Michelangelo_s Notebook

16

The man in the priest’s collar got off the Delta flight from Rome at three fifteen, ran his small black fiber suitcase through the machines and then showed his Vatican passport to a hard-eyed uniformed INS man. The passport identified him as Father Ricardo Gentile and his occupation as priest, which seemed fairly self-evident. In fact none of the information on the passport was true, and the passport itself, although genuine, did not exist on any records at the Vatican passport office in Rome. The INS man handed him back the passport after a brief glance then gave him an “I am the first line of defense in the war against terrorism” nod and allowed him into the United States.

Father Gentile followed the crowds out into the afternoon sunlight, picked up a cab and told the Nigerian driver to take him to the JFK Holiday Inn. He avoided speaking to the driver in his native Anaang although he spoke it fluently; the last thing he wanted to do was make an impression on anyone at this point. As usual the dog collar was bad enough.

The drive took only a few minutes and by three forty-five Father Gentile was checked into the office building slab of the hotel at the junction of the Van Wyck Expressway and the Belt Parkway. The room was narrow, simply furnished and small. The color scheme was predominantly a grape-tinted purple. His window looked out over some sort of Japanese garden. He couldn’t have cared less. He swished the blinds closed and switched on the desk light. There was no overhead; it was something he’d been noticing recently on his travels, the lack of overhead lighting. He went to the closet, found the hard-shell suitcase that had been left for him earlier that afternoon and unlocked it with the key that had been Fed-Exed to him the day before in Rome. He removed the contents, which included two suits, several Arrow shirts in different colors, still in their wrapping, a pair of black James Taylor and Son elevator shoes that added two inches to his height and a Glock 21 10mm automatic pistol with a fifteen-round law enforcement magazine and a Patrick Johnakin muzzle-up spring-loaded shoulder rig to go with it. He stripped off his priest’s clothes, redressed-complete with the Glock and holster-then neatly placed everything into the hard-shell suitcase and locked it again.

He reached inside the pocket of the suit jacket and withdrew two wallets, one large and European, the other an ordinary American-style bill-fold. The large wallet identified him as Peter Ruffino, an Italian agent of the Art Recovery Tactical Squad (ARTS), which was itself a division of Allied International Intelligence, or Alintel, a worldwide concern representing everybody from Lloyds to the British Museum, including several royal families, dozens of major corporations and even a few governments.

The other wallet was filled with the Homeland Security credentials of one Laurence Gaynor MacLean. Both sets of documents were authentic and subjectible to deep background checks. As Father Gentile was well aware, despite endless denials of its existence, the Vatican secretary of state had the single-longest-running intelligence department in the world, an organization that in one form or another had existed since St. Peter came to Rome and underground Christians had chalked the sign of the fish on catacomb walls. Documents and the “legends” to go with them were never a problem. Gentile decided on the Homeland Security persona of good old Larry MacLean, working for a minute in front of the bathroom mirror to spin away his Italian accent and replace it with something vaguely Midwestern, then left the room.

He went down to the lobby, asked for a taxi to take him into the city and half an hour later he was in Manhattan, checking into the Gramercy Park Hotel and telling the desk clerk that Delta had lost his luggage once again. He registered as Laurence G. MacLean and paid with a Bank of America Visa check card that was hooked into what was effectively a bottomless well. He spent ten more minutes in front of the bathroom mirror of his suite practicing a flat Kansas drawl, then left the hotel and began to work.