The Mithras Conspiracy

by M. J. Polelle

  “Where’s the minister of defense?” Without him the conspiracy lacked a key player.

  “In the United States on a fact-finding tour.” Seeming to enjoy the commissario’s consternation, Piso’s eyes brightened. “The minister will remain neutral. But many subordinates, except the navy people, are either sympathetic or neutral.” He snickered. “I doubt a navy cruiser will stop our march on Rome.”

  “And the Americans?” Leone left the question hanging.

  He didn’t need to spell it out. Every European knew their world turned on what the Americans wanted. They were the superpower inheritors of Rome. Without them, Piso had no chance.

  “As long as Roma Rinata keeps the radical left from power and does not threaten American military presence in Italy, they will wring their hands in public but do nothing.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “The defense minister would not stay neutral if he thought the Americans would intervene.” Piso flashed his winning card. “Moreover, let us just say we have friends in the CIA and NSA.”

  The former lieutenant colonel who had escaped the Ciampino villa rushed in with the latest news. In retaliation for a governmental decision to disband their unit, ex-members of the Mechanized Brigade of Sardinian Grenadiers near Rome promised to help seize major media and governmental offices and block any military units racing into Rome to crush the takeover.

  “Lest you underestimate us, I must tell you.” Piso put on his stiletto smile. “A few hours ago our assassination team terminated the interior minister in her sleep.”

  They had killed a brilliant jurist turned politician well on her way to the premiership. She had kept law enforcement free of political ideology and curtailed police surveillance of political groups. For her scrupulousness, she and society paid a high price.

  The ascent of Roma Rinata from the underground blindsided them all.

  “I invite you to join us in fashioning the new Italy.”

  New? It was a con game as old as the Caesars. A mania for personal power sugarcoated with the rhetoric of patriotism.

  “I’m prepared to make you public security chief.” Piso seemed puzzled by Leone’s reticence. “You realize you’ll control all law enforcement, do you not?”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Let me warn you.” Piso snarled. “Your life hangs in the balance.”

  An attendant reminded Piso it was time to get ready.

  “Confine our hostage.” Piso motioned for the guards to seize Leone. “Let us hope he comes to his senses before it is too late.”

  Pursuant to the hostage agreement, every hour on the hour, a military officer called a Soldier of Mithras had armed guards in combat fatigues escort him to the mithraeum entrance. They paraded the hostage outside the bunker like a slave before auction to show off the good state of his health. Unknown to them, Leone had prearranged a secret code of body language with Rossi. His intricate set of hand and leg movements during the hostage walks tipped off the Polizia di Stato about the underground defenses.

  When the hostage walk took place at 10:00 p.m. on Holy Saturday, he would flash the go-ahead signal for the preemptive attack on the Baths of Caracalla unless he could convince Piso to surrender before then. He would rush toward the advancing attackers if that increased the odds of his rescue. The chief of police reluctantly approved the plan on the condition that if the conspirators failed to parade him unharmed at the agreed times, the coordinated attack would automatically begin a half hour later.

  Everything had to go exactly to plan.

  Otherwise he would join Abramo Basso in the land of the dead.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  On Holy Saturday morning, his guards frog-marched Leone, groggy in handcuffs, to the main chamber. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief. The leader of the coup sat on a backless ivory stool with curved legs—the curule chair of an ancient Roman dignitary. A makeup artist had just finished applying a facial foundation on Piso in preparation for his television address to the nation after the takeover.

  Next to the leader of Roma Rinata stood a camp table with a silver coffee set. Guards shoved Leone into a kneeling position on the mosaic floor at Piso’s feet. Piso poured an espresso shot and held it to Leone’s nose. The dark-roast aroma of caramel and smoky chocolate penetrated the cotton residue of insomnia.

  “Will you join me in an espresso?” Piso pressed a demitasse to Leone’s mouth. “Sip from my hands since yours are occupied.”

  Leone shook his head and pursed his lips.

