The Vatican Conspiracy: A completely gripping action thriller (A Marco Venetti Thriller Book 1)

by Hogenkamp, Peter

  His thoughts strayed to Elena, who had also been raised by her father without the benefit of a mother in her life. Marco had always presumed that she had derived much of her strength from being forced to do for herself so many of the things other children had done for them. Perhaps Sarah had benefited in a similar fashion.

  “My first job was to keep the rabbits out of the vegetable patch. My father used to pay me a dollar bounty for every rabbit I shot.”

  “The neighbors didn’t object?”

  She laughed quietly at this. “Neighbors? In the backwoods of Vermont? Our closest neighbors lived two miles down the road.”

  Marco tried to imagine a land so vast that the people next door lived out of rifle range; growing up in a suburb of Trieste, where one house was right on top of the next, he couldn’t.

  “How often do you get back to Vermont?”

  “There isn’t much for me there, so not often. But I did go a few years ago … just showed up one day.”

  She lapsed into silence at the recollection. Marco was curious as to what she had found, but he had enough difficult memories of going home to his own father’s house—it was always referred to in this way, as if his mother didn’t also live in it—to be patient.

  “This woman answered the door. She told me my father had gone to Alaska for the summer … asked her to keep an eye on the place until he got back.”

  “He went to Alaska for the whole summer?”

  She nodded. “My father … he’s a different breed.”

  Marco’s father was a different breed as well. When Marco had told him—shortly after he had been awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valor—that he was leaving the navy to enter the priesthood, a chasm had opened up between them that, despite many attempts, he had never been able to cross.

  “I think I’m going to turn in.”

  “Okay, I’m just going to watch TV for a while.”

  He lowered the volume and began to flick through the channels. After ten minutes of fruitless surfing, he gave up the effort and made ready for bed. She was still awake when he lay down, although her breathing was slow and deep, indicating Morpheus was not far away. His thoughts strayed back across time, slicing through the years like a scalpel, and settled on the first night he’d lain in bed with a woman.

  Sarah reminded him of Magdalena, or maybe she didn’t resemble her at all and his impish mind was trying to torture him. It had been in Rome, coincidentally; he had been a lieutenant in the navy, on leave from his salvage ship. It was a complex memory, crammed full of a variety of emotions—sheer joy, horrible guilt, and, of course, confusion—but one that came to mind often, almost always at night, when the dark and the quiet encouraged him to delve into the recesses of his brain.

  Sarah rolled over and pulled the sheet down. The light from outside streaked in through a crack in the cheap curtains and fell on her face, illuminating her dark skin with its soft glow. My God, he thought, how beautiful she was, even with her green eyes closed and no hint of her wide smile. He wondered how such a person had ended up as a sniper. It was hard to think of her like that, even with the barrel of her semi-automatic peeking out from under her pillow.

  Not that he was in any position to throw stones.

  As he drifted off to sleep, a succession of images floated through his mind’s eye: Mohammed’s disfigured face etched into the communion wafer; Tariq’s bulging eyes and lizard tongue protruding from the faces of the faithful kneeling to receive; and, the most disturbing of them all, the lifeless form of Pope John Paul III lying in the burned-out wreck of St. Peter’s Basilica.

  Twenty-Seven

  Pietro Ferraro got out of the van and surveyed his home for the near future. It was a typical Austrian farmhouse, with three stories built of darkly stained pine covered by a steeply angled roof. He had stayed in something similar a dozen times in his youth, in the hills above Innsbruck, where his mother’s distant cousins lived in alpine meadows dotted with brown cows.

  It was unimaginable that they’d rented it on such short notice in the height of summer—and in Festival season no less—but nothing was unimaginable for his father, who had proved time and again that money and the credible threat of violence could get him anything he wanted.

