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  Then blood welled up and fell in large drops onto the floor. Tears flowed from her eyes and intermixed with the blood.

  One more cut. Just to be sure.

  The second cut was harder for her to do. The wristband of her watch covered the best place on her vein, and her left hand was already weak.

  She sliced into the vein again.

  She sank to her knees, as if in prayer.

  Kathleen managed a third slash before everything jumped to black.

  She fell unconscious beneath the feet of the hanging doctor, whose mouth now seemed frozen in a knowing smile.

  Book One

  THE INVESTIGATORS

  Chapter 3

  GIVEN EVERYTHING THAT HAS happened, it isn’t too much of a stretch to say that this is one of the most incredible stories ever, and the strangest I’ve ever encountered. The weirdest thing of all is that I am part of it. A big part.

  I remember how my involvement began, remember every detail as if it happened just moments ago.

  I was in my small, hopelessly cluttered, but comfortable office in the Back Bay section of Boston. I was staring off in the general direction of the Hancock and Prudential towers.

  The door opened without so much as a tap, and an elderly man stepped inside. He was wearing a gray pinstriped suit, a white-on-white shirt, and a dark blue silk tie. He looked like a successful Beacon Hill lawyer or a businessman.

  I knew that he was neither; he was Cardinal John Rooney of the Archdiocese of Boston, one of the most important religious leaders in the world, and a friend of mine.

  “Hello, Annie,” he said, “nice to see you, even under the circumstances.”

  “Nice to be seen, Eminence,” I said, and I smiled as I rose from my seat. “You didn’t have to get all duded up to see me, though. What circumstances?”

  “Oh, but I did,” Rooney said. “I’m traveling incognito, you see. Because of the circumstances.”

  “I see. Nice threads. Very high WASP, which all us Catholics aspire to. Be careful, some chippie might try to pick you up. Come in. Please, sit. It’s nearly six. Can I offer you something to drink, Eminence?”

  “‘John’ will do for tonight, Anne. Scotch if you have it. An old man’s drink for an old man. Getting older in a hurry.”

  I fixed the cardinal a scotch, then got a Samuel Adams out of the minifridge for myself.

  “I’m honored. I think,” I added as I gave him his glass. “Here’s to — the circumstances of your visit,” I said and raised my beer.

  “The perfect toast,” Rooney said and took a sip of his drink.

  I have a rather complicated history with the Archdiocese of Boston, but most recently, I’ve worked several times with certain members as a private investigator. One case involved a teacher in Andover. She had been raped by a priest who taught at the same high school. Another case was about a fifteen-year-old who’d shot another boy in their church. None of the cases were happy experiences for either the cardinal or me.

  “Do you believe in God, Anne?” Rooney asked as he sat back in one of my comfy, slightly tattered armchairs.

  I thought it an odd question, almost impertinent. “Yes, I do. In my own, very unusual way.”

  “Do you believe in God the Father, Jesus, the Blessed Mother?” the cardinal went on. He was making this very strange meeting even stranger.

  I blinked a few times. “Yes. In my way.”

  Cardinal Rooney then asked, “As a private investigator, are you licensed to carry a gun?”

  I opened my desk drawer and showed him one of Smith & Wesson’s finest. I didn’t feel obliged to tell him that I had never fired it.

  “You’re hired,” he said and knocked back the rest of his drink. “Can you leave for Los Angeles tonight? There’s something there I think you should see, Anne.”

  Chapter 4

  I WILL NEVER FORGET Los Angeles and what I found there, what I felt there.

  I had first seen the graphic pictures of the terrible disease on CNN, and then on every other TV network. I had watched, cringed in horror, as the children of Los Angeles burst upon Cedars-Sinai Medical Center by the carload, all with aching joints and fever, with symptoms that could kill within days.

  When I arrived at Cedars, the scene was more intense than what I had seen on TV. It was so very different to be there in the midst of the suffering and horror. I wanted to turn away from it all, and maybe I should have. Maybe I should have run into the Hollywood Hills and never come out.

