Silver

30

Noah was desperate. Time was merciless and Monsignor Gianni Abandonato was a ghost. The Vatican refused to open its doors to him. He had no legitimacy. That was the drawback of going off the books. When things were desperate, when the clock was ticking and all hell was waiting to break loose, there was no one he could turn to. Not that he was inclined to ask for help.

Noah was a lone wolf, an old-school warrior. Not one of those team players like Frost. He had spent his time as a professional soldier doing the job no one would officially admit existed but everyone knew did. Officially he had been classified as a marksman. That was a nice word for sniper, which in turn was a nice word for assassin. He killed people the government wanted dead. He didn’t need to justify himself by saying he was only following orders. That might have been true, but Noah believed in what he did. He wondered how much pain the world would have been saved if he had been given bin Laden, back when he was called Usama, not Osama, and he wasn’t the poster boy for global terrorism. Or Hussein. Of course it wasn’t that simple.

Back then Usama had been our best friend against the bigger enemy, Russia. He’d been a rising star in the Mujahedeen, a local warlord who was making spectacular inroads against the Red Army. The West wanted Russia out of Afghanistan, and getting into bed with the likes of Usama was the cost of that. They called it The Greater Good. Noah believed in the Greater Good. The Greater Good would have been served if someone had fed bin Laden to his mountain goats tasty morsel by tasty morsel. The Greater Good would have been served by purging Iraq of the family Hussein after the first Gulf War when we started to hear the truth of his reign. The cold, hard truth was that the Greater Good was hardly ever served in the real world. People were too frightened, or their hands were too tied. That was where he had come in. That was where he still came in. He had a different uniform and didn’t salute anymore, but the missions hadn’t really changed all that much.

One bullet was all it would take, but to actually fire that bullet he had to find Abandonato.

Nine days ago, when he had walked out of the basilica of St. Peter’s and gone looking for the priest, he had actually been worried for the man. His first thought was that he had been taken. That somehow one of Mabus’ people had got to him while Noah chased his quarry in a merry dance across the streets of Rome all the way toicide in St. Peter’s.

It had taken him longer to realize the truth.

He should have worked it out sooner, but sometimes he wasn’t the quickest thinker. It had never been a prerequisite for his chosen career. He did what he was told, which implied someone had to tell him what to do, and more often than not, what to think.

Then he started to think for himself. Nick Simmonds couldn’t have survived inside the Vatican alone. A simple volunteer wouldn’t get access to the right parts of the archives and the right texts no matter how much help the holy librarians were in need of. There were too many secrets down there they wanted to protect. Abandonato had almost said as much. But like most people who didn’t want to get caught into giving themselves away, he had checked himself. Simmonds would have needed someone to sign off on his assignments, someone to oversee his work.

There was no way a group of people so used to protecting some of the most precious and unique records of the written and printed word, the very thoughts of people thousands of years dead in some cases, would let just anyone get their hands on the irreplaceable texts and not make sure they were being treated carefully. The library was one thing, but the Vatican Archives? Noah hadn’t seen them, but Neri had explained that some of texts were so frail they were stored in hermetically sealed chambers-low air content and pressure, moisture controlled environments. They weren’t just books on a shelf, waiting to be piled into a box and stacked up in a corner while they waited for the refurbishments to be made.

That had set him to thinking even harder.

He had needed Neri to confirm his suspicions. Neri had checked with the head of the Vatican Police, but they both knew what the answers were going to be before it came back. Three questions, three answers: Abandonato hadn’t returned to his apartment in nine days. He hadn’t shown for work in the library since his meeting with Noah. And finally, Nick Simmonds’ request to work in the library had been granted by Monsignor Gianni Abandonato.

They worked closely, mentor and student. He didn’t know who had recruited whom, but during the course of that one morning Noah had spent in his company Abandonato had spoken enough heresy to last a good Catholic a lifetime.

He should have known. It was right there in front of him. The priest was too sympathetic. Sometimes guilt was as much about what someone didn’t say as what they did. He tried to remember everything Abandonato had said, but couldn’t. It had all blurred into one incoherent mess inside his head. There were lots of prophecies and lots of anti-christs, that seemed to be about the gist of it, and at least oe a generation the world was supposed to be going to hell in a hand basket.

He had enlisted Neri’s help again, trying to find the missing Monsignor the old fashioned way, on foot, knocking on doors. If he wasn’t inside the Holy See, he had to be outside. But it was next to impossible. Rome was a big city, and it was filled with pilgrims in mourning, come to say farewell to Papa. Abandonato would have had to have been a six-foot-tall pink elephant in a tutu for people to notice him. A man in holy raiment was as good as invisible in Rome.

In return Noah gave Neri the photograph of the assassination Lethe had downloaded to his cell phone and told him to pass it on to the head of the Vatican’s police force. There was a rat in the Swiss Guard, and his face was ringed in red so no one could mistake him. Neri trusted Noah. And Noah knew it. He might have seen the news footage everyone else had seen, but he was trained to see beyond the surface. He recognized the fact that the angles didn’t allow for a single image of the dagger being driven home. So while everyone else was prepared to believe the evidence of their eyes, Neri was still willing to at least question.

Noah knew he had passed the photo on, but he had no idea whether the Gendarmerie ever acted on Neri’s skepticism-if the walls of the Holy See were good at one thing, it was keeping secrets. It wasn’t the Gendarmerie’s job to provide protection for the Holy Father; that was the remit of the Swiss Guard. It was however very much in their remit to investigate criminal activity. He just had to trust that they would do their job, put aside their blind faith in the goodness of mankind and investigate. As long as they didn’t the rat was free to wander the holy corridors.

