The Vatican Conspiracy: A completely gripping action thriller (A Marco Venetti Thriller Book 1)

by Hogenkamp, Peter

  Her defensive position was actually reasonably good, even though she had quite literally fallen into it. The thick trunk of the tree against which she was sitting afforded her cover from above, and equally stout trees protected her from both sides. A storm had felled a girthy pine, and its long corpse shielded her from below.

  She heard the sound of pounding feet and twisted around, but she couldn’t see anything. The running stopped. Shots rang out from above her, smacking into her tree with a heaviness she could feel in her back. She heard more footsteps, this time from the slope beneath her. Her finger remained poised on the trigger, but she didn’t shoot, not wanting to give away her position. The next volley came from below, and she could tell by the report that the hunter had moved closer. She guessed the man above would be moving as his partner fired, so she risked a peek up the slope, but saw nothing except the shadows of huge pines.

  Gunfire echoed down. They were closing fast, as if they sensed she was dead in the water. Her only chance was to move, but she knew her ankle wouldn’t hold her. She had examined it earlier, and even with her limited knowledge she knew it was fractured. A slow crawl would be the best she could manage; they would overtake her in seconds.

  “Sarah?”

  It was Marco’s voice, hissing weakly from her earpiece.

  “Marco?”

  “Where are you?”

  She gave him a basic description of her position.

  “Hang on for five minutes. How many are there?”

  She told him. “One is above me, and the other is below.”

  “Keep them busy. I’m almost there.”

  Marco reached a bend in the trail overlooking a gravelly slope and jumped without looking. He hit the ground, and his legs went out from underneath him, sending him into a feet-first slide. The base of the hill rushed up to meet him, and he regained his footing, using his momentum to traverse the heap of rocks that stretched over to where the promontory began to head upwards at a sharp angle.

  Halfway across, he heard the clamor of gunshots, and he adjusted his path across the slag pile. They had come from his right, several hundred meters up the steep incline. He reached the base of the slope and started climbing, angling to the right where the pitch was not as steep. He stopped to catch his breath, lest he give himself away with his gasps for air, and used the opportunity to take the Beretta out of the side pocket of his coat and snap his last clip into place. When his chest was no longer heaving, he resumed climbing at a redoubled pace.

  The trees thickened as he went, in both density and girth, and were three times the height of the mangy evergreens that eked out a meager existence on the rocks below. The ground underneath his feet changed as well, taking on a softer texture and a covering of pine needles, dampening the sound of his footfalls to a barely audible slap.

  He stopped behind a medium pine and let his pupils adjust. The dense canopy above shuttered the moonlight rather well, and it was much darker here than below. Another burst of gunfire came from somewhere above and to his left, and he started off again in its direction. He smelled the faint odor of gunpowder tainting the pine, and he knew he was close. He went slowly now, keeping one eye out for twigs and the other for men with guns.

  He saw the slight sway of a pine bough up ahead in the shadows, perhaps twenty or thirty meters away, and raised his gun. Not wanting to risk killing Sarah, he didn’t tighten his finger on the trigger. Moving from one tree to the next, he closed in on the place where he had seen movement, trying to make out a human form, but all he could see was degrees of blackness.

  Muzzle flashes pushed back the darkness, and he saw Sarah sitting against a large tree, holding her rifle at the ready. Bullets shredded the trunk above her, showering her with bark and sawdust. The gunman adjusted his aim in the light of his own weapon, lowering the barrel a fraction.

  Marco didn’t hesitate. He leveled the Beretta and fired, all in one fluid movement, grouping three shots in the man’s neck, silhouetted by the muzzle flashes. The gunman toppled over, and the firing stopped, allowing the blackness to return, although only for a second. There was a rush of feet from above, and a second gunman charged toward her position. Marco wheeled but couldn’t locate a target. He fired several times at the noise of breaking boughs, but the charge continued unabated.

  “Get down!”

  His warning was too late; no sooner had he spoken than muzzle flashes once again lit up the night. He returned fire, killing the second gunman, but it was too late. Sarah lay motionless on the ground.

