by Ted Krever
Thirteen
Rome.
As the plane skimmed down through the clouds, the squat red and tan hills came into sight and I started smiling. The Umbrian hills are umber—the culture is so old, they named the color of the land after themselves. I found myself misting up. Not only was it a lovely scene, it was one I actually remembered, a little piece of my life come back to me. Just a hint of a remembered past was enough to fill me with a strange gratitude.
We were on a low-budget carrier connecting from Dublin, the long route that, presumably, Volkov wouldn’t be watching. The low-budget airline did without the telescoping offramp the big boys use; we descended a shiny metal staircase like the Beatles at Idlewild and boarded a shuttle bus to the terminal. Guards ringed the perimeter of the building, rifles at the ready. Nonetheless, this was Rome—even the low-rent terminal was clad in mottled dark marble gleaming in the sharp sunlight.
The line for Customs was ridiculous. “We should have used EU passports,” Max said. There were two lines for EU citizens versus one (much longer) line for the rest of the world—and our scrutiny was far more exacting. “Could’ve told you,” Tauber grumbled without explaining why he didn’t.
I guess I heard the voice behind me say “Greg?” but I didn’t even think to look. After all the months I’d spent unable to remember a single soul, a single memory, the thought of someone remembering me was from Mars. But Max was staring so I turned and there was Bill Szymzck towering over me and if I could remember how to spell his name, how could I not be sure who he was? He threw his arms around me and I melted—my brain didn’t register but my arms knew this overgrown bear of a man. It was miraculous to know someone, even if all I knew was that I knew him.
“Great to see you!” he shouted like he really meant it. He was huffing like he’d been running laps. Alongside him, a photographer in full battle gear—three cameras round his neck, flak jacket stuffed with lenses, batteries and memory cards—waited impatiently, legs twitching. “Are you covering this show?” Bill demanded. “Back in the game?”
“Yeah—sure,” I stammered and Billy thrust a card into my hand.
“My number’s there,” he said. “Call me—have to run.” He waved a finger at the photographer and they both took off, part of an army of ink-stained wretches pouring down the tunnel in the opposite direction.
I stuck the card in my pocket and shrugged at Max and the others. “I—I know him,” I smirked though it was all still a blank.
As soon as we stepped outside, the crowd noise swallowed us. The courtyard was packed, crowds swarming against barricades manned by lines of carabinieri in their silly black hats. A few buses and scooters puttered through the middle of the crowd like coffee through a spout. Signs bobbed in the thick air, French, German, English and some Cyrillic lettering joining the Italian. As we squeezed into the crowd, heads began to swivel upward, tracking an Air India jet making its approach. Murmurs and applause filtered in from all angles, until they filled the square.
“Singh,” Max said and his face went dark. He swept the crowd and then retraced the scan. “This way!” he said and the urgency in his voice was obvious. We pushed through the crowd, clearing people roughly out of our way, pushing hard for the center of the square. Max’s head was swiveling, searching, tracking something ahead of us. And then I saw him start, as though a shock had passed through him.
A moment later, a face appeared in the sky—no, in my head, it was in my head, but the way it looked was like it was floating translucent in the air above the courtyard. I could see through it or past it, but when I looked right at it, it had texture and shadows and substance. A youngish man, moving through the crowd, moving swiftly, purposefully, away from us. I knew this without knowing how I knew it. A moment later, I realized it had to be Max’s vision—the thought came to me before the image had ceased to be startling.
Next, in a progression I could barely understand, everything amplified and deepened. I jumped, all at once, inside the young man—feeling what he was feeling; rapid heartbeat and shallow rabbit’s breath, desperation and fear, fear of failure and fear of success. I could feel him now, somewhere just across the traffic island, moving through the crush, arms folded in front of his chest, sheltering the package there, the wires and plastic leading off the detonator on his chest. Suddenly I was pushing hard at the crowd, clearing them away rudely, sharply, yelling louder and moving faster. Kate and Tauber branched out behind me, apparently reacting to the same vision.
Max was ahead of us, moving fast—of course, people just got out of his way. He plunged into traffic, tipping his hand at a black-suited officer, who waved him on. The same cop jumped to stop us when we arrived three seconds later. “Max!” I shouted. I saw him turn, just a glance over his shoulder; the officer straightened like a ramrod and got the hell out of the way.
“Over there!” Max yelled, pointing toward the terminal exits. “Spread out!” The bomber was moving across the grain of the crowd and I kept riding his feelings. It was like a late-night drive, trying to hold onto a staticky distant radio broadcast that kept fading in and out—you held onto the fragments that made sense and tried to assemble the rest from context and guesswork. He wasn’t aware of us, the bomber wasn’t. He kept repeating the same frantic thoughts in succession. Get there. Not too soon. Get there. Not too soon. I kept waiting for something about the mission—the bomb, Singh, something—the kind of compulsion that could drive a person to suicide. But the connection ebbed instantly when I did, so I cleared my mind and returned to simply receiving what he was sending and following it. Necklaces and rings in the air rotated through his head in rotation with Get there. Not too soon.
