by Rene Fomby
Sam slowed her scooter to a crawl to keep from skidding out on the loose rocks and gravel that had been left behind on the tunnel floor next to the train tracks. “You would have thought someone would have come along at some point and cleaned all this mess up,” she complained, mostly to herself.
Gavin stole a glance back over his shoulder, his legs spread out to either side as he almost walked the little white Vespa through the rubble. “Yeah, but why? I don’t think anyone ever planned to be riding scooters back and forth down here. This tunnel was only intended for the train, or maybe for people to escape on foot if necessary. So cleaning up the path on either side of the tracks was a no-win exercise.”
“I suppose you’re right, Gavin, but still—” She stopped for a second to shine her scooter’s headlight down the tunnel a little closer to the tracks. “It looks a little better off to the left. Maybe the air pressure from the train going by helped push some of this stuff out of the way.” She crab-walked her bright red Vespa through some of the worst of the debris until she was almost on top of the railroad ties. The path ahead did look much clearer, so she gunned her engine and shot past Gavin at a brisk fifteen miles per hour, the top speed she was willing to risk in the dark and treacherous confines of the tunnel.
“Hey! Watch where you’re going!” Gavin growled, mostly a little irked that she was now in the lead. But he eased his scooter over closer to the tracks, as well, and sped up until he was just behind her.
“How much further?” she called out, not bothering to look back.
“Hard to tell exactly. We’ve been down here a little over an hour, so we should be getting pretty close. But my GPS is useless this far underground.”
A few more minutes went by, with both of them focusing intently on the path just ahead. A crash down here could be ruinous. Or worse. Finally, Sam started slowing down a bit, leaning forward to look carefully down the bore of the endless dark hole stretching out in front of them.
“Hey, Gav, I think I see something!”
“What is it? I can’t see a thing from back here.”
“It looks like a door, and a platform of some sort. Maybe a hundred or so feet ahead, up on the right.”
Sam throttled down even slower as she approached the station. “There’s no train, but it’s clearly another terminal. Where do you suppose we are?”
They both came to a complete stop with their headlights trained on the platform and the closed set of double doors set into the tunnel wall.
“Well, from your description it looks a lot like the station in the laboratory complex, but as you said, there’s no train. So this must be another entry point for the train. And, based upon what I know about what’s between here and the exit at Ostia, I’d say we’re probably directly beneath what’s left of the Sistine Chapel and the papal apartments.”
“Should we see if we can get the doors open and check out what’s on the other side?” Sam suggested.
“I’d say that was a really bad idea, actually. If this is in fact the escape route for the chapel, there’s nothing left above our heads right now but a pile of smoking rubble. And look—” He pointed up toward the roof of the tunnel, which looked far more damaged than anywhere else they’d seen, with a great many bricks dislodged and lying on the ground all around them. “I think that nails it. It had to have been the force of the explosion to have caused all this damage. So we are getting very close to the train station, maybe another couple hundred feet.” He climbed off his Vespa and set the kickstand.
“Where are you going? As you said, we’re almost there.”
“Yeah, but first we need to make sure none of those bricks or any other debris is resting on the tracks. Otherwise we might get derailed when we come back through here. Or at least get shook up pretty badly, which I’m guessing wouldn’t do those thousand-year-old jars any good.”
“Oh. Yeah, you’re right.” Sam climbed off and set her kickstand, as well, and they both grabbed their flashlights to check out the tracks. As Gavin had suggested, several of the bricks had fallen directly on the tracks, but they made quick work clearing it all off, and pretty soon they were back on their way.
38
Fatebenefratelli Hospital, Rome
“Wha—where am I?” Orso made a big show of coming out of the coma, swinging his head around the room with a look of total confusion on his face, but nobody was around to appreciate his well-planned performance. Annoyed, he reached over and pressed the button to summon a nurse. In seconds several nurses raced into the room, followed on their heels by a doctor wearing light blue scrubs.
“Wha—where am I?” he repeated, now that he had an audience.
The doctor stepped forward. “You are in Fatebenefratelli Hospital, Cardinal Orso. In Rome, in the middle of the Tiber River. You collapsed during the conclave yesterday morning, and they brought you here. How are you feeling?”
Orso pressed his hands to his head, then to his chest. “I—I guess I’m fine. My head hurts a little. What happened?”
“We’re not sure, Cardinal. When you arrived here, your heart was racing pretty fast and your breathing had slowed to a crawl. But everything settled down before we could even get you on a ventilator, and none of our tests were all that dispositive. Still, you’ve been in a coma for almost a day. Do you remember anything about what happened?”
Now was the moment. Everything he had lived for, all his plans for the future were dependent upon how he handled the next few minutes. “I-I was in the conclave. We-we had just finished the vote, and—Oh! I’m not allowed to say anything about that!”
“No, no, it’s fine,” the doctor assured him, glancing back to see that the television was off, and making a small gesture toward one of the nurses to retrieve the television remote and keep it away from the cardinal for the time being. “I think there are some people who will want to talk to you about all that, as soon as you’re a bit stronger. But let’s focus on your collapse. What do you remember about that?”
