Silver

26

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 rats 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.”

The terrorist shook his head. “No, you’ve turned me into a martyr, the first saint of the new Messiah, the first angel of Judas. That’s all you have done. You’ve lost. You’ve lost everything. And you’ve done it here, of all places. For that, I thank you.” He turned on his heel, seemed almost to bounce, buoyed by new found purpose, took two steps and then launched himself up over the railing and into the nothing but air. For a heartbeat he seemed to hang there, suspended by the air itself, but without wings. And he fell.

Noah lurched forward, reaching out with the gun still in his hand.

It was a hopeless gesture.

The sound of impact, flesh on stone, echoed sickeningly throughout the entire inside of St. Peter’s.

Noah leaned over the walkway railing and looked down, knowing exactly what he was going to see down there.

Blood puddled around the dead man, staining the consecrated ground.

The blood of the martyr was like a halo around his ruined head.

Noah had no other names left to call him.

He leaned on the railing, breathing hard, huge gulping breaths. His chest heaved. All he could hear in the silence was the ragged sound of his own breathing.

Priests and soldiers had begun to gather around the body. His arms and legs bent and broken into a whorish sprawl, but his head stared straight up at the vault of the ceiling, straight up at Noah. The dead man didn’t look much like an angel or a saint. He looked like a dead terrorist.

Noah turned his back on the blind eyes and the blood.

He wanted answers, but everywhere he turned he found more questions.

All he had left was the look that had passed between the dead man and the priest. He looked up at the ceiling and said, “Give me this one, eh?”

Pushing through the rats that had swarmed up onto the gallery behind him, he went in search of Abandonato, and the truth.

He only found one of them.