Silver ota-1

by Steven Savile

  “Dear friends, let us pray together to the Lord Jesus so that the world may see and recognize that, thanks to his passion, death and resurrection, what was destroyed is rebuilt; what was aging is renewed and completely restored, more beautiful than ever, to its original wholeness.” He lowered his head.

  Everyone in the crowd did likewise, except for Konstantin, the BKA agents and the Swiss Guard on the stage.

  Konstantin forced his way closer to the stage as the murmured prayers rose to exhort the heavens. Konstantin had a single prayer on his lips, but God wasn’t listening, and the press of people mocked him. He risked a sideways glance and saw two of the black-suited BKA men pushing into the crowd behind him, and another running along the side toward the stage. They were hunting him. They hadn’t drawn their guns. Yet.

  He was two people from the stage.

  The guards on either side of the Pope stared at him.

  Konstantin stared back, trying to read murder in their faces. Any one of them could have been capable of the killing. That was the chilling realization he had as he got close enough to really see them. They were the same. Face by face there was nothing different in the way they looked at him. Any one of them, or all of them, could have been the assassin.

  Or none of them.

  He could be wrong.

  No. The Sicarii made themselves invaluable to their targets. They stood at their side as best friends, then slipped their daggers into their “friends.” This place, this crowd was perfect.

  But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have been played by Devere, steered into another mistake-this one fatal. The man was playing a long game, and each move was thoughtful and well planned. The set-up here was perfect. It could have been a fake, luring him into the open, turning him into the “assassin” and allowing the BKA to take him out, allowing the Pope to die another day when their guard was down.

  He glanced to the right and saw two more BKA agents running along the side of the crowd, following the route the cars had taken to the stage. The pair had their guns drawn and held low so as not to startle the crowd.

  They were staring at him as they ran.

  He pushed between another couple with their heads bowed in prayer. He didn’t let them slow him. He couldn’t afford to. He looked up at the big clock. He had a minute. Two. It was difficult to tell precisely. There would be a small disparity between the timer, his watch and the church clock, but he had no way of knowing precisely how big it would be until the gunshot came. And by then it would be academic.

  There was less than a minute.

  He reached the stage as the first of the BKA men reached the steps.

  Four things happened at once. The gunshot cracked, followed a fraction of a second later by two more, and the trees exploded in feathers and fear, a hundred birds startled into flight. Peter II’s head came up, his prayer broken. There was naked fear in his eyes. He knew tsound. Of course he knew it; it was hard-coded into the DNA of every man, woman and child under the sun. He stopped talking, so the speakers all around the square fell silent. There was a lull for a heartbeat as the shock registered, then people reacted, torn from their prayers by the unmistakable sound of the gunshot. At first there were screams of shock as the birds exploded from the trees, then the screams changed in nature and pitch from confused to frightened. On the stage the Swiss Guard reacted, lunging forward to protect the Holy Father. Konstantin saw the glint of silver in the nearest guard’s hand.

  He couldn’t let the man reach the Pope-even though that meant throwing himself up onto the stage.

  Konstantin shouted out a warning as he hit the red cloth of the stage.

  He thought a second silent prayer then, gambling that the BKA agents wouldn’t take a shot through the crowd for risk of hitting some innocent bystander. In their place he would have taken the shot, risking the collateral damage to protect the principal. He had to hope they were better men than he was. Because that was what it was going to come down to: How much did they value human life? Pope Peter II’s, his, the crowd’s? For this instant, this second, everything hung in the balance. Another shot would almost certainly cause a stampede as frightened people ran for their lives, and in such a tight enclosure more than a few of them would be hurt in the crush.

  Konstantin hit the stage and rolled, coming up on his knees, hands pressed flat against the red cloth.

  Two of the Swiss Guard reacted while the others seemed trapped in indecision. They came forward to stop him, halberds leveled at his chest. The only other guard moving reached the Pope and seemed to be protecting him from the madman that had rushed the stage. Konstantin saw the silver dagger clenched in his fist.

