Robert Blair Kaiser's summary of last week's chapter: Last week, Mahony's fears about the opposition of his brother bishops diminished when he learned, to his surprise, that half of the U.S. bishops had decided to bring elected delegates to the Council. Pike suspected their decision had been dictated by a strong shift in public opinion. Michael Moore's documentary had triggered a swell of popular support for a people's Church, an idea whose time had come, for the people, and for the more-pastorally-minded bishops, whose sense of crisis over the shaky state of American Catholicism compelled them to start "thinking outside the box." It was a cliché that worked for them. A number of these bishops met at an exclusive site in cyberspace called "OUTSIDE THE BOX." This angered Cardinal Grandeur, who fired off an e-mail note to colleagues who were still on his side. "Everyone knows the Church is not a democracy. Everyone except Mahony and his crowd. If they get their way, they will bring to the Council of Baltimore everything that's wrong with American politics: deceptive sloganeering, lobbyists, maybe even television ads full of blatant deception, wild claims, and outright lies. And dirty tricks." Grandeur's reaction was a classic case of paranoia—his forefinger pointing at another, his other three fingers pointing back at him. He had already launched his own plan to derail Mahony's movement for a people's Church with his own department of dirty tricks, including right wing Catholics working for the FBI and the CIA. Now here's Chapter Twenty One...

21: Blackmail

GRANDEUR'S SPOOKS FROM OPUS DEI soon gave him the information he needed. He phoned Jeremiah Hawkslaw immediately with the good news. "Archimedes once said, 'give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.' Well, I think we have the fulcrum and the long lever that will make Roger give up this silly fantasy."

"Fulcrum? Lever?"

"My guys found documentary proof that Nicholas Pike and Juana Margarita Obregón are the sole signatories on several numbered accounts in Zurich. They add up to more than seventy-five million dollars."

Hawkslaw said, "Where would they get seventy-five million?"

"Think about it," said Grandeur. "Seventy-five million sounds like just a little less than the networks paid to that terrorist organization back in November 2008."

"Para los otros?"

"It has to be, because my spooks also tell me that exactly five million recently moved out of one of those accounts in Zurich into an account at the People's Bank in Los Angeles. The name on that account is Organizing Committee, Campaign for a People' Church."

"Who are the signatories on that account?" Hawkslaw thought he already knew the answer.

"Nicholas Pike and Juana Margarita Obregón! And on April 12, 2009, one of their checks, for a million dollars, went to Michael Moore Productions. Hawk, I hope you know what this means. This damn movement for a people's Church is being financed with blood money, pulled together by one of the boldest kidnapping plots of all time."

Hawkslaw shivered with glee, happy to hear that Grandeur had found the ammunition he needed to fight these—these outsiders who had taken over the Church in Los Angeles. But he knew Grandeur didn't want to hear about his joy. Grandeur was a practical man, a man of action. "What's next, Fog? What can I do?"

Grandeur wanted Hawkslaw to confront Mahony with the facts. "Tell him we're ready to bring this entire matter before a federal grand jury in Los Angeles. Once a grand jury gets this documentation, it will have no other choice. It will have to indict Pike and the Obregón person."

"On what charges?" asked Hawkslaw.

"God, I don't know! Kidnapping, extortion, most of the things prohibited by the Patriot Act, I guess, and the Terrorism Act as well. Enough to send Nick Pike back into the U.S. federal prison system for life. And the Obregón person along with him. Unless—" He paused.

"Unless what?"

"Unless we decide not to take this to the grand jury."

"And why wouldn't we want to do that?"

"We strike a bargain with Roger. Option one—either he walks away from this campaign for a people's Church. Or, option two—his friends go to prison."

"Sounds like blackmail, Fog."

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that, Hawk."

"Why would he pick option one? Why wouldn't he let his friends go to prison?"

"He's in love with this Obregón person, isn't he?"

"Is he?"

"You were the one told me he was spending three nights a week at her apartment."

"Yes, I guess I did."

"You've been having him followed?"

