by Tom Fox
‘Still,’ Camaugh returned to his initial point, keeping his formal stance at the centre of the room, ‘this body is the second-highest organ of the Curia, and should be kept abreast of everything. It is we who inform the Cardinal Secretary of State, and in turn the Pontiff, if matters – any matters – escalate.’
‘Agreed, agreed,’ Giotto relented. ‘My apologies, brothers. I still do not feel this particular matter warrants our own interest beyond ensuring the Guard are aware of potential crowd activities today, but I accept this correction and agree I should have consulted with you sooner.’
The show of self-abasement seemed to satisfy Cardinal Camaugh.
‘With that said,’ the Cardinal responded, ‘what’s the actual substance of the material your people have unearthed?’ The question came with a turn on his heels, coming once again to face Giotto.
‘It has to do with the river, of course,’ his fellow Cardinal replied, ‘but with more than just that. And as of today, with two individuals who’ve suddenly become more than objects of mere interest.’
Outside, the Tiber River
Since the river had begun to run red in the morning, no one had been able to identify the source of the change. By the time those with curiosities for measurements and investigations had started in on their tasks, the Tiber’s colour had changed from the Settebagni in the north of the city to Tor di Valle in the south, and the only thing that could be known with certainty was that it had become the biggest news of the Roman day.
Speculation was rampant over its cause and meaning. Few in a city of such significant religious history could fail to note the symbolism of the red colour. Italy wasn’t Egypt, but the stories of the Nile’s transformation into a canal of blood in the days of Moses were part of a common history.
Yet this wasn’t blood – a fact that had become apparent as soon as the first suitably curious reporter stepped down the concrete banks and drew up a handful for a basic smell test. Among the scientifically minded there was suspicion of minerals from a suddenly unsettled deposit somewhere on the river bottom, or of an algae or other plant that might have undergone a rapid process of oxidation overnight.
Among other groups the speculations were of a different flavour. The government feared potential terrorism and suspected the colouring to be a poison, issuing a city-wide alert to avoid anything but bottled water until a full investigation could be mounted – though the water that flowed through pipes and taps appeared unaffected, coming out as close to clear as was ever the case in Rome. Ecologists immediately shouted pollution, wagging the finger at some as-yet-unidentified corporation who must have dumped something before dawn, reinforcing their long-held convictions that big companies would gladly kill off a whole river if it meant saving a few euros in chemical disposal costs.
There were other explanations, too. Religious zealots saw a sign, troublemakers saw a prank, and the Internet saw conspiracy, as it always tended to do.
All the while the river flowed, red as blood, through the heart of a city that could not know what it meant, whence it came, or what it ultimately would mean. Until, at a foreordained time that she held as a secret unto herself, the colour would begin to fade. She would retreat to normalcy before the day was done. It was meant to be like that. But the world around her would not go back to the way it was before.
That, too, had been etched out in the solid surety of stone.
5
Ponte Sisto
Crossing the Tiber River
It was when Angelina Calla arrived at the banks of the river that her world began to fall apart.
The crowds marching away from the Pantheon had led in an ever-increasing crush towards the riverbanks that wound themselves in a great arc through the centre of the city. By the time Angelina had emerged from the Vicolo del Polverone and made her way to the water’s edge, she could barely move through the bodies. Whatever was drawing their attention, it was doing a remarkable job of it. Normally crowds like this only attended Papal audiences or major civic events, and none of those were planned for today.
She reached the bridge – the east end of the famous fifteenth-century Ponte Sisto – moments later.
Below, the Tiber flowed an incomprehensible red.
She hadn’t been able to see it until she was almost on top of it. The high stonework banks that lined the river within the city centre kept the waters hidden from view, and Angelina required a few steps out on to the pedestrian-only bridge that had been rebuilt for the city by Pope Sixtus IV, before she could adequately see.
What she was actually seeing, though, she simply couldn’t comprehend.
Piazza Pia
Near Castel Sant’Angelo
Ben followed the crowds as far as the distant end of the Via della Conciliazione, which ran in a straight line from St Peter’s Square towards the famous, round papal fortress on the water’s edge, which had originally served as a mausoleum for the Emperor Hadrian. He only caught glimmers of their ultimate goal over the swell of moving heads and intermittent traffic, but it beckoned with a strange, uncommon draw.
When he arrived there, one amongst hundreds, he finally saw it plainly.
The river ran red with blood.
The voice on the telephone had been correct. It wasn’t merely mystic-speak or excitable expectation. The Tiber really was crimson as the flow from an opened vein.
Or an open wound in the side of Christ.
Ben’s body was rigid, his understanding overwhelmed. Around him, tourists mumbled in bemused wonder, most speculating whether this was some summer tradition in Rome, to match Illinois dyeing the Chicago River green in the USA for St Patrick’s Day. Cameras clicked almost constantly. Selfie-sticks rose in the air to catch couples’ portraits over tooth-baring grins in front of the unusual waters.
But Ben felt only the trepidation of confused religious zeal, and an odd fear that came from the fact that he’d been told, by a voice on a phone call he couldn’t identify, that this was coming.