Noah couldn’t help but think it was a little bit like telling Adam there was a snake in Eden. He didn’t know if it would change the final outcome, but he had to do it just the same. If they went and bit into the apple, at least he would know he had done his part.

Every day that nothing happened, the worse Noah feared what might happen the day something finally did. It was the basic rule of terrorism. He’d said it a hundred times: you make a threat, you keep it. The minute you broke those promises you diluted the fear every subsequent threat instilled in the public. It was like the boy who cried wolf, the boy who cried bomb. The suicides had promised forty days and forty nights of fear. They had all taken that to mean forty separate attacks across Europe, but after Berlin and Rome, then the murder of Peter II, what could they do? How could they escalate the horror? Because that was what terrorism was fundamentally about, escalating the horror. Blowing up an office block after something as insidious as poisoning the water of an entire city was de-escalation. It didn’t work in the same way. It made the fear mundane.

Rome was actually breathing easy again, as though its time in the spotlight had passed. It had survived. There had been losses, horrible losses, but it had survived. Now it was another city’s turn. They had suffered enough.

If he had been one of the unholy trinity-Mabus, Akim Caspi, or Miles Devere-he would have punished them for their presumption. He would have hit Rome again just to prove that no, they hadn’t suffered enough. He would tell them when they had; they would not tell him.

Noah thought about the note he had found on the “suicide bomber”: We have tested your faith. Today we break it. All of the messages had been enigmatic, laced with the vagueness of prophecy, but they had all come back to faith. The Church. The only two attacks to date, despite the promises of so much more, had come in Italy, home of the Catholic Church, and Germany, the country where the Pope happened to be on pilgrimage. The crowds outside St. Peter’s were proof that killing one man would not break a world’s faith. They had flocked to the square to show their love, and to show the terrorists their faith was not broken.

All of which meant something else was coming.

Something that would shake the very foundations of their unwavering faith.

Something that would make them all ask the same question their Messiah had: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

And Abandonato was the key.

That was the truth.

It had to be.

And he couldn’t find the damned man anywhere.

Abandonato didn’t want to die.

He didn’t want to be a martyr to the truth

At the outset he had believed fervently enough that he not only wanted to do it, he had volunteered to be the one to go out into the square and burn. But that had changed. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe anymore. It wasn’t that he didn’t question. Solomon had found him and bound him to his cause with the truth of the testimony. He had been the first to translate it. No one else knew what they had. The Testimony of Menahem ben Jair, grandson of Judas Iscariot, founder of the Sicarii assassins, the world’s first fundamental terrorists. It was as close as anyone would ever get to a firsthand account of what happened in Gethsemane.

The Gospel of Matthew, written in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, had to have been written after the fall of Jerusalem in AD70, possibly as late as AD100, and Mark, believed to be the oldest of the Gospels, also references the sacking of the Temple of Jerusalem, marking it as at least AD70; whereas Menahem’s testimony of would have been written prior to the mass suicide of the Sicarii in AD73 and couldn’t be any older. The Sicarii were at their height during the Jewish War, from the sacking of the Temple in AD70 to their suicide at Masada. That testimony was almost certainly Document Zero, the first account of the death of Judas. Unlike the Gospels, it showed a tragic hero, a man making the ultimate sacrifice. Of course the Gospels existed for a very different reason. They sought to deify the man Jesus, to prove him divine and elevate him above all others.

The Christ in ben Jair’s testimony was far from divine. He was a man with all the flaws of a man. Ben Jair didn’t claim that Judas was God’s son, far from it. The Judas Iscariot in his story was another very normal man. The testimony spoke of love and friendship and of sacrifice. And it was Judas, ben Jair’s grandfather, who had made the sacrifice, knowing what it would do to his family, but not really understanding how it would be warped and twisted through time. How could he have? How could ben Jair, really? They were living in that time. Reading it now, interpreting it, it was impossible not to read the document through the filter of our understanding, to apply our modern sensibilities to the reading.

The original Gospels didn’t want any of that story. And not just because of its contradiction, but fundamentally to suggest Iscariot’s death was murder over suicide would throw so much else into doubt. Judas would no longer be damned to eternity but elevated, and what of Matthew who had held the rope? Or Mark, Luke and the others who had cast the stones? What of their mortal souls if they went from enlightened beings carrying the teachings of Jesus Christ to the world and became murderers? What, then, was the truth of their ministry?

It undermined everything he had been taught to believe.

Solomon’s words had been sympathetic. He had asked again and again what was the Messiah’s destiny? Again and again, talkig about the line of David and the reconstruction of Israel. It wasn’t a message of war. It was all about peace. About a place in the world for people who had suffered for two and a half thousand years. And when he talked, he laid so much of that hardship at the door of Rome.

It was the Romans who had occupied his country for years, the Romans, who, following the bar Kokhba revolt, had killed more than half a million Jews, razed fifty fortified towns and nine hundred and eighty-five villages. It was slaughter, and all because Hadrian sought to root out Judaism; more atrocities in the name of religion. Hadrian prohibited the Torah, outlawed the Hebrew calendar, systematically hunted and killed Judaic scholars. And still he wasn’t content. Hadrian sought to purge the name Judaea from public consciousness. His first step was to burn it off the map, naming the ancient country Syria Palaestina after the Philistines, the ancient enemy of the Jews. And since that time it had been known as Palestine, not Judaea, not Canaan, or Iudaea. It was the Romans who had created Palestine and took the holy city of Jerusalem away from them. Hadrian renamed it Aelia Capitolina and forbade Jews from entering it.

