The Malta Exchange (Cotton Malone 14)

More than five, though.

Eleven total.

Seemed the seller was holding a few in reserve.

Jackpot.

He replaced the documents and closed the satchel. All had remained quiet inside the villa. The bear was long gone. He should follow suit. He left the study, turning toward the staircase, passing several of the open third-floor doors. His orders called for him to drive to Milan and promptly turn over whatever he obtained.

Suddenly he was struck hard from behind.

His body jerked forward, as though hit by an explosion at his right ear. Trails of light arced before him. His legs caved. He quickly realized there’d been no explosion, only a blow to the back of his head. He tried to rebound, but collapsed, consciousness drifting in and out.

He hit the floor hard against his right shoulder.

Then all daylight vanished.

CHAPTER FOUR

MALTA

9:50 A.M.

Luke Daniels loved the sea, which was strange for an ex–Army Ranger. Most of his service to the country had occurred on dry land. But ever since leaving the military and joining the Magellan Billet, he’d found himself on water more often than not. He’d first met Cotton Malone in the cold chop of the Øresund off Denmark, and only recently he’d completed risky assignments in the Indian Ocean and Java Sea. Now he was bobbing along off the north coast of Malta, sitting in the bow of a twenty-five-foot, deep V-hull, his short hair and open shirt damp with salt spray. He’d found an advertisement yesterday for a local water sports business, one of a zillion vendors that ran out of the many seaside resorts, each catering to the thousands of tourists who came here year-round.

Up, up in the air. Imagine a parachute glide using our special parasailing boat. Our guests take off from the boat and soar to 250 feet over the sea with breathtaking views of the island. At the end of this unforgettable experience, they land back safely on the boat. You can live this flying adventure alone or with a friend. You can glide either in the morning, or take off in the afternoon, to enjoy the famous sunsets of Malta. An unforgettable experience not to be missed. Try it with your friends. Flying duration is ten minutes.

He’d opted to omit anyone else and booked the entire boat for the morning, paying a premium since he wanted to be airborne longer than ten minutes and at a specific spot above the island at a specific time.

“Get ready,” the helmsman called out. “We’re almost there.”

He was hunting for a big fish, but not the kind that occupied the blue waters around him. Instead he was tailing His Eminence, Kastor Cardinal Gallo, one of the current 231 princes of the Roman Catholic Church.

He’d been given the pertinent vitals.

Gallo had been born and raised on Malta, his father a commercial fisherman, his mother a schoolteacher. He left the island before the age of twenty and attended seminary in Ireland, but completed his studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. John Paul II ordained him to the priesthood inside St. Peter’s Basilica. He then served various parishes around the world, but ended up back in Rome studying canon law and earning a doctorate. Benedict XVI elevated him to the cardinalate, appointing him prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the court of last appeal to any ecclesiastical judgment. There he’d stayed through the last two pontificates until his outspokenness got him into trouble and he was demoted. Now he carried only the title of patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a largely ceremonial post usually given to a cardinal near death or out of favor. At the relatively vibrant age of fifty-six, Gallo seemed firmly implanted into the latter category.

The boat slowed to a cruise.

Luke climbed from the bow, past the tanned driver, and hopped up on the stern platform, sitting on a low bench. A second crewman handed him a skimpy nylon harness, which he stepped into. As a Ranger he’d leaped from airplanes at all altitudes, several times into combat situations, twice into open ocean. Heights were not a problem, but the thought of dangling from a parachute at the end of three hundred feet of tow rope, held aloft only by narrow webs of nylon, bothered him. Like he always said, if flying was so safe, why’d they call the airport a terminal?

He slipped on the contraption.

The attendant checked the harness, tugging at places to make sure all was secure and tightening the straps around his chest. Stainless-steel D-clips were snapped onto metal rings, mating him to the chute.

“Sit back. Try not to hang,” the guy yelled. “Don’t hold on to anything and enjoy the ride.”

He gave a thumbs-up.

The boat’s engine revved.

The bow rose to a throbbing pulse, dividing the water with a milky-white wake. The brightly colored canopy above him, flapping in the stiff wind, caught air. Suspension lines drew taut. The tips of his tennis shoes swung freely as he rose from the stern. A thick nylon line unraveled from a hydraulic spool as he kept climbing.

Slow and steady.

He grabbed his bearings, about a quarter mile off the north shore.

