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

by Hogenkamp, Peter

In reply, Nassir pushed the door open and brushed past him. He stopped in front of the table and bent down to whisper something into Abayd’s ear. Khalid stepped toward him and jammed the syringe into his jugular vein, pushing the plunger in as he struck. Nassir’s eyes went wide with surprise before he fell heavily to the floor, oozing blood from his neck.

  Khalid peered out into the main room of the medical clinic and saw that no one had accompanied Nassir. He stripped off his surgical clothes, donned his jacket, and stuffed Abayd’s gun into his waistband at the small of his back. Slipping the wallet and cell phone into his pocket, he closed the door to the surgical suite and locked it. Someone had stolen several bottles of narcotics last year, and Khalid had used the theft as an excuse to change the lock and give himself the only key. He was certain Abayd had acquired a copy, but he was already inside the room, where he would remain until he woke up with a massive hangover.

  He sidestepped to the window, back flat to the wall, and peered out. The clinic occupied the south side of the space above the garage; Abayd’s office and the CCTV control room consumed the north side, overlooking the turnaround. The second floor had a common staircase, leading up from the rear of the garage to a landing with doors to both offices. The only thing he could see from his current vantage point was the darkness on the other side of the cliff and the lights of Salzburg twinkling in the distance.

  He was about to move away from the window when he spotted a tiny red glow below him; one of the bodyguards was standing watch behind the building. His plan had been to take the stairs down to the garage and slip out the back door, hopefully without being noticed. But that was obviously not going to work, with at least one sentry—and possibly several others—boxing him in. He decided to keep his post by the window and wait for the guard to take a break. If an opening didn’t present itself shortly, he would try to bluff his way past the sentry. In the likely event that this wasn’t successful, he did have Abayd’s weapon. He hadn’t fired a gun since the early days of his military service, but if push came to shove, he would shoot his way out or die trying.

  Forty

  It was close to midnight by the time Sarah and Marco reached the hill overlooking Haus Adler. They had driven Sarah’s car—which, if everything went well, they hoped to use as an escape vehicle—to a trailhead on the north shoulder of the mountain, from where the shooting position they had surveyed the previous night was less than an hour’s hike. Unlike the day before, it didn’t matter if people found a car left there all night to be suspicious; they would be long gone before anyone thought to connect their car with the imminent attack. Der Föhn, the dry wind that warmed the Central European Alps, had sparked up in the afternoon, clearing away any straggling clouds and giving them a clear view of the target. Haus Adler looked much the same as it had twenty-four hours earlier, with one exception. In place of the two sentries who had been patrolling the grounds, a half-dozen had taken their place, all carrying assault rifles. Sarah questioned Marco about the change, but he simply shrugged; she finished assembling her rifle without further comment.

  Midnight came; they marked the occasion by installing earpieces and collar microphones. Marco turned on his cell phone and tried to check in with the assault team. “Cobra in position. Copy?”

  The only response was from the wind, which blew a little harder, straightening the windsock next to the prince’s helipad.

  “Alpha, do you copy?”

  Alpha did not respond; the only thing Marco could hear was the rush of blood in his ears and the clicking of Sarah’s telescopic sight as she adjusted the magnification to her liking.

  He checked his diving watch. “They must be behind schedule.”

  Sarah didn’t reply, busying herself erecting a small tripod, on top of which the blades of her wind meter whirred, gauging velocity, direction, and maximum gust.

  “Pietro told me there’s no cell reception on the face.”

  Sarah glanced at her phone, where the wind meter’s readout was displayed on an application via the Bluetooth connection, and made further adjustments to her sight.

  “They have to be almost at the top before we can communicate with them. We’ll just have to wait.”

  He realized she had completely tuned him out, the culmination of a transformation that had begun the moment they left the hotel room. During the drive, she had become increasingly withdrawn—or increasingly focused, perhaps—barely responding to his nervous chatter. The hike across the northern shoulder of the Untersberg had been an extremely quiet affair; other than her complaints about the unnecessary length of the hike they had taken the day before, she had said nothing. And now, stationed three hundred meters above Haus Adler with her right finger on the trigger of her specially modified Sako TRG, she said nothing at all.

  Marco started to wonder if the feel of her body next to his had been a dream after all. Or if it hadn’t been a dream, perhaps the warmth and the feel of her skin touching his—as if it were being charged by an electric current—had been one-sided. Perhaps she had just been making nice all along to keep their working conditions pleasant, and now that it was almost over, she could just ignore him and do her job.

  He took a break from his insecurities and studied the woman he had been getting to know for the last four days. In so many ways, he felt like he knew her well: he knew the things that made her laugh, and he said those things so that he could hear her soft chuckle; he knew the things that would snuff out the sparkle in her jade eyes, and he shied away from those so that he could still see them shimmer like the waters of the Ligurian Sea in the full light of the sun; he knew she was a woman of great faith—in herself but nothing else, particularly not any deity—and this drew him to her like a moon to its planet. But in other ways, he realized he didn’t know her at all: he had no idea if she was married or engaged or otherwise involved with another person, or if she ever had been, and he had asked only once, a question she had deflected like a goalkeeper deflects an unwanted strike; he had no idea if she had been brought up with a faith or theology of any kind, other than the transcendentalism her father espoused; and he didn’t know why her conscience allowed her to make a living by killing other people, or if it had been beaten out of her by a lifetime of violence and bloodshed.