This was not a proud history.

How could he not be sympathetic to the horrors perpetrated against these people in their homeland? How could he not feel a historian’s distant, diluted guilt? He would have to be a monster not to. In his head he heard the mocking cries and laughter of the Herodians and the Roman legionnaires calling Jesus King of the Jews.

It was a long time ago, he told himself, trying to make it less vile by adding the filter of time. It was difficult when Rome itself was still full of reminders of Hadrian’s rule, the Pantheon, even his mausoleum, Castel Sant’Angelo. His touch was everywhere in modern Rome.

Abandonato was a scholar.

He had dedicated his life to discovering the truth.

And then it had all started happening and the truth had stopped feeling so important. People started suffering. And it became real. It was different when it was academic, when it was conjecture, a puzzle, something to occupy his brain.

All of Solomon’s talk of a messiah coalesced into murder on a grand and sickening scale.

He hadn’t agreed to that. He hadn’t sought to be a party to it.

And now all he could do was think, and all he could think was that soe truths were better left hidden.

That was what he was supposed to do now. Remain hidden.

When Nick Simmonds had given him the small plastic sheath and bade him hide it amongst the coals in the fire grate of the Sistine Chapel two weeks ago he hadn’t known what he was really being asked to do.

Now he did.

Now he understood.

He knew what he had to do, even if it meant surrendering his own life. It was a sacrifice he would have to make. He couldn’t live, knowing more deaths were on his hands. He wasn’t a murderer any more than the Apostles were. They had been saving their friends immortal soul. That was the only way the testimony of ben Jair made sense. They were angry, hurt, but they knew he could not live with his betrayal, and suicide would forever bar him from the kingdom of heaven. So they had saved him. Or so Abandonato believed.

But did Gianni Abandonato have it in him to save anyone?

He was a scholar. His world was paper. Words. Stories.

To step outside of that world would damn him as a traitor, just as Judas himself had made the sacrifice that cast him forever as traitor. Abandonato had hidden that small plastic sheath in the fire pit, beneath the coals so no one would disturb it until they lit the coals. He hadn’t known what was inside the sheath until the stories started to emerge from Berlin. Poison gas on the subway. He knew then what it was that he had hidden beneath the coals. And when the fire was lit to say the new Vicar of Christ had been chosen he would be responsible for the murder of the entire College.

He had been used.

He was a fool.

But stupidity was no excuse.

Abandonato knew himself.

He wouldn’t be able to bear life if that fire was lit while the plastic sheath was still hidden inside it.

He was living-if it could be called living-in what had been Nick Simmonds’ apartment down by the old ring of the Circus Maximus. That had always been the plan. It was a truth his masters had learned from years of fighting. The police didn’t return to a place of interest once they had discounted it as abandoned. Simmonds’ apartment offered him sanctuary. He had stocked up on bottled water and lived frugally without light or sound. He didn’t want to reveal himself. It was ironic that he was hiding in the shadow of what had once been another Roman Emperor’s playground. More than ironic, it was poetic, the scholar thought: of all the places in Rome, Circus Maximus was used to make decisions of life and death.

He knew what he had to do.

He couldn’t stay hidden.

He had to get a message to the Cardinal Dean. They couldn’t light the fire.

Noah Larkin begged Neri to get him inside. He had to get inside the Vatican. That was all there was to it.

He was useless out here.

Nothing was going to happen in the square. That had been obvious from the start. It was always going to be inside the walls of the Holy See.

How did you break a man’s faith?

You did something spectacular, that’s how. You did something even God would take notice of.

“For all His omnipotence, what one place is God watching now?” Noah said, trying to reason with the man. “And even if God isn’t, everyone else is?”

Neri looked at him. The grizzled Italian didn’t like the way the conversation was going. “I don’t know, you tell me.”

He pointed right across the square from their table in the overpriced coffee shop at Maderno’s facade. “The Vatican. Just like everyone else, God’s looking at the chimney of the Sistine Chapel waiting for the whitoke to say His new best friend has been chosen.”

“The Vatican is a fortress, my friend. There is no safer place on earth. No one is getting in, no one is getting out.”

“That’s called hubris, you know that? Forget the whole ‘they aren’t soldiers, they’re following a divine calling’ nonsense of the Swiss Guard. They’re men! They aren’t mythological heroes. They’re fallible. End of discussion. One thing we’ve seen is, these guys we’re up against are clever. They’re patient, and they have pulled off the ‘impossible’ more than once in the last few days. They had already put the plan in motion to poison the water long before the first victim was found. So the Vatican’s a fortress? So what? We don’t know if they caught the real assassin, do we? We don’t know if Abandonato’s being sheltered by them. There’s a snake in the garden, my friend-a bloody big one with poisonous fangs, just waiting to take a chunk out of some holy ass.”

“I hear what you are saying, but the conclave is sealed. No one can get in or out once it has begun. The doors were sealed at the end of the nine days of mourning. They will not be opened again until the bell rings and white smoke billows from the chimney. There’s no way in and no way out. The chapel’s even swept for bugs. This isn’t the Middle Ages. The security is state of the art.”

