Rubicon: A Novel of Suspense by Lawrence Alexander

Author:Lawrence Alexander [Alexander, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

14

HART COULD NOT GET THE WORD OUT OF HIS head. He wrote it on a notepad during the flight from Toronto to Rome; he wrote it in his hotel room after he checked in. What did it mean—Rubicon? It was more than a plot to assassinate a political leader, more than an attempt to sabotage the election. But how much more, and where did it lead? The list that Gunther Kramer had made: assassination, the threat of outside enemies, a case for war, and then more assassinations—all of it to make it appear that something “without precedent” had to be done. What was without precedent, and, whatever it was, how would it lead to Rubicon in a way that ran parallel to what had happened in Rome more than two thousand years ago?

He had two days to wait, two days with nothing to do. He wanted to call home, to tell Helen there was nothing to worry about, that he was all right. It had been nearly a week since the night of the murder, five days since he had last heard her voice, but he had become paranoid, almost certain that someone was intercepting nearly every call. He remembered what Raymond Caulfield had said about Orwell’s 1984 and the idea of living under the constant surveillance of some all-knowing power. He had spent three days in Toronto and for almost all of it thought he was being watched and followed. Rome seemed safer, and, more important, closer to what he hoped would be the end of the chase, when he would find out who was behind Rubicon and what, after Los Angeles, was going to happen next.

The hotel where Hart was staying was the same hotel where Dieter Shoenfeld was supposed to meet Mohammed al Farabi early Monday afternoon, the next day. Physically spent and emotionally drained, Hart managed to sleep straight through the night, something he had not been able to do in nearly a week. He had a late breakfast and then decided that he had to get out, that he could not stay all day in his room. He threw on a jacket and a pair of dark glasses, the way any tourist would dress, and walked to the Tiber and took the ancient pedestrian bridge across to the Vatican. The wide avenue that runs from the Castel Sant’Angelo was clogged with Christians waiting to receive the pope’s blessing at noon.

There were shops and stands all along the route selling various religious objects and pictures and postcards of the pope. On a sudden whim, Hart bought a postcard which he intended to send to Charlie Ryan.

“The pope asked about you,” he thought he would write. “Said he would like to hear your confession but, given what you have to confess, was not certain he could spare that much time.”

It gave him a strange sense of the familiar, of being at home. He could almost see the laughter spread across Ryan’s freckled Irish face when he read it.

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