by Tom Fox
A few steps ahead, her present street intersected with the massive Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, one of the largest thoroughfares through the centre of Rome. The metro station was only a few dozen metres to her right. She was almost there.
As she rounded the corner, it was Angelina’s focused gaze ahead – scanning for the traditional signage and stairway that led into the metro system – that prevented her from seeing the glossy black Transit van that pulled up alongside her. Its windows were tinted as black as the paint job, so she wouldn’t have been able to see inside even if she had been looking. As the van matched her speed and spotted her position, its side door slid open and the bodies of four black-clad men inside came into view.
Her abduction happened so quickly that she was off her feet before she knew she was being taken. Two of the men leapt out of the van, one reaching down to grab her legs and the other wrapping thick, solid arms around her chest, a huge hand covering her mouth. The two propelled her towards the van with skilled coordination, the men inside receiving her and pulling her in.
A second later, the two outside had leapt back into the vehicle, the door was slid shut with a slam, and a hood was drawn over Angelina’s face as her world went black.
Piazza Pia
The abduction of Ben Verdyx took place within sight of the Stazione Carabinieri San Pietro at which he had been aiming in his flurried escape from the gunfire by the river. It was a mark of his abductors’ confident boldness that they took him on an open street, only metres from the police station, apparently without fear.
A black van of similar make and appearance to that which had taken Angelina Calla swerved into Ben’s path as he ran. Unlike her, he saw the door open, saw the men emerge, but he was no more equipped to prevent what came next than she had been. The hands that grabbed him were of a strength far beyond his own, and before his mouth could utter a protest or a cry, it was all over. He was in the van, the door was shut, and his hands were being bound behind his back as a hood was pulled over his head, blocking out all vision.
The last thing Ben Verdyx heard before he passed out from fear was the roar of the van’s engine.
The men who had abducted him didn’t make a sound.
10
Forty-seven minutes later
Torre Maura district
Eastern Rome
‘Sit down and be quiet.’ The first words out of Emil Durré’s mouth were typically severe, emerging through their customary thick accent. The Belgian expatriate motioned towards two leather chairs covered in crackled burgundy leather, brass studs sparkling in the light of a simple fixture that hung from the ceiling of an otherwise unremarkable office. The chairs and the immense mahogany desk between them were the only signs of excess and looked wholly out of place in their otherwise cheap surroundings. But they were an extravagance that Emil more than deserved. One day, he would deck out the rest of his paltry surroundings to match the set.
The two men who had walked into the room a moment before took their seats, uncomfortable in the oddly old-fashioned glamour the misplaced furniture strove inadequately to represent. However, given the events of less than an hour ago, they were more uncomfortable still in the presence of the man who had called them there.
Emil drew in a deep, long breath. Behind him, a broad window opened out on to the cityscape of a less than fully posh section of the Roman skyline. The buildings in view in the dying afternoon light were mostly industrial, some residential, without the domes and towers of the city centre that everyone the world over associated with the city.
And there was, most regrettably, no view of the river.
Still, the office window faced west and provided him with striking sunset views on an almost nightly basis. And night would come at the end of this day, despite its setbacks.
The two men opposite him squirmed in their seats. Emil had always liked that word. Squirm. So slavish, so demeaning. Utterly delightful. His native Belgian French didn’t have a satisfactory equivalent. Se tortiller sounded too polite, and se contorsionner was both too long and too literal. Some words simply worked better in translation.
Emil’s temper, however, was not prepared to let them continue squirming in silence.
‘It should go without saying that I am displeased.’ He peered across his desk at the two men. Both straightened. They’d known this was the direction the conversation would go, but neither of them liked it.
‘We’re sorry, Pops,’ the younger and handsomer of the two said quickly in response. ‘Things just got a little out of hand.’
It took effort for Emil to restrain a disgusted outburst. That the stupider of the pair was his son was a fact of nature that couldn’t be helped, though the boy could have at least done his father the courtesy of not opening his mouth in order to sing his familiar song of ineptitude.
