The Seventh Commandment

by Tom Fox

  Efficiently, they each reached down to small packs stashed in those spots and extracted goggles, earplugs and breathers. Soon, the faces of each were covered, their ears protected, and they were ready.

  He pulled on his own mask, excited for this moment. They had worked so hard for so many months. Etching through concrete, then through metal with layer after layer of acid applied with rollers. What was left of the wall they needed to get through was only a few centimetres thick, and had been brittled.

  The small explosion would make quick work of it.

  Ensuring his earplugs were snugly in, the foreman reached down and picked up the firing trigger. He unspooled the remaining wire as he walked to his protective position and awaited the final go.

  The various tunnels and hollowed-out work areas dug over the past months provided access to the site from the eastern side – exactly the opposite of the vertical access corridor that ran from its west edge up to the surface by three flights of steep metal stairs. At the top of them was the guard station, with its three-inch steel security door surfaced and painted on its exterior side to match the brickwork of the buildings surrounding it.

  Two plainclothes members of the Swiss Guard were always at post in the station, just inside the door. They operated on six-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day. They were highly trained, diligent and devoted to their charge.

  But one fact, Ridolfo knew, was the most pertinent for him. They were always looking in the other direction.

  The steel security door was normally the only access point to what was below. The Guardsmen monitored cameras that scanned the piazza outside, the streets nearby, even the air above. The aim was to keep anyone, everyone, out.

  Because it wasn’t possible for anyone to be inside.

  The thought brought particular satisfaction to Ridolfo as he and André silently crested the final steps, wearing specially soled shoes which had been chosen in order to render them soundless on the metal stairs.

  The two guards were at the posts, watching their monitors. Facing the other way.

  Ridolfo lifted his right hand and held the tip of the barrel mere centimetres from the back of one guard’s head. To his left, André did the same with the other. Two friends, about to be bound together in an act that would change both their lives forever.

  The simultaneous firing of their Glocks resonated like cannon fire in the enclosed space.

  The guards had no chance to respond. The monitors in front of them were painted red with their blood, and their bodies slouched to the floor.

  80

  St Peter’s Square

  Above the piazza, the sky began to brighten. Dawn had arrived. The appointed hour.

  Still prevented from entering the square proper, the crowd outside its barriers – now swollen to maximum capacity and filling the connecting streets like a great, unmoving parade – could almost be heard to whisper amongst itself: ‘It’s now . . . this moment. This place.’

  The Swiss Guard continued to keep them at bay as thousands upon thousands of necks craned upwards with the fading of the darkness, but even a few of their highly trained members couldn’t resist the urge to lift their eyes a little higher than surveying the crowd required, captivated in their own right and wondering just what the changing colours above them would bring.

  The sky grew a shade brighter.

  The mess of humanity was a mixture of expectation and doubt. The prophecy that had drawn them here claimed that dawn would be stopped. Yet dawn was breaking, as it always does. But, as they all seemed to feel, something was coming. Could the two things be true together? Or was their expectation failing here, finally, as the sky brightened over them?

  Minutes passed, the air above the rooftops becoming shades lighter with each one. The murmurings of the crowd gradually went soft, then silent. The whole world seemed to be staring up into heaven, waiting.

  But nothing happened.

  Angelina stood next to Ben, frantically surveying the crowd, trying to spot someone out of place – but everyone was frozen, heads tilted back. Was she wrong? Had they all been wrong?

  Finally, a single ray of sunshine crested the roof of a building. As if aimed by some mocking version of providence destined to disappoint the thousands who had gathered, the ray pointed straight into the heart of St Peter’s Square, illumining the cross atop the great obelisk at its centre.

  The sun was shining.

  Of course the sun is shining, Angelina spoke inwardly. It always does.

  Then, a singular voice from somewhere in the thick of the crowd. ‘Look, over there!’

  It was followed by the sound of countless bodies in motion, trying to locate the ‘there’, scanning the sky above them.

  Then, another voice. ‘There!’

  Arms flew upwards, pointing to the sky.

  The voice became three, and a hundred, and then thousands.

  As they cried out, a wall of black cloud billowed over the rooftops with shocking speed. It was not the grey of a raincloud but a black like slate, specked with flashes of orange, and it spread over the square like a blanket.

  The cries went silent, awed. Then they returned as screams of terror and confusion.

  The black cloud overtook the sky, blotting out the singular ray of the rising sun, and pushing away the dawn that did not come.

  81

  St Peter’s Square

  Angelina and Ben stared at the black sky in utter incomprehension. Thomás’s jaw hung open, his eyes wide, watering. Around them were cries of praise and shouts of terror in a jumbled cacophony. A group had started singing a hymn. Another had begun to shout angrily, crying foul, and others were screaming, ‘It’s an attack!’, and running from what they assumed was a terrorist activity.

  Whatever it was, one thing only was certain. The sun was black, and morning was gone – just as they had been promised it would be. Even Angelina could not deny the correlation of what she was seeing to the prophecies of the text she knew – she knew – had to be a forgery. She could not deny it, but she could not understand it.

