Relic of Time by Ralph McInerny Read Free Book Online

sacred image.
    â€œAnyone who would steal that picture will give it up for money.”
    â€œYou may be right,” Crosby said.
    â€œWithin a week, I will double the amount.”
    â€œI wouldn’t do that.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œThey’ll wait to see what you’ll offer the following week.”

    Will Crosby was a large man, over six feet tall, his face an arrangement of planes that did not reveal his mind. He was in excellent physical shape, and he had a wife and grown children, one at Notre Dame; one at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia; and a daughter at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California. Ray Whipple had listed the man’s feats in the CIA, any one of which recommended him for the task Hannan now hired him to undertake. After starting his own agency, he single-handedly rescued a senator’s daughter, still intact, from kidnappers who were negotiating with a Saudi sheik for her purchase; that alone would have recommended him to Hannan. The rescued girl had subsequently written a book about her ordeal, one that was banned by various libraries around the country for its alleged Islamophobia.
    â€œYou’ll start immediately?”
    â€œI have associates who can take care of lesser matters.”
    The two men shook hands; the helicopter lifted, dipped once, seemingly toward the grotto, and then rose gracefully and disappeared over a tree-covered hill. Hannan turned to Laura.
    â€œPrepare a statement about the reward.”

VI
When I was hungry, you fed me.
    George Worth was appalled by Miguel Arroyo’s call to arms. Pacifism was a central tenet of the Catholic Worker movement and in recent years the plight of immigrant workers had become a dominant concern. No wonder. The center in Palo Alto, and others across the Southwest, all the way to Houston, provided refuge and aid to the Latinos who had learned that the utopia they had sought gave them at best an equivocal welcome. Their labor was welcomed but now, with the federal crackdown, many were being rounded up as they emerged from work. Employers were first warned, then fined. The party, it seemed, was over.
    George missed Clare. At first he had considered his attraction to her to be a weakness. She was beautiful, but Dorothy Day had been beautiful at Clare’s age. She was a child of privilege, but who was not? George’s family lived in affluence in Winnetka. When he admitted this to Clare, it was meant to indicate that they were more alike than different. He understood her reaction to the poverty in which he and the guests lived. It had taken him a long time to overcome it himself. Now that he was more or less used to it, he almost missed the aversion he had felt at first. But his conversations with Clare had seldom alluded to what he was sure explained her going.
    â€œGeorge, if this country is as bad as you think, why should you want to protect the illegals coming into it?”
    â€œDon’t call them illegals.”
    â€œWhat should I call them?”
    â€œBrothers. Sisters.” He smiled. “Jesus.” How many guests bore the name Jesú?
    â€œThey’re exploited here, you say so yourself.”
    â€œThey will have an effect on the injustices they suffer.”
    Dorothy Day had spoken of the plight of nonunionized workers, the sweatshops, the bullying bosses, but all that now seemed a bygone world. American workers were now members of the bourgeoisie, comfortable, well paid, materialistic.
    â€œWhat changes?”
    â€œThey’ll keep jobs in the country.”
    The fact was that the big unions now backed globalization, even at the manifest expense of their members, with jobs out-sourced from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, everywhere, and whole industries packing up and resettling in Taiwan, Latin America, wherever they were able to lower their wages and increase their profits.
    Once immigrants had been farmworkers for the most part, harvesting the crops