Hunt for the Holy Grail

by Preston W Child

  The Father hung up.

  Diggs smashed his knee with his fist. “Fuck!”

  “Did you get it?”

  “Naw, ma’am.”

  —

  Lin’s narrow Asian eyes stared at the team of tech guys, their computer screens, and the other hitmen.

  The technician stared back. He shrugged.

  “That shit is a riddle,” said the technician in his Bronx accent.

  “You don’t say,” Lin grumbled. “And what does it mean?”

  The team shared speculative stares, but that was all. The riddle they just pilfered off the air hung in the room like a mathematical theorem. The technician wore his earphones again and listened. He frowned.

  “Somebody, get me a map.”

  —

  “What’s it with this guy and not showing up?” Liam Murphy complained.

  “He didn’t say he isn’t gonna show up, he merely told us a riddle,” said Miller. “We solve it, we find him.”

  “Olivia, first you get shot in public, now you have to solve a riddle?” Anabia Nassif put in. “Why can’t he just hand the Holy Grail over and let’s go home?”

  All eyes were on her. Olivia put her cell phone in her pocket and looked away. The room was quiet. The only proof that they were under the city was the intermittent tremors caused by nearby traffic.

  Victor Borodin, who had been quiet almost all the time, walked over to the former CIA agent and asked him to boot up a map of the city around the Vatican.

  The others joined him.

  “What do you have in mind?” Diggs asked him as the map appeared on the screen.

  “Maybe I’ll know it when I see it.”

  —

  It was 10:00 am, and Olivia and her people were still stuck.

  “You should call him, get more clues,” Liam grumbled.

  The polar explorer had been grumpy all night, saying little except when he griped about how hard his life had been since he arrived in Rome. Borodin said, “Wait till you get shot at.”

  “I ain’t getting shot at this time,” he bickered. “Antarctica was bad enough. I didn’t sign up for this shit. This was supposed to be a fucking adventure.”

  Diggs cast a cold look on him.

  Olivia said, “Really?”

  “I think I found something,” Borodin called.

  The team gathered around him again. The area around Vatican City had been enlarged. They were looking at streets west of Borgo. And spread around that area were the Tribunale do Sorveglianza, the Corte Suprema de Cassazione, and the beautiful grassy square of the Piazza Cavour.

  “The cleric has provided a clue, he knows we will find it.” He looked at the crew. “That said, I think we need to go out in the street. Heaven and hell, there must be something in the street that can help.”

  Miller squinted at the computer screen. “Religious mythology often juxtaposed heaven and hell, side by side, like a parallel—”

  “Yeah, like opposites that never meet,” Olivia added. “Purgatory is often said to bridge the two places.”

  “And the Father said, the Suprema Cassazione in the middle,” Anabia Nassif said. “That is our reference point. In every puzzle, there is a reference point.”

  Olivia pumped her fist. “Yes!”

  “I suggest we all go out into the street,” Frank Miller said.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Liam hollered, “and get shot at by those assassins? I don’t wanna die, man.”

  Everyone turned to the visibly distraught man.

  Miller provided an explanation. “You all will have to forgive Liam here, he’s expecting a baby, his girlfriend.”

  The men clapped him on the back. Olivia congratulated him.

  Diggs dropped his bag of armament on the floor. It made an ominous thud on the stone.

  “If we are gonna go out, we are gonna need guns.”

  “I can't shoot. I have never shot a gun.” Nassif spread his hands.

  Diggs provided a quick description of the gun and its parts. Then he gave weapons around.

  “This is a Glock 9 millimeter. You see a bad guy trying to harm Miss Newton here, or any of the other guys, or that priest, point it at them and pull the trigger. Be careful of the bang, it’s just a bang.”

  Borodin whispered in Anabia's ear, “Try not to shoot the wrong people.”

  “And finally, y'all need to wear this.”

  Diggs held in his palm five pieces of earbuds.