  The muzzle flashes faded, the echo of gunshots died away, but Marco remained in place, replaying over and over the film clip of her torso tumbling to the ground. After a time, he fished a Maglite from his pocket and switched it on. He shone the beam at the base of the tree and saw her leather jacket on the ground. He walked over, knelt down, and lifted her up. She was surprisingly light. He propped her up against the tree, and her head wobbled and then fell to the needle-strewn ground.

  A sound came from behind him, and he swiveled around, probing the darkness with his flashlight. The beam fell on a downed tree; the noise sounded as if it had come from within. He took a step closer, and watched as Sarah wriggled out from the center of the apparently hollow trunk, wearing only a pair of panties and a bra, both black. She brushed fragments of fungi and decomposing wood pulp from her hair and took a seat on the log. Marco picked up her jacket, which was riddled with bullet holes, then unbuttoned the black, long-sleeved blouse and lifted it off her backpack. He yanked her cap off the round piece of rotting log she’d used for her head and handed it to her.

  “I’ll take my pants.”

  He removed the thick branches she’d used for legs, shook out the debris, and handed her the jeans. He noticed she was having difficulty putting weight on her right ankle.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I broke my ankle.”

  “I better get a look at that.”

  He knelt in front of her and examined the ankle, glad to have something to distract him from the fact that he had just killed two men without the slightest hesitation—Pietro would be beaming—and the only thing he felt was relief. He also didn’t want to have to look at her right now. He was sure she would be able to read his face like a romance title, so he kept it bent down and hidden from view as he wrapped her fractured ankle in duct tape. When he was done, emotions in check, he handed her the rifle. She broke it down quickly and stowed it away in the rucksack.

  “We best be off.” He extended his arm, and she grabbed it. They stood up, with Sarah’s right arm wrapped around his neck and Marco’s right arm hooked around her waist, and started hobbling down the piney slope.

  “You shouldn’t have come back for me.”

  “No, probably not.”

  “So why did you?”

  “Leaving didn’t feel right.”

  He steered her around a large pile of moss-covered boulders and filled her in on what had transpired since their last contact, starting with meeting Dr. al-Sharim in the stairwell, and ending with the doctor’s departure from the trailhead in the hijacked van, with Elena riding shotgun.

  They stumbled down the slope heading west, away from Haus Adler, making reasonable time. After a while, the slope became so steep they had to disentangle and shimmy down on their backsides. Marco went first, making sure Sarah wouldn’t fall too far if she slipped, which she did, ending up sprawled awkwardly over his broad shoulders. Their faces brushed as they disentangled, and her lips locked against his. It was only a brief kiss, but when the softness was over, he knew how he felt about her.

  “That’s for coming back.” She kissed him again, longer this time and with a little more urgency; Marco wanted to pull away, to tell her to stop, but he wrapped his arms around her instead. After a moment, they broke apart and continued down the slope, still gripping one another tightly. When they reached the massive slag pile at the foot of the slope, they paused to rest.

  “What happened to Pietro?”

&nb
sp; “He killed the prince. There was another man as well, but he escaped.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “Pietro texted me when he got back to the house.”

  “So that’s it, right? The prince is dead, and the weapons are gone.”

  Marco nodded.

  “Good, because I don’t ever want to come back here again.”

  “Come back? We haven’t left yet.” He helped her up. “And I doubt they’re just going to let us walk away.”

  They staggered across the loose pile of rubble and began climbing the face of the hill. After trying several methods, Marco ended up short-roping her up the slope. She objected at first, but with no ability to dig in with both feet, she couldn’t manage any other way.

  He was exhausted when they reached the hiking trail just after 4 a.m. They had perhaps another hour and a half of darkness. The trailhead where the car was parked was only two kilometers away. In normal circumstances, it would be a twenty-minute walk, but Marco guessed it would take them at least an hour at their best pace, by which point the parking lot would be crawling with either the prince’s bodyguard, all armed to the teeth and lusting for blood, or the Austrian federal police, who were not well known for their sense of humor or leniency. He slid a long arm around Sarah’s waist, trying not to notice the smooth firmness of her muscles and the wide curvature of her hips.