“This only reinforces my argument, Neri. There couldn’t be a more shocking target, could there? Everyone thinks it is impenetrable. So what happens if it is penetrated? What happens in the worst case scenario? Can you imagine? Think like the other side for a minute. Does the difficulty outweigh the reward? If it does, it’s got to be worth it, hasn’t it? Hitting the Sistine Chapel during the election of the new Pope would send shockwaves around the world. You want to cause fear? This is how you cause fear! You want to break people’s faith? This is how you do it! ‘How could God let it happen?’ You can hear all the questions can’t you? You can see them in the square with their rosaries out, wailing and beseeching the heavens. With every Cardinal gone, hundreds of the most holy, the most faithful, wiped out.

“Let’s extend the thought: What if it was never about the Pope as a person? What if it was always about the Pope as an office?”

Dominico Neri looked at Noah, hard. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we are way passed the point where I wished I’d never met you.”

“You already said that. You know it makes sense.”

“Unfortunately, it does. Not a good kind of sense, but sense.”

“You have to get me inside that place.”

“I can’t. No one goes in or out during conclave.”

“I don’t give a crap about the rules, Neri. All I want to do is save lives. They can slap my hands about breaking the rules when they’re all safe. Okay, I don’t know the process. Tell me what’s happening in there right now. Talk me through it. I need to get a handle on how Abandonato’s going to do it.”

Neri took his cigarette tin from his pocket and took his time fixing a smoke. He lit it and breathed deeply before he answered. “The College of the Cardinals is meeting inside the Sistine Chapel. It is one of the most isolated parts of the entire Vatican, one of the hardest to get to. And you can’t get to it from the outside. You have to be inside the Holy See. Like I said, it is a fortress. The Cardinals will choose one of their number best suited to lead the Church into the future, and until they make their decision, the doors will stay locked.”

“Right, that’s pretty much what I thought,” Noah said, following the thought to its natural conclusion. “So every Cardinal in the world is in that one room, yes? The holiest of the holy men all in the same place?”

The Roman sucked on his thin cigarette. “Not quite. The eldest, the cardinals over 80, lose their right to participate in conclave. Around 120 of the 186 Cardinals will be inside the chapel.”

“Okay, so let’s rephrase it, assuming the worst: the only ones left will either have Alzheimer's or one foot and a couple of toes in the grave. That’s just about as bad.”

“I don’t like the way your mind works.”

“Try living with it every day,” Noah said. “You have to get me in there. You have to. Whatever it takes. If you have to beg your man, beg.”

“He isn’t my man, as you put it. There’s no love between the Corpo della Gendarmeria and the Carabinieri. It’s jurisdictional. It’s like cats pissing on their territory. They don’t want us in there. We’ve got no right to be there. And liaising to make it happen? It’s a nightmare.”

“You’ve got a badge, you’ve got a gun, get me in there.”

“It really isn’t that simple. This is Rome, my friend, home of bureaucracy. Take your worst nightmare, multiply it a thousandfold and you’ve got a jurisdictional fiasco. Throw in God’s faithful not wanting to admit crimes could actually happen on their patch and you’ve got the definition of a Vatican jurisdictional fiasco. It’s always that one step beyond the usual pain in the ass. What can I say? Once you walk across that line into Vatican City, all logic goes out the window.”

“I hear that’s what happens when God gets involved,” Noah said. “But there’s a time for paperwork, Neri, and there’s a time for a swift kick in the ass. We’re well past filling in requisitions. I’ll let you in on a little secret: sometimes it is a lot easier to beg forgiveness that it was to ask permission to do it in the first place.”

Neri looked at him with that world-weary face that seemed to say, Are you serious? And when he realized he was, he went very quiet.

Noah could almost read his mind: You get to go home tomorrow, I don’t. All the crap we cause today is mine to swim in for the rest of my natural life. That’s what Noah would have been thinking if he was in his place.

Gianni Abandonato was desperate. He almost ran every third step he was hurrying so quickly. Traffic was not in his favor. There wasn’t a cab to be found on the streets. He ended up running the entire length of Via Del Circo Massimo with his cassock lifted to his knees. There was nothing gracious or glorious about his race. He stared straight ahead, sweat streaming down his face as he ran. His breathing was out of control. He wasn’t a fit man. He lived in the stacks. His exercise was lifting a book down, turning a page. By the time he hit the Ponte Palatino he was on his knees, gasping and panting and struggling to push himself back to his feet and keep running.

Fear drove him.

He could have phoned the Corpo della Gendarmeria offices, but what was he going to say? I have poisoned the entire College of Cardinals? You have to stop the conclave? You have to get them out of the chapel? They wouldn’t believe him, and he wouldn’t have been able to convince them over the phone. He needed to be there. He needed them to see his face. Then they would unerstand.

But they still wouldn’t interrupt the conclave.

He was on a fool’s mission.

He knew that, but knowing it didn’t stop him from trying.

He had to. If not to save them, to save himself.

“Confiteor Deo omnipotenti et vobis,” he mumbled, the prayer comfortable on his lips. “Fratres, quia peccavi nimis, cogitatione, verbo, opere, et omissione: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Ideo precor beatam Mariam semper Virginem, omnes Angelos et Sanctos, et vos, fratres, orare pro me ad Dominum Deum nostrum.”I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do; and ask blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.

No confession would ever be enough if he couldn’t stop them lighting the fire.

He couldn’t think. Keeping his legs moving, staying on his feet, took all of his strength. By the time he reached Della Farnesina he was spent. Every new step came on trembling legs. His muscles burned. His lungs were on fire. He reached out to steady himself, stumbling against the walls of the houses set back off the street, and pushed himself on. And he was still so far from Bernini’s piazza. He regretted running, but he couldn’t stop. He knew what he must have looked like to passersby. He wasn’t a hero running to save the day.