  Piso would not humiliate him as he had humiliated the prime minister.

  “As you will.” Piso withdraw the demitasse and took a sip.

  The makeup artist applied a finishing touch of rouge to the age spots on her client’s face. She removed the apron protecting Piso’s bespoke Italian blue suit of wool fibers plucked from vicuna and musk oxen. His tie bore the tauroctony emblem of Mithras slaying the bull.

  “You can have a great future.” Piso put down the demitasse. “Will you join us?”

  “You can’t hold out forever.” Leone could not let slip that he knew the coup began Easter Sunday sunrise. Surprise was his best ally. “They plan to starve you out. You’re trapped like Hitler in the Berlin bunker.”

  “So that’s your plan.” Piso slapped his thigh and roared with laughter. “Here’s my little secret. I wanted that spineless prime minister let go. He agreed to back our new government. So, the proper analogy is Hindenburg handing over power to Hitler.”

  “The prime minister has outdone himself with disgrace.” Leone struggled with his handcuffs. “No one will obey him.”

  “Even if he proves useless as well as spineless, I still have you.” Piso stopped to whisper an order out of Leone’s hearing and continued. “Your men might well have let that scumbag of a prime minister die at my hands.” He pointed his finger at his hostage. “But they will never let die one of their own, their dear Commissario Leone.”

  “You are mistaken.” He had to try another historical analogy. “In the Moro crisis, the government refused to negotiate. They let the Red Brigades riddle Prime Minister Moro with bullets and stuff his corpse into a car trunk. ‘The state must not bend,’ they said.” Leone tried getting up. “Do you think they give a crap about the life of a pawn like me?” The guards shoved him back onto the floor.

  “The distinction is elementary.” Piso stood up with demitasse in hand. “The Americans wanted no communists in government. Unfortunately for him, Moro was open to it. But they will tolerate me . . . me, the only guardian against the radical left boogeyman.”

  He ordered the commissario lifted up.

  “You’re living in the past.” The handcuffs bit into his wrists. “Haven’t you heard? The Soviet Union has collapsed. The Communist Party has shattered. The Americans have no fear of Italy going communist.”

  What more could he say to this madman? Only Piso knew the distorted logic of the fantasy world he lived in.

  “What do you want Lucio to do?” Piso said in a child’s voice the commissario found chilling. A far-off look clouded over Piso’s face.

  The AISI agent had clued him in on what Carlos Stroheim reported. With increasing frequency in times of stress, Piso slipped into a child’s voice and referred to himself in the third person. In his investigations, Leone had found the mental instability of an intelligent man like Piso the most dangerous because it combined unpredictability with cunning.

  “I want you to surrender.” He had to get through while Piso’s psychological defenses were down. “Somewhere inside, you know you can’t win. Even if your coup succeeds, Europe will quarantine your government. The Resistance will return and topple you.”

  “Never.” The Pater Patrum’s voice had returned. A switch had flipped. He jutted his jaw in a Mussolini pose. “Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.”

>   It was hopeless. Piso had retreated into the narcotic of clichés.

  “This is your last chance,” Piso said. “Will you join us?”

  “Not now, not ever.”

  “Take him and break him,” Piso said to the guards. “What’s he hiding?”

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Dangling on a rope tied to the handcuffs behind his back and fastened to the mithraeum ceiling, Leone spat out blood from a blow to his cheek. Pain seared his arms pretzeled behind his back. His shoulders slumped forward, collapsing his chest into his diaphragm, choking off breath on the way to strangulation. A line of sweat across his forehead leached into his eyes. An invisible pair of hands throttled him.

  How did he, a Jew, wind up hog-tied in what they called a Palestinian crucifixion on Holy Saturday at the hands of a pagan lunatic? He would die in this theater of the absurd. Mondo cane—a dog’s world after all.

