. It was our own Martin who put me on the right track there. Trust a fellow soldier to keep up with that kind of news. Then I had to persuade the Nunciature in Washington to find me someone at the Pentagon who would listen to a random Irishman claiming to be calling on behalf of an injured Pope, and who would put me in touch with the man himself. It's not like you can Google his e-mail address or his direct line, so all that took time. And I know I shouldn't have gone in here, but I didn't know how else to convince them that it wasn't a hoax."
"I don't understand - "
"I sent them a selfie, with the artwork of the chapel in the background, so they could do a reverse search and be sure that I was really calling from the Apostolic Palace. Then they alerted Bergson, and Bergson got back to them within a minute with that quick message, 'Don't give him opiates', and promised that he would call me in person as soon as he was free. That is all I know, Your Eminence."
And it had been an extraordinary achievement in such a short space of time. It wasn't Ray's fault that he had got to the heart of the matter just a few minutes too late.
Thomas put a hand on his arm. "Don't blame yourself, please. You could not have done more."
Ray shook his head. "Well, that makes two of us, but we still have a disaster on our hands. Do we tell them? The doctors, I mean? I suppose we must? That stuff is dangerous. Though how we're going to explain the problem, or contain the fallout if there's a leak, is more than I know."
"I think I have made enough mistakes today deciding things over the Holy Father's head. We'll talk to him as soon as he's awake again, and let him handle the question the way he thinks best."
"But will he even be capable of making that decision?"
Ray was right. Was a single dose enough to trigger a full-blown relapse? "I honestly don't know that," Thomas had to admit. "I…" He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment. The cold of the stonework seeped through his clothes and right into his bones. "I haven't the slightest idea. Imagine that, Ray. I'm responsible for this whole catastrophe, and I haven't got the slightest idea."
Ray heaved a sigh that shook his whole lanky frame. It was disconcerting to see the competent Monsignor so at a loss. Thomas could only guess how pitiful a picture he himself presented.
"We should tell Sister Marisol at least," Thomas decided. "If we lie to her, she'll see through it in a minute anyway." Not to mention how wrong it would feel to try.
"I'll do that. And maybe - " Ray began.
"Yes?"
"I think there may be someone else around here who knows about such things, and who could advise us on the practical issues."
Thomas turned his head towards him in surprise. An expert in heroin addiction? Here in the Vatican?
"Just a short walk away, in fact." The Monsignor rose to his feet. "Let me just verify that first. I may not remember it correctly."
The idea seemed to revive his spirits, and Thomas didn't want to spoil his new-found optimism. But still - "Are you sure it's someone who can keep a secret?" he insisted.
"I dare say. None better." Ray's sombre face softened into a wry smile. "As you should know."
Ray had been gone from the chapel for less than five minutes when his phone in Thomas's hand rang. It was on silent, but the sudden vibrations made him jump and nearly drop it all the same. He fumbled for his reading glasses and identified the alert as that for a video call. He could not even have said how exactly those worked on his own phone, and he had been very hesitant to take over Ray's phone while Ray went hunting for their mysterious potential ally. But the Monsignor had insisted that they needed all the information they could get, and that Thomas should be free to pick up when Martin Bergson got in touch.
There was a green icon with a telephone receiver that blinked encouragingly. Thomas pressed it.
The screen of Ray's phone instantly filled with the video image of a man so broad in the shoulders that he looked about to burst the seams of his smart uniform. A hatchet face, sandy hair turned grey at the temples in a regulation haircut, keen bright eyes, also grey. He was somewhere outside, with an expanse of blue water stretching away into the distance behind him.
"Am I talking to Raymond O'Malley?" the apparition asked. His name had vaguely suggested Scandinavian descent, but his sunburned skin indicated the American South or West. Thomas could not quite place his accent. The collection of colourful badges and decorations on his uniform identified him as a man of high rank, and he also struck Thomas as the type to whom authority came naturally.
"This is Raymond O'Malley's phone," Thomas hastened to clarify. "He's asked me to take your call."
"Is he your boss?"
"Not exactly. I'm the Dean of the College of Cardinals. My name is Thomas Lawrence."
"A college?" the American asked, frowning. "I thought he was calling from the Vatican?"
"Not that kind of college." Thomas felt the tips of his ears grow uncomfortably hot. When had he last spoken with a person that didn't know who he was and what his titles entailed? He couldn't remember. "O'Malley is one of the Pope's aides-de-camp, if you like. I'm more like one of his generals."
The officer narrowed his eyes. "You sound British."
"Well, yes. I'm an Englishman."
"Then what are you doing in the Vatican?"
"I have often asked myself the same question."
Bergson put his head back and let out a short bark of laughter. It quite startled Thomas. "Ah, I know that feeling. Sorry I can't turn round and show you, no private photography allowed and all that. But I guess your place feels as much like a giant prison sometimes as this one does."
He gestured at something behind the camera, and Thomas realised that he must be just outside the main building of the Pentagon. It was ten in the morning over there, and the sun was making the surface of the water sparkle. Was that the Potomac River lagoon? Probably not where a busy Major General was supposed to be at this hour, at any rate. Thomas had not become very familiar with the Pentagon and its surroundings during the years he had spent in the US as part of the diplomatic corps of the Holy See. But he had attended a few commemorative ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery, which wasn't far.
"I was pretty much floored when I heard that you guys had made little Father Benítez the actual goddamn Pope, pardon my French," the officer continued. "My daughter called me screaming to turn on the news when it happened. She's married to a Catholic, y'know, so they'd been watching. It's the last place I'd've expected him to wind up at. But that's how it goes, right? One moment you're still out there in the field, working your ass off to keep yourself and your team alive and safe, and the next moment they give you a fucking desk job and think they're doing you a favour. Mind you, I was relieved to hear he was actually alive at all. I mean, what were the odds, right? And stunned to find out that he was an archbishop or whatever all that time, too. Ashley tried to explain, but I'm not sure I got it. Your system of ranks and honours sounds even more complicated than ours. I'd always figured he wore that fancy ring just for the heck of it. Anyway, your man said he had an accident? Is he OK?"
Thomas had barely been able to process the wealth of information contained in this torrent of words, and was nowhere near ready yet to answer that question. "I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage, sir," he tried to stem the flood. "We here in Rome are only just getting to know our new Holy Father. Nobody was aware of your connection with him until he instructed us to get in touch with you today. So I'm sure you'll understand, especially given your own line of work, if - "
"Ah. Yeah, I get it." The image of Bergson wobbled slightly as he reached over with his free hand and scratched the back of his head. "I get it. You want me to establish my credentials."
"I would like to know how you came to be his friend."
"I don't recall telling you that I was?"
"Am I not correct?" It was a gut feeling rather than a rational conclusion, but Vincent Benítez had been full of surprises since the day Thomas had first met him. He had probably befriended even less likely people in his time than this rather rough-hewn American soldier.
Bergson chuckled. "All right, Padre. You win. How much time d'you have?"
"As long as it takes. I need the full story, please, whatever it is."
Another chuckle. "I hope you've got nothing planned for the rest of the day, then. D'you mind if I take a stroll while we chat? Walk off the lumbago?"
Thomas did not have to fake his sympathetic grimace. "Of course not. Please do."
When Martin Bergson's and Vincent Benítez's paths crossed for the first time, their paths actually didn't cross at all for quite a while. On the first day, Father Benítez had been a mere statistic. Then he had been only a face on a screen for nearly a week, with the added complication of no electric lights and a cracked phone camera lens at his end. And then… But, yeah. That first day.
It had been a busy day at Bagram Air Base. Like moving house writ large. The Americans had been there since they'd ousted the Taliban in 2001, twenty effing years, the longest war in the history of the US, longer than World War II, longer than the Civil War or the War of Independence, even longer than Vietnam. And Bagram had grown into one of the largest air bases in the world over the course of it, thirty square miles, a small city. But now, through the infinite wisdom of the civilians running the US government, it had been decided that Afghanistan had grown up enough to look after itself, and that all the money and all the material that had been poured into it by the NATO powers over the years would be written off as a bad investment. As would the blood that had been shed by the many men and women who had believed that they were building a better future for the country. Over two thousand American citizens alone had paid for that illusion with their lives.
The Taliban had never really been gone, of course, and neither had the many other rivalling extremist groups that tended to pop up, wreak destruction and then disappear again, as if they were in some macabre contest who would commit the greatest number and variety of atrocities in the name of God in the shortest amount of time. All these groups and factions had been getting restless of late, making it dangerous again for civilians and military personnel alike to move around the country outside the big cities and off the main roads. Martin's unit was in charge of securing those roads, and of gathering intel of any insurgent activities that might interfere with the orderly retreat of the Western forces.
It had been a busy day, and a hot day even for early June, and a frustrating day once the satellite link to HQ in Kabul started hiccupping again, like it loved to do just to spice things up when you really needed it to work smoothly. Martin was very near the end of his tether already when late in the afternoon, his aide-de-camp Diego, a young Second Lieutenant, entered his office to report an armed assault on a civilian vehicle headed down from a small village near Khinjan in Baghlan Province, back to the Kabul highway.
"Insurgents or common criminals?" Martin asked.
"No intel yet, sir. Bearded and shouting slurs against Christians, according to the report."
"Isn't that normal for ninety-five percent of the male Afghan population?"
Diego didn't smile. "I know, sir."
"Any casualties?"
"No deaths as far as we know. But several people hauled off, according to the driver of the truck they were travelling on."
"Civilians, you say? Locals?" Martin hoped very much that the answer would be yes. If the victims were Afghan nationals, then the incident would pass into the jurisdiction of the Afghan government's own army and police, useless as they were most of the time, and Martin could wash his hands of the matter before he wrapped up work for the day. Just another pin on the map for their next security report.
"No, sir, not locals."
It had really been too much to hope for, hadn't it? Martin felt a headache starting to build behind his eyes. He pressed the balls of his hands against them. "Fuck. How many?"
Diego consulted a scrap of paper in his hand. "Five. A man, two women, a teenage boy and a young girl."
Martin took his hands away again quickly. "A family?" Where the hell had they come from, and what the hell had they been thinking?
"Not exactly a family, sir." Diego cleared his throat a little awkwardly, as if to apologise in advance for ruining his superior's day completely. "I'm afraid the women are nuns. And the man is a Catholic priest."
Martin stared, shook his head and amended his previous reaction to a more suitable one. "Well, holy fuck."
It had taken until the end of the next day to establish communications with the militant Islamist group that was claiming responsibility for the kidnapping. It went by one of those fanciful names they were so good at, the Holy Brotherhood of the Flaming Scimitar or whatever. The guys from the CIA residency in Kabul were pretty sure that they were part of the Islamic State movement, which complicated matters a lot. With the Taliban, the US troops currently had an agreement that forbade direct mutual attacks at least in theory. With these rogue groups, anything could happen.
Their spokesman, when they got him on the phone at last, could not or did not want to hide the fact that he spoke surprisingly good English with a marked East Coast touch. The CIA knew him well, including the fact that he had spent a year at the MIT on a scholarship for hydraulic engineering. But apparently the idea of liberating his home country from the infidels with fire and sword had exercised a greater pull on him than the prospect of serving it in a more constructive way. It was symptomatic, wasn't it, how the Americans kept losing the battle for the souls of the young men in the countries they kept invading in the name of peace and progress. But there were other things to worry about now. The fact that they were talking to an MIT alumnus did not help them to pinpoint the location of the hostages and their guards. He was calling from the safety of his exile in Pakistan, and it was very unlikely that he would show his face anywhere near Khinjan himself. Locating the hideout of his minions and their captives, however, was paramount to resolving the situation. The Americans badly needed a bargaining chip, and the threat of smoking out an IS hidey-hole usually sped up these negotiations a lot. Alternatively, an exchange of the hostages for some IS detainees would probably work, too. But for that, they needed IS detainees in the first place, and they currently had none that the CIA were willing to part with just yet.
Martin had nothing reassuring to tell the Italian ambassador in Kabul when the man called to ask about any progress in finding the missing… missionaries? Was that what they were? The ambassador said something about them being based in his compound. But even during the most peaceful and stable years of the Afghan Republic, anyone openly preaching any other faith than Islam outside a Western embassy or military base risked being stoned to death in the marketplace. Public sentiment against foreign meddling with the souls of good Afghan Muslims was extremely strong even outside the Taliban's heartlands. What had these people been doing out in a remote backwater like Khinjan?
He learned the full answer to that during his second call with the ambassador. By then, the negotiators had established a modus operandi, which included proof of life every forty-eight hours. Martin had wanted to be well prepared for that, even if it came at the cost of enduring more of the Italian's anxious prattle. The Americans had insisted on a live video call with the hostages, rather than a pre-recorded message, and the Islamists had grudgingly agreed. Their greed for the ransom they were demanding must be even greater than their fear of being traced. They would of course try and hide themselves well behind a wall of encryption and VPN and IP-masking, but a live call was still a live call, and the IT wizards from the National Security Agency – the military branch of the US intelligence services - were rubbing their hands in anticipation of a feast. Martin, sitting in front of one of their computers in a blessedly air-conditioned part of the air base office buildings, waited for the statistics to finally get a face and a voice.
When the video link flickered into existence, the first thing Martin saw was a dusty earthen floor. Then whoever was holding the phone transmitting the call moved it forward, the image bisected diagonally by a crack in the camera lens, to capture two feet in an equally dusty pair of black sneakers. A pair of hands then rose into the screen and took over the phone from its previous invisible operator. The intelligence people would analyse every single frame to death later. It wasn't Martin's job to catch every tiny detail. But he at once noted three things about those hands. The first was the ring that glinted on the right fourth finger in the dim light, not a plain wedding band like the one Martin had worn himself for a while, but a surprisingly elaborate affair. The second thing was the sharp contrast between that ring and the plain digital watch on the left wrist, which looked a lot like the same indestructible model that Martin had been given for his birthday as a teenager back in the Eighties, when they had been all the hype. And the third thing he noticed was the fact that the hands were cuffed together at the wrists.
Then the phone was tilted upwards, and Martin Bergson and Vincent Benítez were looking at each other for the first time.
Martin found it hard to say afterwards what had impressed him most in that moment. Those eyes alone had a mesmerising quality. Serenity wasn't a word that featured prominently in Martin's vocabulary, mostly because the sentiment didn't feature prominently in his life, but that was what they conveyed. The fellow should have been in a panic. He should have been crying and begging and pleading, like civilians always did in that situation. The people who had captured him were the type who decapitated prisoners live on camera, after all. But he just sat there in a bare room with his back against a mud-brick wall, exuding… was it confidence? Not the type of confidence that the military liked best, which was confidence in one's own strength and skills. It was more like an unshakeable assurance that all would be well in the end, the kind that seemed to have its origin in something much larger than his own person. Martin didn't have a name for it at that time, but he later understood that this was what people meant when they said 'faith'.
"As well as can be expected, under the circumstances," Benítez replied to Martin's question whether he and his companions were all right and unhurt. There was a Spanish-tinted sing-song to his English, and his voice was as calm as his face. He omitted mentioning that the dark smudge under his left eye was not dirt but a bruise, as became apparent over the following days when it started changing through all the colours of the rainbow. "We're only worried about the girl."
He turned the phone to the side, and Martin caught sight of the girl in question. She lay sprawled in the lap of one of the nuns, whom the Italian ambassador had named to him as Sister Hasina, a stout middle-aged Malagasy woman in a blue-bordered white gown that Martin associated with photos of Mother Teresa. It was hard to tell the girl's age because she didn't move like a normal child. Her head tilted back, her mouth hung open, and she didn't seem in control of her skinny limbs. She was always like that, though, the nun said into the camera. But the cuts in her neck and shoulder were starting to look infected, and they were about to run out of the antibiotics that the village hospital had given them for her for the journey.
Martin had learned from the Italian diplomat that the sisters ran a small orphanage in Kabul for children with disabilities, a demographic whose mortality rates topped even the already shocking averages for other Afghan kids. Destitute families sometimes abandoned them as just a useless mouth to feed, the man had explained, even if they weren't orphans in the technical sense of the word. The girl was a case like that, the youngest child of a Hazara woman who had brought her to the tiny hospital with bleeding gashes from an accident with a hoe, or so the mother had claimed. The woman hadn't come back to pick the girl up again, so the hospital had contacted the sisters to ask if there might be a place for her at their orphanage. Two nuns had gone to fetch her, and Father Benítez had gone with them because cross-country travel for women without a male companion wasn't a good idea in Afghanistan even at the best of times.
The remaining members of the little group who were now in the hands of the Islamists were a lad of fifteen, who startled Martin by waving enthusiastically into the camera when it was his turn to report himself alive and well, and the other nun, who sat next to him, a young and exceptionally beautiful Indian woman called Anjali. According to the ambassador, the boy was also a resident of the orphanage, Ilhan by name, rather weak in the head but strong in body and good-natured, and always keen to get out and about. It made sense that they had taken him on their trip. The girl could obviously not walk. She would have had to be carried, and he could help with that, as well as enjoy a rare outing.
"Are they feeding you properly?" Martin wanted to know, and Sister Anjali confirmed that yes, they were not being starved. There was clean water to drink, and bread and rice to eat. But their captors had been very angry, she added, lowering her voice and casting down her eyes. They had accused them of stealing Muslim children, and had not liked it at all when Father Benítez answered them that they were very welcome to put away their guns and look after the children themselves. Martin wondered what else he had said or done to be considered dangerous – or infuriating - enough to warrant restraints, which they had not bothered with for any of the other captives.
Whoever was in control of the transmission at the kidnappers' end broke it off then. Its purpose had been achieved, and the enemy knew that every additional second on air increased the opportunities for the intelligence team to get a foot in the door and break through the encryption.
Martin leant back in his chair with a sigh while one of the technicians leaned in to start downloading the footage for the analysts.
"At least they knew the value of their hostages," Bergson summed up. Thomas had already got used to the slight swaying of the camera image as the officer walked along the riverbank footpath while he talked. "Foreign NGO staff were worth their weight in gold at the time. An actual Christian priest was basically platinum. But that also meant that the shit would hit the fan big time if our rescue mission crashed and burned. So, no pressure." He laughed bitterly. "I had the Italian ambassador breathing down my neck every day, but he had your guy in Pakistan breathing down his neck, too, the – what d'you call him? Nonno? No…"
"Nuncio?" Thomas suggested.
"Yeah, that one. They couldn't agree on a strategy. As I understood it, the Church wanted to pay whatever the kidnappers were asking, y'know, peace on earth and goodwill to men and all that. But the ambassador had been there on the ground long enough to know how the IS operated, so he was saying no. And I agreed. Military strength is the only language those fuckers understand, you see. Ah." The American pursed his lips, and Thomas realised with regret that he had not managed to keep his face neutral. "Yeah, right. I know that expression. I know it far too well. We're not having that discussion, y'know. We didn't have it back then, and I won't have it with you now." Some kind of distraction made Bergson frown at his screen then. Thomas assumed that it must be an incoming message or call at his end. "Listen, give me a sec, all right? I've got some stuff to coordinate."
"Of course, Major General."
When the American had hung up, presumably to monitor drone strikes somewhere deep in the Donbas or whatever else he was busy doing these days, Thomas closed his eyes. Survivor's guilt was a real and terrible thing for many veterans. Thomas's own father had never talked much about the war, but the question had always been there in the background, unspoken but haunting, why them and not me? And was it so wrong to look at Vincent Benítez as a veteran of war, too, even though he had carried no gun and worn no uniform? What had happened, somewhere near Khinjan in the heart of the Hindu Kush, that had made him so desperate to numb his mind and to bury his memories that he had succumbed to the siren song of chemical oblivion, at least for a time?
The thrumming of a helicopter engine in the distance that penetrated even the walls of the Holy Father's chapel seemed a fitting backdrop for these contemplations. Then Thomas realised that it was coming closer and closer for a reason.
The door into the chapel opened, admitting Ray O'Malley and – not Sister Marisol, as Thomas had expected, but Sister Agnes of the Casa Santa Marta.
"They're taking him to the hospital now," Ray reported. "You know, for x-rays, just to check that everything is properly back in place. Would you like to go there with Sister Agnes, or shall I?"
Thomas gaped at the nun, then remembered his manners. "Sister – I'm sorry, I'm surprised."
"Are you?" she asked, the hint of an indulgent smile lifting one corner of her mouth. "When I was a novice, Your Eminence, as young and naive as they come, our superioress sent me to serve at our order's outreach centre near the Gare du Nord in Paris for a year. I cannot count the times I have held the sweaty hand of a poor soul in the grip of withdrawal. It certainly made me doubt the concept of God's gift of free will, but it also gave me some knowledge that I hear may come in useful now. There's nothing in that department that I haven't seen before, and nothing so ugly that it would make me turn away in disgust."
And of course she knew how to keep a secret. Who else could Ray have been talking about? With her at the Holy Father's side to watch for signs and symptoms that none of his other friends would recognise or understand, and with Ray to manage all practical questions that might arise, they even had a chance of keeping the whole problem under wraps.
That hardly left any role for Thomas himself, but to his shame, he did not regret that. He would not be able to stand those large dark eyes looking at him like that again, filled with the pain of his betrayal. They already haunted his imagination badly enough. It was a selfish impulse, and a cowardly one, and he would have to examine both those aspects very closely indeed as soon as he had a moment to spare. But for now, all that mattered was to discover the truth and to limit the damage. And if others were better suited to the latter task that than he was, he would content himself with remaining in charge of the former.
"You two go, please," he agreed. "And thank you. Just let me know how it goes, and if there's anything I can do to - " - make amends, he had been going to say. But he was sure that even just to say those words out loud would bring tears to his eyes, and he would prefer for that not to happen until after the others had left. How was he ever going to put this right again?
Whatever they said in reply was drowned out by the ear-splitting racket of the helicopter. It had drawn steadily closer and was now hovering directly above the Apostolic Palace. When it started lowering itself precariously right into the Cortile del Belvedere, it made the surrounding windows rattle and shake as if from an earthquake. Thomas felt as if his whole being was shaking right along with them.
Chapter Text
When all was quiet again for the moment, Thomas briefly considered relocating to one of the more comfortable rooms in the papal apartments, such as the Holy Father's library or the study. But he didn't feel entitled to such a privilege. And besides, what he would have to say to Martin Bergson next was very much in the character of a confession, and the chapel was of course the most fitting environment for that, too.
To Thomas's surprise, he felt that it wouldn't be all that difficult to confide in the American. He would actually have felt shabby not to meet the officer's own frankness with equal candour. And even Bergson's blunt way of phrasing things, jarring at first, had started to feel – did Thomas dare to admit it? - almost refreshing. There was going to be no sugar coating with this man, no hiding behind nebulous euphemisms, and that was a relief. Churchmen were notoriously bad at plain talking, Thomas himself included. And the tougher the subject, the worse they usually got.
Ray must have messaged Bergson Thomas's own number, because it was his own phone that awoke again a while later with the alert that the officer was ready to continue their conversation.
Bergson had apparently not just taken care of some tricky situation several thousands of miles away, but also furnished himself with a takeaway cup of coffee from a riverside stall or café.
"Listen, Major General," Thomas plunged in right at the deep end, "before you go on, there's something you need to know."
Bergson's reaction when he heard about Thomas's mistake was a string of expletives so graphic that Thomas felt sure that scrubbing the chapel with holy water every day for a whole week would not be enough to cleanse it again. Maybe that would be a fitting penance for him, if hard to explain to anyone who might catch him at it.
"That shouldn't have happened." The officer let out a groan. "That's… bad."
"If I'd only known…"
"Yeah… well, I know he can be a cagey bastard. I'm not surprised he hadn't told you guys yet. Self-sufficient, you might call him, independent, yeah, sure, but also proud as the devil, and the last person on earth to admit when he needs help. Trust me, we soldiers are bad enough at that ourselves. We can spot a kindred spirit a mile off. If you want my advice - "
"Yes, please."
"Let him have a friend. Even just one. I don't s'pose popes are allowed to. But if you don't find a way to make an exception for him, you may have to find a new High Priest again very soon."
Outside the chapel, doors opened and closed, and there was the rattle of a stretcher being wheeled along the corridor, accompanied by a multitude of footsteps. At the same time, the engine of the helicopter waiting down in the courtyard came back to life.
Thomas himself had probably forfeited that title of honour forever, but Vincent Benítez did have true friends here, thank God. Sister Agnes, who might well be holding Vincent's hand right now. Ray O'Malley, who would guard the Holy Father's secrets like a Rottweiler. Sister Marisol, who would expertly fend off the curious eyes and ears who loved to gossip and pry where they had no right to, both in here and soon out in the world as well. Nobody could miss the obvious connection between a helicopter from the emergency services touching down right beside the Apostolic Palace and the cancellation of all the Pope's current appointments. But anyone asking for details would have a hard time getting past that formidable trinity.
"I'll make sure of it," Thomas said. "I promise."
The drone of the waiting helicopter became a thundering roar again as it got ready for take-off. There was no point in continuing the conversation in that din, but neither Thomas nor Martin Bergson considered hanging up. The officer had a far-away look in his eyes as he sipped on his coffee, as if the soundscape brought back distant memories.
"That takes me back," Bergson said with a sigh when the helicopter had lifted off, confirming Thomas's impression. "It's gonna take him back with a vengeance, too, by the way. Well, can't be helped, I guess. So, where were we? That first video call, right? We'd learned a number of things from that."
You were always on a ticking clock in a hostage situation. You did your best to string the kidnappers along, quibbling with them about the conditions of a deal you would never agree to anyway except for show, while in the background, you were working frantically on a rescue plan. Consideration for the wellbeing and the sanity of the hostages came third after that. Most of them were a case for the nut house anyway if they survived, like that Swedish lady from UNICEF that Martin had put on a plane home the year before, after a mere twenty-four hours in the hands of the Taliban. Even the doctors at the Bagram base hospital hadn't known how to stop her shaking, except with a constant stream of propofol. It was the symbolic fact of their survival that determined whether you'd lost or won. What those people's lives looked like afterwards and whether they were still worth living interested nobody.