  He didn’t have a choice. He didn’t even have time to reach around and pull his Glock. All he could do was launch himself toward the Pope and pray his momentum took the pair of them out of the range of the Judas dagger.

  He threw himself at the pair of them full on, hitting the old man in the chest, both hands hard to the ribs and barreling him off his feet. The collision sent all three of them-Pope, assassin and savior-sprawling. Konstantin fell on top of the old man, his weight throwing him down hard. They landed on the red carpet together. All around them screams and shouts erupted. He couldn’t hear any individual words. He didn’t need to. There was no doubting what they were for.

  It didn’t matter.

  He had done it. He had reached the Holy Father in time. He had beaten the clock, beaten the assassin. He had saved Peter II’s life. He closed his eyes, waiting for the hands to grab him and haul him off the white-haired Pontiff. He felt the man breathing beneath him. It wasn’t a smooth regular rise and fall of the chest; it was erratic, desperate, like a man struggling desperately to draw his next breath.

  Konstantin rolled away from the old man.

  It wasn’t his weight that had winded the priest.

  There was blood on his hands when they came away from the Pope. He looked down at him. The old man lay sprawled across the red of the stage. It took Konstantin a second to see it. There was blood where the silver blade had pierced the Pope’s white cassock. The hilt of the damned dagger jutted out through the purple tippet wrapped around Peter II’s neck, driven in through the gold cross woven into the cloth. There was a lot of blood, too much. The gold and purple quickly stained red as the blood pumped out through the wound. The Holy Father clutched at the dagger’s hilt. His lips moved. Konstantin heard the barest whisper of a prayer on his lips: “Father, forgive… know not… what…” It was the last prayer of Jesus as he hung dying on the cross, the prayer to his father to save the souls of his murderers.

  Konstantin crawled toward him, unable to believe what he saw.

  The entire front of his white cassock was stained red with holy blood.

  The Vicar of Christ looked up at him without seeing him. His eyes already had the gloss of death stealing over them.

  Konstantin was too late.

  There was nothing he could do.

  After everything, he had failed. He lifted his head to the sky and screamed one long terrible roar of guilt, agony and despair. He had come so close. Close enough to cradle the dying man in his arms as the BKA agents rushed the stage. “Please,” Peter the Roman said. Konstantin didn’t know what he meant, what he was asking for. The old man swallowed and the light in his eyes went out. He was dead.

  Konstantin tried to pull his hand out of the way. The last thing he wanted to do was contaminate the evidence. But even as the Pope slumped into his arms and his blood soaked into his clothes, the knife clattered to the ground. The blood spatter fell like a handful of coins on the red carpet. He didn’t need to count them. There would be thirty. Thirty splashes of red life to mark the betrayal.

  The BKA men ran at him, guns aimed at his face and body, yelling, “Get down!”

  “On your stomach!”

  “Down!”

  “Get your hands where we can see them!”

  e saw their guns and the rage in their faces.

  There was
hate there. Burning. Blazing.

  Outrage.

  Each one of them wanted to pull the trigger.

  And who could blame them?

  Konstantin reverently lowered the dead man to the carpet. He didn’t look at any of the others on the stage. He didn’t hear the screams of the onlookers. He put his hands behind his head, interlacing his fingers.

  The Judas dagger lay on the red carpet beside him, blood on its silver blade.

  The Swiss Guard who had delivered the fatal blow looked at it, then at Konstantin, at the blood on his hands; and the ghost of a smile reached his lips as he cried, “Murder!”

  Konstantin stared at the man, memorizing every inch of his face.

  And then someone hit him from the behind, taking him down.

  They pressed his face into the bloody carpet and stretched his arms out. Someone hissed in his ear, “Just give me an excuse to pull this trigger.”

  Konstantin closed his eyes and waited for the bullet.