  How could this possibly be accomplished? There is only so much human ingenuity can do.

  If such questions ate at Angelina inwardly, they had a more external effect on the crowd around her. Beholding the obvious miracle, or plague, or whatever each wanted to call it, the mass was no longer willing to be held back. It burst through the barriers erected by the Guard and flooded into the square to behold the sight more clearly.

  The Guard tried to stop them, but even in all their array there was only so much force they could marshal. That limit was passed, and the sea of humanity flooded into St Peter’s Square like an unstoppable tide.

  Heinrich could barely form his words as he depressed the button at his shoulder and shouted into his microphone, ‘All hands, all hands! Into the piazza!’

  The sky was black. Heinrich was shocked, terrified and dumbfounded. But he was here for a purpose, however incomprehensible the circumstances. He frantically surveyed the flood of bodies as they came into the square, but he couldn’t identify anyone that looked out of place.

  Everyone looked out of place. The whole scene was a shambles, a chaos.

  And he sensed that it was only going to get worse.

  82

  In car, en route to Piazza Mastai

  Emil had just stepped into the car when it had happened. He was now halfway to the incursion site, a short trip of only a few minutes, but he hadn’t spoken since the man behind the wheel had pulled away from the kerb.

  He was absolutely dumbstruck.

  It was all happening, actually happening, exactly as he’d said it would.

  As I said! his thoughts roared, baffled. As I determined!

  Emil had chosen the place for its grandeur. Of course a pinnacle moment should take place in a locale of power and mystique. The timing he’d chosen for dramatic effect, as well as practical reasons. ‘On the third day’ would resonate with even the most nominally religious, and it gave him the tim
e he needed to get the city distracted and prep the final stages of his other manoeuvres.

  He hadn’t anticipated that the Guard would block off St Peter’s Square in quite the way they had, but that had only rendered his choice of the spot all the better. At the end of the day, it hadn’t really mattered what location Emil chose for his ‘fifth plague’. It could have been at the Colosseum, or the Forum. Or a glacier in the Antarctic. Or on the moon. Because it isn’t possible to stop the dawn and blot out the sun!

  His fist slammed down on the leather seat at his side as confusion clenched his muscles. Outside the windows, the streets of central Rome were blacker than they had been at midnight. Behind him, the square at St Peter’s was a mayhem of cries and shouts, but outside his windows the rest of the city seemed to have gone silent in shock. In the strange blackness, the thick clouds cutting out the light, even the morning birds had stopped singing. Cars halted at the sides of roads. Pedestrians stood rooted to the ground, staring at the sky, jaws open. The more religious made the sign of the cross, eyes wide in wonder. And there were tears.

  But Emil Durré had only one question in his heart.

  What the fuck is going on?

  From his breast pocket, Emil’s phone suddenly chirped him out of his mental shock. He recognised the number on the screen immediately. His hands, however, were so clammy that he had to swipe his finger across the screen three times before he finally gained the traction to answer it.

  ‘What!’ The word flew out of his mouth at twice the volume necessary.

  The voice that answered came from the man Emil had assigned as foreman for the incursion itself.

  ‘Boss, the guys up top say something’s happened,’ the man said gravely. ‘We’re all set down here, everything’s in position. But I just got a radio chirp – something about the sky going black? The fuck’s that about?’

  Emil bristled. None of this had been part of his plan. How could it have been? What he was seeing was simply impossible.

  But he couldn’t allow even the impossible to stop him.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he answered. ‘Not important.’ Outside his windows, the world seemed to broadcast a different message. But the foreman was underground.

  ‘What’s going on up here doesn’t change anything,’ Emil barked again. ‘Your men are ready?’

  ‘The trigger’s in my hand. But, boss, we weren’t expecting this. Everything’s been so tightly planned. Synchronised. Do we abort?’ There was obvious nervousness in his voice.

  For an instant, Emil considered the request. It was sensible. This whole venture had been orchestrated down to its finest minutiae, planned to hour-by-hour execution over the span of more than a year and a half. An unknown fact at this stage, of this magnitude – who knew what it meant for their success?

  But a second later, Emil’s resolve firmed. He wasn’t having his whole project go awry now.

  He pressed the phone close to his face.

  ‘Pull the trigger. Do it now.’

  83

  St Peter’s Square

  The noble piazza had been transformed into a mass of uncontrolled human emotion. Its bright lights had snapped off a minute ago, on timers that expected this morning hour to be flooded by the natural light of day. Instead, it rendered the darkness yet thicker than it had been the moment the cloud swept over the Vatican.

  Ben’s neck had barely craned downward since the event had begun, his eyes straining to take in every inch of the strange cloud above them. As if vision would enable comprehension.

  Angelina, however, had given up on trying to understand. Whatever was actually happening in the sky was something she was sure would be explained eventually, but the scenario of what was taking place with the event as a whole was something she was increasingly convinced was . . . wrong. The tablet’s prophecies were fakes, of course. No one could deny that now. But it was the same set of prophecies that had predicted this morning – down to the place and time. And now . . .