A second later, I glimpsed a close-cropped haircut jerking through the crowd ahead and knew immediately this was him, this was the bomber, in plain sight, moving across the edges of the crowd where it was thinner and he could move faster. Tauber crossed over, moving to an angle where he could cut him off. I changed my angle to catch up behind them and threw myself through the crush. I could feel the boy’s desperation mounting, the sweat pouring down his face and chest, his hands twitching. Too soon, too soon. She’ll be here soon. His desperation matched my own. We’d come all this way and barely made it in time—if we were in time. Minutes to go—seconds? He still wasn’t aware of us—he wasn’t aware of anything now but her, the imminence of her. The plane had surely taxied in by now–she’d be at the gate anytime.
Tauber burst out of the crowd right behind the bomber, lifted his arms to grab him and—crack!— he was on the ground, writhing and quivering. I was there a second later—I reached for him but somehow managed to pull my hands back at the last second. The electricity made a crackling noise as it pulsed through his body. His skin was bluish and shimmering; the smell and sizzling noise were the same as in the back of Dave’s store in Florida.
Max rushed up, touched Tauber’s shoulder and the blue light drained off. “He’ll be okay,” he said. “Get after him!” The bomber had reached the edge of the traffic island—I could feel his satisfaction, a sense of finality, of relief. He’d made it. I anticipated his next step, jumping across traffic and making that last dash—a good run, but the last one—to the exit gate. To his target. But somehow, he stopped instead, lolling like he was right where he meant to be.
There was no one between us now. I ran, sprinting headlong, abandoning any concern about frightening or upsetting the crowd. But, with a couple yards to go, Max grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me to the curb to watch. We had a front-row seat for the scuffle that made the news—the camera crew, in fact, stood right in front of us.
Five or six guys came from nowhere, swarming the bomber, wrestling and throwing him to the ground, pinning his arms behind him to eliminate any chance of tripping wires or throwing triggers. His shirt came open and the squares of plastic explosive on his chest, the wires and battery taped there, were suddenly visible to all. The crowd started to shriek and scatter in every direction. The panic spread like an infect
ion through the crowd, starting close-by and gushing out in all directions, becoming more desperate with distance, blindness always worse than the most terrible sight.
Max pulled me the short distance back to Tauber—Kate was helping him regain his footing. His hair was sticking out in all directions and he was hissing like a dry cleaner.
“Are you alright?” Max asked.
“Fuck no, I’m not alright! What the hell happened?”
“You took a lightning bolt. I guess Marat can temper them enough to knock you over without killing you.”
“Ain’t that genteel of ‘im!” Tauber growled. He kept trying to lean against the lamppost but sparks kept flickering from his fingers when they got close together.
“I think the air shield would have protected you, if we’d known” Max offered, not that he sounded real confident.
“Frying him first would protect me!” Tauber yelled. “Torching him down to his shoes would protect me!” They were arguing in the midst of a riot, understand—people rushing by, screaming, others rooted, paralyzed, watching the guards struggling with the bomber. He was still flailing and kicking, the whole group staggering back and forth until they finally tied his hands and clamped their own arms solidly around his neck and waist. Then the team lifted the bomber entirely off the ground, a van pulled up with perfect timing and they dragged him inside, shouting and protesting.
As the van made its way out of the square, the crowd seemed to get the message. Applause rippled through the courtyard and followed the van, lights flashing and siren whooping, as it pulled out of sight. We stood, deflated, in the midst of the cheering crowd, staring at each other blankly.
“So?” Kate said. “Are we done? Is that what we came for?”
People were filtering back into the square now that the drama had ended. We wandered to the corner where the guards had overpowered the bomber. Bits of wire and one brand-new Nike sneaker remained at the curb.
“Expensive shoe,” I said, “for an anarchist.”
“Too far away,” Tauber growled, gauging the distance to the gate. “Couldn’a done much damage from here if he wanted to.”
“He wanted to,” Kate said. “He had to. He was panicked, running late, frantic to make up time, I could feel it. Though, once he got here, he was totally confused, like he didn’t know the next step.”
“That’s not what I got,” I said and suddenly they were all staring at me.
“What did you get?” Max asked.
“What you sent! Wait—you mean you weren’t sending out his thoughts? For us to pick up?” Max shook his head immediately. “Then what was I getting?”
“What did you read?” he repeated and the sound of his voice reverberated inside my head.