  He climbed the steps leading to the porch that wrapped around the second floor of the house and entered the main living space through a glass slider. The Corsican Guard was there, all ten of them sitting on the chairs and sofas that surrounded the massive stone hearth built into the opposite wall. They were a surly lot, but he was familiar with all of them, having worked with them prior to being incarcerated. He nodded to them; they nodded back as they sat there drinking small glasses of grappa and smoking foul-smelling Sicilian cigarettes. It was a diverse group by age and region—there were three Siracusans and a couple of Nisseni; the rest were Palermitani—but with a common thread: they were all killers.

  Pietro moved to stand next to one of the Palermitani, a short, stocky man with a thin veneer of black hair combed straight back over his squat head.

  “Luca.”

  The man grunted a hello and went back to sipping his grappa. One of the Nisseni, a man named Custanti, who was good with a switchblade, tried to raise the bottle of grappa to pour a glass for Pietro, but Luca held his hand down with a forearm the size of the average man’s thigh.

  “No grappa yet. Talk first.”

  “I didn’t know you were giving the orders now, Luca,” Pietro said.

  Luca shrugged. “Some of us have been working while you were on vacation.”

  The hair on Pietro’s neck bristled, but he remained calm. “What would you like to talk about?”

  “What the hell are we doing here?” Luca spoke slowly, carefully, as if he had measured each word and decided it was exactly the right one.

  “We’re here to do a job. That’s all, just like any other day at work.”

  “Just like any other day … is that right?” Luca snorted his derision. “Then why are there a dozen assault rifles in the basement?”

  A murmur arose from the Siracusans seated on one of the couches. All three of them were short, powerfully built, and as dark as the ash from Mount Etna, which smoldered upwind of their homes.

  “We’re taking somebody out, nothing that any of us hasn’t done before. That somebody just happens to be a prince with an armed bodyguard, so we’re packing a little heavier than usual.”

  The hubbub died down for a second, and Pietro seized the opportunity to flip open his laptop, type in the password, and open a file. The computer was already connected to the large flat screen on the wall underneath the mounted head of a huge red stag, and now a picture of Haus Adler appeared, looking minuscule sitting atop the massive rock upon which it was built.

  “This is Haus Adler.” He used a laser pointer to circle the chalet. “It is Prince Kamal el-Rayad’s home for the month of August.” The red dot dropped down over the cliff face in front of the residence. “This is our way in.”

  A curse was muttered. Someone belched, filling the air with the aroma of anchovies and grappa.

  “There’s no other way?” This was from the other Nisseno, the man sitting next to Custanti on the near sofa. His name was Carlo, and he had recently killed a man with a gardening trowel.

  Pietro hit a few keys on the computer, and the view changed; Haus Adler was still visible, but now from above. A lengthy driveway ran along the edge of the precipice, leading to a large garage.

  “This is the other way in. It’s barricaded, patrolled twenty-four hours a day, and monitored by over three hundred closed-circuit television cameras.”

  He switched back to the view of the cliff face. “Over the next few nights, I am going to climb this face. The base is only a few clicks up the road from here.” He pointed through the window toward the dirt road that wound into the dense grove of pines surrounding them. “I’m leaving pitons in place and stashing ropes. Once all the pitons are in, all I have to do is climb up ahead of the rest of you an
d fix the ropes, and we should be able to reach the top in three or four hours.”

  He paused to look around the room and was greeted by grim stares, surly faces, and a collective lack of enthusiasm. Only Custanti, a man he had climbed with on several occasions, looked on with interest.

  “You were all selected because you have climbing experience. It will be a walk in the park once the ropes are up.”

  “What happens when we all get to the top?”

  “Only six of us are going up. Two will stay at the top, in case we need cover fire on the way out.” Pietro used the laser pointer to highlight the flat patch of ground between the cliff and Haus Adler itself. “Four of us will cross this space; two will take up positions here at the base of the house, one on either side. Luca and I will be the only ones to enter the building. Surprise and stealth are the keys here, not firepower.”

