New Rome Rising

by Rene Fomby

  “Okay, that still begs the question, where’s the exit? It can’t be close by, because for any of those incidents, popping up out of the ground anywhere near Rome would have been like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”

  “I think you’re right, Sam. And, more to the point, if this is an ancient Roman aqueduct, or even a major underground tunnel, there’s really only one destination anywhere near that direction that makes much sense. Ostia Antica. The ancient port of Rome, which lies directly to the southwest of the city. But, offhand, that place has seen some major archeological projects lately, and I’ve never heard of anything like a secret tunnel ever showing its face anywhere near the site. Although, to be fair, if you intended the tunnel to be kept top secret, you would probably do a pretty fair job keeping the other end well covered up. Otherwise, just about anybody could come traipsing in, right under the feet of the Swiss Guards, with nobody being the wiser.”

  “Yeah, that’s how I’d do it.” Sam checked her watch. “But hey, it’s late. It’s been a big day, and although this is cool and everything, we’ve still got a lot more rooms to search. So I’d suggest we lock all of this back up and keep moving. We can come back and check it out more carefully tomorrow. And bring along some monster flashlights.”

  “Sure thing. But wait just a sec.” Mehmed pulled out a small pocket knife and, kneeling down, peeled back a few pieces of wood from one of the railroad ties. As Sam clicked off the lights, he pushed in the latch on the open door and wedged it in place with the shards of wood. “There. This’ll make sure the door stays unlocked in case we ever need to get back in someday. I’m thinking that train might prove very useful if we need to sneak the amphorae out without anyone noticing.”

  “And if our clown-car guards ever wake up and realize that our badges actually work on every lock in the entire complex. Good thinking.” She helped him push the door shut, being careful not to dislodge the pieces of wood, then brushing the dirt around in front of the door with their feet to cover up the fact that they had been there. In the dim light of the complex’s long corridors, by the time they were finished, someone would have had to look long and hard to see that anything had been disturbed.

  Sam clapped Mehmed lightly on the back as they made their way slowly down the hall to the next room. “Okay, done with lucky number seventeen, so that means we still have about twenty more rooms to check out on this floor, and then I say we call it a day and try again tomorrow.”

  “Sounds like a plan, Sam. And, if you’re done with my badge now, I’d like it back if you don’t mind.”

  “Badge? Oh!” Sam looked around desperately. “I must have dropped it back—” She laughed as she saw his shoulders droop and he painfully turned his head to look back toward the train station. “Just kidding, you silly goose!” She fished the badge out of her back pocket. “But hey, I saw that look. I’m tired, too. Why don’t we head back to the lab and see if we still have some cans of soda or something left in the fridge.”

  “I think that’s a capital idea,” Mehmed agreed, clipping his badge back onto his belt. “After all, we have all the time in the world to do this. And I still need to finish scanning in the documents we found in the sixth amphora. It looks like we’re finally getting to the good stuff …”

  ※

  No sooner had they made it back to the lab—and Sam had managed to fish two Diet Cokes out of the refrigerator—than there came a loud noise from out in the corridor and the front door suddenly swung wide open. Leaning over in his desk chair to peer down the hall, Mehmed saw a burly black-bereted Swiss Guard soldier dressed in his non-ceremonial black uniform bursting into the room, with two other guards staying out in the corridor on either side of the door, brandishing black HK MP-5s and looking deadly serious.

  “You Mehmed Çelik?” the lead guard asked, checking out each room one by one as he strode forward. Hearing his voice, Sam stepped out of the kitchen, Diet Cokes in hand.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Mehmed demanded, stomping into the hallway with an angry scowl on his face. “This is my laboratory. You have no business barging in like this—”

  The guard held up his automatic rifle. “This gives me the right to do anything I please, thank you very much. And I’m only going to ask one more time, are you Mehmed Çelik? Answer me!”