“Get there. Too soon. He was panicked about being early—and, once he got here, to this corner, he was satisfied. He’d done it—reached his goal. He knew it—it was very clear to me.” Kate shook her head, listening and all I could do was shrug. “I’m probably wrong, I don’t have the power like you guys. In my head, he kept thinking about jewelry.” Every eyebrow went up. “Big red stones.”
“I didn’t get anything about jewelry,” Kate offered.
“Ruby Red,” Tauber said but it was a question and I nodded. He turned to Max immediately. “It’s a control—rubies. Like the lapel pins.”
Max stared, mulling for another moment—then he wheeled on Kate. “Could you see his face?”
“What do you mean?”
“The image you got from him. Was the camera on him—or was he the camera?”
“Oh, he was the camera, for sure. I saw what he was seeing, the street in front of him.”
“And you?” he turned on me next, fierce and rushed. “What did you see?”
“I saw his face, sometimes,” I answered. “Sometimes closer , sometimes further. Sometimes from the side, sometimes from behind.” I panicked a little, replaying it all in my head. “I must have got it wrong. How could he see the back of his own—?”
I didn’t get the chance to finish the sentence.
“Come on!” Max cried, jumping against the flow of the crowd, leading us at a tear away from the terminal.
We rushed headlong toward the outer edge of the square. As we went, Ciampino’s exit gate opened and the first motorcycle came through, siren wobbling. A solid row of caribineri took up positions alongside the gate and another motorcycle followed. That was when the chant started, voices rising from every part of the courtyard. “Pace” and “Friede,” “Paix,” “Paz” “Peace” and other variations, one chanted after the next, call and response like gospel church.
This was not the roaring crowd demagogues (and most politicians) hope for—this was a strong, individual voicing, quiet, respectful, gaining strength with every repetition, with the power of the same idea in fifty languages in close proximity. Scanning the faces as we ran past, I couldn’t say that these were really hopeful faces. Mournful seemed more accurate. Maybe they just hoped to be hopeful, hoped for the chance someday to feel hopeful again.
And then the gate opened and the motorcade came through, four Mercedes limos followed by two more rows of motorcycles. One flipped its siren, a momentary honk and the crowd hushed for a second but the chant continued immediately, almost a whisper. And, a moment later, a hand extended from the rear window and waved a thumbs up.
“This way!” Max said. He led us across a blinding marble courtyard and through the echoing lobby of an office building onto the street beyond. He hailed a cab and gave the driver an address and some directions. We hurtled off as soon as the doors closed behind us.
“Where are we going?”
“To the bomber’s apartment,” Max whispered.
“How do you know where he lives?” I asked. He just shot me a look like Have you been paying attention the last week? and I moved on. “Why are we going there?”
“Because of what you saw.”
“I probably saw it wrong.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Let’s find out.”
It took us fifteen minutes in traffic to get where we were going. Rome is a beehive—the traffic moves slowly but comes from everywhere, cars feeding in from sidestreets, alleys, driveways and thoroughfares built on twenty separate levels, buses and cars crowding through insanely small openings and motor scooters like mosquitoes buzzing around everything else at random. Traffic lights were obeyed as much by coincidence as duty. Blocks of buff-colored sixteenth-century apartments nestled between sleek glass office towers curving around an arch built in the year 2 (II) to honor the Roman Conquest of the Week.
At one point, the wide shopping thoroughfare we were on, lined with cypress trees in neat rows, sidewalk cafes and leather and haute couture boutiques, changed without warning or transition to a one-lane brick shelf descending three stories across the face of an ancient stone wall, dropping to a narrow cobblestoned roadway twisting through the middle of a pruned, manicured park—all in the space of a quarter mile—before dumping us in the midst of a working-class neighborhood filled with grimy apartment houses, trattorias and a spectacular domed temple built before Christ to a God I’d never heard of and restored later by a Pope I’d never heard of in commemoration of an apostle I’d never heard of.
All this to reach a pretty ordinary-looking block of apartments built above a Laundromat, an electronics store and a local flea market offering sheets, plumbing supplies and live ducks and pigs for on-the-spot slaughter.
“We’ve got a problem,” Max said as the cab stopped. A pair of carabinieri stood all puffed-up outside the front door. We loitered, stymied, wandering into the stores to keep from being too obvious.
“We’ve got to find a way in,” Max said as we lingered among the IPods and laptop computers, electric pasta makers (in Italy?) and the latest digital cameras. “The caretaker’s in the basement. He’s already trying to figure out how to turn this unfortunate boarder into cash.” He pulled a couple of hundred-Euro notes out of his pocket. “But
we need an excuse to get in there without alarming the cops. You know, normal everyday graft.”
“You couldn’t just suggest they leave us alone?”
“Suggestions are short-term; when they remember, they get very pissed. Not good pissing off cops, especially if you need them later.”
