While Pope Luke Paul went into the private chambers off the altar of the main cathedral to change his garments with the assistance of the cardinal, Joe waited with Ariana in the anteroom.

“You should be in there with him.” She paced a small circle. He knew it was her anxiety talking. They both knew he was safe with the cardinal. No one else—not even his double—knew he was there.

“I’m standing in front of the door. He’ll be out in a few minutes.” He wanted to say that he was where he should be, watching her. That he’d rather watch her.

The self-admission rippled through him, mixed with his adrenaline.

“We’ll be with him when it counts.”

She stopped and folded her arms across her chest. She wore a black suit with a slim pencil skirt that showed off her curvy hips and shapely legs. She’d always reminded him of a WWII pinup girl. All she needed was the glamorous make-up. But as it was, she was a head-turning beauty with long golden hair and compelling angel-blue eyes, no matter how well she tried to disguise herself in the conservative trappings of security garb. His fingers itched to pull the pins that secured her hair in a knot at the back of her head.

She might have guessed at his thoughts judging by the wary look she gave him.

“I want you to know that it was his decision, not mine.” She paused a beat. “I tried to talk him out of it.”

“Did you tell him why?”

“No.”

“Tell me why.”

“You already know. So does His Holiness, I’m afraid.” She turned away.

“You didn’t do something foolish and go confessing anything to him, did you?”

“No. But he doesn’t need to be told things to know them.” Keeping her hands folded, she pivoted back to face him again. “Kind of like you.”

“You flatter me.”

“Don’t give me that false modesty. You know you have excellent instincts.”

“Maybe. But I’m not in the same universe with Pope Luke Paul. Literally. He has otherworldly help.”

“Maybe.”

The slight dimple reflected a faint glow on her face. Not something he saw often. He hoped for her sake she glowed with that joie de vivre more when he wasn’t around. It didn’t sit well that he might be a damper on her life.

“How’ve you been?”

“Keeping busy. I beat Luke Paul in chess once two months ago. Your tutoring helped.”

He wished he could read that pensive look of hers and see what her thoughts were, specifically what she thought of him. How she felt about him.

As if he knew, because he probably did, Pope Luke Paul intervened by opening the door, saving Joe from getting into trouble, from making the same mistake twice. An unforgivable thing in his business. In his life.

Now Luke Paul looked like the Pope.

Ariana went to his side, making a call on her cell phone. Then she pulled a small two-way from her bag.

“Do you want to carry the ?” Ariana pointed to a staff topped by a .

“No, my child. I have you and Joe to lean on.”

She smiled, but without that faint dimple.

“Let’s roll.” She glided forward with a skater’s grace, conveying His Holiness with familiar ease.

Joe flanked Pope Luke Paul on the left and the cardinal followed. The small party departed along the same path as when they’d arrived twenty minutes earlier. The Mercedes had been replaced by a limousine and it wasn’t alone. A cavalcade had been assembled in the tight quarters of the streets of Boston. Ariana opened the door of the papal limo adorned by the gold-and-white papal flag with the insignia consisting of Simon Peter’s crossed keys. She slid into the back seat, followed by the Pope dressed in a simple version of papal regalia. He wore his skullcap or zucchetto on his head and a green chasuble over his long white cassock.

Joe slid in next to Pope Luke Paul and Ariana raised her hand to signal the driver. Several men standing around the limo stepped back, raising their com devices to their ears. The devices looked like mini walkie-talkies of the kind Joe had played with as a kid, but he knew these had a range of miles rather than feet and none of the official-sounding static he remembered. Joe pulled the heavy armored door of the car closed behind them, encasing them in churchlike silence. The limo rolled forward at no more than five miles an hour.

“What’s our ETA?”

“Thirty minutes. We’re expecting crowds along the way. This is a public appearance starting now.” Ariana kept her phone in hand and looked past Joe out the window.

“I miss driving in an open car,” Pope Luke said. But as the limo turned the first corner past a heavily barricaded street, people appeared as if they’d been paid extras on cue in a Hollywood production. Pope Luke raised his hand and leaned forward past Joe to wave and smile at the people as best as he could.

It was no exaggeration to say that Joe felt the energy radiating from the man as he reached out to the crowd in spite of the closed window. He was thankful for the police lining the street and doubly grateful that they were not in an open car. As it was, Joe’s heart thudded like a frog on speed in his throat. He slid his eyes towards Ariana. She watched the crowd and kept the phone to her ear, speaking in a quiet, staccato voice. Joe guessed whoever was on the other end of the line was at their destination, City Hall Plaza.

As useless as he’d been up until now, hardly having done a thing that Ariana couldn’t have handled, he knew he’d earn his pay once they arrived at the security nightmare of that open plaza. There the Pope would be on a raised platform in front of tens of thousands of people with very little to protect him save his special Kevlar undervest—and Ariana and him.

Of course, there would be hundreds of special-detail police and hundreds more undercover from all walks of law enforcement, including the Pope’s own security.

“Where will the Swiss Guard detail be deployed?” he asked Ariana, tearing her attention away from the window and the phone.

“Excuse me,” she said into the phone, then covered it with her hand. “They’ll be with us on the platform and immediately surrounding it.”

Joe nodded and it occurred to him that they might be wondering why the hell he was flanking the Pope and not one of them. He knew why, but there was no way anyone else would guess.

