He opened the closet and spotted Callahan unfurling himself from a cramped shelter position underneath a magnificently carved wooden chaise. All gunfire stopped, followed by a sickening thud. A body had fallen from the fourth floor landing, having been picked off by one of Lang’s men.
Lang staggered out of the closet and surveyed the bodies of the 10 who had fallen in the span of just a few minutes.
“Well?” Carver asked.
Lang looked up, knowing exactly what Carver was asking. He shook his head. Senator Preston’s killers were not among the dead. He nodded toward two survivors.
Carver regarded the two monsters that had travelled to Washington D.C. to kill the senator. Both were reloading. The elder of the two was in his mid-40s and had a crescent-shaped birthmark covering his left cheek. The other was in his 20s, with loose skin around his earlobes that Carver guessed were the effects of wearing gauge plug earrings.
Apprehending these thugs would solve nothing, for no trial was possible. Any criminal proceeding in the U.S. would expose the story the administration had released about Preston’s death, and possibly, the shadow war over the ossuary.
He wished he could eliminate both of these scumbags right now. But that would solve little except avenging a single death. We would have to exercise patience. For the next hour, they were in this fight together.
*
Sebastian Wolf sat cross-legged on the mattress, willing himself out of the meditative trance he had dwelled in for the past three days. He was unable to tell whether the explosions were coming from inside or outside, from above or below. The expansive maze of rooms and tunnels swallowed sound. The excavations down underneath the villa, into the lost catacombs and temples of Rome, had been ongoing for years preceding his arrival. So many entrances and exits. He had needed a chaperone to keep from getting lost.
A boom came from outside. From the hallway. He was sure of it. The sound of the nightingale floors was drowned out by Magi’s incessant barking.
They were under attack now. And yet Wolf was calm. There was no reason to be anxious. It had been foretold.
The destiny of the Great Mission now rested with Adrian Zhu and the girl. They had just been here. Or had it been days since he had seen them? He did not know. He had lost track of time and space.
By his own insistence, he and Magi had remained undisturbed for some time. Such was his destiny. To be a pure conduit of light for the reincarnation of their savior.
But the time for prayer was over now. The nightingale floors sang like a flock of a hundred birds all at once. Intruders were in the house. He tried to raise Lars, but all communications were down. Where were the guards?
He struggled to get to his feet, pulling at the black monogrammed pajamas as they slipped down his lean buttocks. As Lars had taught him during the drills, he went to his desk and punched a star pattern on the touchscreen monitor on his desk. The bookcase behind him hinged open, revealing a staircase.
He called for Magi. The dog was highly agitated, foaming at the mouth as the heavy bedroom doors bumped and flexed. The enemy was at the gates.
Wolf gripped the dog’s lead and pulled him through the hidden doorway. Motion-triggered lanterns illuminated a coiling spiral staircase. Built within a hidden shaft in the villa’s rear, it descended the home’s four floors and continued underground to the laboratory.
He paused as he descended the first few steps. Had there been some way for him to seal the passageway? Surely there was, but he could not remember. Maybe he had never even known.
But now he recalled where the guards had gone. They were with Adrian Zhu and the girl. He had ordered it, despite Lars’ protests. So be it, he had told Lars. We come into this world alone, and we leave it alone, he thought. And then we will finally feel the unconditional love of God.
But it would not happen yet. No. He wanted to be in the presence of the ossuary one last time. The lifegiver of the second coming.
And finally, on the first landing, he saw the two large black buttons that Lars had shown him. They were recessed in a steel casing and protected by a transparent cover so they could not be pushed accidentally. Yes, he remembered now. He was supposed to press them in sequential order, left to right. The first one would seal the stairway behind him. The second would release the swarm.
*
Lang’s men blew open the doors to the home’s master suite, releasing a wave of stale, putrid air. They held their weapons with one hand, using the other to cover their faces. The walls of the enormous room were adorned with crosses of every shape and size imaginable. Enormous books were strewn about the floor, many of them open and with pages ripped out, as if they too had been under attack.