Emil had hesitated to bring André into the project, given that the boy had so little to offer to it. Circumstances, however, would hardly allow him to be kept in the dark. One cannot go from pauper to prince, from insignificance to storied fame, without one’s kin noticing the change. Short of cutting André out of his life completely, which would have meant Emil himself relocating physically out of his son’s life once everything was over – an option that he nonetheless hadn’t dismissed without careful consideration – there was no other option but to bring him into the fray. And at the end of the day, Emil supposed he did, in fact, harbour a touch of familial sentiment, something that might even qualify as paternal loyalty. He would have preferred a smarter child, of course, one with more business sense and drive, but the genetic dice had rolled where they willed. Emil’s first wife had been a looker but an airhead, so the sole fruit of their union could hardly be blamed for his lot in life.
Yet, he’d failed. In this, one of his first important tasks.
‘You had only a single aim,’ Emil said, ‘quite literally. Take out the woman. One lady on the street, and an academic to boot. Hardly the most capable of opponents. And you’re telling me you couldn’t do it?’
‘Pops, it’s just that—’
‘Don’t speak,’ Emil cut off the boy’s pitiful attempt at a reply. ‘And don’t fucking call me that.’ He hated the affectionate slang his son used, and André knew it, though the fact never seemed to influence his behaviour. It was just possible that Emil didn’t intimidate his son the way he hoped he did.
He turned to the man in the other chair. ‘You, you should have prevented this.’
‘I’m sorry about that, boss.’ The man said nothing more, but held his gaze up to Emil’s without flinching. Something the latter man respected.
Ridolfo Passerini, who was only three years the elder of Emil’s son, yet in ability far more substantially his superior, had once been described to Emil as ‘ugly as a whore’s back end’, and the fact that the description had come from his own mother had given it a certain merit. Emil had never been able to muster up convincing disagreement. In private moments, when he and Ridolfo had first met, Emil had joked behind his back that if he ever walked into a bar fight without a weapon he would simply thrust Ridolfo between himself and his attacker – ‘The sheer force of such undiluted ugliness would be enough to shock a man into retreat.’ Then, after Emil had got to know him better, he’d joked in this way to Ridolfo’s face. He was a young man who assessed himself accurately, dispassionately, and therefore took little offence in the knowledge that he was ugly as sin, being perfectly aware that he made up for it in a brilliance that was just as pronounced. It was Ridolfo’s emerging ruthlessness that had raised him to the level of a prize in Emil’s eyes. The man had a coldness about him, and that coldness signalled a willingness to do, uncompromisingly, what was asked of him.
‘Not only did you not kill the woman,’ Emil continued, ‘you let her get away. Unacceptable. Though, it has to be said, your counterparts fared little better with the man.’ He would have his discussion with the other team later. ‘And now there are police everywhere, reports of the attacks on every
television station. Sections of the city are on lockdown.’
‘She didn’t get away,’ Ridolfo answered calmly, ‘she was taken.’
‘Taken?’
‘She was headed for the metro, as near as we could tell. Once we figured that out, we were holding back, waiting for the chance to catch her underground. A closed environment, easier to capture.’
‘Get to the point.’
‘Just before she got to the entrance, a van pulled up along the street. Four men in the back, and a driver.’
‘They were professionals, Pops,’ André butted in. The look Emil shot him silenced André instantly.
‘Whoever they were, they knew what they were doing,’ Ridolfo confirmed. ‘The van was unmarked, I couldn’t catch the plates. But the abduction was . . . perfectly orchestrated.’ He said the words with unfeigned respect for whoever had pulled off the abduction.
Emil rattled his fingers over the surface of his desk.
‘The same thing happened with Verdyx,’ he finally admitted. Ridolfo’s eyebrows rose. ‘The team I had on him reported exactly the same set of circumstances. Caught them entirely off guard.’
A tense silence. ‘What does it mean, that they were both taken right out from under our noses?’ Ridolfo finally asked.
Fingers rattled again. ‘I honestly don’t know, but it can’t be anything good.’ Finally, Emil looked up and stared intently at both men.