Not even Ariana guessed that the Pope wanted Joe to protect her, to be her bodyguard while she guarded the Pope. It was a hell of a thing to wrap his mind around, but he’d never been more committed to an assignment in his life. Couldn’t think of higher stakes than protecting Pope Luke Paul—the most kind, courageous and revered Pope in a half a century—from a real and verified threat, and saving Ariana, the love of his life, from herself.

“I should have an earbud,” he said.

She slid her eyes to his. He knew this would be a point of contention, that she wanted to be in control and giving him communications access would threaten her control.

“You’ll be within sight and sound at all times.”

“You know the protocol.” He stared her down. She shuttered her eyes. The protocol called for him to be on the same line of com as she was. She knew the reason. In case she went down, he would take over. He didn’t bother saying it out loud in front of Pope Luke Paul.

Not that His Holiness hadn’t already figured all this out—because if he hadn’t realized the danger, he wouldn’t have asked for Joe to be there, would he?

She reached into an inside pocket of her dark suit jacket, revealing the lush contour of her breasts as she did, and removed an unusually small pair of ear buds, holding them in her palm. He reached forward to retrieve them.

“Excuse me, Your Eminence.”

The Pope turned to him, bestowing a brief smile and with it a flash of understanding. The holy man’s face expressed volumes in the blink of acknowledgment. A wash of emotion went through Joe as he engaged the earbuds. Energy surged with a renewed sense of mission and he turned to the window and the crowds of people. Their closeness heightened the sense of vulnerability so that he reminded himself of the limo’s state-of-the-art bulletproofing.

He knew that having the latest technology in bulletproof vehicles would have been a contingency prior to agreeing to any appearance. That was one of Ariana’s nonstarters. She was a world-class negotiator mainly due to her world-class willfulness. Others might have called her stubborn. Joe admired her endless well of resolve. Most of the time.

The noise of the crowds alleviated the quiet of the car’s interior when they arrived in Government Center and circled around Tremont Street, then took a left turn, normally the wrong way on a one-way street, to circle behind the monolithic Boston City Hall building. In design and spirit, it seemed to be the antithesis of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross from where they’d come.

When the limo took a left turn onto Cambridge Street onto another closed street filled with thousands of cheering people, Joe’s adrenaline kicked in. The garage entrance under the building was within one hundred feet. They were closing in on the dangerous part of this outing.

If His Holiness anticipated any danger, Joe couldn’t tell. The Pope relentlessly shared his benevolence with the people on the street. There couldn’t possibly be this many Catholics in the Boston area. And there weren’t, but this pope had a universal appeal that went beyond Catholicism, beyond celebrity, and verged on needy fanaticism. People needed his beacon of fearless kindness and courageous generosity, his politics-defying honesty, as if they were parched for a drink from his inexhaustible spiritual well.

Joe knew this, not only from those who surrounded him, including Ariana, but he knew it from his personal experience. He’d been a blessedly lucky man to be included in the orbit of the most truly holy man on the planet in decades.

“Are you ready?” The gentleness of her words spoken to Pope Luke struck Joe.

He knew that voice from a different context, knew the depth behind the words. He took a deep breath as the limo passed inside the garage door that rumbled open to a gaping dark cavern ahead.

The Pope nodded, aiming a personalized version of his holy smile at her.

She smiled back. “This is where you’re supposed to say you were born ready,” she said.

The Pope chuckled. “I know it must be true, but I still have difficulty understanding the nature of this readiness.” He turned to Joe and said, “If you knew me as a young man, you would know what I mean. Ariana has an inkling. She knows my history as a rule-breaker.”

“No wonder you like me,” Joe said. He smiled at Pope Luke Paul, mindful that the garage door thundered closed behind them as the limo descended to a stop in line with the unadorned gunmetal steel elevator doors of City Hall’s underbelly.

“How could I resist such a young man as you, Joe? You bring holy devotion to your calling as though you are a priest of protection.”

Joe put his hand on the door latch. The Swiss Guard detail assembled outside in the small space between the limo door and the elevator, waiting. But he waited, sensing and needing for the Pope to be ready to ascend.

Pope Luke Paul turned to the silent and eternally serious Ariana. She was composed and passionate at the same time, filled with her own devotion. She humbled Joe every time he witnessed it.

“I’m nothing compared to Ariana,” he said.

She flicked her eyes to his, surprised. And not surprised. Maybe surprised that he admitted it now. His Holiness took her hand in his.

“My Ari. We are blessed to share her presence, are we not, Joe?”

If he hadn’t witnessed the palest pink blush in the dim light, he wouldn’t have guessed it possible. A tiny fissure in her composure.

“Are you sure, Father, that you must go through with this?” She whispered the familiarity with reverence. Joe had only heard her refer to Pope Luke Paul as ‘Father,’ as she had as a child, once before. And that was the long-ago time he struggled to forget.

“My child.” He put his hand to her face, the heavy papal ring prominent and weighty, and caressed her cheek. “We both know I must. Be glad with me.”

She smiled. It was that infinitely sad smile that threatened to tear a hole in his chest even as he was aware of the time ticking and the need to move, to leave their protective cocoon, to go out into the dark underground garage and ascend on the elevator to the main floor where Pope Luke Paul would emerge to the open plaza, exposed and vulnerable to all the world.

Joe pulled on the door handle, unlatched it, and shouldered the substantial door open. The waft of air ambushed them, toxic with motor vehicle exhaust and mottled with the musty dampness of the subterranean atmosphere. Joe stepped from the car and turned to help Pope Luke Paul. The older man was nimbler than he looked, or perhaps he was energized with anticipation of his meeting with the people. He truly loved his people.