The Secret Cardinal

58

Grin awoke with a start as the riffs of ‘Gimme Shelter’ poured from the computer’s speakers. He adjusted his glasses and clicked on the center of the logo to retrieve Kilkenny’s message.

‘Not a story problem,’ Grin howled. ‘I hate story problems.’

He dismissed this thought as quickly as it came, writing it off to his body’s natural desire for an undisturbed sleep cycle — something he had missed over the past two weeks.

Then he thought about the original quote: There’s a sucker born every minute. It was a cynical expression, to be sure, but it perfectly expressed the view of the master showman who coined it. Grin wondered what message Kilkenny was trying to send with it.

If there’s one born every minute initially, Grin thought, what happens afterward?

He wondered how time figured into this, and what was causing the initial minute to change. He quickly filled a clean page on his legal pad with every random thought that flashed into his sleep-deprived brain. His mind finally went blank, the well empty.

‘Initial minute, initial time,’ he said aloud, hoping the sound of his own voice might reignite his synapses.

‘Initial,’ Grin said again, the word becoming almost a mantra.

Then he saw the first line he’d written on the page.

There’s a sucker born every minute — P.T. Barnum

If it isn’t time, Grin mused, maybe it is initials.

He circled Barnum’s first and middle initials and brought up the map of the region where he believed Kilkenny was located. In the middle of one of the valleys that ran from Tibet in Ladakh, he saw a long thin lake shaped like a flattened letter N. On the Tibetan side, the lake was called Bangong Co, but across the border it became Pangong Tso.

P.T. Ah, Pangong Tso! He had it.

Grin picked up the phone and dialed Donoher. The Camerlengo answered before the second ring.

‘You’ve heard from Nolan?’ Donoher asked.

‘Yeah, and something’s happened. I got a very specific message pointing to a lake that straddles the border between China and India. It’s right through one of the valleys I thought he’d use.’

‘Then you were right.’

‘About the valley, yeah, but Nolan’s pointing us to the lake, or specifically the Indian side of the lake. I don’t think they’re in the air anymore — they’re traveling by water.

‘Which means they’ll be on foot once they reach India. I’ll pass the word to our people there,’ Donoher said. ‘Let me know if you hear anything else.’