Ponte Sisto
Angelina shuffled for a better view over the side of the ancient bridge. She’d been annoyed all day with crowds, and this one bore infuriating traits all its own. Mumblings of ‘rivers of blood’ and ‘signs from above’ seemed to Angelina’s ideologically atheistic background as absurd as suggestions that Caesar drew his water from medieval fountains, yet such comments blundered their way out of lips all around her. So little knowledge. Such a flood of ungrounded belief. A people too foolish to know the Forum from a hole in the ground could only be expected to confuse something which clearly had a scientific explanation with something descending from a mystical realm beyond.
Finally, she pushed her way through to the stone railings that ran along the bridge. From her new vantage point she could lean out over the edge and stare straight down at the water.
For the briefest instant, Angelina was tempted towards something more ethereal than her usual academic worldview. The strange flow of the crimson river was mesmerising, otherworldly. She saw her face vaguely reflected back at her, though her hair, almost the same colour as the water, seemed to disappear into its currents.
But she brought herself back to reality quickly enough. There is an explanation for everything under the sun. And in Angelina’s experience it rarely had anything to do with forces coming from anywhere else.
She was about to begin mulling through the possibilities in her head, the comforting swell of scholarly analysis a welcome diversion from the odd tenor of the crowd – but Angelina never had the chance. Her thoughts were replaced by the exploding sound of gunfire and the pain of impact as stone shards flew into her stomach from the wall of the bridge which blew apart beside her.
6
Ponte Sisto
The duo of .380 calibre bullets that slammed into the bridge’s stone siding caused it to explode in a cloud of angular granite fragments and dust. The pain of the coin-sized stone chips flying into Angelina’s stomach and legs was compounded by grit blowing into her eyes,
her lids scraping over their lenses as she tried to blink away the sudden blindness and comprehend what was happening.
Before vision had wholly returned, another explosive sound echoed from somewhere behind her. A millisecond later stone was shattering again, this time from only a centimetre or two to her left.
The first impact had been only centimetres to her right.
The gathered crowd burst into an instantaneous fit of screams and motion, some dropping on to the pavement in an impulsive, self-defensive posture that offered no real protection against arms fire but was a strong human impulse all the same. Others ran in any direction, every direction, confused and terrified.
Angelina’s thoughts were as frantic as the bodies around her. Her catalogue of life experiences included nothing like this, and her mind froze, flashing to blank in shock. Yet something within her moved on impulse with those who chose to run. Without pausing to debate other actions, she bolted back in the direction from which she’d come.
Beyond two lanes of traffic on the broad Lungotevere dei Vallati, which ran alongside the eastern bank of the Tiber and was lined by parked cars on either side, was the entrance to the much smaller Via dei Pettinari – a cross street that seemed like the only protective cover to hand, tall buildings lining each side and the spaces between them less open. Safety, or as much as Angelina’s mind could make of it.
She fired all the energy she could muster into her legs and ran.
Piazza Pia
Ben Verdyx had never heard gunfire except in films, so when the report of actual arms tore through the lulled wonder of the crowd around him, his brain didn’t know how to interpret what he was hearing.
The answer came in a spray of blood that erupted in front of his face. A man had been standing no more than two metres ahead of him, gazing out over the same red river with a shiny Samsung Galaxy held up to film the moment. A millisecond after the strange explosion sounded in the distance, his head simply disintegrated. Fragments of bone and gore sprayed on to Ben’s beige jacket, and as he watched the body in front of him teeter and fall, his stomach rioted and turned over.
The only explanation his mind could formulate burst through his senses.
A murder. I’ve just witnessed a—
But then the explosive sound came again, and Ben realised the shooting wasn’t done.
To his left, a woman suddenly spun around in a blur of motion. Ben yanked his head towards her, just in time to see a spray of blood emerging from her shoulder. No, this is impossible . . . Crowd shootings were hardly uncommon any more, but they were things he read about in the news. Things that happened abroad. Mass shootings didn’t happen in Rome. It couldn’t be real, not here.
The woman at his side had fared better than the man in front of him, the bullet shattering her shoulder but missing her head or vital organs. A companion at her side now had her in her arms, pulling her in the opposite direction from the river.
The crowd as a whole had transformed into a roaring mass of bodies fleeing in every direction, but Ben was stunned in place. Before him, the crumpled frame of the dead man lay at his feet, sickeningly lifeless amidst an expanding pool of blood that almost perfectly matched the colour of the river beyond.
When the report of the gun sounded again, Ben leapt into the air. Not on the same impulse to flee that had overtaken everyone around him, but because the paver stone beneath his feet exploded with such shattering force that he felt himself all but propelled upwards.
And Ben Verdyx’s mind finally comprehended his predicament. The man in front of him had been shot. The woman beside him had taken a bullet. And now, with the crowd scrambling away and Ben left solitary in his spot, a bullet had landed centimetres from his feet.
Whoever was shooting, was shooting at him.