He stumbled on.

Dominico Neri walked up to the Swiss Guard’s station and held out the badge that identified his as Carabinieri as though it would mysteriously lift the barrier for him. It didn’t. The guard barely looked at it and shrugged as though to say, So what? That doesn’t impress me.

There were four guards at the tation.

None of them seemed particularly enamored with the combination of hot weather and their heavy uniforms.

It wasn’t one of the main entrances. There was no point trying to get anywhere near the front of St. Peter’s with the crowd. It would be a fight they wouldn’t win. Neri wasn’t big on fights he couldn’t win. He led Noah to a side entrance. There was a sentry box, stern-faced boy-guards and a road beyond the barrier that opened up into a forecourt and beyond that splintered into a dozen paths between the cramped buildings.

“Get me the Inspector General,” Neri demanded, staring straight at the youngest guard. It was simple bully-boy tactics and he knew it. But Noah was right; there was plenty of time to apologize later. Right now it was enough that the young guard snapped to attention.

“Your identification,” one of the guards beside him demanded, a little older, a little less willing to be intimidated. He didn’t just want a little flash of the badge, he held out his hand. Neri handed over his ID. The guard looked pointedly at Noah.

“I don’t have any,” he said. “I’m still going inside though, so why don’t you just open up the barrier and save us all a lot of wasted time and energy.”

His almost flippant attitude didn’t amuse the soldier.

The guard who had taken Neri’s ID disappeared into the guardhouse. No doubt he was going to call the Carabinieri offices to confirm he was who he said he was, then call his superiors and ask for a reason to turn them away. A few minutes later he emerged with a wireless phone in his hand and an expression on his face that said, You lose. He handed the phone across to Neri and moved to block his way.

They weren’t getting in, Neri knew, even as he raised the phone to his ear.

Before he could begin to argue their case with the policeman on the other end of the line, Noah ducked under the barrier and sprinted off across the forecourt.

One of the guards drew his pistol and started to aim it at Noah’s back as though he intended to shoot him dead in his tracks.

“Don’t you dare, soldier!” Neri barked, slapping the man’s arm aside. “That man’s with the British Secret Service!” He had no idea what effect his words would have.

What he didn’t expect was for the youngest soldier to look at him and say, “Like James Bond 007 Licensed to Kill?” all in one rushed breath, as he took off after Noah Larkin as though someone had just lit a fire under his ass.

For a moment Neri thought he was trying to stop him, and then he realized the young soldier intended to help any way he could. He shook his head. Sometimes there was no accounting for the stupidity of youth.

Noah didn’t know where he was going.

He just ran.

The place was a warren of little paths, overhung alleys and twisting side streets that wove a labyrinthine course through the chapels and apartments in this oddest of cities. He needed to get inside, which meant finding a door. As far as he was concerned any door would do. He knew it wasn’t true, but he didn’t know what else to do.

He tried to see over the rooftops to get a fix on the chimney above the Sistine Chapel and orientate himself. It was pointless.

He heard the heavy slap of running feet behind him and glanced over his shoulder. The young guard from the barrier was running with his Beretta held out in front of him as though it might bite. For a moment Noah thought he was going to try and stop him, and he started to turn back, figuring the soldier’s training wouldn’t be enough to stay his hand if it came down to shooting him in the back or letting him get away. Then the young soldier surprised him and shouted in terrible fractured English, “I help you, James Bond!”

It took Noah a moment to realize what the hell he meant, and that he wasn’t about to get himself shot in the back. “The Sistine Chapel? Where is it?”

“I help you, James Bond!” the guard repeated. “Follow me!”

He didn’t exactly have a lot of choice. He could have r around like a blind mouse in the maze for a month of Sundays without getting any closer to the chapel if he was left to his own devices.

Abandonato closed his eyes. His entire face was flushed, his hair was plastered down across his scalp. He was shaking. He was walking awkwardly, favoring his right side because a stitch burned there. He was panting.

The guard looked at him as he approached. He felt sure the guard was going to stop him, to challenge him to prove his right to be there. He had every right, of course, his apartment was beyond the wall. This was where he lived. There were only one hundred and ten guards sworn in the service of the Holy See. He knew them all by sight. Likewise they knew him by sight. If they were looking for him, now was when he would find out. They didn’t stop him. The guard nodded slightly, then stepped back, allowing Abandonato through. It was ludicrously simple. Even after the assassination, they trusted the outfit. It was a costume, clothes, the familiarity of his face. He wanted to scream in the man’s face. It didn’t make him good! He might have had the olive-white complexion of the Mediterranean, but he was every bit as vile a terrorist as any Middle Eastern suicide bomber. The only difference was he was too much of a coward. His “bomb” was already in place, just waiting for the flame that would shrivel the plastic and release the toxic gas.

He shuffled along quickly, heading for the Sistine Chapel.

He didn’t know how he was going to stop the conclave.

He hadn’t thought that far ahead.

The washed-out colors of the murals and the corridors seemed so much more alive to Abandonato. It was almost as though knowing it was all going to end heightened his senses and made everything so much brighter and more vivid. He saw the paintings of Michelangelo’s apprentices and Bernini’s journeymen as though looking at them through new eyes. Every brush stroke was rendered exquisitely. He wanted to linger, to run his fingers over the colors as though he might soak up their brilliance and absorb it into his skin. But that was the Devil talking, trying to delay him while his evil work was done.

He cursed himself and hurried on, following the path his feet knew so well, praying the Lord still believed in him. Give me the strength, he thought, coming around the final corner.