In this particular case, the girl's injuries made the clock tick faster than usual. There was no way that the kidnappers were going to allow any medication to be got to her. The risk of the shipment being tracked was too great. So instead, the American negotiators suggested releasing her separately right away. What did the militants want with a disabled toddler, anyway? To that, the MIT graduate replied coldly that it would be better for her to die a Muslim than to be raised by Christians. When Martin heard that, he swore and picked up the phone to tell the intelligence team to hurry the fuck up with the geolocation.
They had little progress to report. The encryption the insurgents had been using for their video call was an unusually tough nut to crack. The men in charge of guarding the hostages had also been very careful to avoid being caught on camera themselves. So even if they, too, were old acquaintances of the US intelligence services, they couldn't be identified by their voices, height, stature or facial recognition. And their spokesman clearly considered himself unassailable, far away in Pakistan. The only small success was an analyst's confirmation that the handcuffs they had put on Father Benítez were Afghan Police standard issue. There had been an attack on a police station further up the road from Khinjan back in the winter. It had left four officers dead and the place looted by the time reinforcements had arrived at the remote location. Nobody had claimed responsibility back then, but local rumour had raised two names. The CIA were able to provide a last known location for both of these men – a father and son - in the same general geographical area.
In theory, they were still looking at an area of hundreds of square miles, but the unique geography of the terrain helped to focus the search further. This was one of the most scarcely inhabited parts of Afghanistan. Most of it was steep, rugged, inaccessible mountain ranges of bare rock that no man or beast could scrape a living from. The rivers were the area's lifelines, creating narrow strips of green along their banks. Human habitation clustered there, and all the roads followed their courses, too. The fact that the captives were all penned up together in one small room probably meant that there was not enough space in the building to hold them separately. This ruled out a mosque or school or any other larger structure as their hideout. There was also no bedding for the prisoners visible in the video, nor any other source of warmth like a hearth or a spirit stove. The snow-capped summits lining those river valleys soared to fifteen thousand feet and more. Temperatures at night could dip below freezing point even in the lower reaches. But the kidnappers did not seem worried that their precious guests might freeze to death. This meant that they couldn't be very high up in terms of altitude. All this didn't amount to GPS coordinates yet, but it was better than nothing.
There was no hope, of course, that the hostages themselves would be able to provide any clue to their whereabouts. Any kidnapper worth his salt would have made sure they were blindfolded for the journey. And even if they did know where they had been taken, they would be risking their lives if they tried to communicate that to the outside world. Martin would not dream of asking them any questions that might make their captors suspicious.
And anyway, when it was time again forty-eight hours later for another welfare check, as Martin's aide Diego had dubbed their scheduled video calls, Martin could hardly get a word in edgewise. Ilhan, the boy, leaned into the screen right from the start, gesticulating with his hands in a way that reminded Martin vaguely of that game children played, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and let out a torrent of Dari. Martin had never had the time – or the talent, as he admitted freely - to learn more than a few words of the language, but he could still tell that the boy was stuttering very badly. He didn't seem distressed though, just excited. They had indeed been playing Rock-Paper-Scissors, Father Benítez translated into English. Ilhan had just beaten him at it three times in a row and was very proud.
"Three!" The boy seemed to recognise the number. He thrust his hand towards the camera, beaming. "Three!"
It was the strangest way Martin had ever seen a person indicate the number three with his fingers, even a child. The boy had his second and his fourth finger folded down while his thumb, third and fifth finger stuck out, the thumb pointing to one side and the other two, close together, to the other side.
"I'm afraid he's very bored," Benítez said when Ilhan had dived back out of the frame again. "He misses his book."
"What book?" Martin asked, puzzled. Weren't they wasting valuable time?
"A schoolbook. Someone donated it to the orphanage. It's so old that it still has the Soviet Union. But some things don't change, do they."
"Can he read?" Martin would be very surprised if the answer was yes.
"No, but he likes to look at the pictures. He's fine, though. She's not." Benítez turned the phone around, and Martin saw the little girl again. They had put her to lie on her side, her head cushioned in Sister Anjali's lap, so Sister Hasina could change the bandages on her neck and shoulder. Except there were no more bandages, just some strips of cloth the same colour as the boy's knee-length shirt that would do very little to protect the injuries from dirt or abrasion. The antibiotics had run out, too. Hasina showed Martin the empty box.
"We think she's running a fever," Sister Anjali said. There were tears in the young nun's large almond eyes.
This was when Martin realised that the girl would be doomed if there wasn't some kind of miracle. But her white-clad guardian angels could not work miracles with nothing. And he wondered what would happen to this little family that was not a family once the boy realised just how serious the situation was, too, and could no longer be distracted with games and chit-chat, as Father Benítez had clearly been very good at doing so far.
"Listen, we're on it," Martin said aloud into the camera. "We're doing everything we can."
Diego, who stood beside Martin's chair, murmured something and then actually crossed himself. The young officer was Latino, with Nicaraguan parents who had raised their son as a good Catholic. Being part of an assignment that might well end with the death of a priest and two nuns had to come with a special kind of pressure for him.
As usual, the kidnappers ended the call without warning, and Martin got to his feet. "Don't get too attached, buddy," he told his aide. "That'll only make things worse if we fuck up."
"Yes, sir, I won't," the young officer replied as in duty bound.
All the same, when Martin stepped out of the office building, and the glaring sun bouncing off the shadowless airfield made his eyes prickle, he had to wonder who it was that had started caring a little too much.
"But he is like that, isn't he," Bergson said after a moment's pause and another sip of his coffee. "I don't know what it is, but somehow you can't not. Care, I mean." The light was much kinder under the trees by the Potomac riverside, but his eyes had still softened to a degree that Thomas would hardly have thought possible from what he had seen in the seasoned soldier so far.
"No, I understand," Thomas agreed. "He is like that, yes." Having been privileged to closely follow the first month of Pope Innocent's pontificate, Thomas had had ample opportunity to observe how Vincent Benítez touched hearts wherever he went. Even his opponents within the Church tended to at least moderate their tone once they had met him face to face.
"Anyway." Bergson pulled in a breath with a sharp sniff. "Yeah. So. I had plenty of other work to do, of course, dismantling Bagram and shipping stuff and people safely back home or back to HQ in Kabul. But the mind is a funny thing, and mine kept jumping back to that little gang in their mountain lockup. And you know what niggled at me most? The book."
"The boy's old schoolbook?" Thomas asked, surprised. What significance could it have had, other than proving that Vincent must have known the children of the orphanage quite well, and had taken a kindly interest in how they occupied themselves?
"Yep. I can't explain it. It's like a sixth sense. Like when you're on a reconnaissance mission in hostile territory and you have to decide which path you take, the right one or the left one. And you couldn't say why, but the right one just smells of landmines and the left one doesn't. You know what I mean?"
"I'm afraid I don't. In the Vatican, our experience of navigating minefields is usually limited to metaphorical ones."
Bergson chuckled. "That takes its own set of skills, I guess. Well, never mind. The book, right? The analysts didn't see either what the point would be, and I couldn't blame 'em. It was just a hunch. But when I made my next report to the Italian ambassador, I asked him to get his hands on it and have it put on one of our convoys coming back empty from Kabul. It arrived the following evening. By then, morale was pretty low at our end. The location efforts had stalled completely. Every lead had just fizzled out. People had started snapping at each other, and I was fed up to here with the whole affair, to be honest. Couldn't they have stayed the fuck at home in the Green Zone, nice and cosy, no need to go out and piss off the local jihadists?" Bergson rolled his eyes. "But try telling that to Father Benítez, eh?"
Indeed. "Did it help in any way?" Thomas asked. "The book, I mean?"
"You bet. It was the breakthrough."
The NSA analysts were no fools, far from it. All they had needed was a little nudge in the right direction, and they got that the same evening, in the form of an agitated Major General bursting into their office with a shabby old book in his hand.
Martin hadn't even needed to open it. The answer to the mystery was right there on the cover. He couldn't read the title, which was in Persian script. But he could tell from the collage of colour photographs that it was a geography or natural history book. A proud snow leopard stared at him from one of the pictures. A mountain lake of a blue so intense as to seem unnatural was depicted in another. And the third picture, spanning the whole bottom half of the cover, was of a mountain range featuring three peaks close to each other. Whatever forces of nature had brought them into existence millions of years ago had met with some kind of resistance in the middle, so that the two peaks on the left leant a little drunkenly to that side, while the one on the right bore away in the other direction at a rather lower height. Martin was sure he had never seen that place for real. But only yesterday, he had seen something so like it in shape that it could not be a coincidence.
Some things don't change, do they. Too right. The Hindu Kush had looked like this for a long time already, and still would for a long time to come.
"This is where they're at," Martin announced to his stunned audience. "Find those mountains, and we'll've found 'em."
He had to make them click through the frame-by-frame version of the latest video call until they got to the boy holding his hand into the camera in that funny manner, two fingers down and three fingers up. But they all saw it then. It was as accurate a rendition of the shape of that mountain range as you could achieve with nothing but your hand, both the shape and relative height of the peaks and their angles an exact match to the photo on the book.
One of the agents who knew Dari took the book and skimmed the opening pages for a reference, typed rapidly on her computer and pulled up an aerial image. "Posht Shtar," she said. "The Camel's Back, on the western side of the Salang river valley, forty miles south-east of Khinjan. Right inside our search area."
Someone else began studying the topographical maps of the area and had an epiphany about the possible significance of the number three. Looking west and upwards from certain vantage points on the valley floor, he explained, the sun might well be visible right above the Camel's Back at three o'clock in the afternoon. It would be a simple triangulation to calculate which exact spots fulfilled that condition.
A third agent came up with the idea of comparing the past week's satellite images of the river pastures down in the shadow of the Camel's Back. Animal husbandry was the livelihood of most people in the area. Their herds moved with the seasons, up in the spring after the snow melted, and down again in the fall. Thirty minutes later, he had established that the families of one particular village had driven their animals into a new broad stretch of budding green in a western side valley of the Salang river a week ago. But then a few days later, they had suddenly moved them back down to their previous pastures, where grazing was now scarce. It made no sense for them to starve their animals on purpose like that, unless someone had sent them back at gunpoint.
The satellite images also showed a small farmstead on a ledge of rock above the pastures at the far end of the valley, the only dwelling fit for human habitation far and wide. It was a typical building for the area, with one half used as shelter for the herdsmen and the other as a stable for their more valuable or vulnerable beasts, built of mud bricks, with narrow iron-barred window openings and a flat roof. But there was no farm machinery near it, and the nearby enclosures for livestock were in disrepair, too. The place must be abandoned. The reason why its last regular occupants had left was also immediately apparent. A massive rockslide had come down the steep slope behind the building at some point in the past, missing the house by no more than ten feet and creating a solid barrier that extended all the way down to the riverbank. After that, nobody had wanted to take the trouble of moving their cattle across or around that obstacle to reach the grazing area any more. It was an ideal spot if you wanted to make five people disappear for a while.
By the time the math whiz among the agents confirmed that the coordinates of the abandoned farmstead tallied exactly with his calculations of the solar altitude at fifteen hundred hours, Martin was already on the phone with HQ in Kabul for green light on a plan of action.
Chapter 4
Notes:
Please heed the warnings in the author's note at the start of the story. They apply to this and the following chapter in particular.
Chapter Text
Thomas let out a long breath. He felt as if he had been holding it for quite a while. "So, the game, the book… That was all a message?"
"Sure it was a message." Thomas got a brief, dizzying view of the trees overhanging the riverside footpath as Martin Bergson sat down on a park bench. He put down his coffee cup at his side and then repositioned his phone until they were looking at each other again. "What did you think, that he'd just sit around and pray for their deliverance till they were all dead? We were the ones who screwed up, 'cause it took us nearly two days to even realise that he and that clever lad had telegraphed us their exact location. What's the point of being Vincent Benítez when your allies are idiots, right?"
And how could God have allowed history to repeat itself today in exactly the same manner? Even Ray O'Malley's remarkably quick thinking hadn't been quick enough to get to the truth this time. Thomas felt a fresh wave of shame approach.
Bergson startled him by poking his index finger right into the camera, as if he had read his mind. "Ah, no. First rule of surviving a war, Padre. No what ifs."
Thomas tried but failed to shake off his anguish. "I'll try. Please, continue. I wonder how the boy - "
"Yeah, I never found out either how much exactly he understood of what was going on. I know I just said 'clever', but he really, you know - " Bergson touched his forehead. "- wasn't quite all there. But he trusted Father Benítez blindly. All those kids did. And those bearded bastards made a big mistake right from the start. They must've thought that just 'cause the lad wasn't right in the head, he had no eyes nor ears neither. They'd let him out twice a day, to fetch the food for the prisoners and to empty the bucket they used as a toilet. He only had to look up, and he saw those mountains and the sun above 'em, and recognised 'em at once from the book cover."
"And they'd left Father Benítez his watch, too, so he could take note of the time?"
"Correct."
"Dear God. What if - " Thomas recalled just in time that he wasn't supposed to ask questions that began with those words. And the militants had clearly not smelled a rat, or not yet, so it was pointless to worry what the consequences would have been if they had realised that their captives had outsmarted them. But Thomas was also clearly not listening to a happy story. 'Sit and pray till they were all dead,' Bergson had said, as if it was a given that by the end, someone had been. It was a terrible decision that Vincent had made there. By giving the Americans the opportunity to come to their aid, he had also handed them the power to shed a lot of blood - that of the kidnappers, that of their own soldiers, and even that of the hostages themselves. What man of God could want that on his conscience? But what would Thomas have done in his place? There was no profit in that question. Thomas had only ever been responsible for himself, never for a family.
"The next step was reconnaissance," Bergson continued. "You know, determine the number of combatants, their weapons, defence measures, that kind of thing. You want to be as well prepared as you can before you let any of your own boys put his ass on the line."
"Of course." Thomas paused. "But didn't you say, sometimes just the threat of smoking them out…"
Bergson's lip curled. "Oh, no way. You're thinking of what we call surgical strikes, right? Focusing your hit so precisely on the bad guy that the people next door don't even wake up? That's propaganda bullshit ninety-five percent of the time. Impossible in a place as tiny as that one without hurting the hostages as well. And the enemy knew that, of course. No, there was no other way but to go right in and pluck your folks out by the scruff of their necks before anyone fully realised we were even there. And mow down anyone who stood in our way."
His tone had become so harsh that Thomas had to resist the urge to cross himself. Had Vincent known that it would come to that? Or had he been naive like Thomas and believed in a peaceful resolution?
Bergson shrugged as if in answer to Thomas's unvoiced question, then continued his tale. "But anyway, we first had to wait for daylight to launch a drone."
"Wait for daylight? Aren't there cameras, you know – what are they called?" Thomas vaguely recalled blurry images of wild nocturnal animals caught in camera traps, their bodies oscillating in shades of orange, red and purple according to their body heat, their eyes glowing incandescent white.
"Night vision cameras? Or infrared ones? They can't see through walls, and there'd've been no reason for anyone to leave that building at night."
"Oh."
"I can tell you what we'd've seen if they could've shown us the inside of that place, though. We'd've seen five human shapes curled up on the floor of one of the rooms of that house, four big and one small, huddled together like a litter of kitties in a basket, 'cause it really got fucking cold out there at night. And then we'd've zoomed in to check what was wrong, 'cause the body temperature would've looked very off in the case of the girl. It would've shown her burning alive till midnight or so, and then she'd've started cooling all the way through the colour spectrum from white-hot through the normal orange-red and from there to purple and then blue till finally, she'd just've been, y'know, ambient temperature, and no longer showed up on a thermal image at all."
This time, Thomas did cross himself. "God have mercy."
"Not really. Her wounds had gone septic, and the fever just rose and rose till her little heart gave out." Bergson cleared his throat. "There's no what if here, though. If we'd gotten our shit together faster, she'd've had a fighting chance."
"I'm the last person who should dare to pass judgment on that, Major General."
"Well, at least she wasn't alone. The older nun told me about it afterwards, how they held her and soothed her and sang to her. And in the morning, when she was gone, they all prayed for her together."
"Oh. I don't suppose their guards were happy about that."
"No, no. They literally all prayed for her together."
"I - I'm sorry, what?"
A wry grin pulled at the corners of Bergson's mouth. "I know, right? Your Pope went from getting socked for being a filthy unbeliever to spiritual authority of the place in less than a week."
"But how - "
"Well, how d'you go from odd man out to leader of the world's biggest church in less than three days? He's got a talent that way, in case you hadn't noticed."
"Oh, we're all aware of that, I assure you." Was it force of personality? Was it the power of the Holy Spirit? Thomas liked to believe that it was the combination of both that had moved the Conclave, just as it had made even those hardened fighters remember that the dead deserved respect and needed intercession. It was a universal human impulse, after all, not the monopoly of any particular faith or creed.
"But that sounds almost too good to be true, doesn't it?" Bergson grounded Thomas again quickly. "And it sure was too good to last. Your folks had managed to strike up some kind of rapport with the Brotherhood's men on the ground. That happens sometimes when people are cooped up together like that for a while. The lines start to blur, for better or for worse. In this case, the jailers had been loyal enough to their own central command to let the girl die. But once it had happened, they were on a slippery slope. A few more days, and they might've ended up just letting the others walk away."
"Really?"
"Yep. You may be the one holding the gun, but if you keep it trained on someone long enough without any consequences, they'll start questioning your intentions, and then you'll start questioning your intentions, and everything goes downhill from there. We drill our own boys hard to break that pattern. And their boss knew that danger as well. The MIT doesn't take morons, right."
"You mean their spokesman - "
"He was actually their leader, yeah. The rest were basically just, I don't know. Desperate, I guess. But he was the real asshole of that gang. And your folks were about to make his acquaintance."
"I thought he was in Pakistan?"
"So did we. But we pieced together later that he'd travelled down to the Camel's Back valley during the night while the girl was dying, in a pick-up truck with two more of his cronies. They got there an hour after sunrise, when we were already watching live."
"He'd come to take charge of the ransom business himself?"
"Not really. There'd been a change of plan, and he'd come to fetch away his bride."
"I beg your pardon?"
Bergson's lip curled again, but entirely without humour this time. "How much detail d'you want on that? I mean, you being…" He seemed to be searching for an inoffensive term. "… a man of the cloth and not a man of the world and all that?"
Thomas felt a weight drop into his stomach. But no matter how ugly a turn events had taken, who was he to close his ears to the distress of the people who had actually lived through them? "Please don't spare my feelings."
"All right, if you're sure. So I wasn't the only one who'd noticed that the younger of the nuns, Sister Anjali, was blessed with real beauty. Or should I say cursed. That son of a bitch up in Pakistan had seen her in the footage, too, and decided that she wasn't gonna get ransomed. She was gonna be his wife."
"Dear God."
"So the old guard team got kicked out of the house and degraded to sentry and cooking duties, and the new gang took over inside and rearranged things to suit their chief's new priorities."
"You mean, they - " Thomas broke off again quickly.
"Drone cameras can't see through walls, remember?" Bergson reminded him, and Thomas felt relieved and ashamed of his relief at the same time.
"But why didn't he leave with her at once?"
"He couldn't know we'd locate 'em so quickly. He thought he had all the time in the world for his wooing, the scumbag."
"Didn't he owe you another video call by then, too?" Unless Thomas's reckoning was off, there should have been another welfare check soon, horribly cynical though the expression had become. Thomas could not imagine how the remaining hostages had coped with their grief and their anger at the girl's death, on top of the already extreme stress of their captivity. With this new threat to one of their number, the situation must have become a nightmare beyond endurance.
"They should've called that morning, but the bastards cheated. It wasn't till late afternoon, well outside the agreed forty-eight hour window, that their motherfucker-in-chief could finally be bothered to get in touch again. That's when our drone had picked up all the data we needed and we were getting serious about the rescue mission. He told us he wanted no more money. He wanted the lady, and we could have the others back for all he cared if he got to keep her. We said no way. He laughed and said in that case, we were welcome to pick up the others' bodies once he'd upped and left with his bride. But if we tried to stop him, she'd be dumped by the roadside dead, too. That's what finally got us the green light from the top brass to go straight in. The fact that the guy was there in person now, I mean. I told you, civilian hostages really aren't popular. But tell 'em there's a fully fledged IS commander in the crosshairs, and it's a different story. He actually was a moron, at least in that way. Insanely risky, to come back into the country where we might catch him. Shouldn't've paused the jihad for the sake of a pretty face, eh? Should've been thinking with his brain rather than with his, y'know. But I swear to you, if I'd known what was going down in that building for a whole fucking day while we were still busy figuring out stuff and covering our own asses, I'd've gone right in with guns literally blazing, green light and backup be damned."
Bergson's voice had grown agitated, and his ruddy face was flushed with the intensity of even this distant echo of the passion he must have felt back then. It was all passion, Thomas realised, far more than a mere sense of duty, or wounded professional pride. It had occurred to Thomas by then that the American might not be gifting him so much of his valuable time out of mere politeness or selfless generosity, but such a strong bond between people who had never even met each other was quite extraordinary.
"Did you go right in then?" Thomas asked.
"Yeah, sure. Well, I didn't, not personally."
"Oh?"
"Come on, look at me." Bergson gestured at his weathered face. "I'm fifty-six now. I was fifty-two then. My Delta Force days were long over. That kind of mission takes a younger man. I'd've been a liability. And besides, you don't throw away a Major General for five civilians, no matter how holy or how well liked. That's just not how the exchange rates work." The camera wobbled as he picked up his half-empty coffee cup and tossed it into a rubbish bin close to the bench he was sitting on. It landed with a metallic clang. "The perks of seniority, eh? I guess you know all about that, too. Still all the work, but no longer any of the fun, right?" He didn't wait for Thomas to agree or sympathise. "Diego did go, though, my aide. I had to call in a few favours to get him a seat on the bus, so to speak. But I wanted at least one of us there, if you understand. All I got to do was see 'em off to their Black Hawk, though, and then it was back to kicking my heels and waiting for news. Can you tell I hated that?"
I hate it, too, Thomas thought.
Again, his face must have been more eloquent than he had intended. Those keen grey eyes really missed very little. "You haven't got any news of your own yet, have you?" Bergson asked.
"No. I would have told you."
"All right, thanks. So, just as a heads up – the next part of the story really won't be fun to hear."
"Will it be harder for me to hear than it will be for you to tell?"
"I wouldn't know." Bergson huffed a humourless laugh when he saw the look of undisguised incredulity on Thomas's face. "Well, who would I talk to? My fellow officers, who've all seen the same kind of shit themselves, and really don't need to hear more? My ex-wife, who thinks I'm the most selfish asshole on the planet, and who wouldn't even talk to me about the fucking weather? My daughter, who's got her own busy life and a baby on the way now, too?"
"But isn't there any kind of professional support when you get back from a deployment?"
"There is if you ask for it. But then word gets round that you asked for it. I'm not ready to kill my career off just yet, y'know. What would I do with myself?"
Thomas's heart went out to the man, all the way across the many thousand miles of land and sea that separated them. "Listen, Major General – "
Bergson made a dismissive gesture with his hand. "Ah, that's such a mouthful. Martin is fine."
Thomas nodded. "Certainly. Martin. I just wanted to say, we don't have to do this if you prefer not to. I think I've heard enough to understand why he would - you know. Look for a way to cope, afterwards, and resort to unhealthy means, if no other relief was available."
Bergson let out a snort. "Ah, no. You still don't understand, with all due respect. That's not what happened at all." He rose to his feet. "And if he didn't get out of it, why should we?"
Chapter Text
Even launching an unmanned drone above the valley of the Camel's Back had not been entirely without risks. Flying right into the place with a helicopter mounted for combat could not possibly go unnoticed. Speed was everything. They would have the element of surprise for about a minute, two at best. And while the drone images had given them no indication that the insurgents had any kind of heavy artillery at their disposal, a simple rocket-propelled grenade launched from a man's shoulder could take down a Black Hawk and everyone in it.
There was nothing of that sort. No grenades, not even gunfire. The moment the helicopter turned around the shoulder of rock that marked the entrance to the valley, and the sentries outside the farmhouse had started shouting and gesticulating, the remaining men came swarming out of their hole and scrambled across the stony bank to get to their pick-up truck. The Americans had identified a total of six separate individuals in the drone images from outside the house throughout the day, three original guards and three newcomers, and they were all here now. But they were also dragging a seventh along in their midst. Her white gown with the blue border showed bright among the men's mottled camouflage colours, even in the fading light.
Sister Anjali was not coming quietly. She was fighting tooth and nail as they pulled her along. Her headdress had come adrift, her black hair was wild, and the camera mounted in the cockpit of the helicopter caught the white flash of her teeth as she sank them into the hand of one of the men who tried to clap it across her mouth to muffle her screams. But she was one and they were six, so they reached their truck very quickly. Their leader pulled out a handgun and forced her into the cab with another man as her personal guard, then got behind the wheel himself while the rest of them climbed onto the truck bed. He revved up the engine, and the vehicle started moving onto the dirt road that led away from the house and down towards the main valley.
"Cowards," Martin muttered, back in the control center at Bagram.
Next to him, the Delta Force commander who was in charge of the rescue operation leant forward in his seat. "Stop 'em," he snapped into his microphone.
The commander had covered every eventuality with his team before they took off, and neither the pilot nor the man in the cockpit who controlled the Black Hawk's armament needed more instructions than that. The aircraft veered away from the car until it was facing the rocky slope above the road head-on. The camera image jerked as the grenade was launched, and a split second later the whole mountainside exploded in a hail of rocks and rubble. A cloud of dust ballooned out from the centre of the impact, obscuring the view for a moment. Then with a growl of thunder that could be heard even above the din of the helicopter engine, an avalanche of rocks started moving downhill towards the road, gathering speed and strength with every foot of ground it covered. The echoes of the blast in the narrow valley were still enormous, too, another bang, and another, and another, like so many giant firecrackers, too enormous almost for a mere echo, but the camera was trained forward and there was no telling what exactly was going on outside its field of vision.