  “Let’s get going.”

  “Don’t we want to go the other way?” She pointed north, in the direction of the path they had taken earlier.

  “Not unless you want to find out what the inside of an Austrian prison looks like.”

  “Then where the hell are we going to go?”

  He picked a few strands of grass growing by the side of the trail and tossed them in the air; they swirled south toward the finger of Germany that stuck into Austria. Grabbing his phone from his pocket, he thumbed a text to Pietro and waited for the reply, which came quickly.

  “Berchtesgaden, Germany,” he said.

  “Why on earth are we going there?”

  “It’s downwind.”

  Forty-Six

  Anatoly Gerashchenko pulled his Vektor pistol from its holster on his chest, grabbed the door handle with his other hand, and debated his best course of action one last time. He desperately wanted to know what was going on outside, but he was safe inside the prince’s office, which had been surrounded by a ten-centimeter casing of titanium; it was bulletproof, capable of deflecting a rocket-launched grenade, and—with its self-enclosed air conditioner system—impermeable to biological and chemical attack. It was also windowless and completely soundproofed; a war could be going on just outside, and he wouldn’t have any idea. The bank of monitors on the wall next to the desk was supposed to be his window into what was happening, but without the prince’s fingerprints, he couldn’t activate them.

  But the waiting was getting to him, and his pride as a former Spetsnaz officer—the only people allowed to carry the Vektor pistol—was taking a beating as he cowered inside the office and allowed others to do the fighting. Worse, he wanted to make sure the nuclear weapons were safe and sound in the garage. His employer wanted those weapons to be deployed against Vatican City; he had been very clear about that, and he wasn’t a man who reacted well when things didn’t go according to plan. The prince was dead; that was unfortunate, but he had played his part. They would have to find another scapegoat to blame for the nuclear firestorm that would burn Vatican City to the ground, but el-Rayad had at least brought them the weapons.

  Gerashchenko twisted the door handle and looked out into the hallway. The prince was gone; only the blood-soaked carpet and the ricochet-riddled walls provided any confirmation of the execution that had taken place less than an hour ago. He padded over to the door leading down to the third floor and peered into the stairway. The walls were scorched, and the air stank of phosphorus, evidence of the recent use of a flash-bang. There was no one in sight. He considered calling out, but if the attackers were still there, he would only be attracting unwanted attention.

  He crept down the stairs, peering out into the third floor, which was the residence of the bodyguards. All the doors to the bedrooms were closed, and other than nearly a dozen ashtrays overflowing with cold ash, the living room was empty. Continuing down to the second floor—the bailiwick of the prince’s wives and prostitutes, who lived there in oddly peaceful harmony—he found the same situation, other than the ashtrays.

  Ibrahim looked up at him as he emerged from the stairwell on the ground floor. The prince’s dead body was wrapped in a Persian carpet. Only his head was visible. His normally dark skin was pale and sallow, and his brown eyes were open and staring blindly into the distance. A stream of clotted blood flowed out of his open mouth.

  “Where are the others?” Gerashchenko demanded.

  “What others?”

  “The bodyguard.”

  Ibrahim shrugged, a scowl adorning his face. Like the other members of the prince’s bodyguard, he didn’t like the Russian, and he liked taking orders from him even less. “You are looking at it.”

  Gerashchenko glanced around the room, featuring an open floor plan that incorporated the living room, kitchen, and eating area. It was full of the usual detritus of an armed camp: coffee cups littered the wooden tables, flat-screen TVs blared from the walls, showing a variety of football matches from around the world, and magazines dotted the sofas and overstuffed chairs. But there were no people.

  “Where is Abayd?”

  “No one has seen him.”

  “Where was he last?”

  “Dr. al-Sharim was stitching him up in the clinic.”

