The Thieves of Heaven

by Richard Doetsch

  He had asked their neighbor, Mrs. McGinty, to feed and walk Hawk. The old lady was more than happy to help. She’d even refused the money that Michael offered for her services. She was glad to keep CJ in her apartment for the week, glad to have the cat’s company since she had lost both her own cat and her husband, Charles, in the last six months. It was good to have a purpose again, she told him.

  Michael pulled into the long-term lot and paid for seven days in advance. As he locked the trunk, he noticed a green Torino slow up outside the parking fence. He had spotted it back on the highway; he had always had a fondness for muscle cars, so this one had easily caught his eye. Those big engines were a thing of the past, rarely seen in anything but police cars these days. He hadn’t paid it much mind as it exited the interstate behind him but now he watched it continue past the lot.

  Michael locked up the car and headed for the terminal. He didn’t see the Torino again and breathed a little easier as the large sliding doors of the airport came into view. Paranoia, he told himself. He had been out of practice for almost six years now and was probably just being overly cautious. He stepped up to the airline check-in counter. No one on line. A pretty lady with a Southern accent took his ticket. “Will you be checking any luggage today, Mr. McMahon?”

  “Just carry-on, thank you,” Michael replied, checking in under an alias. His first crime committed, he had just broken his parole. The airline attendant handed Michael his boarding pass, thanked him, and directed him to the security checkpoint.

  Paul Busch was beginning to feel terrible. He had followed Michael, never knowing his intended purpose, never knowing what he would say when he caught up to him. Michael had followed procedure and it was Busch’s call whether or not to let him leave the state. As he walked through the doors of the airport terminal, he decided he would just see Michael off, granting him his permission to go. He would put his faith in him.

  Busch had sent his son home with Jeannie, telling her not to wait up, then borrowed the assistant baseball coach’s Torino. Since the birth of their children, Jeannie had one rule. It was reasonable and, in this day and age, it was prudent. There were too many horror stories and she refused to let her family be a statistic. No guns around the kids. And so, Busch had left his gun, along with his wallet and badge, in the safe at home before the baseball game. He hadn’t bothered to pick them up on the way to the airport; he didn’t see the need.

  Michael walked through the airport, his carry-on bag slung over his shoulder, slapping his thigh as the bag bounced with his stride. The black case he carried in his right hand was heavy. He flashed his ticket at the security gate, emptied his pockets, and placed his bags upon the conveyor belt. As he stepped through the archway, the alarms sounded. Michael froze. Flashbacks of being arrested coursed through his mind. They must be onto him, he thought; he was doomed. Before he left his apartment he’d made sure that there would be nothing incriminating in his bags or on his person: now he couldn’t fathom the problem. The guards moved forward to pat him down. He rechecked his pockets and sighed with relief as he found a stray nickel. He stepped back into the archway. This time, he was clear and free to go.

  As Busch reached the security checkpoint, he caught sight of Michael heading quickly down the hallway toward the gates. Before he could decide on his next move, the guard asked him for his ticket. Of course he didn’t have one. Busch asked to be let through: he was a police officer on official business. The guard asked him for his ID, but of course he didn’t have that, either. Busch watched Michael blend in with the sea of outbound passengers. He looked around for a solution and decided he would continue to give Michael the benefit of the doubt; he’d speak to him when he came back in seven days. But then, he saw the sign: INTERNATIONAL DEPARTURES.

  Michael had just become a fugitive.

  From the tarmac, in the shadows, a figure watched the 747 climb into the night sky. The man was alone and he wasn’t an airline employee. He walked back toward the hangar door passing the maintenance crews and luggage carts; no one paid him any mind, it was as if he belonged or had a special pass.

  The figure stepped through the door and headed down the security tunnel. A guard stood at the exit. The guard looked up, puzzled at the unfamiliar man walking his way, but when the figure flashed his police badge it instantly became clear. Dennis Thal smiled as the guard bid him good night and walked out the exit.

