Then, as Godin grunted once with effort, his jowl to the flab of Benigni's left side, the prelate felt himself dead-lifted. The soles of his Gucci shoes departed slick granite. Holding Benigni's soft, yielding bulk over his right shoulder like a sack of meal, Godin straightened his legs, upending the monsignor.

Benigni screamed in horror as he stared straight down into the almost black depths of the gorge. Then he was released, launched head downward like a crucified martyr. As the cold air's passage stung his cheeks and eyes he screamed and screamed for God to help.

Godin watched as the monsignor vanished from sight in the mist that boiled from the falls. He put his hands to the small of his back and stretched his body backward as a last thin wisp of scream echoed among alpine peaks. He was capable of dead-lifting far more than the obese prelate's weight, and had used proper form. But his muscles were not so durable as once they were.

Then he doubled over in a coughing fit. What the two huge, hard men and the one huge, soft man had not been able to accomplish, it did; it brought Father Godin almost to his knees.

He hung on to the rail until the fit passed. He dabbed moistness from his mouth with a handkerchief. He put it away without looking at it.

One more job done, he told himself. Doubtless two more will spring up in his place. Yet I can only do what one man can in the service of our Lord.

He checked his own wristwatch, a cheap digital that nonetheless kept time as serviceably as the miniature treasury Benigni had worn strapped to his fat wrist. Then he turned and walked briskly toward the hotel and the highway. He had a flight to catch from Zurich, back to Rome and a discreet rendezvous where he expected to receive the assignment that would cap his long, illustrious career.

And then I will have truly earned my rest, he told himself. But will I be allowed to take it?

Chapter 3

"Ms. Creed," the young Asian woman at the hotel's reception desk said. Her perpetually cheery demeanor had slipped slightly. "I'm afraid I need to let you know that we can't give you an option to renew your room after your reservation runs out the day after tomorrow."

The lobby of the new Ramada Inn on the south side of the small Española Valley town of Pojoaque was decorated in what Annja had come to think of as Southwest Typical. Rounded whitewashed forms hinted at adobe brick beneath – no matter what was really there – rich-colored tile and brass and smoked-mirror trimming were offset by the occasional horsetail-fern accent. It actually produced a pleasant, calming effect even if it had become something of a design cliché.

"Really?" Annja asked. "Why not?"

"We've had a run of new bookings," the young woman said. She had a round, pink face and wore severe black slacks and a white blouse with a bolo tie sporting a silver-and-turquoise sun symbol. "I'm afraid we've committed all of our rooms."

"Is something happening at one of the casinos?" The local Pueblos, clustered thickly in the fertile upper Rio Grande Valley, had already constructed several casinos, giant pyramids of neon and more faux adobe. In fact, the dig site a few miles north and east of the hotel lay on land owned by the San Esequiel Pueblos, who had earmarked the site as part of their own projected casino complex. The tribe would not permit the UNM team to camp on the land; hence the need to find rooms in nearby hotels. The rest of the group were lodged in a Days Inn down the highway.

"Oh, no," the desk clerk said. "They're pilgrims. And paranormal investigators. They're here about the Santo Niño."

"Santo Niño?"

"It means 'Holy Child' in Spanish," the helpful young woman said to Annja, who knew. Annja was fluent in the modern Western Romance languages of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, as well as Latin.

"I see," Annja said.

"It's all over the Internet, you see. There've been sightings here for weeks. People have gotten really excited."

"Who or what is this Holy Child?" Annja asked.

"He's a little boy who appears standing by the roadside. He looks eight or ten. He's wearing some kind of funny clothes – they say totally sixteenth-century Spanish or something. People feel sorry for him and pick him up. He thanks them and warns them something terrible is about to happen. Then he vanishes." She leaned conspiratorially across the counter. "I even read that a Japanese family picked him up a couple days ago. And he talked to them in Japanese!"

"My," Annja said weakly.

Well, at least it's my room for a night or two more, she thought as she sat on the bed a few minutes later, freshly showered and wearing a white fluffy robe and a towel wrapped around her hair as she tapped at her laptop. With the dig winding down, Annja didn't have much holding her in New Mexico. Except –

She felt a strong sense developing that she needed to stay. She wasn't sure why. But she and her companions had seen that terrifying flying thing not two hours earlier. The fear it inspired still seemed to echo in her soul like the tolling of a distant bell.

And now this Santo Niño seemed to be resurrecting the classic vanishing-hitchhiker urban legend. Oddities seemed to be converging on this small area of New Mexico, which was plenty peculiar to start with. And Annja's life was all about strangeness, it seemed.

A few Google search words – "black giant bird anomalous" – took her quickly to a site for a movie from a few years back called The Mothman Prophecies. She hadn't seen it. She had little interest in supernatural stuff, being of a skeptical turn of mind. That site led her to a listing for an ostensibly nonfiction book by a man named John A. Keel, and then to a scattering of paranormal and cryptozoology sites. It was all the usual huffing and conspiracy theorizing. She skimmed for a while and then moved on to other subjects. It probably was just an eagle after all,she told herself.

A quick check of Snopes.com confirmed what she'd first thought. The tale the girl at the front desk had told her about the Holy Child played out pretty close to the classic vanishing-hitchhiker script. Except in those tales the eponymous prophetic hitchhiker wasn't a child in antique Spanish drag, but Jesus Christ, himself.

Strange,she thought.

She felt a rumbling in her stomach and leaned over to pick up an apple from a little basket she'd put on the bedside table. The Española Valley was famous for its apple orchards, and a fresh crop had just been taken in. The local apples were all they were made out to be, she had to admit, as she bit into one.

Next she did a bit of flash research into the Santo Niño stories. He was pretty much as the hotel clerk described him, with a gown and a cape and long locks flowing from under a slouch hat with a pinned-up front.

She read a couple of articles. It was definitely a strange apparition for the early twenty-first century – although if he was going to show up any-where, she had to admit northern New Mexico was just the place. It had a character unlike anywhere else she'd been in North America. It was a place where religious pilgrims walked on their knees at Easter to the sanctuary of the church at Chimayó, just a few miles beyond the dig site from where Annja had been working. And where lines of top-flight physicists drove hybrid cars or rode recumbent bicycles, making their own daily pilgrimage to Los Alamos National Labs not so far away to the west.

But Japanese tourists? There were Japanese Christians, indeed Japanese Catholics, Annja knew The Jesuits, austere, learned, ubiquitous and to Annja's mind, a little bit scary – they started out professedly as a conspiracy to take over the world, after all – had sent missions to Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Indeed, some authorities blamed the Jesuits and rumors that they were assembling an invasion force in the Spanish colonial stronghold of the Philippines, for Tokugawa Iyeyasu's closure of the country to outsiders. And the Philippines, Annja had just learned, was another locus of Santo Niño sightings.