The men in the truck knew that they could do nothing against the rockslide except try and outrun it, and they would have to be very lucky to manage that. The driver floored it. The vehicle shot forward precariously on the uneven surface of the road. Incredibly, they reached and passed the spot where the avalanche was going to hit and block the road seconds before the sliding mass of rubble itself did. Boulders tumbled across a view of the truck's rear lights, and Martin and the commander swore in sync.
"Go again, sir?" the gunner's voice came to them over the radio.
The commander turned to Martin as if to apologise for what would happen next. They had had this one chance of blocking the enemy's escape without inevitably sacrificing the young woman at the same time, and they had bungled it. The next grenade would have to be aimed at the vehicle itself, and it would not distinguish between friend and foe. The helicopter had already turned around in pursuit. It wasn't up to Martin to make the decision, but he could share the burden. He nodded.
"What the fuck?" That was the gunner's voice again, crackling with static, and for one moment Martin thought the man was questioning his commander's order. Then he realised that the on-board camera was showing them that the fleeing truck had suddenly started swerving wildly across the dirt road of its own accord. For no reason that Martin could make out, it zigzagged two or three times, throwing the figures in its back around like ninepins. Then it veered off the road altogether at full speed, dived down the steep embankment right into the riverside pasture, overturned with a horrible crash of glass breaking and metal bending, tumbled on downwards for a few more yards and then came to rest on its side, the men who had sat in its back strewn about it like so many broken dolls, none of them moving.
"Were they all dead?" Thomas asked quietly when Bergson fell silent. It had started to feel silly to cross himself every time a corpse was mentioned. Maybe he was turning callous himself now, but maybe that was also his brain protecting him from spiralling down into utter terror. He was cold, and his hands that clutched his phone felt clammy.
Bergson had resumed his walk while he'd been talking, and from the background noises and the way light and shadow had played across his face, he had passed underneath a bridge and then possibly under an overpass as well. Thomas had lost all sense of direction as to where his steps might be taking him. "Three dead right away," he reported dispassionately in answer to Thomas's question. "One died in hospital later. The rest, fractures and concussions, but lived to see a prison from the inside."
"And the sister?"
"You do realise why the truck went off the road, don't you?"
"To be honest, I don't."
"She was still clutching that shitface's handgun when we dug her out of the crushed cab. Blood and brains all over her white dress, but hardly a scratch on her otherwise. She'd seen a chance and seized it. And you're the expert, of course, but going by the result, I'd've said God approved. She was alive. He was not."
Thomas felt as if someone had grabbed him by the throat and squeezed hard. The poor, poor woman must have been mad with fear to do what she had done, or mad with rage, or both. God could not possibly have approved, but Thomas hoped that she had since discovered that He could forgive.
"The rest was routine, as far as these things ever are," Bergson continued. "Our boys landed, secured the crash site and then went on to secure the house."
The moment the little farmhouse came into view on the bodycam of the Sergeant who led the team on the ground, Martin knew that yet again, his sixth sense for danger had not let him down. What he had heard earlier had not been the mere echoes of the grenade they had fired into the mountainside. It had been a battery of landmines that the insurgents had placed all along the back of the house, to discourage a rescue party sneaking up on it at night. They must have been set off by the vibrations in the ground, and the avalanche had triggered them almost simultaneously. Their combined power had torn a hole into the back wall of the building, into which the roof had partially collapsed. The front doorway was undamaged, but it now led into a structure that was half ruin.
Martin had secured plenty of buildings himself in his time, and the team made it a textbook exercise. He did not enjoy seeing the boy Ilhan thrown to the ground, searched and detained as soon as he came to meet the soldiers in the half-light, but he did approve. The boy himself was harmless, of course, but he could have been used for some dirty trick. Three armed guards had seemed a very small number to control four adult-sized prisoners, even if two of those were women and one was a dimwit. If there was another insurgent still lurking in the house, neither the hostages nor the rescue team would be safe until he was neutralised.
As it turned out, there was no one left who still required neutralising. They first checked the rooms on the undamaged side of the building. They had been the living quarters of the guard team, stacked around the walls with provisions, water cans and ammunition. A seventh member of that Holy Brotherhood of Losers lay sprawled on the earthen floor, a bullet hole between his bushy grey eyebrows. A little bundle was next to him, covered in a piece of white cloth with a blue border, just like the nuns' gowns. Martin pulled in a sharp breath when the Sergeant kicked the cover aside. The girl looked peaceful, though. She had been laid out with care, and whatever had happened in that room afterwards had not violated her dignity.
"How did that man end up dead, too?" Thomas prayed fervently that none of the other hostages had got their hands on a gun and made the same horrible choice as Sister Anjali, him or me.
"Oh, he'd been dead since morning. Ever since the engineer had arrived from Pakistan, caught him reciting the Prayer for the Dead together with a Christian priest, and lost it completely. He shouted at the old fella to just take the girl and dump her in the empty cistern outside the house. The same place where they'd been taking their human waste."
"Please, no."
"The greybeard didn't think so, either. He made the mistake to argue."
"So their leader killed his own man? Just like that?"
"I can kinda see his point, to be honest. We don't shoot our own soldiers on the spot, but we don't tolerate insubordination, either. You don't get results when you've got endless debates about everything with everyone. And mutiny spreads like wildfire. If you want to contain discontent, you've got to act fast and show strength. So when their chief had offed the other guy, he turned to Father Benítez, who was still on his knees by the girl's side, put the gun right between his eyes and repeated his order."
Thomas flinched. Then he remembered that the girl's body had still been there in the evening, untouched and undefiled, and that Father Benítez was now the Pope in Rome, very much still alive if not currently in great shape. "He refused, too?"
"Yep. He didn't argue. He just said no."
"And then?"
Bergson sighed. "Then, I'm afraid, it basically came down to a personal battle between those two."
"Who won?" Thomas asked, dreading the answer.
"It wasn't about winning. How d'you win against a man who holds all the cards when you hold none? The only question from that point onwards was whether he'd bend, or whether he'd break. And how soon."
The rescue team found them in the single room on the other side of the house, the one with the hole in the roof. Daylight was almost gone by then, and the headlamps of the soldiers cut corridors of blindingly bright light through the dimness. They instantly lit on the white gown of Sister Hasina, who lay among a heap of bricks and rubble with a broken leg trapped under a fallen roof beam. Her headdress was gone, too, sacrificed to serve as the little girl's shroud, and her face was streaked with sweat and tears. But she was conscious and lucid enough to protest that she would be fine and they should see to him first. She pointed, the Sergeant's bodycam swerved through one hundred and eighty degrees, and then Diego was already pushing past the Sergeant to get to the dark, unmoving shape on the ground in the corner.
They turned him over, and he slumped onto his back like a rag doll. It was difficult to tell underneath the blood, but Father Benítez's face had a blueish pallor to it that made the Sergeant instantly check for a pulse.
"Can't tell if he's breathing," he reported. "Only just, maybe." He slapped the still face hard, twice, three times, but there was no reaction. "OK, start CPR." He sat back on his heels to radio for the medic to get the fuck up here, while Diego put his combat rifle down and got going.
"Come on, wake up!" Martin heard the young man gasp out in sync with the dull rhythmic thumping of the chest compressions, like a conjurer's incantation. "You don't get to die on us now!"
"Oh shit," the Sergeant's voice cut across him. "Look at that." He had gone over their patient's body in a quick check for any obvious injuries, his headlamp painting brushstrokes of light across faded black cloth as he moved. Finding nothing elsewhere, he had grabbed the still tethered wrists and pushed up the sleeves. In the crook of the left arm, a large bruise had formed around a little cluster of needle marks, small dark dots set close together and crusted with dried blood. "Fucking bastards."
Diego leaned in to look, and then turned to stare through the Sergeant's bodycam right into Martin's eyes, so horrified that he even forgot for a moment that he was supposed to keep a faltering heart beating.
"You know what Naloxone is, don't you?" Bergson asked, abruptly returning both Thomas and himself to their respective present of the quiet chapel and the leafy footpath. The contrast could not have been more haunting.
"I do know what it is," Thomas confirmed. The appalling death toll of the opioid crisis in the US featured regularly in the news, after all, as did the fact that the situation had become so dire in many places that they had started handing the antidote out for free in public libraries and community centres.
"Then you know how they got past him to the young sister. And how we got him to breathe again afterwards. When nothing else worked, they pumped him full of smack to make him meek. And then they kept him nice and hazy all day, just awake enough to get what was going on, but too drowsy and weak to do anything against it."
"Devils."
"Yeah, that bit was basically punishment for being so difficult before. That's what Sister Hasina thought, anyway."
"Sister Hasina?" Thomas seized the opportunity to go off on the tangent, even if it was unlikely to be a more comforting one. "What about her, was she safe?"
"Yeah, she was lucky in that way. Not sure why. Too old? Too black? They can be just as racist over there as we are. But she made a very good witness. I got most of what I'm telling you right now from her later. That happens sometimes. That someone takes that role onto themselves, I mean, to be the one who stays sane and keeps looking on 'cause someone will need to tell the world afterwards what happened. That was her. And trying to calm down the boy, of course."
"I hope they left him alone, too?"
"Mostly, yeah. He was just very, very frightened. I guess that made him no fun to play with, except for a few gratuitous kicks and punches."
"And with that last dose, did they - "
"You mean did they overdo things by accident, or did they mean for him to die? Who knows. I don't s'pose they cared any more by that point." Bergson ran a hand across his face, an angry gesture that seemed ungentle on purpose. Thomas sensed some kind of shift that he should have noticed earlier, had he not been so dismayed himself by what he was hearing. Up to this point, the American had been a master of the stiff upper lip most of the time. But there had been chinks showing in his proverbial armour at intervals, and those intervals were shortening. "I just know that if we hadn't got there when we did – "
"Martin," Thomas interrupted him softly, "didn't you say, no what ifs?"
"Yeah, I forget that sometimes, too. Sorry. Look, I – I think I need to get back to work now. Text me when you hear from the hospital. I'll be in touch again when I'm free."
Bergson hung up without waiting for Thomas to confirm the plan, and Thomas was left to stare at the opposite wall of the Holy Father's private chapel.
How wrong he had been. Vincent had looked the evilness and the ugliness of the human condition in the eye time and again throughout his life, and hadn't flinched. Why should he suddenly have cracked and given in to temptation, after so long? But then why, why did Thomas have to be the one who put him straight back into that hell that Bergson's men had plucked him out of literally at the eleventh hour?
Thomas could feel his friend's dark eyes upon him again, and the depth of their despair. Don't do this to me. Not again. And yet he had.
Chapter Text
"Are you all right, Your Eminence?" said Sister Marisol's voice.
Thomas looked up in confusion into her worried face from where he was kneeling on the cold marble floor of the chapel.
He didn't know how long he had been absorbed like this, the words of the psalmist repeating themselves endlessly in his mind, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness; according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions; and my sin is ever before me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. He had found no comfort in the familiar lines, but at least they had been something to cling to.
Had Vincent still been capable of prayer during his ordeal? Thomas's own experience of intoxication, whether voluntary or accidental, was very limited. He had never drunk alcohol to excess except on a few occasions back in his student days, spurred on by others, of which he remembered nothing but the excruciating hangover afterwards. He had never toyed with the idea of experimenting with anything illegal. The prospect of the loss of control had terrified him even more than the consequences of getting caught. What might have surfaced from the unexplored depths of his soul, the darkest corners of his subconscious, and snuck up on him when he was least aware? What man would lower those defences on purpose? And even during his illness, when he had been given medication that rendered his brain clouded and sluggish, he had never quite felt as if he had lost himself. He had been a tired, torpid, useless version of Thomas Lawrence, but he had still been that person. What had it been like for Vincent?
"It's just, I thought you must be hungry," Sister Marisol insisted. "Come on, let me help you up." She offered him her arm, and he took it gratefully, not to lean on – he could not expect that – but at least to guide him back to his feet. His knees were smarting, and it was a surprise to him that his spine did not creak audibly.
She was right. His head swam with hunger and fatigue as she led him out of the chapel and across the corridor towards the dining room. The papal apartments were completely deserted now except for the two of them, as if all life had been sucked out of the place when its main occupant had been taken away. Even the vestibule had emptied, and the Swiss Guards had withdrawn as well, now that there was no one to guard any more. Outside the windows, it had gone dark, but nobody was working away in the kitchen, and nobody had set the dinner table for twelve. Sister Marisol had found the makings of some simple sandwiches and put down two plates and a carafe of water. They sat down together at one end of the empty table, and Marisol pushed the sandwiches towards him. Thomas saw that she had cut them into triangles, as if his English stomach could not have digested them in any other shape, and couldn't help smiling.
"Please don't scorn my efforts, Decano," she encouraged him. "You want to be at your best when he gets back home."
Thomas looked up in surprise from pouring them each a glass of water. "Is he coming home, then?"
"Oh yes. Ray called to say they'll be back in an ambulance early tomorrow morning. Around five o'clock, when the roads are quiet and there's no one out and about yet. Less publicity, you know."
"And then?"
"Oh, there's a plan. I hope you've got nothing urgent on for the next day or two? That's how long the doctor estimates it will take till the worst is over. If the two of us take turns with Sister Agnes and Ray, we should be fine, and able to actually sleep in between, too."
The bottom of the water carafe met the surface of the dining table with a rather loud thud. "What are you saying? That the four of us are going to - " What on earth were they going to do, babysit the Pope?
"We're going to see him through detox," Marisol said in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, as if she hadn't just uttered a complete absurdity. "And the fewer people know about it, the better."
"And what exactly will that entail?"
"For us? Mostly just being there, according to Sister Agnes, and not flinching."
It required a great amount of self-control on Thomas's part not to flinch even just at those words. Then he felt ashamed. He thought of Martin Bergson's men, who had waded into a mire of blood and rubble without a thought for their own safety and comfort. Thomas himself was never going to be a warrior, but he could at least try and learn to be a little less squeamish. "And what will it entail for him?" he asked, apprehension making his voice unsteady.
"That will depend on several factors we're not entirely clear on yet. Degree and recency of habituation, mostly… physical constitution, which is fine for his age generally but obviously took a bit of a hit today… and mental resilience plays a big part, too, obviously."
"And there's no way to… I don't know, soften the effects?"
"There is if you don't mind the headlines. 'Supreme Pontiff Successfully Completes Twelve Step Programme.' 'Pope Issued With Long Term Methadone Prescription.' Not sure the world is ready for that. And not sure it's fair on him."
Thomas sat back in his chair. "What does he want?"
Marisol grimaced. "It was his own idea to go cold turkey. He's been adamant about it ever since he resurfaced and the doctor told him what the options were. He says he wants to get it over with quickly, and he knows he can do it because - " She paused.
"Because he's done it before?" Thomas guessed, feeling his heart contract painfully in his chest.
Marisol nodded. "You know more about that by now than any of us, I suppose."
"Not nearly enough yet." There were a lot of gaps yet to fill for Martin Bergson. Thomas could only hope that the American would still be willing and could still spare the time to do it, for the sake of the information only he could give them, but also for the sake of helping Thomas to … what was it, repent? It was preposterous to pretend that listening to the soldier's tale, harrowing as it was, was going to mend anything. Vincent might even be angry at how frank Bergson had been with Thomas. Maybe it was best if Vincent never found out at all just how deeply Thomas had been taken into his American friend's confidence.
"Wait, what about the doctor?" Thomas asked, realising suddenly that Marisol had mentioned him as if he was a natural part of their little conspiracy. It made no sense at all. Doctor Baldinotti was more likely to suffer a heart attack at the news that the Holy Father was struggling with an opiate addiction than he was to come up with an unorthodox plan of action how to deal with the situation. "Are you saying someone put Baldinotti in the picture?"
"Oh dear me, no," Marisol reassured him at once. "It's Doctor Ariyaratna who made the plan with us."
"And how did he figure it out?"
"He didn't, not really. But he insisted on knowing what triggered the Holy Father's panic attack, back here when he and Baldinotti were about to give him the painkillers."
"What panic attack?" Thomas asked, utterly at a loss.
"The symptoms that Baldinotti thought were the beginnings of hypovolemic shock. You saw it, didn't you. The sweating, the shallow breathing, the erratic heartbeat…"
"That was a panic attack?"
"I'm afraid so." Marisol didn't say whether she would have been able to recognise it for what it was if she had been allowed in the room, but Thomas was convinced of it. Baldinotti would be handed his dismissal papers by morning. "Ray asked Doctor Ariyaratna why he thought that's what it was, and the doctor just smiled a little sadly and said 'I'm Sri Lankan. I ran from the tsunami in 2004 carrying my younger brother on my back. I have run from it again many times since.' He'd realised by then why His Holiness's symptoms were familiar, so there was no point any more in us trying to lie to him. But he also said that he knows all about wanting to put on a brave face for the world, and not wanting it talked about in public, and that he's on board with that, too. He says he can easily justify an overnight stay at the hospital, and he'll use the time there to make him as comfortable as he can. But after tomorrow morning, there'll be too many potential witnesses asking too many questions. Someone is bound to recognise the situation for what it is. So we'll be better off here. He'll come over twice a day to see how the shoulder is doing, and he'll be on standby the rest of the time, too, if we need him for anything else. He and Sister Agnes between them should be able to tell if there's a need for specialist intervention."
"Then I'm glad we have him on our side." It would have been equally irresponsible to leave the Vincent without medical supervision during his recovery as it would have been to leave his medical supervisor in the dark about the full extent of his troubles. Thomas could hardly believe that this particular dilemma at least had resolved itself so neatly.
"I am, too. He's a good man."
"I only wonder…"
"Yes?"
Thomas sighed. "I wonder if I'm the right person to… You know. I'm not sure he'll want me around anymore, of all people."
"You're his friend, Decano."
"What if I was his friend?"
"I get the impression that he doesn't resent the doctor for what happened, either."
Thomas shook his head. "The doctor was only doing his job. You know how their oath goes, to heal not to harm and all that."
"And what else were you trying to do?" When Thomas didn't answer, Marisol put a hand on his arm. "Listen - if he really doesn't want to see you, you can be in charge of the laundry and of the cooking. Someone will have to do that, too. If it's me in the kitchen, it'll just be sandwiches three times a day."
"Oh." Thomas was grateful to her for lightening the tone. "I think I could manage to boil an egg, for variety. But if you want a culinary high flyer, you'll have to bring in Cardinal Bellini."
A smile flashed across Marisol's face and then faded again very quickly. "I assume we'll have to tell him, too? Or are we expecting him to step in and keep the whole machinery running for a week or more without asking a single question? I think we'll be able to turn literally everyone else away, strict bedrest, doctor's orders and all that. The only trouble will be tons of people wanting to help and being upset if we don't let them. But I wasn't born to fool Cardinal Bellini. I'd prefer not to try. Can I leave that decision to you?"
Thomas and Sister Marisol had nearly finished changing the sheets on the bed in the Holy Father's empty bedroom – a task that in Thomas's privileged life so far had been performed for him by an unbroken succession of white-capped housemaids, boarding school matrons and housekeeper nuns - when Thomas remembered that Martin Bergson had asked to be updated as soon as Thomas had news. Thomas had failed in that task even more spectacularly than he was now failing to put the pillowcase on the pillow the right way around. He struggled with the thing until it yielded, then excused himself and took out his phone to type a short message.
When they were done with the housework, Thomas contemplated the empty bed for a moment, stripped now of all the marks of the awful struggle that had gone on there earlier in the day, cleansed and made anew like the soul of the sinner in the psalm by Sister Marisol's kind efforts and Thomas's own meagre contribution. But were they even wise to put Vincent back in here, in the same room where he had experienced distress extreme enough to make his heart stutter?
"I've been wondering the same thing, actually," Marisol said quietly. "But I'd say it makes sense to try and reclaim the place sooner rather than later. He'll have to come back eventually, but the longer you allow the brain to attach a negative significance to a location and avoid it, the harder it will be to turn that around again."
Thomas nodded, reassured. How lucky were they, for Vincent to have been inspired to pick a certified expert in the troubles of the human soul as one of his closest personal staff? Or did luck actually have anything to do with it at all?
"Please don't look at me like that, Your Eminence," Marisol chided him with a wan smile. "I swear I did not know this kind of thing was going to be in my job description when I transferred here. I may have to have a word with him about that when he's better, actually. But who are we to put a limit on how useful we can be in a crisis?"
"I'm glad he's got you," Thomas said, and meant it.
"And I'm glad I've got you," she replied, picked up an armful of dirty bedlinen and thrust it at him. "The laundry room is the second door down from the kitchen. Come on."
When they returned, Martin Bergson had answered Thomas's message. Good luck, he wrote. It's not gonna be pretty, but please trust him to see it through. He's the bravest man I've ever met, and I've spent my life among soldiers.
When they had made everything ready, Marisol left for her own lodgings in the Via del Pellegrino, with the promise to be back well before five in the morning. Thomas, however, could not bring himself to return to his own apartment in the building of the Holy Office just across St. Peter's Square for the night. Just like during the Conclave, it would have felt impossible, illegal even, to go back home in the middle of so much unfinished business. He settled down in the Holy Father's private library instead.
This was a misnomer, of course, since it was really just a haphazard accumulation of books that the past three or four popes had considered essential reading, each in his own way. Heavy leather-bound tomes of classics such as the Complete Annotated Works of St Augustine alternated incongruously with well-worn editions of South American liberation theology in plain linen or paper covers. It was far too early for Innocent XIV to have left his own mark on the place yet. And the books were not why Thomas had come in here anyway.
Maybe he was seeking out the company of the dead, after hearing of so much death in Martin Bergson's story. But all the men whose books he was looking at now had grown old, and no matter whether their pontificates had been long or short, they had departed this world looking back on many, many years of fruitful service to God and their fellow men. How different had those deaths in the valley of the Camel's Back been, ugly and violent and pointless, robbing the innocent girl of her right to live and thrive to the best of her abilities, and robbing those misguided men of the chance to repent and atone.
But maybe Thomas – weak old man that he was – had also simply come here for the comfort of the high-backed armchair by the window. There was even a sofa on the opposite side of the room, with bookshelves built around it to form a downright cosy reading corner. Under ordinary circumstances, the bookworm in Thomas would have felt right at home over there. But today, he did not feel entitled to such an indulgence, and settled in the chair instead.
He was behind on saying the offices of None and Vespers, but catching up, he found that the texts chosen for this day did not suit his mood and his needs at all. They were jubilant and full of gratitude for the greatness and the goodness of God's creation, a jarring contrast to Martin Bergson's sombre tale of suffering that Thomas had not even heard the end of yet, and no remedy at all for his own mounting anxiety what the morning would bring. He should have embraced the dichotomy and let it help him to see his own troubles as if through a reversed telescope, tiny and insignificant compared to the larger picture God had had in mind when He brought the world into being. But Thomas could not make his mind blank and receptive enough to even begin with that exercise.
He let the rest of the words wash over him and then, like the true denizen of the globally connected world of the twenty-first century that he was rapidly becoming, he put his breviary aside and took out his phone instead. Not ten minutes later, it rang again.
Martin Bergson did not look as if he had returned to his office in the Pentagon, as he had told Thomas he was going to do. He was still somewhere outside, with sunlight bouncing off a white wall and the edge of a white marble column behind him. He also looked like a man who had experienced a situation that he had preferred not to be witnessed by anyone else, then gone into a bathroom and tried to remove the traces of his lapse. His hair looked a little damp, his uniform tie was slightly off-centre as if he had loosened and then imperfectly fastened it again, and his eyes…
"Yeah, no, I'm all right," he greeted Thomas a little gruffly, replying to the question before Thomas could put it to him. He was sitting with his shoulders hunched and his elbows on his knees, and for the first time Thomas could truly tell his age. After all, he knew a thing or two himself about the cruelty of putting men into the highest positions that their callings offered only once their powers had begun to decline.
"Sorry I disappeared for a bit there," Martin apologised. "I've decided to take the rest of the day off and come up here. Say hello to a couple of old friends. I do that now and again. Helps me to… how did you Brits put it on those famous posters? Keep calm and carry on."
There was birdsong in the background, too, and it really should not have taken Thomas such a long time to realise where Martin must have relocated. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said.
"Oh, it's OK. In my job, when you get to my age, you'll have outlived some people. It's just a fact of life. And this is a beautiful place, really. Nice and green." Martin abruptly turned his phone away from himself. It swept across a succession of white columns until the view opened onto a seemingly endless expanse of grass dotted with the equally endless rows of plain white, uniform grave markers that made up Arlington National Cemetery. It seemed that he, too, had been drawn to seek out the company of ghosts.
"Is there anyone in particular whom you'd like me to keep in my prayers?" Thomas asked by way of a common curtesy when Martin's camera turned back onto the officer's face. He realised only then that someone unfamiliar with the traditions of the Church might misunderstand the offer as fishing for information, or worse, as criticism of their own lack of effort on behalf of their late friends' souls.
Thankfully, neither seemed to be the case. "Oh, don't," Martin said quickly, but he did not sound offended. "That wouldn't feel honest. You see, before someone put Vincent Benítez into my path, or me into his, who knows, I'd've said God didn't even exist."
"And since then?" Thomas asked, treading softly.
Martin smiled wryly. "Since then, let's say I've occasionally considered the possibility that he does. Still trying to figure out what the fuck his game is, though. Drawing a blank, so far."