  Chapter 8

  The raven-haired waitress placed the cappuccino on the table next to Michael’s work papers. It was Michael’s second cappuccino and his new favorite drink. Starbucks didn’t hold a candle to the original made in its land of origin.

  The cafe, Bourgino’s, was just outside Vatican City on Via del Campiso, an ancient Roman street of rutted cobblestone. For the past two days, it had been his destination of choice: tiny, off the beaten path, and completely absent from Fodor’s tourist guide. The clientele was a mixture of locals and expatriates, his presence was not even questioned. Fortunately, he was mostly black Irish. With his brown hair and tanned skin, he easily passed for Italian.

  He had spent his first day in the city learning the narrow streets and alleys, his flawless memory his greatest tool. Committing buildings, security systems, and routes to his personal brain trust allowed him time to work out the intricate problems and details of his trade.

  Michael had pored over every renowned work on the Vatican and its contents, but nothing he read had prepared him for the grandeur that met him as he walked up Via della Conciliazione. The massiveness of St. Peter’s Basilica dwarfed the images in his mind. The Piazza San Pietro’s width was just shy of three football fields: it could hold three hundred and fifty thousand people for the Pope’s Masses. It was framed by two vast semicircular colonnades that reached out from the basilica like welcoming arms. The 284 Bernini-designed Doric columns stood forty feet tall and ran four deep around the entire ten-acre open space. As Michael looked up, he couldn’t help but feel he was being judged by the scores of marble saints perched atop the colonnades, all staring down into the square.

  In the center of the enormous piazza rose the obelisk brought to Rome by the Roman emperor Caligula, in AD 37. Capping the eighty-five-foot structure was a cross and golden ball rumored to contain the remains of Julius Caesar. While such an ancient obelisk in any other city would have been the center of attention, here it was simply an afterthought. The Vatican was another world, a remnant from a nearly forgotten history, a fairy tale out of the past. This holy city was beyond the imagination of any one man. Rather, it was the magnificent achievement of some of the greatest artistic minds that ever lived. While Michael had researched its history, inside and out, he hadn’t grasped until this very moment its astonishing breadth. Back in the U.S., he had stayed intensely focused on saving Mary’s life, treating this mission as just another building to overcome, another security system to defeat, another police force to outsmart. He was unprepared for the grandeur of the world he now entered.

  The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica reached up to Heaven, like an enormous bejeweled crown. At the foot of the wide entrance steps stood the enormous statue of St. Paul. He held a sword, defending the Church against those who wished to bring her harm. On the left stood an equally massive marble statue of St. Peter, the first Pope, in his hands a cluster of keys.

  Looking in every direction around him, he saw nothing but architectural genius, not only in form but in function. The Vatican City’s immense, imposing wall ranged from forty to over one hundred feet in height, its medieval design capable of repelling even a modern-day military strike. Vatican City held everything you would expect of a country, even one that was only a little over one hundred acres—banks, post office, radio stations, a newspaper, and even a helicopter pad. It had its own currency and judicial system, and it was presided over by Europe’s only true absolute monarch, the Pope. While the Vatican welcomed the public into certain of its areas, the majority of the Vatican was isolated within the walled enclave. Access to this area
was permitted only to a select few.

  Michael spent two days in the more public areas of the Piazza San Pietro, the Sistine Chapel, and the host of museums photographing and observing, learning and planning. He hadn’t realized until he commenced his research the breadth of the Pope’s cultural domain. The Vatican included a twelve-museum complex; one, some claimed, was the largest in the world, a title debated by both the Louvre and the Smithsonian. The Vatican Museums encompassed fourteen hundred rooms. They stretched along corridors totaling over four miles. A sightseer could spend an entire year there and still not see the vast collection, one accumulated over two thousand years. Every interest could be satisfied: Etruscan art, classical statuary, archaeology, Middle Eastern artifacts, Renaissance paintings, books, maps, manuscripts, tapestries, furnishings. Treasures that no one man could imagine and precious items collectors everywhere coveted. From the three-hundred-and-sixty-foot-long Gallery of Maps to the Gallery of the Candelabra overflowing with Roman classical sculptures to the mummy- and sarcophagi-filled Egyptian Museum, every square inch of the museum complex held some of the world’s most irreplaceable objects.