Ponte Sisto
During her first adrenaline-powered steps, the panic finally burst wholly into Angelina’s consciousness. All the sudden realities hit home together, the voice of her racing thoughts shouting at full bore. We’re all targets, every one of us on this bridge. Everyone who’d gathered by the river. We’re all—
Another blast tore through the afternoon light as she ran, and the kerbstone beneath Angelina’s right foot blew apart. Her balance faltered and almost gave way as her ankle strained to compensate, but momentum propelled her forward and she regained her step, her thighs pushing her yet faster into the main street.
Another shot. Another fantastically narrow miss.
A car swerved sharply to avoid running her down as she plunged into traffic, its driver leaning on a tinny, receding horn. In an instant sweat had flooded Angelina’s whole body, drawn out of her skin by equal doses of fear and sudden exertion.
That was four shots. She’d been in the line of fire for them all.
The fifth round missed her left toe by less than a millimetre, and it was then that, through the chaos of her terrified realisations, Angelina knew the shots weren’t random. She hadn’t been caught out in a crowd as a gunman trained his firearm at random. She was a target.
That impossible reality propelled her forward with a new flurry of panic and speed.
Across the street
Along the Lungotevere dei Tebaldi
‘For Christ’s sake, take the woman out!’ the man called Ridolfo snapped at his partner, irritation ripe and volatile in his voice.
‘I’ll get her.’ The skinnier man, his handsome face distorted in an expression of frustration and focus, answered testily. ‘Just . . . hold the fuck on.’
The second man, André, the younger of the duo by three years, had his pistol at eye level. It moved slowly as he attempted to track the woman in her race across the crowded street.
Hold on. Ridolfo couldn’t believe André hadn’t taken her out with the first shot. He was now up to his sixth, and still the woman was running, obviously unscathed – hardly what they wanted. By this stage she had to realise she was the target, which Ridolfo wanted even less.
André should never have permitted her to last that long. People who knew they were being hunted tended to try to protect themselves, just as she was now doing. The woman was clearly no expert in evasion, yet she was running for the side streets. Moving for cover. A good, laudable instinct.
André pulled his gun’s trigger again, but just as he’d done with each previous shot, he pulled back far too hard on the sensitive mechanics of a fine piece of combat craftsmanship. The 102mm barrel of the Glock 25 followed the motion of his grip and the shot flew wide and high, the bullet slamming into the side of a parked car a metre ahead of the woman’s course.
‘Damn it, you told me you knew what you were doing!’
The other man didn’t look back at him, but Ridolfo knew the remark would piss off his partner. Let it. André had assured him that, despite the fact that neither of them were hit men by trade, he was capable of firing a gun.
Ridolfo had assumed that skill also included aiming it.
‘Aim at the centre of her chest, then a few centimetres ahead of her to compensate for the movement,’ he instructed tersely, aware that they had only seconds with the woman still in sight. She was approaching the opposite side of the busy street as fast as she could make it through the dart-and-dodge game she was forced to play with oncoming traffic. ‘Then squeeze the trigger, don’t fucking yank on it.’
An instant later, André’s Glock burst to life again. On the far end of his sights the bullet reached its mark, but once more it was brickwork that blew apart, rather than the chest of his target.
‘Fuck!’ he shouted, spittle flying from his lips. André didn’t need Ridolfo to chastise him. He was pissed with himself, his neck swelling with indignation.
By the time he’d aligned his gaze through the sights once more, it was all too late. The woman with the red hair had slipped between buildings on the far side of the street.
His target was gone.
7
Piazza Pia
Ben couldn’t see who was shooting at him, but harbour
ed no impulse to search his surroundings. He turned from the body crumpled and bloody before his feet, spinning 180 degrees on his leather soles, and charged off in the direction of the fleeing crowd.
On the far side of the street was the Auditorium Conciliazione, a massive structure beyond which lay the cover of a denser mass of buildings. But in the frenzy of his run, Ben’s main thought was not on the whole, but on one smaller building he knew was situated just on the other side of the elevated corridor, called the Passetto di Borgo, that ran behind the auditorium and connected Castel Sant’Angelo to the Vatican. The Carabinieri, one of the three police forces that oversaw public safety in Italy, had their small St Peter’s Bureau in the little edifice around the corner, and Ben couldn’t think of any place he’d rather be in this moment than in the safety and security of a police station.
He pointed himself towards the connecting street and tried to increase his speed beyond the full sprint he was already at, but his legs could do no more.
The report of the next gunshot arrived with new terror. Certain he was now a target, the sound came replete with a series of visions – bright and horrifyingly vivid in his imagination – of a bullet slamming into his spine, or into the back of his head, causing the same kind of explosion of skull and skin he’d seen moments ago with the man standing in front of him.
Ben’s world threatened to go white with the overwhelming blindness of panic. But the shot didn’t hit him, and he simply uttered a frantic prayer, Lord, help me!
And he ran.
Inland from the Ponte Sisto
At last making it through the flurry of traffic and across the main thoroughfare at the Tiber’s edge, Angelina then bolted into the first small lane she came to with every ounce of energy her body could muster. With gunshots landing within a few centimetres of her feet, her only hope was to escape line of sight. Get out of view.