  “Well, yes. But—”

  “What were you doing, poking into rooms and floors you have no authorization to—”

  Mehmed faced the guard with his feet spread wide apart and his arms crossed in front of his chest. “As a matter of fact, asshole, I have full authorization to go just about anywhere I please. Go ahead, check out my security clearance. You’ll see.”

  “I have, and while technically that is true, that still doesn’t answer the question of what you were looking for.” The guard nodded toward Sam. “And her. Who is she? And was she with you?”

  Mehmed’s scowl grew even deeper. “That, my ill-mannered friend, happens to be the richest, most powerful woman in all of Italy, and a personal friend of the former pope, and I would advise you to tone down your attitude toward her if you want to keep your job.” Sam just smiled and shrugged, leaning back against the wall with what she hoped would be taken as an air of casual nonchalance. Inside, though, she was shaking. The sight of guns always did that to her, regardless of how many times she’d been forced to deal with them as a criminal lawyer back in Texas. She quickly decided that her best course right now was to treat the whole intrusion as a comic farce as Mehmed continued his tirade. “Ms. Tulley happens to be in charge of this entire operation and, according to the terms of the lease she signed with none other than the pope himself, you are now trespassing on our property, so I would appreciate it if you and your two ape-brained friends outside would get the hell out of our laboratory and let us get back to work!”

  The guard’s attitude seemed to deflate just a hair, a mustard seed of uncertainty as to the breadth of his authority in this particular situation beginning to work its way into his bluster. He paused to consider his position, and the nagging possibility that the arrogant Turk standing in front of him just might be right. And he knew the Turk was at least dead right about their security clearance, at a level he had never before seen granted to an outsider. “Fine! But I’m not leaving here until I’ve made good and certain that you didn’t steal anything from one of the storage rooms and bring it back here.”

  With that he started diligently checking out each room, beginning with a storage closet in the very back and moving methodically toward the front of the lab. When he was done, and having found nothing that raised any suspicion, he paused inside the front door one last time and turned to point a pale, bony finger in Mehmed’s direction. “We’re not done here, Turk. Not by a long shot. Watch yourself, you and your girlfriend. Whatever agreement you may have had with the old pope, he’s dead now, and the next pope may not be so friendly. Step out of line one more time, and next time, I promise you, I won’t be so generous.” With that he turned on his heel and stomped through the doorway into the corridor outside, slamming the door to the laboratory shut behind him.

  “Mmm. That was pleasant,” Sam offered, taking a sip of her Coke.

  “Yeah, all that guy was missing were some jack boots and a Nazi swastika.” Mehmed drew in a deep breath, trying to calm himself down.

  “And I bet right about now you’re thinking that bringing those boxes up here might not have been all that good an idea.”

  “All right, rub it in, okay?” Mehmed pulled opened his jacket, showing off the document he had taken from the box, neatly folded inside his left breast pocket. “Just glad he didn’t think to pat me down, or the whole thing might have gotten ugly.”

  “Yeah, we wouldn’t want that,” Sam agreed, now grinning widely. “Because that friendly little get-together was anything but ugly, don’t you think?” She handed him his can of Coke. “Tell you what, why don’t we finish up your scan, and you can get that purloined letter stashed away safely in the
safe, then let’s bug out of here. I know a great little restaurant nearby where we can laugh this whole thing off over a drink or three, then grab something to eat. My treat.”

  Mehmed had settled down enough to give her back a small smile of his own. “Well, since technically you’re paying for this whole operation, including my salary, everything’s your treat already. But I think you’re right—it’s been a long day, and other than a toxicology report and a secret train station, we really don’t have much to show for it. And—” He glanced toward the door. “—I’ll go out on a limb and say our Dora the Explorer days are now numbered.”

  “Probably for the best,” Sam agreed. “It was all just keeping you away from you real work, anyway. Plus—”

  “The sooner we get all that done, the sooner we can get the heck out of here,” Mehmed interrupted. “And I’m beginning to get a sneaky feeling that something evil this way comes.”