"Yes, I was. Not any more, though, once I confirmed my suspicions. But I still don't see him walking away from the movement. He can't do that. Not without giving the public and the press a damn good explanation."

"With your help, he can make up a story. "

"The movement may go on without him."

"I doubt it. Who will take his place? No bishop I know."

Hawkslaw said, "Nicholas Pike is the real brains behind this campaign. He could keep leading it, with or without Mahony."

Grandeur sounded very sure of himself. "People won't follow a layman. If they don't see an American archbishop at the front of the parade, they'll know this movement isn't really Catholic. And if it isn't Catholic, it'll be just one more damn Protestant church."

Hawkslaw pondered that. His good friend Fog was probably right. The movement needed Mahony. "So, when will you tell Roger?"

"Hawk, I was thinking you should tell him."

"Me?"

"He wouldn't have to know you've been spying for me. You're just my messenger."

"He might buy that," Hawkslaw conceded. "He knows we worked together in Rome for three years, but—"

"Right."

"But he will be very angry when I bring him this news. He may want to kill the messenger who brings it."

Grandeur chuckled. "Well, if he kills you, he'll really be in trouble, won't he?"

ROGER MAHONY AND JUANA MARGARITA OBREGÓN. Her apartment. He in his navy blue jogging suit, his face dark with anger. She in a bright blue, floor length, jersey robe, buttoned down the front, her face frozen with fear.

She sits motionless, poised on the edge of her couch.

He has grabbed a kitchen chair, planted it ten feet away from her, turned it around and straddled it, using the back of the chair as a kind of shield. He leans toward her and says in a hoarse whisper, "How could you?"

"What? How could I do what?"

"You and Pike planned this whole thing." He tells her all he knows about Para los otros and its numbered Swiss accounts, news delivered to him not an hour ago by Jeremiah Hawkslaw, along with Grandeur's threats to expose her—and Nicholas Pike—unless he resigns his leadership of the movement for a people's Church.

When he is finished, she says nothing. She raises her palms and shrugs.

He shrugs, too. "Well?"

She rises, walks over to the window, opens it to the cool night air, and returns to the couch. "Where do I start?" she says. "This has been so—. We never planned it this way. We thought we would hold our mock trial and send you home. The Mexican commandos and the U.S. Army Special Forces—" She shakes her head and shrugs. "We never thought—"

"You never thought? You never thought?" he says, cutting her off, hardly wanting to hear what he is sure will be another lie. "That's obvious. All those people dead! Iván Díaz. Paul Kelly. Five bishops. your entire film crew. And María."

This news has numbed him. It ties so well into his suspicions about Pike. He should have known—that Pike has been using him all along. How stupid he was, not to realize. How stupid, too, not to realize Pike has been using Juana Margarita Obregón. Or maybe she has been using him, who knows? He rises from his chair, pushes it back, presses his palms to his temples and closes his eyes. Pike was his friend. And he thought he was in love with Juana Margarita Obregón. He can taste the double betrayal, a mouthful of lye. He strides toward the door.

"Where are you going?" says Juana Margarita Obregón,

"Out!"

"What are you going to do?" she cries.

"Frankly," he cries, just before he slams the door behind him, "I don't know. I just don't know."

Juana Margarita Obregón bursts into tears.

MAHONY DOESN'T HEAD BACK to his room at the hospital. He strides east on a deserted Sixth Street all the way to MacArthur Park, turns south on Alvarado, turns west on Wilshire, his mind a blank, his soul a jumble of conflicting emotions. If he were an elevator right now, he'd be plummeting in free fall. He wonders when he will hit bottom. Juana Margarita Obregón looked intelligent. She just "didn't think." Didn't think . . . what? Was anybody else thinking? Not so much as anyone could notice. An hour later, he finds himself ringing the buzzer at Juana Margarita Obregón's apartment.

"Roger?" she says.

"Yes," he croaks.

"You coming up?"

"What do you think?" he cries.

She replies by buzzing him in.

