by Daniel Silva
A movement caught Gabriel's eye--an arm in motion--but it was only Karl Brunner, raising his right hand and touching his earpiece. Immediately his demeanor changed. His shoulders squared and he seemed to be leaning forward on the balls of his feet. Blood rushed to his face, and his eyes were suddenly alive and on the move. He raised his wrist to his lips and mouthed a few words into the microphone concealed in his shirt cuff. Then he took a quick step toward Father Donati.
The priest leaned forward and said, "Is something wrong, Karl?"
"There's an intruder at the Vatican."
AFTER LEAVING the papal apartments, Eric Lange walked downstairs one level to the office of the Vatican Secretary of State. In the antechamber he encountered Father Mascone, Cardinal Brindisi's trusted private secretary.
Lange said, "I'd like to see the cardinal, please." "That's impossible." Father Mascone shuffled some papers and bristled visibly. "Just who in God's name do you think you are marching in here and making demands like that?"
Lange reached into his pocket and in a fluid motion withdrew the silenced Stechkin. Father Mascone murmured, "Mother Mary,
pray for me."
Lange shot him through the center of the forehead and walked
quickly around the desk.
Gabriel and father Donati scampered down the steps of the synagogue. The papal limousine stood outside, glistening from a light drizzle, surrounded by several carabinieri straddling idol motorcycles. Father Donati approached the closest officer and said, "There's an emergency at the Vatican. We need a motorbike."
The carabiniere shook his head. "I can't, Father Donati. It's completely against regulations. I could be fired if I let you take my motorcycle."
Gabriel put a hand on the officer's shoulder. In Italian, he said: "Il papa has personally dispatched us on this mission. Do you really wish to refuse a direct request from His Holiness?"
The carabiniere quickly dismounted the motorcycle.
Gabriel took the handlebars and swung his leg over the saddle. Father Donati climbed on the back.
"Can you drive one of these things?"
"Hold on."
Gabriel turned onto the deserted Lungotevere and opened the throttle full. As he raced north toward the Vatican, he could hear Father Donati reciting the Lord's Prayer in his ear.
Marco Brindisi stood in the center of the room before a bank of television screens. His arms were spread wide, his palms were open, his face seemed to have drained of blood. In his rage, the red. zucchetto had fallen from his pate and lay on the carpet at his feet.
"Will no one silence this heretic?" the cardinal screamed. "Damn you, Carlo! Cut him down! Where is your man?"
"I'm right here," Eric Lange said calmly.
Cardinal Brindisi turned his head a few degrees and took note of the man in a humble clerical suit who had slipped silently into his office.
"Who are you?"
Lange's arm swung up, the Stechkin in his hand.
"Would you like to make a last confession, Eminence?"
The cardinal narrowed his eyes. "May the fires of hell consume your soul."
He closed his eyes and prepared himself for death.
Lange indulged him.
He pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession. The Stechkin spit fire but emitted no sound. Three shots struck the cardinal in the chest, forming a perfect triangle over his heart.
As the cardinal collapsed onto his back, Lange stepped forward and stared into the lifeless eyes. He placed the tip of the silencer against the prelate's temple and fired one last shot.
Then he turned and walked calmly out.
VATICAN CITY
It took three minutes for Gabriel to reach the entrance of St. Peter's Square. As he skidded to a halt at the metal barricades, a startled carabiniere leveled his automatic weapon and braced himself for assault. Father Donati waved his Vatican badge.
"Put your gun down, you idiot! I'm Luigi Donati, the Pope's private secretary. We have an emergency. Move the barricade!"
"But--"
"Move it! Now!"
The carabiniere lifted a section of the barricade, creating a passage wide enough for a motorcycle. Gabriel nosed through and started across the crowded square. Startled tourists leapt out of the way to safety, screaming insults at him in a half-dozen languages.
By the time they reached the Bronze Doors, the Swiss Guard had dispensed with his halberd and was holding a Beretta pistol in his outstretched hands. He lowered the gun when he saw that it truly was Father Donati on the back of the motorcycle.
"We were told there was an intruder," Donati said.
