“What’s that for?” she asked.
“Do I need a reason?”
She smiled. “No. I suppose not.”
He was glad she was all right. “I’m told the location has been sanitized. No trace of the carnage remains, save for a few bullet marks in the floor. Everything found there was burned.”
“Only Jonty and his man DiGenti knew the hiding spot for the information,” she said. “I made sure of that before I killed him. He was going to use it as a bargaining chip. The Russians definitely wanted Olivier alive.”
“It’s still a risk—with that information out there, in the open.”
“We could not allow Olivier to walk away.”
“Yet we allowed Malone to walk away.”
“Because there was no reason to kill him,” she said. “He was drawn into this, not of his own accord. He has no idea where that information is located, so he poses no threat. It was bad enough that all of the others had to die. And Olivier. I’m in the intelligence business, not murder-for-hire.”
He caught the sharp tone in her voice. “I understand. You did what you had to do, and I appreciate it.”
They’d discussed it at length. He’d never asked or ordered her to kill Olivier. But she’d known what to do.
She pointed at the box. “I’ll return the spear to the castle.”
“That definitely needs to be done. Let’s make sure there are no loose lips there, either.”
A buzz disturbed their privacy.
His phone. He checked the display. His chief of staff back in Warsaw.
He answered the call, listened, then said, “Do it.”
Sonia stared at him.
“The president of the United States wants to talk to me. Now.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Cotton recalled a story he’d heard while growing up in middle Georgia on his grandfather’s onion farm. A local man ran for county sheriff and garnered only seventeen votes. The day after the election he paraded around town with a gun strapped to his waist. Someone asked him why and he said, With as few friends as I apparently have, I definitely need one.
He felt the same way.
He was back in Kraków, surrounded by strangers, walking straight for the American consulate. Sunshine filtered through broken pewter clouds. He had no idea where Stephanie might be, but this seemed like the best place to start. The time was approaching 4:00 P.M., the shops and eateries busy for late afternoon. He was stopped at the doors by the uniformed marines. This time they weren’t expecting him. He asked if Stephanie Nelle was there, and a few moments later he was allowed inside. He found her on the second floor, eyes dull and red-lined with fatigue, and made a full report, including Bunch’s death.
“Where’s the car?” she asked him.
“Parked down the street. With six of the most precious relics in the religious world locked inside.” He paused. “All yours.”
“I appreciate the gift. But I doubt it’s going to buy me any political capital with Fox. He wants missiles here and he’s not going to stop.”
“We don’t get everything we want.”
“What is it you’re not telling me?”
“Do you have your Magellan Billet laptop?”
She nodded.
He felt numbed, confused, and bewildered by all that had happened. He needed time to sort things out, to categorize, compartmentalize, make sense of the confusion. “Can I use it?”
“Is it about that book?”
And she pointed.
He’d brought the volume that he’d found at the castle. The City in Salt. The Wieliczka Salt Mine.
“That’s what I want to find out.”
She handed over her computer and he opened it to a search engine. He typed in the word BOBOLA and found a reference.
On May 16, 1657, Cossacks surprised a holy Polish Jesuit in the town of Pińsk. Father Andrew Bobola, aged sixty-five, fell to his knees, raised his hands toward heaven, and exclaimed, “Lord, thy will be done.” The Cossacks stripped him of his holy habit, tied him to a tree, placed a crown of twigs upon his head, then scourged him, tearing out one eye and burning his body with torches. One of the ruffians then traced, with his poniard, the form of a tonsure on the head of the priest and the figure of a chasuble on his back. Finally, all of the skin was stripped from the body. During this indescribable torture the priest prayed for his tormentors until they tore out his tongue and crushed his head. Father Andrew Bobola was declared Blessed on the 30th of October, 1853. He was made a saint by Pope Pius XI in 1938.
At least he now had a Polish connection to the name.
One more inquiry.
He typed in BOBOLA and WIELICZKA SALT MINE and found several hits, one that explained the relationship.
The deep Christian faith of the Wieliczka miners comes from their Catholic upbringing, as well as the difficult work conditions in the mine. They faced threats from fire, leakages of underground water, and collapse. Holy patrons were supposed to protect them from such dangers. For centuries, the miners cultivated a group of saints whom they worshipped with particular devotion, believing in their powers of intercession. Many were honored with carvings made in the salt, the miners themselves the artisans.
One of those carvings was of Father Andrew Bobola.
He found an image of the salt sculpture, created in 1874, still there in the mine. A little crude and eroded from time and water, it sat alone in a square-shaped niche. A caption indicated that the figure had once been colored white, red, and black, the same paint used for marking the mine’s work sites. It had been carved by a miner, in his spare time.
Located on Level IX.
He showed Stephanie the chunk of salt crystal.
“That was on Olivier’s person when he died,” he told her. “And he had that book, all ready to go in an envelope. It all adds up. 9 Bobola. That information is hidden in the mine, where that statue is located, on level nine.”
He thumbed through the oversized picture volume, finding a schematic of the mine’s various levels. Not a lot of detail, but enough to get the idea that it was a huge underground complex.
He placed a period on his line of thoughts. “I think that Eli Reinhardt knows this, too.”
“He’s going after it?”
“You tell me. Do you know him?”
She nodded. “He’s an information broker, just like Olivier, but his reputation is not the best. He and Olivier were active competitors, and that information on Czajkowski is still worth a lot of money. So yes, if he can, he will go after it.”
“He may already be on the way to that mine, trying to find a way in.”
They were inside the same office used yesterday, with the door closed. The afternoon sun, still hazy, slanted through the blinds.
“We ought to preempt him,” he said.
He could see she was intrigued by the possibility.
“And what do we do if the information is there?” she asked.
“Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.”
Neither one of them was comfortable with any of this. Stephanie was defying her employer. He was offending Sonia. But the thought of allowing that information to fall into the hands of Reinhardt seemed repugnant. No telling what would happen then.