  Sam rubbed her forehead, frowning. “Yeah. I’m getting a bad feeling about this place, too. And it’s not just because I’m Jewish and you’re Muslim. A long black train is headed this way, and you and I need to be off the bloody tracks well before it gets here, because down in this hole, Dudley Do-Right doesn’t stand a chance in hell of saving either one of us.”

  24

  Marseille

  For the first time in a very long while, Constantine’s voice sounded somewhat relieved. Or at least somewhat less angry and threatening.

  Boucher took the phone call at his father’s old desk, staring out across the Marseille harbor. The French police had been by several times over the past few days, asking questions, and each time Boucher had been forced to retreat into the secret study his father had built into the side of the room, hidden by a heavy bookcase. But now the police were gone, this time most likely for good, so Boucher could finally relax and enjoy the quiet solitude of the room he had spent so many days in as a child, watching his father command his little empire of fishing vessels.

  “Are you sure we’re done with him this time?” Boucher could sense the impatience in his emperor’s voice, and the unspoken implication that Boucher had already failed him once before.

  “I sent a man to follow his body to the morgue, and another to check the morgue’s records. He is dead, no question about it. His body is being prepped as we speak for transport back to his family in America.”

  “Good. Now maybe you can focus on my son’s whore for a change. I still think we would have been better off if she had died in that car with him. A twofer, as you called it.”

  “We’ve already been over that a thousand times.”

  “Well, you had your chance in Vegas and botched it.”

  Boucher sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “In Vegas, I was as surprised as anybody when I stumbled upon her in that casino, sipping wine in that little side bar. There was no time to plan an operation, so I had to improvise. I couldn’t just kill her and dump the body somewhere, that would have raised questions. Questions that might have led the police right to our doorstep. So instead I doped her up with enough Xenophant to scramble her brain like it was your morning breakfast. Which would have accomplished our purposes just as surely as killing her.”

  “And yet, once again, you failed.”

  “I honestly have no idea how she survived that. I used pills from one of the first batches of the drug, so maybe it degraded over time. Lost some of its sparkle. But I was just as surprised as anyone when she woke up the next morning, asking questions. It was all I could do to beat a hasty retreat before she recovered completely. But rest assured, Emperor, she will not escape the next time. I plan on handling that operation personally. Regardless of your daughter’s opinion as to my methods.”

  “Well, you have the time now to get it done. More than enough time. After all, she’s just a simple little housewife, and a Jew at that. How hard can it be? Take care of her—and her daughter, while you’re at it—then wrap everything up out there and get your ass back to the palace. I need you here in place for our final launch planning. Spain is complete, so E-Day can’t be more than a few weeks away at this point.”

  “Okay, I understand. Everything is just about finished up here, so I can leave Marseilles this evening. I need to make a side trip out to Barcelona to deal with a minor scrape-up between some of the priests out there, plus put an operation in motion for the Jew. I’ll get that all taken care of while I’m on the road. As much as I love this city, it’s a very dangerous place for me right now, with SDAT sniffing around the docks asking questions. It’s only a matter of time before some fool makes a mistake and leads them right back here.”

  “Yes. Fools. The world is full of them, I’m afraid to say.” Constantine seemed to hesitate. “And the girl. What about her? Do you want me to have her—”

  “No, Your Grace. With your permission, that is one little detail I would prefer to handle on my own. It’s—personal.”

  Constantine chuckled. “Yes, I understand completely. She is quite the looker, I’ll give her that. And very feisty, I’m told, just your type. Okay, we’ll leave her in the dungeon a little while longer. I suppose you’ll want her—fattened up a bit in the meantime. To make her more energetic, a little more playful?”

  “I would appreciate that greatly,” Boucher agreed with a chuckle of his own. “A cat likes to play with his mice for a while before he eats.”