Thomas nodded. They were both silent for a while, but it was a companionable silence, not the awkward variety. Martin obviously wasn't expecting a sermon, and Thomas would not have dreamed of delivering one. He himself would certainly have worded it differently, but Martin's question was universal to all of humanity after all. What was God's plan for mankind, and why did things continue to happen that were difficult to reconcile with the idea that there was a plan at all? Who was Thomas to pretend that he had the answer?
"Look," Martin spoke up again eventually. "It wasn't a great time. We'd been fighting a losing battle for twenty years by that point. Two thousand of our folks dead, and for what? A little bit of window dressing that made Afghanistan look just a bit less ugly and brutal and godforsaken than it was and always had been. You can't put a bandaid on a gushing artery, y'know. Can't heal centuries of poverty and oppression and bigotry by bombing a couple of terrorist camps and handing out candy to the local kids. It was all so pointless. And I was angry with him, I'll admit that. I really was angry with him, that he saw a future where I didn't, that he saw a purpose in what he was doing when I hadn't in years. That he wouldn't even let me use the word 'godforsaken'. I did that once and if looks could kill… But how could he be right and I wrong? Where did his certainty come from? What did he know that I didn't? What could he feel that I couldn't?"
"Was that anger, or was it envy?"
Martin considered this for a moment before answering. "Definitely anger," he said then. "I didn't want to be like him. I knew I never could be. I just… wanted to understand. And I'd've liked to sleep at night."
"What kept you up?"
"Guard duty, I guess you could call it."
"I see." Thomas hesitated to impose a confidence, but then he took the leap. "Actually, I can relate."
It was clearly a greater revelation to Thomas himself than it was to Martin. "Yeah, I thought so," the officer replied simply.
Chapter Text
It was fully dark by the time the Black Hawk touched down back at Bagram, or as dark as it ever got under the air base's massive floodlights. The pilot had radioed to say he'd be making straight for the helipad by the base hospital, and Martin had gone over there for the unloading of his human cargo. Everyone who was still breathing had been crammed into the one helicopter together with the rescue team. Sending in a second aircraft as backup would have been far too risky. Night flights in those narrow, pitch dark mountain valleys were no joke even if you didn't have to fear anyone with a makeshift rocket launcher picking you out by your lights.
It was strange to see them all become real people at last, one by one, strange and disconcerting. Martin was seized by an odd sense of grief that he had never known them when they had still been whole, when the children had just been children in spite of the tough lot life had dealt them, and when the adults had simply gone about their peaceful business, meaning no harm and doing none. But what else was life but a succession of missed chances and irreparable mistakes?
Sister Hasina, still clinging to sanity with grim determination, her broken leg splinted as best they could, was lifted out of the helicopter first, closely followed by the boy Ilhan, unharmed in body but mute and wide-eyed with awe. After him came the Sergeant, who – he told Martin later – was the only one of the soldiers the boy didn't seem to be afraid of. Maybe because he happened to be the only member of the rescue team who was black, like Hasina. He was carrying the dead girl in his arms, still wrapped in white. The boy had refused to get on board unless they'd take his little sister as well, the man explained, and they had humoured him just to speed things up and get going. But it seemed right in itself to Martin, too, that they hadn't left her behind, after all that her little adoptive family had gone through with her and for her.
An all-female medical team closed in next to take charge of Sister Anjali, who was quiet and biddable now but moved like a robot, her eyes fixed on the ground. Martin saw with relief how gently they wrapped her in a blanket before leading her away. And then Diego appeared in the open side door of the aircraft, caught Martin's eye and shook his head in a wordless warning that Martin instantly knew he could not and would not heed.
Naloxone was a bitch. It saved your life, but it also reversed your poppy dream so quickly and so powerfully that it kicked you out of sweet oblivion straight into rapid-onset withdrawal. There was no transition, no time for your body to adjust, and no time for your mind to prepare itself, either. One moment you were still floating along pleasantly, not even aware that your breathing was slowing down to nothing. And the next you were back to reality in its cruellest possible form, twitching and panting and shaking and puking your guts out as your body screamed in protest at the sudden deprivation.
There had been no way to ease any of that with the limited resources of a medic's standard field kit. There hadn't even been space enough aboard the cramped Black Hawk to take a bolt cutter to the handcuffs for a minimum of comfort. Martin stood back, not wanting to be in the way while someone finally took care of that and the medical team bundled their charge onto the next waiting gurney. He looked so small. But then, nobody looked impressive when you curled them into the recovery position. Martin briefly wondered what the point of that particular manoeuvre even was any more. Both the dusty black clothes and Diego's camos looked stained past salvaging anyway, and probably had been already by the time they had reached the helicopter. There could hardly be anything left in his stomach to come out.
The true reason why they hadn't put him on his back only revealed itself in the brightly lit triage area inside the hospital building. And even then, it should not have come as such a shock. The battered face under the oxygen mask and the dried blood matting the black hair should have warned Martin that chemical warfare had been the end point of Father Benítez's encounter with the forces of evil, but by no means the whole extent of it.
Thomas did not ask for details, but they still came tumbling out fast, painting a picture as harsh and unsparing as the lights of that hospital ward.
"His nose had got broken early on, so our docs couldn't do a lot about that any more by the time we got him back, except to make sure he was breathing OK. Hasina said their leader had sensed very quickly that fear alone would get him nowhere with Father Benítez. So he'd taunted him with a nasty deal. He'd allow him to give the girl a proper burial if he'd also bless his marriage with the sister."
Thomas grimaced. "And of course he said no to that, too?"
"Oh, worse. Hasina said he quoted the Quran to the guy, the bit where it says you've got to treat women with respect and let 'em make their own decisions. It seems it really does say that, by the way, not that I knew. Anyway, he got the butt of a rifle in the face for that. That was the nose gone. And you know how things escalate. Once someone's bleeding, all bets are off. They decided that it was blasphemy for a Christian to point out that they were getting their own holy book wrong. And I guess you've heard how people get punished for that kind of thing in Sharia law. That's how the docs at Bagram ended up peeling his shirt off his back in bits and pieces. I s'pose you've seen the scars? That's where they're from."
Oh Lord. "Of – of course not," Thomas stammered hastily. "On what occasion - "
"Right, sorry," Martin saved him at once from drowning in mortification. "I keep forgetting he's the Pope and you're not…" He left the sentence unfinished, but Major General Bergson was not the type to blush at an indiscretion like a schoolboy. "Never mind. It's just… That was the worst part, hands down. Normally, when someone's been through the wringer like that, the docs just knock 'em out and then they're free to do whatever needs to be done in peace and quiet. I didn't get at first why they weren't doing that with him. But when they're dealing with an overdose on top of other damage, they've got to be super careful with the anaesthetics till they're sure the shit's fully out of your system. They'd be courting another respiratory arrest else. So it was a catch-22 situation. Let him suffer, or risk killing him outright. Obviously our docs decided to let him live, but fucking hell. I can still feel his hands in mine, clinging so hard I thought he was gonna crush my fingers to a pulp while they cleaned up his back bit by bit. They were going as fast as they could, but it still felt like hours. I can still hear the noises he was making, too. Sorry, that's probably…"
Thomas became aware that he had put his hand over his mouth, and took it away quickly. "No, I'm… I'm glad you're telling me. I had no idea. Dear God."
"And you're probably gonna tell me off when I say those fuckers deserved what they got. But I stand by that. I hope they're all burning in hell for that alone. And if you asked Anjali, I bet you'd get the same answer. That son of a bitch had ordered the women out of the room for the worst of it, but they could still hear. Hasina told me she and Anjali both knew he was just trying to buy her time. The longer he held out, y'know… Not that it helped either of 'em in the end, with us not getting off our asses all day."
"You did what you could, Martin," Thomas said, painfully aware that he was exactly echoing his words to Ray O'Malley from a few hours before. They were still true, and they were still no comfort at all. "And I have no words to express how glad I am that you were there with him at the hospital, when you were really not obliged to be." Thomas would never forget how Vincent had taken hold of his own hands at a time of profound doubts and crisis, and how anchored he had felt, how comforted. It broke his heart to learn that that moment had only been an echo of a much more harrowing experience of raw agony. But wasn't that why God allowed such things to happen at all? So the kindness and the compassion born of them could proliferate?
"I don't think I did all that much, really," Martin reflected. "My voice seemed to calm him down for some reason. Maybe he recognised it from our video calls, I don't know. But what works works, right? And was I obliged to be there? You bet I was. I owed him that, for being so damn slow about the thing with the book. But I was getting a second chance, too, that I'd never seen coming, nor deserved. And I wasn't gonna waste that, either. That fucking poison wasn't gonna get him, too, if I had anything to do with it."
Looking back, it seemed unforgivable to Thomas that he hadn't picked up on the hints long before this moment. How could he have failed to understand that there had always been another person in this story, hovering just out of sight and out of reach all throughout Martin Bergson's long and painful tale? This was the true ghost, the one who had made Martin want to visit a graveyard in the middle of an ordinary working day. And maybe the same ghost had lured Thomas into the dead mens' library tonight, too, the only room in the papal apartments that was still stuck in the past while all the others had been transferred successfully to a vibrant present. Whoever exactly he was, he had clearly been near and dear to Martin in life. And Thomas also feared that it would not be difficult to guess at his cause of death. Any soldier deployed to Afghanistan would have found a way to access those substances, and the temptation to self-medicate would have been great for many of them.
"Are you still sure," he asked gently, "that there's really no one I might pray for?"
Martin thought for a moment. "Pray for Jamie," he said then. "Can't hurt, can it."
"One of your Arlington friends?" Maybe Martin wanted to walk them to the grave? He did seem to find it easier to talk when he was on the go.
"No, he's… he's back in Colorado. That's OK, though. It was home. He loved the mountains. He and Ashley stayed there with their mom after, y'know, things fell apart. Was that the start of the trouble? I'll never know for sure."
Within a split second, the image of the ghost that Thomas had entertained in his mind transformed completely. He shed the uniform, and he also shed many years of his age. Not a disillusioned war hero, not a brother-in-arms who had chosen his path in life open-eyed, and paid the ultimate price in the full knowledge that it might be asked of him. Just a young man like a thousand others, who must have stumbled into a war with himself that he had neither sought nor even seen coming. A young man like a thousand others, but also… Martin's own son.
"How long ago was this?" Thomas asked. He was on very thin ice now, testing it with every careful step, and fully expecting Martin to shut him down without warning or explanation again if he probed too deeply.
This time, however, Martin let him advance. "About a year before. I was already in Afghanistan. Diego, too. He knew. Couldn't help overhearing one of the phone calls, I think. Never said a word, though, and I guess I'd've just growled and snapped at him if he'd tried. But yeah, he knew. He knew I'd've destroyed every poppy field in the country with my own hands if I could. But there we were, our own folks down in Helmand patrolling right past those fucking factories of death every day and looking the other way, just 'cause we didn't want the local farmers to lose their income and starve. What would that have looked like on the news? But meanwhile at home, some fucking doctors got rich pushing those infernal pills on our own kids for every little ouchie, and then they couldn't stop, and then they'd start selling the shit to each other and all their friends to fund the habit, and then the next time you looked they were injecting three times a day already and walking around like zombies, till sooner or later they caught a bad batch with just a little too much elephant tranquilizer in it, and that was it. Game over."
"How old was he, Martin?"
"Twenty-one. Final year of college. Sports injury. Ruptured Achilles tendon. Made him miss out on the whole rest of the season. Not the end of the world, you'll say, but at twenty-one, you haven't got a very good idea yet what is and what isn't. Bored out of your mind, all your friends out there having fun without you… That's how they tried to explain it to me afterwards, anyhow. I didn't have a clue at the time. Didn't help that I was so far away, of course. I'd noticed he'd stopped posting about his outdoor adventures and his matches and all that, but that's a given with a busted ankle, right? He always sounded OK on the phone. Still told me not to worry about him when he'd already started stealing money for dope from his mom and his sister. But then one day, he didn't need to lie any more anyway. He was just gone." Martin's voice went up an octave in an awful mockery of those robotic computer voices. "The person you're trying to call is not available."
"I am so sorry."
Martin shook his head, blinking rapidly as he raised his eyes above the camera frame, looking at the sky or maybe into the leafage of a nearby tree. Thomas felt his own heart ache in his chest.
"'Course I could've got home leave for the funeral," Martin continued eventually. He seemed to have waited until he could trust his voice again. "But I didn't go. Ashley wanted me to come, but my ex-wife would've torn literal strips off me if I'd shown my face there. No idea what she thought life as a military family was gonna be like, but yeah, she's convinced that all I ever cared about was my career. Not true. But for her, this was like the final proof." He sighed. "Well, let's not get into that part. We'd got married way too young, and didn't know shit. So." Martin shifted in his seat and straightened up again. "Now you know why I don't like it when people overdose on my watch. And why I'd rather sit by their bedside afterwards and wipe away sweat and snot and tears and let myself get puked on and sworn at, than allow 'em to go on destroying themselves."
"Was that what it was like at Bagram, too?"
"Yeah, pretty much. Except for the swearing. He doesn't swear, does he. And it was just the first night really, till they decided he was fighting one battle too many and put him on methadone there and then. Not that he liked it when he heard about that later." He huffed a laugh, half affectionate, half peeved. "Why does everything have to be difficult with this guy?"
"Not everything, in my experience," Thomas objected. Vincent was in many ways one of the most straightforward people he had ever known. You want me to vote for a man you see as ambitious? Ha, no. I will vote for you. "I'll agree with stubborn, though."
"Pig-headed," Martin grumbled. "But he did see our point eventually. That he might want to space out his battles a little, I mean. And to be fair, we thought he'd be off our hands very soon anyway. As a matter of fact, he was booked on our very next flight out of the country."
Chapter Text
The base hospital at Bagram was a revolving door, and had never been intended to be more than that. People got carried in there, mostly with their limbs mangled or missing or with bullets or shrapnel lodged in their bodies, were patched up provisionally and then evacuated to the specialist institutions around the globe where their actual recovery would be taking place. It was an automatic process. Very few of those patients could have been expected to resume their duties within the country any time soon. None ever wanted to.
In the case of Father Benítez, his referral had been greenlighted and his paperwork had been ready before anyone had even bothered to tell him that he was leaving. Captain Won, the doctor in charge of his ward, mentioned it only in passing while she measured out another dose of methadone into a small plastic cup during her mid-morning round. The first dose had gone in via the IV access during the night, once he had lost so much fluids that they had struggled to keep him afloat even with back-to-back pressure infusions. He had not been asked then, nor been in a state to make an informed decision. And now it was too late for a change of mind. Captain Won had been very clear that the human heart was not made for the strain of yo-yoing between the extreme stress of withdrawal and the relief of substitution. It had to be one or the other. And now that one had proven too much for his battered body, it was going to be the other, simple as that. So she said nothing more now, just caught Martin's eye and looked pointedly from the little cup with the syrupy liquid to their patient as she placed it on the bedside locker, Make sure you get this inside him, I don't care how. The medical team had clocked by then that Martin, for some reason, spoke better Benítez than anyone else in the building, and they made use of that fact all too happily. It was what he got for playing the volunteer nurse.
Not that the two of them had been speaking a lot yet at all. Towards daybreak, they had both clawed their way back to consciousness at the same time, Martin after dozing fitfully in his chair by the bedside for a while, and Vincent escaping with a badly suppressed groan from whichever circle of hell he had been stuck in last. He had of course become Vincent in Martin's mind by that point. You didn't go through this kind of shit together without ending up on first name terms. But even after opening his swollen eyes, he had still been drowsy and stupid for quite a while, and it took him even longer to remember that he knew any English. But as soon as the haze had lifted enough for Martin's face to come into focus, he had already smiled. He had fucking smiled.
"Fly me out where?" Vincent asked now when the doctor announced the news, a frown crinkling his sweaty forehead.
"Central Command in Qatar, for now," Won informed him. "They'll figure out your final destination when you get there. Walter Reed hospital in Maryland would be our usual choice for patients with addiction issues. Our branch in Germany is closer, though. And I hear the Italians are laying a claim to you as well. I'll let the Major General fight that out with their ambassador." Martin grimaced, and she left to continue her round.
The damn Italian ambassador had been a right pain in the ass when Martin had cut a few minutes out of his night watch to call and let him know that – well, no, he had not promised that the Mission in Kabul would be getting its priest back, nor that the two nuns would return to their orphanage any time soon. Neither had seemed remotely likely. But as soon as the fellow had heard Martin's quick summary of the rescue mission, he'd insisted on coming up to Bagram in person to welcome his protégés back, and to make sure that they received the best care and support available, as if they didn't already. Martin really did not need any more VIP civilians out on the roads. With their resources dwindling further every day, the man's necessary armed escort could hardly be justified for the sake of a handful of patients who would be fine, definitely, Your Excellency, trust me, we know our job. He had eventually managed to talk the diplomat out of the plan, but it had been exhausting.
"Is that what I have now?" Vincent asked Martin in a deceptively mild voice when the doctor had left. "An addiction issue?"
It wasn't really a question. Martin would learn over time to recognise that tone as exactly what it was, a polite precautionary declaration of war in case you should dare to disagree. But this was early days, and Martin made the mistake of taking the question at face value. "Not sure how much you remember of last night," he shrugged. "But from what I saw, your body says yes, very much so."
"How can I be addicted to something I do not remotely want?"
Martin huffed a laugh. "It's biochemistry, buddy, not a philosophical question. Good luck wishing it away. But they'll show you how to manage it, over in Germany or in Rome or wherever you're headed. I s'pose you wouldn't mind Rome, actually? Isn't that your HQ anyway?"
"Oh, Rome." It was difficult to have a dignified dispute when you were reduced to lying on your tummy with your chin propped on your hands like a little kid. But Vincent still managed to pull off a sulk of epic proportions. "What do I want with Rome? I'd much rather stay here."
"You do realise that we'll all be out of here anyway by the end of August? And this place is gonna close down even sooner? Now be good and drink up your stuff, or Doctor Won's gonna give me hell."
"God forbid." Vincent held out his hand for the cup. Its contents went down as well as anything went down at the time, which was to say with difficulty. "Can you ask the doctor to look in again when she has a moment?" he asked between sips. "There's something I need to talk to her about."
"Talk, or argue?" Martin asked suspiciously.
"Just talk, promise."
When the next evacuation flight carrying badly damaged human beings to safety took off from Bagram and set a course for Qatar a day later, Father Benítez was not on it.
"Did he really say that?" Thomas simply had to ask. "'What do I want with Rome?'"
"Definitely." Martin chuckled. "I know, right. Joke's on him. But he's gonna be fine, isn't he. He can make something out of anything."
God willing, Thomas prayed fervently. "And he managed to convince you and the doctor and the Italian ambassador and everyone else to let him stay and continue his work, in spite of what had happened?"
"Well, I didn't need convincing. I was naive. I really thought at the time that we'd all be on our way out together on August 30, and I definitely didn't mind his company in the meantime. The doctor was fine with it as long as he still got himself checked for infection and stuck to the substitution treatment, and he could get both at our HQ in Kabul after Bagram closed. And I think the ambassador never found out about the methadone anyway. Not from me, anyhow. He meant well, but he's the kind of guy who's difficult to get off your back. No need to give him more to fret about, right? I think Hector was the only one outside of Bagram who knew. But Hector's a cool guy who'd take anything in his stride."
"Who on earth is Hector?"
"Oh." Martin rubbed his nose. "Haven't I mentioned him? He came over from Kabul to bring clean clothes for everyone, and Vincent's prayer book and sketchbooks and stuff. He was the janitor at the Italian embassy, and their gardener and driver and whatever else they needed doing, and also the Mission's – what d'you call the guy who sets up stuff at church? Like the candles and the robes and everything?"
"Sacristan?" Thomas suggested a little distractedly. His mind was still stuck on the word 'sketchbooks'. He must have misheard.
"Yeah, that."
"And was he a local?" The name did not sound Italian.
"Filipino. Don't ask me how he'd washed up in Afghanistan of all places. But he'd been there for ages. His daughter was married to a local man with a big family in Jalalabad, so he got out and about in the country quite a lot. Spoke the language almost like a native, too."
"That seems very unusual."
"Well, the lady was no more his daughter than her husband was her husband, but people didn't know that. She wasn't even Filipina, she was from East Timor. But who's ever heard of East Timor, right? And could you tell the difference?"
"But then why – "
"She was a nurse on some kind of WHO vaccination programme in her day job. The guy who was s'posed to be her husband was doing infrastructure projects for an electricity company or something. They both travelled a lot for their work. And family ties are sacred in Afghanistan. It was the perfect double cover."
"Are you saying they were some kind of underground – "
"Those three were literally the Catholic Church in Afghanistan outside the Green Zone, yeah. It had two faces, you understand. There was the chapel in the grounds of the embassy in Kabul, with the nuns and the orphanage and the Sunday services for homesick expats, all regular and official and above board. And then there was that little guerrilla group. They went out and kept in touch with the locals in the rest of the country, the ones who had to keep their faith under wraps if they didn't want to be lynched. And your Pope was the glue that held both branches of the business together."
"He went out there himself, too?"
"Sure. A lot."
"And what was his cover story?"
"That he was an English teacher based in Kabul with a passion for weekend trips to scenic spots. Afghanistan is beautiful, y'know. I know I called it ugly a while back, but that's just what us humans have made it. Those mountains are breathtaking, and I'm from Colorado, so I've got standards. Anyone who's into art would sit down and start sketching. And then the locals would be curious and come to watch and start chatting with him and invite him to meals, and no one would suspect a thing. It's how the new converts found him, too. Word got round. Looking for salvation? Talk to the guy with the sketchbook, he's your man."
"And he really is – "
"An artist? Didn't you know? Well, when I say artist… but I guess he's pretty good, for an amateur. He made quite a few portraits of people at Bagram, too, when his wrists had started hurting less. Captain Won became almost human when he gave her the one he'd made of her."
Thomas tried to imagine Vincent sitting cross-legged on his hospital bed with a sketchpad on his knee, and couldn't help smiling. He must have filled whole books over the years. Did they still exist? Where were they? "Did he make a portrait of you, too?" he asked.
"No, but – " The image wobbled as Martin took his phone into his left hand and dug out his wallet. He flipped it open and pulled out a piece of paper folded in half. "Look."
The picture filled Thomas's screen, a simple but expressive pencil drawing of a handsome young man beaming at the observer with all the innocence and optimism of youth. His face was a softer, rounder version of Martin's own, his hair longer and cut in a much more fashionable style. The collar of his shirt indicated sportswear rather than a uniform.
"Jamie?" Thomas asked, touched.
"Jamie, to a tee," Martin confirmed. "Vincent looked at a couple of photos on my phone and then came out with this in less than half an hour." The picture disappeared again, and Martin's own face was back, the deep lines that life had engraved on it more obvious by contrast than ever.
"You'd told him what had happened?"
"No. I mean, I knew I had things to explain. But I left that to Diego as well, I'm afraid. He was keeping Vincent company quite a bit, too, chatting with him in Spanish a mile a minute. So it was only a question of time till Vincent would ask him if it was normal for a busy Major General to keep midnight vigils at the bedside of random victims of terrorist violence. I figured Diego should have an answer to that, so I told him it was OK to talk about Jamie. 'Course, they did at some point."
"What would you have said if Vincent had put the same question directly to you?"
"I honestly don't know."
They were stolen days, to be savoured only at the price of a creeping sense of guilt. But at least in retrospect, they had a tinge of gold to them as well, like a week taken out of time, progressing at a kinder and more humane pace than the world outside was moving at. Martin made a habit of coming over to the base hospital once or twice a day to check on everyone's progress and, frankly, for a breather of his own. He never came away with a light heart in the strict sense of the word, but even just switching his focus from one kind of worry to another made for a welcome change.
Outside the barbed wire fences of Bagram Air Base, things were going rapidly downhill. The map of Afghanistan was changing daily now, and the scattered spots of green that had marked Taliban-controlled territory earlier in the year had become large swathes. Kunduz had surrendered to them without a fight. Mazar-i-Sharif was under siege. There were reports of massacres of captured Afghan soldiers and of civilians who hadn't immediately embraced the Islamic paradise their new masters were setting up. In military circles, people had started wondering openly whether it would really be their ally the Afghan president who would wave the last contingent of the international troops goodbye on August 30, or whether it would be turbaned yahoos flipping them the bird.
Martin had no photos to remember those days by, but he didn't need them. He could still conjure up the images in his mind at will, and scroll his way through them as if through an actual camera reel - some good moments, some bad, and most of them something in between. Bittersweet might be the right word.
One of Martin's favourite mental snapshots was of Ilhan getting his beloved schoolbook back. It raised the first smile Martin had seen on the boy's face since he had played the hero's role in the video call that made the hostages' rescue possible. He clutched the old thing to his chest like a long-lost friend.
Another image that Martin found himself revisiting often afterwards was of Hasina, enthroned in her hospital bed with her broken leg in its plaster cast and her hands folded in her lap as she got all the unspeakable things that she had recorded so faithfully in her memory off her chest. Her hands had shaken so badly by the end that Martin had gone to get her a strong coffee with lots of sugar from the hospital's cafeteria. She truly was a lioness of a woman, and needing a strong coffee now and then didn't change that one bit, did it.
Then the imam of nearby Bagram town had arrived to collect the body of the girl from the hospital's morgue. Two of the town's most respected elders had come with him, and everyone in uniform had eyed the delegation with deep suspicion. But after a long conversation with Father Benítez, the dignitaries were confident that their community wouldn't blame her death on the foreign infidels, and that there would be no unrest or retaliation after her burial. And there was none.
Vincent had been strong enough to get up by then. The morning of the day when the men from the town had appeared, Martin had found him sitting up on the side of his bed for the first time, poring over some data on a printout with Doctor Won, nodding along while she explained something. The true significance of that particular moment would remain a mystery to Martin until the final days, when he would learn what the plan had been, and where it had gone awry. Initially, he had stored that image on his mind's hard drive just because it was such a triumph. Well, Vincent moved like an old man, and he grimaced like a clown when he thought you weren't looking. But at least he was moving.