  While most had heard of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the side walls of the chapel itself were masterpieces in their own right. Here, the greatest artists of their age—Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Rosselli—had created magnificent frescoes that spanned the entire length of the chapel. In other halls could be found entire rooms painted by the likes of Raphael, Pinturicchio, and Signorelli, And though the Sistine’s ceiling cast its shadow over the other works, their perfection was never in dispute.

  The great collection had initially overwhelmed Michael, but he had forced himself to focus. Now he paid particular attention to the Museo Storico-Artisticoe e Tesoro. Known as the Sacristy and Treasury Museum, the ten-room complex was adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica and housed many of the greatest relics of the Christian empire and Papal State; the Crux Vaticana, containing fragments of Christ’s cross; innumerable reliquaries; the diamond-encrusted Stuart Chalice donated by England’s King Henry IV. Manuscripts and decrees passed down from pontiff to pontiff, staffs, crucifixes, and weapons. And of particular interest to Michael, a section devoted to the first Pope. Here, too, were artifacts from the days St. Peter himself walked the streets of Rome: a copy of the Chair of St. Peter; the rusted chains that had bound him prior to his crucifixion at the hands of the Roman emperor Nero. But of greatest interest to Michael was a hallowed corner where stood a single display case. Its pedestal was made of ebony, the dark wood merging into the surrounding shadows and yet standing out in sharp contrast to what it supported. The glass case that sat upon it was two feet square, the glass an inch and a half thick. A ceiling-mounted, pencil-thin spotlight cut through the gloom to illuminate the purple velvet pillow upon which sat the targets of Michael’s mission here. Their design was simple, reflecting their two-thousand-year-old age. They were given to St. Peter by Jesus and were the origin for the symbol of the Pope. Their image was reflected frequently throughout the Vatican, most particularly in the Vatican’s crest. To millions of people they were the true symbol of St. Peter and his Papal heirs, the leaders of the Church Christ himself had founded. To Michael, however, they held a different meaning: the one chance he had to save his dying wife.

  Their design was simple, slightly larger and thicker than one would expect today. And though they did appear to serve a function at one time, today they were clearly displayed to inspire awe. They were the gold and silver keys; the keys to Mary’s survival.

  It was estimated that within these walls, there was in excess of forty billion dollars in art, antiquities, gold, and jewels, along with titles to the Catholic Church’s vast holdings throughout the world. No other country concentrated their assets in such a small area. And because of it, there were security measures with no equal in the world.

  Every doorway was monitored personally and electronically. The modern-day architects of the Vatican rivaled the fabled masters in their creativity. Their security designs—while cutting-edge—were, for the most part, out of sight so as not to diminish in any way the grandeur of the structures they protected. Metal detectors were concealed, so were radioactive sensors and electronic bomb sniffers. Hidden or not, all were in constant search of the next threat: knives, guns, explosives, even nuclear material. The precautions taken were proactive.

  The Swiss Guard were stationed at every entrance and checkpoint, but they were not the ones who gave Michael pause. It was the contingent of Vatican Police wandering and intermingling within the crowds—the guards without uniforms. Their haircuts, the way they walked and positioned their bodies evident only to the practiced observer. These men floated in and out of the crowds seemingly at random, but upon closer scrutiny, a pattern was revealed. Each museum was always covered by at least two Vatican policemen. As one left, another arrived. Their timing was synchronized down to the second. And they were all watching. They were all waiting for any conceivable threat to the security of this unique kingdom.

  Within the Sacristy and Treasury Museum were nine stationary cameras, their observation span covering every angle around the gold and silver keys and the entire range where Michael planned to operate. The cameras were superbly concealed within the walls so as not to interfere with the art and ambiance, but as Michael committed the room not only to memory but to film—never taking more pictures than the average tourist—he knew the hidden video cameras monitored his every move. And he realized this job would require more than experience and creativity. It would require ingenuity and a resourcefulness unlike any he had ever possessed if he was to overcome the impossible and save his wife.