  Agony tempted him to squeal what they wanted to know. He now understood how Colonel Soames felt before betraying Uncle Benjamin. To fortify his resolve, he fantasized his lips sewn shut. He refused to backstab his comrades the way the colonel had backstabbed his uncle. Without the specter of his uncle’s betrayal, would he have held out so long?

  Teetering on the rim of surrender, he felt the rope snap slack. He collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  “We’ll continue after his beauty walk,” one of the two guards said over the buzzing in Leone’s head. “We have to keep him in one piece . . . for now.” A kick in the ribs rolled him over onto his back. He endured another kick in the groin with the knowledge the attack would begin when he gave the signal outside the bunker, at 10:00 p.m. this Holy Saturday. They dragged him to his feet and wiped off the blood so his comrades could see him alive and uninjured.

  When they took him out for the hostage walk, he’d give the signal and attempt a dash across the esplanade toward his comrades coming to the rescue under cover of darkness and a barrage of police bullets. He had only a long-shot chance at salvation.

  One of Piso’s officers regaled as a Soldier of Mithras barged into the chamber. “What are you doing? We’re already late for the hostage walk. Get going.”

  “How late?” Leone asked, trying to suppress his anxiety.

  “None of your business,” the Soldier said. About to leave, he turned and asked, “Why do you want to know anyway?”

  “I’m supposed to take medication for Addison’s disease.”

  “Not now.” The Soldier of Mithras spat on the ground. “Go and bring him back unharmed . . . but put him in leg irons this time.”

  “Why? Your guards watch my every move.” He rattled his handcuffs. “I’ve also got these.”

  “I’ve watched you,” the Soldier said. “You’re up to something.”

  He’d never make it to the police line.

  The thwacking of helicopter blades and then the popping pulsations of gunfire filtered through the mithraeum. A sentry stumbled inside, yelling that attack helicopters had opened fire on the outdoor stage.

  It had to be 10:30 p.m. The attack was underway. They’d kill him for deception. A guard dropped the leg irons and hustled Leone away. The other guard rushed the entrance with an Uzi submachine gun. Grenades exploded outside over the whining patter of a gunfight. The tripod-mounted M240G machine guns out front fired rat-a-tat bursts.

  The police had to be advancing on the mithraeum as planned while the helicopters stormed the orchestra stage in the other prong of the attack. Assault teams should soon rappel down from helicopters to rescue the orchestra hostages.

  A thin trail of tear gas released outside snaked through the entrance. Tears burned in Leone’s eyes. The gas pricked his throat like needles. He convulsed in hacking coughs. Defenders ran inside, one hobbling on a leg streaming blood.

  The renegade lieutenant colonel waved his pistol and threatened to shoot wavering defenders unless they returned to their posts. “Everyone to the front,” he ordered, as Piso’s fighters sealed off the entrance. To mitigate a gas attack, a Lion passed out goggles and masks to selected fighters. He did not have enough for everyone. The lieutenant colonel pistol-whipped a fighter grabbing someone else’s.

  Just maybe. Leone pinned his hopes on the subterranean surprise.

  “Keep Leone at the front,” Piso ordered, forcing his way through his fighters. “If they try to break in, tell them the commissario gets a bullet in the brain. We just need to hold out until sunrise when the coup begins.”

  The guard held a pistol barrel against the back of Leone’s skull. He steadied his trembling. If he had to die, he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of smelling fear. His mouth felt hot and dry like sand in the sun.

  Reaching the barricaded entrance, Piso turned to his warriors. He donned the pointed Phrygian cap and alabaster mask of Mithras. “I am Lord Mithras.” He pounded his jewel-encrusted crosier on the ground. “We shall fight to the last man.”

  Lucio Piso had jumped the rails of sanity for good.

  The outside shelling stopped and so had the circulation of air. The attackers must have cut off the ventilation. The uncertainty of silence weighed as heavily on Leone as did the rising humidity. The mithraeum stank of sweat and blood. He exhaled tension as his guard removed the pistol from his head and raced to shore up the crumbling defenses.