  No one could do this, her inner voice said on repeat. No one can change the sky, not to this extent.

  It was the collision of these two realisations that finally led her to a conclusion.

  A person couldn’t do this; but a person could get everyone to come and see it.

  Something clenched within her as the conclusion hit. Freak accident, coincidence – hell, Angelina had no idea how to characterise the actual arrival of the darkness above her. But the fact that they were all here, that someone had concocted a way – a convincing, and clearly effective way – to amass this crowd here, now. A crowd that numbered in the thousands, opposed by nearly the whole force of the Guard . . .

  The whole force of the Guard.

  Suddenly Angelina spun towards Ben. ‘Quit looking up and give me the radio.’ He’d shoved it in a pocket after Heinrich had given it to them, and with his look of bafflement remaining plastered on his face he extracted the small radio and handed it to her.

  Angelina clicked the call button a few times, shouting Heinrich’s name into its microphone. It took longer than she would have liked for any sound to emerge in response, but after nearly thirty seconds of trying, the box finally chirped to life.

  ‘Heinrich.’ His response was yelled, just as Angelina’s call had been. ‘I can barely hear you!’

  Angelina knew he must be somewhere in the midst of the fray of the square, those Guardsmen who’d been posted on its periphery having moved in when the crowds burst the perimeter.

  ‘Listen,’ she shouted into the radio, ‘this isn’t the spot! Whatever Durré and his men are planning, it’s not taking place here.’

  There was barely a pause before Heinrich’s answer came back.

  ‘Bullshit!’ Frustration tore through his roaring shout. ‘Look up, woman! Look around you!’

  In all directions the scene was pure chaos.

  ‘I see it,’ Angelina replied, ‘but all this, this . . . this isn’t it.’ She didn’t have further details. She just knew. ‘Somewhere else, something is happening. Not here.’

  Heinrich’s voice snapped something back over the radio waves, but Angelina’s attention was overtaken by the sight of the man himself. Heinrich stood on the massive staircase in front of St Peter’s, his radio at his face, a sinister-looking weapon strung over his shoulder.

  ‘Hold on,’ Angelina shouted, clipping off his broadcast. ‘I see you. We’ll be right there.’

  A second later the radio was in her pocket, her hands grabbing at the wrists of Ben and Thomás, and the three ran towards the Major of the Swiss Guard.

  84

  Two streets away from the Piazza Mastai

  Emil’s driver slammed on the brakes harder than was necessary as they arrived at their destination, his nerves tense from the inexplicable environment, and Emil was out of the car almost instantly. The access route his men had created over the past months had its entrance in the back room of a flower shop off the Via della Luce, a panel in the floor pulled back to reveal a vertical shaft that led down into the sewer system. Emil knew the entrance well, having observed the process of its excavation at numerous stages along its development.

  He climbed down the ladder, grime and dust staining his suit, and dropped to the cement floor of a tunnel that ran the length of the street and provided sewer drainage as well as a conduit for water and electrical pipes feeding the buildings above. Emil was nearly at a jog as he traversed the required length of the city tunnel, finally arriving at a large metal electrical box that stood as tall as the walls themselves. The box had been a plant, fabricated by Yiannis’s crew, and as Emil tugged on its right side it swivelled on concealed hinges, revealing the entirely illegitimate tunnel they’d dug behind it.

  He had to crouch as he walked through the narrow corridor that connected the sewer to the precise incursion point, beneath the piazza above them.

  The entire journey from his car to the spot took Emil just a tense ninety seconds. When he arrived, though, his tension slipped away. It was repl
aced, instantaneously, by awe.

  And envy.

  And joy.

  He’d been here many times before, had seen the protective concrete wall and watched the painstakingly slow process of scraping it away – undertaken at a pace that wouldn’t risk triggering the motion sensors contained within, configured to overlook minor trembles, such as those caused by buses and trams above, but which would certainly notice anything more violent. The chemical etching away of the metal layers beyond the concrete had been even slower. Progress, millimetre by millimetre.

  Today, it was entirely different.

  The foreman handed him a paper mask without saying anything, knowing Emil would not want to pollute his moment of triumph with words. He took the mask and held it over his mouth and nose, keeping out the dust that still filled the air from the explosives the team had set off a few minutes before.

  The result was visible directly before him, the perfect result of his perfect dream.

  The blast hole was large, the height of a man. Its bottom edge was flat, flush to the floor, shaped charges having done their work precisely. Just as he’d instructed.

  Emil took a deep breath through the mask, grabbed a torch from the foreman’s outstretched hand, then stepped forward through the hole in the wall.

  The space into which he entered was everything he’d hoped for. Not just hoped, known. There was no light except for the torch he held, but it was enough to make the interior sparkle and glow, Emil’s face turning a glittering gold in the reflection.

  It was here. And now, it was his.

  85

  St Peter’s Square

  Heinrich’s eyes were wild as Angelina, Ben and Thomás approached him on the steps of the basilica. The scene beneath them was the worst scenario a man in his position could contemplate. Chaos, right in the heart of the Vatican.