“Nobody here,” someone said.
The Vatican Intelligence chief slumped into an empty chair. Despite his rigorous regimen of long daily walks, the tunnels and four flights of stairs had taken their toll. He was running on pure adrenalin now.
“What died?” Callahan shouted as he entered the room.
Carver spotted the source of the rancid stench. It was not, as the priest suggested, rotting flesh. It was animal waste, evident by several heaping dog piles placed about the room and the yellow-stained baseboards.
The walls were painted with scripture. He also recognized several passages from Drucker’s manuscript.
And when he has gathered all that is necessary to know to bring all that is dark into the light, the One from the East will use her to make me anew, just as I have made you anew.
And in turn, you will return my heart from stone to flesh, so that all men may share in the wisdom of the LORD.
And when I am raised, the knowledge hoarders shall be exposed as bearers of false idols.
“Over here,” Father Callahan shouted. He pointed to an opening in the bookshelf. A secret passageway. He went out the door, and then popped back in.
“It leads to a coiling staircase. Emergency escape route, I’d guess.”
“Or the entrance to the lab,” Carver said hopefully.
A high-frequency hum entered Carver’s consciousness. Like insect wings, but modulating evenly. He turned, scanning the dog piles for flies. He saw none.
He looked at Seven, who was keeping an eye on Lang. “You hear that?”
She nodded. “What is it?”
It was getting louder, and was soon joined by the sound of grinding gears. A thick steel door rolled down over the doorway they had come in through. Another slab of steel threatened to seal the secret passageway leading to the staircase.
Callahan acted quickly, pushing a trio of heavy, oversized books into the opening. It momentarily stalled the door’s progress. Carver raced to help, grabbing a small bronze bust from one of the shelves. He shoved it in, risking his limbs as he got onto his back and kicked it into place.
He heard the gears within the walls slipping. Then came the smell of heat – like a hairdryer that had been on far too long. Next was the unmistakable burn of mechanical failure. The crushing steel halted with a loud metallic knock from within the wall.
He looked around the room at the others. With the entrance now sealed off, there was no way to go but down the passageway. Fortunately, the entire crew was slim enough to slide underneath the 16-inch gap. Except Callahan, he realized. He glanced at the priest’s midsection and had his doubts.
“That sound,” Seven said. She had her hands over both ears. Carver had been so preoccupied with securing their freedom that he hadn’t noticed the incessant buzzing. It had grown louder.
Carver pointed up at the 20-foot ceiling and saw what he had failed to notice earlier – a shiny black orb, consisting of perhaps hundreds of tiny holes.
What he saw next truly terrified him. Emerging from the holes was a swarm of flies. Hundreds of them. Only they weren’t flies, Carver knew. They were flying nanobots. Just like the one that killed Drucker.
*
Seven was the first to slide under the 16-inch gap to the relative safety of the passageway. Carver was right behind her,
wriggling his muscular but lean build through the opening. He took Lang next, the old man’s thin, long frame coming feet first as he scooted through on his back. His two henchmen were next.
And then there was Father Callahan. He pushed his backpack through first, and then his weapon. This was going to be tight.
Carver peered through the gap from the other side. The swarm had descended now perhaps five feet from the orb, and they were dispersing horizontally, a squadron of drones preparing for attack. “Hurry!” he implored Callahan.
Like Lang, the stocky priest came feet-first, perhaps anticipating that his midsection would prove to be the most challenging piece. His knees and thighs cleared, but sure enough, 16 vertical inches wasn’t quite enough to get his potbelly through the space.
“Suck it in!” Carver yelled.
“I’m trying!”
The priest tried to make himself thin as Carver pulled from the other side. Within seconds Callahan was bleeding from broken skin at his waistline. He screamed for Carver to stop.
