Three Marys Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Glenn Cooper

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Glenn Cooper

  The Cal Donovan Series

  SIGN OF THE CROSS *

  THREE MARYS *

  The Will Piper Library Series

  LIBRARY OF THE DEAD

  BOOKS OF SOULS

  THE KEEPERS OF THE LIBRARY

  The John Camp Down Series

  PINHOLE

  PORTAL

  FLOODGATE

  * available from Severn House

  THREE MARYS

  Glenn Cooper

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY

  This eBook edition first published in 2018 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2018 by Lascaus Media LLC.

  The right of Glenn Cooper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8821-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-941-2 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-998-5 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  PROLOGUE

  For Pope Celestine IV, his Wednesday morning general audiences at the Vatican were usually joyous events on his calendar – a time for him to connect with his far-flung flock in a relaxed, even festive atmosphere. On this morning he rose early, prayed in the chapel of his Sanctae Marthae residence, and had a convivial communal breakfast with staff in the cafeteria. With time approaching for him to make final preparations for the occasion, he looked up to see his private secretary and his cardinal secretary of state enter the room, both appearing rather grim.

  Celestine excused himself and went to speak with them at an unoccupied table in the corner.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘The two of you look like you have bad news.’

  Sister Elisabetta, his private secretary, laid a folder in front of him. ‘Holy Father, we believe you might wish to give an alternative homily this morning.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘It’s the attendance for the audience,’ Cardinal Da Silva said. ‘It’s rather anemic.’

  ‘How anemic?’

  Sister Elisabetta had gone to one of the upper windows of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St Peter’s Square to snap a few photos with her phone, and showed them to him now.

  The pope put on his reading glasses. ‘My goodness,’ he said. ‘When did you take these?’

  ‘Only fifteen minutes ago.’

  Da Silva said, ‘The sun is shining, Holy Father, the sky is blue, the temperature is mild. Yet, the people have not come.’

  The pope looked at the photos again. On such a day the piazza should be a sea of humanity – tourists from dozens of countries, Romans, pilgrims, clergy from all over Italy and Europe. But today, the Vatican grounds were half empty at best, with vast swathes of cobblestones visible.

  A month ago the piazza had been packed for the papal audience, but each week had seen a diminution in attendance. And now, this.

  Celestine scanned the homily text.

  ‘I know you didn’t write this today,’ he said.

  ‘We prepared it in advance in case it was needed,’ Elisabetta said.

  ‘It’s quite tough, don’t you think? Excommunications?’

  Da Silva nodded gravely. ‘It’s the consensus of the Curia, Holy Father, that it’s time to get tougher, to fight fire with fire before we completely lose control of the situation. Today is a good time to begin fighting back with greater vigor.’

  Celestine closed the folder and looked off into space. He was a heavy-set man and his big chest rose and fell, sending his silver pectoral cross into motion.

  ‘Is this my doing?’ he asked. ‘Did I push for change too rapidly? Did I misjudge the mood of the faithful? Did I not see the miracles that were right in front of my face for what they are?’

  ‘Holy Father—’ Elisabetta said gently.

  The pope’s eyes were moist when he said, ‘Am I responsible for the greatest schism in the history of the Catholic Church?’

  ONE

  Tugatog Public Cemetery, Manila, Philippines

  Tuesdays were clinic days at the cemetery. To an outsider it might have seemed odd that a mobile health clinic would choose a municipal burial ground as a base of operation, but to the slum residents of Malabon City in metro Manila, Tugatog was something of a safe zone. At least during the day. At night druggies scaled the walls and hung out among the concrete graves stacked in the air like condominiums, shooting up, smoking, snorting, doing deals. But daylight ushered in tranquility, and the poor and the sick felt protected and cloistered among the dead and their gentle mourners.

  The Health In Action mobile van was parked in its usual spot near the main gate on Dr Lascano Street. The small staff of humanitarian volunteers – doctors and nurses dressed in the organization’s light-blue polo shirts – was midway through a six-hour clinic when a teenage patient wearing thick glasses made it to the front of one of the lines. She was accompanied by her mother who looked so young she might have passed for a teenager herself. The girl was given a plastic chair under the van’s shaded cano
py where she sat listless, a little on the floppy side, wilted by the heat.

  The nurse – a Tsino, a Chinese Filipino – glanced at the long line of patients leaning and squatting among the graves. She didn’t have time for niceties.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  The girl was slow to answer.