I’d been admiring a really nice digital video camera behind the counter, sizing up the detachable microphone and the very nice zoom lens. That’s when I had one of those cartoon moments, the thought balloon with the exclamation point going off right over my head. “It’s a story!”
“What is?”
“The apartment—the bomber. Billy asked me if I was covering the summit. I’m a reporter, remember? At least I was. We got this guy’s address from a source and we’re checking it out.”
“If you’re the reporter,” Kate demanded, “who are we?”
It took a two-second glance at this group to answer the question. “You’re the reporter,” I told her. “I’m your producer, Max is cameraman and Mark is audio.” I pulled Max’s bogus credit card out of my back pocket, gesturing at the counterwoman and the video camera.
Five minutes later, we tramped around the back of the apartment house, skirting the edges of a deep pit covered by heavy planks and rubber sheeting. The pit filled the space between the rear walls of several adjoining houses. Kate threw a curious look at the spades and brushes stacked against the outer wall as we went by.
“Keep the lens on wide-angle,” I told Max. “It’ll keep the picture from shaking too much. Get as close as you can to your subject. If you want a wider shot, back up but remember, it’s TV—closeups still read better across the room.” I knocked on the door several times before a slightly feral face appeared, bearing that universal hungry look. That hunger was a great reassurance.
“GNN,” I told him in English, assuming like an arrogant American that he could speak it. “We want pictures. Video. TV.” I held out my bogus passport without actually giving him time to read it. That’s all the look he’d have gotten if I’d had real ID. We tried to dance past him through the door but he stepped over to block it. He wasn’t big but he was built like an oak tree.
“Polizia is coming,” he said in accented but reasonable English.
“We want pictures,” I said. “Before the polizia come.”
“Polizia statale,” he clarified. “Especiale. They want everything very clean. Nobody sees nothing.”
His words said good citizen, his eyes read hungry. I pulled out 200 Euro and kept adding 50 Euro increments (slower and slower each time) until we reached 450 and he grabbed for the money. I pulled it back. “Fifteen minutes,” I told him.
“Fifteen,” he repeated with a look that said 450 Euro.
“We don’t have fifteen minutes,” Max said as we went up the stairs. “Marat got into a cab just ahead of us—”
“You saw him?!” Tauber nearly lifted out of his shoes. “And you let the son-of-a-bitch get away?”
“It was more important to get here first,” Max answered. “Besides, I got this address when he gave it to his cab driver.”
“How’d we beat him here?”
“That unfortunate cab driver is temporarily seeing left as right and right as left. So Marat is now on the wrong side of town and getting into a new cab. He’s not stupid—he’ll call in reinforcements. We have approximately seven to ten minutes.”
“Give me the camera,” I told Max and he handed it over gratefully. “Nobody’s going to let us carry evidence out of here. We’ve got to document as much as we can.”
The room was a classic student clutter, a hovel, clothes piled on the ripped second-hand couch, Godard and Che on the wall, books and pamphlets in piles on the floor and bomb-making equipment spread across the table.
Tauber pulled a pair of latex gloves from a box and handed each of us a pair. “Put them on now. Nobody touches anything nekkid.” Then he set to work examining wires and diagrams.
Max wandered to the desk by the side window, and picked up a battered leatherette slipcase that was lying open. “The bomb maker was doing his bills,” he said.
“What?”
“He was writing checks—my Italian’s not perfect but it looks like the gas company, electric, telephone…” I jumped to the desk and got pictures of the ledger.
“Putting his affairs in order?” Kate offered.
“He’s a nihilist—he’s going out in a few minutes with a bomb strapped to his chest. He’s paying the phone bill?”
“This is even better,” Tauber said and we grouped around him. A pad of longwise European paper displayed bomb-making preparations, a diagram of the bomb, a scrawled map of the airport and scribbled notes around the edges. “He marked down his destination,” Tauber said. “Look where,” holding up the pad and angling it so I could get video. “He wasn’t even trying to reach the gate; his goal was the corner. Across the street. Several lanes of traffic between him and the target.”
“Too far away—you said so yourself,” Kate said.
“Only,” Tauber twinkled, “if ya actually intend to blow somebody up.”
“Look! The rubies!” Scribbles of the gems were all over the edges of the page, obsessively drawn and colored in with marker or something. I shot close-ups.
“Yeah,” Tauber nodded like this was no surprise. “Gems are a good control. Almost everybody sees rubies as the same shade—even if you’re color-blind, it’s a consistent, vivid shade o’gray.”
“And color,” Max cut in, “is a frequency, just like sound. So if you want to maintain control over somebody at a distance, you program them to replay the image in their heads over and over. It keeps them around the right frequency, so they keep receiving your suggestions.” He kept picking through the wire and clutter on the table, examining each bit and holding it out to the camera, moving rapidly. “This was a fall guy. They monitored him—”
“Who did?”