  While Piso’s demolition expert used the lull to booby-trap the entranceway with explosives, Leone heard scratching like the sound of rats within walls. The scratching changed into a pounding. At Piso’s command, two of his personal bodyguards with bandoliers across their chests ran back into the mithraeum to check out the disturbance.

  The rear wall of the mithraeum erupted into an explosion of stone and brick. In a bug-eyed gas mask, a NOCS commando jumped out spraying submachine gun fire. One commando after another popped out of the opening with weapons firing into the defenders surprised from behind. Shooting broke out from every direction. Men groaned and fell.

  The gamble on the subterranean surprise paid off.

  The Romans had built a service tunnel from the upstairs baths to the mithraeum below, but no one knew it was passable until he dared to take a chance.

  A grenade exploded, throwing him to the ground.

  Breaking through the booby-trapped entrance of the mithraeum, the attackers raced over rubble and bodies to meet up with fellow NOCS commandos coming forward from the rear. Shrieks of the wounded resounded off the walls.

  A tear gas canister whooshed through the demolished entrance before exploding into a white cloud. The shooting sputtered into silence as the sound of coughing men amplified. Handcuffed behind his back, Leone used a wall to steady his way up to a standing position. Through the spreading miasma of tear gas, he made out Piso running back and forth near the blood pit as NOCS attackers pressed the defenders from front and rear like predators surrounding prey.

  Fighting off burning eyes and chest pain, Leone stumbled his way toward Piso just as the billionaire slid on the blood-slippery pavement headlong into the pit full of blood from the sacrificed bull calf. He wanted to pull Piso out by his legs. Leone’s hands wouldn’t move from behind his back. The handcuffs.

  Bubbles popped through the putrid red ooze of the pit and collapsed.

  The bubbling slowed and stopped.

  Medics among the living and the dead fished Piso out of the pit.

  They covered the body with a sheet and moved on.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Early on Easter Sunday, an unshaven Inspector Rossi burst into Commissario Leone’s office. “The pope’s in the waiting room.”

  Had he misheard? His head ached. He should have taken the medic’s recommendation of an overnight hospital stay. Leone had Rossi repeat his pronouncement.

  “The . . . pope . . . is . . . in . . . the . . . waiting . . . room.”

  “What’s he busted for? Selling indulgences withou
t a license?” Leone just wanted to go home with Mondocane and fall into bed. “Quit pulling my leg.”

  “It’s true. Come see.”

  Sure enough, Celestine VI sat on a bench normally reserved for pimps and thieves awaiting interrogation. The pope doffed the green baseball cap of the Nigerian national team. He smoothed his salt-and-pepper hair. Standing beside his boss, the personal secretary looked dashing in the helmet and leather chaps of a motorcyclist.

  If word got out about the pope’s surprise visit, the Curia was sure to fuss and fume. Through back channels, they had promised Leone to prevent the pope from creating security nightmares for the Polizia di Stato by his impromptu excursions in a motorcycle sidecar. And yet here he was, back to his old tricks. What did he want at police headquarters? In a few hours, he had Easter Sunday services to attend to.

  The Leone Squad sprung back to life in the presence of the Holy Father after the exhausting firefight at the Baths of Caracalla. One minute, they were filling out postincident reports and being debriefed while trying to stay awake. The next, they scrambled to attention, jarred by the unexpected presence of the Vicar of Christ.

  “What can I do for you?” Leone added, “Your Holiness.”

  A wary Mondocane hobbled around the pope and sniffed at his clothes. Leone commanded the dog to heel. Mondocane ignored the command.

  “The question, Commissario Leone, is not what you can do for me.” Celestine VI stood up with the assistance of his personal secretary and straightened his white cassock. “It’s what I can do for you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I want to personally invite you to attend Easter services in St. Peter’s Square today. You will receive the Benemerenti medal in public recognition of your service to the Church and society.”

  “But I’m not a believer.”