  Gerashchenko hurried outside with Ibrahim on his heels. Even in the moonlit darkness, he could see the line of bodies running from the porch all the way to the garage, which was lit up like a beacon on the other side of the narrow peninsula. A car smoldered in the driveway; he could smell the acrid fumes of smoking oil and hear the creaking of heated metal. He strode past the bodies without giving them a second look and entered the garage. The van with the weapons was gone.

  Cursing loudly, he ran past the trio of BMW motorcycles the prince loved to ride on the mountain roads and hit the stairs at the back of the garage. Hesitating at the top, he waited for Ibrahim to catch up with him.

  “Which of these doors is the clinic?”

  Two doors and a hallway led away from the foyer in which they were standing. Ibrahim pointed to the one straight ahead. Gerashchenko yanked on the handle; it didn’t budge.

  “Get a drill, right now.”

  Ibrahim complied with the order, and Gerashchenko went down the hall to the security office. This door too was locked; he knocked on it, but there was no response. He knocked again, this time pounding with his massive fists, but the result was the same.

  Ibrahim was drilling out the lock to the surgical suite when he returned to the foyer. Gerashchenko waited for him to bore all the way through it, filling the air with steel dust and the smell of hot metal, then tried the handle again. The door opened with a smooth swing, and he stepped inside. Abayd was thrashing around on the surgical table; Nassir was prone on the floor, unmoving. They helped Abayd to a sitting position, and as they waited for him to become more alert, Ibrahim wrapped several bandages around the wounds on his forearms until they could be seen to properly. By the time he had finished, Abayd was awake and demanding something to drink.

  “It’s about time you woke up.”

  He eyed Gerashchenko darkly as he gulped at a glass of water. “What happened?”

  Ibrahim gave him a quick summary of events.

  “KiKi is dead?”

  Ibrahim nodded; the scowl on Abayd’s face deepened, darkening the circles under his eyes and exacerbating the sharp angles of his face.

  “Where are the weapons?”

  Ibrahim explained that Dr. al-Sharim and one of the commandos had stolen them.

  “And you just waved goodbye as they drove off?”


  “Jibril and two others went after them in a Mercedes, but they didn’t return. I rode out on one of the motorcycles; all three men are dead, and the gate has been disabled.”

  “How many men are left?”

  “You are looking at them.”

  Abayd gave him a look that drained the blood from his face.

  “You ordered Yasser to dispose of the bodies of the Americans. He took three men with him and hasn’t returned yet. Waleed is missing—”

  “Waleed? He should be in the security office.”

  “It’s locked, and he isn’t answering his phone. Hanza and Brahim left thirty minutes ago to take care of the sniper on the hill above us, and they haven’t returned.”

  “Did you call them?”

  Ibrahim nodded.

  “They didn’t respond?”

  He shook his head.

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Help me up.”

  Ibrahim moved over to help, but Gerashchenko pushed him aside and lifted Abayd to his feet as easily as if he were a paper doll. They walked over to the countertop, stepping over the unconscious Nassir, and Abayd searched through his bomber jacket. A series of epithets issued forth from his mouth, echoing in the confined space.

  “What is it now?”

  “Al-Sharim took my phone.”

  “The doctor has your phone?”

  “Yes, why do you care?”

  Gerashchenko produced his own cell phone, thumbing a number of commands. “Because I’m tracking it.”

  Abayd spit on the floor, nearly hitting Nassir with a wad of tobacco-tinged saliva. “You had no right to do that.”

  Gerashchenko shrugged indifferently, turning to Ibrahim. “Do you still have the key to the motorcycle?”

  Ibrahim dug a key out of his pocket, and Gerashchenko grabbed it and exited the medical suite, taking the stairs down to the garage three steps at a time as Abayd screamed loud curses into the air. He jumped onto the motorcycle Ibrahim had left in the middle of the bay, started it up, and accelerated down the driveway, barking orders into his cell phone as he motored past the burning cars, dead bodies, and large pots of red geraniums, blossoms shining weakly in the growing light.