"If you want my opinion," Icicle said, "the price was cheap, given the atrocities they committed."

"Including your father?" Seth asked. Icicle stood. "Not my father! He divorced himself from the others!"

"Really? Sorry to disillusion you, but your father killed as many

Jew-savers as my own father did. Their argument wasn't about Jews but about a woman, about your mother! She chose your father over mine! I could have been you!

And you would not have existed!" Icicle realized how deep their hatred was. He raised his hands in surrender. "It's a stupid argument. There are too many problems we have to face." Seth's eyes dulled. "Of course.

And we still haven't found our fathers." With effort, he reverted to professional control. "In that case"--he breathed--"in my opinion"--he breathed again--"the situation is as follows." Icicle waited. "We've eliminated the theory that what Halloway calls the Night and Fog is a terrorist group that discovered what the cardinal knew, abducted him, and wants to take over Halloway's munitions network."

"I agree," Icicle said. "The theory isn't valid."

"But the cardinal's disappearance is related to the disappearance of our fathers," Seth continued. "The Night and Fog couldn't have found our fathers if not for the cardinal."

"Again I agree."

"So if the purpose of abducting them wasn't to hold them hostage for money, that leaves the possibility that the Night and Fog are doing this for personal reasons. That the Night and Fog are Israelis. But to suspect the cardinal, to have discovered what he knew, the Jews would have had to infiltrate the security system of the Catholic Church."

"I doubt that."

"I do as well.

And it makes me wonder."

"Wonder what?"

"Eliminate the possibilities.

Could someone... or some group... within the Church be the Night and

Fog?" black jesuits

Eight blocks to the east of Zurich's Limmat River, Saul and Erika passed an Agency guard in an alley, opened a door, and entered a garage. The room was large, its overhead lights brighter than the morning sunlight they'd just left, its concrete floor immaculate. There was only one car, the Renault the three assassins had used. An Agency team had picked it up where Saul told them he'd left it--at the parking lot near Zurich's train station. Overnight, a crew had been working on it, checking for fingerprints, dismantling and searching it. It was now a mechanical skeleton. "These guys were ready for World War Three,"

a gravelly voice said. It belonged to Gallagher. Saul turned as the burly station chief came over, holding an RPG-7 rocket launcher. He nodded toward the munitions laid out on the floor. Plastic explosives, grenades, Uzis, AK-47s. "Did you find any fingerprints?"

"All kinds,"

Gallagher said. "But this is a rental car--we can't tell which belongs to your friends and which belong to whoever used the car before them."

"You know where we hid the bodies. You could send a team to get their prints."

"I already have. My men should be back by tonight. Aside from the weapons, we didn't find anything unusual in the car. But it was rented in Austria. They wouldn't have risked bringing a trunkful of weapons through Swiss customs. They had to get the stuff in Switzerland."

"Right. And since they were following us, they wouldn't have had much time to pick up the weapons without losing us," Saul said. "Their contacts must be excellent."

"A network we don't know about?" Gallagher said. "Maybe. I can buy that a lot more than I do your suspicion these men were priests. Just because of the rings they wore."

"An intersecting cross and sword."

"That still doesn't make them priests." Gallagher set the rocket launcher down beside the AK-47s. "Religion and violence aren't exactly compatible with the meek inheriting the earth. When I spoke to Langley,

I didn't tell them about the religious angle. I'm waiting on that till

I'm sure. Right now, our people are checking on the French DDs you took from the men. The passports and drivers' licenses are probably fake. Our contacts in French intelligence will let us know soon enough."

"But the credit cards," Saul said. "They're the key."

"No question. My guess is we'll find the cards have a perfect rating.

And I'm damned curious about who pays the bills." A phone rang. Saul glanced at Erika as Gallagher went over to answer it. They couldn't hear what he said. Mostly Gallagher listened, and when he came back, he looked excited. "The men whose names are on those passports died years ago. The addresses are rooming houses for transients. But the credit cards are three months old, and the bills were paid as quickly as they were received."

"Who paid them?"

"Each man had a different card. Each bill was paid through a different bank. But each bank has photocopies of the checks paid through each account, and the signature on the checks wasn't the bogus name of each man you killed. No, the man who wrote the checks was an accountant.

Unusual--don't you think?--for someone whose address is a transient's rooming house to have a need for an accountant. Even more unusual for three transients with separate addresses to have the same accountant.

But it gets better. The accountant doesn't exist either. His checks are good. But he's in a graveyard in Marseilles. And he has a post office box instead of an office. So we go past the bogus accountant, and what do we find? You were right, Romulus. I'm sorry I ever doubted you."

Tell me."

"The Catholic Church. The bills were paid through Rome. Through the

Vatican office of a cardinal whose name is Krunoslav Pavelic. And here's the kicker. The cardinal disappeared several months ago. So what does a missing cardinal have to do with three assassins who might be priests and the disappearance of--?"

"My father," Erika said. "A Jew, not a Catholic."

"But if the cardinal disappeared, who paid the bills?" Saul asked. "The cardinal's assistant," Gallagher said. "Father Jean Dusseault."

Hunched over a wooden table in the muffled silence of a reading room in

Rome's Vallicelliana Library, Drew and Arlene examined the books a librarian had given to them.

The half-dozen titles, all in Italian, were dictionaries of religious biographies, the equivalent of Who's Who in the Vatican, the Curia, the

Roman Catholic Church. They found the information they wanted and glanced at each other with dissatisfaction, returned the books, and stepped from the library's vestibule to face the brilliance and noise of

Rome. "Well, at least it was worth a try," Drew said. Arlene's response surprised him. "As far as I'm concerned, we learned a lot."

"I don't see what. The biographical references in those books were little more than public relations for the cardinal."

"He doesn't lack ego, that's for sure," Arlene said. "Most Who's Whos base their citations on information supplied by the people listed in them. The cardinal apparently views himself as a saint on earth. He has medals and testimonials from dozens of religious groups. He even has a papal decoration. But a list of honors isn't a biography. The cardinal didn't supply many details about his life. Either he thinks his biography is boring, which I doubt given his willingness to let everybody know his various titles and honors, or else--"

"He's got something to hide?"

"Let's put it this way," Arlene said. "We know he was born in 1914 and raised in Yugoslavia. We know he felt an early calling to the Faith and entered the Church when he was eighteen. We know he received his religious training here in Rome. For a time, he served as the Church's liaison with the Red Cross. He moved rapidly up through the ranks of the Church. At thirty-five, he was one of the youngest men to be admitted into the Curia. As a controller of the Church's finances, he holds one of the most powerful positions in the Vatican."