“That, we’ll see—I think we all know the prime candidate—they controlled and moved him around like a dog on a leash. Kate heard his panic—he had to reach the right spot on time but, when he did, he had no idea what to do, no further goal. It was all fed to him and now the feed dropped off.”
“So I was wrong.” I wasn’t surprised but a little disappointed. It sure felt like I’d been tapped into somebody.
“No—you were right too,” Max said and I was totally confused. “You, I’m certain, tuned into the suggestion—the signal from his minder, his runner. The guy whose job was to lead him to the wrong spot and abandon him there.”
This, strangely, was confounding. I had a much harder time accepting I’d succeeded than a few moments earlier accepting that I’d failed. “So I did it? I’m a mindreader?” I’d hardly spoken more than a few words a day the week before.
“Don’t get cocky,” Max said, rummaging through cabinets and drawers, pulling out papers and holding them under my camera for recording. “You picked up a specific mind intentionally beaming out a message. You’ve been around Tauber and me, you had to fight off Volkov and Marat and now we’ve got Kate and a bunch of drones trying to probe us. That’s a lot of activity all at once, so you’re getting stimulated. You probably live on the minder’s frequency anyway.” He looked me square in the eye. “But you paid attention,” he said. “Give yourself credit for that. And fix those rubies in the back of your mind—you may find them handy later on.”
“But what was the point?” Kate asked. “Why send out a bomber intentionally to get captured?”
“Good question,” Max said.
“Think of the damage he could’ve done if nobody’d stopped him,” she mused.
“He wouldn’t’a done shit,” Tauber said, holding up the bomb blueprints for us. I focused the camera on the drawings in the center, where he was pointing. “See?” he challenged Max, who stared at it blankly. “Didn’t they teach you anything in that program?”
“I told you, I resisted.”
“Shee—it!” The bluep
rints quivered in his hands but not as bad as they had the day before. “It was no bomb to begin with! Damn thing couldn’t go off the way they had it wired. No way, no how. Wiring’s all wrong.”
“Jesus,” Kate moaned. “What a sitting duck.”
“Time’s up!” Max yelled suddenly, throwing another few documents under my lens for preservation. “We’ve got company.”
A moment later, we heard shouts and a crackle of electricity in the street below. Tauber started badly at the electrical sound; he had the door open before Max yelled “Go!”
“Head for the staircase at the end of the hall!” Renn ordered but there was a stairwell just in front of us. Tauber and I both made for it, Tauber arriving just in time for a bolt of electricity to rip past his ear and blow a hole in the ceiling above. Leonardo light poured gloriously down through the billowing plaster. Tauber turned two shades paler than he already was and we scrambled backward.
Shouts and footsteps echoed up the stairwell, but Max came tearing around the corner, his arms swinging over his head and down the stairwell. He looked crazy at first but, then you could see the energy ball arcing through the smoky lightshaft and plunging down the metal staircase. The banisters buckled and bent, the steel latticework groaned and screeched and several steps collapsed, crushed like someone had dropped a steam roller. We heard the cries of shooters scrambling away as the ball bounced down into the lobby below, taking the rest of the staircase behind it.
Tauber gaped but Max simply pointed at the far end of the hall like this happened to him all the time. “That staircase, dammit!” Kate was already ahead of us, hitting the landing and disappearing down the shaft.
We bounded down two flights before the crunch hit. Kate went first, slipping-jumping as many steps as she could without falling, the rest of us a few rungs behind. We had just about made the lobby when a lightning bolt hit the staircase just above us, slicing it away from the wall. I looked up just long enough to catch Marat’s white hair and the arm of his dark robe flapping over the railing. The staircase groaned and began to list at a nasty angle. We stumbled on, the lobby just ahead.
That’s when I saw something that wasn’t there. Just like at the airport, that distant radio station began drifting in and out of my head again. This time, I knew what was happening, so I focused—rubies, rubies. I held that color, that frequency, vivid in my head and locked into the signal right away. And I found myself staring at the staircase—the staircase we were descending, except I was seeing it from the lobby just below.
The lobby where Marat and five L Corp guys with stun guns and anti-noise headsets waited to take us the moment we appeared. Marat and five others, including the guy whose head I’d just gotten inside of again.
Kate was inches from the last step. I threw myself into the air and grabbed her just above the last step, our momentum carrying us hard into the far wall. We flew through the doorway in two seconds—the third second, the place opened up, bullets and lightning bolts everywhere. We lay flattened on the floor, scrunched tight together as the place erupted.
In the fifth second, dead silence, except for the tinkling of glass hitting the floor. We were cramped into the corner behind the doorframe, staring across at Max and Tauber still clinging to the precarious staircase.
