Gabriel looked down at the telephone in the console. “Do it,” he murmured. “I dare you.”

Shamron snatched up the telephone and dialed. “This is Shamron,” he snapped. “There’s an El Al flight leaving Lod for Rome in thirty minutes. It has just developed a mechanical problem that will require a one-hour delay in its departure. Understand?”

TWO HOURS LATER, Bruce Crawford’s telephone purred. He brought the receiver to his ear. He recognized the voice. It was the surveillance man he had assigned to follow Shamron. A dangerous game, following the former chief of the Office on his own soil, but Crawford was under orders.

“After he left the embassy, he went to Lod.”

“What was he doing at the airport?”

“Dropping off a passenger.”

“Did you recognize him?”

The surveillance man indicated that he did. Without mentioning the passenger’s name, he managed to communicate the fact that the man in question was a noteworthy Office agent, recently active in a central European city.

“Are you sure it was him?”

“No doubt about it.”

“Where was he going?”

Crawford, after hearing the answer, severed the connection. A moment later, he was seated before his computer, punching out a secure cable to Headquarters. The text was direct and terse, just the way the addressee liked it.

Elijah is heading to Rome. Arrives tonight on El Al flight from Tel Aviv.

GABRIEL WANTED TO meet the man from the Vatican someplace other than his office on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace. They settled on Piperno, an old restaurant on a quiet square near the Tiber, a few streets over from the ancient Jewish ghetto. It was the kind of December afternoon only Rome can produce, and Gabriel, arriving first, arranged for a table outside in a patch of warm, brilliant sunlight.

A few minutes later, a priest entered the square and headed toward the restaurant at a determined clip. He was tall and lean and as handsome as an Italian movie idol. The cut of his black clerical suit and Roman collar suggested that, while chaste, he was not without personal or professional vanity. And with good reason. Monsignor Luigi Donati, the private secretary of His Holiness Pope Paul VII, was arguably the second most powerful man in the Roman Catholic Church.

There was a cold toughness about Luigi Donati that made it difficult for Gabriel to imagine him baptizing babies or anointing the sick in some dusty Umbrian hilltown. His dark eyes radiated a fierce and uncompromising intelligence, while the stubborn set of his jaw revealed that he was a dangerous man to cross. Gabriel knew this to be true from direct experience. A year earlier, a case had led him to the Vatican and into Donati’s capable hands, and together they had destroyed a grave threat to Pope Paul VII. Luigi Donati owed Gabriel a favor. Gabriel was betting Donati was a man who paid his debts.

Donati was also a man who enjoyed nothing more than whiling away a few hours at a sunlit Roman café. His demanding style had won him few friends within the Curia and, like his boss, he slipped the bonds of the Vatican whenever possible. He had seized Gabriel’s invitation to lunch like a drowning man grasping hold of a lifeline. Gabriel had the distinct impression Luigi Donati was desperately lonely. Sometimes Gabriel wondered whether Donati regretted the life he had chosen.

The priest lit a cigarette with a gold executive lighter. “How’s business?”

“I’m working on another Bellini. The Crisostomo altarpiece.”

“Yes, I know.”

Before becoming Pope Paul VII, Cardinal Pietro Lucchesi had been the Patriarch of Venice. Luigi Donati had been at his side. His ties to Venice remained strong. There was little that happened in his old archdiocese that he didn’t know about.

“I trust Francesco Tiepolo is treating you well.”

“Of course.”

“And Chiara?”

“She’s well, thank you.”

“Have you two given any consideration to…formalizing your relationship?”

“It’s complicated, Luigi.”

“Yes, but what isn’t?”

“You know, for a moment there, you actually sounded like a priest.”

Donati threw back his head and laughed. He was beginning to relax. “The Holy Father sends his regards. He says he’s sorry he couldn’t join us. Piperno is one of his favorite restaurants. He recommends we start with the filetti di baccalà. He swears it’s the best in Rome.”

“Does infallibility extend to appetizer recommendations?”

“The pope is infallible only when he is acting as the supreme teacher on matters of faith and morals. I’m afraid the doctrine does not extend to fried codfish fillets. But he does have a good deal of worldly experience in these matters. If I were you, I’d go with thefiletti. ”

The white-jacketed waiter appeared. Donati handled the ordering. The frascati began to flow, and Donati’s mood mellowed like the soft afternoon. He spent the next few minutes regaling Gabriel with Curial gossip and stories of backstairs brawling and court intrigue. It was all very familiar. The Vatican was not much different from the Office. Finally, Gabriel guided the conversation round to the topic that had brought him and Donati together in the first place: the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holocaust.

“How is the work of the Historical Commission coming along?”

“As well as can be expected. We’re supplying the documents from the Secret Archives, they’re doing the analysis with as little interference from us as possible. A preliminary report of their findings is due in six months. After that, they’ll start work on a multivolume history.”

“Any indications which way the preliminary report is going to go?”

“As I said, we’re trying to let the historians work with as little interference from the Apostolic Palace as possible.”

Gabriel shot Donati a dubious glance over his wineglass. Were it not for the monsignor’s clerical suit and Roman collar, Gabriel would have assumed he was a professional spy. The notion that Donati didn’t have at least two sources on the Commission staff was insulting. Gabriel, between sips of frascati, expressed this view to Monsignor Donati. The priest confessed.

“All right, let’s say I’m not completely in the dark about the Commission.”

“And?”

“The report will take into account the enormous pressures on Pius, yet even so, I’m afraid it will not paint a terribly flattering portrait of his actions, or of the actions of the national churches in central and eastern Europe.”

“You sound nervous, Luigi.”

The priest leaned forward over the table and seemed to choose his next words carefully. “We’ve opened a Pandora’s box, my friend. Once a process like this is set in motion, it’s impossible to predict where it will end and what other areas of the Church it will affect. The liberals have seized on the Holy Father’s actions and are pleading for more: a Third Vatican Council. The reactionaries are screaming heresy.”

“Anything serious?”

Again, the monsignor took an inordinate amount of time before answering. “We’re picking up some very serious rumblings from some reactionaries in the Languedoc region of France -the sort of reactionaries who believe Vatican Two was the work of the Devil and that every pope since John the Twenty-third has been a heretic.”

“I thought the Church was full of people like that. I had my own run-in with a friendly group of prelates and laymen called Crux Vera.”

Donati smiled. “I’m afraid this group is cut from the same cloth, except, unlike Crux Vera, they don’t have a power base inside the Curia. They’re outsiders, barbarians beating at the gates. The Holy Father has very little control over them, and things have started to heat up.”

“Let me know if there’s something I can do to help.”

“Be careful, my friend, I might take you up on that.”

The filetti di baccalà arrived. Donati squeezed lemon juice over the plate and popped one of the fillets into his mouth whole. He washed down the fish with a drink of the frascati and sat back in his chair, his handsome features set in a look of pure contentment. For a priest working in the Vatican, the temporal world offered few delights more tantalizing than lunch on a sun-washed Roman square. He started on another filetti and asked Gabriel what he was doing in town.