Orso wiped his brow. “The vote—the vote, it was complete, and the Dean was taking me—Oh! I mean, well, it was all so shocking! But you should know all about that, now. The Dean. Where is he? I need to—the Room of Tears, I need to get dressed—I need to—”
The doctor checked the cardinal’s vital signs on the monitor. Everything was well within normal limits. “That’s okay, Your Eminence. There will be time enough for that later. Right now you just need to rest.”
“No! I can’t rest! There’s too much to do! Surely you understand that!”
“I assure you, whatever you think you need to do can wait just a little bit longer. We need to get your strength back first.” He leaned over to one of the nurses and ordered a small sedative, just enough to get the cardinal settled down enough to sleep normally. And give him time to make a phone call to the Vatican.
As they all swept slowly out of the room, one of the other nurses whispered into the doctor’s ear. “He doesn’t know!”
The doctor put a hand on the small of her back and ushered her outside, out of earshot of the cardinal, before whispering back. “Yes. And we are not going to be the ones to tell him. You understand?”
She nodded, then glanced furtively back at the open door. What the cardinal had said, the Deacon, the Room of Tears. After all the intense television coverage leading up to the papal conclave, she didn’t have to be Catholic to understand exactly what that meant. That the man lying on the bed in the room next to her was not a cardinal, after all. He was the new pope.
39
The Tunnel
Sam reached out to punch the button, bringing up the lights for the lab complex train station, when Gavin suddenly grabbed her from behind and pulled her back.
“Whoa, there, pardner, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“What—why not?” she stammered in a low voice. “Do you think it’ll trigger some kind of alarm?”
“Probably not. But think about it. On the other side of that door, the entire hallway all the way to the el
evator is so dark you can barely make your way from one doorway to the next. But with the lights on inside here, we open that door and it’d be like sending a beacon out to anyone who’s out there saying ‘Hey, there! Look at me!’ Do you think we need to take that risk?”
Sam’s cheeks reddened as she pulled back from the light switch. “No, you’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You weren’t thinking is the thing. But hey, nothing to be ashamed of, you just haven’t been trained for this sort of thing, attacking an enemy under cover of darkness. That just happens to be my bailiwick, so from this point forward until we’re back at Ostia Antica, you need to follow my lead. Deal?”
“Yeah, deal. Let’s just get this done and get the heck out of here.”
They parked the Vespas on top of the train platform, facing back down the tunnel toward the exit. Ready to be loaded onboard the train at the last minute if needed, but also ready for a quick getaway. At least, as quick as they could manage on scooters traveling through the dark, littered tunnel. With their hands covering the light shining from their flashlights, they could barely see their way to the door. Gavin motioned for Sam to stay behind the door to the right as he opened the one on the left a crack and peeked outside. Not seeing anything moving around out there, he opened the door wider and stuck his head through.
“Looks like it’s all clear. Time to kill the flashlights for now and find our way down to the tenth floor. This way,” he said, moving off to the left.
“But the elevator’s the other way!” Sam protested.
“Yeah, but the sound from the elevator is audible on every floor, even if they don’t have some kind of alarm set up to warn them of its use. There’s a set of stairs, though, on the opposite end, and I seriously doubt they’re tracking those. So the stairs are our safest bet for now.”
“But won’t that be a problem when we start moving the jars? As small as the elevator is, we’ll have to make at least ten runs to get everything up to this level to load onto the train. If someone is watching, they’ll be on top of us before we’re even halfway done.”
“Don’t worry about that, Sam. I have a Plan B that should do the trick nicely.”
Gavin headed for the elevators with a brisk stride, staying close to the hallway wall on the right and relying upon his crepe-soled shoes to cover the sound of his passage. In moments they were racing down the stairs. At the tenth floor he once again carefully checked the hallway for people, but they were in luck. Nobody appeared to be guarding the door to the lab or patrolling the rest of the floor. He held the stairway door for Sam to slip through, then quickly followed, easing the door shut to muffle any sound.
They were in front of the door to Mehmed’s laboratory when Gavin dug out his cell phone from his pocket.
“You’re trying to place a call? Down here, ten stories underground? Seriously?” Sam asked.
“Shh. Sound carries,” Gavin muttered, still tinkering with his phone. Finally he seemed to find what he was looking for, and Sam heard the unmistakable sound of the door unlocking. Gavin pushed it open. “Inside, Sam. Now.”
They both moved inside the lab and Gavin slowly and silently closed the door behind them. The only light in the pitch-black room came from the screen of his cell phone. “Wait here,” he instructed, moving over to an almost-invisible panel set high up on the outside wall. Pulling it open, he flicked a switch, and suddenly all of the lights came on in the lab, temporarily blinding Sam.
“Okay, what gives?” she asked, shielding her eyes with her left hand. “How did you do all that?”