At the same time, I still saw the other angle as well, the same doorway but now from down the hall, through the eyes of my L Corp contact, as his crowd waited for us to show, for a clear shot at us.
“You wrecked the other staircase,” said a dry voice from down the hall. Through the L Corp side of my head, I could see the head blueshirt—a bullethead with a full red beard—talking and Marat slinking up behind him. How’d he get back downstairs if there was no other staircase? “So there’s no place else for you to go.”
“Like hell,” Max muttered. He and Tauber were hanging onto the monkey-bar staircase, their weight threatening to pull it down altogether at any moment.
“That’s all you got?” Max answered loudly, moving hand-over-hand very deliberately toward the landing. “Volkov offered three-quarters mill and a country house.”
“Offer?” Redbeard answered, sounding almost amused. “You’re taking offers?”
“We need an escape route before I run out of bullshit,” Max whispered. “Anyone has suggestions, now’s the time.”
The staircase shrieked and sagged sickeningly toward the outside wall of the building. If I’d ever heard that sound onboard a ship, I’d be looking for life rafts. The whole apparatus now hung entirely over the wide-open stairwell, Max and Tauber literally clinging to the handrails.
“The Italian police just want accomplices; you’re better off with us,” came Redbeard’s voice again.
I don’t know if Kate had risen to her feet or if I’d just lost track of her, but suddenly she was at the back of the stairwell, sheltered behind the doorframe, out of the line of fire, peering down into the dim landing.
“I think I can get a better offer,” Max yelled. In seconds, he and Tauber were either going to have to swing over onto the landing—in full view of our attackers—or plummet two stories down into the stairwell.
“I think you’re misinformed,” Redbeard answered drily, clearly close to the end of his patience.
“It’s a plumb-bob!” Kate mumbled, talking to herself, gazing into the stairwell with an idiotic level of excitement. It’s a cannon, I’d have understood. A plumb-bob?
“Are we outside the walls of Rome?” she demanded.
“What walls?” Tauber rasped. His fingers were slipping; he was in no mood.
“The ancient city had walls!” she burst, like this was absurdly obvious. And, looking over the railing, I saw the plum-bob, conical, pointed, ridiculous, string looped over the doorknob two flights down. “We have to be outside the ancient city,” she muttered to herself.
“Time’s up, Renn! Come out or we come in!”
“What’s the point, Kate?”
She was smiling now, which was insane. “We go,” she said softly.
“Go? Where?”
“Down,” she answered. She was already working her hands back and forth, in and out. A moment later, she leaned into the doorway and threw an air ball down the corridor. I had to grab the doorframe to keep from being sucked out after it. Marat’s team scattered in twenty directions as it flew between them, ripping pictures off the walls and pulling potted trees, newspapers, doormats, pairs of shoes and every bit of dirt and lint and paper in the hall into a crazy, swirling, rolling tide.
“Go!” Kate yelled, jumping brazenly across the landing into the stairwell. Max and Tauber swung and landed hard on the steps. We scrambled down two flights, breakneck, to the basement door. Max threw it open and then melted the lock, sitzing and sparking, behind us.
A rickety wood staircase plunged two more stories in seconds through a rough-cut chamber that looked carved out of the earth instead of built. An ancient narrow stone archway blocked the view below. I heard the others gasp as they reached it—when my turn came, I couldn’t help but do the same.
Stretched out below, under floodlights, lay the open-air courtyard of the Emperor Nero’s summer house. Two huge fountains framed an archway like the Lincoln Memorial but fancier; behind that stretched an open-roofed courtyard with a wading pool and a mosaic floor hand-painted by a cast of thousands.
“What’s the point of a museum education?” Kate whooped. “I know excavating equipment when I see it, that’s what.” Behind us, I could hear fists pounding at the melted doorway.
We ran a central corridor, between rooms painted with flat pre-perspective murals—mountain and garden landscapes, well-dressed Roman citizens dancing, drinking, bathing and some other stuff. Some of it looked pretty dirty, actually. I wouldn’t have minded spending a little more time there, under better circumstances. The lights cast dramatic shadows behind the pillars and the timber skeleton bracing the cavern ceiling.
“What the hell is this?”
“
Rome is built on top of ancient Rome,” Kate yelled back. “They just buried the old neighborhoods and used the old buildings for foundations.”
She dashed to the last chamber, the largest, deepest room, where picks and trowels and paint brushes lay among wheelbarrows and two-by-fours in a disorderly pile.
“Lecture later!” Tauber yelled. “We need outta here, dammit!”
Kate lit a torch from the pile and threw it at me. Everyone grabbed one and she ran to the farthest corner, kicking over a construction pile with a clattering roar. She poked her torch into the corner, close to the ground, where a small oblong hole appeared just above the base of the wall.