  —

  Tourists soaking up the sun hung about the street as they went by the Antica Sartoria Scalella, a hub of shops where they sold antiques. Ideal place for American spenders, Olivia thought. She looked at their reflections in the glass as she crossed the street.

  They split up, each one trying to match his imagination with reality. Rome was a city with the most traditional names Olivia had ever seen. And she began to think just like most foreigners who visit Rome for the first time, that every name or building held something symbolic.

  They went up a fairly broad street. A street sign beside the antique store said Via Ulpiano. Olivia stayed right, Diggs followed a few steps behind her, and Miller took the agent's rear.

  Victor Borodin led Anabia and Liam on the other side of the street.

  “Stay sharp guys, stay close,” Diggs’ voice filtered in.

  “Anybody see something that helps?” Olivia asked.

  There was a chorus in the negative.

  The Suprema Cassazione rose high and long on the left. Cars were parked on the curb. Olivia glanced at the building, thinking the Suprema was the middle of the cleric's riddle, that made her sit on the street, the right side.

  Then she stopped walking.

  Diggs braced himself. He quickly scanned the street. He checked the windows of the buildings for snipers, the glare of scopes looking down. As far as he could see, there was none in sight. But that didn’t mean the threat could not appear any time. He searched faces for any trace of Asian.

  “Ma’am, are you okay?” he said through clenched teeth. “Talk to me.”

  “Stop calling me that, Diggs,” Olivia said, still turning around on the street. “The answer is somewhere here, right now. Here.”

  “Ma’am, you are gonna have to be a little bit more specific,” Diggs came again.

  Diggs had veered off and was resting against a wall. In front of him were a man and a woman talking very expressively in Italian.

  The team on the other side of the road had stopped walking too. Anabia Nassif was trying to look like a legitimate tourist, window-shopping. He wasn’t getting far with his pretense, so were the others.

  Olivia asked, “Anyone recall the riddle word for word?”

  “I do,” Anabia Nassif said. “It says—”

  “Shit, you don’t have to turn around, you numb fuck!” Liam Murphy hissed.

  Nassif quickly turned back to the clothes doll behind a show glass. “Was that language necessary, Liam?” he asked in a tremulous voice.

  “The riddle, please, Nassif?” Miller’s soft voice said.

  “Hell is on the left, heaven is right, Corte Suprema Cassazione in the middle, you will find me in the heaven of the pagans,” said Nassif. “That’s it. Did I get it all?”

  “Fair enough,” someone said.

  Olivia was mumbling the words to herself and walking again. Diggs followed, and Miller. Olivia stopped at the intersection before Piazza Cavour. She turned to the traffic coming in from Vittoria Colonna.

  “No, this is wrong.” She gritted her teeth. “It’s got to be back here, somewhere here. This the right; something is missing.”

  The time was 11:54 pm.

  —

  Two blocks away, on Via Triboniano, which was on the other side of the sheer square of the Suprema building, a van parked on the curb.

  There were men in the back dressed in black ops clothes, face masks, terrifying guns. In the middle was the tech guy and his computer screen. He stared at one single moving dot.

  “She’s on t
he move again,” the tech guy chimed.

  On a different screen, there was a map of the street all around. It was a conventional map that anyone with a mobile device could pull up quickly. Standing behind the tech guy was the man leading the kill team.

  “Can you repeat the riddle?” Lin asked over the tech guy’s shoulder.

  The guy repeated it, verbatim, in the same fashion that Anabia Nassif was doing at approximately that same moment for Olivia. But with a singular difference.

  “Right?” Lin murmured.

  The tech guy said, “What?”

  “That word, 'right,' is the key,” Lin said with a grimace that his Asian eyes could not quite accomplish.

  The tech guy took a piece of paper and wrote the riddle on it. Lin grabbed the paper and studied it; he took the pen from the tech guy and brooded over the paper.

  “The comma isn't right,” he said.

  The tech guy, in fact, hadn’t put any comma.

  Lin put a comma between the word 'pagans' and 'right.' Then he reread it. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, “especially when it isn’t a question. It was a statement.”