He had made it. A surge of relief broke over him. He thought he was going to collapse under it. He stumbled into the antechamber. He was consumed by a single thought: get inside the chapel before they lit the coals.

Six guards stood at the door of the Pope Sixtus’ chapel, the same six who had stood on the stage with Peter the Roman in Germany, the inner ring, the six most loyal. Five stared eyes front. The sixth looked at Abandonato as he buckled. For a moment he thought he was going collapse and go sprawling across the floor. He didn’t. The only collapse was internal, hope caving in to despair. It is always the most loyal, Abandonato thought, locking eyes with the man whose silver blade had slain the Holy Father. That had always been the Sicarii way.

He was so close.

One door away.

But that door wasn’t merely chained and guarded, it was chained and guarded by Peter’s murderer, the last Sicarii assassin. The assassin had one final task: to see that the conclave’s seal would not be broken until the new Vicar of Christ had been chosen-by which time the College of Cardinal’s would be dead, murdered not by the assassin, but by Abandonato’s hand.

He knew it was useless.

He knew he had failed.

Still he had to try.

“I have to speak with the Cardinal Dean,” he demanded, breathless. There was no conviction behind his words, as though he expected to be denied. He barely had the air in his lungs to fuel the words. He was a broken man.

“The conclave is sealed, Monsignor,” the assassin said. “It cannot be broken. That is the law of the conclave. Whatever your message, it must wait.”

“No,” Abandonato pleaded. “It cannot. I must speak with the Cardinal Dean.” He stepped forward, reaching out to grab the guard’s uniform and shake him to make him understand-but of course he understood. He had engineered it. The man was Solomon’s left hand. Abandonato hesitated at the thought of “most loyal.” It seemed foul when he applied it to the murderer’s cause. The priest didn’t even know what his real name was. He wasn’t Swiss; his entire identity was a lie, though he did bare a passing resemblance to the young man whose life he had stolen. When the fire was lit he would leave the Holy See and return to his master, his job here done. Abandonato stopped himself from clutching the man’s double His hand just hung there between them, reaching out, while the guard stared at him. Abandonato could see the black hatred smoldering in his eyes.

“Control yourself, Monsignor. Conclave will not be broken.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You have to open the doors. You have to let me in. Please,” Abandonato begged. He didn’t know what else to say. All the way here he had thought about nothing more than reaching the doors, as though God would see them break open before him, like the waves of the Red Sea for Moses. He hadn’t expected the assassin to bar his way. He had thought he would simply throw himself on their mercy. He was so close. One door was all that stood between him and redemption. He couldn’t bear it. He reached out for the chains, but two of the guards beside him closed ranks and took hold of his arms, restraining him physically. They weren’t gentle. “There is a traitor,” he said, barely able to say the words. “The conclave is breached…”

“Impossible,” the assassin said, reasonably. His black eyes burned into Abandonato. “We have been on duty since the doors were sealed. No one has entered. No one has left. That is the law of conclave. You are mistaken. There is no traitor here. If you insist on trying to force your way in to the chapel, we will have no choice but to think you are the one with treachery in your heart, and we would have to stop you. I take no pleasure in this, Monsignor, but the law is the law.”

Abandonato felt every ounce of strength drain out of him. “Have mercy,” he pleaded. But there was no mercy here, and no redemption. His sins would find him out.

The assassin stepped in close, his lips no more than a few inches away from Abandonato’s ear and said, “Return to your chambers, Monsignor. Let God’s will be done. I will come to look in on you when my duty is done. I will see you are taken care of. I understand your grief and pain, but you must abide by the will of Our Father, just as we all must.”

Abandonato slumped.

“Go with God, Monsignor,” the assassin said, and from his tone Abandonato knew he was mocking him.

He wanted to scream, but all he could do was turn his back. He wasn’t a fighter. He didn’t have a gun and even if he had, he would not have been able to wield it. Force went against everything he believed in. But there was so little left for him to believe. He wanted to believe he had been seduced, like Eve, tempted into the path of evil. He had chosen his path. He had set his foot on it. It was his choice. There was a serpent, but the choice was his. The Lord had given him free will and he used it to betray Him.

There was nothing Abandonato could do to force them to break the seal and pull back the chains. This was his punishment. He had brought death into the House of the Lord, and death would not be appeased by begging, prayers or guilt. Its hunger was rapacious. It would only be sated by the inevitable. More than one hundred souls would find the glory of God ahead of their time. That is my doing, he told himself.

The two guards who held his arms escorted him to the end of the passageway, then crossed their halberds across the entry, barring any possible return.

He looked at them each in turn. “You have to break the conclave,” he pleaded. “They can’t be allowed to vote. They will all die.” He knew he sounded like a crazed man. He was desperate. That stripped him of his reason.

Their gazes didn’t waver. It was as though he had already become a ghost.

Finally he had no choice but to walk away. There was no second way into the chamber. The assassin was right when he said it was a fortress. If he couldn’t get past them, there was no way he could stop the vote. And if he couldn’t stop the vote, he couldn’t stop the fire.

He was damned.

He had failed the living.

He would inevitably fail the dead.

Names had power. He was named true. Gianni Abandonato, Gianni the Forsaken.

There would be no place at the Lord’s side for him. Not with their blood still fresh on his hands. How apt that he had fallen for the silver tongue of Solomon and the so-called truth of Judas. He laughed bitterly. The sound chased him through the Holy See.

He knew then how Iscariot must have felt, trapped into the only possible course of action left to him at the end.