"Old man is nice," Vincent had grumbled in response to a silly comment of Martin's along those lines. "What does that make you, ancient?"
They had discovered by then that they were actually the same age, with Martin the older by a mere four months. Martin had been pretty sure that this head start gave him a certain right to crack stupid jokes, but he was yet to learn that it gave him no right at all to give Vincent orders.
Another good moment that Martin liked to recall was Ilhan sitting under the awning outside the cafeteria with his friend the Sergeant from the Delta Force. The man was off-duty and had come over for a shared lunch, and he was watching with a big grin as the boy minutely examined the different layers of a cheeseburger for the first time in his life.
On the evening of the same day, Martin found Vincent under the awning, talking to a young woman in a t-shirt and camo pants, her black hair in a tight braid down her back. Martin did a double take when he recognised Sister Anjali. Hector the handyman had been and gone by then, so she had ditched the white gown and veil deliberately. It made sense though. Martin wasn't sure if nuns still were into that virginal Bride of Christ stuff nowadays, but that concept could hardly be helpful after what she'd been through. Not to mention the fact that she had technically ended the lives of four people. Or five in the eyes of the Church, if you counted the morning-after pill that Martin could only hope the medical team had convinced her to take just in case. He hung back, not wanting to intrude, and watched until they made the sign of cross together. Then Anjali put her arms around Vincent, very gently and very carefully, and they just sat there and held on and maybe felt a tiny bit lighter for sharing the load, while Martin tiptoed quietly away.
The final image of the reel was of Vincent curled up on his bed the following morning with his ravaged back to the world and his broken nose in his prayer book and no interest in conversation whatsoever. Martin hadn't been aware at first that it was Sunday, and he still had to have the full extent of that particular misery explained to him by Diego later. But of course your own opportunities for confession were a little limited when you were the only priest for miles and miles around, and no confession, no Eucharist, right?
That was when Martin realised that it was time to let them go.
Anjali left first, ignoring a summons from the mother house of her order and opting instead to return home to her family in Kerala for a complete restart. In Martin's book, that made her no less of a lioness than Hasina, if in a different way. Once your autonomy had been trampled on as brutally as hers had been, and you had killed in order to get it back, did you really let other people decide what to do with the rest of your life?
Ilhan had started missing his siblings from the orphanage badly by the time Hasina had mastered the use of crutches, and kept asking when they would go home. And with Vincent out of danger if not yet out of pain, too, there was no good reason to hold them back any longer. For any of them to truly be out of pain again one day was too much to ask for anyway. That was a thing that the Catholics got right actually, wasn't it, with their Jesus suffering on his cross twenty-four seven for ever and ever. To live meant to hurt. But if you hurt, you weren't dead just yet, too, and wasn't that good news? Besides, the deadline for the handover of the air base to the Afghan authorities was looming.
Martin hated goodbyes, always had, so he made this one very short. And it wasn't really goodbye anyway, was it, when they would see each other again in Kabul in a fortnight or so?
Chapter Text
"That sounds rather as if it didn't happen?" Thomas asked. "You seeing each other again soon, I mean?"
"Well, you know what it's like when you get back into the daily grind. Over the next couple of weeks, it became obvious that Afghanistan was going back to Taliban rule, not just to an uncertain future. It was only a question of when. So Vincent and I were both really busy getting our ducks in a row. They just happened to be very different types of ducks, and they also faced in opposite directions."
"Had he told you that he wanted to stay in the country?"
"Not in so many words, not yet. They'd started planning to relocate the orphanage, to Pakistan or to India or wherever they could get the funding and arrange transport to, and I just assumed he'd be going with 'em. The only unexpected thing I noticed when I saw him again was that he'd gotten a haircut, but I didn't get the meaning of that, either. It was the day we officially furled the flag at our HQ, and I was feeling pretty low. Not sure why I thought it was a good time to bother him, but after the ceremony, I went over to the Italian embassy to see if he was around. It was Sunday again, and Hector the handyman's supposed relatives had come over from Jalalabad, Violeta the nurse and Mukhtar the electrician. They'd just wrapped up Mass, and I walked straight into a council of war."
"You've met them?"
"Just briefly, long enough to learn who they were and who they weren't. But I thought they'd just come to make plans how to keep in touch after their priest went into exile. Idiot me even made a joke about Vincent's new hair. Taking a leaf out of Hector's book, I said, 'cause Hector's used to be a good deal neater, but the new style made 'em look oddly similar, what with 'em being in the same age group and around the same height and build, too."
"I think I'm beginning to see - "
"Then you've got way more brains than I," Martin conceded generously. "I thought he just wanted to look smart wherever he was going next. Anyway. The others went down the road then to say hello to the nuns and the kids, and Vincent and I sat down in the yard outside his chapel for a chat."
"You look like you need a - " Vincent began.
"Don't say 'vacation'," Martin snapped ungraciously. He hadn't meant to, but that was how it came out. There were going to be no more breaks for either of them, with only seven weeks left now to pull down everything they had built up before the enemy did it for them. No need to rub it in.
"I was going to say 'coffee'," Vincent corrected him mildly, and Martin immediately felt boorish and rude.
"Oh… No, thanks, I'm fine. It's just…"
Vincent had a remarkable gift for giving people space, and this was another of those instances where he said nothing, just let you sort out your tangled thoughts until you were ready to voice whatever you couldn't untangle yourself. Martin only came to truly appreciate that talent afterwards, when their paths had separated again and it became one more thing that Martin missed.
"It should be just one more job," he said when he was ready. "Not that hard. You'd think I'm used to it. Most places I ever went into with the Army, we pulled back out again in the end without a great deal won, too, and just left it to the locals to clean up after us, or to live with the mess. Somalia, Iraq, Libya… But this time is worse, somehow. It's like everybody back at home stopped believing in our mission years ago anyway, and we're morons to realise that only now. This half-hearted shit is just as bad for morale as an actual defeat. Soldiers aren't made to sit round and watch their allies get steamrolled and not be allowed to lift a finger to stop it. Just let us do our fucking job. D'you know what I mean? "
"I know exactly what you mean." Vincent shifted on the bench they were sharing and stretched out his legs, a scuffed black shoe kicking at a stray pebble that Hector's broom must have missed. It rolled towards the door of the chapel that had been left open after Mass.
"Then how d'you do it? The morale thing, I mean?"
"I'm not sure our situations compare in that sense. When you serve God, you can never lose your backing."
"Easy for you to say," Martin grumbled.
Vincent turned his head to look at him. "You think so?"
It was a simple question, no censure in his tone and no reproach in his eyes, but Martin still felt himself cringing with shame. Had he forgotten so quickly what they had pulled out of the helicopter back at Bagram, a body pushed so hard against the limits of human endurance that it was a marvel there had still been a spark of life in it at all? And how had that spirit flared back up again so fast? How dare he use the word 'easy' for such a miracle? "Sorry," he muttered. "Are you... I mean, are you OK? I can see you're busy, but that's not the same, is it?"
"I am both. Please don't doubt that. Thanks to your medical people, I get through my days without trouble."
"And the nights?"
Vincent took his time answering that question. "I had an interesting conversation with a military chaplain of yours when I got back here," he said then. "We talked about original sin, and how the real meaning of it is that all life is a journey towards healing. Even if we never fully arrive, every step counts."
Martin only had a very vague idea what original sin was even supposed to be, but the bit about healing sounded good, so he nodded.
"At least that's something to try and remember at four in the morning," Vincent continued with a wry quirk of his lips. "But I also tell myself that if it had to happen at all, at least the timing was excellent. I would say on balance, I've gained more from that week in the mountains than I've lost, except maybe in the department of weight."
Martin wasn't sure whether to be amused or disturbed by his way of looking the matter. "Knock it off," he protested. "You're a bloody priest, you're not allowed to be cynical."
"Am I not? Too bad. It's true, though."
"Then what the hell d'you mean you've gained?"
Vincent regarded the toes of his shoes. "Clarity," he said then, and got to his feet. "And now the bloody priest is definitely getting a coffee. Remember we're technically on Italian soil, so it's going to be a decent one. Are you still sure you don't want one, too?"
"'Course I know now what he meant by 'clarity.'" Martin sighed. "It's hard to believe, but I think he'd really come to look at that whole bloodbath in the mountains as something like a trial run, with us as his safety net. As if he'd been given a chance to find out how far they'd go and how much he could take. I don't mean that he thought of it that way while it was going on. But the human brain is a funny thing. It always wants to make sense of everything, doesn't it, and I guess that's the reasoning it came up with for him afterwards. And that's OK, really. I've seen people go literally mad, not so much 'cause some really bad shit happened to them, but 'cause they found no way how to explain it to themselves later. For all I care you're welcome to call it God's will or bad karma or providence or whatever, as long as it helps you to cope. Maybe this whole fucking world really fumbles along only by chance, but that's a very bitter pill to swallow for most people. Can't blame 'em for trying to sweeten it a little just to get it down."
"Is that what you think we're doing?" Thomas asked. "Sweetening the pill?"
"You as in organised religion?" Martin asked back. "I don't know. I'd've said yes, back in the day. Now, after what I've seen over there, I'm not sure anymore that any one person can find the strength all just within themselves to get back up and soldier on after shit that extreme. Maybe there is something bigger than our own brain chemistry shaping our fortunes, who knows. With Vincent, I s'pose he never really considered leaving anyway. But if he still had doubts before, they were all gone after that business in the valley. It was totally a case of 'now more than ever', if you ask me. And there was nothing that I or anyone else could've said that could've changed his mind. Would've saved me and quite a few others some big headaches if we'd just accepted that. But hindsight's twenty-twenty, right."
The camera tilted upwards as Martin got to his feet. "I'd better get moving. They'll be closing in a bit, and I don't want to explain myself to security."
Thomas glanced at a small clock on one of the bookshelves. It was closer to eleven than it was to ten. "Listen, if you prefer - "
"Oh, it's fine. I've still got to get back to my car. If you're OK and not dead tired already - "
If Thomas had told the truth, he would have had to admit that he was not OK and definitely dead tired, but that was neither here nor there. Their conversation had long ceased to be a quid pro quo exchange of information, and it mattered to Thomas to listen for as long as there was anything for Martin to say, just as it must matter to Martin to be listened to as long as he needed to talk.
They were soon back in the now familiar, slowly swaying rhythm of Martin literally walking them through his tale. Only the backdrop had changed from the riverside path to the sprawling burial grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.
"Over the next weeks, things got really ugly," Martin remembered. "We went from emergency meeting to emergency meeting. Town by town and province by province were falling to the Taliban like dominoes. At first, our intelligence people were still confident that Kabul would last another couple of months. Then they said the Afghan National Army could at least defend the Green Zone for a while, even if the Taliban entered the suburbs. What a joke. That army existed only on paper by that point. Their soldiers were surrendering or deserting in droves. The Taliban were capturing more vehicles than they had drivers for, more weapons systems than they had people who knew how to operate 'em, and enough ammunition to keep the war going for another twenty years. I think it was on August 7 when all the foreign embassies advised their citizens to leave the country at once. That was the first time I felt a little sorry for the Italian guy. He had his hands full trying to get all the Italian expats safely out, but he felt responsible for the Catholic Mission, too. The nuns hadn't found anywhere to take their orphans. By then all the border crossings into Pakistan were under Taliban control, and the only way out was by air, which they simply couldn't afford. But the sisters refused to leave the kids behind, too. And I mean, fair enough. Left to themselves, they'd probably just've died one by one. Vincent refused to leave at all. He got shouted at a lot that day. First the Pope's guy in Pakistan called to tell him that martyrdom was off the agenda and to get the fuck outa there. I think Vincent wriggled out of that one by pretending that the phone link had broken down. Then there was the ambassador himself, who I guess pleaded rather than shouted, but with the same success, meaning none. And then there was me. I definitely shouted. Wouldn't have, maybe, if I'd seen it coming, but I hadn't. I mean, that was all on me. I'd gotten all the clues. He'd as good as told me, hadn't he, that he felt his official job in Kabul was only kinda half-hearted shit, too, and that he'd never been OK with just watching from a safe distance how his people out there in the rest of the country struggled. And if I'd ever asked him outright what his plans were, I doubt he'd've lied to me. But I still felt fooled. I guess that made me angrier than his decision itself. What the fuck are you gonna do when they come marching in, I yelled at him, grow a beard and take a wife or two to blend in? He just said, calm as you please, that he wasn't likely to do either, and showed me the passport."
"Sorry – what passport?"
"The passport of a Filipino citizen named Hector Benítez, with a plausible birthdate and Vincent's own fucking photograph in it, neat hair and all."
"How had he got that?"
"The CIA aren't the only people who can pull off stuff like that, y'know. The Italian ambassador had pulled a few strings of his own, and apparently Catholic nations stick together, so…"
"But that meant that the real Hector – "
"He was gonna give Vincent his identity, yeah. They'd decided that the secret Christians in Afghanistan needed a priest more than they needed a janitor. But the Taliban were more likely to tolerate a harmless handyman dusting and airing an empty embassy than a priest residing right in the heart of their emirate. So Hector was gonna leave, even if it was tough for him after all those years. And to anyone who wasn't of their own faith, Vincent was gonna be the new Hector."
Thomas's mind boggled. Why had he never wondered how exactly Vincent had even managed to exist in Afghanistan for three whole years of Taliban rule without being detained and deported as a persona non grata, or worse? That he had never used his title of Archbishop or dressed the part was a given, but of course even a simple priest would have been the target of aggression, if that was what he had been known to be.
"He doesn't even look like a Hector," Thomas said, a completely inconsequential comment that promptly made him blush and Martin smile wryly.
"Oh, I agree. He doesn't look very Filipino at all, does he. But who was gonna notice, when they closed all the schools and people only got to read one book anymore, if that? I mean, it was nowhere near perfect as a cover story. Pretty easy to poke holes in, even with the Pinoys backing it. But what use is that when you get in trouble and there's no more embassy to appeal to anyway? So 'course I tried to argue, and that was one of my points. But I was wasting my breath. And besides, my phone kept ringing in my pocket like mad 'cause of all the other shit that needed doing, and in the end Vincent just told me to stop neglecting my duties for no good reason. That's when I lost it. Believe me, I was this close to literally knocking some fucking sense into him. But you don't punch a clergyman, right. That's basic etiquette. Even I know that. Especially not if he's just been kidnapped and tortured."
They stood there in the ambassador's office in a leaden silence, two arms' lengths apart just to be sure, Martin breathing heavily, Vincent still as a statue, both convinced that they were championing a just cause and that the other was a damn fool not to see that, and both of them absolutely miserable for it.
"Listen," Martin said eventually when the silence became unbearable. "Whether you like it or not, I'm saving you a place on every flight that goes out of here between today and August 30. All you have to do is turn up and claim it."
"Then I will find someone to fill every place you've saved for me who needs it much more urgently than I do."
"You're a fucking cheat, Benítez."
"And you're a very generous man, Major General. Thank you."
The words gnawed at Martin for days afterwards as if with poisonous teeth, both his insult and Vincent's coldly polite rejoinder. He hadn't realised it, but it was the time now when anything you said to another person could be the last thing they ever heard from you. You really shouldn't ruin those moments like Martin had just done.
On August 12, both Herat and Kandahar fell to the Taliban within hours of each other. Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, the only other big city that had still been offering any sort of meaningful resistance to them, was bleeding slowly to death.
The Western embassies in Kabul finally realised that they would never manage to process all the visa applications from the thousands of people who had worked as contractors and support staff for the international troops, the NGOs or the official Afghan government, and who would now be in danger of Taliban retaliation if they didn't get out of the country in time. The consular files and databases with all those names in them would actually become hit lists if they fell into the wrong hands. Overnight, 'how to destroy a computer hard drive' became the most-Googled question in the Green Zone. Bonfires burned bright in the embassy backyards, fed by the endless amounts of paperwork that any bureaucracy inevitably produced. Smoke still rose from them the next morning, when the people queuing at the embassies' gates were told to just try their luck directly at Kabul International Airport, with whatever documentation they had to prove that they had somehow ended up on the wrong side of Afghan history. By then, Martin's unit had been sent to secure the place.
In the late afternoon of August 14, the American embassy itself evacuated to the airport, and all the other embassies in the Green Zone followed suit. When Martin finally went to snatch a few hours of restless sleep that night, the airport had become a well-administered de facto military base. But when he woke up on the fifteenth, rumours that the Taliban were about to enter the city had turned it into both the gateway to the Promised Land and hell's precipice at the same time, and it would teeter on that knife-edge for two whole weeks to come while the world watched in horror.
"Pandemonium doesn't even cover it. The place was overrun. But you saw the news, I'm sure." Martin was still walking, but he had left the green expanse of the cemetery behind him and was now passing by a building site. A long wall of wooden scaffolding travelled alongside him. "People got crushed and trampled to death in the turmoil. Parents tried to hand us their babies over the fence so at least the little ones would be safe. Our boys were firing tear gas into crowds of women and children just to stop 'em running right onto the airfield. Most bizarre order I've given in my life, I can tell you. But you don't fuck with a hundred ton Boeing C-17 taxiing at thirty-five miles per hour. There's gonna be a clear winner there, and it's not gonna be you."
Thomas had indeed seen the pictures and heard the reports of those heartbreaking scenes at Kabul Airport, but with the detachment of a man sitting in his safe and comfortable home on the other side of the world. He even recalled having prayed for the people of Afghanistan, for peace and freedom and stability. But it had been the formulaic, impersonal kind of prayer that never varied except for the place names, and those tended to blend into one another over time, too, especially the frequent candidates. He had never taken the time to really think how hard pressed those people had been, and how frightened, to leave behind everything they knew and possessed and valued in a wink. It had also not occurred to him to pray for the men and women far from home who had been giving their all to create some kind of order out of that chaos, so they could alleviate at least some of the suffering. He felt ashamed of that omission now. "I do remember," he said. "I can't imagine what it was like to be caught up in the middle of it."
"It's gonna sound weird, but there's a lot of stuff I don't remember myself. Too much to process. Bad news coming in so fast you could hardly keep track. I can recall their president striking his colours and fucking off to the Emirates. I missed the moment when the first Taliban actually arrived outside the airport gates. I swear though that they were just as surprised to be there already as we were. And they clearly had orders not to engage, which was fine with us, what with ten thousand or so defenceless civilians packed in between us and them. Yeah, that was a mad day. We'd become an island, with three entrances, north, east and south, and the sky the only way out. If you'd told me then that we'd end up squeezing a hundred thousand people through that bottleneck in a little over a fortnight, I'd've called you crazy."
"I hope you're proud of that achievement, Martin."
Martin laughed a little awkwardly. "You're sweet to say that. Yeah, I guess I am a bit, after all. What little boy doesn't want to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records one day? Biggest airlift operation in human history? I guess there's worse stuff to be remembered for. And Vincent said – "
"Oh." Of course, what had become of the people of the Catholic Mission? Thomas, too, had lost track of things there for a moment. "Where were they? Safely inside the airport by then, I hope?"
"I wished, but no way. Only the ambassador had made it. He'd organised a convoy, but his own car was the only one that got through. The streets were so jammed that the others had to turn back if they didn't want to become sitting ducks. It took him two or three days to find a minibus driver willing to try again, but it was just the one small bus, and with the best will in the world they couldn't fit everyone in there."
"How many people were there left?"
"Thirteen or fourteen kids, not all of 'em able to walk, plus five nuns, with Hasina still on crutches, too. Not the type of people who could easily run for cover if anything happened to them on the road."
"What did they do?"
"Crammed the bus full till there was barely room to breathe, and the rest set out for the airport on foot."
"On foot?" Thomas echoed, aghast.
"It's not as absurd as it sounds. It was only about two and a half miles from the embassy. And they were all good walkers, Vincent, Hector, Ilhan and two girls, I think one with Down Syndrome and the other blind, but fit otherwise, and young enough not to be considered wife material yet, too. Under normal circumstances, they could've done it in less than two hours."
"But passing through Taliban territory? In broad daylight?"
"Better in broad daylight than at night, to be honest. There was a curfew, and any patrol they might've met after dark would've opened fire first and asked questions later. By day, they had a decent chance to look like just another family en route to a better future."
"Good Lord. How long did it take them to get there?"
"Almost the whole day. Dodging patrols, skirting checkpoints, lying low during prayer times to avoid attention… That took a while. Diego radioed me late in the afternoon to say that they were at the gate. Our boys couldn't make 'em jump the queue or there would've been a riot, but they got 'em water for the wait, and the Viking was talking people's ears off on the phone so - "
"Sorry, who?"
"Ah, yeah, I forgot. They'd set out with five, but they were twelve when they arrived, or thirteen if you counted the baby. They'd met a local woman with four young children on the way, and joined forces. Her husband had been training as a police officer for the official Afghan government, and 'course he'd burned his uniform before they set out for the airport. But they ran into a Taliban patrol with a neighbour of theirs who recognised him. They walked him round the corner, to check his papers, they said - "
"And the woman waited in vain for him to return?"
"Oh, she didn't wait. As soon as she heard the gunshot, she grabbed her kids and ran. And then a few blocks on, when they couldn't run any more, Vincent's little group bumped into them and decided that they shouldn't just sit on the curb and cry. They made their best catch a little while after that, though, when they came across three guys whose car had broken down. It was the ambassador of Finland, who'd left it a little late to get out of the Green Zone, too, with two bodyguards, Nepali security contractors, armed to the teeth and afraid of nothing, you know the type. But they didn't know how to repair whatever had gone bust, and Hector couldn't fix it without proper spare parts, either, so they just left the car on the side of the road and joined the growing trek. It was a safety in numbers thing by that point, and the Gurkhas' guns came in handy as a deterrent, too. I mean, try passing off a six foot five Norseman in a business suit as a local dad, even with an Afghan kid on his back? Not really, right. When they finally all got to the airport, the man was so relieved to be alive that he slashed through the red tape with a battle axe and got the cop's widow and her kids through the checks and on a plane to Finland without any papers at all, never mind the right ones. I met 'em on my way down to the gate, and I remember wondering if they'd like fish and if they'd be OK with the cold. But then I forgot about 'em again as quickly as I forgot the many thousand other faces that passed through there in those days and weeks. I just didn't have the bandwidth any more to worry about each and every one of 'em. Besides, it was time for the Catholic gang to get on the truck that would take 'em to their plane, too, now that they were complete."
"Did you get to see them off?"
"Not really. I meant to, but it was too late. The conspiracy was already under way. Hector was the one wearing all black that day, and Diego warned me that he'd seen Vincent hand his phone to Hector, too, when the two of 'em embraced to say goodbye. The idea was to leave it on till they landed in Doha, obviously, just in case anyone ever thought of tracking it, so the trail would lead out of Afghanistan and then grow cold. I'd've blown Vincent's cover if I hadn't kept a distance. Janitors don't chat with US generals, not unless they're spies. Remember, there were hundreds of strangers potentially watching, and those evacuees weren't all angels. The Taliban definitely had their moles among 'em. Maybe I didn’t agree with Vincent's plans, but I'd no right to paint a target on his barely healed back, either, did I. So it was better to just hang back and watch."
"What did you see?"
"Oh, just the men lifting the kids onto the truck, Vincent giving Ilhan a leg up last, clasping Hasina's hand by way of goodbye, and those of the other sisters, and then… Yeah, that was another moment that could've broken your heart if you'd let it, when the kids realised Vincent wasn't coming with 'em. But he just waved and smiled and probably told 'em they were going on vacation till peace came back to Kabul, and to be good and not make trouble for the sisters and enjoy their flight and all the bullshit you tell kids to stop 'em crying when it's time to say goodbye. Then they were off, and I'll never forget the sigh I saw him heave when they were safely gone."
Thomas thought he could see it, too, and felt it like a physical pain.
"Then he turned and scanned the uniforms around there, found me and gave me a tiny little nod, blink and you'll miss it. I felt that was him saying thank you that I was respecting his choice. So I nodded back, to say thank you that he didn’t hate me for not liking his choice. And that was it. He just walked off, past the long lines of the hopefuls still waiting to be let in, back into his city. And I watched him go till he disappeared in the crowd. OK, sorry, that's my car. Hang on a sec."
Thomas hadn't noticed, but Martin had left the road with the building site behind and arrived in a car park. He put his phone on the roof of his vehicle, screen up so Thomas was left to contemplate the evening sky of Virginia for a moment while Martin unlocked the car and pulled the door open. There was another dizzying blur of light and colours as he retrieved the phone and got behind the wheel with it.
"I don't want to keep you," Thomas said, but purely out of courtesy. He felt that they were so close to the end now that he wouldn't be able to sleep in spite of the late hour, not knowing how those final days had gone for both of them. Or had that been the end already? Had that brief moment of silent mutual acknowledgment been the last Martin had known of Vincent's fate until the papal election had made worldwide headlines?
"I'm OK being kept, actually," Martin said, sliding his seat back into a more comfortable position. "If I'm completely honest, I've been thinking for a while now that I'd've liked to have known a pastor like you back in my day. You're a good listener. I hope the people at your church know how lucky they are."
Thomas did not have the heart to tell Martin that he actually had no church of his own, no parishioners to take care of, no children to baptise, no young people to marry, no doubters to counsel and no elders to accompany in their decline and to their graves. When he said Mass, it was for other clergymen, who could all have done it just as well as him, or better. It had been about time that he rediscovered the actual reason why the world out there needed priests.
Indeed, who was doing whom the greater service by now, the man who listened or the man who talked?
Chapter 10
Notes:
Please let me remind you that this is the chapter with a suicidal ideation scene. And there are also a lot of actual dead bodies.
