Konstantin closed his eyes, recalling as best he could the layout of the city, and headed in what he thought was the direction of the Florinsmarkt. Five minutes later the phone in his pocket began to vibrate. He answered it. “Who did he call?”
“I love you, Koni, in a very manly way, of course. I don’t think I’ve said it before, but I just wanted to make sure you knew.”
“Yes, yes, who did he call?”
“Not one, not two, but, wait for it, three calls in as many minutes. The first was to the mothership in Canary Wharf, the Devere Holdings building. That one took me by surprise. It certainly wasn’t the call I was expecting. The second was more interesting, to an unlisted pay-as-you-go cell phone which was part of a bulk order placed in London a month ago. I think it is safe to assume this one was to your shooter. The third call was the shortest of all of them, to a landline in Switzerland. Again the number’s registered to another branch of the Devere corporate network; this time, though, it was one of daddy’s.”
“Spit it out.”
“There you go spoiling my fun again. The third call was to the Humanity Capital offices in Geneva. Happy now?”
Not really, but he didn’t say anything to Lethe. He needed to think. He hadn’t expected Devere to call daddy-that threw his thinking for a loop. London made sense because it was the base of operations for the multinational concern; information would traffic through the hub and filter out to wherever it needed to be. Calling the shooter to warn him made sense as well. It was the call he had hoped to illicit with his impromptu visit. That was the call that told him he had read Miles Devere correctly. The man was used to being in control. He hadn’t been able to resist checking in with his man.
No, what surprised him was that he had expected one of the calls up the chain to Mabus, meaning a number out in Israel. Tel Aviv, most likely. It was possible that Mabus was in either London or Geneva, but it was unlikely. Given the level of mystery around the terrorist’s identity he couldn’t imagine Devere entrusting that call to one of his grunts, especially considering Devere’s psychology.
ize="3Could you trace the second call?” Konstantin asked, still thinking.
Lethe sucked in a wounded breath. “I’ll let you off this once, Koni, but only because I just professed my love for you. That’s how good I am to you, remember that. Could I trace the call, indeed? Sheesh. Does a naked Pope shit in the woods?”
Konstantin said nothing.
“The answer you’re looking for is ‘of course’ because he’s Papa Bear, get it? Goldilocks? Sometimes I think my genius is wasted on you, Koni. Yes, I triangulated the signal from the cell phone to a building on one of the approach streets to St Florin’s. Mehlgasse, number 13.”
“Unlucky for some,” Konstantin said, killing the connection. He pocketed the phone.
It took him seven minutes to cover the ground from Jesuit Square to Mehlgasse. It wasn’t one of the streets cordoned off for the papal visit, making it ideal for the getaway. Konstantin walked along the sidewalk. The buildings rose higher here, up to five and six stories. He scanned row after row of blind windows as he walked down the street.
He checked his watch again. Less than thirty minutes before the benediction was due to begin. He didn’t like the way time seemed to be accelerating on him.
There was nothing remarkable about number 13, nothing that said this was the house hiding an assassin. It was an utterly average facade, with row after row of plain windows. There were no balconies. He studied the top row of windows. A flicker of movement below caught his eye. A curtain moving in the window furthest from the Square. The window was open six inches. Enough clearance for a shot.
Konstantin turned, following the trajectory from the window as best he could from below. The angle of the shot was tight. The shooter would only be able to see a fraction of the square itself, but he had a partial view of the stage that had been constructed. Assuming the steps up onto the stage were on the left, what the shooter had was an unobstructed view of the Pope as he climbed them up onto the stage and his first four or five steps across the red cloth toward his papal chair.
He pictured the scene, the white Mercedes Benz pulling up beside the dais, the Pope and his guard climbing out, and being escorted to the stage. For the short time it took to get from the car to the chair the old man was a sitting duck. The bottom of the street closest to the church square was blocked off. He saw two BKA agents standing bythe barricade. Worshippers had come to stand beside them. By the time the Holy Father arrived the crowd would be twenty or thirty deep.