Abandonato shuffled through the corridors, lost in grief, his head down, hands clutched together in prayer, but those prayers failed to reach his lips. He resolved to kill himself, not that his one death would sate the beast he had loosed within the Holy See.

“Fater, forgive me,” he said, doubting that even the Almighty’s capacity for forgiveness could be so vast as to accommodate his crime.

And then someone shouted his name.

He looked up.

Noah couldn’t believe his eyes.

It took him a moment and a double-take to recognize that the man shuffling quickly towards them down the narrow passage was Gianni Abandonato. He had walked out of one of the smaller passageways that fed into this one. Abandonato had his head down, his fingers laced in front of him as though in prayer, but when Noah called out his name his head snapped up and he stopped dead in his tracks. There was no mistaking the man.

“Abandonato!” His voice swelled to fill the hand-painted chamber. The Monsignor looked like a startled rabbit, trapped, and he backed up a step. Noah saw the sweat, the nervous twitches, the almost robotic walk-they were all classic signs of a suicide bomber. He had a split second to think. His hands were hidden in his cassock. They could be holding a detonator; they could be empty. He didn’t have the luxury of being able to make a mistake.

Abandonato’s robes were bulky enough to hide a vest under. A bomb didn’t have to be a complex thing. If he got into the chapel, even the least sophisticated ball bearings and nails sewn into a stockade of dynamite would take out everyone in the blast radius. And it would be messy. There was no way for Noah to tell whether the priest was wired to blow. He was walking unevenly. He seemed to be favoring one side, his right over his left. That could mean he was packing something heavy, something that changed his walk. He had a split second to weigh it all up.

“On your knees! Now!” he yelled. When Abandonato didn’t go down, he didn’t yell again. He couldn’t risk what would happen if he insisted on taking the martyr’s way out.

Abandonato seemed trapped in indecision for a moment, then turned and bolted.

That one desperate action told Noah all he needed to know.

He drew and fired in a single smooth motion.

Beside him, the man who wanted to be best friends with James Bond put three shots into the Monsignor as his body jerked and jived and fell. He put another one in him as he hit the floor. Abandonato twitched once, a violent spasm, then lay utterly still.

Noah approached the body cautiously, his gun aimed at the man. Anything, the slightest movement, and he would put another bullet into him. Noah felt the adrenalin flood his system. That was always the way, the sudden kick, too late to do any good, the rush of the chemical in his blood. He felt good. He’d done his job. He’d succeeded where Konstantin had failed. He’d saved the Cardinals. He knew then and there he was going to gloat. Just once. Just to see the Russian’s face. He smiled to himself, imagining the look his wisecrack would earn him. He had the entire journey from Rome back to Nonesuch to come up with a killer line.

He stood over Abandonato and looked down at him. The priest wasn’t quite gone. He held on for dear life. Noah crouched down beside him, pulling his hands out from the folds of his cassock. There was no detonator. The holy man’s last breaths made a curious whistling noise as they leaked between his teeth.

Abandonato was trying to say something.

“No last rites, Father,” Noah said, kneeling down beside him. “It’s too late for that. You’re going to hell.”

“Please,” Abandonato managed. It was barely a breath. Noah leaned in closer until he could feel the dying breath on his cheek. Words came out with it like ghosts. “Fire.”

“That’s right, pal. That’s where you’re going. You’re going to burn in hellfire.”

Abandonato didn’t hear him.

He was already dead.

Noah checked for a pulse at his throat. Barring resurrection, Abandonato wasn’t getting up again.

He didn’t close his eyes.

He patted the dead man down. He wasn’t wearing a bomb belt or anything else. He checked his pockets. There was no detonator. If he a suicide bomber, he wasn’t a particularly good one. He’d only managed fifty percent of the job.

Noah pushed himself back up to his feet.

“You better get someone to clean this mess up,” he told the young soldier beside him.

He had done it.

Had he been a religious man, he would have given thanks to God.

He wasn’t.

Instead he took the cell phone from his pocket and dialed home. “It’s over,” he told Lethe. “The priest’s dead. I got to him before he could finish it.”

“Then I’d say today’s a good day, wouldn’t you?” Lethe said.

“One of the better ones,” he agreed. “Sometimes it’s nice to be on the side of the angels.”

“Amen to that, brother man, time to come on home.”

Noah hung up the phone.

“Humor me,” he said to the soldier. “I want to go check out the chapel, make sure everything is okay. You stay here. If that guy moves, shoot him again.”

The young guard nodded earnestly.

Noah followed the passageway all the way to the doors of the Sistine Chapel. There were only five guards standing sentry. One of the guards came toward him. He recognized the man vaguely, but horribly, he had already begun to think that one joker looked pretty much the same as the other.

He saw the ceremonial chain looped through the silver door handles. From where he was he couldn’t see whether the seal had been broken.

“Has anyone entered the chapel since the conclave began?” Noah asked.

“No one is permitted to break the conclave, sir,” the guard said, his English slightly accented. The man’s smile was just as slight.

“I know. But just because no one is allowed to go in doesn’t mean no one has gone in. I mean, I’m not allowed to be here, and here I am,” Noah said.

“The seal has not been broken, sir.”

It wasn’t until he was on the steps of St. Peter’s and walking down in the piazza that it hit him: the priest was coming the wrong way. He wasn’t going to the chapel at all. He couldn’t have been. He had to have been coming back from it. Otherwise Noah would have come up behind him. There was only one way in and one way out of the Sistine Chapel.

He had checked Abandonato’s corpse. He had been clean. No bomb. No detonator. No gun. Nothing.

