The occasion itself enforced the mood. Even a group of mildly punked-out Anglo kids who had walked near Annja for the past few hundred yards, scoffing among themselves, paused to buy candles from a little card-table vendor set discreetly on the outskirts of the church grounds. Now they walked softly without speaking, their young faces showing mostly a sort of awed expectation in the lights of the fat little yellow or white votive candles they carried in gloved and mittened hands.
Annja approached the church through a grove of cruelly topped cottonwood trees, with thin shoots rising unnaturally vertically from the lopped-off stumps of once mighty limbs. Many leaves still clung to shoots and limbs, probably still colorful to judge by what she had seen of the rest of the river valley and its flanking mountains, where great stands of aspen had caught flame in autumn yellows and reds. The snow muted any color the dry leaves held, made them sodden and dull. On the outskirts of the little grove several ambulances and emergency vehicles were parked. The EMTs stood around or sat in open doors, chatting and smoking.
Annja's boots crunched in the new snow. Despite the solemnity of the setting and affair, and the overhanging sense of dread, Annja felt a certain schoolgirl's delight at walking through snow. It was still a relative novelty for her. Growing up in New Orleans she could remember seeing snow only twice, once during a freak dusting of the city, a second time during a field trip some of the girls unaccountably were taken on to Cleveland, Ohio around Thanksgiving.
"And how is our warrior maid this evening?" a voice called softly in French.
Annja turned quickly around to see the trim, erect form of Father Robert Godin standing beneath a tree with utterly bare limbs, his hands in the pockets of his scuffed leather jacket. She felt an urge to move away quickly, and another urge to walk right up and slap him.
What she did was sigh and walk toward him. She kept a hand discreetly ready to move for the butt of the compact .40-caliber Glock 23 she carried in a holster clipped at the small of her back. She was not going to be caught off guard again. It gave her range the sword lacked. Also, if she did have to defend herself its effects would be a lot easier to explain.
"I'm cold," she said. "I didn't pack for this weather. I wasn't really thinking of this as a skiing trip."
He laughed softly with that seamed hound's face of his. "Let us hope you don't find things too warm soon."
She recoiled slightly. He frowned and shook his head. "Ah. Forgive me. A careless choice of words, was it not? I intended no reference to your illustrious predecessor. But rather to the possibility of vigorous action. Please forgive a young, gauche Antwerp wharf rat grown into an old, gauche Antwerp wharf rat, if you will."
She laughed and shook her head.
She came and stood by him, all the while wondering why. Just seeking the comfort of familiar companionship, on such a strange and fraught occasion, she thought. Although the more cynical part of her wondered why she might take comfort from the presence of someone who'd recently tried, determinedly and skillfully, to disable or kill her. She was beginning to understand the complex connection between Roux and Garin a little better.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, still speaking French. It seemed a useful security measure. Many of the people she had overheard spoke Spanish, and most of the rest spoke English.
"The same as you," he said. He didn't look at her, but instead scanned the scene ceaselessly from behind his round lenses. "Something will happen here tonight."
He glanced at her then, with a hint of a smile. "Or do you pretend to yourself not to sense it?"
She shook her head, frowning. "I don't even know what the hell I'm doing here talking to you. Aside from the fact you tried to shootme – "
"A misunderstanding, shall we say?"
"I did a little online research on you. You have quite the résumé. Belgian paratrooper. Congo mercenary. French Foreign Legionnaire. Ph.D.s in history and psychology."
"Please don't leave out civil engineering," he said. "That was the hardest, by far."
"Globally renowned antiterrorism expert. And if I paid attention to conspiracy sites, what you've done the past twenty years has been a lot spookier than what you did in your mercenary days, and not a lot less bloody."
His smile was abstracted. He was scanning the scene again. His weight was rotated forward on the balls of his athletic shoes. He seemed tense as a hunting dog who's caught the first whiff of prey and is straining at the leash.
"You're well advised to ignore them. Their purported facts are absurdly mistaken. If not necessarily their take on the natureof what I am about."
She stared at him with mingled disbelief and horror. "You admit it? You're actually a hit man for the Vatican?"
Several Latino couples passing nearby, middle-aged and dressed in their Sunday best, looked sternly over at her outburst. Fortunately, they gave no sign of understanding what Annja had said.
"My niece apologizes," Godin told them in Spanish. "She finds herself somewhat overwrought by the occasion. She is an impressionable child."
The matronly scowls softened into smiles and nods. The men smiled, too, trying not to look too closely, much less too approvingly, at the leggy young gringa.
The youngest of the women noticed Godin's collar. "Your blessing, Father?" she asked shyly.
"To be sure," he said warmly. He blessed them. They crossed themselves and murmured thanks.
A shadow passed over Godin's face. He set his mouth, coughed behind his lips. To Annja's look of concern he gave a quick shake of his head.
"Sometimes I don't know whether to hug you or punch you," she continued in French.
"If you don't answer my question I'm walking away," she said. "Are you really a secret enforcer from the Vatican?"
He stuck a thumb inside his collar and fished out a round silver medallion hung from a fine silver chain. She squinted to look at it in the uncertain light. Then her eyes widened in shocked surprise. It looked like a crudely struck coin. It prominently showed a cross, not of squared timbers, but logs knobbly with the stubs of hacked-off limbs. To the left the cross was flanked by a small bush, possibly laurel. To the right was an upright straight-bladed sword, not so very different from the one that answered Annja's call. Around it were inscribed tiny words.
" Exurge domine et judica causam tuam," she said, half-breathlessly.
He nodded. "'Arise, O Lord, and judge thy cause,'" he translated, though certain she knew it. "Your eyes are very fine."
"I don't have to read it. That's the insignia of the Inquisition!" she exclaimed.
"Quite."
"I didn't think the holy office existed anymore."
"They have gone through some changes. And my functions are not – how shall we say? – openly acknowledged."
She took a step away from him. He laughed.
"You need have no fear of me. I have not the slightest interest in burning heretics or witches. But even as my somewhat questionable predecessors thought they were doing, I am engaged in protecting the body and soul of the church. And of humanity itself, communicant or otherwise."
"How?" she asked.
"You are familiar with the concept of spiritual warfare?" Godin asked.
"You wage spiritual warfare for the Vatican?"
He smiled. "Not exactly, my dear. When it ceases to be a metaphor – and moves beyond the purely spiritual, as it were – that is when my real work begins."