The Templar Salvation

Chapter 10

Tucked away in the Palace of the Tribunal behind St Peter’s Cathedral, the Central Office of the Vatican Gendarmeria was in meltdown. Urgent footfalls were stampeding up and down the medieval building’s cavernous hallways, phones were ringing all over the place, questions and updates were being shouted out across rooms and through doorways, the whole discordant chaos drilling into Tess Chaykin’s ears and echoing painfully inside her skull.

Reilly and some carabinieri had brought her here, away from the rigged car, and settled her on a couch in a waiting room. A couple of paramedics had been drafted in to check her over. She was dehydrated, weak from hunger—but otherwise unharmed. They’d given her some rehydrating drinks, some Gatorade, and someone was dispatched to rustle up some clean clothes and some food for her. The whole thing had gone by in a blur, except for one question that was firmly anchored in her mind:

Rome?

How the hell did I get to Rome?

She glanced up at Reilly, who was talking to the paramedics. He must have sensed her look, as he turned and smiled at her. She watched him thank the paramedics, then he joined her.

“How are you feeling?”

“Much better now that I’m not in that damn coffin.” She had a million questions for him, but still felt groggy and was having trouble ordering her thoughts.

“I’ll get you out of here as soon as I can. They’re going to find you a room and a bed.”

“Thanks.” Her voice was still weak, her throat felt scabrous, and her eyes still hadn’t lost their haunted veneer. “I need to get to a phone,” she told him. “I need to call Kim, and Mom.”

He handed her his BlackBerry. “You know the lock code.”

“Yeah,” she answered, a faint smile warming up her face.

A voice from the doorway cut in. “Reilly.”

Reilly turned.

Doug Tilden, the FBI legal attache in Rome, was standing there. A tall man with combed-back graying hair and sleek, frameless glasses, he looked like he was having his own meltdown. “We need you in here.”

Reilly acknowledged him with a slight nod, then turned back to Tess and cupped her cheek in one hand, softly. “I’ll be next door if you need anything.”

“Go. I’m fine just sitting here with my stash,” she said, holding up her bottles and his phone, her face clouded but still managing a pained smile.

He rose to his feet, but Tess caught his arm in her grip and stopped him. She pulled him back down, drawing his face right up to hers. “I’m sorry. I had no idea it would—”

Reilly cut her off with a slight shake of his head. “Don’t worry about it. Okay?”

She held his gaze, then pulled him closer and planted a soft kiss on his lips. “Thanks,” she whispered. “For finding me.”

He smiled, his eyes clearly telegraphing that the relief was mutual, then headed out with Tilden.

“THAT’S ONE HELL OF A shitstorm you’ve got us in,” Tilden told him as they made their way to the inspector general’s office. “Why didn’t you say anything beforehand? We could have helped.”

Tilden was a career federal agent, and as the Bureau’s legal attache in Rome, he was responsible for FBI operations in Italy as well as liaising with law enforcement organizations in southern Europe, the Middle East, and non-French-speaking Africa. He was undoubtedly used to dealing with crises, but this one had clearly blown out the fuses of his shitstorm-o-meter. His being around wasn’t making things any easier for Reilly, who had met him before, years earlier, when they’d both been on a joint task force working alongside the DEA. It had been a painful assignment that had ended in tragedy, just as today had. Innocent bystanders had died on both occasions, although back then, Reilly had pulled the fatal trigger himself. The shooting had never stopped haunting him, and it was something he would have preferred not to have Tilden’s presence dredge up, especially not today, of all days.

“You know how these things sometimes go down, Doug,” Reilly told him.

“Plus it was Tess, right?”

Reilly gave him a “what do you think” look.

Tilden nodded grudgingly. “Well, I’m just glad you told them you were here on personal business. Takes a bit of the sting off my ass.”

“It was my call all the way.”

Tilden slid him a grave sideways glance. “All right,” he grumbled. “Just do me a favor and don’t make things worse in there.”

“Do I need to get myself a lawyer?”