Chapter Text
Looking back, Martin barely understood how he or any of the remaining troops at the airport got through the period that followed without using up their field hospital's entire supply of Xanax by the end of the first day. Then again, maybe they really had used it all up, and had been resupplied discreetly every time their planes returned to Kabul empty to fetch more people away. Nobody wanted to let down their pals and report sick officially, but many of the youngsters were close to tears every time they came off duty. A lot of them probably did make the acquaintance of the stuff then, and quite a few would remain friends with it for life. Martin himself had nothing better to dispense to his men than pats on the back and slogans that sounded hollow in his own ears. But they appreciated even those. Suffering thrived in solitude, and companionship was a powerful antidote, at least until the next time panic hit you like a punch in the gut.
Was it easier when it wasn't your own safety you were freaking out over, or did that make it worse? Martin's defences weren't what they used to be, and he had begun to have visions of Vincent lying dead in the empty yard of the Italian embassy with a bullet in his head and his little church burning behind him. There might be better looting and more fun to be had elsewhere in the city, but would the Taliban be able to resist such powerful symbolism if they found out who he really was? Had it already happened? Would it happen today? Would it happen tomorrow? There was nothing between him and evil now, nothing at all, no safety net, no armed guards, no rescue team waiting in the wings. There was no more phone Martin could have called to hear if he was OK, even if local cell phone services hadn't kept breaking down constantly in those days anyway, with too many people trying too desperately to get in touch with too many other people. And there was absolutely no way to go out and check on him in person or to send someone to do it, not if they didn’t want news footage of dead American soldiers dragged through the streets by triumphant Islamists again, like in Mogadishu back in ninety-three. There were only two and a half miles between them, but it might as well have been an ocean already.
For ten days, Martin knew absolutely nothing, and each of those days was its own nightmare for that reason alone. He went to his camp bed in what had used to be the customs office in the airport terminal every night feeling like the day that lay behind him had been the worst yet and that things couldn't go further downhill. And yet they did.
By then, the Americans had established a perverse kind of cooperation with the Taliban stationed outside the airport gates. Anyone out in the city was the Islamists' fair game, and there was nothing the international troops could do about that. But once people got in line, the militants would not stop them or even harass them any more. They just sat on their trucks or hung around in small groups and smoked and watched that human haemorrhage as if it didn't concern them at all. Well, maybe with the country's birth rate at nearly five children per every woman, it really didn't matter to them to lose a few ten thousand people every week. Every morning and every evening, Martin or another senior officer would meet their commanders at the gates for a very brief mutual reassurance that the status quo would hold, and hold it did. The guy in charge at the North Gate, a lanky fellow with a hooked nose and clever eyes, reminded Martin of a vulture that sat patiently waiting on a withered old tree until you died and his feast would begin. Why should they expend any energy to hurry things along when everything would fall into their laps anyway in a little while? Maybe it was this phlegmatic attitude of theirs that Martin hated them for most. In the face of the desperate frenzy inside the airport grounds, it was pure provocation.
It was on day eleven after the fall of Kabul, however, that they learned what pure provocation really was. There had been rumours beforehand. Even the Vulture had made cryptic remarks the day before that he could only guarantee his own men's good behaviour, nobody else's. But with most of the intelligence people's usual contacts out in the city lying low in fear of the new regime, and the Taliban turning IS fighters loose every day from the prisons they had overrun, the Western security agencies had never been able to pin down what exactly was being planned by whom and when and where before it was too late.
It beggared belief that a single suicide bomber should be able to cause the deaths of a hundred and eighty people, a hundred and eighty, the size of a small battalion, all wiped out in a single moment. But that tightly packed throng of humanity at the gate on the southern side of the airport had been easy prey for the grim reaper. Even the Marines in their full body armour who had been on guard there to shepherd the crowds towards the checkpoints had not stood a chance.
In the confusion and the panic that followed the massive explosion, it took a while for the full extent of the carnage to sink in. But it did when Martin suddenly had to find thirteen flag-covered caskets at once just to send their own boys and girls home in. Thirteen fallen comrades, the youngest of them just turned twenty, the oldest thirty-one. They were the first deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan in over a year, four fucking days before the deadline, a mere ninety-six hours between them and eternity. And someone for some fucking reason had decided that eternity should win out.
Martin had somehow found the caskets, of course he had. But he finally hit rock bottom when a little later, the refrigerated truck that they had parked by the field hospital as a makeshift morgue broke down under the strain. Did they let the summer heat ruin the last semblance of the dignity of the fallen now, or did they mess up the whole flight schedule for the rest of the day and bring their repatriation forward? Martin solved that problem, too, because everybody expected him to and there was no one else to do it. But when it was done, Diego found him sitting on his camp bed in the old customs office, with no more strength left in him to stop the world outside drowning in chaos, and no strength even to keep his own head above water.
"I'm sorry, sir," the young officer reported as he stuck his head in at the door, "but the Red Crescent volunteers at the South Gate have run out of body bags and - " He broke off, stared at his superior in wide-eyed disbelief for a moment, and then with remarkable presence of mind simply walked up to him, very gently took the gun out of Martin's hands, clicked the safety catch back on and put it aside, out of reach.
There was no drama, no protest, no justifications, nothing. Martin would forever be grateful to Diego for not making that moment into a big thing. That's not what it was, after all. It had just been a kind of idle, hypothetical idea, a mere little mental game. And Diego only had to say a few more words to snap Martin out of it again.
"And he's out there with them, sir. I just thought you'd like to know."
Knowing wasn't enough. Martin had to see with his own eyes to believe. It was of course hardly wise for a man of his rank to show his face at the site of the attack and make himself a potential target for anyone who might feel inspired to jump on the bomber's bandwagon. He could see the concern and the covert disapproval in the face of every sentry he passed on the way there. But what could they do except salute and let him through?
Minutes later, Martin stood by the concrete barriers marking the southern entrance into the airport grounds and tried to get his bearings. He had of course seen battlefields and scenes of mass casualties before, but it was the contrast between the hustle and bustle of the place that he had got used to over the past weeks and the ghostly quiet that greeted him now that really got to him. The constant soundscape of people shouting, children crying, loudspeakers blaring and shots being fired into the air somewhere had fallen silent. The ground was littered with the debris of people's baggage that had been ripped apart or crushed in the explosion and the ensuing stampede. The nearest building, a former hotel, had been turned into a first aid station for people with minor injuries. Through the open doors, Martin could see professionals in white coats and high-vis gear move back and forth across the lobby. Outside, the untrained volunteers had been given the grim task of laying those beyond help out in rows to be transported to the city's morgues. They had started in the area directly in front of the hotel, where the building cast a shadow, to protect the bodies from being grilled by the sun. But they had already run out of space there, and the road was now lined on both sides as well. The few living men who moved among the dead went quietly about their work, but Martin couldn't tell whether that was out of respect or just out of a kind of torpor. Some of them had medical face masks that hid their expressions, but most of them had not, and Martin saw weariness everywhere.
A man exited the hotel, carrying a stack of bedsheets, and made his way in between the rows to where another man was squatting by a body, his back to Martin. They exchanged a few words that Martin of course wouldn't have understood even if he had been close enough to hear. But their meaning was clear when Vincent shook his head, gently put down the dead person's hand that he had been holding, and got to his feet so they could spread a sheet over the body together. Martin understood that until a moment ago, this had still been a human being with a beating heart that the ambulance teams had somehow missed when they had rushed the badly wounded to the surrounding hospitals. But it was too late now, and all Vincent and his helper could do was tuck the sheet neatly in, scribble whatever they knew of his or her identity onto the white fabric with a marker, and then go and do the same service for the next victim.
A third man came walking over from the hotel, a young fellow, no older than the youngest of the Marines that Martin would shortly be sending home in their zinc boxes. The lad had a pack of water bottles that he started handing out to the volunteers. Vincent straightened up, received his bottle with a nod of thanks, emptied it almost in one go, stood there with his eyes closed for a moment, then gave the bottle back, wiped his face with his forearm and looked around for the next job.
Maybe this was Martin's own moment of clarity. Back at Bagram, he had regretted that he would never get to know Vincent Benítez whole and undamaged. But how could Vincent be doing this kind of work, unless he was still truly whole and undamaged at heart? Until now, Martin had desperately wanted Vincent to abandon his post because he didn't want him to die. But now he had to wonder if it wasn't the other way round. Wasn't it Vincent's work that kept him going, and wouldn't he die if he was forced to give it up? Maybe that was putting it too dramatically. But wouldn't he die at least on the inside if his purpose was taken from him? And what was life worth if all that was left of you was an empty shell? Martin couldn't be responsible for that.
He should have withdrawn then, taken that realisation with him and been content with it. But he hesitated just a little too long, and the decision was taken out of his hands. The lad with the water bottles had spotted him standing there at the gate, nudged Vincent and whispered to him, a worried look on his face. Vincent looked across as well, reassured the other with a few words and came walking over.
Their charade would have been perfect if Martin had come to the ready with his rifle and ordered him to stop, and if Vincent had raised his hands and stated his business from fifteen feet away. But you no more pointed a gun at a priest than you punched him in the face, right? Other people had done both recently and paid for it with their lives. Luckily Vincent seemed to trust his fellow volunteers not to give him away even if they saw him being oddly at ease around an American officer. Or maybe he was just relying on them to be too tired to notice. He kept walking, and Martin was glad to follow his lead and let him approach.
Up close, the first thing Martin noticed was how thin Vincent had become. It wasn't just the baggy clothes he wore, a long loose shirt and wide trousers similar to those of the other men around him. There were deep shadows under his eyes as well, and his cheeks were hollow. It was all the more disconcerting because it was inexplicable. The people of Kabul were keeping their heads down and their eyes peeled, but they weren't starving. And yet Vincent looked as if he hadn't eaten for a week.
"Which turned out to be pretty much exactly what had happened. "
"But why?" Thomas asked, bewildered. If there was no rationing of food in the city, let alone a famine, what - or who - could have forced Vincent to fast? It seemed the completely wrong time and place to be doing it as a voluntary spiritual exercise. Vincent would have needed his strength intact and his wits about him in that crucial first week under the new regime. What if a patrol had come to check if the embassy was really empty? What if people had come there to loot?
"You've forgotten about it, too, haven't you?" Martin asked with a humourless smile. "Well, so had I."
"Forgotten what?"
"The methadone. The substitution treatment that he'd started at Bagram and then got from the docs at our HQ in Kabul, till they struck camp from one day to the next, too. It was what had kept him functioning all those weeks. But you can't just stop taking it, or you're back to square one immediately. You've got to taper off slowly, if at all. Lots of people don't even manage that. He'd made a detailed plan with Dr Won, ambitious but doable for someone very disciplined, that would've got him clean by August 30. But the Taliban ruined the plans of five million people in Kabul that summer, didn't they. This was one of 'em."
Thomas heaved a sigh. He had in fact entirely forgotten about this matter. Vincent had seemed to bounce back so quickly. It had been a pleasant thought that it had all been thanks to his own inner strength, but Thomas saw now that he had been naive to think so. Who knew how much of a struggle those weeks of recovery had really been, in spite of the support of the US Army Medical Corps, and with that looming doomsday scenario of the Taliban conquest as a backdrop, too. "What on earth did he do when he ran out?" he asked.
"Cleverest thing he could, actually. He rationed what he'd got left of the stuff, and he was just about all right till he'd got everyone to the airport. Then he went back home, locked himself in, lay down and let happen whatever would happen. Ah, yeah, I think I made that face, too, when he told me afterwards. And he even had the nerve to joke about it after, how it was the best time to go cold turkey when you literally couldn't leave the house in search of your next fix without getting shot by armed puritans. That was the problem of temptation pretty much taken care of, he claimed. But I'm guessing the sickness really was the bigger issue, the nausea and the chills and the cramps and all the other ugly ways your body will try and make you change your mind. Withdrawal doesn't kill you, but it'll do its best to make you believe that it can. And he may not look it, but he's not a young man any more, either, is he. How the fuck did he do it, I asked him, all alone and with the puritans just outside the embassy gate, so he couldn't even show a light at night or get a breath of fresh air in the yard? He told me he'd spent a lot of the time praying. That's half the truth at best if you ask me, but you know how he is. You'll have a front row seat come tomorrow, won't you. Maybe you'll solve the mystery how he does that mind-over-matter thing without going round the bend. Anyhow, it worked. The day of the bombing at the airport, he'd gone out for the first time in over a week in search of sunlight and supplies. He heard what had happened, and took it as a sign that it was time to get back to work. And by then, except for the occasional mass casualty event of course, the city was settling back into a kind of normality. The Taliban did keep order of a sort. Anyone looking for revenge or plunder in the initial power vacuum would've had to scale back their operations by then. And the fanatics themselves were switching from random atrocities to systematic oppression, too. Not nice, but way more predictable. It really had been clever to lie low and make himself invisible for that particular period. Excellent timing, again."
Indeed. How had Sister Marisol reported it? He says he wants to get it over with quickly, and he knows he can do it because he's done it before. But good timing or not, Thomas felt sure that the image of Vincent suffering alone in a blacked-out room for a week while his city descended into despair would haunt him forever.
An ambulance rounded the corner and moved towards the deserted South Gate. It halted in front of the hotel, and the driver got out and set its back doors wide open. There was no gurney in there and no team of medics, just an empty space waiting to be filled.
"Listen," Martin said to Vincent in an undertone. "I just – I'm sorry." He realised there were too many things he still wanted to say, but this was the most urgent. "I'm sorry I shouted at you. I'm sorry about this mess. I'm sorry for everything that happened, and I don’t know - "
The Army's full combat gear – flak vest, ammo belt, helmet and all – didn't exactly lend itself to human contact, but Vincent found a way to put his hand on Martin's arm where Martin could feel it. "Stop it," he said so firmly that Martin automatically complied. "Stop. There is one thing you must never forget. Evil likes to pretend that it is the full picture. But it never is. Never."
What a statement to make in the middle of a sea of dead bodies. "That's… one way of looking at it, I guess," Martin conceded, unconvinced.
"It's the only way."
"Is that another thing you'll be telling yourself at four in the morning?"
"It's what I'm telling you right now."
Well, maybe it was a thought worth pursuing at some other moment. Right now they were simply running out of time. Vincent had already let go of Martin's arm again when someone called across to him to lend a hand. The new name grated horribly.
"So, what's the plan now?" Martin asked quickly.
"Now we could really do with a few more body bags, if you have any you can spare." Vincent turned to look up and down the rows for a quick calculation. "Thirty or so should be enough."
"I mean, after…" Martin made a gesture with his hand, so he didn't have to say 'all this shit'.
"Ah. Jalalabad first, I think, as soon as the roads are safe again." Vincent caught Martin's very doubtful look. "Safer," he amended. "What about you?"
"August 30, as planned. If that asshole today meant to speed us up, he failed in that, at least."
"Then I'll be there to say goodbye."
"You sure that's wise?"
"No. Not at all."
Martin could only detect a tiny glimmer, but it was enough to prove to him that even now, Vincent Benítez had still not lost his smile.
Chapter Text
By the time the sun went down on August 30, there were only four of the US military's huge grey cargo aircraft left on the airfield at Kabul International Airport. By nine p. m., there were three, and by ten, two. There were no more queues at the gates and in the terminal building, either. The civilian evacuations had been wrapped up well before nightfall, a few more prayers answered at the last moment but many more hopes dashed, like on all the days before, except this time it was final.
Millions of dollars worth of vehicles and equipment were still left in and around the airport buildings, too, but that couldn’t be helped, either. All Martin's careful salvaging plans had been scrapped a fortnight ago already, when the US leadership and their allies had decided to prioritise human lives over money for once. The armoured trucks and whatever else might be of strategic value to the enemy would be disabled before midnight with a series of well-placed charges of thermate, a clever chemical concoction that burned at temperatures not even reinforced steel could withstand.
Eleven o'clock saw the departure of the last remaining contingent of Marines, thirteen short of their original number. Their commander saluted Martin and they shook hands, but neither of them said anything more momentous than 'See you in Doha, then.'
One by one, the lights went out in the airport buildings and in the hangars, and whoever had still had business over there converged on the only remaining aircraft. The opening under its tail yawned like the mouth of a gigantic shark, and the metal loading ramp gleamed silver in the floodlights. Every person still on the ground felt its pull, and would find their way inside within the next half an hour without any need for an extra invitation. All Martin had to do now was wait for the remaining minutes to tick by, and of course bury his hopes that there could have been a proper farewell. But hadn't he always hated those anyway, and hadn't he told Vincent himself that it would be unwise to make the trip at all if he wanted to keep his cover story intact? And at night, with the curfew still on, he would have been batshit crazy to even try.
Diego came walking over from the direction of the airport terminal with the news that it was empty. It was time to give the final orders and then board, but Martin couldn't bring himself to do it just yet. He stood there undecided for a full minute or two. Then his radio crackled. One of the sentries guarding the approach to the plane on the side away from the buildings reported that they had apprehended an odd sort of intruder, sir.
Martin felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. "Odd in what way?" he asked.
"He says he comes in peace and just wants to say goodbye, sir. No weapons or explosives on him, just a book."
"Let him through," Martin radioed back. "He's - " He very nearly said 'harmless', but that would have been an insult as well as a lie. "He's safe," he amended quickly.
Diego, who knew exactly why they were a little behind schedule, put two and two together very quickly. "I'll be on board then, sir," he said. "Check if everything's ready."
Martin appreciated the young man's tact more than ever. "Thank you." He defied the rules by taking off his helmet so he could wipe his forehead. With a much lighter heart than he had dared to hope, he gave the order to tighten the cordon and to tell the guys in charge of the artillery to start the sound and light show.
Excellent timing again, Benítez, he thought as the first of the trucks parked at a safe distance along the perimeter fence had its engine melted to a clump with a loud pop and an aureole of white-hot fire. Heat bombing didn't cause outright explosions, which was handy if you didn't want the nosy public to come running to watch. But it still generated temperatures that weren't survivable if you got too close. Either Vincent had known that and given them a wide berth when he made his way in here, in spite of the useful cover they offered, or someone else had made sure yet again that he would walk through one of the world's nastiest danger zones unscathed.
The boys on guard duty brought him with them as they fell back from their former positions and regrouped around the loading ramp. Vincent looked tiny next to his broad-shouldered escort. The familiar black clothes blended in well with the darkness.
"Thank you, friend," he said politely to the bemused soldier, as if he hadn't noticed that the man still had his rifle covertly trained on him.
Martin dismissed the guard with a nod. "Come to watch the fireworks?" he asked when everyone else was out of earshot. Another charge of thermate had just flashed brightly on the edge of his vision. He carefully avoided voicing his true thoughts, which were somewhere between 'Have you lost your mind to come waltzing in here after dark?' and 'Thank fuck you came, I was so scared you wouldn't'.
"Come to wish you godspeed," Vincent corrected him earnestly. "And to give you this."
He held out the book the sentry had mentioned. It was medium-sized and with a plain black cover. There was no title on it, and although it seemed vaguely familiar, Martin couldn’t immediately place it.
"OK, no problem," he said, taking it. "D'you want me to send it somewhere?"
"I thought you might like to keep it."
Martin looked from Vincent to the book and back with a frown, then realised that he might understand if he opened it. He recognised it the moment he flipped the cover open. There was a date on the flyleaf, about fifteen months previously, within weeks of the start of Martin's own current tour of duty. A dozen or so pages towards the back were missing, from when Vincent had given away portraits to the people at Bagram hospital, and the few remaining pages after the gap were blank. But the rest of the book was filled with the sketches and drawings that Vincent had made on his most recent travels up and down the country. There was no time and the light wasn't good enough to appreciate many details, but it seemed to Martin that he was looking at the whirling kaleidoscope of an Afghanistan that he himself had scarcely known in all the time he'd been there, or never really paid attention to. Mountains, trees and flowers, rivers, bridges, people, animals, ancient ruins, bustling markets, lakes and waterfalls… and no sign anywhere of the war. In anyone else, Martin would have suspected either naivety or propaganda. But he understood that those drawings were both a record of actual places and a vision of the country's future, seen through the eyes of a man who firmly believed that evil was never the full picture. And who wanted to help Martin to see that, too, at least in retrospect.
"Thank you," Martin said, his throat constricting. He closed the sketchbook carefully and looked back up. "You're not gonna do this anymore, are you?"
Vincent shook his head. "No. I'm afraid Hector from Manila has no talent that way. But he can do other things."
"Like what?"
"He likes to cook for people, and to share his meals with his family and friends."
"Don't tell me he bakes his own bread and likes to share that, too."
"Of course he does."
"Bloody hell. Be careful."
"You mustn't forget that I'm not alone, and we're not beginners. Look," Vincent added after a moment when Martin said nothing, "it's very simple, really. In all the other places I've been, I only ever left once things had got better. I've never left when things got worse."
Martin was tempted to suggest that this might be a good time to start a new tradition, but the familiar words that he himself had tried to live by ever since he'd signed up with the Army straight out of high school popped into his head just in time to stop him. I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. Who was he to deny Vincent the right to stick to the same principles? At least one of them should be able to say that he had kept faith.
All the same, the impulse to grab the little madman, stuff him into a duffel bag and drag him aboard nearly overwhelmed him. It seemed a poor substitute to only put Vincent's book into the side pocket of his camo pants. It just fit.
Above their heads, the jet engines started up. The sentries about-faced and began filing up the ramp.
The time had come to acknowledge the truth that Martin had first discovered at Bagram, but had then chosen to ignore for another two months. You could pick up a bird with a broken wing out in the wild and take it home and consider it yours for as long as you were nursing it back to health. But you couldn't put it in a cage for the rest of its life and expect it to keep singing. Once it was ready to fly again, you had to let it go, even if the world out there was still full of dangers.
The fireworks had died down, and they were alone on the airfield now, two small figures dwarfed by the massive structure of the plane above them. The air suddenly felt too thick to breathe.
"I think they're waiting," Vincent reminded Martin quietly. "I won't have you break your word on my account."
"You really won't let me save your life, will you?" Martin asked. He had to, even though he knew it was futile.
Vincent smiled. "You already have." His hands cupped Martin's tired face like a pair of real, gentle wings. "God bless, now."
Not so long ago, the gesture would have made Martin freeze and burn at the same time. But now he just stood still and closed his eyes and felt the kiss to his forehead like the cooling and calming benediction that it was, no more and no less.
It was hardly a proper expression of affection and gratitude to crush a civilian against the sharp-edged ceramic plates of your flak vest, but damn the armour, damn the barriers, damn the deep, deep chasm that had separated them from the beginning and always would, just this once. Martin shoved his rifle out of the way and pulled Vincent into his arms.
It couldn't last long. Midnight was ticking inexorably closer with every second that passed. It was Vincent who let go first and stepped back. "Go on, then." His eyebrows went up in another little smile when Martin still didn't move. "Dismiss."
That did the trick. Martin took a deep breath, nodded to acknowledge the command, replaced his helmet and surrendered to the curse of inevitability.
At the top of the ramp, where the loadmaster stood ready with his hand on the controls to close it, Martin turned around for a last look. He saw Vincent raise a hand in farewell, his face in shadow now with the lights behind him, and his smile a mere memory already.
Diego had saved Martin one of the more comfortable folding seats along the curving inside wall of the aircraft. By the time Martin had sat down and buckled up, the ramp was three quarters shut, and the strip of floodlit night sky at its top was narrowing rapidly and soon gone, too.
With a jolt, they got under way. A C-17 had no windows, but everyone recognised the moment when the aircraft reached the end of the runway, turned through 180 degrees and then paused at its holding position for a moment. With the tower no longer manned, they gave themselves permission for take-off. Everyone looked at their watches – 23:57 – and everyone let out a collective sigh as the engines fired up and the big steel bird started racing down the runway, rumbling over that rutted, tortured tarmac one last time, faster and faster, until its nose went up and the rattling stopped, the familiar pull at the pit of Martin's stomach telling him that they were airborne. He checked his watch again. 23:59.
He felt nothing. He wondered if anyone else did. But when he looked around, from the nineteen year old rank and file to the old hands of Martin's own age and seniority, all he could see in their faces was the same numb, exhausted apathy. Even the American ambassador and his remaining few consular staff just sat there among the uniforms, looking small and lost and utterly worn down.
It wasn't until a little later, when the pilot let them know over the intercom that they had left Afghan airspace, that the tears came.
The silence lasted for minutes this time, filled only with the sound of Martin's breathing as it gradually became calmer and more even again. Then a bell started tolling. The sound was so familiar to Thomas that it did not even consciously register with him at first. But Martin raised his head at once.
"Is that midnight at your end now, too?" he asked.
"It is." The bell of St. Peter's was tolling twelve across the Square, committing the old day and all that had happened on it to the care and the mercy of God, and ringing in the new. The words of the Angelus hovered somewhere on the outer edge of Thomas's mind, but God would need to forgive him for skipping yet another scheduled devotion. This was still more important.
Martin rubbed at his eyes. "Then I'm the one who's keeping you up now. Wow. I was joking when I said we might take all day. Now I've ruined your evening as well."
"Please be assured that you've done nothing of the kind," Thomas hastened to object. "I'm only wondering how you will now spend yours."
"Me? I'll just drive home now. Pick up something with calories on the way, maybe a pizza in honour of you guys in Italy, how's that? Get a nice cold beer from the fridge – just the one, don't worry – and then call it a day, I guess. Bit drained now, to be honest."
"I hope you'll sleep well, Martin. I'll be to blame if you can't."
"Oh, don't talk like that. I get a feeling that we both tend to blame ourselves for a lot of things, even for stuff we couldn't have changed with the best will in the world. Let's take a break from that now, all right? I'll be back in touch tomorrow, if that's OK. Just to hear how things are going."
"Of course. Or do you have any message that you would like to leave with me now?"
Martin narrowed his eyes. "A message for him, or for you?"
Thomas was intrigued rather than alarmed. "Both, if you like."
"All right. Then tell him from me that if the African warlords didn't get him, the IS didn't get him and the Taliban didn't get him, he's not allowed to let some shitty old elevator get him now. That's too big a step down."