The Swiss Guard nodded. "Now there's been a report of a shooting inside the palace."
In another life, Father Luigi Donati must have been a track star or a footballer. With his long legs and lean build, he bounded up staircases three steps at a time and charged down hallways like a sprinter hurtling toward the finish line. Gabriel was doing all he could do just to keep the cleric in sight.
It took less than two minutes to reach Cardinal Brindisi's apartment on the second floor of the palace. Several Swiss Guards were already there, along with a trio of Curial priests. The body of Father Mascone was slumped over the desk in the antechamber in a pool of blood.
"My God, but this thing has gone too far," murmured Father I Donati. Then he bent over the body of the dead priest and administered last rites.
Gabriel entered the study and found a nun bowed over the body : of Cardinal Brindisi. Father Donati followed a moment later, his, face ashen. He walked wearily across the room, then collapsed to the floor next to the nun, oblivious to the fact that he was kneeling; in blood.
FROM HER position at the end of the colonnade, Katrine Boussard had seen everything: the arrival of the two men on motorcycle, the confrontation between the carabiniere and the priest who claimed to be the Pope's secretary, the mad race across the square. Clearly they knew something was taking place inside the palace. She started the engine, gazed across the square toward the Bronze Doors, and waited.
Lange's hopes of slipping quietly out of the Vatican were all but gone. The entrance hall of the palace was filled with Swiss Guards and Vatican police, and it appeared as though the Bronze Doors had been sealed. Obviously someone had ignored his warnings and sounded an alarm. Lange would have to use other means of escaping. In a hasty attempt to alter his appearance, he removed his eyeglasses and shoved them into his pocket. Then he headed calmly toward the Bronze Doors.
A Swiss Guard put a hand on his chest. "No one in or out for the time being."
"I'm afraid I can't be detained," Lange said calmly. "I need to leave at once for a pressing appointment."
"Orders are orders, Monsignor. There's been a shooting. No one can leave."
"A shooting in the Vatican? Dear God."
For the benefit of the Swiss Guard, Lange made the sign of the cross before reaching inside the jacket of his clerical suit and drawing the Stechkin. The Swiss Guard fumbled in his Renaissance costume trying desperately to remove his own weapon, but before he could bring it into play Lange shot him twice in the chest.
A scream filled the hall as Lange lunged toward the Bronze Doors. A Swiss Guard stepped into his path, a Beretta in his outstretched hands. He hesitated; Lange was surrounded by shouting clerics and Vatican bureaucrats. The man who spent eight hours a
day holding a halberd didn't have the nerve to fire into a crowd and risk innocent casualties. Lange had no such worries. The Stechkin swung up, and he blew the Swiss Guard from his feet.
Lange sprinted through the Bronze Doors. A carabiniere walked toward him, gun leveled on his hip, shouting at him in Italian to lay down his weapon. Lange turned and fired. The carabiniere fell to the paving stones of St. Peter's.
What he saw next was something out of his nightmares: a half dozen carabinieri, running across the square directly toward him, I automatic weapons drawn. There would be no shooting his way out of this. Come on, Katrine. Where are you?
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Standing a few feet away was a woman, an American girl by the look of her, about twenty-five years old, too terrified to move. Lange closed the distance between himself and the girl in three powerful strides, then seized her hair and pulled her to his body. The carabinieri skidded to a stop. Lange placed his Stechkin against the side of the girl's head and started dragging her across the square.
Gabriel heard screaming outside the window of Cardinal Brindisi's office. He parted the heavy curtains and looked down. The square was in turmoil: carabinieri running with weapons drawn, tourists scurrying for cover in the colonnade. And walking across the center of the square was a man in a clerical suit, holding a gun to the head of a woman.
Katrine Boussard saw him too, though from a different vantage point: her position at the end of Bernini's Colonnade. As
the square erupted into chaos, the carabiniere who had opened the barricade to the two men on motorcycle left his position and ran toward the palace. Katrine kicked the bike into gear and rolled forward, then she turned through the gap in the fence and started across the square.