‘I need the two of you to take care of this. Bartolomeo’s team has different work to be doing now. I’m going to need you to take care of both these – problems.’ He let his gaze linger on Ridolfo. ‘Can I count on you?’
Ridolfo firmed up his posture, nodded in the affirmative.
‘Because,’ Emil continued, now turning to face his son, ‘the point of no return on this whole project was passed the moment the water went red this morning.’ André nodded in return, though there was little sign of deeper comprehension on his features. ‘There can be no turning back,’ his father continued, ‘and there can be no room for being tripped up by the involvement of others. Prophecy is something that cannot be controlled.’
There was a delightful irony to the statement, but Emil made it convincingly. ‘It will run where it will. It will run amok. And we will delight in the running.’
It seemed so incongruous to hear Emil Durré, bygone scholar and loathed exile of the establishment, speak of prophecy. His atheistic antagonism was as well known among his friends as his dislike of his former colleagues, and prophecy was just the sort of ‘culturally antiquated nonsense’ he’d inveighed against for years.
But then, both André and Ridolfo knew that prophecy was what this was all about. And they both knew, with the certainty of a surprising faith, that all around them visions were about to become reality.
PART TWO
Prophecy
11
Beneath the Apostolic Palace
The hood was pulled from Angelina’s head with force, but not briskly. She was seated on a chair that felt wooden, hard, her hands bound and positioned behind the chair’s back to keep her fixed in place.
From the moment of her abduction till now, no one but Angelina herself had made a sound. Frantic cries of ‘Who the hell are you?’ and ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ were met only with silence, and eventually Angelina had given them up, out of breath and exhausted. She’d been raced from her abduction point to God knows where – a drive that took perhaps fifteen minutes in the starts and stops of what she assumed was traffic – and was eventually unloaded with the hood over her head still on, shuffled into the interior of some building, somewhere.
The certainties of Angelina’s life had all but disappeared. The only one that remained was fear.
As the hood finally came off, she squinted at the sudden arrival of brightness. For a few seconds she could make out only blurs and splotches of bright, amorphous colour in a well-lit space; but as her eyes adjusted the colours began to solidify into definite shapes.
A room, rectangular. Concrete walls. Plain, unpainted. No windows. Fluorescent lights sunk into low ceilings. A few plain tables, and not much else, over a poured concrete floor. Fear tightened Angelina’s chest. This was no office, and her gut told her nothing good happened in this sort of room.
Men were in various positions around her. Two stood directly in front of her chair, dark suits matching, dominant and tall. Another sat in a chair to her left, just at the periphery of her vision.
‘Dr Calla,’ one of the standing men said in a measured, businesslike tone, ‘I would like to do you the courtesy of unbinding your hands. That is, if you can assure me you will remain calm, and seated.’
Her terror choked at her throat, but Angelina suddenly wanted to explode. At this man’s condescending words her fear was overwhelmed by anger.
‘The courtesy?’ The words were darts shooting out from between her teeth. ‘You chase me down with guns, you kidnap me off the street, and you have the gall to talk to me about courtesy?’
At least they didn’t shoot me, she heard her interior voice affirm over her rage. They’d fired so many times, but each time they’d missed. Reassurance.
Then, a realisation. Maybe that had been her pursuers’ aim all along, from the bridge and throughout the chase. Not to kill her there on the street, but to lead her to a spot where she could be taken. Like a sheep in a pasture, fleeing from the sheepdog only to run straight into a waiting corral. She’d thought she’d been so clever in her convoluted course, but she’d been led, rather than leading herself. Into a concrete room, with no windows . . .
‘I’m sorry about the manner in which we had to bring you here,’ the man’s steady voice continued, sounding anything but sorry, ‘but given the circumstances, there was little option.’
‘Go to hell,’ was all Angelina could muster. It didn’t sound convincing, but it felt good.