Thomas couldn't help smiling. "That almost does sound like an order, Major General."
Martin snorted. "Oh, never. Just a polite request from an old friend. Reword as necessary." They shared a little chuckle, but then Martin quickly became serious again. "OK, now one for you?"
"Yes, please," Thomas agreed, failing spectacularly to take the question as the fair warning that it was.
True to character, the officer did not beat about the bush. "Right, I'll try and make it short. Don't make the same mistake I did, running away from myself all my life. Tell him. Say something, before it's forever too late. We're none of us getting any younger. And even if we were, lightning doesn't strike twice, does it."
It felt to Thomas as if it had struck him right now. Or why else were Bergson's words making his cheeks burn like fire?
"I - " Thomas could hardly form the words. "I - I don't think I know what you - "
"Oh, you know exactly what I mean." Well. Thomas should have known that he wouldn't get off the hook so easily. He had asked for a message to himself, and he was getting it. He had better be brave enough to listen. "Don't forget you've had your own camera on all this time, too," Martin reminded him. "You need to work on your poker face if you want this kind of thing to stay secret." His tone softened. "Don't get me wrong, though. I'm glad to be passing on the torch, I honestly am. Still not sure what exactly it was we had back then, if it even was anything at all. But it was so doomed already. And now?" He let out another little laugh. "Imagine yours truly taking fifty bloody years to figure himself out, and then when he finally gets it, of all the people in the world that it could've been, it's the effing Pope. You've at least got a chance to make it work. I'm telling you to seize it with both hands, and hold tight."
Thomas was sure that his face had flushed crimson all the way up to his thinning hairline. "Wait, wait," he protested. "You're probably aware - "
"- of the rules? Fuck the rules. It doesn't matter what you call it, or even what exactly you do or don't do. You're sailing under the same colours, and on the same course. Who are they to tell you that you can't share a boat? I mean it, my friend. No great thing ever came out of unhappiness, or out of denial. I've learned that the hard way. I don't s'pose you've got a kid to lose, but I don't want you to have the same level of regrets. Or him."
"I… I appreciate you saying that, Martin, but - "
"But you still think I've told you every last horrible thing about that time just to make sure his doctors get the information they need? No, sir. This is a handover. A changing of the guard. And I can't tell you how relieved I am. Please don't disappoint me by declining the honour. He's been through so much shit on his own and he's had to be so strong for everyone else for so long. And that's not gonna get any better now, with that new job you guys've saddled him with. Who takes care of Vincent Benítez while Vincent Benítez takes care of the rest of the world? Someone's got to do it, and I couldn't imagine him in better hands."
"But I know nothing of the kind of life he's lived. I hardly ever set foot outside churches and offices, I've never had to worry about my next meal, I've never been threatened with violence and death - "
"Yeah, no, that's exactly why you're the right person," Martin insisted. "He needs a rock, not a wreck."
Merciful God, this was a conversation that Thomas had never imagined he would have. Or should he say, a conversation he had never dared to hope to have? His own words were still coming out with difficulty, but there was something else mixed into his embarrassment now, a sudden fear that this wasn't even real, that Martin might start laughing any moment because it was all just a joke, or that he would suddenly disappear from the screen of Thomas's phone entirely, and Thomas would wake up to find it was all just a dream. "If… I mean, I'm sure I don't deserve your compliments. But even if it were possible for me to accept the honour, as you call it… Where would that leave you? You talk of happiness, but how could I pursue it at your expense?"
"Oh, chuck your English restraint overboard already. Didn't I say all I'm feeling is relief? I'll be fine. I don't know if there'll ever be any other, but that's OK. I've still got my work to fill my days and to keep me on my toes. Don't worry about me. You go and get some sleep now, and I'll touch base with you again tomorrow, all right?"
"Certainly, yes. And Martin? Thank you. Thank you so much, for your time and your trust and - "
The screen of Thomas's phone suddenly did go black, and Thomas stared at it in confusion for a moment. Then he realised that their long conversation must simply have used up all the phone's battery power. It was surprising that it had held out even this long. But hadn't Thomas just heard a tale of incredible endurance and perseverance? It seemed that even the inanimate world had been inspired to follow suit, and achieved the impossible.
With a deep sigh, Thomas rose to go in search of a means to recharge his phone.
Chapter Text
"Your Eminence?"
Thomas resurfaced at a glacial pace. The first thing he felt was embarrassment. Had he slept right through the beeping of his alarm clock again, and had his housekeeper, Sister Anjelica, had to enter his bedroom to make sure he woke at all in time for the day's duties and devotions? It had happened several times in the first days after the Conclave, but Thomas had really hoped that he had returned to his usual levels of discipline by now.
"Your Eminence? Are you awake?"
The second thing he experienced was confusion, because that was the voice of Raymond O'Malley, not of his housekeeper, and Thomas felt vaguely that the Monsignor should be somewhere else, looking after someone else…
The third thing he felt were the aches of his ageing body after spending the night, or what had been left of it, on a sofa that was just too short for him to stretch out fully, and whose cushions were far too thick and unyielding for his head to rest on comfortably. Why was he on a sofa anyway? He raised a hand to his chest and felt the fabric of his cassock with its red piping and buttons. What on earth had possessed him to lie down and sleep in it?
"I'm so sorry to wake you, Your Eminence," the Monsignor was saying. "But I couldn't reach you on your phone, and we were getting a little worried." A smile sneaked into his voice. "And it seems I'm now also answerable for your personal wellbeing to an earthly authority that won't be content with shoddy work or half-baked results."
Thomas must have finally opened his eyes, because he could see the smile now, too. "No, I am sorry, Ray… What did you say? What authority?"
In response, Ray took out his phone, activated it and read from the screen: "'I'm afraid I've just sent your boss into a battle situation he's got neither the training nor official approval for. Please make sure someone's got his back, too. I don't know if you've got a lot of people like him, but I get the feeling he'd be hard to replace.'"
Thomas struggled into a seating position, shaking himself like a befuddled dog. He had a vague memory of getting out of the armchair in the Pope's private library in order to recharge his phone, but it seemed that he had progressed no further than the other side of the room. At least he had kicked off his shoes before he lay down, overwhelmed by exhaustion. They were there on the carpet, the laces still tied. "What time is it?" he asked.
"Quarter past ten."
Good Lord. "Then I'm afraid the Major General's high opinion of me is entirely undeserved." Thomas could feel the stubble on his unshaven cheeks prickle uncomfortably, and he raised a hand to try and smooth at least his hair down into some kind of order. Honestly, he had kept it together better when they had got him out of bed at two a. m. the night the late Holy Father had passed away. He sighed. "I can't believe I've let you and the sisters down now as well."
Ray shook his head in protest. "No such thing, Your Eminence. I believe those who keep the midnight vigil are excused from the morning duties." Not that he looked as if he had slept much himself.
"How do you know - "
Ray held up his phone again. "Sent at 00:47 a. m., our time." He moved a step backwards to give Thomas space to get to his feet. "Your housekeeper's been here to bring you some things you might need. The bag's in the study. I've said morning mass in the chapel. And I'm sure you'll be able to move Sister Agnes's heart to still give you some breakfast as well. Don't worry, we're up and running, and running pretty smoothly so far."
Thomas would not have asked for his arm to help him rise, but Ray offered it as a matter of course, and Thomas accepted it gratefully. He waited in vain, however, for Ray to rescue them both from talking around the only question that really mattered. Then he acknowledged how shabby it was of himself not to have asked it minutes ago already. "How is he, Ray?"
Ray shrugged. "Hard to tell. Still a bit woozy from the sedation. The doctor basically put him to sleep for most of the night, so he'd, you know. Not feel it as much. There's still the shoulder to consider, too. Every hour won is an hour won, the doctor said."
One battle too many, Thomas thought, and hoped that this time at least, it had been Vincent's own decision to tackle them one by one rather than all at once.
"Sister Marisol is with him right now," the Monsignor continued. "He's asked her to read him some Aztec history."
"Aztec history?" Thomas echoed, bewildered. Then he remembered what the papal secretary had told him the night before over the household chores they had shared, how fascinated Vincent had been to find ancient manuscripts from his own home country in the Vatican Library.
"We learned our lesson there yesterday, didn't we?" Ray smiled a little ruefully. "The more surprising his requests, the better the reason for them. The Aztecs were the last thing on his mind just before the accident. He'd been hatching ideas with the Chief Librarian and his senior students for an exhibition of their ancient American pieces, as their graduation project, I believe. There was talk of a published catalogue and a symposium and all. They've got a Zoom call scheduled for tomorrow to discuss the project further."
"Sister Marisol and the Librarian?"
"The Holy Father and the Librarian."
Thomas raised his eyebrows. "Will that even be possible?"
"Oh, it'll do them both good to have something to occupy their minds. The man is laid up with his broken toes and probably bored out of his brains, too. No, seriously," Ray added when he saw that Thomas was still less than convinced. "The doctor said that distraction can go a long way, and that we're free to figure out whatever works."
By the time Thomas emerged, his rumpled cassock replaced with the much more practical black woollen jumper that Sister Anjelica had somehow known to pack for him, and his face burning both from a hasty shave and from the shame of having overslept while everyone else had been hard at work again already, the others had come on in leaps and bounds figuring out what worked and what didn't.
Fresh fruit and an omelette had worked reasonably well, Sister Agnes reported when Thomas found her in the kitchen. Peanut butter sandwiches had emphatically not. "He says he got enough of those at Bagram for a lifetime, whatever exactly that means. They're in the fridge, if you want them."
Thomas had intended to skip breakfast altogether, but maybe his penance was meant to begin right here. So he accepted the offer, as well as that of a cup of tea, but not before he had asked the sister for her own opinion on the state of the Holy Father's health. Thomas rather suspected Ray O'Malley of having been deliberately vague in order to spare his feelings.
"It usually looks like a combination of demonic possession and a bad case of the flu," Sister Agnes said while she filled the kettle. "But how much demon and how much flu tends to vary for every individual. Some get very restless and twitchy. There's a reason why you call it 'kicking the habit' in English. Some just curl into a ball and want to die."
"And how is it with him?" Thomas asked, hoping that the domestic clattering was drowning out the anxiety in his voice.
Sister Agnes clicked the kettle on and dried her hands on a towel. "Three quarters flu." She watched Thomas for a moment while he tried to imagine what even a quarter case of demonic possession would look like in their Pope, then took pity on him. "And one quarter Vincent Benítez. The demons may still be trying, but I dare say they will tire first."
"Are you sure?" At least nobody was setting the door wide open and inviting them in any more.
"Your Eminence." Sister Agnes set down a cup in front of him with the same emphasis that she was putting into the tone of her voice. "We're not getting out the Rituale Romanum. We'll be winning this battle with hot soup, warm blankets, plenty of hydration and companionship, not with incense, Holy Water and dark mutterings."
"What about prayer?"
She gave him a stern look. "Always. What a question. Now eat your breakfast, please, I have another task for you after that."
She turned away to occupy herself with pen and paper while Thomas drank his tea and stoically ate the peanut butter sandwiches. They were nourishing, but that was also the only justification for their existence that he could think of. He tried to guess what task she would need his help with next, but apart from putting his used tableware into the dishwasher, he could see nothing in the extremely tidy kitchen that required improvement.
"What was it you wanted me to do, Sister?" he asked when he put down his empty cup.
Sister Agnes raised her head from what looked like a meal plan or a grocery list and regarded Thomas over the rim of her reading glasses. "I want you to change your perspective. You need to stop asking God how on earth he could have let it happen, and start asking why he let it happen."
"Is that not the same thing?" Thomas protested weakly.
"Is it the same thing to pretend to know God's will, or to be curious and open to God's own voice? What makes you so sure that God wants you to indulge in self-pity, when he may be trying to tell you something far more important? Your method is clearly getting you nowhere for the second day running now. Don't you think it's time you tried a different approach?"
She returned to her paperwork, but when Thomas said nothing, she looked up again as if she was surprised that he was still there and not already hastening towards whatever she imagined the different approach would look like. Thomas's own mind was blank. If Martin Bergson's frank parting words from the night before had made him burn with embarrassment, Sister Agnes's admonishment now was like a cold bucket of water over his head.
"It's not a method," he objected, grasping at straws. "It's just - "
"You mean you're just letting yourself be paralysed by fear? That is worse, if you ask me. Well. The Secretary of State is due at half past twelve for instructions, and the doctor will look in around one. I will allow you to hide here in the kitchen until then. You can give me a hand with lunch. But you also need to make up your mind."
Maybe Sister Agnes, being familiar with the myriad of little tasks that came with running a household, found it easy to ponder difficult questions while her hands were busy with more mundane work. Thomas, who lacked her experience and routine, could barely even focus his mind on the chores she assigned him. There was a delivery of provisions from the kitchens of the Casa Santa Marta to carry inside and put away, a large quantity of vegetables to chop and the dishwasher to run and unload. They paused only for the noon Angelus, then Sister Agnes began putting together the Holy Father's lunch on a tray. He was still having trouble getting food down and keeping it down, she informed Thomas in that disquieting matter-of-fact tone of hers, and didn't need an audience for that, so Thomas and the other two conspirators were welcome to help themselves to the minestrone here in the kitchen while she saw to feeding the patient. Off she went, and Thomas was still none the wiser as to what God could possibly have intended when he made Thomas fail in his sworn duty to protect his sovereign.
"What we need," said Aldo Bellini after a lengthy silence spent deep in thought, "is some kind of early warning system."
"What do you mean?" Thomas asked. The expression made him think of earthquakes and volcanoes.
They were seated around the kitchen table, tea towels drying on the rack behind them, lunch cleared away and even the indefatigable Sister Agnes persuaded to go and rest for a few hours now. Doctor Ariyaratna had arrived for his promised afternoon visit, and according to Ray O'Malley, who had taken him in to his patient, he had already declared that the axillary nerve – his main concern – seemed to be doing very well. Whether he would pass the same judgment on the rest of the Holy Father's person remained to be seen. Ray had left them to it, and the consultation was still ongoing.
Thomas had preferred Sister Agnes's disapproval to eating another meal so soon after his belated breakfast. All his instincts suggested penitential fasting to him anyway. But at least Ray and Sister Marisol had showed some appreciation for her cooking. As had Aldo Bellini, who had collected the Holy Father's signatures on some urgent documents just before the doctor's arrival, received his instructions how to proceed with whatever could not be delayed until next week, and then marched into the kitchen to demand rather bluntly what exactly was wrong with His Holiness that they weren't telling him about. Declining himself lunch had left Thomas free to give the other three the gist of Martin Bergson's tale while they ate.
To Thomas's intense relief, Aldo had wasted no time with exclamations of dismay, and he had not been judgmental, either. There was no question of declaring the Holy Father unfit for office, or even of putting that question to a larger jury. "But we can't risk something like this hitting us again out of the blue," Aldo insisted. "Who knows what else is lurking under the surface that may catch up with him when he himself expects it least. Someone needs to be aware early, even if we can't prevent it. Make sure he has a softer fall next time."
It wasn't easy to accept the idea of a next time, but Thomas knew that for all Aldo's reputation as an aloof academic, his old friend had a better understanding of human weakness and a more pragmatic approach to dealing with it than many of his critics.
"Well, what can we do?" Thomas asked. "Like you say, this was nothing even he himself could have seen coming."
"And he probably won't be able to give us a comprehensive list of things to avoid, either," Marisol added. "That's not how this kind of trouble works. Logic doesn't have much to do with it. You'd think he'd flinch every time he's near an armed and uniformed person, too, but he definitely doesn't."
On the contrary – none of Vincent's modern-day predecessors had been nearly as naturally comfortable around the Swiss Guards and the Gendarmerie as he seemed to be. So far, Thomas had put it down to Vincent Benítez simply being kind to everyone by default. He knew better now. How had Martin Bergson put it? We can spot a kindred spirit a mile off.
"I admit…" Aldo took off his glasses and polished them fastidiously on his sleeve. "I shudder to think what might have happened if you three hadn't managed to contain the problem so quickly. The system is not as Byzantine as it used to be, but it seems to me that it's still inhumane. At the moment, the official options come down to a choice between solitude or the public sphere, with nothing in between. The latter is unwise. Far too many people involved, with too many questionable agendas of their own... And the former is just cruel. I've honestly begun to wonder why on earth we consider our kind exempt from the universally agreed assumption that no man is an island, if you will forgive the platitude. Can we really expect God to fill all that empty space himself? Especially in times of crisis and illness?"
"You speak in riddles," Thomas protested. He looked around at the others, expecting them to share his bewilderment, but Ray actually nodded.
"This secret-mongering right now is hardly a long-term solution," the Monsignor agreed. "If it becomes a pattern, there'll be endless questions, and lies just beget lies, and silence begets suspicion, and soon we'll have no more room to turn."
"Well, God allowed his own son twelve good friends," Marisol pointed out. "Three of whom hardly ever left his side, and for one of whom our Lord even had particular affection, according to Scripture. It seems fair that the Vicar of Christ should have at least one person like that, too, doesn't it."
"I agree entirely." Aldo replaced his glasses. "It's the obvious middle ground between letting him struggle alone and letting him struggle in full view of the unkind world out there. And I believe I'm already the second person today who tries to recruit the obvious candidate for the position, but he sure needs persuading."
Thomas felt foolish, groping about in the dark while the voices of his friends tried to steer him towards a light that might be too bright for his eyes to bear when he found it. "Why the second person?" he asked. His voice had gone hoarse with apprehension.
Aldo shrugged. "Just now, when Sister Agnes left, she said to me, 'Please make our Dean see sense, Your Eminence, because apparently I can't.'"
"I…" Thomas tried to cast his mind back to his own conversation with the sister before lunch. He needed to start discovering God's intentions, she had instructed him, with openness and curiosity instead of crushing guilt and self-reproaches. But here he was, still avoiding even coming face to face with the one person who could absolve him from that burden. Were they really all trying to tell him the same thing? With Martin Bergson last night, it might have been possible to dismiss his advice as an outsider's romantic fantasy that had nothing to do with the reality Thomas and Vincent lived in. Coming from Aldo and the current papal housemates, however, all pillars of the very system that expected God to be the only confidant you needed and prayer to be the answer to every question, the idea was far more difficult to discount. But of course that didn't stop Thomas trying. "Aldo, you can't be serious," he objected. "He's the Pope."
"Exactly. The loneliest man on earth, if we condemn him to that fate."
And if you don't find a way to make an exception for him, you may have to find a new High Priest again very soon. Well, that was not romantic fantasy, that was a stark warning from the only one among them who knew from personal experience that your memories could eat you alive if you let them fester in solitude, and that the ghosts of the past could chip away at a man until there was nothing left. Who takes care of Vincent Benítez while Vincent Benítez takes care of the rest of the world?
Thomas rose so abruptly from his seat that he rather startled the others, but he couldn't risk his courage slipping away from him again, now that he was finally finding it. "Actually, you're the third person," he said to Aldo. "God have mercy on the slow old man that I've become."
Chapter Text
Thomas practically collided with Dr Ariyaratna on his way out of the kitchen. He remembered his manners for long enough to hear the doctor's full report, and to shake his hand and thank him for his care and his discretion. But then he got away at the earliest opportunity.
Sister Marisol would surely commandeer the papal study in a moment for a string of phone calls with the Dicastery of Communications. The worldwide media must still be clamouring for regular updates on His Holiness's health, and if they gave them nothing for too long, the rumours would get out of hand. Thomas decided to take refuge in the chapel instead. Over the last twenty-four hours, he had missed out on far too much of the Divine Office. In the past, even during the most stressful phases of his service to the Holy See, his duties had still been tailored to accommodate a priest's obligations of prayer and worship. But the current emergency had hardly made any allowances for them at all. Even if Thomas had yet to find reassurance in the actual words again, asking God for guidance was never wrong, and he had also begun to feel the lack of structure to his day keenly.
It seemed that he was not the only one.
The corridors of the papal apartments had been so quiet that Thomas had assumed that their main occupant must be asleep now. He had taken extra care not to make a sound as he opened the door into the chapel, slipped inside quickly and closed the door again before he even looked around. So he was startled to see that underneath the stained glass ceiling, more reminiscent of the open sky than ever now that the sun outside was just past its zenith, the colourful birds embroidered on the prayer rug had already made room in their nest for a visitor. Too large for a bird and yet almost as fragile at this moment, he sat there with his legs crossed and an open book on his knee.
Thomas stood very still, overcome with awe. It was a platitude, too, to state that he would never look at their Holy Father with the same eyes again, knowing what he knew now. But he was relieved to realise that nothing of what Martin Bergson had told him the night before had diminished Vincent's dignity in any way. If anything, Thomas's admiration had only grown, as had the tender protectiveness that he had always felt towards Cardinal Benítez from the moment the latter had turned up at the Casa Santa Marta just in time for the conclave. He is like that, Martin Bergson's voice said in his head. You can't not care. Thomas honestly did not know what he would do with his life, should he no longer be allowed to.
"Come and join me, if you like," Vincent said without turning to look who had entered, and patted the space next to him with his good hand.
Thomas obeyed automatically. He lowered himself onto his knees at Vincent's side, then sat back on his feet so as not to tower over his companion. The position was not practical when you were wearing a cassock, but he found it surprisingly comfortable in casual clothes. 'Casual' was touchingly relative, anyway. Vincent himself was in pyjama bottoms and a too large green and white fleece jacket. A badge on it said 'Shamrock Rovers FC', and the left sleeve hung down empty, his arm in its padded sling too bulky to fit into it. It didn't matter. From now on, it would take more to shock Thomas than the Pope borrowing team wear from an Irish Monsignor with a passion for his country's national sport. Besides, the jacket looked warm, and the marble floor under the rug was cold.
"I was hoping you might come," Vincent said while Thomas settled down. "Shall I - ?" He gestured at his book.
"Please," Thomas said, swallowed the anxious questions on the tip of his tongue - 'Are you well enough for this? Should you be out of bed?' - and closed his eyes. The doctor had been satisfied with his patient's progress. There was no reason for Thomas to pretend to know better than the expert.
Secretly, Thomas still kept expecting Vincent to tire and falter any time, but he didn't, and soon Thomas was letting himself be carried along as if on a gentle swell of the sea. His Spanish was too rusty to follow every word exactly, let alone to join in, apart from the most formulaic parts of the liturgy. But all the same, every line of every prayer, every verse of every psalm helped to loosen the knot inside his chest a little further. The office of Sext was a short one, and they arrived at the last Gloria al Padre, y al Hijo, y al Espíritu Santo almost before Thomas realised they were there.
"What's on your mind?" Vincent asked after a moment of silence, closing the prayer book and putting it aside.
You didn't lie to the Pope any more than you punched him or pointed a gun at him, so Thomas opted for the truth. "Guilt," he said.
Vincent nodded. "Ray says you've talked to Martin?"
"I have."
"Then tell me, have you given any thought to the person at the village hospital who told the wrong people that the Christians had come to take away a child?"
The question was so unexpected that Thomas had to take a moment to collect his thoughts. With an effort, he tried to recall the earliest part of Martin Bergson's long account, but he had no recollection of any mention of such a person at all. "No," he admitted. "You mean someone gave you away?"
"Oh yes. That ambush on the road was far too targeted to be a coincidence."
"That hadn't even occurred to me."
"So you feel no anger towards that person? No resentment?"
"Well, I do, now that I think about it. If the IS hadn't known you were out on the road that day…"
"But suppose that person just let the information slip by accident? Or told someone in good faith, thinking it was good news? Or was made to reveal it under duress, even? Would that change your feelings?"
Thomas hadn't considered those possibilities, either. "Well, yes, of course," he conceded. "If there was no evil intent, it would be unjust to - " He understood then, and fell silent.
"See," Vincent said. Then he suddenly yawned, and gave a shudder as if he was starting to feel the cold creeping up from the floor after all. Again, Thomas was on the verge of questioning whether they should be here at all, but Vincent didn't let him. "And what about the little girl's mother?" he continued, pursuing a new line of reasoning that Thomas had yet to grasp. "In her desperation, she decided to get rid of her child. But in the end, there were seven people dead. How much blame do we lay on her?"
"You mean it's a question of degrees, as well as intent?"
"Is it? Then who would you find easier to absolve? Anjali, who held a gun against a man's head and pulled the trigger, knowing exactly what the result would be? Or me, who never touched a weapon and who had no control over what the Americans would or wouldn't do when I called them in? Does that mean she committed murder, but my hands are clean?"
"But those were such exceptional circumstances…"
"Then what is the use of our categories if they fail us as soon as the circumstances are exceptional?"
Thomas pulled in a deep breath, but whatever he had meant to reply never reached the stage of verbalisation. His mind had just done a backflip, and he had finally realised that he had been looking at this whole conversation all wrong, as if with the colours reversed, like the negative of a photograph. This was not a theological debate, nor a piece of instruction from the highest earthly authority that Thomas's faith recognised. This was, very simply, just one human being telling another that they were facing the same struggle, and searching for the same answer.
"What, Thomas," Vincent said, confirming his epiphany in a voice that was almost unbearably gentle, "do you think is on my mind when I recall that time of my life, if not guilt?"
Decades of habitual introspection and the constant examination of conscience required of a pious man ahead of confession had made Thomas spiritually selfish to a degree that now shocked him. He would have to learn, and quickly, that there were times when the state of your own soul didn't even matter. That sometimes, you were called to serve God and mankind regardless of your readiness or your worthiness, and it was arrogant to let your doubts about either keep you back. That your own moral integrity or spiritual purity came not just second but in fourth or fifth place at best when there were lives to save and wounds to heal and tears to dry. Both Martin and Vincent lived by that principle, and both of them achieved more every day than Thomas's endless self-reproaches had ever achieved in his life.
"But then what is the answer?" Thomas asked, his own voice far from firm.