  The sound of chaos and fear was well over a hundred decibels inside the fabled hospital, which had been turned into a confused mess. The shouting of the emergency-room nurses and doctors, and the wailing of their young patients, ricocheted sharply off beige tile walls.

  It was so sad, so ominous. A portent of the future?

  A curly-haired boy of four or so in yellow pj’s was waiting to be intubated. I winked at him, and the boy managed to wink back. On another table, an adolescent girl was curled up in a fetal position around her stuffed sandy-haired bear. She was crying deep, heartrending sobs as doctors tried to straighten her contorted limbs. Other children were banked in a holding pattern along the perimeter of the room. Policemen, their radios squawking loudly, manned the doorways as best they could. They restrained desperate parents from their babies. The long linoleum hallway was packed wall to wall with feverish children tossing and turning on blankets laid across the bare floor.

  Each room off the corridor had been turned into a dormitory of tragically sick kids. Their families seemed eerily related by the flimsy, blue paper gowns and the masks they all wore. Each new image was indelibly stamped into my mind, and then into my soul.

  The doctor walking beside me was named Lewis Lavine, and he was the hospital’s director of pediatrics. He was tall and somewhat gawky, and his black pompadour made him look even taller, but I found him heroic in his own way. Dr. Lavine had the presence of a rock in a sea of chaos. He was giving me the grand tour when clearly he had no time for it.

  The same deeply mysterious plague had just broken out in Boston. Before I left for L.A., I saw the devastation at St. Catherine’s, a very large hospital run by the Church. The archdiocese had sent me to L.A. on a fact-finding mission. I was their investigator.

  “You know what it is, don’t you?” I asked Lavine as we walked hurriedly down the hall.

  “Yes, of course,” he told me, but seemed reluctant to go further, to actually give a name to the horror. Then he spoke gravely. “It’s basically poliomyelitis, only this time the virus is faster, even deadlier, and it seems to have appeared out of nowhere.”

  I nodded. “It’s the same in Boston. I talked for over an hour with Dr. Albert Sassoon at St. Catherine’s. He’s a terrific doctor, but he’s baffled, too. It’s polio — the second coming of the dreaded disease.”

  Polio had once been a killer plague that attacked more than six hundred fifty thousand people, mostly children. It killed some twenty percent of the infected, receding from the rest like a lethal tide, leaving behind deformed limbs and crippled spines, bodies that would never heal. Dr. Salk’s and the Sabin vaccines had eradicated polio, ostensibly for good. There had been only a handful of cases in this country since 1957. But this present, mysterious epidemic had a much higher fatality rate than the polio of old.

  “All of these children were vaccinated?” I asked.

  Lavine sighed. “Most of them. It doesn’t seem to matter. We’re looking at the Son of Polio,” he said. “The old menace with a new, more potent kick. It rushed past the old vaccine without blinking. Some of the World Health people think a broken sewer line contaminated a water source, and that’s how it spread. But in Los Angeles we don’t know how the hell it originated. Here. In Boston. Or wherever it breaks out next. And we certainly don’t know how to stop it.”

  As if to emphasize his point, he looked around at the sick children — the dying children. Many of them wouldn’t be going home, and that was so sad, so incomprehensible.

 
“No, Doctor, neither do the doctors in Boston. They don’t know how this could have happened. But it did. What the hell is going on?”

  Chapter 5

  Rome, one week earlier.

  FATHER NICHOLAS ROSETTI had never been so focused yet so devoid of original and illuminating thought in his life. He knew all about the “mysteries,” the tragedies in Los Angeles, in Boston, and elsewhere. Sadly, he knew much more, so much more that his mind was threatening to implode. He thought that he knew why the diseases and plagues were happening. He knew the unthinkable.

  Nicholas Rosetti’s workman’s build spoke of years of hard labor and outdoor life. He dressed simply, but well. His smile was disarming and self-assured, even when he was feeling almost total panic. He was darkly handsome, and that was inconvenient for a priest.

  He had been born of poor, simple parents, but Nicholas was very smart, and he was ambitious. He understood how powerful the Church still was, but more important, how powerful it could be. He knew, he just knew, that one day he would be a cardinal.

