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Bertie had been teaching at Harvard when the assassination occurred and was as shocked by it as everyone else. When he moved into the circles of power in the seventies, he occasionally made an e
ffort to find out what had happened and who had been behind it. It was a source of constant disappointment to him that he had never found any concrete signs of a conspiracy.
The archbishop of Washington began his march down the aisle wearing the startling blood-red vestments that symbolized the tongues of fire that the Holy Spirit gave to the apostles during Pentecost. He followed a priest in blindingly white robes carrying a golden cross, and another very tall one swinging a censer filled with smoking incense. A flock of cardinals in scarlet frocks with tall white miters on their heads came trailing behind him. The whole effect reminded Bertie of the circuses of his youth. He half-expected a lion tamer to come in next, followed by acrobats and tumblers and a tiny car full of clowns.
The solemn procession passed under the red and gold dome, and sunlight streamed down. This was old-school majesty at its finest, Bertie thought. He was an atheist, but he approved of the sentiment and pageantry. Blind the people with ceremony, circuses, and red robes. Keep them happy and distracted. Power brokers like him could do whatever they wanted.
The choir sang and the organ played and the ceremony began. There was much standing and sitting and kneeling by the congregation, and a reading from the Acts of the Apostles by a junior priest. Bertie had begun to nod off before the actual homily began. He took a sip of green tea to try to wake up. God, he hated green tea.
Bertie stared at the flat-screen. He could see his sons sitting in the front of the church. Like the three wise monkeys. Except they could see, hear, and speak all manner of evil, Bertie thought with a laugh that shook his whole body and brought up some phlegm.
—
Werner shifted uncomfortably in the hard wooden pew. He couldn’t wait to hear the bishop say “Go in peace” so he could get out of there and go back to Blane-Grunwald. He glanced next to him where Hans sat ramrod straight, with no expression on his stony face, chest thrust forward to show off all his medals, as if he were in combat and shouldn’t show fear.
Manny, on the other hand, looked like he was enjoying the hell out the show. Since he was joining the Supreme Court tomorrow, Manny considered himself the guest of honor, as if this whole ceremony was being put on solely for his amusement.
Archbishop Aberrai stepped up to the pulpit, and Werner sighed as Aberrai began to speak in his soothing Ethiopian accent. Keep your eyes open and look awake, Werner thought. The old man was watching C-SPAN and there’d be hell to pay if he caught one of his sons nodding off.
“I have thought long and hard about the words of the reading for today,” Aberrai said. “In this city, we all seem to speak in different languages, don’t we? It’s a bit like the Tower of Babel, isn’t it?”
Blah, blah, blah, Werner thought. What the hell was the idiot talking about? He looked around. If this was his property he’d put in a cash bar. Maybe a Starbucks. God, he could really use a Starbucks.
“Why can’t we speak so that each of us hears the other in his own native tongue?” Aberrai said. “Why can’t we—”
The lights went out.
The church wasn’t plunged into darkness, exactly. There were stained glass windows high up on the walls letting in colored light, and glowing beams streamed down from the opening in the dome. Werner supposed the best way to describe what happened was that the church was plunged into dimness.
—
Riley looked down into the church from high up in the dome. She could see the nave of the cathedral and watched as the congregation reacted to the sudden loss of illumination with quiet disinterest.
“Well,” Archbishop Aberrai said. “I guess this is a sign from above.”
The congregation laughed and the archbishop continued. It was an easy crowd, Riley thought. They were going to love her little slide show. She touched an icon on her iPad, and images were projected from remote cameras scattered around the church. The images were ghostly but clear. Images of gold. A freaking maze of the stuff. The gold hoard in Area 51.
The tall priest holding the censer of incense stepped forward. “You’re looking at images of the world’s gold,” he shouted. “Gold that’s been stolen from the Federal Reserve vault and recast and repositioned in Nevada.”
Werner leapt to his feet. “That man is an impostor. He’s not a priest. That’s Emerson Knight! He’s a wanted man! And he’s insane. Security!”
“Let him finish,” the archbishop said. “I rather like the slide show.”
“Thank you, Alex,” Emerson said to the archbishop. “The gold is at Nellis Air Force Base. It’s being stored in tunnels and caverns under what is commonly called Area 51.”
Hans signaled his aide to stop Emerson and cut off the C-SPAN feed. Manny popped a Rolaid. Werner looked to see where the nearest exit was located.
“Werner Grunwald, Hans Grunwald, Manfred Grunwald. He who covers his sins will not prosper,” Emerson said, dodging a Secret Service agent and bolting for a side altar lined with a series of confessional booths.
Emerson yanked open the door to the first confessional. Gold coins spilled from the tiny room, rolling and clattering and shimmering and spinning on their edges before rattling to rest on the tile floor.
“But whoever confesses and forsakes them shall have mercy,” Emerson said, opening the doors to the other booths and freeing still more coins into the church. Thirty thousand of them in all.
There was stunned silence for ten seconds, and then there was bedlam. Everyone had their phones out, taking selfies and video. C-SPAN clicked back on. Security locked arms to keep people away from the coins. The network news trucks returned to the cathedral and jockeyed for position. And Werner vomited all over the floor of the men’s room.
Bertie Grunwald threw the remote at the flat-screen but it fell short. Fucking modern televisions, he thought. Too damn far away.
Riley had been in the interrogation room for six hours. For most people, this would have been a terrible hardship. Even a few weeks ago, Riley herself would have seen it as a nightmare.