  But while Sarah’s conscience was either not present or held somehow in check, Marco’s, now that he was here, with a fully loaded gun in a holster on his hip, was operating on overdrive. Whereas it had been possible in the days leading up to today—walking through the rose-scented Mirabell gardens, or hiking up the sunlit slopes of the Untersberg with the smell of pine hanging in the air—to push the smell of blood out of his head, it had come back now with redoubled force. His fingers stank of it, despite the light gloves he wore; his clothes reeked of it, despite being freshly laundered; and his nostrils were inundated by it at all times, the metallic odor of the lives he had extinguished as expediently as an altar boy snuffs out a candle.

  Pietro found a slight crack in the rock with his probing fingers, inserted a hand, and pulled himself up and onto a flat slab of stone. He sat for a minute to rest and checked the time. Midnight. He was on schedule.

  His practice sessions had paid off. Using the line he had followed every night, he had climbed over one hundred and fifty meters of vertical rock in an hour. He had pushed himself hard to save time, and his shoulders and forearms ached from the effort. But it had been worth the price: he was only fifty meters from the top of the cliff, a distance he could negotiate in another half-hour.

  He reached inside a crevasse on the other side of the slab and extracted the waterproof bag he’d hidden there twenty-four hours ago. There were four items inside: a stainless-steel water bottle, from which he drank deeply, two protein bars, and a spare cell phone. He turned the cell on, but there was no signal here; from previous experience, he knew he had to get almost to the top for the signal to be strong enough to text. Having no idea when, or if, his next meal would come, he took a few minutes to eat the energy bars. H
e finished the water, put the bottle back, and resumed climbing.

  The last section would be the most difficult: the face was the steepest at this point, and he had only risked practicing it once, the night before. He checked his heart rate: it was high, driven by the exertion and the adrenaline. He took several deep breaths from the diaphragm, trying to slow his heart rate and lessen the amount of adrenaline surging into his bloodstream. Too much adrenaline created a tendency to hurry, and any rock climber worth his salt knew there was a price to be paid for hurrying. It was usually death, although permanent paralysis and mutilation were also possibilities.

  He shrugged these unwelcome thoughts aside and focused on the task. There was a simple truth about rock climbing he found calming: a massive face was scaled one hold at a time. Secure each hold, and you were good. The converse was something he never considered, but it lurked in the recesses of his mind nonetheless: one mistake, and you were fodder for the rocks that waited below with eternal vigilance.

  He fell behind schedule quickly, but didn’t succumb to panic. He climbed methodically and with purpose, following the route he’d marked previously. Twice he slipped but recovered, and once he sent a loose stone into a freefall. He stopped several times to allow some strength to ebb back into his limbs, and once near the top to eavesdrop, hearing nothing.

  He pulled himself over the edge and crawled behind the large rock he had seen on satellite images of the property. When his breath had recovered and the dexterity had returned to his fingers, he grabbed his cell phone and began composing a text to Marco, which he wanted to word carefully. His godfather had taken an enormous risk getting him out of jail, and he wasn’t about to turn tail and run at the first sign of difficulty; he just needed Marco to feel the same way.

  Marco’s phone vibrated on his hip; he had received an incoming text. He put his night-vision binoculars down and snatched up the phone, reading the message twice. When he looked up, Sarah was watching him expectantly.

  “Pietro?”

  “Yes. His team was ambushed before they left their house. He was the only one who survived.”

  He tried to gauge her reaction, but her face was inscrutable.

  “He made it to the top of the cliff, and he’s going into Haus Adler now to get into position in the prince’s bedroom before he comes home from Salzburg.”

  “Any change in plan for us?”

  “No.”

  Marco thumbed a reply as Sarah put her eye behind the scope, where it had been positioned for over thirty minutes. As he sent his message, Cardinal Lucci’s warning—by whatever means necessary—echoed inside his head. All along, he had feared that his strictly observational role had been a ruse designed by Lucci to ease his conscience; that his destiny was one of violence, and that as a priest, he had no place being here, with a gun in his hand and carnage in his future. The more he tried to push these thoughts aside and concentrate on what he was doing, the more they dominated. Pietro’s words reverberated in his skull—Focus on the moment, on what you are doing … ignore what might happen and what has happened. See only what you are doing in the present moment—but all he could picture was Gehenna burning around him.

  Pietro stowed his phone, readied his Beretta, and dashed toward the house, bemoaning the loss of his silencer. The weaponry had been transferred to the vans before el-Rayad’s men had attacked, and he hadn’t dared to double back to re-arm. He would have to make do with the Beretta and the extra clip he’d scavenged from Luca. Although he had plenty of firepower, his chief weapon was the element of surprise, and it would be lost the first time his finger whitened on the trigger.

