Gregg Loomis - The Coptic Secret

Viktor crossed his arms. "I stretch my neck for you, Lang."

"OK, fifteen hundred including the passport."

Lang was more than willing to pay the two thousand. That was not the point. Like most Italians, Viktor admired the art of bargaining. Lang would have lost face had he simply paid the first price offered.

Fifteen minutes later, Lang felt the reassuring weight of the Colt in his belt under his shirt as he left Viktor's apartment. He had had his picture taken for a passport that would be ready about this time tomorrow.

He was returning to the Vatican by the most direct route possible. This included crossing the multilaned Lungotevere dei Tebaldi.

Even during the afternoon recess, automobiles, buses and scooters clogged the boulevard. There are unwritten rules of crossing a street in Rome: If a driver knows a pedestrian has seen him, the vehicle continues, insane speed undiminished. The wary street-crosser stays in the crosswalk, eyes down, pretending to see nothing but the pavement in front of him.

Observing the rule, Lang was about to step off the curb when an alarm went off in his head. Agency training, intuition, blind luck. Something was out of place, an aberration like an open front door in an affluent neighborhood.

There was no one behind him, nothing…

He saw them.

Two workmen, one approaching from his left, the other from his right, their gait timed so that each would reach him simultaneously. Restoration and construction is always in progress in Rome, but work sites, like businesses, closed for the first part of the afternoon and it was not likely that the two were out for a stroll in the midday heat. And their clothes, though worn, were clean, none of the city's yellow dust or grainy grime that came from working with old stone.

Street crime in Rome tends to limit itself to picking pockets or snatching purses. Neither of these two looked the

type. They lacked the furtive movements. Besides, pickpockets and purse snatchers rarely operated in tandem.

Lang's hand went to the heavy weight in his belt. No, that wouldn't work. Shots would draw the carabinieri or polizia that were never far away. Just having the gun was a serious crime, and Lang didn't enjoy the thought of being imprisoned where his enemies could easily reach him. The two workmen knew that, too. A quick stab with a knife and they would continue on their way before anyone knew what had happened.

Where the hell had they come from? A picture of the two priests flashed across Lang's mind. Like most people, when he saw a priest, a cop, a soldier, he tended to see the uniform, not the face. He had failed to notice the two priests outside the bank, two clerics dressed in full cassocks that could easily conceal the clothes he now saw.

He took a look up and down the street, busy no matter what the hour. Of course there wasn't a taxi to be seen and the nearest bus stop was a block away. A dash across the street could prove as fatal as not moving.

In Rome, there were two types of jaywalkers: the quick and the dead.

Turning slowly, the moves of a man uncertain where he was going, Lang began to limp back toward the ghetto. There, if he had to use the.45, he had a better chance of getting lost in the winding streets.

The two workmen peeled off in unison, making no effort to conceal their intent to follow.

As Lang would have said during his years with the agency, he had a tactical situation.

v.

Schlossberg

Baden-Baden, Germany

At the Same Time

Gurt had thought the hike would have tired Manfred. Perhaps it had been the conversation with Lang. For whatever reason, the child had been cross all morning. He had complained about the same breakfast he had eaten without comment every day. He grew tired of his favorite toys.

Gurt had even allowed her son a rare interlude with the television. She usually forbade more than a few minutes of sitting in front of a device she suspected rotted brain cells, as witness the women she had met in the States who sat in front of the thing all day while their husbands pursued cardiac arrest at jobs that allowed them to meet the women's demands. Usually trophy second wives who shared Lang's condo building could speak only of the morning dramas that never seemed to reach conclusions.

What were they called? Something to do with washing, although Gurt had never seen anyone bathing the two times she watched the mindless action. Laundry shows? No. Never mind.

The same women spent afternoons with cooking demonstrations on TV when the only thing they made for dinner were reservations.

Even the magic box had not calmed Manfred.

Gurt was a loving mother, but she did not subscribe to the irrational thought that a child should be given a choice between obedience and "time out." When discipline was called for, she applied it, usually to the seat of Manfred's pants. It was old-fashioned but effective to make markets, airlines and other public places more enjoyable. Unfortunately it had gone out of style in America.

Gurt's father looked up from his Süddeutsche Zeitung, speaking in English as Gurt insisted whenever Manfred was present. "Why not take the automobile into town? You may find something to amuse him there."

Not one to cater to irritable children, even her own, Gurt gave the idea consideration. Inflicting a whining child on someone else, even a grandparent, was selfish, another concept long dead in America. But it might work. Baden-Baden liked to call itself Europe's vacation spot, as indeed it had been when crowned heads from Portugal to Russia had visited in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to partake of the mineral baths that supposedly had curative powers. The custom dated back to the first-century Romans who had founded the town.

European royalty was notably lacking these days, but tourists still came to take the baths, lounge in the Belle Epoch hotels and gamble in the Rococo casino that sat like a gem on green velvet in the narrow meadow that was the valley of the river Oos. The river, though scenic, would hardly rate the status of a creek in the US.

Gamble.

Also horse racing.

Horses.

Manfred loved to watch the horses as they were put through their morning exercises.

Gurt took her son by the hand. "Come, Manfred, we will go see the horses."

That suggestion, along with the hint they might have lunch in whatever American junk food spot had recently opened, brightened the child's disposition to the extent he forgot his usual complaints when buckled into the child seat that occupied most of the backseat of the ancient but pristine Volkswagen.

The road, a snake of pavement, wound around steep hills. Gurt had driven enough here that she knew every bend well enough to reduce driving to an almost subconscious level.

Certainly her mind was not completely on the task at hand.

Why was it, she asked herself, that women are ultimately stuck with the job of nurturing the children?

Because if men did it, no one would ever grow up.

Still, it wasn't fair that Lang was doing something exciting in Rome while she was reduced to taking a tot to watch horses. Of course, she admitted, she had not given Lang the chance to experience his son's early days, his first step, his first word. Perhaps she had been a bit overly independent, too fearful her freedom would be compromised.

That was when she noticed the big Mercedes in the rearview mirror.

Rich people were fairly common in the area, so expensive cars were no surprise.

But this one was flashing its lights and blowing its horn as though to pass.

"Car make noise," Manfred observed, twisting his neck to look out of the rear window.

In itself, again no surprise. The wealthy were frequently in a hurry.

But pass?

The ribbon of asphalt had few straight stretches and fewer shoulders. The outside of each turn was lined with flimsy-looking Armco barrier and the inside tended to climb vertically.