It didn’t make sense.

The guard had sworn no one had been inside the chapel after it had been sealed. Neri had assured him about all of the security measures the Vatican Police took before the Cardinals were locked away, sweeping for bugs and other devices. The place was a fortress. People had been telling him that all day. There was only one way in and one way out, and that was through the guards. The place couldn’t have been much safer if it was lined with lead and buried sixty feet under.

He twisted around to look back at the Basilica.

Black smoke billowed out of the chimney.

All around him disappointment murmured through the faithful.

There wouldn’t be a new Pope today.

And Noah relaxed because the smoke meant they were safe.

Behind him news crews began rorting the black smoke to the waiting world. The message was clear. The Cardinals had failed to reach agreement. There would be another election in three days.

Until then the faithful would be without a spiritual leader.

He walked away through the crowds.

All he wanted to do now was go home. He didn’t feel like being alone. He never felt like being alone. He didn’t like the dark hours. He didn’t like the silence. That was the dark country where his ghosts lived. That was why he drank. That was why he paid women to share his bed. He would face his dead when he joined them down in the fiery pits of hell. Until then he wanted to hear breathing beside him, as if the shallow rise and fall of someone else’s chest could stop the dead from finding him.

Blessed is the silence.

Noah was with Neri in the same cafe, drinking the same thick, strong coffees when the TV feed switched from the news anchor to one of the many on-the-spot reporters covering the conclave. Their conversation veered from Juventus to supermodels and fast cars. It was the easy chat of two men whose friendship had been forged in hell and had come out on the other side of the pit together. He checked his watch. He had four hours until Sir Charles’ G5 would be ready for takeoff, which meant plenty of time to look at the stunning beauty of the city or the stunning beauties of the city as they walked by. He opted for the less energetic option. There really was something about the twenty-something Roman women he watched laughing and joking and utterly self-absorbed as only twenty-somethings can be. It was as if the world around them didn’t exist. He appreciated the view. “Very easy on the eye,” he said to Neri.

“This is Rome, my friend,” Dominico Neri agreed. “Even the buildings have the good grace to look hot.”

Noah grinned. “I need to come back one day when there isn’t a crisis, take some time to appreciate the natural beauty of the city on the seven hills.”

“There is a couch with your name on it.”

There was the flicker of movement on the screen over Neri’s shoulder. It caught Noah’s eye. The face on the screen held it. xistim Caspi. Solomon. He was holding an RTL microphone and talking.

“Turn it up!” Noah shouted, dragging his chair back from the table and standing up.

Neri turned around trying to see what Noah was shouting about.

“Carabinieri! Turn the damned TV up!” Noah yelled at the barista behind the counter. She didn’t seem to know what to do. “Just give me the bloody remote!”

Noah dodged between the tables to stand beneath the television set. He could barely hear Solomon’s speech. He would hear it again and again over the coming days, but at that moment it was barely a whisper until the barista found the volume.

Neri came up beside him.

“You don’t know my name,” Solomon said to him through the TV speaker, “but you will. It will be on your lips every day now for the rest of your lives. I will tell you this, your church is built on lies and death. Its very foundation is not the rock of Peter; it is the glorification of a false messiah. Today I bring the death back to the door of Rome. For five hundred years Rome tortured my people. For five centuries and more it turned them into slaves. It drove them out of their own homeland. It tried to purge the name of them and their home from the earth, so deep and unreasoning was its hatred. Today that changes. It was my blade that killed Peter Romanus. That blade forged from the silver pieces of Judas Iscariot. The coins that bought the death of your Messiah spend just as well today. They have bought another death-this time the Roman Pontiff-and with his death the world is ready for the new Messiah.” He stared out through the screen. His beautiful face was made for Hollywood.

Behind him the picture broke into a grainy image from a pinhole spy camera hidden within the Sistine Chapel.

It took Noah a moment to realize what he was seeing.

The Cardinals were dead.

Some had died on their knees in prayer, staring down into the pits of hell itself. Others on their backs, staring blindly up at the beauty of Michelangelo’s ceiling, out of reach like heaven itself.

Solomon’s face came back onto the screen.

“I am Solomon. Remember my name.”

Then he was gone, and the camera was focused on Maderno's facade. A moment later the live feed broke and the grainy image of the dead in the chapel returned to fill the television screen.

Noah pushed out through the glass doors of the cafe into the rising heat of the afternoon. There were thousands of people still packed into the square. He could see the RTL mobile broadcast trailer. He started pushing through the people to get to it.

But by the time he reached it Solomon was long gone.

Noah slammed his fist off the side of the trailer.

He had been there.

He had stood right in the middle of them and as good as said your God is dead.

He opened the trailer door and climbed up and inside.

The female anchor lay dead and bloody in one of the chairs, her cameraman lifeless on the floor at her feet. The screens all showed the grainy live feed from inside the chapel itself. He had no idea how to kill the transmission, so he went down the banks of switches and dials, tripping them all until the picture died.

Neri came into the trailer behind him.

He looked like a living dead man. He was talking into his cell phone in rapid Italian, shaking his head and gesticulating.

Noah wasn’t listening to him.

He had found the gift Solomon had left for him.

The woman clutched a battered leather drawstring purse in her hands. Noah pried it from her lifeless fingers and emptied it out. Thirty pieces of silver spilled out across the bank of displays. There was a note. He unfolded it. The message was written in blood.

All debts paid in full.

“Not even close,” Noah said.

The truth of just how badly he had failed was only beginning to sink in.

Beside him, Dominico Neri made the sign of the cross.