  ‘Come on, child, do you see how many people are waiting?’

  ‘Maria Aquino.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  Maria was slow off the mark again and her mother answered for her. ‘She’s been sick in her stomach.’

  ‘How long?’ the nurse asked.

  ‘Two weeks,’ her mother said. ‘She’s throwing up all the time.’

  ‘Any fever? Diarrhea?’

  Maria shook her head. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed for a while. Her t-shirt was dirty.

  ‘What time of day does she vomit?’

  ‘Mostly in the morning,’ her mother said, ‘but sometimes later.’

  ‘Are you pregnant?’ the nurse asked, looking the girl full in the face.

  ‘She’s not pregnant!’ her mother said, offended.

  ‘I asked her,’ the nurse said.

  The girl answered strangely. ‘I don’t know.’

  The nurse got testy. ‘Look, have you had sex with a boy?’

  Her mother pounced. ‘She’s only sixteen! She’s a good girl. She goes to the church school. What kind of a question is that?’

  ‘It’s a question a nurse asks a girl who’s throwing up in the mornings. When was your last period?’

  The girl shrugged.

  ‘When?’ her mother asked.

  ‘I don’t pay attention.’

  The nurse went to a shelf and took down a plastic cup. ‘Maria, go inside the van and pee in this cup. Bring it back to me and wait over there. Next patient!’

  The nurse blitzed through three more patients before remembering the cup of urine. She took a plastic testing stick, the kind that pharmacies sell to people who can afford them, and dipped it. Seconds later, she called Maria and her mother over.

  ‘OK, you’re pregnant.’

  ‘She can’t be!’ her mother said angrily.

  ‘You see the blue stripe. Pregnant. Remember having sex now, honey?’ She didn’t say ‘honey’ sweetly.

  The girl shook her head and that made the nurse shake hers too.

  ‘Let’s have one of the doctors see you. Christ almighty, I’m never going to make it through the whole line.’

  Inside the van, behind a privacy curtain, the doctor, another Tsino, glanced at the nurse’s note and asked Maria to hop on to the small table. After a minute or two spent trying to see if the girl understood how one got pregnant, he gave up and raised the stirrups.

  ‘What’re those for?’ Maria asked.

  ‘Put on this gown and take off your underpants. You put your feet in those and you spread your legs. That way I can examine your reproductive organs.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  Her mother told her it was all right. It was what women did.

  The doctor put on gloves and a head lamp. He had to almost force her legs open wide.

  Peering under the gown he grunted a couple of times then raised his head.

  ‘OK, you can get dressed.’

  ‘What? That’s it?’ her mother asked. ‘That’s not a proper exam.’

  ‘There’s no point in doing a manual exam or using a speculum,’ he said. ‘She’s a virgin. Her hymen is intact. There’s enough of an opening to let out her menstrual flow but this is a virginal hymen.’

  ‘So she’s not pregnant?’

  ‘She can’t be. It must be a false positive. We’ve got a rapid blood test I can do.’

  ‘I don’t like needles,’ the girl whined.

  ‘It’s just a pinprick. Don’t worry.’

  Five minutes later, the doctor parted the curtain and came back in with the nurse. Both looked puzzled.

  ‘The test was positive,’ the doctor said. ‘You’re six to seven weeks pregnant.’

  Her mother almost jumped out of her chair. ‘But you said—’

  ‘I know what I said. I’m afraid this is beyond me. I’m going to send her to the Jose Reyes Medical Center to see a specialist. There’s got to be a good explanation.’

  When mother and daughter left the van clutching the paper to present to the hospital, the nurse asked the doctor what he really thought was going on.

  He confessed his complete bafflement and laughed nervously. ‘It’s been two thousand years since the last Virgin Mary. Maybe you and I just saw a goddamn miracle.’

  TWO

  Demre, Turkey

  In midsummer, the daytime temperatures on the south coast of Turkey soared oppressively but the evenings held the promise of cool Aegean breezes and easy sleeping. Cal Donovan enjoyed the fresh gusts wafting through the open windows as he showered and dressed, choosing his cleanest pair of khakis and last laundered shirt.

  He stood in the sitting room of the small house he shared with his flatmate, Turkish archaeologist Zemzem Bastuhan. Zemzem looked up from his laptop and asked, ‘Going out?’

  ‘Thought I’d get a drink, Zem. Want to come?’