When she opens her door, he notes the redness in her eyes. "You have to tell me more," he says, taking a seat in the straight back chair, closing his eyes, as if to gather his thoughts. He opens them and gives her a level, unblinking look. "Who thought up the kidnapping and the trial?"

She perches on the edge of her couch and blinks. "Iván Díaz. Me. A few others."

"Brilliant!" he cries. "Pike, too?"

"Pike? No. He helped found Para los otros, but that was to bring bread and justice to Central America. We never told him we had a plan for a people's Church in the United States. At the time, we did not even have a plan."

"But Pike's name is on that Swiss account!"

"That only came later, long after I had escaped the holocaust in the jungle and made my way back to LA. Then, after we hooked up with Michael Moore, he jetted with me to Zurich so we could straighten out our numbered accounts with the banks."

"Get his name on them, along with yours?"

"Yes, to take the place of Iván Díaz. We had quite a time doing that."

"I can imagine."

"We had to prove that Iván Díaz had died, prove that was indeed my name and my signature on the accounts that Iván and I had opened a year before our adventure."

Mahony shakes his head, amazed at all the planning that had gone into their caper. "And then when you made Nicholas Pike a signatory on the accounts, you jetted back to LA and started working on me?"

She nods and bites her lip. "No. We were 'working on you' long before that. But the plan was never that clear-cut. Things just sort of evolved. Nick wanted reforms in the Church—the reforms chartered at Vatican II—but he had never even thought it possible to create a people's Church in the United States, never heard the word autochthony before."

"Neither had I."

She says nothing, tries not to move a muscle while he mulls all this. Finally, she says, "You have to admit. A people's Church in America is still a good idea. No matter what happens to me and Nick."

He nods, heaves a sigh, lumbers over to the couch, and drops to his knees, his forehead to her breast.

She leans into him, dropping her head to his neck. She goes on, still teary-eyed, spilling her words, needing to pour out the rest of the story. "And then our Aussie, Sean Sunnyhill, joined the team. And then Phoebe McNulty rose up out of the hills of Solvang with her people's liturgy, and pretty soon we had an idea, an idea whose time, we thought, had come."

"Yes, autochthony. It was a brilliant idea. And if I am not mistaken, its final form came from our tough friend Rackham, the union organizer."

"Not even a Catholic." She smiles through her tears.

"No," he nods. "Just one smart Jew." Mahony mulls that, too. His silence is almost more than she can bear.

"So," she says finally, "that is pretty much the way it happened."

He sighs. His voice is now a whisper. He has to believe her. He has no other choice. He loves her. "Okay. I guess that's. How. It. All. Happened."

"You believe me?" she says, pushing his shoulders back so she can look into his eyes.

"It is all such a fantastic story. I shouldn't believe it. But—I—do." He kisses her on the neck.

Blinking back her tears, she returns his kiss, first on the neck, then shifting to his lips. It is not a sexy kiss. In the past few months, they had become intimate in almost every way a man and a woman can be intimate without having sex. They weren't going to start now. Her obvious, chaste love for him had given him the courage to mount this campaign. His reliance on her, for her intuitive advice through one crisis after another, made her feel important againˆin yet another kind of career. They hug for a long silent minute, then stand and walk over to the open window and breathe deeply of the cool night air.

"Now," says Mahony, "I cannot do what I thought I had to do only two hours ago."

"Two hours ago?"

"That was when the Hawk brought me the bad news. And gave me Grandeur's ultimatum."

"Specifically? Tell me again?"

"One, he wants me to trash the whole project, the people's Church idea, the Fourth Council of Baltimore, everything. Or, two, trash you and Pike. Send you both to federal prison for life."

"And?"

"I cannot do either."

She smiles. "I am certainly glad to hear that!"

"Only an idiot would think I'd go for either of these two choices."

"So, what other choices do you have?"

"I don't know. But there has be a twist somehow, somewhere, in this wacky plot."

"Great!" She laughs at his solemnity.

"We need a good screenwriter. Or a team of them."