Konstantin looked back up at the window.
There it was again, the slight movement of the curtain as though whoever was behind it was checking the stage area obsessively. It was oddly amateurish, but not out of keeping with the debacle of their surveillance efforts in Berlin.
He counted the windows: fifth floor, forth window across.
He shielded his eyes, trying to see more of what was going on behind the glass, but he didn’t have the angle to see much more than a patch of the ceiling.
He checked his watch again. Twenty-five minutes until the parade was due to reach the square. He thought about calling in to Lethe, alerting the BKA officers, playing it by the book, but not only would that have made a liar out of him, it would have risked compromising him. It wasn’t only that he had told Devere he was going to stop the assassination, and then he was going to go back and kill him-which pandered to his overdeveloped sense of justice-his movements put him in Berlin before the sarin gas attack, and now he was here. It was too much of a coincidence, and he couldn’t call on the Service to help him out. It also meant he was a prime suspect. They’d close off the road and rail, hit every lodging house and hotel, turning the place over. He was alone. Which meant making the best out of a bad job. It was as black and white as that, as far as he was concerned. That didn’t mean he was happy with the situation.
He tried the street door. There was an intercom on the wall beside it. Assuming the buttons mirrored the layout of the building, he pressed his way down the line, skipping the buttons for the fifth floor. Thirty seconds later someone buzzed him in. It never failed. He tried to tell himself this was one of the good things about living in the West, but really all it meant to him was if he wanted to go on a killing rampage, statistically speaking, some idiot would let him into whatever building he chose. It didn’t matter how secure or safe it was supposed to be.
Again he took the stairs, but as a precaution he opened the door on the cage elevator, breaking the circuit so it couldn’t be called.
He climbed slowly and steadily.
He didn’t draw his gun until the third-floor landing.
He carried on up to the fourth, the muzzle of the Glock 19 leading the way.
He stopped before he reached the fifth floor and leaned against the elevator cage. The steady rise and fall of his own breathing was the only sound he could hear in the entire stairwell. He moved up to the landing, keeping his center of gravity low, his stride powerful as he climbed the stairs three at a time. The stairwell came out in the middle of the landing. There were two doors to the right, two to the left. The two farthest doors opened into apartments that looked out over the back of the street, the two middle doors onto the front. The doors themselves were old-fashioned heavy wood, but the locks were nothing special. He could have bumped it in thirty seconds flat. Instead he put a shot right into the middle of metal ring and kicked it down. The wood around the latch splintered under the force of the blow and the door flung inwards, slamming off the wall.
He felt the timing ticking away from him.
Konstantin stepped into the apartment, gun aimed straight ahead.
The place had that musty unlived-in smell that only comes with months if not years of emptiness. The carpets had been ripped up, leaving bare wooden floorboards and, in places, patches of old newspaper that had obviously been used to line the floor before the carpets had been laid. They were yellow with age and brittle beneath his f
eet as he walked over them.
He checked left and right, clearing each room as he went.
The kitchen and bathroom were empty. He tore back the shower curtain. There was no one there. The shooter hadn’t passed him on the stairs and he hadn’t been able to call the elevator, so he had to be in the room. He stepped into the lounge, the room overlooking the corner of the Florinsmarkt.
It took him a split second to process what he saw.
There was a sniper rifle on a tripod by the window, a cell phone on the windowsill, a little, plastic toy robot dog that yapped while he stared at it, the sudden burst of noise startling him. He stepped back instinctively toward the nearest wall, cutting off the number of angles he could be attacked from. On the windowsill the sudden motion of the dog caused the curtain to twitch. It barked twice while he was watching, then fell quiet. There was nothing else in the room.
Heart hammering, he checked the two bedrooms.
Both of them were empty. There was no furure and no cupboards for the shooter to hide in.
