A Woman Involved. John Davis Gordon

      She massaged her forehead. She said, ‘And you’ll examine the contents, I suppose.’ She shrugged wearily. ‘You won’t find anything. Because I’ve destroyed it. But the keys must be guarded.’

      He frowned at her. ‘What have you destroyed?’

      She shook her head, rubbing her forehead. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

      ‘Of course it matters! Or the Russians wouldn’t be after it.’

      Her nerves cracked and she cried: ‘One page from his notebook! Containing a list of numbers, that’s all!’

      ‘Numbers? Of what? Safety-deposit boxes?’

      She cried, ‘Of course! If you were Max where else would you keep something that could destroy the whole Roman –’

      She opened her eyes, aghast. She stared at him; then she dropped her head, and held it.

      ‘Oh God, forgive me …’ she whispered.

      Morgan stared at her. Destroy the whole Roman what? The whole Roman Catholic Church? … She sat tensely, then she flung her head up. She waved her hand angrily at the bag.

      ‘Go ahead! The box numbers are listed in his will, anyway.’

      He frowned. ‘But, if the numbers are listed in the will, why did you destroy the numbers in the notebook?’

      Suddenly tears were glistening.

      ‘All the numbers except two are listed in the will! And those are the numbers I’ve destroyed! They are in my head! I memorized them!’

      ‘But tell me why …’

      She cried at him: ‘Because I’m going to destroy what’s in those two boxes, that’s why!’

      And she threw herself on the mattress and put her hands over her face. She sobbed once. And he came down beside her and put his arms around her. She cried: ‘I’m not going to tell anybody … I’ll die first, like God’s Banker hanging from Blackfriars Bridge! … And if you try to take me anywhere I’ll fight you tooth and nail!’ …

      His exhausted mind was racing. God’s Banker hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London? Two months ago? The Italian banker? … He held her, his mind fumbling.

      ‘I won’t try to take you anywhere you don’t want to go.’

      She lay, racked, sobbing her exhaustion into her hands; he held her, and oh God he hated this whole stinking business; then she twisted in his arms.

      ‘Do you swear?’

      His heart turned over for her. ‘Yes.’

      She lay still a moment; then she sat up abruptly. She looked at him hard. ‘And you’re not here to trick me – do you swear to that?’

      He said: ‘I swear it …’

11

      Over at old Pearls airport there was still scattered gunfire as the Marines mopped up the Revolutionary Army and the Cubans. The Rangers were still clearing the new airfield of the earth-moving equipment and spikes under sniper fire; they hot-wired the bulldozers and steamrollers and they used them as tanks to charge Cuban positions, and there were running battles and counter-attacks, and all the time the thudding of the mortars and the stench of cordite. The Revolutionary Army retreated back through the town, commandeering houses for defence positions and setting up barricades; they swarmed around the True Blue medical campus, and the American students lay low in their rooms, the bullets smashing and whining and ricocheting everywhere. And now helicopter gun-ships came clattering through the sky to take on the People’s Revolutionary Army surrounding Government House, but first they had to take on the anti-aircraft guns at Fort Frederick and Fort Ruppert, and the thudding and thundering and clattering and chattering filled the sky and shook the windows.

      Upstairs, Anna Hapsburg was in an exhausted sleep at last.

      Once upon a time, when he was a schoolboy, Jack Morgan had been deeply religious, and a Catholic. But university and the rough-and-tumble of the Navy had changed that. He found he could no longer believe in a God who would damn him to eternal flames, if only because no twentieth-century judge would sentence anybody to such a punishment for anything; nor could he believe in a God who logged up millions of prayers a minute like a mighty computer and tried to rearrange the world on request, if only because such a God cannot be persuaded to change His mind because, being omniscient, He already knew whether He was going to change His mind or not. And so Jack Morgan, scientist, had reluctantly become an atheist. But then he had the good fortune to meet Anna Valentine and read a book called Summa in Theologica, written in the fourteenth century. And, to his relief, the good Saint Thomas had proved to him, through pure, invincible Aristotelian logic, that a God existed – even if he could not, by logic, prove what kind of God He was. And Morgan had been able to believe again. It was a long way from the Holy Roman Church that he used to believe so completely, but Jack Morgan had the comfort of being able to pray again, at least in homage.

      But it was different for Anna Hapsburg. She believed completely.

      He looked at her. She lay on her stomach, one leg bent, her long hair matted across her face.

      Her beloved Roman Catholic Church? Was that what this secret, this Nazi file was all about? ‘Something that could destroy the whole Roman …’ she had said. And she had been aghast that it had slipped out.

      An important Western institution, Brink-Ford had said.

      Well, if the authority of the Catholic Church were suddenly destroyed, many governments would be in trouble. Latin America – the power of the Church there was enormous, it was the opium of the masses. If the Russians had the ability to undermine the Catholic Church, to destroy its authority, it would enormously help their policy of world-wide revolution, of ‘liberating the world from the capitalist yoke’.

      Morgan dragged his hands down his face. But all this was guess-work.

      He was too tired to think straight. Oh, to sleep. To just take her in his arms and sleep, sleep, sleep. But he could not. It had all been go go go, so much action, so much tension, that the enormity of it hadn’t fully sunk in until now. The Russians had sent a man to get her and she had killed him … And if she hadn’t she would probably be dead herself now – the information extracted from her, her body dumped midst the ruins out there. And if the British couldn’t get the information out of her politely? He was bloody sure they’d get it somehow. And then what? Do they just turn her loose afterwards, to tell every newspaper what the terrible British had done to her, to shout her story from the rooftops? Including perhaps the very information they so desperately wanted to get their hands on. Or did even the pukka British make sure people didn’t talk?

      God, it was like a bad dream. Gone was the euphoria of finding her, of knowing she was safe for the moment.

       Something Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, a Nazi war criminal, knew.

      Something the Catholic Church had done during the Second World War?

      Collaborated with the Nazis? But it was common knowledge that the Catholic Church had not raised its voice to stop the Nazi extermination of the Jews, that the Pope of that time made a concordat, a live-and-let-live deal with Hitler to ensure that the Holy Roman Church was allowed to survive. But would that, so long after the event, shake the Church to its foundations, destabilize the Western world?

       Something that God’s Banker had died over? …

      He gave an exhausted sigh and looked down at the contents of her handgrip, spread on the floor.

      The notebook. Passports. The will. Some share certificates. Some newspaper and magazine articles. A wad of money. The keys.

      The passports. Three. At least one was false. It was an American passport, it