"Well, yes, I should hope so. Something that will stop Grandeur. You think he could go ahead with his threat—to put me and Nick Pike away in prison for life?"

"I don't know. Hawkslaw says Grandeur wants to hear from me by Monday. Until then, we have to see how we can stop him."

THE TEAM MET THAT EVENING — Friday night at Judge Matt Riley's five- bedroom beach house in the Malibu Colony. Riley had told Mahony, Mi casa es tu casa. "My house is your house. If your group needs to talk most of the night, there are more than enough bedrooms for all of you. Tess and I will get out of the way—go stay with our son and his family in Encino."

And so, after they had barbecued some prime steaks on the deck overlooking the Pacific at sunset and poured themselves some California red, a Benovia 2005 Russian River Zinfandel, Pike took the lead. "Grandeur's blackmailing you, right, Roger?"

"That's an ugly word. " Mahony frowned. "Let's just say he gave me an ultimatum."

"Let's analyze this," said Rackham. "What does Grandeur really have on Pike? Or on Juana Margarita Obregón?'

"You mean what can he prove?" This from Pike.

"Well," said Mahony, "he can prove you have all this money in a Swiss bank."

"So?" asked Rackham.

"The feds could trace the money," said Mahony.

"To the TV networks?" asked Rackham. "So what?

"They paid for the rights to televise the trial."

"Exactly," said Rackham. "Nothing illegal about that. Not on the part of the networks, not on the part of the folks who were conducting this trial. It was a mock trial, for the entertainment and the enlightenment of people all over the world. No crime there."

"Kidnapping's a crime," said Mahony.

"So who can they prosecute for that?" demanded Rackham.

Pike agreed with Rackham. "The kidnappers are dead."

"That's what I mean," said Rackham. "They've got nothing on you, Mr. Pike."

Pike pointed to Juana Margarita Obregón, "What about this lady?"

"What proof do they have," said Rackham, "that she did anything more than play a prosecuting attorney on a bit of reality TV?"

"Hey," objected Juana Margarita Obregón. "I helped plan the whole thing!"

Rackham laughed. "You shut up! You're innocent until you're proven guilty. You don't have to testify against yourself."

"Great!" said Sunnyhill. Nemo se accuset. St. Thomas Aquinas. No one is obliged to incriminate himself."

Pike held up both hands. "Halt!" he cried. "Best case scenario, Juana Margarita Obregón and I get acquitted in a public trial. But we're in the middle of a political campaign for a people's Church, remember? We simply don't want any kind of trial."

That gave Rackham pause. He spun his wheelchair in a complete circle. Twice. Then he said, "you're right. Of course."

Pike said, "We just have to figure out a way of turning Grandeur aside."

Rackham asked, "Can we get something on him?"

Mahony grimaced. "We need to stop him. But 'get something on him?' I don't even want to think about it."

"Better you do think about it," advised Rackham.

Primum est vivere, said Sunnyhill. "The first law, mate, is the law of self-preservation. That's a free translation. And you're fighting for your life here."

Mahony still couldn't quite feature this. He said he felt guilty, plotting against a fellow member of the Sacred College of Cardinals.

Sunnyhill said he had to get over that. "Maybe it's the word 'sacred' that holds you back. But it isn't holding Grandeur back. In the long history of the Church, cardinals have done people in, and been done in, in a great many interesting ways, for good reasons and bad. Leo X had some cardinals beheaded for plotting against him. One cardinal was defenestrated—pushed to his death on the cobblestones below. But not by another cardinal—by a jealous husband."

"You mean," said Pike, "this guy pushed the cardinal out the window?"

"Out of his own bedroom window, mate, after the man found him bonking his wife!"

"The human element in the Church of God!" laughed Pike, raising his glass to all.

"So," said Phoebe, "we have to go after Grandeur."

"Defenestration?" joshed Rackham. "We gotta push him out a window?"

"No," said Pike. "But we might look for a skeleton in his closet."

"The end specifies the means," said Sunnyhill.