“It’s no use!” he cried.
The American stuck his head under the space. The swarm had spread wide, and was now sweeping the room from above, as if they were a single collective.
“Lie still!” he commanded. “Those bots can’t be individually controlled. Maybe they’re motion-activated.”
Callahan tried to quiet his body and minimize his breathing. No small task given that he was half inside, half outside the room, wedged underneath a steel door, with a threat of death hovering overhead.
Carver reached into Callahan’s pack and pulled out two stun grenades. They were eight inches long with openings in the black matte metal casing designed to prevent defragmentation during the explosion. When Carver had pulled them from the priest’s trunk, he had imagined using them on human beings. He wasn’t sure whether they would effectively disrupt the nanobots, but he was out of both ideas and time.
“Everyone close your eyes and ears,” he said, then tapped one of the priest’s boots, “Except you. Just close your eyes, there Padre. Be very still.”
Carver pulled both pins simultaneously and rolled the stun grenades into the center of the room. Carver used his index fingers to plug his ears. He felt a twinge of pity for the additional pain Callahan was about to endure. That was assuming he didn’t die. Stun grenades weren’t designed to be lethal, but they occasionally killed people all the same.
The blast came hard and fast. The shockwave belched a blast of hot air out the gap and into the staircase. Even kneeling just outside the room, Carver felt the fluid in his ears in flux, putting him slightly off balance.
He heard the priest screaming, which was a good sign. He peered under the gap. The swarm was gone.
“I’m blind,” Callahan screamed.
“I told you to close your eyes,” Carver chided him. The blinding light from the grenades caused all the light sensitive cells within the eye to activate at once. It would, however, pass.
“Agent Carver,” Lang called from within the iron staircase. “We have to go.”
Carver patted the priest on the leg. “Hang tight. We’ll be back.”
*
They descended the iron helix that went ever deeper into the porous, spongy earth that had allowed Rome to be so easily tunneled in ancient times. A mechanical hum – gas generators, perhaps – droned somewhere in the distance. A series of construction lights strung along the walls provided adequate illumination.
Carver and Seven moved behind their unlikely assault partners warily, and always on guard. After all, this was merely an alliance of convenience. Carver had every expectation that they too planned on violently ending the partnership once they found what they had come for.
A series of ancient slabs, piles of broken pottery and pieces of sculpture were clustered near the far wall. Relics unearthed during the recent construction, Carver presumed. A bit further in, they approached a security post that looked much like the TSA stations at the airports in American megacities. Sheets of transparent blast-proof glass flanked a full-body scanner.
“Nobody here,” one of Lang’s soldiers said in wonderment.
A bad sign, Carver knew. By his count, they had killed only eight guards in the villa. Surely their numbers had been greater in recent days. Why had they already abandoned these underground security posts? Had the ossuary already been moved? Zhu would have had a week at most to work with the DNA samples.
At the end of the cavern, an open-air lift moved slowly up and down at regular intervals. There were no doors, no buttons. Getting on and off it appeared to be a matter of careful timing, much like a department store escalator.
He crossed to the other side, where a straight, smooth pole descended into another chamber where the facility’s emergency lights glowed. The dog bark he thought he had heard earlier had not repeated. If their prize had escaped, there was no telling where they would go. Equipped with a map such as the one Callahan had, it was possible to walk from one end of Rome to the other using only the ancient tunnels.
“Wolf is here,” Lang insisted. The old man was out of breath, but the thrill of the hunt propelled him forward. “I can feel him in my bones.”
Lang’s soldiers helped him onto the lift, which descended at an uneven pace. Carver and Seven joined them. The ride down to the bottom took approximately 10 seconds. Carver had lost all sense of depth. Were they a hundred yards below ground? Five hundred? The only thing he was sure of was that he didn’t like this. The lighting had grown erratic, twittering on and off at irregular intervals. He hoped the generators weren’t running low on fuel.