It wasn’t a place you’d think of going on your own. It looked like the floor had given way. If you were going, you’d at least want a wetsuit.
“That’s the way out,” Kate said. “But I’m not going first.”
Just at that moment, we heard a groan above us as the door to the apartment building began to give way.
I dropped my torch into the gap. It landed on a nearby floor with a muffled clatter. The walls within shown with an eerie glow. I took a breath as though diving underwater, swung into the hole and let go.
I fell further than expected and landed in a kind of silt that cushioned the impact. But it didn’t feel right from the first second—I got shivers just trying to get my footing. The torch was above me and only a few feet away but the floor was unstable—every time I reached for it, the ground underneath would shift under me.
“You okay?” Tauber called but I kept my mouth shut—I didn’t like it.
When I finally got the torch over my head, I saw…bones. The whole floor was bones, bones in layers, bones several layers deep, bones that turned to dust as soon as I touched them. All I wanted was to jump and run, get the hell away from this place as fast as I could. But with every movement, the ground kept dissolving under my feet.
I probably would have lost it right there except for hearing the door above give way with a crash. That was it—panic was something we couldn’t afford. I remembered what they said in the movies about quicksand—instead of struggling, I slowed down, moving slow and deliberate and suddenly, I was making headway. A solid stone ledge lined the room; I climbed up onto it and took a quick survey. The room was vast, the walls lined with small chambers covered with painted images.
“C’mon down. Just move slow,” I called and the others started dropping through the hole.
Several passages ran into the black distance. I ventured in that direction, torch in hand, and came face to face with Jesus, an ancient flat-perspective version painted three times life-size, rough-featured, stark, a whole lot edgier than the greeting-card Jesus I grew up with. This guy looked like a carpenter. I could see him losing his temper, tossing the money-lenders bodily out of the Temple. A working-man’s savior, with a wand(!) in hand.
“Catacombs,” Kate said, scrambling up the ledge. “Common people couldn’t bury in the Holy City, so outside the walls, it’s all catacombs, miles and miles of them.” She leaned her torch into the passages, the light dancing into the distance.
“We should split up,” Max said.
“Bad idea,” Kate answered sharply. “These bones aren’t all ancient. People go into catacombs and don’t come out.” She ran down the center passage and we followed, bunched into the narrow space.
The passage quickly got so tight, we could barely scrape through. Rough-hewn walls ran to several-story-high ceilings, miles of stone wall, every few steps bringing another row of chambers floor-to-ceiling, some wide-open displaying loose bones or skeletons, others marked by stone blocks with handwritten legends in Greek.
Everything was painted chalky white, set off with bright borders, flat-perspective trees, real and mythical animals, charioteers and soldiers, muscular heroes and some rather shapely goddesses. With our torches held high, we still couldn’t see the end.
Behind us, Marat and gang dropped through the gap in the wall and made the same noises we had climbing out of the bone pile.
“How are we getting out of here?” Max asked.
Kate shrugged. “I’m depending on you for that.”
In minutes, we heard them on our heels. They had split up and were moving down the narrow corridors faster than we could. With us lighting the way, they’d be on us in minutes.
A lightning bolt smashed the wall to our left; it collapsed in a deafening cloud of smoke. Another bolt overhead scattered a chunk of stone into the passage in front of us. We peeled off to the last clear corridor, but with them now right behind.
And then, a minute later, we hit a dead end. A hole halfway up the white-painted wall showed where the ancients had wriggled through to the next chamber, but we had no wriggling time.
The two groups faced off in close quarters. There was a sudden lull, like maybe they’d caught up with us faster than they expected and nobody was quite certain what to do. Each breath sounded lurid, echoing against the high walls full of painted witnesses. A rumbling groan warned that the ruptured corridor nearby was breaking down and not slowly.
Max’s hand swiped the air in front of us and I could feel the shell forming. We held our breath but not for long—it got tight in the corridor all of a sudden, like a belt worn a notch too close. The shooters were eyeing us in no particular hurry. Marat held out several headpieces like an offering.
I felt the rock wall behind me creep upward a quarter-inch and then drop back into place. Even Max couldn’t maintain a shield and rearrange several hundred tons of rock at the same time.
“Come along,” Redbeard said. “Put on the headsets and we’re good. When this is over, you can tell anyone you want about us. Levitate cars on YouTube for all I care. We know your tricks, pal. Nobody’s getting close enough for you to do anything. Take the glasses or we take you down—your choice.”
I felt Max reach behind me, reach for Kate. “This isn’t the time,” she muttered but he pulled her close and whispered, “Remember what you did… at home? To amuse your boyfriends?” He nodded at the chalky walls, the gallery of Orthodox crosses and pagan gods. “Do it now… with all this.”