"Cheers for the Jesuits," said Phoebe, raising her glass of orange juice on the rocks.

"Let's stop fooling around," said Pike, "and start thinking."

Somehow, the group proceeded to brainstorm, just ignoring Mahony's objections. And he let them do it. He was strangely exhilarated now, despite his reservations about planning a counterattack—and launching it against a cardinal who had no apparent scruples at all.

So the group fantasized together, about Grandeur and the life he led in Philadelphia. After a good deal of open speculation, the group concluded it didn't know much about Grandeur's private life, or much about his public life, either. He ran a big archdiocese, one of the richest in the land, and that was pretty much a full-time job. He visited different parishes, one after another, on Sundays, and didn't consort with anyone outside of his own circle. If he had any friends, they were most likely his auxiliary bishops.

"I guess that means we wouldn't find any of Grandeur's inner circle willing to tell tales out of school?" said Rackham.

Mahony said, "His own auxiliaries? He made them bishops. They are much more likely to back him than buck him."

"How about his pastors?"

Blank looks all around. To sound out all the pastors in the several hundred parishes of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, surmised Phoebe, they would have to start dialing up these pastors one by one. "And we'd have to do it all in two days."

"Good luck with all that this weekend!" said Sunnyhill.

Pike waved his right hand. "Let's forget that idea. Even if we could reach ten percent of them, we'd have zero chance of getting any pastor to gossip about his archbishop—with someone calling from LA, someone he doesn't even know."

For an hour, the group discussed other ways and means of getting in with Philadelphia's many pastors, in enough to do them much good. "I give up," said Pike. "We're pumping away in a dry hole."

"What about the other bishops around the country? Grandeur have any enemies among them?" This from Sunnyhill.

Mahony said, "They hardly know him. Some can't stand his lordly ways, but—"

"We're going at this from the wrong end," interrupted Rackham.

"Meaning?"

"We start with what we know. How do we even know Grandeur is the one who has come up with this ultimatum?"

"Well," said Mahony, "Hawkslaw said so."

"Exactly," said Rackham. "But how do we know Hawkslaw is telling the truth?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, maybe we should focus on Hawkslaw first. Maybe this is all about him, not Grandeur. I've never trusted the Hawk."

"Or about Hawkslaw and Grandeur," suggested Sunnyhill. "Maybe they both have special reasons to stop us." He pointed out that Grandeur and Hawkslaw worked together for more than three years in Rome.

"You think they were sweethearts?" Rackham had a twinkle in his eye,

"Or," suggested Pike, "still are?"

"Now, mates, that's a thought," said Sunnyhill.

But it wasn't a very productive thought. They agreed; they didn't have much time to check out that possibility either.

"Let's keep brainstorming this," said Pike. "Let's ask a different kind of question. 'What does Hawkslaw have to lose if our people's Church moves ahead?'"

"Power?" suggested Phoebe. "lot's of power?"

"Okay," said Pike, "that's good, Phoebe. But exactly what kind of power?"

They all looked to Mahony.

Pike said, "Tell us something, Roger, about Hawkslaw's duties as chancellor of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles?"

"In effect, he's our corporate counsel. He informs us what we can do and cannot do under canon law. Under civil law, too, sometimes."

"That doesn't sound like much power," said Rackham.

"He look over contracts?" asked Pike.

"Building contracts?" suggested Rackham.

"No," said Mahony. "We have a whole department doing that. Our building department wouldn't call in Hawkslaw unless it was having a special problem with canon law."

"What about purchasing?" asked Rackham. "lotta room for graft there."

"Oh, I see," said Juana Margarita Obregón, "you are looking for a money angle?"

"What else?" asked Pike. He recalled a mantra from Bob Woodward's Watergate story. "Follow the money."

Impatient with the turn this conversation was taking, Mahony said, "Forget the money angle. Our money is all handled by our purchasing department. All good people."

"All your purchasing?"

"Yes."

"Construction?"

