The Assassini

by Thomas Gifford

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

It is 1982.  In the Vatican, priestly vultures gather around the dying Pope, whispering the names of possible successors.  In a forgotten monastery on Ireland's gale-swept coast, a dangerous document is hidden, waiting to be claimed.  And in a family chapel in Princeton, New Jersey, a nun is murdered at her prayers.  Sister Valentine was an outspoken activist, a thorn in the Church's side.  When her brother, lawyer Ben Driskill, realizes the Church will never investigate her death, he sets out to find the murderer himself--and uncovers an explosive secret.The Assassini.  An age-old brotherhood of killers.  Once they were hired by princes of the Church to protect it in dangerous times.  But whose orders do they now obey?

The Assassini marks the triumphant retum of a master at the peak of his powers--the first novel in more than a decade from the acclaimed author of The Wind Chill Factor.

Release date: April 24, 2013

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 688

Sample

1
DRISKILL
 
I remember that first day quite clearly.
 
I was summoned to lunch at his club by Drew Summerhays, the imperishable gray eminence of our well-upholstered world downtown at Bascomb, Lufkin, and Summerhays. He possessed the clearest, most adaptable mind I’d ever encountered, and most of our luncheon discussions were both illuminating and amusing. And they always had a point. Summerhays was eighty-two that year, the age of the century, but he still ventured down to Wall Street most days. He was our living legend, a friend and adviser to every president since Franklin Roosevelt’s first campaign, a backstage hero of World War II, a spy master, and always a confidant of the popes. Through his close relationship with my father I’d known him all my life.
 
On occasion, even before I’d joined the firm and subsequently become a partner, I’d had his ear because he’d watched me grow up. Once, when I was about to become a Jesuit novice, he’d come to me with advice and I’d had the lack of foresight to ignore it. Oddly enough, in such contrast to his austere, flinty appearance, he was a lifelong football fan and, particularly, a fan of mine. He had advised me to play a few years of professional football once I’d graduated from Notre Dame. The Jesuits, he argued, would still be there when I retired but now was my only chance to test my ability at the next level. He had hoped that fate might deliver me to the New York Giants. It might have happened, I suppose. But I was young and I knew it all.
 
I’d spent my Notre Dame years as a linebacker, caked in mud and crap and blood, all scabby and hauling around more than my share of free-floating anxiety and rage. Two hundred and fifty pounds of mayhem stuffed into a two-hundred-pound body. Sportswriter hyperbole, sure, but Red Smith had so described me. The fact was, in those days I was a dangerous man.
 
Nowadays I am quite a civilized specimen in my way, kept in one psychological piece by that fragile membrane that separates us from the triumph of unreason and evil. Kept intact and relatively harmless by the practice of law, by the family, by the family’s name and tradition.
 
Summerhays hadn’t understood the simple truth that I’d lost whatever enthusiasm I’d ever had for playing football. And my father wanted me to become a priest. Summerhays always thought that my father was a bit more of a Catholic than was, strictly speaking, good for him. Summerhays was a realistic Papist. My father, he told me, was something else, a true believer.
 
In the end I hadn’t played pro football and I had gone off to become a Jesuit. It was the last bit of advice I’d ever taken from my father and, as I recall, the last time I ignored a suggestion from Drew Summerhays. The price for my lack of judgment was high. As it developed, the Society of Jesus seemed to be a hammer, the Church an anvil, and the smiling linebacker got caught between. Bang, bang, bang.
 
It wasn’t just that I didn’t become the Jesuit my father had hoped for—young Father Ben Driskill, mighty Hugh’s boy, chucking old ladies under their chins at rummage sales, shooting baskets with the neighborhood toughs and turning them into altar boys, giving smelly old wino Mr. Leary the last rites, arranging for the teens’ hayride with Sister Rosalie from the Visitation Convent School, leading the caroling at Christmas … none of that for me. No, I said good-bye to all of it, turned in my rosary, hung up the reliable old scourge, packed away the hair shirt, kissed them all farewell.
 