The apartment was empty, but it didn’t look like it had been abandoned in a hurry, unless the shooter had incredible discipline. There was no trash, no drink cans, no sleeping bag, nothing to suggest anyone had been in the place since the sniper rifle was set up on the tripod.
He leaned down, checking out the shot through the scope. It wasn’t lined up on the stage or any of the area around it. In fact it seemed to be aimed at one of the five trees in the main square, a fair distance from the stage itself. It seemed odd to go to the effort of setting the shot up early and not have it lined up precisely, but it was possible the shooter had knocked it as he’d cleared the room. Or perhaps it was a superstition thing and he didn’t want to aim at the target until there was something there to kill. He squinted at the tree itself and realized a dozen or more bird feeders had been strung up from the branches. The tree was hiding an entire flock of hungry birds.
That was interesting.
There was quite a crowd gathered in the square already. He checked his watch yet again, feeling like an obsessive compulsive. There was less time on it than before and no shooter. Individually, both facts were bad enough; together they were the worst of all possible worlds.
He checked out the gun itself.
That was when he knew for sure the entire thing was a set-up. There was a small timer set on the side of the stock and attached to the trigger guard. The timer was ticking down. It had 27 minutes left on it. Twenty-seven minutes would not only have placed the Pope in the square, it would have put him up on the stage. Konstantin checked his watch to be sure. The benediction was due to begin in 21 minutes. This gun was never intended to kill the Pope. Devere’s call to the cell phone here had triggered the timer, setting everything into motion. It was like that kids’ game, Mouse Trap. The shot would go off, itself triggered by the timer, the bullet would fly straight into the tree where it would startle the birds nesting there. The sudden explosion of movement and the ricochet of the gunshot would trigger panic in the crowd. In the seconds immediately after the shock of the gunshot someone close would then step in and kill the Pope while everyone else was looking frantically left and right for a shooter that didn’t exist.
He took the cell phone from his pocket and called Lethe to fill him in.
“I hate to say it, Koni, but it makes sense,” Lethe said in his ear. “Think about who we’re dealing with here. If they’ve modeled themselves on the Sicarii, surely they’ll mirror the Sicarii MO: get close, be trusted, and slip the knife in even as you’re calling out for help.”
“Great,” Konstantin grumbled. “Trust no one.”
He looked at his watch again: 19 minutes.
“What doesn’t make sense is why Devere would trigger the remote timer immediately after your visit… He must have known we’d trace it and find the gun. He’s not an idiot, you said so yourself. You don’t plan something as elaborate as this and then blow it on a single phone call.”
“But it wasn’t a single call was it? There were three. He played us. Mudak,” he cursed in his mother tongue. “He hid the important call in plain sight, giving us something closer to home to worry about.” He slammed the side of his fist off the window frame and cursed again. “Geneva!” he spat, the pain focusing his brain. “Swiss Guard! Every member of the Guard have to serve in the Swiss Army, right? That was the call. It’s one of the Guard. The inner circle’s been breached.” Konstantin realized the implications of what he had just said. He had 18 minutes before the papal cavalcade arrived at the stage, and the people he needed to trust the most to do their job, to protect the Pope, were the ones he could trust the least to do their job.
e looked out of the window. There were perhaps a thousand people congregated in and around the square now.
“What do we do?” Lethe asked.
The truth was Konstantin had no idea. He knelt and started to strip the timer away from the gun, but stopped. Devere had warned the assassin-that’s what the call to Geneva had been about-but it didn’t mean he had called the man off. But if the gun didn’t go off, the assassin wouldn’t strike. That was a stone cold certainty. If the assassin didn’t strike in the next half an hour, when they knew where he was, he could strike tomorrow or the day after or the day after, anywhere along the pilgrimage’s long road. And if he was right and the assassin was part of the Swiss Guard, he could wait until they were “safe” in the Holy See and no one would be any the wiser. No, this was the one place they knew something was planned to go down.