Vincent traced the shape of a bird close to his knee with a finger. "That we're caught up in a web of sin whatever we do. But sometimes our actions deserve no more blame than the hummingbird that beats its wings and creates a storm." Another shudder passed over him. Thomas saw it with concern. "I know you're going to say that's dodging responsibility. I'd call it dividing up a back-breaking load into packages small enough for a single human being to carry." His eyes met Thomas's again. The shadows under them were so deep as to seem almost black. "Forgive me, I'm too muddle-headed today to remember it correctly word by word, but doesn't it say in Matthew, Come to me - "
"'Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest, for my yoke is easy and my burthen is light'," Thomas quoted, and then realised with alarm that Vincent literally needed to get some rest right now if they didn't want him to end up flat on the floor of the chapel within the next few moments. Thomas caught him in his arms just in time, fumbling not to jostle the injured shoulder as Vincent's weight slumped against him. He meant to call for help, but Vincent shushed him.
"Don't fret, I'll… be fine. It'll pass." His eyelids were suddenly drooping, heavy with fatigue. "It… comes and goes. But less often now."
Thomas shifted carefully for a better hold as Vincent settled in his embrace. "I'm so sorry. You should never have stayed up for so long."
Vincent shook his head. His hair brushed against Thomas's cheek, straggly and damp with cold sweat. "Just… a moment." He took a few shaky breaths, as if to get a sudden onset of nausea under control. "Just promise… you'll remember."
"Remember what?"
"That no hands are ever clean… but - " Vincent's teeth started chattering, and he broke off.
"But all life is a journey towards healing, and every step counts?" Maybe it was time Thomas began to apply this piece of wisdom to himself, too, instead of lamenting his shortcomings over and over.
Vincent raised his head sharply when he heard his own words from Thomas's lips. "Promise?" he demanded. His voice had taken on a startling note of urgency.
"I promise," Thomas declared solemnly, "with all my heart." He felt Vincent not relaxing in his hold then, but downright deflating, the remaining tension of his body dissolving into complete exhaustion, and realised where the urgency had come from. "And now, for the love of God, back to bed," he decreed. "You're shaking like a leaf. Let's get you nice and warm."
They could have done with the support of Ray O'Malley's capable hands and powerful frame, but Vincent was having none of it. "We'll manage," he insisted when Thomas made another attempt at calling in reinforcements. "We're... two people, Thomas. That's enough to put… one sick pope to bed."
"I think it's a butterfly," Thomas said to the high ceiling. The evening sun coming in through the window was painting a rhomboid of light onto it, deep gold with pointy corners. Maybe it was this shape that had inspired the thought. "I mean, isn't it supposed to be a butterfly that beats its wings and starts a storm, not a hummingbird?"
"Is it?" Vincent's voice muttered, slurry with sleep and startlingly close to Thomas's ear. "I don't care. I'm Mexican. I can make it a hummingbird if I want to." He stirred to stretch out his legs, his knees nudging against Thomas's own. "They're amazing creatures. Their hearts beat a thousand times per minute, and their wings a hundred times every second, did you know? You'll never see them sitting still when they're awake. But they go into a state of deep hibernation every night to preserve enough energy for the next day."
"Really?"
"Oh yes. Most intensely alive and beautiful things you'll ever see. The Aztecs believed they were the reborn souls of fallen warriors."
Thomas turned his head so their eyes could meet. Vincent misunderstood the movement and lifted his own head off Thomas's shoulder.
"Sorry, am I - "
"No, no," Thomas assured him at once. "I just meant to agree. I'm sure the Aztecs had a point." Martin would agree, too. He may never have used those exact words to Thomas, most intensely alive and beautiful thing he had ever seen, but he might as well have.
"Hibernation is good sometimes, too, though." Vincent sighed and let his head sink down again. It was such an unfamiliar feeling, but Thomas liked its solid, comfortable weight. He was, of course, not used to any prolonged contact with another person's body at all, but he had already discovered over the past few hours that he preferred a decisive, deliberate touch to a passing and ephemeral brush. The latter made him feel giddy and awkward. The former grounded him. And the experience wasn't one-sided. The doctor had warned them at his noontime visit that insomnia would probably remain par for the course for days to come, but Vincent had just woken from sleeping in Thomas's arms for several hours without any chemical assistance whatsoever.
It had been such a simple remedy in the end. "Is there anything else I can do?" Thomas had asked once Vincent was safely settled in his bed again. "Can you keep me warm?" Vincent had asked back, teeth still chattering in spite of the bedcovers pulled up to his neck. "I just feel so cold."
Aldo had been right, and Sister Agnes, and Martin, too. Who could sit outside that invisible prison of reverential isolation and look in through the bars while the demons screamed and scratched and pulled at their prey, and not be guilty of incredible cruelty? So Thomas had broken open the doors of the prison and also broken down the barriers in his own mind, and even shunned the prayers that he had been taught to ask for fortitude in the face of temptation. It had seemed absurd to him that this should be an occasion for them. Sure, he had also been taught that the devil liked to cloak his pitfalls in the most innocent of guises. But how could God want him to turn his back and leave the room when six good men and women were relying on him to step in and do whatever might help a sick friend? Even if it meant getting right into bed with him, a fellow priest, and holding him close until the chills that shook him from head to foot finally grew less and then stopped altogether? Didn't it say in Ecclesiastes, If two lie down together, they will keep warm; how can one keep warm alone?
From that point onwards, the afternoon had passed in blessed calm and uneventfulness. Vincent had been asleep within less than an hour, and Thomas, alone with his thoughts at first, had finally succumbed to the same pull, too. Maybe he should have let go and moved over to the other side of the bed at least then, but that idea had not really taken root in his mind, either, before his breathing had slowed down to align with Vincent's, and he had felt far too heavy and stupid already to move at all. The next time he had gently freed one arm to look at his watch, it had been evening.
"Are you warm now?" Thomas asked, just to make sure.
"Mmh," Vincent hummed and closed his eyes. "Warm enough. That's one of the lasting legacies they've managed to give me, I'm afraid. I really don't like being cold. It puts me right back in those mountains." Thomas gently tightened his hold. "I don’t mind mountains as such, though," Vincent continued. "It was a two-day hike across the border into Pakistan, so I could get on a plane for the conclave. And the people smugglers in the area aren't exactly pleasant company, either. But I was fine that whole time. That's strange, isn't it?"
"Sister Marisol says logic doesn't have much to do with it."
"Sister Marisol is a wise woman. You know," Vincent went on after another moment of silence, "I never asked God for a new life. But now that I've got it, I've made a mistake. I thought I could shed the old one like the skin of a snake. Choose to keep only the good memories, and leave the bad ones behind. Seems I was very wrong about that."
"What was it like before, when you left a place and went into a new ministry?"
Vincent gave a little one-sided shrug with his good shoulder. "Not the same. You don't remember last week's bullets while you're busy dodging this week's. I fear this is the downside of being here to stay now. Too calm. Too quiet. Too much time to think."
"You must be the first pope in history who says that of his life in office."
"Well, all is relative, as they say." It did explain a lot, from the way Vincent had decided to run this new home of his – open to anyone, open for anything to happen – to his disinclination to actually talk about his past. "I'm only sorry that I've caused so much trouble for you all. That was unfair on you."
"You'll need a regular doctor you can trust."
"I know. Ariyaratna is the wrong specialty, and I wouldn't dream of asking him to sacrifice his career for me. But he's promised me to come up with a recommendation."
Thomas nodded. "Very good. And just so we know, are there…" He broke off to rephrase the question. Marisol had been sceptical whether there was a point in trying to make a list, after all.
"Are there patterns, you mean?" Vincent saved him the trouble. "As in, do I love helicopter flights? I know they'll be inevitable once I start travelling. Let's assume for now that I'll be all right if I can sit up and see where we're going." Thomas could hear the wry smile in his voice. "What else? I'd already realised during the conclave that it's not a great experience for me to be trapped in an enclosed space, even one as lofty and magnificent as the Sistine Chapel, and to have to beg to be let out again. I hope my neighbours during the voting didn't notice that I was breathing a little heavily every time they turned the key with all that ceremony, or maybe mistook it for some kind of spiritual ecstasy." He huffed a little laugh. "Well, I'll never have to trouble with that particular situation again, will I. But I may become known as the pope who prefers to take the stairs. The smaller the space, the more challenging, unfortunately."
Thomas had not even realised yet that this was where yesterday's trouble must have started already, in that awful elevator, well before there had been loud bangs, blood and injuries.
"I think none of that truly gets to the heart of the matter, though," Vincent concluded.
"Then what would you say is the heart of the matter?"
"Being made to lose myself. That was what made me snap completely, yesterday with the doctors. I've been forced to learn that there's a version of me that doesn't remember how to pray and how to care, and I never want to be that person again. It's the one thing that truly terrifies me." He made a little gesture with his hand, encompassing the bed, the room, his current situation. "Not this. This isn't frightening. It's just what Sister Agnes calls the demons getting in a few parting shots before admitting defeat. But the doctors - "
"They were telling you to agree to be that person again."
"Exactly. And I couldn't do that. At least not on my own. Not without someone at my side who does the praying and the caring for me while I can't." Now he was the one who turned his head to look at Thomas, and his hand searched for Thomas's own where it rested on his chest. Their fingers intertwined, and under their combined weight Thomas felt Vincent's heartbeat, slow and firm, nothing like the chaos that the ECG machine had rendered visible the day before, when both his body and his soul had been in such turmoil.
"It will be the honour of my lifetime," Thomas said, and that was all that needed to be said for a long while.
The rhomboid of light on the ceiling slowly changed shape, lengthening and narrowing until it was only a thin line and then finally gone. Thomas spoke up again as the twilight began to sap the colours from the room around them. "Do you mind the dark?"
"No. Darkness and silence have been friends to me so many times. Remember, I was practically a ghost for three years. And I'd learned how to tread softly and how to fade into the shadows well before that. No, don't look so sad." Apparently the twilight was not as deep yet as Thomas had counted on, or he would have made more of an effort at that poker face that he, according to Martin Bergson, emphatically did not possess. "Maybe I was a ghost, but never a ghost without friends."
"What happened to the others? The people from the Mission, I mean? And your local flock? Is it too dangerous for them to keep in touch, or do they ever send word?"
"Certainly they do. They find ways."
"And what about the nuns, and Hector, and the children?"
"They're in India, and doing well. I hope to go and see them soon. I made Ilhan the guardian of my sketchbooks. He'd always liked my little drawings, especially the animals. Hasina says he keeps asking when I will be back to make more."
"All your sketchbooks except one, I hear."
"All except one." A few more heartbeats passed in silence. "Martin really remembered what I said there, did he?" Vincent asked then. "About the journey towards healing?"
"Oh yes. It clearly meant a lot to him."
"That makes me glad."
"And do you know what became of Anjali?" Thomas did not ask merely for the sake of completeness. Of all the souls that had made it back out of that valley alive, Thomas felt sure that she had been most in need of God's healing grace.
Vincent did not hesitate long, but just long enough for Thomas to sense that he maybe should not have asked that question. "I didn't," Vincent said after a moment. "But her parents wrote after the conclave." He let out a slow, deliberate breath. "There's a women's refuge in her hometown that's named after her now. They say she wanted to study law, so she could go into that line of work. But she was never well enough again. Her younger sister does now, though." Thomas had gone very still, almost frozen in place. "That's the reality of war, Thomas. Not everyone survives, and it's not just the guilty who don't."
"Merciful God." Thomas didn't know what else to say.
"So we hope, don't we. How does God decide these things? Not always according to a plan that we can understand, that's for sure."
"How can you bear it?"
"I can't," Vincent said simply. "I go and... bake bread, usually. Or I used to, anyway."
"Are you serious?" Hadn't Martin meant that as a joke?
"Oh yes. It's a very good way to occupy yourself when you feel that everything else is pointless. You'll always find someone who has a use for it, too, even if you're not hungry yourself. And I don't know if you've ever noticed, but it's difficult to be angry with the smell of freshly baked bread in your nostrils. I really should start again. There are too many things I've not got around to yet since I came here. But I suppose there's no point in trying to knead dough with an injured arm."
"No, hardly," Thomas agreed. "But maybe you could teach me."
Vincent raised his eyebrows. "Now?"
"Well, maybe not. I suppose it takes hours and hours?"
"Not all types do, actually. Are you hungry? We can give it a go." He was already stirring to get up. "You'd better ask Sister Agnes for an apron, though. Flour and clerical black are mortal enemies."
"Says the man in white?" Thomas couldn't resist quipping.
It earned him a delightful look. "Says someone who knows it from hard-won experience. Don't say you haven't been warned."
Vespers was said very late that evening in the papal apartments, while the dough rose. Compline, however, the night office, would have to wait a little longer still. Its concluding words, May the almighty God grant us a restful night and a peaceful death, were supposed to be the last utterance of any faithful tongue before sleep, and could not be brought forward for reasons of convenience, or to fit a baking schedule.
Vincent had not been exaggerating. Thomas felt as if there was flour everywhere, including – he suspected – in his hair and even in his eyebrows. Some merciful providence had at least made sure that Ray and the sisters had all retired for the night by the time the two prospective bakers had resurfaced from their lair to take over the kitchen, and they had had the place to themselves. Thomas had retrieved his newly charged phone from the desk in the papal study first, and had found a message each from Ray and from Marisol to the effect that he should call them any time he might need support or relief, and a handwritten note from Sister Agnes telling him that she could be back over from the Casa Santa Marta with dinner within minutes if desired. But Thomas was determined that they should all get to enjoy a proper night's rest for a change.
Now the flat round bread was turning gold in the oven. Thomas felt tired after measuring and pouring according to Vincent's instructions and then kneading, kneading, kneading until he felt sore from the unusual exercise, employing muscles in his arms and in his shoulders that he hadn't even known he possessed. But he did not feel any regret. Vincent had not overstated the magic of the smell, either. It was impossible to feel rage or bitterness while anticipating the enjoyment of this particularly blessed gift to mankind. Grief, yes, for the sake of the young woman who had been too deeply hurt to recover in this life. But whatever anger and horror Thomas had felt on her behalf seemed to have been absorbed into his work, just like Vincent had predicted. It had been no less comforting than saying a mass for her soul; more so, in fact.
They ate the bread in silence by way of a late dinner, the simplest of meals and yet it lacked nothing. Thomas only realised when their plates were empty that it had taken Vincent neither a particularly long time nor a particularly great effort to make his upset stomach accept the offering. God willing, they were out of the darkest part of the woods already.
"Bedtime?" Vincent asked, suppressing a yawn.
"Gladly," Thomas said, and amazed himself by how easily and naturally the answer came.
It was close to midnight again by the time the words of Compline were fading away into the unlit corners of the papal bedroom. Thomas switched off the reading lamp on the bedside table, shifted until he found a position that he hoped would be comfortable for both of them, and accepted it reluctantly when Vincent, half asleep already, pulled Thomas's arm firmly around his middle and – with surprising disregard for his sore shoulder – wriggled even closer.
It was only when Thomas closed his own eyes that he remembered the one member of their conspiracy who had not been in touch today, even though he had promised twice that he would be. Well, he tried to tell himself, Martin Bergson was a busy man, and Thomas had made him miss out on almost a whole day's work yesterday. So there was probably plenty to catch up on, and Thomas could not fault the American for not having found the time for another chat yet.
And maybe there was still a lingering heartache there after all, too, in spite of Martin's assurances that he was ready to move on. Thomas could not fault him for not wanting to open old wounds further than necessary, either.
Or… A new and very disquieting idea crept into Thomas's mind. What if those wounds had been far deeper than Thomas had assumed until now, both the ones of the heart and the ones inflicted by the horrors of war? What if it had been absolutely irresponsible of Thomas to make Martin relive that terrible time and then send him off to his empty home to deal with the memories all on his own, without even a colleague or a neighbour as backup in case they overwhelmed him?
What if they had overwhelmed him? What if the wounds were bleeding in earnest right now, and there was no one there to help staunch the flow?
Thomas suddenly found it hard to breathe. How selfish had he been, to not even consider that possibility all day? I'll be fine, don't worry about me. How many times had Thomas himself used those same words to fend off a concerned question, or to stop someone touching a sore spot, while deep inside, misery was threatening to tear him apart?
"What's wrong?" Vincent muttered.
"Nothing," Thomas whispered back. "Try and sleep, hmm?"
Chapter Text
"Thomas? I think that's your phone."
Thomas jolted awake, disoriented for a moment – Vincent's voice, Vincent's bed, what on earth – but then memory returned, and with it an almost defiant acknowledgment of this new reality. There was just light enough outside the curtains for them to see each other's faces without having to turn on the lamp. Morning of the third day, then. The time when miracles revealed themselves.
Another buzz of the phone. Thomas must have fallen asleep with the thing still in his hand, the other hand that was, the one that wasn't holding on to Vincent. He remembered his thumb hovering above the screen, deeply uncertain whether he should try and contact Martin to make sure he was all right, and if yes, how exactly to word his enquiry. Sleep had made the decision for him, and there was his phone now, somewhere on the other side of the pillow, vibrating with a message alert.
Thomas groped for it, then felt the lack of his reading glasses as the screen swam into view.
"It says Are you awake?," Vincent supplied helpfully.
"Ray?"
"American number."
"Good Lord."
"Call him back?"
"Now?"
"Well, you are awake, are you not?"
"But we're - "
"We're here together, yes. That's convenient. I'd like to say hello, too. Go on."
"If you're sure." Thomas retrieved his glasses from the bedside table and put them on. The little numbers in the top corner of the screen indicating the time said 6:54. He started the video call, then held the phone up above them so they could both see the screen when Martin picked up. Thomas couldn't anticipate what state their American friend would be in, to feel an urgent need to talk at one in the morning after twenty-four hours of radio silence, but four eyes would see more than two.
Martin's image popped up with that jack-in-the-box rapidity that would always startle Thomas. And just like Thomas, he had now shed all the marks and trappings of his rank and office, swapping his uniform for a plain t-shirt, not even olive-green. It made him look younger and softer, much less angular and imposing.
Martin opened his mouth for a greeting, then realised what he was seeing on his own screen. His eyes grew very round, but then a grin pulled at the corners of his mouth. "Oh," he said. "Bloody hell, guys. You lost no time, did you? Well done."
Thomas could have kicked himself. He had forgotten, yet again, that unless he deactivated his own phone's camera somehow – which he had no idea how to do – these calls were not a one-way street. But it was already too late to try and undo the terrible indiscretion that he had just committed.
"Hello, Martin," Vincent said and smiled. "You're up late."
"And you, my friend, look surprisingly well."
"Only by the grace of God, and through the care and kindness of my friends here in Rome. You look happy, Martin. You've had some kind of good news."
Martin raised an eyebrow at Thomas. "Still reading people like an open book, I see."
"I happen to get the same impression," Thomas confirmed once his tired brain had caught up with the conversation. Something had certainly caused the officer to both loosen up and brighten up since their long talk last night. "Would you like to tell us what it is?"
"Yeah. No. Apologies first."
"What for?"
"I've looked you up on Wikipedia. That's a pretty awesome kind of college you're in charge of there. I'd no idea you were the guy who organised the whole thing. That's damn impressive, Your Eminence."
The circumstances were of course absurd, but Martin took obvious pleasure in finally using Thomas's correct title. Thomas was as touched as he was embarrassed. Couldn't he at least have rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and straightened the collar of his pyjamas? "Oh, please," he protested. "This is hardly the moment to stand on ceremony. It's Thomas. And now let's hear your news."
Martin took a deep breath. "All right. So. Yeah. Ashley's baby was born last night. I'm a grandad."
In the stunned silence that followed his words, the miracle took shape and grew, expanding right into Thomas's elated heart. Praise be, he thought as relief flooded him. There could not have been a better reason for Martin's silence. Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day.
"That's wonderful," Vincent said quietly.
Martin nodded slowly, as if struck anew himself with disbelief and wonder. "Kinda sudden, though. More than five weeks early. She's tiny, but she's fine. Mom's fine. They’re all fine. Thrilled to bits. Diego's being quite ridiculous, really. Can't blame him, though. She's the sweetest thing on earth. And their first, of course. That's always special."
"What have they named her?"
"Paloma." Martin's eyes shone even as he said the name. The Dove, the symbol of innocence, the messenger of hope, the bringer of peace, and the embodiment of the Holy Spirit that moved all beings and shaped all things according to God's good intentions for his creation. It was a beautiful choice.
"Have you been to see them?" Thomas asked. It would more than explain why Martin had found no time to get back to him until now.
"I wish," the American sighed. "Not that easy. They're based in Germany at the moment, at Ramstein. That's a bit too far for a day trip. But it won't be too long till I get to go. They…" He hesitated and cleared his throat. "Actually, they've asked me to be their girl's godfather as well. That was kinda sudden, too. Totally out of left field, to be honest. And I don't really know what to make of that bit. Been mulling it over all evening. Kinda stuck right now."
"But - " Thomas began. How could Martin hesitate to accept such a clear mark of confidence from his loved ones? Then he felt a slight nudge against his foot, well out of sight of the camera. He instantly understood, and fell silent. There was another of those knots to be untied here, and pulling at the wrong end was not going to help.
"I mean, I'm hardly - " Martin made a gesture with his hand. 'The obvious choice', he surely meant to say, and it was true. The obvious choice would have been Ashley's brother Jamie, but Jamie was no longer there.
"They're asking Diego's sister, too, luckily," Martin went on. "So they've already got someone in charge of all the actual Catholic-ing, and I guess I'd just be, y'know - "
"- Grandad?" Vincent suggested.
"D'you think that's enough, though?"
"Would they have asked you if it wasn't enough?"
Martin nodded again, then smiled a little wryly. "There's something else, too. 'Course, Ashley's gonna want her mom there as well. At the baptism, I mean. That's not a great prospect. Her wedding was awkward enough already, even with a lot more people there acting as a buffer… But, yeah. Maybe it's time to stop running away on the home front now, too, before anyone else gets hurt. I won't get a medal for that, and Debbie's probably still gonna hate me. But I guess she can at least start hating me for the right reason. I mean, what's the worst she can do? Kick up a fuss big enough to end my career?"
If Thomas remembered correctly, the rules had been very strict back in the day, and – absurd to think, really – Martin would not have been allowed to join the Army at all if the cards had been on the table then. Thomas wasn't sure if that fact alone would still be official grounds for a discharge now. But in the current climate, it might be enough for some people in high places to try and freeze him out, even in spite of his extremely impressive record, and that was hardly better. "Would she really do that?" he asked.
Martin shrugged. "See, I don't even know. And guess what? That idea's become a lot less terrifying now than it used to be, too. Retirement's starting to sound not so bad after all. Wouldn't mind a little more freedom, actually. I mean, sooner or later Diego's gonna be sent to places again where he can't take his family, and that's gonna be a lonely life for Ashley and the kid if there's no one else around." Thomas meant to assure Martin that he would deserve a medal for that commitment alone, but it had become difficult to even get a word in. "So, yeah. Maybe I'm s'posed to chance it." Martin suddenly laughed. "I guess that's me decided, then. I'll never understand how the heck you guys do that, but never mind. Well. Look at the two of us, eh?" He spoke to Thomas, but he jerked his head in Vincent's direction. "He falls down a bloody elevator shaft, and we both get to hit the reset button on our lives. It's kinda unfair, isn't it? Why's he always the one who gets the short end of the stick?"
"Am I?" Vincent asked, his tone genuinely wondering. "I wasn't aware. Listen, Martin – When is the baptism?"
"Ten weeks or so. There's no rush. She's breathing and feeding just fine."
"And it'll be in Ramstein?"
"Yeah, sure. Diego's gonna be with the European Command for a while yet. I s'pose they'll get to use the chapel on the base, or they could ask at the parish church in town."
Vincent put his head to one side with a slight frown. "You know… I think we can do better than that."
"What d'you mean?"
"Well, if Diego can get leave, and if the mother and the child are up for a journey - "
Thomas did not hear Martin's reaction, nor did he feel that he had a right to. He had already handed his phone over to Vincent, slipped out of bed with as much grace as a man of his age was capable of at seven in the morning, muttered something about seeing to breakfast and tiptoed out of the room.
The coffee pot on the stove had boiled and Thomas was pouring himself a cup – one of the few domestic tasks that he was capable of performing without instructions or supervision – when the kitchen door opened. The windows faced east, and the morning sun had begun to peak over the neighbouring rooftops. It sprinkled Vincent's dark hair with flecks of gold, and Thomas felt his heart skip a beat.
Vincent sniffed the coffee-scented air. "Oh yes, please. Lots of sugar."
"Have you really - "
"Coffee is never the wrong answer, Thomas."
Thomas's cheeks reddened as he quickly reached across to fill a second cup. "No, no, I meant – "
"I know what you meant." Vincent smiled. "Yes, I have, and I'm sure their answer is going to be yes."
"And that is… all right?"
"Of course." Vincent took a careful sip of the coffee that Thomas handed him, and hummed contentedly. "You can close a book before the final chapter, you know. But that's rarely satisfying, and sometimes downright unhealthy."
Thomas nodded, and as if in response, the room brightened. Instinctively, they both turned and stood side by side looking out over their city, the glorious morning sun, fully up now, shining on their faces and warming them through and through. The miracle was complete. This moment alone was a blessing already, but now there would be even more, a whole string of them in the weeks to come. A reunion of friends… the committing of a newborn child to the care of God, with a grandeur that would not be out of proportion to the vast amount of love that all who knew of her existence already felt for her… and even the possibility of a pair of bereaved parents finally sharing some long-overdue solace. Blank pages filled, and then time to open a new chapter.
If this had been God's plan all along for the past two days, then Thomas might be forgiven for not grasping it right away. But he would be a fool not to recognise His handwriting, now that he saw it as clearly as if the words had been written right there in the morning sky.
Proof of Life.
THE END