The Malta Exchange (Cotton Malone 14)

“I was the one who alerted the Maltese to both of you,” Spagna said. “I used the attack on the water from earlier as the pretense. I wanted local resources to find you, but now we need to be alone.”

“That conversation I witnessed between the two of you didn’t look all that friendly,” he said.

“I tell my people,” Spagna said, “that sometimes an actor has to play, in a single room, what the script describes as forty rooms. He must make the audience believe all forty exist. To do that, he must change reality. That’s what a good spy does, too. Change reality. Ms. Price is a good spy.”

“Whose side are you on?” Luke asked Spagna.

“Always, my church. My job is to protect it.”

“And what about you?” he said to Laura.

He didn’t like being played. Not ever.

She stared him down. “The only side that matters. My own.”

They kept moving.

He tried to calm down and be the eyes and ears Stephanie needed on the ground. They were now sufficiently far from Republic Street that they could slow their pace. They stopped at the end of an alley, where it intersected with another busy thoroughfare littered with cars. The shops here were all closed for the night. Fewer people on the sidewalks, too.

“It’s nice to make your acquaintance, Mr. Daniels,” Spagna said, offering a hand.

Play the part. Be the gentleman.

He offered his hand in return.

“You both should be honored. I don’t usually work the field.”

“Why are you now?” Luke asked.

Spagna extended his arms in a mock embrace. “Because everything is happening here, on this ancient island. And being at the center of the storm is always the best place to be.”

This guy had style, he’d give him that.

“By the way, Mr. Daniels, do you have a cell phone?”

He nodded and found the unit. Spagna took it from him and tossed it into the street, where an oncoming car crushed the case.

Malone’s voice rushed through his head.

Dumb-ass mistake, Frat Boy.

You think?

“We don’t need to be tracked. I know the Magellan Billet’s standard issue contains constant GPS.”

“Aren’t you a wealth of inside information,” Luke noted. “I bet you’d be hell playing Spy Jeopardy.”

“You can keep your Beretta,” Spagna said, pointing to his exposed shirttail. “Call it a show of my good faith.”

Comforting. But not enough to alleviate his suspicions.

“Tell him what you told me,” Laura said to Spagna.

“I know what Cardinal Gallo is after.”

“That’s all great. But I need to check in with Stephanie Nelle,” Luke pointed out. “She gives me my orders.”

More thunder growled in the distance, signaling storms were coming.

“You can contact her,” Spagna said. “Later. I’ll make sure that happens. Right now she has her hands full trying to save a former agent named Cotton Malone.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Cotton walked back through the refectory, past the empty workstations, and reentered the cloister. Pollux Gallo was gone, but it remained unclear if he’d fled alone. The two brown-robed brothers from the chapter house might still be somewhere on the premises.

He headed back their way with the gun ready.

His clothes were wet from the dousing of the sprinklers, and at the chapter house door he heard the faucets still spewing. He’d regretted the destruction to the manuscripts. All no doubt irreplaceable. But Gallo had brought him here to die. He’d had no choice.

The sprinklers shut off.

He came alert, wondering if that was automatic or by human hand. He peered inside. The tables with their glass domes dripped with water, the floor soaked and puddled. He slipped inside and made a quick run down the end aisle, looking for the guy he’d first taken down, but nobody was there. He fled the chapter house and headed back to the crypt and found the same thing. The robed brother he’d taken down there was also gone. Where were they? And why had Gallo not kept up the attack?

He needed to check the rest of the monastery. Grant had specifically wanted to know about anything on Mussolini. He decided that, so long as he was here, he’d see if there was anything to find.

He left the crypt and returned to the cloister, checking the metal doors, one after another, that lined its inner wall. All of them were closed and protected by electronic locks that required a code from a keypad. At a point diagonally opposite to the chapter house he stopped and stared out through the arches into the darkened courtyard. Lights lit the cloistered corridors on both the ground and second floors. Across, on the far side, he noticed a half-open door on the second level. He was still cautious about the two brothers who had vanished, so he made his way to the nearest staircase and hustled up, keeping a watch in all directions.

The second floor seemed as quiet as the one below.

He approached the half-open door, the room beyond lit with bright fluorescent bulbs. The space was small, maybe thirty feet square, with dark-stained timbers overhead. The stone walls were lined with shelves and cabinets, the center containing another of the stout oak tables, this one devoid of any displays.

He stepped inside and surveyed the shelves.

Many were filled with books, all on Mussolini, in various languages. His trained eye noticed the bindings. Some were cloth, others leather, most wrapped with paper covers protected by Mylar. Several hundred at least. He noticed no overhead sprinklers here. Which made sense. Green metal cabinets, lined in rows, flanked the walls. He opened one to find folios of documents bearing dates starting in 1928 and continuing to 1943. Many of the brittle and fragile typewritten pages inside reminded him of what he’d seen in the elephant-skin satchel. He scanned a few and realized this was the Mussolini archive.

To his right he saw another of the metal cabinets, its doors not fully closed. He stepped across and opened them, revealing four shelves of identical thin, leather-bound volumes. He noticed dates on the spines. All mid- to late 1942. Here and there a book was missing, perhaps nine gone. He slid one of the volumes free. The pages were filled with a heavy, masculine script in black ink. He read some of the Italian, each entry h

eadlined with a specific date, as in a diary.

His gaze raked the room at the shelves and he began to notice gaps where more books had once stood. He wondered if this room had been picked over, the important stuff removed.

He heard a noise beyond the exit doors, out in the cloister.

A scuttle of footsteps.

Perhaps his two problems had finally materialized.

He hustled across and assumed a position to the left of the door, between two of the metal cabinets, his spine flat to the stone wall. He kept the gun at his side, finger on the trigger, ready, raising it as the noise drew closer. Maybe they intended on charging in with a frontal assault.

He waited.

Someone entered the archive.

He aimed his gun.

“I was looking for you,” Stephanie Nelle said calmly.

He lowered the weapon. “What in the hell are you doing here?”

“That was actually going to be my question to you.”

“I’m here because I got greedy and thought I could make an easy hundred thousand euros. I’ve been playing ‘the bait’ all day, and I almost got eaten. Why are you here? And heads up, there are still a couple of threats hanging around.”

She waved off his concern. “I doubt they’re still here.”

“What brings you into the field?”

“There’s a problem developing in Rome with the conclave set to start tomorrow. It’s a big mess, Cotton, and the Entity is involved.”

Those folks he knew all too well, including their head, Danjel Spagna.

“The Lord’s Own?” he asked, adding a smile.

She nodded. “He’s on Malta. He and I go way back, to my time years ago at the State Department.”

He knew what she was referring to.

“Luke is on Malta, too,” she said.

“How is Frat Boy doing? Last time I saw him, he was in a hospital bed.”

“He recovered. But he has his hands full at the moment. And what’s happening there relates directly to what’s happening here. I came to enlist your help.”