Knowing gave them a hand, if not the upper hand. There was a chance the assassin could take the gunshot to mean Konstantin wasn’t as good as he was, wasn’t as close. It was a risk. All he could do was get close to the stage. That way when the gun went off and the birds exploded from the trees in a flurry of wings and screams, he would be the one person watching the stage. It was a dangerous game to be playing, but he wasn’t about to throw his hand in now.
“We use the Pope as bait,” he said, realizing, even as he said it, the stakes of the gamble he was about to make. It wasn’t just one man’s life he was playing with here.
23
The Beast with 13 Horns
He wore the dagger in a ceremonial sheath nestled beneath his left armpit.
The crowds cheered and waved their flags as they pressed up against the barriers, hoping to get a glimpse of the Pope. The noise of the people sent a thrill through his skin. It had been so long in the planning, so long since there had been honesty in the world. But it was coming. It was close. And when it returned they would have something to see.
His fingers strayed toward the dagger. He felt its weight so close to his heart. It wasn’t an ominous weight. It wasn’t portentous. Like his task today, it was an honest weight.
They had found the silver dagger in one of the suicide tombs unearthed by the earthquake at Masada. It had been returned to them while the world adjusted to the new millennium. No truth can lay hidden forever. That is the way of great truths.
The tomb had contained the desiccated skeletal remains of a man, along with a document. They had no way of knowing exactly what the roll of papyrus actually was, what it said and whose words they were, because by the time they had unearthed it, it had been in such a wretched condition the individual folios had fused together, forming a thick pulp.
But they had suspicions.
How could they not?
The world knew what had happened as the Roman legions had built their ramp up the side of the mountainside of Masada. It was the last fortress of the Sicarii, the freedom fighters bound to the service of the bloodline of the true Messiah, Judas Iscariot.
And on the day when they took their own lives and ended the bloodline, it had been home to Menahem ben Jair and his brother Eleazar, the grandsons of Iscariot. If either of them had penned the testimony, the wisdom it contained would be priceless. What truths might it contain?
But the papyrus was ruined beyond anything they had the resources to salv
age. Mabus had wanted to try anyway. They had skills, they could find people they could trust. But the other man-the one who had taken the name Akim Caspi after they had found the dagger-had said no, that they could not risk the truth, so long lost, being destroyed.
Caspi had brought the truth to him, and entrusted the silver dagger to his care. He welcomed the truth, pledging himself to the Disciples of Judas. They didn’t know the secret of the blade until they deciphered the Testimony.
They had turned it over to the Vatican’s experts, knowing even as they did that there was no way the Church of Lies would release the truth it contained. That meant they would have to steal it back, but not until it had been restored and translated. It had involved careful thought and planning, like everything else, but because it was driven by truth, God had seen them through. Of course, he had never doubted. Why would He not want the truth known? After all it was His truth. They had put their own man on the inside, a priest who worked in the library. He monitored the restoration, then, anted ext was ready to be deciphered, sent word to Caspi so he could send in his own expert to oversee the translation and spirit the Testimony out of the Vatican before the truth could be buried again.
The first revelation was its writer. What they had discovered in the hidden tomb was no less than the Testimony of Menahem ben Jair, grandson of Judas Iscariot, founder of the Sicarii zealots. Menahem ben Jair was the grandson of the true Messiah.
The second revelation came in the body of the text itself. Learning the truth had not been easy. There were levels of truth in the words: first the bloodline itself, Menahem son of Jair, Jair son of Judas and Mary, the same Mary Magdalene the Church of Lies had painted as a harlot. The truth played out in the garden at Gethsemane, where he begged Judas to stay strong, to deliver him to the Romans, knowing to do so would break his friend. How could any man ask someone who loved him to deliver him to death? Still faithful to his friend, Judas shared that last kiss knowing he was damning himself because of the guilt he felt; because he knew he would not be able to live with it.
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