  “Very well. I’ll look forward to seeing you sometime in the next few days. Why don’t we have breakfast upstairs in my garden as soon as you get back? It may be one of our last opportunities to lounge around at leisure for a very long time.”

  “I’ll look forward to it, Your Grace.”

  Boucher heard the click that signaled Constantine had hung up. The emperor was never a man for idle words. And with so much about to explode around them over the next few weeks—quite literally—neither of them had much time left to be idle.

  25

  Vatican City - Friday

  With everything around her now seemingly thrown up in the air, her regular daily routine totally shattered by the pope’s death, the need to protect the Project, and now Andy’s disappearance, Sam had completely lost track of time. So the phone call from Harry Crawford caught her utterly by surprise. Had it really been well over a week since the last time they chatted?

  “Harry, what a wonderful surprise! You can’t know how much I need to hear your refreshing voice right now. What’s going on out in Houston?”

  “Hey, Sammie, everything’s ticking along right as rain out here. Same old, same old. But what the heck’s going on with you right now? I understand you’re down in Rome for a while.”

  Sam quickly caught him up on the highlights of what she’d been up to over the past week, leaving out any details she didn’t trust to the open line. “Anyway, I’m worried sick about Andy, and things could go south with the Project at any time, depending upon who gets elected pope, but there’s not much I can do proactively about any of that right now. I’m in total react mode.”

  “I hear ya, Sam. Sounds a lot like what I’m doing these days, juggling everything with the law practice right now. A ton of hearings, mostly just moving pieces around on the board, but very little is really moving forward. I keep hoping the phone’ll ring soon with the Next Big Case, but every time I pick it up it’s just another fender bender personal injury job. Couple of hours work, one or two thou in the bank if I’m lucky. Not exactly a triple-murder trial.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess from our clients’ point of view, it’s probably a good thing those don’t come along all that often. But still, I could use a little of that day-to-day sameness right about now. I feel like I’m rushing from one car wreck to the next one every single day. And just when I thought I’d gotten things under control and could finally start thinking about moving back home to Texas.”

  “Hmm. You know, Sammie, I had this buddy back in law school at Baylor. His daddy was rich as Croesus, oil money and all that, and he had himself a sweet little priv
ate jet, and a pilot to go along with it. The problem was, according to my buddy, the pilot was sloppy as hell, and he kept getting them into all kinds of unnecessary scrapes. Fuel emergencies, flying into raging thunderstorms, all that. But when he complained about the pilot to his dad, suggesting they fire him and hire someone else, his dad insisted that he was in fact the best pilot in the world. As he told his son, any other pilot and I’d probably be dead.”

  “So what you’re saying, smarty britches, is that maybe I make some of my own emergencies.”

  “Alls I’m sayin’ is, if the shit keeps hittin’ the fan, maybe you should step a little further away from the fan.”

  “I get you, Harry. And believe me, that’s what I’m trying to do. But it’s like the dang fan keeps following me around anyway. I mean, I didn’t ask for my daughter to inherit billions of dollars from an ancient Italian family with roots going back to the Templar Knights, or for her wicked grandfather to step in and try to steal the whole thing out from under her, but there it is. So I have to fix it. And I wasn’t really trying to find the Templar treasure in the basement of our old palace in Venice, but now that I’m responsible for that, too, I think you’ll agree it would be criminal to let it get destroyed. Or hidden away forever in some secret Vatican warehouse.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t be complaining, Sammie. After all, it’s your whole Don Quixote tilting at windmills thing that got me working for you in the first place. And I wouldn’t have it any other way, really. I suppose what I’m really trying to say is, I miss you. And I want you to come home to Houston. Sooner rather than later.”

  “Ah, that’s sweet. And I miss you, too. Those few weeks you were out here after graduation, running all over Europe, they went by way too fast. But good news! I’ve got Claudia working on a house-hunting trip to Houston in about a month, assuming I can slip these surly bonds out here, so it looks like it may be sooner, after all. How’s that sound to you?”