Lange saw her coming. When she was a few feet away he pushed the American girl to the ground, climbed on the bike in front of Katrine took hold of the handlebars, then turned the bike around and headed for the edge of St. Peter's Square. A carabiniere was sprinting along the barricade, trying to close the breach before the bike arrived. Lange took aim and squeezed off the last two rounds in his magazine. The carabiniere tumbled to the pavement.
Lange sped through the opening in the barricade and leaned the bike south. A moment later, they were gone.
ST. Peter's square was in chaos. Clearly, the first priority of the police would be to secure the area and tend to the victims rather than pursue the man who had wreaked the havoc. Gabriel knew it would take only a matter of seconds for a trained professional to disappear into the labyrinth of Rome. Indeed, he had done it once himself. In a moment, the Leopard, the man who had murdered Benjamin and countless others, would be gone forever.
The motorcycle Gabriel and Father Donati had ridden from the synagogue was where they had left it, resting on its kickstand a few meters from the Bronze Doors. Gabriel still had the keys in his pocket. He climbed into the saddle and roared across the square.
Rounding the end of the colonnade, he turned right, as the assassin had done, and was immediately confronted with a decision. He
could continue along the perimeter of the city state or turn to the left, toward the southern end of the sprawling Janiculum Park. As Gabriel slowed to make his decision, a tourist with a camera around his neck stepped forward and shouted at him in French: "Are you looking for the priest with a gun?"
The Frenchman pointed down the Borgo Santo Spirito, a narrow cobbled street lined with Vatican office buildings and souvenir shops selling religious articles. Gabriel turned left and opened the throttle. It made sense. If the assassin followed this route of escape, he could disappear into the open spaces of the park. From there he could make his way to the tangled streets of Trastevere in a matter of minutes. From Trastevere he could cross the river to the residential districts of the Aventine Hill.
After a hundred meters, Gabriel banked to the right and sped along the facade of a dusty palazzo. He came to a busy piazza near the river, swerved to the right, and headed up an access ramp leading into the park. At the top of the ramp was a traffic circle outside the entrance of an underground bus terminal. Gabriel thought he saw the assassin for the first time, a motorcyclist dressed in black, with a female passenger on the back. The bike accelerated around the circle and disappeared into the park. Gabriel sped after it.
The roadway was lined with broad gravel walkways and towering umbrella pine. It ran along the spine of the hill and rose gradually, so that after a few seconds Gabriel felt as though he was floating above the city. As he neared the Piazzale Garibaldi, he saw a flash in the heavy traffic, a motorcycle knifing dangerously between cars, a man in black at the handlebars. Entering the chaos of the massive piazzale, Gabriel briefly lost sight of the bike; then he spotted it again, turning onto a smaller road that led down the hill toward Trastevere. Gabriel leaned the bike hard and fought his way through the traffic, ignoring the symphony of horns and curses, and followed after him.
The descent out of the park was a steep series of switchbacks and hairpin turns. The carabinieri motorcycle had more power than the assassin's, and Gabriel did not have the added weight and balance problems of a passenger. He closed the distance quickly, and was soon about thirty meters behind.
Gabriel reached inside his coat and drew the Beretta. He maneuvered the weapon into his left hand and twisted hard on the throttle with his right. The bike roared forward. The woman glanced over her shoulder, then turned and took awkward aim at him with an automatic pistol.
Gabriel barely heard the sound of the shots over the drone of the motorcycles. One of the rounds pierced the windscreen. The bike bucked from the impact. Gabriel's hand slipped from the throttle. The Leopard began to pull away. Gabriel managed to get his hand back on the throttle. With agonizing slowness, he gradually closed the gap.
Lange took his eyes off the street long enough to glance into his rearview mirror at the man pursuing him. Dark hair, olive skin, narrow features, a look of sheer determination in his eyes. Was he Gabriel Allon? The agent codenamed Sword who had coldly walked into a villa in Tunis and assassinated one of the most heavily protected men on the planet? The man whom Casagrande had promised would not be a problem? Lange hoped someday to repay the favor.