  “Hello.” Mary’s voice was as clear as if she were next door, her greeting sweet to Michael’s ear. The satellite phone Finster had given him was amazing; bulkier than a cell phone and quite noticeable when in his pocket, but the reception was perfect as he walked the streets of Rome.

  “How is it going?”

  “You first. Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “How’s the treatment?” She’d started chemotherapy the day he left. But for the past four days she had been too weak to do more than whisper into the phone. Today, for the first time, she sounded like herself.

  “It turns out it’s not really that bad.” Her tone was upbeat and filled with energy. “Now, tell me—are you OK?”

  “Fine, things are going great, I’m actually ahead of schedule. I should be able to get home a day or two early.” Michael was relieved not to be lying for once.

  “I was hoping, when you get back, maybe we could get out of town for a few days, maybe just be alone.”

  “I would love that. Are you getting everything you need?”

  “Jeannie comes every day. She brought all your favorite junk food and a collection of literary smut. And Paul stopped by today. He brought some pictures that his kids made and was nice enough to drop off some of my schoolwork.”

  “How was Busch?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “I think I pissed him off.”

  “Michael…” She sounded like a disappointed mother.

  “He offered to come with me and I turned him down.”

  “Why?” There was a tinge of sadness in her voice. “He was just being nice.”

  “I think he was having second thoughts about what I was doing and wanted to keep an eye on me.”

  “You’re paranoid, he seemed fine. He said he couldn’t wait for you to get back, said your team took a beating—twenty-one to six—due to the lack of their star quarterback and that he was going to take his anger and frustration out on you.”

  “I’ll bet,” Michael said.

  “Michael, Paul is your best friend, he trusts you.”

  While Mary, the eternal optimist, was fighting for her life, she had actually begun to think of death as an escape from the devastating feeling that wracked her body. She would never admit to Michael what she was going
through. The pain from the chemotherapy was more than she ever imagined. But each time she thought about dying, she quickly said a prayer and asked for God’s forgiveness. There was nothing she wanted more than to live. To live and enjoy life, experience the world, appreciating all those things she took for granted when she’d so carelessly thought herself immortal. Michael was fighting for her life as much as she was and she viewed her terrible thoughts as a betrayal. She was determined to make it through this wretched journey; she wouldn’t let Michael down.

  The garage smelled of grease and oil. It had not only stained the air but the concrete floor as well. Two dismantled Fiats were in the corner; their engines hung from chains in the ceiling. Michael was in the back near an open window; it helped to carry away the fumes as he cooked over a Bunsen burner. The fumes weren’t toxic but their sweet smell was in stark contrast to the odors emanating from the car repair shop and he couldn’t afford the attention. He had picked up his supplies at the supermarket, an art supply shop, and nearby drugstore. Mothballs, Epsom salts, paint, sugar: everyday items with everyday purposes. Michael combined and heated the mixture to 137° Fahrenheit. He formed the thick paste into malleable balls, and painted each brown. He poured them into an empty Milk Duds box and placed it next to a box of Good & Plentys.

  He’d located the garage before he even left the States. It specialized in Fiats and Alfa Romeos, and its sixty-five-year-old proprietor was of the highest reputation—particularly when it came to erasing the ownership history of a vehicle. Michael had gone straight there after landing. He found the owner, an old-style grease monkey, working on a transmission in the driveway. Attilio Vitelli stood there silently in his blue coveralls as Michael explained his desperate need for a metal lathe and some tools. He had some very expensive video equipment that had been damaged by the careless luggage handlers at Rome’s airport. The parts he needed would take a month to arrive from Japan and if he missed his fast-approaching deadline he would lose his job. Michael wore a green windbreaker and a New York Yankees cap. His small gold-rimmed glasses gave him an intelligent, inoffensive appearance.