He needed privacy.
And darkness.
A location occurred to him.
He turned left and kept walking.
SALAZAR TRIED TO CONCENTRATE ON CASSIOPEIA, BUT HIS thoughts kept returning to Cotton Malone.
The insolent gentile.
Malone reminded him of other arrogant foes who, in the 1840s, terrorized Saints with unchecked vengeance. And the government? Both state and federal had sat by and allowed the mayhem to happen, eventually joining the fray on the side of the mobocrats.
“What did you mean,” he asked Cassiopeia, “when you told Malone he’d be sorry for what he did?”
“I’m not without abilities, Josepe. I can cause that man many problems.”
“He works for the American government.”
She shrugged. “I have reach there, too.”
“I didn’t realize you had such wrath inside you.”
“Everyone does, when challenged. And that’s what that man has done. He challenged you, which means he’s challenged me.”
“Dissenters,” the angel said in his head, “must be trodden underfoot, until their bowels gush out.”
That they must.
“I’m so glad to have you here with me,” he said to Cassiopeia.
They continued to walk beside each other, finding Getreidegasse and turning back toward the Goldener Hirsch, which sat at the far end. He’d come a long way in the eleven years since he and Cassiopeia had last been together. Both personally and professionally. Thankfully he’d met Elder Rowan, who’d encouraged the recreation of the Danites. Rowan had told him that Charles R. Snow himself had sanctioned the move but, as in the beginning, there could be no direct link. His job was to safeguard the church, even at the expense of himself. A difficult task, for sure, but a necessary one.
“It is the will of God that those things be so.”
The angel had just repeated what Joseph Smith had said when he first visited a Danite meeting. Intentionally, the prophet had not been told the extent of the group’s mission, only that they were organized to protect the Saints. From the beginning there were those who spoke with Heavenly Father, as Prophet Charles now did. Those who administered and implemented the revelations, as Elder Rowan and his eleven brethren did. And those who protected and defended all that they held dear, as he and his Danites did.
Cotton Malone threatened that.
This gentile had come for a fight? Okay. That he would receive.
He and Cassiopeia arrived at the hotel.
“I will leave you here,” he said to her. “I have some church business that must be handled before we leave. But I will see you in the morning, at breakfast.”
“All right. Have a good evening.”
He walked away.
“Josepe,” she said to him.
He turned back.
“I meant what I said. Malone now has two enemies.”
MALONE ENTERED ST. PETER’S GRAVEYARD, A CHRISTIAN burial site founded only a few years after Christ’s crucifixion. The oldest parts were the caves hewn into the rock face, and a hundred feet above them were strangely labeled catacombs. Centuries ago the monks of St. Peter’s lived there, in seclusion, the isolated perch their hermitage. The ancient Benedictine monastery remained—towers, offices, storehouses, a church and refectory, all grouped behind a fortified wall encasing both the cemetery and the Gothic St. Margaret’s Chapel.
The scene was a bit surreal, more like a garden than a cemetery, the colorful flowers adorning the elaborate graves muted in the darkness. He’d visited before and always thought of the von Trapps as they fled to freedom through here in The Sound of Music, though their escapades all happened on a sound stage. Many of Salzburg’s wealthiest families lay buried in the outer Baroque porticoes. What made the place unique was that the graves were not owned but rented. Fail to pay the yearly fee and the body is moved. He’d always wondered how many evictions had actually occurred, since each plot was always lovingly tended, decorated with candles, fir branches, and fresh blooms.
His minders had stayed back and unsuccessfully tried to be inconspicuous. Maybe they wanted him to know they were coming. If so, they were clearly amateurs. Never give yourself away by signaling your intentions.
He needed both hands free, so he laid the wooden box at the base of one of the markers, among a cluster of pansies. Then he hustled ahead, toward St. Margaret’s Chapel, its entrance doors closed and iron-barred. He rounded a corner and pressed himself against the rough stone, spying back toward the entrance. There were two ways into the cemetery. The one he’d just utilized and another a couple of hundred feet ahead of him, down a paved path that paralleled the rock face. All of the monastery buildings were pitch dark, only a few incandescent fixtures attached to the outer porticoes breaking the blackness.