‘I’m sure that, once your circumstances have been explained to you, you’ll feel less hostile towards our activities.’ The man’s tone was difficult to read, and Angelina squinted to get a better look at him. He was tall, perhaps just under two metres, with cropped brown hair that took on an odd halo from the fluorescent tubes above. His whole body looked . . . Angelina struggled for the right word. Sturdy. He was solid, a thick tree trunk planted firmly in the earth, sure of his footing and hard to sway.
‘There’s nothing you could possibly “explain” to me that would justify what you’ve done. Those were bullets you shot at me, you bastards!’ The fuck you’s kept creeping towards the tip of Angelina’s tongue, but somehow she managed to hold them back. ‘And you did it in a public place – in a crowd! God knows how many people you could have hurt!’ Then it occurred to her that she had no idea if others had, in fact, fared worse than she. ‘For Christ’s sake, how many bodies back there caught your bullets?’
‘Dr Calla,’ the stoic man added, moving for the first time to take a small step in her direction, ‘you need to calm yourself down. Breathe.’ Then, impossibly, ‘We did not shoot at you.’
‘Fuck you!’ the words finally exploded from Angelina’s lips. The man might be imposing, but she wasn’t going to just sit and take his lies.
‘That language is not appropriate in this place,’ he answered. For the first time, Angelina could see a flash of something other than force in his eyes. The vulgarity had apparently genuinely offended him. His nearly reverent ‘this place’ echoed in her ears.
The concrete walls around them hardly looked hallowed.
‘Take a breath,’ he continued. ‘If you’ll give me a chance to explain, you’ll realise we’ve brought you both here for your protection.’
Angelina’s anger momentarily halted. Instantly confused, she peered into the tall man’s eyes. ‘Both?’
He didn’t answer. Instead, he merely gave a nod towards Angelina’s left.
She slowly turned, following the line of his glance. She remembered that another of her captors was seated off to the side, and soon found herse
lf looking in his direction.
What she saw, however, was not another well-suited man in command of his situation. On a hard chair that looked identical to her own, a man in a beige coat sat stiffly, his arms tied behind his back, pale as the white light that illumined them. Brown stains of blood marked his coat and stained his face.
The man glanced at her, eyes bulging with fear, and for the briefest instant Angelina felt all her other emotions – the fear, the anxiety, the terror – slip away. Where moments ago nothing in her present experience had seemed certain, now one thing did.
She had seen this man’s face before.
12
Beneath the Apostolic Palace
The plastic tie that had bound her hands together for nearly the past half-hour snapped apart as one of her captors clipped it off. Angelina’s sudden shock at seeing a familiar face in this unexpected place had silenced her stream of angry protests, and the man in charge had apparently felt satisfied that she wouldn’t shoot out of the chair in hysterics.
Angelina brought her hands on to her lap and began rubbing the red stripes that now encircled both wrists. Her shoulders and forearms ached from the strain of the awkward position in which they’d been bound, and her legs, she suddenly acknowledged, still burned from the race that had come to such a sudden and unexpected end.
‘Allow me to introduce myself properly,’ said the tall figure who was quite evidently in charge. He stiffened into what approximated military straightness. ‘My name is Hans Heinrich, a Major of the Papal Swiss Guard. Behind you is my sergeant, Wachtmeister Jonas Wüthrich, and just beyond the door,’ he motioned behind him to a steel door that was firmly closed on the far side of the room, ‘is Korporal Max Yoder, who has joined us to ensure we’re not interrupted.’
Angelina heard the words, but processing them was temporarily beyond her. The Swiss Guard? The fabled corps of bodyguards was, as far as she remembered, the private security staff of the Roman Catholic Pope – but Angelina The Atheist hardly had dealings with pontifical clergy. Besides, these men didn’t look anything like the guardsmen she’d seen within Vatican City on her frequent visits there with tour groups. They always appeared traditionally clad in ceremonial attire befitting a religious vision of a dancing clown, as she’d interpreted their outfits: bright, contrasting primary colours with overly inflated trouser billows and ridiculously outsized collars. The men in this room, by contrast, were dressed slickly: grey suits over black shirts that clung to what were visibly muscular bodies.