Kate’s eyes opened wide. And, right away, things began to change.
She leaned against us and I heard the rumble inside me like a generator, pulsing through my shoulders and trunk. I got a raging erection—it would be a problem if we had to run real soon. The shooters heads swiveled and I realized they could hear it too. But clearly they had no idea where it was coming from.
A moment later, the deep blackness turned to mist, chalky paint sifting off the walls into the boneyard air. The shooters, being he-man types, tried not to react but it was a real effort—their shoulders rose half a foot pretending nothing was happening.
This was good for about five seconds.
Then the ancient paintings began to dance off the stone walls and out over our heads. Painted chariots began racing up and down the shaft, the drivers lashing each other and the flailing shooters when they wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of the way.
Soldiers marched tight rows in thin air two feet above us and then broke ranks, laying bets on the chariot race, drinking from giant jugs and trying to make time with the shapely goddesses. Centaurs and unicorns dueled just below the ceiling, peacocks drank from fountains guarded by teasing nymphs and huge bushes flowered in every empty space.
None of this was even slightly realistic; these were the piecework no-dimensional paintings that came with your entry-level Roman funeral. But you could feel the air kick up when the chariots roared past and a drizzle hit your hair from the fountains. The fact that it was all totally unconvincing only made the whole thing eerier. All around us, paintings grew, changed shape, mingled, argued, fought and fornicated. Well, I’m not 100% certain about the fornicating but it got difficult to keep track once the shooting started.
The shooting was kind of inevitable, once a couple hundred bones flew out of their burial chambers, arced into the air like someb
ody was chucking them and tore straight for the blueshirts. They were shooters, after all, so, when attacked in a very narrow space by pagan gods most of them had never heard of, they responded about the way you’d expect. Redbeard kept screaming at them to stop, as each discharge brought more and more of the ceiling down on us.
Crazily, in the midst of the insanity, I detached. I found myself focused on a sandy-haired shooter ducking under a chariot wheel because I saw the wheel close-up, inches from my face, just as it brushed by his.
This is the guy, I thought, the guy from the apartment and the airport, the guy I can read. Jesus, he was panicked! Not that you could blame him, attacked by Mars, Hercules, St. Peter and their really hot girlfriends all at the same time. It’s a trick, he kept repeating with mounting fervor. In his panic, he never noticed our connection—but I knew I’d remember him.
Max yelled, “Push!” We jumped forward, smacking the air shield into the wall. There was a spongy reaction and we bounced backward. He shouted ‘Again!” and this time, I heard his voice in my head saying Scream after you push. We pushed together and the wall teetered, wobbled and finally collapsed, locking Redbeard’s crew on the other side.
I was screaming the whole time but exactly nothing came out. Just as the wall came down, I heard all our voices at once—and then snuffed out just as abruptly. The screams came mixed into the sound of several other sections of wall giving way. Max emerged out of the dust with a finger to his lips and pointed in the other direction—we squeezed around a pile of rubble.
Kate still had her torch—she re-lit it and the dust in the air scrambled the light like a Seurat. You couldn’t see three inches in front of you. I could feel myself coughing but somehow didn’t make a sound doing it.
We were in some kind of huge high-ceilinged room. When we finally reached the staircase at the far end, Kate turned to Max and he held his arms out to her. She punched him hard in the shoulder.
“Ow! That’s the thanks I get.”
“For what? Almost getting us killed?”
“Hopefully for getting us killed—as far as they’re concerned. They had us cornered but we were crushed under a wall trying to escape.”
“They’ll buy that?” Tauber, ever the skeptic.
“Marat knows better—he’s probing and I’m blocking. But, for some reason, he’s not the boss—they don’t trust him. The leader, the guy with the beard, knows they’ll all be heroes—as long as they stick to their story. The other choice is to spend the next week digging through every corridor and passageway around here on the off-chance we escaped. So we’re dead. By the time they get back to headquarters, they’ll probably have decided there were fifty of us and we fell into a volcano.” He turned back to Kate. “Which gives us one more chance to surprise them when the time comes. Okay?”
“You could have told me,” she griped.
“If I’d thought of it a second earlier, I would have. Really. I’m just making this up as I go.” It was a pretty good Harrison Ford imitation, actually. She nodded grudgingly.
The mist finally began to dissipate. It turned out we were in a wine cellar and a beautiful one at that: floor-to-ceiling darkwood shelving, bottles organized by brand and years, the rows all aligned toward a grand modern staircase.
Tauber crept up and back in seconds. “Where are we?” Max asked.
“Guessing through the door slit, a fuckin’ palace.”
“Are we company?”
“After that bang? If they’re not down here already, six’ll get you ten we’ve got the run of the place.”
“Let’s have a look.”
~~~~