  ‘Can’t. Got to finish this. Have fun.’

  The night air carried whiffs of roasting meat and fragrant spices. But Cal didn’t walk down the hill toward the town center and its bars bulging with tourists, but uphill toward the excavation. If Zem had surprised him by tagging along it would have thrown a wrench in his plans, but it had been a good bet Zem would decline since he was a studious sort and not much of a drinker. The latter couldn’t be said of Cal. Since arriving at the dig a month earlier, he had embraced the local liquor, raki, all but abandoning his vodka habit. Of course, the final common pathway for either beverage was the same: a bit of happiness, a bit of oblivion, followed by a bit of a thick head the next morning.

  Cal was treated as royalty in these parts. As the co-director of the Turkish–American excavations at Myra he brought in vital funding from Harvard University and the National Science Foundation for a project that stirred national pride. Myra, a town in the ancient Greek region of Lycia, had been a pilgrimage destination for Byzantine Christians. Best known for the fourth-century church of Myra’s bishop, St Nicholas – he of Santa Claus fame – recent archaeological work had begun to reveal a vast, remarkably preserved ancient Christian city beneath modern Demre. Professor Bastuhan of Istanbul University had done much of the groundbreaking work at Myra but, short on funds, he had called on Cal to join the excavation as co-director.

  Cal had leapt at the chance. He held a joint appointment as professor of the history of religion at the Harvard Divinity School and professor of biblical archaeology at Harvard’s department of anthropology, but it had been a while since he’d done field work. Myra gave him the chance to oil his trowel and to give Harvard students the opportunity to spend summers working in Turkey. The only downside had been the curtailment of his usual summer research period at the Vatican.

  Even in the dark, some local residents of Demre, out for an evening stroll, tipped their caps to him and murmured ‘Profesör’ as they passed. Closer to the dig, two Harvard grad students crossed the street to say hello.

  ‘Working late?’ Cal asked.

  ‘Just finishing up some cataloging,’ one of them said.

  The other added, ‘We’re heading to Mavi’s for a drink or three. Want to join us?’

  ‘Maybe later. I’ve got a few things to do.’

  ‘Geraldine’s still up there.’

  ‘Is she?’

  He knew she was.

  She was French and they had joked that all the good words to describe what they were up to – assignation, tryst, rendezvous – were French in origin. Geraldine Tison was a young archaeology lecturer from the Sorbonne in her first year at Myra. During her first week at the dig, she had been working in the Quonset hut fiel
d office when she glanced out a window and noticed Cal climbing a ladder in a nearby cutting where he had been inspecting the remains of a newly exposed eleventh-century chapel. There was a pair of binoculars hanging on the wall and she’d been tempted to have a better look at the tall guy with muscular forearms and tousled black hair. But that would have been cartoonishly obvious.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she had asked her Turkish colleague instead.

  ‘That’s the American co-director. Professor Donovan,’ she replied.

  ‘I expected someone much older,’ Geraldine had said.

  ‘Interested?’

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’

  That had been a half-lie.

  The next time she saw him at the dig she left the hut and made her way toward the women’s lavatories, flashing a shy smile as she passed, the equivalent of casting a lure into a pond. The fish hit the bait hard.

  ‘Hi, I’m Cal Donovan,’ he had said, stopping abruptly.

  ‘Geraldine Tison.’

  ‘From the Sorbonne,’ Cal had said. ‘Welcome to Myra. I was going to look you up. I make a point of meeting new faculty members.’

  ‘As you can see, I’m here,’ she had said melodically.

  ‘Maybe we could grab a drink tonight to discuss the progress we’ve made this season,’ he said. ‘A bunch of us like to go to Mavi’s Bar in town.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  The dig was located at the outskirts of the town in an old olive-tree farm. Ground-penetrating radar revealed that the ancient city of Myra was vast, extending below much of modern Demre, but logistically the archaeologists could only excavate in undeveloped land on the periphery that they could buy from local farmers. The Quonset hut was a few hundred meters from the nearest cluster of cottages and on a moonless night the light from its windows was the only illumination in the area. The door to the hut was unlocked.

  Geraldine looked up from the mound of pot shards on her desk. She was a specialist in Byzantine ceramics and quite adept at three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. A pot of glue and a half-assembled pilgrim flask attested to that.

  ‘You should lock the door when you’re alone up here,’ Cal scolded.