I haven’t been inside a Catholic church in twenty years, except to honor my sister Valentine, who picked up the standard that I’d thrown down and became a nun of the Order. Sister Val: one of those new nuns you kept hearing about, running around raising hell, driving the Church nuts. Val had made the covers of Time and Newsweek and People. Old Hugh—to his considerable dismay, at times—had sired a hellion.
 
Val and I used to joke about it because she knew where I stood. She knew I’d gone inside the Church and glimpsed the machinery glowing red-hot. She knew I’d heard the sizzle. And she knew I’d been burned. She understood me and I understood her. I knew she was more determined than I, had more guts.
 
The only thing I didn’t enjoy chatting with Drew Summerhays about was football. Unfortunately, as I’d feared, football was on his mind that day. It was the season, late October, and there was no stopping him as we set out on foot for one of his many clubs. He wore his impeccable chesterfield with its perfectly brushed velvet collar, a pearl-gray homburg, his tightly rolled Brigg umbrella tapping the narrow sidewalk where the jumble of financial district workers seemed miraculously to part and make way for him. It had become a raw, blustery day down at our end of Manhattan, heavy smudged clouds like thumbprints moving in after a sunny, perfect morning. There was a taste of winter working its way up the island, starting with us. Grim gray clouds were pressing down on Brooklyn, trying to drown it in the East River.
 
As we sat down and commenced lunch, Summerhays’s dry, precise voice was going on about a long-ago game I’d played in Iowa City against the Hawkeyes. I made seven unassisted tackles and had two sacks that day, but the play that was lodged in the old man’s mind was the last of the game with Iowa on the Notre Dame four-yard line. The tight end had run a brutal little post pattern, I’d had to fight off two blocks, and when I looked up, the ball was floating toward the tight end in the back of the end zone. We were six points ahead, there was no time left on the clock. The end zone was flooded with receivers alert to the possibility of a tipped ball. So I’d made a frantic leap out of the mud sucking at me and intercepted the pass. Anybody standing there could have done it. It happened to be me. My nose had been broken to start the fourth quarter and a gash over my eyes had blinded me with blood, but I got lucky and caught the damn thing. The interception became a Notre Dame legend that lasted the rest of the season, and Drew Summerhays, of all people, was remembering it and wanted to hear the whole boring story again.
 
So while he was bringing down all that old thunder from the skies I remembered how it had felt when it had struck me during a summer scrimmage that I quite suddenly understood the game. I could see it all, as if it were a single piece of fabric: the quarterback across the humped tails and helmets of the down linemen, his eyes moving, the cadence of his raw, hoarse voice, yes, I could somehow see his voice; I saw running backs tense; as if I could chart the movement of molecules, I saw the receivers shift their weight, strain at the leash. I saw the linemen thinking out their blocking assignments. I saw inside the quarterback’s head, I knew what he was thinking, how the play would develop, how I should react.
 
And from that day on I understood the bloody game, saw each play developing as if it were in slo-mo. I understood the absolute essence of what was going on and I became one hell of a football player. Made the Look All-American team and got to shake hands with Bob Hope on TV. Football.
 
You tell yourself later on that you learned a lot about life from playing football and maybe you did. You learned about pain, about the wild-eyed crazy bastard down in the silt at the bottom of your psyche; you learned about locker-room jock humor and gung-ho for the Fighting Irish and old grads who turned on you if you lost the fucking game; you learned that just because you were a football player it didn’t mean you were going to get anywhere with the blondes with big tits on the Bob Hope Show. If that was life, well, I guess you learned something about life from football.
 
But nothing I’ve ever known since quite equaled that moment of summer scrimmage when I saw it all so clearly. Drew Summerhays never understood football like that. And what he understood I simply never grasped. Summerhays understood the Church.