  He reached the side of the house and hid in the shadows created by the overhanging eaves. When he was sure he hadn’t been spotted, he looked up at the fruit trees trained against the stucco wall, selected the largest one, and began to climb. The tree was a century old, he guessed, but generations of gardeners had pruned it back to a level just below the porch encircling the third story. It wasn’t as convenient as a ladder, but it sufficed. He went slowly, trying not to stress the hundred-year-old branches. When he got within arm’s reach of his destination, he jumped out toward the bottom of the porch, grabbed the floorboards, and swung up. He landed on his feet and crept to the back corner of the house, where a circular staircase ascended to the porch on the fourth floor. He used a set of lock picks to open the gate and wound his way up.

  The fourth floor of Haus Adler was the exclusive domain of the prince. Only a handful of people were allowed to be there, and those only with specific permission. Not even Abayd al-Subail, the head of el-Rayad’s personal bodyguard unit, set foot on the fourth floor without the prince to supervise. All of this made Pietro smile as he used a small device to find the contact points on the alarm positioned on the other side of the sliding door. The machine vibrated when it found the right area, and he attached it to the glass. Using a lock pick, he opened the door and stepped into the massive bedroom, where there was little chance anyone would discover him until after he had killed the prince.

  Pietro was well aware that the best-laid plans often went awry, and he was not surprised to hear giggling coming from behind the silk drapes covering the prince’s four-poster bed.

  “KiKi?” a feminine voice called out.

  It was one of the prince’s concubines—he kept many, in addition to having over a dozen wives—waiting for him to return to earn her keep. A vision of the Caruso woman popped unbidden into his brain. He could still see the horror and fear on her pretty face: horror that he had just killed her husband, fear that he was going to kill her too. He dimmed the lights and strode across the plush carpet.

  “You’re home early. Couldn’t wait to get your hands on me?”

  She was right; he couldn’t wait to get his hands on her. He saw her shapely outline behind the thin silk hangings and dove through the opening, landing against her and sending her into a tumble.

  A burst of giggles erupted from the other side of the bed. “So you want to play rough? Two can play at that game.”

  She dove back in his direction, arms outstretched in front of her. He easily evaded her and chopped an open palm down against her neck. She went limp instantly. He found some handcuffs in a drawer and secured her hands and feet to the bedposts, then taped her mouth shut with several layers of duct tape. He made sure she was still able to breathe, and then rolled off the bed.

  He searched the room in the darkness, looking for the ideal spot to hide. In the end, he chose a large walk-in closet. He carried a desk chair inside, texted Marco that he was in place, and sat in the darkness with the closet door cracked and the Beretta laid across his lap, waiting for the prince to come home.

  Marco’s phone vibrated: it was Elena, informing him that the prince had just got in his limo and was en route. He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that he had forgotten about her. Speaking as quietly as he could, he filled her in on what had happened.

  “What now?”

  “I don’t know; I’m thinking.”

  His forehead dripped with sweat despite the cool breeze blowing down from the summit, and his stomach churned as if he were trying to digest a full tray of Sauerbraten.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Just outside the old city.”

  “You’re armed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drive up here. Pull off the road after you pass the driveway for Haus Adler, close enough but not too close. There are cameras everywhere. Wait there.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Honestly … I have no idea.”

  Forty-One

  Marco ignored the knot in his neck and kept his eyes glued to the binoculars. He could see the lights in the distance, sweeping in his direction. The prince’s caravan crested a small hill and appeared beneath him, four vehicles in total. The first was a Mercedes sedan, running some fifty meters ahead of the others. Next in line came the black limousine that he recognized as the prince’s Bentley. He was not famili
ar with its specifications, but Sarah had assured him that the bullets loaded into her gun would scratch its paint, nothing more. It was the third vehicle, a brown UPS van, that took him by surprise.

  “Sarah.”

  “I see it.”

  He raised the magnification of the binoculars and trained them on the van. The realization came to him quickly. “The nuclear weapons are in that van.”

  “They’re not supposed to be coming until next week.”

  The caravan approached the garage, and two of the bay doors opened. The lead sedan parked in the turnaround; several men hopped out, swelling the ranks of the armed men standing guard. The Bentley and the van disappeared inside the garage, and a second Mercedes remained in the driveway, blocking the way.

  “That’s why there are so many guards, when there were only two last night.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “What happened to the assault team? Are you trying to tell me it’s a coincidence they were ambushed tonight?”

  The garage doors closed. No one entered or exited.

  “What are they doing in there, Marco?”

  “I suspect the prince has some kind of expert examining the weapons. If I spent millions on something, I’d want to make sure it worked.”

  “How long is it going to take?”

  He had no idea—he was a priest, not an international weapons inspector—but he could guess as well as the next guy, maybe better. “Twenty minutes.”

  “And then what?”

  “The prince is going to go into the house and authorize the money transfer. The delivery men will stay until they get word the payment has been received, then offload the weapons and leave.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out, I see.”

  “Except for the part about how we stop them, yes.”

  The side door of the garage opened, and the prince’s bodyguard filed out. Sarah’s finger closed over the trigger. “I think I have a shot.”