“Probably,” Tilden replied tersely. “Assuming they let you walk out of here alive.”

Judging from the looks that Delpiero and the two other men in the room shot him as he walked in, Reilly knew that wasn’t a given.

Delpiero, the Vatican’s head cop, rushed through an introduction of the two men to Reilly—one was from the State Police’s antiterrorist unit, the other from the country’s intelligence service—then opened out his hands in an incensed “what the hell?” gesture. “Barely an hour ago, I left you with Monsignor Bescondi and your professor and told you I was there for you if you needed anything. This is how you reward our generosity?”

Reilly didn’t have an easy answer for him. Instead, he asked, “The second bomb. Is it safe?”

“It’s been defused.”

Now for the harder one. “And the first bomb? How bad is it?”

Delpiero’s expression hardened. “Three dead. Over forty wounded, two of them critical. That’s what we know so far.”

Reilly scowled, processing the terrible news. He felt his veins petrify with anger and remorse. After a moment, he said, “There was a man in the trunk of the first car.”

Delpiero turned to one of his colleagues and rattled off a question in Italian. They had a brief and intense exchange that told Reilly his statement was news to them.

“How do you know this?” Delpiero asked.

“The guy who was with me told me.”

“The man in the trunk—do you know who he was?”

“Behrouz Sharafi,” Reilly informed him. “The real one.”

“So the man who was with you—”

“He was an impostor.” The thought welled up some bile in Reilly’s throat. He saw that Delpiero and the others were lost.

Delpiero’s tone rose with anger and confusion. “So you brought this—this terrorist here, to the Vatican, without even knowing who he really was?”

“It’s not that simple,” Reilly fired back, trying to keep his fury—at the bomber and, even more, at himself—in check. “I was told I had to get him into the archives or that woman sitting out there would be killed,” he said, thrusting an angry finger in the direction of the door. “That bastard, whoever he is—he played his role perfectly, and you can be damn sure that given the level of resources he seems to have at his disposal, he would have had no trouble flashing me a fake ID with Sharafi’s name on it had I asked for one.” He shook his head bitterly. “Look, he tricked me, all right? I never expected anything like this. I was just trying to save a friend’s life.”

“And in doing that, you got three people killed and dozens injured,” Delpiero countered.

The comment pierced Reilly’s chest, and any angry words he wanted to blurt out just shriveled up in his throat. People had died, others had been hurt, and he felt responsible. He’d been played by that son of a bitch, whoever he was—played and bested. Almost. Reilly tried to console himself with the thought that he could have easily ended up dead himself. If he’d given the bomber half a chance once they were out of the Vatican, there was little doubt in Reilly’s mind that the man would have killed him. Which would have meant that Tess would have probably died too. At least he’d managed to turn that part of it around. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about any book or about wrecking the pope’s wheels. He’d saved Tess’s life, which was what he’d set out to do. But not like this. That wasn’t part of the bargain. People had died, innocent people whom he had no right to draw into his drama, and nothing would ever make up for that.

Tilden read the torment on Reilly’s face and stepped in. “With all due respect, Ispettore. I think we need to hear all the facts before any of us say something we might regret.”

“I agree,” a voice chimed in from behind them.

Cardinal Brugnone had walked into the room. Monsignor Bescondi, the prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives, was with him, seemingly recovered from the injection Reilly had given him. They weren’t smiling.

Reilly found it hard to look them in the eye.

“We need to know all the facts about why this outrage was allowed to take place,” Brugnone grumbled. “Agent Reilly—why don’t you tell us what you should have told us when you first arrived here?”

Reilly felt the onset of a massive headache. “I’ll tell you what I know, but I don’t even know all the facts myself. We need to hear from Tess—Miss Chaykin, out there—to get the whole picture.”

“Why don’t we invite her in?” the cardinal suggested.

“I’m not sure she’s up to that just yet,” Reilly said.

The cardinal fixed him with a grave stare. “Why don’t we ask her about that?”