The Assassini Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the next pope.…
    “No defections in the ranks?”
    “Why should anyone defect? Saint Jack is seventy-six years old. He won’t last forever and then … well, by then you’ll be wearing the red hat and the Church will have had a great man as pope for a time. And this old Church will have been moved on into the twenty-first century, going the only direction it can go if it’s going to survive. It’s a new world coming, Andy, and the Church has got to hit the ground running. It’s as simple as that.”
    “I gotta hand it to you, you make it simple. The money is certain?”
    “I never deal in mere probabilities, Andy.”
    “Well, this calls for a libation.” Monsignor Heffernan reached for the Rémy Martin on a tray beside two handsome pieces of Baccarat crystal. He poured and handed one glass to Curtis Lockhardt. “To money well spent.”
    The two men stood at the vast expanse of glass, drank a toast against the awesome backdrop of Manhattan. It was as if they stood on a man-made mountaintop, a peak they’d achieved together, Lockhardt leading the way with his faithful monsignor.
    “To jolly old Saint Jack,” Lockhardt said quietly.
    “To the future,” the monsignor echoed.
    It was Heffernan who saw him first. He smacked his lips, looked up, and saw an old priest. Somehow he’d come in unheard, descended the steps while they’d been enjoying the view and congratulating themselves. Monsignor Heffernan cocked his head quizzically, his red face smiling sunnily. “Yes, Father, what can I do for you?”
    Lockhardt turned, saw the priest. It was the skater. Lockhardt smiled, remembering the scene at the ice rink. Then he noticed the gloved hand coming up, and there was something about it …
    While Lockhardt watched, strength draining from his body and being replaced with biological, chemical, uncontrollable shock, he tried in the fractional instant tograsp what was happening. This priest was all wrong. He didn’t come from Curtis Lockhardt’s corridors of power. There was a gun in his hand.
    It made a strange muffled sound, like an arrow hitting a wet target.
    Andy Heffernan was slammed backward against the vastness of glass, silhouetted against the light, arms outstretched as if waiting for the nails to be driven home. The sound came again and the sunburned face came apart—irrevocably apart, ended in every way: the thoughts tumbled through Lockhardt’s brain as he stood; unable to move, to run, to throw himself at this gunman—the face he’d known so many years came apart in an explosion of blood and bone. A web of cracks appeared in the blood-spattered glass wall, radiating away from a hole the size of a man’s fist.
    Lockhardt stared down at what was left of his friend, stared at the slippery crimson trail he’d left on the window. Lockhardt felt his way along the edge of the desktop, moving slowly as if in a dream, moving backward toward the body of Monsignor Heffernan. He was only barely functioning. Everything seemed so far away, dim, as if things were happening at the end of a tunnel.
    Slowly the priest swung the gun around to face him.
    “God’s will,” he said, and Lockhardt struggled to comprehend, struggled to decipher the code. “God’s will,” the old priest whispered again.
    Lockhardt stared into the gun barrel, looked into the old priest’s eyes, but he was seeing something else, a little girl in a frilly bathing suit dancing and laughing and showing off in the rainbow of a sprinkler’s arc, dancing in the sunshine, on the wet, newly mown grass that clung to her toes as she danced.
    Lockhardt heard his own voice, couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. Maybe he was calling to the little girl, calling her name, trying to reach her before it was too late, trying to get there, scrambling back into the safety of the past, the safety of the net of time.…
    The priest waited, his face kindly, as if he were giving Curtis Lockhardt time to reach safe ground.…
    Then the old