Gavin was smiling like a Cheshire cat. “I’ve been tinkering with home automation on and off for the past few years, and when we built out this lab, I thought it might be a good opportunity to put some of the gizmos I had lying stuffed in a box back in Rabat to good use. You know, just planning for a rainy day, like the one we’re having now.” He pointed toward the lock. “Basically, the lock mechanism is just a simple electromagnet that pulls back the latch, plus some electronics tied to the keypad outside that supplies the power for the magnet. All I did was wire an extra circuit into the latch. I’ve got a smart home box in the corner tied into a private Wi-Fi that doesn’t broadcast its SSID—you’d only know it was there if you knew to look for it. I just logged my phone into the Wi-Fi, brought up the smart home app, and triggered the lock. Since we didn’t use their keypad, there’s no way they can know that we just unlocked the door.”
“And what about the lights? Won’t they notice you turned them on?”
“They would if I was drawing any power from the complex’s electric grid. But when I put in the smart lock, I also installed a battery back-up for the lights. That’s what feeds that electric panel on the wall. So, with no windows and the door sealed completely shut, no one on the outside will ever know that we’ve got everything powered up in here and are packing the joint up.”
“Smart. And here I had you pegged as a backwater hillbilly. Guess I’ll have to drop the backwater part for now.”
Gavin grinned and hooked a thumb toward the room where the amphorae were stored. “Honestly, Sam, I’d love to get into it with you right here and now, but we’ve got the history of Christianity to save, so let’s get a move on.”
“Okay, but just to be clear, so far I’m really impressed, Gavin. You seemed to have planned for just about anything and everything. Smart switches, battery backups. But how are we possibly going to move all of those jars—plus the documents Mehmed has already pulled out, scanned, and resealed—out to the elevators and up to the train station without getting caught?”
“I was wondering when you were going to ask that question. This way, my little doubting Thomas.” Moving into the storage room that held all the amphorae that hadn’t yet been opened, Gavin double-checked that they were still firmly attached to the loading pallets that had been used to transport them from Venice to the Vatican laboratory. Next, walking over to the far wall, he pressed a button mounted obscurely on the adjacent wall near the corner. Immediately a section of the wall started to slide into a side niche, exposing what looked very much like an old-fashioned freight elevator.
“What’s this?” Sam asked, caught completely by surprise.
“Why, my dear, it appears to be a freight elevator. One large enough to carry the contents of this entire lab all the way up to the third floor in one trip. And, if you’ll look closely enough, I’ve also included a small forklift, plus a lovely assortment of parting gifts for you to take home and share with your family and friends.”
“And you built all this without anyone knowing?” Sam was blown away by the sheer audacity of what Gavin had managed to pull off under everybody’s noses.
“No, no, silly goose. It was here all along. If you think about it, there was no way the Vatican could have moved all of those huge paintings and statues they have down here using that puny little six-person elevator out front. So I figured when we were choosing where to put the lab, there had to be a service elevator tucked away down here somewhere. And when I looked over the original schematics for this complex, sure enough, there was one unmarked void on each floor, stacked one on top of the other. When I came down here to scope it out, that’s when I found it, gathering dust like that train upstairs. In fact, now that I know where everything’s located, I’m willing to bet that the back door on the elevator opens up directly onto the train platform, just in case everything needed to be evacuated lickety-split some day.”
“Hmm. Do you think it’s tied in somehow to the Swiss Guards’ security stations? So when we start moving it’ll send them scurrying our way?”
“Honestly, Sam, I don’t think so. But I guess we’ll have to plan for that contingency and be ready to hightail it onto the train as soon as we get there.” He spread his hands wide. “But that’s a problem we’ll have to deal with later on. Right now, we’ve got some jars to move.”
40
Vatican City
With the brief call from the hos
pital now behind them, the two men sat across a small table from each other in a well-secured room in the middle of the Vatican compound. Both were dressed in simple black robes, the only obvious difference between them being their hair—while one man had a full complement of slowly graying black hair, the other was completely bald, his pink scalp almost glowing in the harsh light from the fluorescent fixture mounted above them.
“Do you think he could be faking it?” the bald man asked.
“I don’t see how it’s possible,” the second answered. “He was unconscious from the moment they pulled him out of the chapel until he woke up at the hospital just a few minutes ago. He’s had no visitors, other than his doctors and nurses, and they all report that he’s been out like a light the entire time. When he woke up, his telephone was at the nurses’ station, and his television was off, so he couldn’t have heard any news about the attack. So if he’s lying, he’s got to realize that the other cardinals—who he still thinks are alive, by the way—will call him out on it. And consider the timing. Just minutes after Orso was pulled out of the chapel, the cardinals signaled that they had elected a new pope. And on top of that, Orso, as we both know, was considered at the outset of the conclave to be the leading candidate for the office. That all leads us to just one logical conclusion, that he is the duly elected pope, and managed to somehow miraculously escape the conclave just before the Turkish jet crashed into the Sistine Chapel and killed everyone else.”
“But still, what if he is lying somehow. Then we’d be naming a false pope to lead the Church …”
“And what exactly is the alternative? Look at the facts. The old pope is dead, probably also murdered by the Turks. The entire second tier of Church leadership is gone, at least all of them healthy enough mentally and physically to make it to the conclave. The Church itself is facing an unmitigated disaster, an existential crisis of faith possibly greater than anything else in the history of Christianity. So, what, you’re proposing that we call Cardinal Orso a liar? Based on what?”