Berry, Steve - the Third Secret

A part of him resented Clement for what he’d done. History was replete with popes selected simply because they would soon die, and many of them had fooled everyone by lasting a decade or more. Jakob Volkner could have been one of those pontiffs. He was truly making a difference. Yet he ended all hope with a self-induced sleep.

Michener, too, felt like he was asleep. The past couple of weeks, starting with that awful Monday morning, seemed a dream. His life, once resonant with order, now gyrated out of control.

He needed order.

But stopping on the third-floor landing he knew that only more chaos lay ahead. Sitting on the floor, outside his apartment door, was Katerina Lew.

“Why am I not surprised you found me again?” he said. “How did you do it this time?”

“More secrets everybody knows.”

She came to her feet and brushed grit from her pants. She was dressed the same as this morning and still looked lovely.

He opened the apartment door.

“Still going to Romania?” she asked.

He tossed the key on a table. “Plan on following?”

“I might.”

“I wouldn’t book a flight just yet.”

He told her about Medjugorje and what Ngovi had asked him to do, but omitted the details of Clement’s e-mail. He wasn’t looking forward to the trip and told Katerina so.

“The war’s over, Colin,” she said. “It’s been quiet there for years.”

“Thanks to American and NATO troops. It’s not what I would call a vacation destination.”

“Then why go?”

“I owe it to Clement and Ngovi,” he said.

“You don’t think your debts are paid?”

“I know what you’re going to say. But I was considering leaving the priesthood. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”

Her face registered shock. “Why?”

“I’ve had enough. It’s not about God, or a good life, or eternal happiness. It’s about politics, ambition, greed. Every time I think about where I was born, it makes me sick. How could anybody think they were doing something good there? There were better ways to help those mothers, yet nobody even tried. They just shipped us all off.” He shifted on his feet and found himself staring down at the floor. “And those kids in Romania? I think even heaven has forgotten them.”

“I’ve never seen you this way.”

He stepped toward the window. “Odds are Valendrea will soon be pope. There’s going to be a lot of changes. Maybe Tom Kealy had it right after all.”

“Don’t give that ass credit for anything.”

He sensed something in her tone. “All we’ve talked about is me. What have you been doing since Bucharest?”

“Like I said, writing some pieces on the funeral for a Polish magazine. I’ve also been doing background work on the conclave. The magazine hired me to do a feature.”

“Then how can you go to Romania?”

Her expression softened. “I can’t. Wishful thinking. But at least I’ll know where to find you.”

The thought was comforting. He knew that if he never saw this woman again he would be sad. He recalled the last time, all those years ago, when they’d been alone together. It was in Munich, not long before he was to graduate law school and return to Jakob Volkner’s service. She’d looked much the same, her hair a bit longer, her face a moment fresher, her smile equally appealing. Two years he’d spent loving her, knowing the day would come when he would have to choose. Now he realized the mistake he’d made. Something he’d said to her earlier in the square came to mind. Just don’t make the same mistakes twice. That’s all any of us can hope for.

Damn right.

He stepped across the room and took her into his arms.

She did not resist.

Michener opened his eyes and focused on the clock next to the bed. Ten forty-three P.M. Katerina lay beside him. They’d been asleep nearly two hours. He did not feel guilty for what had happened. He loved her, and if God had a problem with that, then so be it. He didn’t really care anymore.

“What are you doing awake?” she said through the dark.

He’d thought her sleeping. “I’m not used to waking up with somebody in my bed.”

She nuzzled her head against his chest. “Could you get used to it?”

“I was just asking myself the same thing.”

“I don’t want to leave this time, Colin.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Who said you had to?”

“I want to go with you to Bosnia?”

“What about your magazine assignment?”

“I lied. I don’t have one. I’m here, in Rome, because of you.”

His answer was never in doubt. “Then maybe a Bosnian holiday would do us both some good.”

He’d gone from the public world of the Apostolic Palace to a realm where only he existed. Clement XV was ensconced within a triple coffin beneath St. Peter’s and he was naked in bed with a woman he loved.

Where it all was going, he could not say.

All he knew was that he finally felt content.

THIRTY-EIGHT

MEDJUGORJE, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 28

1:00 P.M.

Michener stared out the bus window. The rocky coast whizzed past, the Adriatic Sea choppy thanks to a howling wind. He and Katerina had flown into Split on a short flight from Rome. Tourist buses had lined the airport exits, their drivers clamoring for passengers to Medjugorje. One of the men explained this was the slow time of the year. Pilgrims arrived at the rate of three to five thousand a day in summer, but that number dwindled to several hundred from November through March.

Over the past two hours a guide had explained to the fifty or so making the bus trip that Medjugorje sat in the southern portion of Herzegovina, near the coast, and that a mountainous wall to the north isolated the region both climatically and politically. The guide explained that the name Medjugorje meant “land between the hills.” Croats dominated the population, and Catholicism flourished. In the early 1990s, when communism fell, the Croats immediately sought independence, but the Serbs—the real power brokers in the former Yugoslavia—invaded, trying to create a Greater Serbia. A bloody civil war raged for years. Two hundred thousand lost their lives until finally the international community stopped the genocide. Another war then flared between Croats and Muslims, but quickly ended when UN peacekeepers arrived.

Medjugorje itself had escaped the terror. Most of the fighting was waged to its north and west. Only about five hundred families actually lived in the area, but the town’s mammoth church hosted two thousand, and the guide explained that an infrastructure of hotels, guest houses, food vendors, and souvenir shops was now transforming the place into a religious mecca. Twenty million people from around the world had come. At last count, there’d been some two thousand apparitions, something unprecedented in Marian visions.

“Do you believe any of this?” Katerina whispered to him. “A little far-fetched that the Madonna comes to earth every day to speak with a woman in a Bosnian village.”

“The seer believes, and Clement did, too. Keep an open mind, okay?”

“I’m trying. But which seer do we approach?”

He’d been thinking about that. So he asked the guide more about the seers and learned that one of the women, now thirty-five, was married with a son and lived in Italy. Another woman, thirty-six, was married with three children and still lived in Medjugorje, but she was intensely private and saw few pilgrims. One of the males, in his early thirties, tried twice to become a priest but failed and still hoped to one day achieve Holy Orders. He traveled extensively, bringing the Medjugorje message to the world, and would be difficult to find. The remaining male, the youngest of the six, was married with two children and talked little to visitors. Another of the females, almost forty, was married and no longer lived in Bosnia. The remaining woman was the one who continued to experience apparitions. Her name was Jasna, thirty-two years old, and she lived alone in Medjugorje. Her daily visitations were many times witnessed by thousands at St. James Church. The guide explained that Jasna was an introverted woman of few words, but she did take the time to speak with visitors.