  The screen changed, showing a close-up of the massive four-story alpine residence. Pietro used the pointer to indicate the top floor.

  “Prince el-Rayad lives on the fourth floor. No one else is allowed up there, not even his wives.”

  “How do we get up there?” Luca seemed a little happier now that he knew he would have a chance to slit the prince’s throat as he slept.

  Pietro highlighted a tree that had been espaliered against the south side of the house, in the traditional way of the local farmers.

  “By climbing this pear tree to reach the porch around the second floor.” He enlarged the picture of that side of the house. “This is a staircase that runs between the second and fourth floors. It will take us straight up to the prince’s bedroom.”

  “Security system?”

  One of the Palermitani had asked the question; it was one for which Pietro had been prepared.

  “Haus Adler was built in the early 1800s, so it doesn’t lend itself to retrofitting a sophisticated security system. According to the latest information from the CIA, only the fourth floor has any security, and that is just an easily defeated contact alarm on the sliding door.”

  “The latest information? Are we going in on three-year-old intel?”

  More flak from the Palermitani. He knew them better than the rest and had expected them to give him little trouble.

  “It’s what we have. I wish it were more recent, but it’s not. So, I am going to check out the house the night before we go in. I’ll be up there anyway putting the last of the pitons in. If they have added more security, we’ll have a whole day to adjust the plan.”

  A bottle thumped down on the table as the Palermitani refilled their grappa glasses. The fire crackled in the hearth, and the flames danced, casting moving shadows against the far wall.

  “If you’re being honest with us.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  The man who had been asking the questions shrugged. He was bigger than the others, very large by Sicilian standards, with a narrow head, sallow skin, and bright blue eyes that seemed incongruous with the rest of his face. His name was Alessandro; Pietro didn’t know him well, but he was familiar with his reputation as a stern man with a mercurial temper and a penchant for excessive violence.

  “This whole job stinks like a bad fish. We have no business here.”

  “We do have business here.”

  “Sì, sì, bad business. This isn’t what we do. We shouldn’t be here … we wouldn’t be here if your father hadn’t made a deal he had no right to make.”

  “What deal is that, Alessandro?”

  Alessandro drank his grappa in one swallow. Pietro walked over to where he was sitting, hunched over the table, clutching the glass with both hands.

  “If you have something to say, say it now.”

  The tall Sicilian stood up, towering over him.

  “All right, I will. Your father has wanted to get you free since you were sentenced. And here you are, suddenly out of prison like magic, telling us we have to take out someone from Saudi Arabia that none of us have ever heard of, and that we don’t care about.”

  The two men glared at one another as a low murmur flooded the room. Glasses thudded against the table.

  “That’s the deal I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t meddle in my father’s business.” Pietro paused for a second, letting the implication that Alessandro was meddling in his father’s business sink in. “I’m here following orders, just like I have always done. Just like we have all always done. Just like you have always done.”

  The murmuring died down a bit.

  “Tell me, Alessandro, is that going to change? Or are you still going to follow orders?”

  The room went quiet, other than the hiss of the flames and the occasional crackle of a sap ball igniting; the only movement was the play of the shadows on the wall.

  “No, it’s not going to change. I don’t like it … but I’m still following orders. For now.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Marco woke early and went for a walk to clear his head. He stopped halfway at a small church to pray and check for tails. Finding none, he walked back to the hotel. Sarah was showering when he returned, and so he rang room service for a continental breakfast.

  She emerged wearing a large towel and smiled a greeting, then snagged a piece of melon and a cup of coffee and retreated back to the bathroom. When she came out ten minutes later, she was wearing a dark silk suit and a white blouse, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

  She twirled around in front of him. “What do you think? I picked it up yesterday.”

  “I think you’re going to cost me a lot of money. Mr. Romano doesn’t like to part with his money.”

  Their passports listed them as Marco and Sarah Romano of Utica, New York. They were Americans of Italian descent, making their first trip to Europe.