  But an odd and unexpected thing happened to him once he was ordained a priest: Nicholas Rosetti started to believe; he was given the divine gift of faith. From that moment on, he promised God that he would dedicate his life while here on Earth to serving the Church and its people. He was almost too good to be true — but he was consistent. That was how he eventually came to the attention of the Holy See, and then Pope Pius himself. It was known that Father Rosetti was as smart as any priest in Rome, but he was loyal, a genuinely good man, and he actually believed.

  As he walked he found himself staring up at the familiar, shimmering gold domes, the two-thousand-pound crosses and needle spires of St. Peter’s Basilica. He was looking for answers, but finding none. His already brisk pace accelerated.

  As he struck out across the familiar, swarming St. Peter’s Square — that majestic piazza with the Bernini colonnades — he could still hear the recent words of His Holiness Pope Pius XIII. The words kept ringing above the din of the Roman streets crowded with tourists, peddlers, and honking cars.

  Nicholas, Pope Pius had said, speaking to him as a true confidant, you are the chief investigator of miracles all over the world. I want you to investigate a miracle for me. Actually, two miracles. You can tell no one. You will be alone.

  Nicholas Rosetti strode quickly past the four magnificent candelabra built at the base of the Egyptian obelisk that had once towered center ring in Nero’s Circus. His mind was still fixed on the words of the man whose spiritual authority and leadership spanned the globe.

  Eighty-one years ago a message was left at Fatima, Portugal, by Our Blessed Lady. As you know, the “secret” of Fatima has never been revealed. Circumstances dictate that I must now tell you of the extraordinary message. I must tell you this secret, but you can tell no one. . . . It’s vitally important, Nicholas. It has to do with the polio outbreak in America, the famines in Asia and Africa, so much more. . . . Everything is connected. You’ll see for yourself soon enough.

  Rosetti had already come to the Porta Sant’Anna. He was about to leave the 109-acre papal state called Vatican City. And will I also be leaving its protection? he wondered. Am I truly alone now?

  As he turned down the ancient, crumbling Via di Porta Angelica, the priest felt a curious surge of dizziness. It was disorienting, a kind of swooping vertigo.

  He felt that he was being . . . watched.

  Shooting pains engulfed his heart, like knives piercing into his broad chest. His vision dimmed and was reduced to a narrow pinprick of light.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered. “What’s happening to me? What’s happening?”

  Suddenly he heard a voice — deep and powerful. There is no God, you fool. There never has been. Never! There is no way a human fool could ever know God.

  He tried to steady himself, grabbed on to a lamppost as a tide of nausea swept over him. But it wasn’t like a wave of food poisoning. It was far worse.

  “A man is sick,” someone shouted in Italian. “A man is very sick!”

  Nicholas Rosetti gasped hoarsely. Excruciating pain lanced suddenly down his left arm and entered his leg. He had the thought: I’m being skewered.

  He again heard the Voice deep inside his head. You are going to die, and that’s the end for you. You’ll cease to exist in a few seconds. Your life meant nothing.

  Could he be having a heart attack? No, he was too young for this to happen! Only thirty-six. He was as healthy as a horse. He’d been in excellent health just days before. Hours before! He’d jogged five miles along the Tiber that morning.

  Your exercise, your jogging, is a joke! You see that now, don’t you, fool?

  He fell to the cold stone pavement. The sky seemed to be fading in and out. Colors swam before his eyes. Faces looked down at him, blurred in his sight. They were grotesque, changing shape.

  He thought of the incredible revelation he’d received — just moments before, inside the gold-domed Apostolic Palace — in the papal apartment itself.

  I must tell you the secret, Pius had said. I have no choice. Listen to me. Listen closely. Father Rosetti, Our Lady of Fatima promised the world a divine child. It’s happening now. You must find the virgin mother, Nicholas. Only she can stop the diseases, the plagues around the world. You must find her.

  “Please, help me,” Nicholas Rosetti gasped as he lay in the street. “I can’t die now. I know the secret.”

