In the kitchen, Scott, Benny, and Father Rodrigo sat at a rough wooden table eating cheese, crackers, and hard salami and drinking wine from hammered steel cups. The rectory was a comfortable two-bedroom cottage that had been added on to the church more than a hundred years ago, Father Rodrigo said, when San Judas Tadeo was a thriving parish and had needed two priests.
"I practically grew up here," Benny said. "My favorite place to play was the wine cellar. Do you remember, tío?"
"I remember more than once I had to climb down that old ladder to get you out."
"There were no lights," Benny said. "And sometimes my flashlight would go out."
"The reason there weren't any lights was because it's not really a wine cellar," Rodrigo said. "I used to store wine down there." He smiled and pointed to the dark green, unla-beled bottle on the table. "Medicinal wine like this, of course. But that's not why it was built. It was a priest hole."
"A what?" Benny asked.
"An escape tunnel," Rodrigo explained. "A lot of churches added them back in the 1920s during La Cristiada, when President Calles made most of the teachings of the Catholic Church illegal and sent the army to hunt down priests who were still celebrating the sacraments."
"I'm sorry," Scott said, "but I've never heard of...What did you call it?"
"La Cristiada," Rodrigo said. "In English it's called the Cristero War, but it's not very well known outside of Mexi-co, and even here, despite the fact that the government mur-dered nearly a hundred priests, most people have forgotten it."
Benny shuddered. "I just thought it was a wine cellar."
"You were a little girl having fun," Rodrigo said. "There was no reason to tell you."
Scott ate another cracker topped with cheese. Then Fa-ther Rodrigo poured more wine into all three cups. "It's good, isn't it?" he said.
"Delicious," Scott agreed after a sip.
"It's made here in Nuevo Laredo," the priest said, "from Mexican grapes grown in the Guadalupe Valley in Baja."
"And I bet the little old ladies donate it to you by the case," Benny said.
Rodrigo gave his niece a devilish smile. "Not all of them are old."
Benny blushed.
* * * *
After they cleared the table, Benny asked her uncle if they could use his computer.
Rodrigo didn't ask any questions. He simply showed Benny and Scott into his study, which turned out to be a cramped room the size of a broom closet, with just enough space between the walls to wedge a small desk.
A jumble of papers covered half the desk. On the other half squatted an old computer monitor, the kind shaped like a pyramid lying on its side, with a convex screen, probably with vacuum tubes inside its hard plastic shell. A banged-up keyboard and a plug-in mouse lay in front of the monitor. The monitor, the keyboard, and the mouse all had wires run-ning down to a huge rectangular central processing unit, the old "tower" design, which stood under the desk.
Scott and Benny squeezed into the room and stood shoulder to shoulder. Father Rodrigo stood behind them in the doorway. "Does it have a USB port?" Scott said.
"To be honest," the priest said, "I'm not sure what that is. I don't know much about computers. Someone donated that one."
"Let's see what the keyboard is plugged into," Benny said as she dropped to her knees on the hardwood floor and crawled under the desk. She slid the CPU out enough to get a look behind it. "There are two USB ports. The keyboard is plugged into one, and the mouse is plugged into the other one."
"We probably don't need the keyboard," Scott said.
Benny unplugged the keyboard and inserted the flash drive into its spot. Then she crawled out from under the desk.
Scott pressed the POWER button.
"I'll leave you two to your work," Father Rodrigo said as he walked away.
The system took forever to boot up, the old monitor flashing long strings of DOS code during the whole process. Finally, a primitive version of Microsoft Windows appeared on the screen. Naturally, it was the Spanish edition. Scott pointed to the screen. "Can you...?"
Benny sat in the small, unpadded wooden chair and rolled the mouse around to make the pointer show up. Then she launched the file manager, found the USB drive, and opened it. There was only one file on the drive. It was named meeting.wmv. "There it is," she said.
And Scott was sure her voice held a hint of apprehen-sion. He was sure because he felt the exact same way. They'd almost been killed several times tonight trying to protect this video. What the hell could be on it that was so important? He was about to find out. He took a deep breath, then said, "Open it."