  “That explains this third-rate hotel, which Mrs. Romano doesn’t like.”

  He finished eating and took a quick shower, trying to avoid conjuring a mental image of the shower’s most recent occupant. But it was a difficult task, and he cut his time short for fear of failing. He dressed in black slacks and a dark gray cotton shirt, feeling confident he looked like an American on holiday in Rome. They packed their few things quickly and left via the back staircase.

  In the garage beneath the hotel, Sarah led him to a silver Volvo sedan and threw him the keys.

  “You drive.”

  It was still early, and traffic was light, at least by Roman standards. Marco took the A1 and headed north, thinking about the time, several weeks and a different lifetime earlier, that he had driven south on his way to stop Boko Haram from assassinating the pope and razing St. Peter’s Basilica.

  “What’s our plan?”

  “We’re driving to Salzburg.” He checked the rear-view mirror, as Pietro had instructed him, seeing nothing other than the outskirts of Rome slowly fading away. “We’ll check in to a hotel in the old city. Tomorrow we’ll hike the Untersberg and scope out the shooting position above Haus Adler.”

  It didn’t seem like much of a plan to him, but what did he know? He was a Jesuit priest from Monterosso, and the sooner this was over, the quicker he could return there, to his quiet parish overlooking the Ligurian Sea.

  They stopped north of Bologna to refuel and eat lunch at a café next to the gas station. Sarah drove after the break; Marco tried to take a nap—he hadn’t slept well—but his mind was active, and he couldn’t rest. He thought about the woman in the car with him. Who was she, really? How had it come to be her livelihood to kill other people, like a fireman put out fires or a janitor mopped up mud from a dirty floor? And, the most disquieting question of them all, why did he feel himself drawn to her, like a moth to a porch light?

  She was beautiful, yes, but Italy was full of beautiful women, and he had always—with the glaring exception of Elena—been able to keep himself in check. No, there was something more about her, something he couldn’t name, that beckoned him like the Sirens of mythology beckoned the Greek sailors on their way home from war.

 
They stopped at the rest area overlooking the Brenner Pass and got out to stretch their legs. Marco had been here several times in his life, but the severity of the landscape never failed to impress him. He marveled at the steepness of the slopes and the narrowness of the grassy valleys pinched between the sharply angled hillsides.

  They returned to the A10, heading north to Innsbruck, taking in a pasture full of brown cows and small hay barns. It was good to be back in Austria, he thought, even if it was to witness an execution.

  “How long have you worked for the Vatican Security Office?” Sarah asked.

  “I’m not really with the Security Office. I’m only on loan to them.”

  “From whom? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  He did mind, but he didn’t say as much. There was something about the soft fragrance in the car and the exposed patch of skin at the nape of her neck that weakened his resistance. What kind of priest was he? But he knew the answer: the regular kind, with all the human frailties one would expect.

  “The Secretariat.”

  “I didn’t realize the Secretariat had an enforcement arm.”

  “We like to keep a low profile.”

  “So do I, Marco. So do I.”

  “Are you married?”

  She stopped staring out the window at the Hochkönig, a massive pile of rocks rising into a cloud-specked sky, and turned to look at him. “Of course I’m married.”

  He was surprised by her answer, not judging her profession to be well suited for married life. And a little disappointed?

  “I’m married to you, darling, and have been for ten wonderful years.”

  “I meant in real life.”

  “So did I, Marco. Right now, this is my real life, and it’s yours too.” She punctuated her message by placing her hand on his bare forearm. It felt like warm silk. “Haven’t you been happy?”

  “Yes. Very.”

  Twenty-Nine

  Abayd snapped his cell phone shut, slipped it into the pocket of his black blazer, and stuffed his Glock in his chest harness. He knew he shouldn’t carry it—there were strict federal laws against gun possession in Austria—but he didn’t feel dressed without it. He took the back stairs down to the garage, hopped into a black Mercedes sedan, and backed out.