  “We all know it,” whispered someone in the crowd gathered over him.

  “We all know the secret,” they said in chorus. They smiled. “We all know!”

  And he saw now that they were devils — every one of them. The streets were filled with grotesque, snarling devils. They looked like werewolves, vicious, hateful beasts up on their hind legs.

  He heard the Voice again.

  You’re going to an early grave with your precious secret, Nicholas. You’re going straight to the Kingdom of Hell.

  Chapter 6

  Newport, Rhode Island.

  KATHLEEN BEAVIER NERVOUSLY scratched at the ragged red and purplish scar on her wrist. The sixteen-year-old remembered when she had cut herself in Boston, but she put it out of her mind now. She tried to anyway. Months had passed, but of course she couldn’t forget.

  She glanced at the Boston Globe sitting on the breakfast table beside her. The headline was about a mysterious outbreak of polio in Boston. The whole world seemed to be going crazy lately. Or maybe she was just projecting her own feelings and fears.

  Suddenly, she had the sense that there was something wrong with the air circulating in the house. It was thick and nasty. It seemed almost evil to her.

  Stop it. Just stop it, Kathleen commanded herself.

  She had thoughts like this all the time now. Heard voices. Had crazy ideas. But at least Kathleen knew they were crazy. Ever since South Boston, she’d known that she might be crazy. But who wouldn’t be a little nuts under the circumstances? She turned the newspaper over. No need for bad news right now.

  A figure moved across her vision.

  “I don’t want any breakfast,” she said to the housekeeper, Mrs. Walsh.

  “Don’t talk to me like that, Kathy,” Mrs. W. scolded mildly. She put out a tempting little tray of goodies: fresh fruit, cereals, hot breads. The breakfast table on the veranda looked out over the rocky shoreline behind the Beavier house in Newport, Rhode Island.

  Kathleen finally smiled. And despite her wish to be obdurate, to starve herself, to just say no, she stuck her spoon into the muesli cereal.

  “Blech,” she said.

  “You’re very, very welcome,” said Mrs. Walsh, who’d been the Beaviers’ housekeeper since before Kathleen was born.

  The girl played with the cereal and the mandarin orange sections and the seven-grain toast on her tray. She sipped her chamomile tea and found it just about perfect, exactly as she liked it. Then she extricated herself from napkin and chair and slowly moved away.

  “Be careful, Kathleen,” M
rs. Walsh called after her.

  It made the girl smile. Careful? Wasn’t it a little late for that?

  Chapter 7

  SUPPORTING HER PROTRUDING stomach with her left hand, Kathleen negotiated a steep flight of bleached wooden stairs outside the house. Her one guiltless pleasure lately was the beach, and it lay directly ahead.

  She could cry on the beach. She could scream all she wanted to and her voice would be drowned out by the crashing waves. She could act crazy if she wanted to. And she very much wanted to. She was eight months pregnant and that was just one of the things that made no sense to her. The doctor who was supposed to abort the child had either committed suicide or been murdered — the police still didn’t know. Kathleen too might have died that night in South Boston if another patient hadn’t arrived and found her bleeding on the floor.

  Kathleen sighed loudly as she reached the beach. Her swollen feet were bursting out of her high-top Nike sneakers. She would have untied the laces but she couldn’t see her feet, let alone reach them.

  How had this happened to her? How? Why?

  Wading through the ocean’s low tide, she put her hand on her huge tum. She made the gesture pregnant women everywhere make: She rubbed a soothing circle on the swollen globe.

  She wanted to hate it, but no matter how angry she was that she was trapped in this body, the baby was hers. And she couldn’t be angry at the baby. Her baby hadn’t done anything wrong.

  She stood with her face to the early-morning wind and watched a crack drill team of sandpipers on tiny matchstick legs scrambling in and out of the frothy surf.

  The gray-and-white birds watched her right back.

  Was it her vivid imagination? Or another of the weird things that had been happening to her since her old life was taken over by this new one?

  She sighed. Gently stroked her belly again. A thought about the polio epidemic jumped into her head. She forced it out.