“The lab!” Seven said as they neared the bottom. She pointed at what appeared to be a decontamination chamber. Behind additional panes of transparent glass was the shining equipment that Nico had tracked to the villa.
Opposite the lab was an astonishing cavern. Vaulted ceilings. Spring-fed fountains. Walls decorated with faded frescoes of wildlife and chariots. And at the rear, a small throne room, perhaps 500 square feet.
Sebastian Wolf sat on an ancient throne that had been carved out of rock. It was easy to see why Wolf had built the lab here. Carver imagined him sitting there, observing Zhu’s work through the transparent lab walls like some omniscient God supervising the creation of a new world.
The cult leader appeared to be unguarded, unarmed and unafraid. The Alsatian at his side barked ferociously. Wolf whistled one short, sharp tone that snapped the dog into quiet obedience.
The white chalk ossuary rested on a marble platform before him. Although Carver had seen the dimensions on Lang’s illustration, it was still smaller than he had imagined, roughly the size of his nephew’s toy chest.
Carver watched Lang carefully. He appeared to be almost as mesmerized by the sight of his old friend as he was by the ossuary. Lang had sworn a blood oath to protect this relic, and yet he himself had never actually laid eyes on it.
“Go on, Heinz,” Wolf said. “See what your papal masters have hidden from the world for these two thousand years.”
Lang walked forward, stretching his right hand out before him. He touched the chalk box, running his fingertips gingerly over the faded engravings on its side. And then he touched the inscription. Yeshua bar Yehosef. Jesus son of Joseph. Just as Wolf had claimed.
“Although we’ve had our differences,” Wolf said, “We did the right thing in Venice, you and I. It would not have been right to let Himmler have this.”
Wolf’s Judas looked up at his former friend. “He would have had nothing. Just as you have nothing now.”
Wolf chuckled. “My old friend. My Judas. If you did not believe this was the Holy Ossuary, then you would not be here.”
“We’ll have to cut the reunion short,” Carver said. “Where’s Zhu?”
Wolf smiled pityingly. “I’m afraid you are too late to catch Mr. Zhu. Our friend’s time in Rome is already complete. He has left to complete his destiny.”
Carver swore. It was just as he had feared. The speed o
f Zhu’s work, even more than his innovations, was what had made him famous in the first place. And yet it was still astonishing. A world-class paleo-DNA lab had been created for a project that had lasted less than two weeks. And that was assuming that it was equipped with a staff that had set to work immediately after the ossuary had been stolen.
“I’ll check the lab,” Seven said.
“What are you waiting for?” Lang said, gesturing toward one of his men. “Go with her.”
Wolf watched them go. “They will find nothing,” he said. “But the empty feeling you have inside will no doubt pass, Heinz. Soon Mr. Zhu’s role in the great story of our time will be evident for all people to see. And if you are still alive, then you too will join him in worshipping the return of our savior.”
Lang held the cross he wore around his neck up to his lips and kissed it, as if protecting himself against Wolf’s blasphemy. “If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams.”
Wolf grinned. “Oh, I do love Deuteronomy. I really do. But I am not a false prophet, Heinz. And these bones before you are not those of a false idol. They are nothing less than evidence that Christ walked on this earth, and through the miracle of the knowledge God has endowed upon us, he shall walk again.”
“May I kill him now?” one of Lang’s soldiers called out. He appeared to be every bit as subservient to his master as Magi, the Alsatian, was to Wolf. “Please let me kill him.”
Wolf spoke over the man’s pleas. “This ossuary was, I am told, quite unusual from an anthropological perspective. In a typical Jewish or Greek ossuary, the bones would reside alone. In this case it appears that the disciples added personal effects to the box before it was brought to Rome. We found a stone vessel containing a lock of hair. In another vessel, a piece of sponge that could have been used by Joseph of Arimethea to wash the body. And there was a rusted nail, Heinz. From the true cross, no doubt.”
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