The Secret Cardinal

52

Grin was deep inside the PLA’s Air Force network when the Rolling Stones logo reappeared in the center of the monitor, accompanied by the familiar opening chords of ‘Gimme Shelter.’ As Jagger sang the opening lyrics, Grin tapped the window to retrieve Kilkenny’s latest message.

‘Nolan, my man, you are really putting me to the test.’

Grin wrote the message in block letters across the top of a legal pad, then allowed his mind to wander. The first thought that came to mind was the Led Zeppelin song ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ — the wording in the message too exact to ignore. The song derived its name from the long mountain range that ran down the center of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, though the mountains figured more prominently in The Hobbit than in the epic on which Kilkenny had based his initial messages. Grin pondered Kilkenny’s last message that indicated the team was traveling west across China.

‘Imaging chamber on. Display Earth, wire frame with longitude and latitude.’

The chamber glowed as it powered out of its sleep mode, and soon a skeletal rendering of Earth floated in midair. Land masses were defined with bright green lines, the navigational divisions in white with numerical markings.

‘Enhance region between fifteen and fifty degrees north latitude and sixty and one hundred and twenty degrees east longitude.’

A bright line appeared, defining the boundaries of the region Grin requested. The globe expanded in size and appeared to sink through the bottom of the chamber, and as it did so, the highlighted region spun into view. A domelike portion of the Earth’s surface now covered the bottom of the cylindrical chamber.

‘Display national boundaries.’

Yellow lines raced across the visible section of Asia, tracing out the familiar puzzle pieces of the political map.

‘Display topography and render.’

The computer controlling the holographic display assumed for the purposes of the rendering that the sun was directly over the equator, as it would be on the first day of spring or autumn, and that it was also solar noon above the center of the selected area. Mountain ranges swelled up where tectonic plates collided eons ago. Rivers snaked through valleys and splayed into deltas. Oceans flat and blue contrasted with the wrinkled green texture of the land. The curvature of the earth was still apparent at this scale, and Asia appeared without the cartographic distortion of flat maps.

He studied China’s western border and discovered that nearly its entire length ran through mountainous terrain. China’s Misty Mountains ran more than two thousand miles and included some of the world’s tallest peaks. Somewhere in all that jagged topography, Kilkenny intended to exit China.

‘Mi hermano, you’ve got solid brass cojones the size of grapefruit.’

Fairly confident of what Kilkenny meant by ‘Misty Mountain Hop’, Grin set to work on the number that followed.

‘Display one hundred eleven longitude east.’

A white line shot through the eastern half of China, north to south, just a few hundred miles from Beijing.

‘About three time zones off, if China had more than one. Delete one hundred and eleven longitude east.’

The white line disappeared. Grin sat back with the legal pad and played around with the numbers, trying to ascertain their significance. He recalled that Lord of the Rings opened with the celebration of Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday.

‘Eleven-one,’ he said, breaking the digits apart. ‘One-eleven.’

He drew a backslash between the second and third numeral — 11/1 — and he saw it.

‘November the first. They’re crossing the border sometime tomorrow.’

Satisfied he had cracked the first line of code, Grin went to work on the second. He took the word ZOSO as another reference to Led Zeppelin and sketched the logo associated with the band’s lead guitar player, Jimmy Page.

It took him a while to recall the logo exactly — he’d last drawn it in the margins of his notebooks in high school. As he doodled, the phone purred and he answered it.

‘Gagliardi was our Judas,’ Donoher said, sounding tired and depressed. ‘It was all a scheme to get the mafia’s tentacles back into the Vatican Bank. What a mess. Before I return to the Vatican, I plan to pay a visit to Gagliardi’s nephew to inform him of his uncle’s passing and perhaps send a message of my own.’

‘Gagliardi is dead?’ Grin asked.

‘He passed while I was with him,’ Donoher replied. ‘I went to the hospital this morning mad enough to kill Gagliardi, but in the end, I could only pity the man.’

‘Want some good news?’

‘You have to ask?’

‘I’m pretty sure Nolan plans to cross out of China sometime tomorrow, which from his point of view starts in just a few hours.’

‘Do you know where?’

‘I’m still working on that — the second part of his message is trickier than the first. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something.’

‘God willing, tomorrow will be a bright and glorious day indeed.’

‘Speaking of good news, I hear this day off has been a real boon for the environment,’ Grin offered. ‘All that black smoke billowing out of the Sistine Chapel really jacked up the city’s smog index, not to mention global warming.’

Donoher laughed, forgetting for just a moment the burden he carried. ‘Now I see why you and Nolan get along so well. You’ve got a wicked sense of humor.’ ‘Between Nolan and me, all puns are intended.’ ‘Keep at that message,’ Donoher said. ‘Once Nolan and his team are across the border, I want to be ready to move them as far from China as humanly possible.’