Page 9 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
Kindly Father Rivard stepped out from his side of the confessional. His face was flush, his hair unkempt as if he’d been trying to pull it out in tufts, and his eyes had a wild, frightened look to them. Peggy stood and crossed to him. She was a big woman, broad at the hips and busty, while the French clergyman was small in stature. She had little problem guiding him to a step and helping him sit.
“Are you all right, Father? Do you need some water?”
His breathing remained ragged for another minute and so he didn’t answer.
Knowing he couldn’t tell her anything, her natural curiosity got the best of her and she blurted, “Who was that, Father Rivard?”
He finally pulled his gaze from the distant closed doors and regarded her face. “The devil, Peggy. I believe he was the devil.” He paused, contemplating his words. He asked, “What does Satan look like?”
They both turned to study the doors the man had passed throughmoments before. “The truth, Father? An angel. He looked like a beautiful young angel.”
—
The angel had had manynames in his young life. He currently went by Balka Rath, a name his brother had given him before he’d emigrated from Europe the year before. His brother, now called Karl Rath, had stayed behind as leader of an anarchist cell that had all but raised Balka. While other children learned fables and fairy tales, Balka had learned political theory and the best way to disrupt a society. He’d killed his first man when he was fourteen, a French tax collector known both for his corruption and for the protection given to him by a particularly powerful superior.
The decision to come to America had been Karl’s. Their cell had been in German-occupied Belgium for some time and the fact that Balka was a conscription-aged man not in the military was just too hard to cover up. Karl, a mountain of a man in his forties, already looked like he’d served, given his flame-ravaged cheek and missing eye. But Balka risked being accosted by recruiters and had twice nearly fallen into the hands of a roving press-gang searching for laborers to be sent back to Germany. He could not remain in Europe. Karl had assured him that while their fight was with the aristocracies of the Old World, America would suffer in the upcoming anarchist revolution.
Balka Rath wasn’t Catholic. Even before becoming an anarchist he’d had no religious training at all. His family were from the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe. They were itinerant woodcutters who poached trees from royal forests in the summer months and shaped them into lumber during the long winters. Religion had no place in such a nomadic and risky life.
He went to confession before embarking on one of his missions because he felt the need to tell someone else what he was about to do, in the off chance he was killed. It wasn’t an unburdening, nor was it bragging. He simply wanted another person to be an unwitting chronicler of the evil he committed. He chose to tell Catholic priests because he knew that in the Church’s nearly two thousand years of existence there was not a single incident of a priest breaking the sanctity of the confessional. Not one. No matter what he said inside the tight little cabinet, the priest would never divulge it, not even to another priest.
When he’d started this tradition, he’d considered visiting the same priest over and over just for cruelty’s sake, but then he decided to never go to the same church twice. He liked to imagine some New York priests getting together to talk theology and faith and all of them burdened with a secret they could never share.
Tonight’s mission wasn’t particularly dangerous, but he’d wanted to tell a priest about a woman he had killed who was trying to extort one of the Irish mobsters he did occasional work for, because her body would doubtlessly be discovered soon.
While he’d been waiting in the church for his turn, dusk had become a cool, moonless night. Balka Rath turned up the collar of his wool coat as he took the church’s steps down to the sidewalk. He had a Ford parked at the curb. It wasn’t his car. It belonged to a local anarchist cell that was run by the son of a wealthy Wall Street broker. In truth, the cell was only financed by him, to be more precise. It was his passive retaliation for his father’s aloof distance. Rath considered him a spoiled fool, but welcomed the money.
A quasi-intellectual Columbia dropout named Frederic Fowler was the cell’s real brains. He led discussions in the back rooms ofbars near various college campuses, expounding on anarchism and the class struggle, and trying to recruit new members.
Rath started the car and headed southeast to meet Fowler and a couple of the other cell members. Karl had cabled him recently and told him to suspend all operations because he had a big role in an important upcoming mission, and it was no longer worth the risk helping the various criminal organizations who used his ruthlessness. That also included the cell he’d joined, but Balka thought tonight’s job, while high-profile, was actually low-risk, and was thus worth him defying his older brother.
The city quickly gave way to rural Nassau County. It was always a surprise to go from the world’s second-largest city to a pastoral setting of farms and country lanes in just a few miles. Cities in Europe seemed to go on forever before slowly petering out. Twenty miles from the church, Rath pulled the car into the parking lot of a clapboard restaurant that sat on a crossroads alongside a general store with a pair of gas pumps out front and across from an old swaybacked barn that was being dismantled to make room for something newer.
He pulled into the lot next to Fred Fowler’s car, a Ford built more than a decade earlier that burned nearly as much oil as gasoline. He killed the engine and stepped out into the chilly air.
The restaurant was cozy, with low ceilings and mismatched chairs and tables, but the smell of the food was enticing. Rath hadn’t eaten for a while and the aroma kicked off a series of eager sounds from his belly. Fred and one other man were at a back table, away from the two couples sharing a meal and the lone man who looked like he’d been out on sales calls across Long Island and needed a bite before pushing on to the city.
A waitress caught his eye. He indicated that he was joining the party in the back corner, and she nodded.
Fred poured beer into a glass from a heavy pitcher as Rath approached. Fowler’s wire-framed glasses flashed in the light of the dining room’s overhead lamps.
Rath slid into a seat and accepted the glass. They never shook hands. “Good to see you, Fred.” He spoke with an accent that no one could place because he’d grown up in more than a dozen countries. “You, too, Stan. Where’s Marcus?”
“Pneumonia or the flu or something. He couldn’t get out of bed.”
“Doesn’t really matter. Is everything set?”
“The device is in the trunk. Stan’s gone over it a dozen times. It’s foolproof.”
“The timer?”
“You set it yourself a couple of blocks from the target,” Stan the bombmaker answered. “Fifteen minutes is enough time for you to get away, but not enough for them to discover it. Here’s the thing—”
“Ahem,” Fred said softly. The waitress was approaching.
“Sir, your friends are having the roast beef and fried potatoes. Would you like that, too?”
“That’ll be fine.”