  He didn’t realize it was happening until the man closed his hand around the dagger. Even with his weight pressing down on to his back he flinched instinctively, the blade lying inches from his face, smeared with bloody fingerprints.

  26

  Seven for a Secret

  Noah ran, head down, as he raced across the cobbled streets. He was gasping hard.

  He had been chasing the joker for the best part of five minutes. It was a long time to run that hard. He knew every twist and every turn of the streets, which meant he was local, well enough acquainted with the city to know all of its byways and backstreets. Noah pushed between tourists looking at their street map and didn’t slow down as they shouted at his back. The guy was fast. He wasn’t just fast, he was lithe, agile, fit. He went over low walls as easily as a gase monkey up a pole and came down on the other side already running. Noah was out of shape. He hadn’t realized just how badly until the clown led him a merry dance past the steps of the Castel San Angelo. They had run an entire circuit around the Vatican walls, the length of Via Vaticano and through Piazza Risorgimento, dodging traffic down Via Crescenzio and through the shadow of Archangel Michael’s sword to the River Tiber.

  As Noah chased the asshole, he ran all the bad names under the sun through his head, dickwad, dirtball, slime-bag, scum bucket, prick, spitting them all like arrows at the guy’s back.

  He raced the length of Piazza Cavour and over the Cavour Bridge. Noah stumbled as he came to the steps that led the way down beside the bridge, looking left and right. Somehow he’d lost the son of a bitch. There were five roads he could have taken, three that fanned out into the heart of the old city and the labyrinth of close-pressed houses or two that ran along the river. Then he saw a bundle of clothing beside the foot of the bridge. He ran down the short flight of steps. It was the hoodie. He scanned left and right along the riverside, looking for a flash of gray from the bastard’s tee-shirt. He was still running all of those names through his head, biting on them.

  Then he saw him. He had slowed down and was walking as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Had he not glanced back to see if Noah was still chasing him, he might have gotten away with it. Swallowing a deep breath, Noah set off after him.

  Like Lot’s wife, the asshat glanced back over his shoulder one time too many, saw Noah coming for him and bolted. The names were still coming thick and fast, and he was getting more and more inventive with them. The short walk had given the dick munch whatever rest he needed to gather his second wind. Noah raced, arms and legs blur, along the river bank past the first two bridges, then hurdled over the iron rail and took the steps up to the Vittorio two and three at a time.

  If he hadn’t wanted to take the guy alive, he would have pulled his gun and put a dozen slugs in his back out of spite. He really didn’t appreciate the workout. As it was, he needed to get information.

  It was all Noah could do to keep up.

  It took him a moment to realize the tool was doubling back on himself to the broad street of Via de Conciliazoine, which in a few hundred yards opened back up into the elliptical ring of the Piazza di San Pietro, where the suicide bomber still lay in the street. He could see the tall obelisk of The Witness mocking him as every muscle in his body burned, and beyond it the ambulance and the crowd that had gathered. Gritting his teeth he tried to close the gap between them, forcing a burst of speed out of his legs. Every breath blazed in his lungs as he spat it out. The cordon the Swiss Guard had set up to isolate the square had already begun to break up. The flock of tourists was already forty or fifty rows deep, and people were losing their patience. Disgruntled mutterings came in a dozen languages. The guards were doing all they could to keep the people back.

  “I really want to shoot you!” he yelled at the douchebag’s back as his legs tied up. Noah stopped running and bent over, hands braced on his knees. He muttered into the paving slabs, “And I’ve got no problem with putting that cap in your ass,” but the threat had no power. He doubted the numbnuts even heard him.

  The pole smoker slowed, almost skipping as he moved now, and turned to offer another mocking salute and disappeared into the crowd of people, one more tee-shirt-clad tourist among the press of tee-shirt-and-jeans-wearing pilgrims.

  For a moment the crowd parted and Noah saw the way people melted away from the jerkoff. He couldn’t hear what he was saying as he pushed through them, but whatever it was it was working. No one stayed in his way for more than a second.

