Page 13 of Bitter Burn
Take it. I wrote them down.
I don’t have time to consider that I’m wrong about what he meant, and I take the Bible with me when I go, marking the story with the ribbon before closing it. Jacob and Esau. Not the story I’d want to go out on if I had a choice. I’d want rods and staffs and comfort—maybe some talk of vines and branches—not tent stew and deception.
I leave the way I came, and no one pays me any mind as I stroll back into the warren of streets, a leather book tucked under my arm. I get back to my hotel late in the day, shower, pack my things, and then walk to the train station. My suit and gloves from earlier are neatly dispatched in a wood-fired bread oven—with some money given to the baker for his trouble—and it seems like so far, no one has drawn a connection between a tall, blond tourist and the two fresh corpses in the city.
I board a train to Tangier, tuck myself against the window, and fall asleep.
Seven
Mark
I wake just before Tangier with a twinge in my right knee and a cramp deep in my chest. I stretch my leg out carefully before standing and getting my things; I don’t bother trying to do anything with my chest. I already know the two pretty reasons why it hurts.
There are two ways to disappear, or at least to disappear well. You can vanish—there one breath and gone the next, the kind of disappearing that either happens because you’re very quick or because you have your fingers in a salient digital pie—or you can evanesce over the space of a few hours, dissipating like fog on glass, fading until there’s nothing left for anyone to follow. For example, anyone who noted the well-heeled British tourist in Fez might have been able to find his name—Trevor Owens—and see that he boarded a train to Tangier. But the man who stepped off the train in Tangier is no longer blond or well dressed or even British…he is dark-haired in a worn T-shirt with the tired shuffle of a gig worker. He will not board a train or a plane or a ferry, and he will not linger, and by the time a red-haired man slips off a freighter docking at Algeciras to pay cash for a car and drive to the French border, Trevor Owens will be little better than a ghost.
I am still prepared to bribe my way out of the messes I left behind in Fez, but honestly, I’d rather not spend the secrets if I don’t have to. I have a feeling I’ll need everything in my treasury before I’m done bringing down Cashel and Ys.
On the freighter, I dye my hair again, change clothes, and slip some cash to the captain before I step onto Spanish soil and strike for the part of town where I’ll be able to find a new phone and a car that doesn’t require real paperwork. I don’t have to go far—just that scabbed-over seam where the industrial section meets the actual town, the shore where the dockworkers and incoming crew eddy with the unhoused, the unemployed, and police looking for smuggled hashish. And that’s where I see the news, blaring from a mounted television inside a narrow store selling T-shirts, cigarettes I’m certain are smuggled from Gibraltar, and, most importantly, cheap cell phones.
My Spanish is strong, but it still takes a moment for the chatter of the news anchors to sink in, for me to hear not just the news but the low tones of the people smoking on the steps outside the store.
The pope is dead.
Fuck.
The news report is low on details. They only say that the pope died last night—lingering complications from a prior surgery—and that the funeral is four days from now. The papal conclave will follow quickly after, and then the cardinals will select the new pope from among their number.
The anchor talks about the pope’s ailing health over the last year as the feed cuts to the gathering crowds in St. Peter’s Square. The camera focuses on a microphone, presumably meant for an imminent statement. Behind it, the cardinals and bishops stand like a cloud of blackbirds trimmed in scarlet and amaranth red. I see Cashel at the very edge, conferring with a monsignor with their heads bent. Whatever Cashel is saying, he’s saying it quickly, the monsignor nodding and nodding as he taps something onto his phone. When the monsignor inclines his head briefly and strides away, Cashel turns back to face the crowd, his expression one of beatific solemnity, of profound sadness and yet also humble reassurance.
Another monsignor scurries up to the group, all of them turning and shuffling to confer—there is no overstating how complicated the choreography is for a Holy Father’s death, a constant tension of practical and ecumenical demands, all of them overlapping onto a modern media and legal ecosystem—and I watch as Cashel lifts a hand to his jaw and rubs while the monsignor gestures behind him at the basilica.
I don’t need to see any more.
The pope is dead. Cashel has made his move.
I purchase my new phone, activate the eSIM, use the browser to access a surveillance portal protected by multiple layers of authentication. The same portal I used to track Tristan and Isolde to Morois.
I stare at the two dots moving at a train’s speed eastward from Calais. In the direction of Rome.
Shit.
I call Andrea and explain why I won’t be back at Lyonesse tomorrow as planned and ask her to let Dinah and Sedge know too. Then I call my twin.
“This is Trevena,” Melody answers crisply. She’s the newly sworn-in deputy director of the NSA and very busy now. I don’t care.
“It’s me.”
She sighs. “Hold on.”
I hear movement and then the closing of a door. I imagine her in her spacious office, the newly crowned monarch of Fort Meade, ready to shape the world with a flick of her fingertips.
“Okay,” she says. “What is it—and before you tell me, please tell me that you’re not on your way to Rome right now.”
“I’m on my way to Rome right now.”
I hear something between a scoff and a sigh.
“You know Cashel is behind this. This is his play. This is how he gets the ring.”
