Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“, ,” Naylor repeated.

“Again,” Sweaty ordered.

“, ,” Naylor said again.

“Now you know how to say ‘Bless, Your Eminence’ in Russian,” Sweaty said. “When you say it in the dining room, the archbishop will reply, ‘May the Lord bless you,’ and make the Sign of the Cross, and place his right hand on your hands. Then you kiss his hand. That’s it, unless His Eminence decides to introduce you to the archimandrite. If he does, then you go through the routine for him.”

“Got it,” Naylor said.

“You better have it. If you fuc— don’t get it right and His Eminence or His Grace is offended, I’ll chop you into small pieces with my otxokee mecto nanara.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any way I can opt out of this charming ritual?” Dick Miller asked.

“Not and live, there isn’t,” Sweaty said. Then she ordered, “Janos, take them to His Eminence.”

Janos opened the door to the dining room and announced, in Russian, “Your Eminence, Your Grace, the Americans are here.”

“Please ask them to come in,” a voice replied in Russian.

Janos signaled for the Americans and Liam Duffy to enter the dining room.

There were six men in the room, all dressed in black. One of them was Aleksandr Pevsner, a tall, dark-haired man who appeared to be in his late thirties; his eyes were large, and blue, and extraordinarily bright. Another was Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, who was a shade over six feet tall, weighed 190 pounds, and also was in his late thirties. The third was Tom Barlow, who looked so much like Castillo they could pass for brothers. The fourth was Nicolai Tarasov, a forty-odd-year-old short, stocky, and bald Russian. His mother and Aleksandr Pevsner’s mother were sisters. These four wore dark blue, nearly black, single-breasted suits, white shirts, and red-striped neckties. They were all cleanly shaven and looked (at least everyone but bald cousin Nicolai did) to be freshly barbered.

The fifth and sixth men in the room looked as if they hadn’t been close to a barber in a decade or more. Their black beards dropped down over their chests. They, too, were dressed in black, but it was not a single-breasted business suit.

The material of the archimandrite’s garment, the hem of which nearly touched the floor, was velvet, heavily embroidered with white-gold thread. Near the bottom were two representations of winged cherubs surrounded by a leafless tree, also embroidered in gold or white-gold, or maybe platinum, thread.

Draped over his shoulders was a foot-wide—for lack of a better term—black velvet shawl with a white-gold fringe at its ends. Running all the way around it was a white-gold-embroidered border an inch and a half wide into which had been sewn at six-inch intervals gemstones, most of which seemed to be emeralds. The shawl also had representations of cherubs, various versions of the Holy Cross, and some other decorative features. A large golden crucifix hung from a golden chain around his neck, and on his head was a foot-tall white-silk-covered headdress with a tail—like that of French Foreign Legionaires in the desert, D’Alessandro thought—reaching down past his shoulders.

The archbishop was similarly attired, except that he had even more white-gold embroidery and a larger golden crucifix.

Taking a chance that the latter might be His Eminence Archbishop Valentin, Vic D’Alessandro dropped to his knees, touched the floor, put his right hand over his left hand, palms upward, and said, “, .”

“May God bless you, my son,” His Grace the archbishop said, in American English.

When Archimandrite Boris saw the surprised look on Vic’s face, and as he waited for Torine, Miller, and Naylor to play their parts in the ritual as Sweaty had taught them to do, he smiled and said, “Both His Eminence and I were born and raised in Chicago.”

III

[ONE]

La Casa en el Bosque

San Carlos de Bariloche

Río Negro Province, Argentina

0115 6 June 2007

Colonel Jacob Torine was accustomed to being around very senior people, some of whom had worn exotic clothing—among other assignments, he had served as the senior aircraft commander of Air Force One—so while he was impressed with Archbishop Valentin, he wasn’t dazzled.

As soon as the introductions had been made, he said, “It is very gracious of Your Eminence to hold dinner for us.”

“Not at all,” the archbishop replied. “While we were waiting, we’ve been at these magnificent hors d’oeuvres and heeding the advice of Saint Timothy, who admonished us, you may recall…”

“‘Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,’” Torine picked up. “In the King James Bible, First Timothy, chapter five, verse twenty-three. One of my favorite bits of Holy Scripture.”

“That would suggest you’re a Christian, Colonel,” Archbishop Valentin said, “which is one of the questions I planned to pose.”