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.It was a phone number.“Call me,” said Father Thomas.“You have twenty-four hours to make up your mind.” He glanced meaningfully toward the bald man, who still had neither moved nor said a word.“After that things will no longer be within my control.” The priest smiled pleasantly.“Now eat up before your food gets cold.”“I think I’m going to puke,” said Rafi.He pushed back his chair, the legs scraping noisily on the tile floor.He stood, glared down at the bald priest Damaso, who had begun to eat his zuppe.“I’ll kill you if you so much as touch her.”Damaso looked up from his bowl, a little juice dripping down to his sharp chin.His lips barely moved when he spoke.“You could try, Jew boy,” he said quietly.Rafi stormed out of the restaurant.“Your friend appears to have lost his appetite,” said Father Thomas.“Perhaps your Egyptian colleague watching us from across the street would like to finish Dr.Wanounou’s meal; he must be hungry by now.” He pointed his fork toward Rafi’s place at the table and the steaming bowl of aromatic seafood soup.“It would be a shame to see it go to waste.”Holliday stood up.“I’m not hungry, either,” he said.“As you wish, Colonel Holliday, but you’re missing a culinary treat.” He took a sip of wine.“Twenty-four hours.”Holliday followed Rafi out of Piacere Molise.The priest watched him go, then turned his attention back to the food before him.Half an hour later Rafi sat fuming in one of the armchairs in the sitting room of their suite at the Alimandi Hotel.On the other side of the small elegant room Holliday sat waiting by the telephone.Through the open doors leading out to the balcony came the buzzing sound of the waspish little Vespa scooters whizzing through the traffic on the Viale Vaticano.“Did it work?” Rafi said.“Hold your horses,” said Holliday.“We’ll know in a few minutes.”“We should have heard by now.And why hasn’t Tidyman called?”“Relax,” said Holliday.“How am I supposed to relax? That bastard was talking about torturing Peggy,” said Rafi hotly.“If this plan of yours doesn’t work, we’re screwed.”The phone rang.Rafi jumped.Holliday picked up the receiver and listened.“Thank you,” said Holliday.“Send him up.” He hung up the phone and turned back to Rafi.“He’s here.”“It’s about time.”Holliday rose and went to the door of the suite.A few moments later there was a knock.Holliday opened the door.It was the waiter from Piacere Molise, minus the long apron and carrying a paper bag in his hand.He was grinning broadly.Holliday led the young man into the room.“You two haven’t been introduced.Rafi, this is an old student of mine, Lieutenant Vince Caruso, class of ’06.I gave him a C minus, if I remember correctly.He works for the military attaché here.” Caruso sat down on the couch and put the paper bag on the coffee table.“Pleased to meet you,” said Rafi.The young lieutenant opened up the bag and took out the tall pepper grinder he’d left on their table in the restaurant.He unscrewed the bottom of the grinder and eased out a flat FM microphone with a dangling wire.He reached into the bag and put something that looked like a small cassette player on the table alongside the little microphone.“My boss would have a fit if he knew I’d borrowed his stuff,” said Caruso.“How’d we do?” Holliday said.“They kept talking for half an hour after you guys left,” said Caruso happily.“All sorts of good stuff.Kind of thing that the media eats up.These are serious bad guys.” The young man shook his head.“Talk about wolves in sheep’s clothing.”“The most dangerous kind,” said Rafi.“Any trouble with the owners of the restaurant?” Holliday asked.“Are you kidding?” Caruso laughed.“He calls those people corvos nero, black crows.He was only too happy to help his amici Americano.”“Then we’ve got them,” said Holliday, clapping his hands together with satisfaction.“But we still don’t have Peggy,” said Rafi.The phone rang on the other side of the room.Holliday got up and answered it.He listened for a few moments, then hung up.“That was Emil,” said Holliday, grinning from ear to ear, his eyes sparkling happily.“The GPS tracker you gave us worked perfectly, Vince.We nailed it.”“Where is she?” Rafi said.“A place called Lido del Faro—Lighthouse Beach, less than twenty miles from here at the mouth of the River Tiber.They’ve got her stashed in some kind of old fishing shack there.”25“I’m surprised that it worked at all,” confessed Holliday, sitting in the roof garden of the Hotel Alimandi and eating breakfast.It was only nine thirty but the day was already hot, the summer sun shining down from a cloudless sky.Across the Viale Vaticano Holliday could see the top of the Sistine Chapel and the ranks of tiled rooftops within the Holy City.“I’m not,” said Emil Tidyman, eating a very Western meal of sausages and scrambled eggs.“Perhaps you have to live in a religious place like Egypt to understand it.A place that has bred fundamentalist thought for a thousand years.”“I was born and raised in Israel,” snorted Rafi.“What would you call that?”“Israel is a democracy; church and state are separate.In Egypt the ulamas, the religious leaders, still control the heart and soul of the nation.The only thing the average Jew does not do is eat these,” said Tidyman, waving a chunk of sausage on the end of his fork.“I’m talking about how these people think.”He ate the sausage, then reached out and poured himself another cup of coffee from the shiny silver pot in the middle of the starched linen tablecloth.He nodded toward the Vatican rooftops.“Jews have turned independent thought into a virtue.To Catholics and Muslims it is virtually a sin.Catholic fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists are very much alike in that they share a common fundamental belief: there is no individual, there is only Faith with a capital F.Everything is the will of God or the will of Allah and that’s all there is to it.The ordinary man is powerless.Free will is for the Gods alone, interpreted by various popes and mullahs
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