"I already told you. Our building department handles all that. And the money all goes through central purchasing."

"How about textbooks?"

"Textbooks," said Mahony "go through central purchasing at the archdiocese.

"Who decides what textbooks? A committee, I imagine."

That gave Mahony some pause. "Wait," he said. "In 1985, when I arrived here from Stockton, Hawkslaw was already in charge of selecting textbooks for all our schools, K through twelve. I let him go on doing it. He didn't want textbooks that were teaching heresy."

"Uh huh," said Pike. "That's understandable."

"Lotta money there?" Rackham looked at Mahony.

"More than ten million a year."

"You say your schools buy ten million dollars worth of books every year?"

"Yes. At least that. But the money all goes through central purchasing."

Rackham's eyes brightened and his bald pate took on a kind of shine. "Have you ever heard the word 'kickbacks,' Roger?"

"I never thought of kickbacks," said Mahony. "Kickbacks from the publishers?"

Pike's voice rose. "What kind of lifestyle does Jeremiah lead?"

Mahony measured his words. "Fairly affluent," he said, "for a diocesan priest."

"Doesn't come from a wealthy family?"

"No."

Phoebe said, "He wears tailor-made suits, alligator loafers."

"Alligator loafers!" exclaimed Pike. "Those come at two thousand dollars a pair."

Mahony remembered, "When we moved out of the cathedral rectory last year, he didn't go to a nearby rectory. He found an exclusive high-rise apartment building at 9999 Wilshire Blvd."

Phoebe said, "And he bought a yellow Mercedes 650-SL convertible."

Mahony said, "You knew about that?"

"Every nun in town seemed to know about that," she said.

"Those only run about two hundred thou," said Pike.

"Mercedes, huh?" asked Rackham. "He have a girlfriend?"

"We don't think so," said Mahony.

"He gay?"

"Maybe. But some of my best priests are gay."

Pike said, "My impression is that the Hawk is asexual."

Mahony said, "You may be right. you've seen how stiff he is. With everyone. But he has two apparent passions. The Dodgers and the Lakers. Somehow, he manages to see every game from the owner's box."

"Dodgers or Lakers?"

"Both. If he's got any friends outside the clerical club, they're likely to be the upper-crust friends of Frank McCourt. Or Jerry Buss."

Sotto voce, Phoebe explained to Juana Margarita Obregón, "McCourt owns the Dodgers. Buss owns the Lakers."

"Doesn't matter who his friends are," said Rackham. "We gotta get a look at his financial records. Checking accounts. Savings. Investments."

"How will we do that?" asked Pike. "Banks are closed on Saturdays and Sundays."

"Go to his bank?" asked Mahony. "I wouldn't want to do that. I wouldn't want to ask him to show me his bank accounts either. I don't feel comfortable with this."

Rackham rolled his eyes. He wanted to tell Mahony that his comfort didn't have anything to do with anything. "An eye for an eye," he said.

"No," cried Mahony. "We follow that course, and the whole world is blind."

They were all stunned at Mahony's vehemence. After that, the meeting fizzled. People were tired. Mahony suggested they sleep on the problem, and pray over it, and talk more in the morning. "There are plenty of beds here."

"Okay," said Pike, "you guys can talk—or pray—in the morning. But I need to drive to San Diego tonight. I haven't seen Anne in days. I'll phone here at noon tomorrow. See what you've decided. Everyone okay with that?"

Agreed.

AFTER PIKE ROARED AWAY in his Ford Explorer, after everyone else went off to bed, Rackham and Phoebe continued to talk. Phoebe helped herself to another glass of orange juice on the rocks. "You want some port?" She waved a bottle at Rackham that had been nesting among some other liqueurs on a sideboard.

"No."

She raised an eyebrow. She knew Rackham liked the port.

"I've had enough wine," said Rackham. He wheeled his motorized chair closer to her. "I need some clarity to discuss what I want to talk about now."

"Okay?"

"I have a hunch Hawkslaw has the information we need to spike his guns. Or Grandeur's guns. And I need your help."