  The tech guy shrugged, then he said, “She stopped again, I think she may have found something.”

  Lin crumpled the paper and tossed it in a corner in the van.

  “Showtime.”

  The van started around the corner and headed towards the black dot.

  —

  Heart beating fast, Olivia began to walk back down. She passed Diggs and Miller on the street.

  “Diggs, you have that recording on you?” she said. “I want to hear it in the cleric's voice. The riddle, play it, please.”

  Olivia had just broken protocol. She had just given the team’s position away, the former agent thought, quite irritably.

  “That’s gonna take a few seconds,” he said in a calm voice.

  He took out what looked like a Dictaphone. He worked on it while acting as natural as he could and keeping his eyes peeled for the killers who he was sure was now on to them.

  “Everybody, keep your eyes open. We’ve just slipped our cover,” Diggs announced.

  “Come on, Diggs.” Olivia walked faster, she kept looking in the buildings.

  Suddenly she stopped a stranger on the street. The startled young man with the outlandish hairstyle carried a backpack with a dog in it. The dog barked his discontent at Olivia.

  “What is this building called?” Olivia asked the lady.

  He stared at Olivia, uncomprehending. He shook his head and was pulling to the side; Olivia attempted a shredded form of Italian.

  “Che cosa questo edificio?” She waved her hands in the air like an Italian would.

  The lad's face brightened. He smiled and showed teeth encased in braces. He looked at the building and erupted in an exuberance of Italian. Olivia squinted at him, unable to keep up. She touched the lad on his shoulder.

  “Rallenta, rallenta, please,” she begged. “Slow down.”

  The stranger's head bobbed. “Okay, okay, you are American?”

  “Yes, American.”

  Diggs' voice spurred Olivia alive. “Ma’am, we have two minutes.”

  In a deliberate pace, like a schoolteacher simplifying a problematic concept, Olivia said, “The name of this building, nome, nome.”

  She pointed at the building under which shadow they stood.

  The lad pulled on his bag harder in a gesture of sudden discernment. “Oh, sì, sì.” He bobbed his head again, and the dog in the bag started barking again.

  “Someone, shoot that damn dog,” Liam Murphy said in everyone’s ear.

  “Sì.” The guy pointed at the building. “Dipartimento Della Protezione Civile.”

  Olivia thanked him profusely and trotted down the street, looking for an entrance.

  “No, wait!” Diggs hissed.

  —

  “Stop!” Lin barked at the driver of the van.

  The van braked to a stop in the middle of the street. Lin slid the door open and stepped into the hot afternoon. He started sweating immediately. He turned to the group in the van. “Take your masks off!”

  Three men followed Lin as he went down the street, in the trail of the woman and her friends. Lin could make out the back jacket of the woman and her brown pants. Her hair was long and flowing, blowing in the wind. Such a beautiful thing was going to go to waste, he thought.

  He made out the American too. He was thin, but he was strong, Lin could tell. It didn’t matter; the American was no match for him.

  He walked with his left hand rigid beside his body, extended from it, hidden in the sleeve of his black leather jacket. One twitch of his hand and he would be busting the street.

  The woman stopped walking and turned around. Their eyes met.

  —

  Diggs saw the Asian too.

  “We’re blown, folks.”

  Olivia was rooted to the spot on the street. She felt a breath catch in her throat. Like an automaton, she started walking away, towards the open street.

  “Olivia, wait,” Miller said. He walked briskly, trying to catch up with her.

  Meanwhile, Diggs hung back. He walked in front of two Italian women talking and waving their hands everywhere. One walked a dog that looked like a cross between a rock badger and a rodent. The other pushed a pram with a baby in it.

  Diggs hoped the Asian was not ruthless enough to shoot at the women, but at the moment, they were his shield. He kept in front of the women as he hurried after Olivia.

  “Oh my God,” Liam said, “that’s the Asian, I see him.”

  “Don’t give away your position, goddamn it, Liam!” Miller scolded.