  Noah followed him into the crowd, shouting, “Io sono con lui!” in pigeon Italian as he tried to force his way through the press of people.

  Suddenly the crowd opened up and he was confronted by a brow-beaten Guard with his ceremonial halberd leveled squarely at Noah’s chest. He didn’t seem all that eager to let Noah through. Behind him, Noah saw the butt monkey jogging toward The Witness. Whatever he had said had been enough to get him through the security cordon, and the only thing Noah could think of that would do that wouldn’t be words at all, or at least not alone. Words and a badge. The bonehead had pulled rank, making him either a really good liar, or the law.

  Noah stared at the Guard and said simply, “I’m coming through, so you either stab me or you get the hell out of my way. One or the other,” and he surged forward, dropping his shoulder as though to go right, wrong-footing the guard. It was a clumsy maneuver, but he executed it quickly and efficiently. As the guard rocked to go to his left to block Noah, Noah pushed off on his left and darted past him. He ran with the cheers of the crowd at his back, delighted in the fact one of their number had just humiliated the poe-faced guard in his motley. Noah didn’t hesitate or risk a backward glance. He ran flat out for the center of the piazza.

  The fudgepacker turned at the sudden surge of noise and saw Noah coming for him.

  exactly what it meant. Abandonato knew the rug muncher. What that meant… well, that was what Noah didn’t want to know.

  Someone saw the gun and screamed.

  He didn’t care.

  There was maybe thirty yards between him and the asswipe. He threw himself forward, running on pure adrenalin.

  His feet slapped the concrete. He yelled, a primitive tribal roar, using the anger of it to spur him on.

  He was running out of names to call the bozo.

  It didn’t matter.

  The gap between them narrowed to twenty-five yards.

  He ran straight through the middle of a flock of pigeons, startling the birds into flight. They exploded into the sky in a flurry of wings and feathers, beating frantically at the air as Noah charged through them. They changed direction slightly, toward the main portico. Noah chased him past the statue of St. Peter and up the steps and through the doors of the great cathedral into the nave. They weren’t alone, but no one moved to stop them as they barreled down the central aisle toward the Papal Altar.

  Noah felt like the guy behind the Pied Piper, the first rat suckered in by the sweet music. He didn’t need to look back to know that they had quite the pack of r
ats chasing them, though in this case the rats had guns, swords and halberds instead of sharp teeth. He concentrated on reaching the man in front of him as he ran headlong toward the altar.

  Before they reached it, the muppet skidded, arms pinwheeling as his momentum continued to carry him forward. He twisted, angling toward the gallery stairs that led up to the dome walkway. Cursing, Noah followed him up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. His entire body screamed at the exertion. He felt his vision swimming and his heart hammering. Sweat stung his eyes. “Just give up, will you!” Noah yelle His voice echoed all around the dome, startling loud in the silence.

  The bastard started laughing manically, as though it were the funniest thing he had ever heard.

  Noah heard others coming up the stairs behind him.

  He stopped running and turned to face Noah. “You’ll never take me alive, you do know that, don’t you?” he said, sounding hideously reasonable as he spoke, and barely out of breath, which was just insulting. Noah was surprised he spoke English.

  “Give it up,” Noah said, walking toward him. He aimed the gun at the center of the man’s gray tee-shirt.

  “Or what? You’ll shoot me? In here?” His accent was curious, not Italian, but definitely not English, and not quite American, like he had learned it from watching MTV maybe.

  “I’ll shoot you anywhere, pal, I really don’t give a damn. This isn’t my church, and me and God are a long way from being pally.”

  “You can’t stop us,” he said. “It’s too late for that. It’s too late for all of you.” He looked at his watch. It was a curious gesture, but seeing the time, he nodded as though the hours and minutes had proved him right, and that it really was too late.

  “I already did,” Noah said. “Look around you, where can you go? It’s over.”