Malta sat in the center of a narrow channel, 60 miles from Sicily, less than 200 miles north of Africa, an island in the Mediterranean of a mere 120 square miles, rising no more than eight hundred feet at its highest point. The Romans called it Melita, meaning “honey,” after the rich local variety. Location had forged its history. The Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, Hospitallers, French, and British all had claimed it at one time or another. Now it was an independent democratic republic, a member of the United Nations, the European Union, and the British Commonwealth. A barren rock devoid of water, arid in summer, drenched in winter, constantly raided through the centuries by one invader after another. The south shore loomed impregnable, mainly towering serrated cliffs, streaky hills, and jagged ridges, impossible to breach. But here, on the north shore, long bays jutted inland like fjords, creating marvelous harbors.

At the hotel last night he’d read a short history from one of the tourist books in the room. Since ancient times the native Maltese had always lived away from the coast to avoid weather, pirates, and slavers. The Sovereign Knights of Rhodes, though, had been a sea power. Once they arrived in the 16th century and became the Knights of Malta, to combat the threat of invasion and secure their hold on the island, they ringed the coast with watchtowers, built of local orange-brown limestone, positioned apart at strategic distances so they could signal one another in succession. Some were small, others mini fortresses. The one he was staring at now from three hundred feet above the towboat had been erected in 1658, still solid and serviceable.

Madliena Tower.

He’d learned about it yesterday during a quick on-site visit, including that it had served as an artillery battery during World War II. He’d climbed its spiral staircase to a parapet and stared out at the sea to exactly where he was now. Like its siblings, Madliena occupied a bare rocky promontory. Zero cover. Wide open. Making any type of meaningful surveillance from land impossible.

So he’d improvised.

He checked his watch.

10:00 A.M.

Shortly Cardinal Gallo should be standing on the parapet of the Madliena Tower.

Which in and of itself raised questions.

The pope had died thirteen days ago. The Apostolic Constitution mandated that the body must be buried within four to six days. Then a nine-day mourning period, the novemdiales, occurred. A conclave was required to be convened fifteen days after the date of death. But with less than a day left until it began, Cardinal Gallo had suddenly fled Rome for Malta. That act had caught the attention of Washington and Luke had been dispatched to monitor Gallo’s activities. Why? That was above his pay grade.

He’d just been told to get there and watch.

He was now high enough that all sound had vanished. A warm, stiff wind played across his face. Foamed breakers smashed against the rocky shoreline. He was no longer a Magellan Billet rookie, or a Frat Boy as Cotton Malone liked to call him. Mor

e an experienced operative. His boss, Stephanie Nelle, seemed to have developed confidence in him. Even his relationship with his uncle, former president and now U.S. senator Danny Daniels, had evolved into a good place. He’d found a home at the Justice Department and intended on hanging around.

Time to earn his keep, though.

He reached back and freed the Velcro on the pocket to his shorts, removing the high-tech receiver. It had been waiting for him at his hotel yesterday when he’d arrived on the island. He took the advice of the guy below and sat back in the harness, stuffing fobs into both ears. He switched on the device and aimed its laser at the tower, about a quarter mile away. He stared down at the shoreline and was pleased to see that his target had arrived.

And he could hear every word.

CHAPTER FIVE

Kastor Cardinal Gallo stood atop the Madliena Tower and soaked in the sun. The chilly northeast winds common to January and February were gone, replaced by a southern sirocco that had blown in from Africa, the dry, hot air ridding the island of its spring humidity. Today’s weather was what his mother liked to label healthy, and he recalled as a child looking forward to the sirocco’s periodic arrival.

He savored the earthy, decadent smell of the steamy land, accented by a hint of salt blowing in from the sea. He was annoyed to be out of Rome, the intrigue prior to a conclave a necessary evil that had to be endured. What one of his professors once said? Suspicion can rot the mind. True. But there was no better way to ease the anxiety of paranoia than to be present and alert. This time there seemed more of a pre-scramble than usual.

Canon law expressly forbid campaigning for the papacy, but no one paid that prohibition much attention. Kastor had participated in two conclaves since his elevation to cardinal. At neither had he been a serious contender. The first one because of his relative youth and inexperience, the next thanks to his outspokenness. His only vote at either had come from himself, made on the first ballot when it seemed a tradition to recognize those who would never be pope.

Four hundred years ago a knight adorned in a red cape with a white cross would have manned this tower, on the lookout for both friends and foes. He’d not chosen this spot for the meeting, somebody else had made the selection. But he appreciated the symbolism.

Friends and foes.