  Olivia was on the main street now. Across the street, the trees of the Beer Garden shaded the middle of the road. Light traffic breezed past in both directions. Cars were parked in the middle of Piazza Dei Tribunali.

  Olivia found the entrance into the Protezione Civile. She disappeared into it.

  Diggs turned around, and quite expectedly, a gun dropped out of the Asian's sleeve.

  —

  Diggs reacted first by shooting into the air.

  The street came alive, and people sprang into the road in the chaos, clearing the curb. Diggs dove into the glass doorway after Olivia, colliding with the doorman as he stomped in. He pushed the doorman into a corner. “Get out of here!”

  Diggs waited for the Asian.

  Miller hung in the street. He reasoned that the Asian did not know him, nor did he know the rest of the team. When he looked across the street, Anabia Nassif was standing there with his Glock in hand and staring at the Asian in utter shock. Liam Murphy pulled the biologist after him as he walked off.

  “Dr. Nassif, get a grip on yourself, you’re giving yourself away!” Miller wheezed.

  “Oh my God, not again,” Nassif moaned. “Not again.”

  Inside the Protezione Civile building, Olivia checked her watch; it was 12:05 pm. She hurried on, checking her phone as she did. The place was in commotion too. People were cowering on the white marble floor, in the corners, and behind the marble-topped desk a lady's large, scared eyes peered at the pacing woman.

  Olivia stumbled over to the desk, and the face there disappeared.

  She banged her fist on the marble. “Hey, what the hell is this place?!”

  The face rose slowly from the back of the counter. It was an Italian woman with a large mouth; her eyes were the size of quarters behind the glasses. She mumbled incoherently.

  “What do you do here, what is this place?” Olivia asked more casually.

  “Civil Protection Department,” the woman spat.

  “Oh, you speak English, thank goodness!” Olivia glanced at the door. Diggs hugged the wall, waiting for the Asian assassin. The woman’s eyes had suddenly gotten a fixation for the gun in Diggs' hand.

  “Hey, look at me.” Olivia tapped the marble. “I need a back exit. Is there a way out of here through the back?”

  The woman pointed down a hallway
on the left. When Olivia looked that way, she saw a dozen faces staring at her there.

  She thanked the woman at the desk and ran down the length of the hallway, frightened eyes following closely.

  There were doors on her left, none on her right. But when she got to the end of the hall, she found a door on the right. She opened it to another hallway. There were people here as well, speaking Italian. They pelted her with questions; she found the exit at the end of this hallway. It was open.

  She went through it and came out into the sun.

  “Shit.”

  —

  The assassins knew the building better, so three men went around. It was Anabia Nassif, scared enough to piss his pants, who saw them. He instantly understood what was going to happen.

  Sirens had started screaming in the distance. People gathered in the street. They watched the spectacle, two hunters waiting for the other to slip.

  Diggs made sure that Olivia was gone before making his move.

  He crouched on the floor and popped his head out from below the door. He squeezed three shots into the spot where he supposed the Asian would be. And he was right.

  Lin was fast, but not fast enough. The slugs hit his right thigh as he plunged into the back of a pillar in the wall. Before he landed against the wall, he squeezed his own shots. The silencer coughed twice, the bullets sank in the edge of the door, spraying particles of stone and dust.

  Diggs was off without delay. As he went, he barked into his radio, “Miss Olivia is on the move, I’m going after her, be advised.”

  There was a babble of questions that Diggs ignored.

  “Diggs! Wait for us, goddamn it!” Miller yammered.

  Diggs was out in the sun in no time. But Olivia was nowhere in sight. Angered and desperate, the former agent braced himself for what was sure to come next, which was an equally enraged assassin.

  The courtyard was shaped like a square and grassy. There were park benches made of concrete in the place, with pillars surrounding it under the building.

  Diggs chose a pillar that gave him a view to the side of the door where he just came through. He said to Miller, “There is a way around the building, go check if you’d find Olivia.”

  “How about you?” Anabia asked.

  “I have a meeting with the devil,” he growled.