For now he focused his thoughts on the task at hand: finding some avenue of escape. A car was waiting across the river on the Aventine Hill. To get there, he needed to navigate the maze of Trastevere. He was confident he could lose the Israeli there--if they survived that long.
He thought of his home in Grindelwald, of skiing beneath the face of the Eiger and bringing women home to his enormous bed. Then he pictured the alternative: rotting in an Italian jail, subsisting on rancid food, never touching a woman again for the rest of his life. Anything was better--even death.
He opened the throttle full and drove perilously fast. The streets of Trastevere lay before him. Freedom. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw that the Israeli had closed the gap and was preparing to fire. Lange tried to increase his speed, but couldn't. It was Katrine. Her weight was slowing him down.
Then he heard the gunshots, felt the rounds shearing past him. Katrine screamed. Her grip on his pelvis weakened. "Hold on!" Lange said, but there was little conviction in his voice.
He left the park and entered Trastevere, racing along a street lined with faded tenement houses. Then he turned into a smaller street, narrow and cobblestoned, cars parked on both sides. At the head of the street rose the spire of a Romanesque church, a cross on top, like the site of a rifle. Lange made for it.
Katrine's grip was slackening. Lange glanced over his shoulder. There was blood in her mouth and her face was the color of chalk. He looked into the mirror. The Israeli was about thirty meters behind, no more, and making up ground quickly.
Lange murmured, "Forgive me, Katrine."
He grabbed her wrist and twisted it until he could feel the bones cracking. Katrine screamed and tried to grab hold of his torso, but with only one hand it was futile.
Lange felt the weight of her body tumbling helplessly off the back of the bike. The sound of her body striking cobblestones was something he would never forget. He did not look back.
The woman fell diagonally across the street. Gabriel had less than a second to react. He squeezed the brakes in a vise-grip but realized that the powerful motorcycle was not going to stop in time. He leaned hard to the left and laid the bike on the cobblestones. His head slammed to the pavement. As he slid along the street, skin was torn from his body. At some point he saw the bike cartwheel into the air.
He came to rest atop the body of the woman and found himself staring into a pair of beautiful lifeless eyes. He lifted his head and
saw the Leopard roar up the street and vanish into a church steeple.
Then he blacked out.
IN THE turmoil of St. Peter's Square, no one took notice of the old man making-his way slowly across the timeworn paving stones. He glanced at a dying Swiss Guard, his vibrant uniform stained with blood. He paused briefly near the body of a young carabiniere. He saw a young American girl, screaming in the arms of her mother. In a few minutes, the horror would be amplified when news of the cardinal's assassination was made public. The stones of St. Peter's, awash in blood. A nightmare. Worse than that day in 1981, when the Pole was nearly killed. I have wrought this, thought Casagrande. It is my doing.
He slipped through the colonnade and made for St. Anne's Gate. He thought of what lay ahead. The inevitable exposure of the conspiracy. The unmasking of Crux Vera. How could Casagrande explain that he had actually saved the life of the Pope? Indeed, that he had saved the life of the Church itself by killing Cardinal Brindisi? The blood in St. Peter's was necessary, he thought. It was a cleansing blood. But no one would believe him. He would die in shame, a disgraced man. A murderer.
He stopped outside the door of the Church of St. Anne. A Swiss Guard was standing watch. He had been hastily called to duty and was dressed in jeans and a windbreaker. He seemed surprised to see Casagrande climbing slowly up the steps.
"Is there anyone inside?" Casagrande asked.
"No, General. We cleared the church as soon as the shooting began. The doors are locked."
"Unlock them, please. I need to pray."
The tiny nave was in darkness. The Swiss Guard remained near the door, watching curiously as Casagrande made his way forward and fell to his knees in front of the altar. He prayed feverishly for a moment, then reached into his coat pocket.
The Swiss Guard sprinted forward up the center aisle, screaming, "No, General! Stop!" But Casagrande seemed not to hear him. He placed the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. A single shot echoed throughout the empty church. He remained balanced upon his knees for a few seconds, long enough for the Swiss Guard to hope that the general had somehow missed. Then the body slumped forward and collapsed onto the altar. Carlo Casagrande, savior of Italy, was dead.