"Why me?"

"Because you're a gal with gumption—and a nice pair of legs."

"What do my legs have to do with it?"

"Because we're gonna do a little caper. I don't have the legs for this,"

"A caper?"

"A burglary. But I can't do it alone."

"Burglary? You must be joking."

His urgent tone told her he wasn't joking. "Hawkslaw's apartment on Wilshire. Where did Roger say?"

"At 9999 Wilshire! The Hawk won't thank you for breaking and entering there."

Rackham pretended he didn't hear that. "We'll have to go into his apartment tomorrow night. But it will take us all day tomorrow to get ready."

She looked at her watch. "You mean tonight? It's already tomorrow. It's after midnight."

He nodded. "Yeah, yeah. I am talking about Saturday night."

"What are you after?"

"You mean 'we.' What are we after. Are you in or out?"

"I'm in," she said. "I think." She waited for him to answer her question.

"We're after his computer."

She nodded. "We're just going to steal it?"

"Not steal it. Download its entire contents into my laptop. Take ten minutes. Maybe fifteen."

"And where will he be while we are doing all this?"

"Dodger Stadium's my guess. Dodgers and the Giants. Game time's at seven. That'll give us all day to case the place, get a key made."

"Whew! Sounds like you're a pro at this."

"In another life."

"I guess. But, uh, how do we know he'll be at the game? He might want to watch it on TV."

"We're gonna assume he is going to the game. But we can check that out when the time comes. We'll need his phone numbers. Cell phone number. land line. Can you get 'em?"

"I know someone at the chancery. A nun in my order."

"Good! Can you get 'em by noon tomorrow? I mean today?"

"Yes, of course." Phoebe was trying hard to understand Rackham's plan, and shoot holes in it, if she could. "And what if he stays home, simply not answering any calls? We break and enter and find him there, watching the game on TV?"

"No. We park across the street from 9999 Wilshire until he leaves—in his yellow Mercedes convertible. Then we go in."

"And how do we get in?

"Good question. Those luxury high-rise apartments along Wilshire usually have underground parking, and doormen, and a security staff. There's gonna be some risk here."

"Risk? That's okay. We can take risks, if we have a high probability of reward. What do you hope to find on his computer?"

"God knows."

"'God knows?' That's not good enough."

"Let's just say I got a hunch about Hawkslaw. He's hiding something. We just need to take a look. As a great philosopher once said, 'Sometimes you can see a lot just by looking.'"

"Yogi Berra?"

Rackham cracked a smile. "I like smart nuns. Nuns with gumption."

She laughed. "And good legs?"

WHEN THE TEAM ASSEMBLED for breakfast the next morning at Malibu, it hardly had a quorum. Pike was in San Diego. Rackham and Phoebe were nowhere in sight.

"Rackham's van is gone," reported Sunnyhill. "But Phoebe's Chevy is still here."

"We will assume they left together," said Juana Margarita Obregón. "But why?"

"I'll try Rackham on his cell," said Mahony. He dialed him, got nothing but an invitation to leave a message. After trying Phoebe's cell phone, he said, "Ditto for Phoebe. I wonder where they went?"

"You are worried about them?" asked Juana Margarita Obregón.

"I don't even want to imagine," said Mahony, "what they might be doing." In the past few months, Mahony had found it in himself to feel a genuine affection for both of them, Rackham, his paraplegic, outspoken Jew, and Phoebe, his try-anything nun. They were such—well, he had to fall back on an ancient term of endearment. They were such pistols. He just hoped that, whatever these pistols were doing, they didn't get shot down.

"CARDINAL MAHONY – A NOVEL" now serialised in Spanish HERE

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Other books by Robert Blair Kaiser:
A Church in Search of Itself
Clerical Error
The Politics of Sex and Religion
“R.F.K. Must Die!”
Pope, Council and World
Co-author (with Tim Smith): Jubilee 2000, A Musical Comedy

[Index of this serialisation of Cardinal Mahony — A Novel]