New Rome Rising

by Rene Fomby

  “Yes, of course. We’ll get underway immediately. We have more than enough fuel on board to make it all the way to Venice, where we can offload your cargo straight onto the docks at BancItalia. I’ll have a cabin boy show you to your room, and the steward will be up in just a moment with a bottle of our finest champagne.”

  “Hmm. I think a bottle may be too much for now, Captain. I’m trying to cut back. In fact, please promise me that if I have more than one or two glasses of wine and then start bellowing for more, like Ulysses screaming for the sirens, lash me to the mast and plug your ears up with cotton until I’ve come to my senses.”

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” he answered with a wink. “But at any rate, I’ll have the steward bring you a split for now, plus a bottle of sparkling water and some ice.”

  “Perfect! Thank you. Well, I’ll stop pestering you for now and let you get us on our way. See you at dinner tonight?”

  “Yes. The crew was lucky enough to pull in some fresh bonito while we were waiting, and we picked up some nice gamberetto when we refueled in Messina, so the chef has promised us a feast.”

  “I look forward to it. Until then, buongiorno, Captain.”

  “Buongiorno, Signora Tulley.”

  53

  Vatican City

  “Your—speech—has created quite a stir.”

  The pope had just finished breakfast and was leafing through the intelligence briefing his staff prepared for him at the start of each day. His newly appointed personal secretary and the head of the papal household, Archbishop Giorgio Bianchi, stood off to one side, watching the pope with a cautious eye.

  “Hmm, yes, I imagine it would.” He stopped when he came to the folder breaking down all of the evidence proving Turkey’s complicity in the attack on the conclave. “There doesn’t seem to be any real remaining doubt. The entire operation was planned and executed at the highest levels of the Turkish government.”

  “So it would appear, Your Holiness. But I might suggest that the Turks are not the same as Islam. There is really no evidence pointing to a larger conspiracy in all of this. And taking on all of Islam, inciting nothing less than a new holy war over the attack—”

  “Are you saying I’m wrong, Giorgio?” the pope asked, one eyebrow carefully arched.

  “No, Your Holiness. It’s just that—a holy war on this scale, that would lead to nothing short of a new world war, a war that could dwarf all of the wars of humanity’s past combined.”

  “Yes. An Armageddon. That’s what they’re calling it, isn’t that right? The Eschaton. The end of the world.” The pope placed the folder down on his desk and sat back. “But the end of one world is the beginning of the next. Before we can see the Kingdom of God, He must bring the fire that scourges the Earth of its demons, of its evil. And where is there any force on this planet that is more evil than Islam?”

  “Parts of Islam, perhaps, Holy Father, but not all—”

  “If only part of the meal set before you is corrupt, is that all right? Doesn’t all of the meal then become corrupt when you partake of it, and doesn’t it then render you corrupt, as well? Islam is a disease, an abomination before our Lord, and our world must be cleansed of it before that disease corrupts all of humanity.”

  Archbishop Bianchi had no answer to that, or at least no answer that seemed in any way likely to sway this pope. “I can see that you’re fully committed to this path, Father, and that nothing I say at this moment will change any of that. So, what next? The Vatican by itself is not capable of going to war—we would be challenged to take on even Istanbul with the resources currently at our command. And although the Church itself wields untold riches, almost all of that is in real estate or other non-liquid assets. If this holy war is to proceed, who exactly is going to take this war to the Muslims? Who is going to pay for it?”

  “All in due time, my friend.” The pope reached into a drawer and pulled out a small sheaf of papers. “Here you’ll find the draft of a Papal Bull I drew up last night when I had trouble sleeping. In it are instructions reconstituting the Black Nobility. They will serve as my vanguard in the coming battles.”

  “The Black Nobility? The same group of offices pope Paul VI abolished back in 1968?”

  “The very same. It was a mistake, a grievous error on his part that must be corrected immediately.”

  “But Your Holiness, the doctrine of papal infallibility—”

  “Is exactly why he was wrong to abolish the Nobility in the first place!” The pope had jumped up from his chair and was pacing back and forth from his desk to a window overlooking a small courtyard set deep inside the Vatican. “Don’t you see, that which other popes had established was never in his power to dissolve. No, the Black Nobility shall be restored, must be restored, and with it the honor and reputations of those who were so unfairly deprived of their rank, position and wealth. Before we can move forward to repair the wrongs Islam has inflicted on this earth we must first set right the wrongs we have inflicted on ourselves.”

  Archbishop Bianchi picked up the sheaf of papers from where the pope had dropped them on his desk during his short tirade. “Yes, Your Holiness. Forgive me, I was wrong to question you about this. Of course you are right. I will have the staff set to work on this right away.”

  “Thank you, Giorgio.” The pope walked over and settled again at his desk. “I’d like to see that completed by mid-week, if it’s at all possible.”

  “Mid-week? Yes, I’ll have it all ready for you by then.”

  “Good. In that case, please excuse me. I have some more pressing work to complete before the day is done. Please make sure I’m not interrupted before dinner.”

  “As you wish, Your Holiness.”

  54

  Rabat - Sunday

  Gavin was getting more and more frustrated. He was already several days deep into the mousetrap gambit, and still there wasn’t a single rat that had even stopped to sniff at the easy bait he was dangling right out in front of Tulley’s henchmen on the streets of Rabat.

  If his plan was going to work at all, something had to happen soon. After all, every day that crept by meant Andy’s chances of survival were melting away like an ice cream cone in summer. Just to keep himself from going crazy waiting, he pulled up the file on her kidnapping for the thousandth time and started digging through it one line at a time, trying to find some clue that might point him toward where she was being held prisoner. But, once again, he found nothing. Her abductors hadn’t left so much as a single footprint in the sand.

  He dialed Sam just to have something to do, but she didn’t answer. Meaning she was still probably out to sea on her family yacht, keeping close personal watch over the priceless Templar treasure. That left him checking and rechecking the details of all the traps he had set on the road between his apartment and the American Embassy. The key to turning the tables on his attackers, after all, was to simply be much better prepared. And Rabat was now his home turf, so with all the time he had been given to sort through the details of his counter-attack, with even the smallest amount of luck he just might have a very narrow chance of succeeding, of getting to them before they managed to get to him. And that was a chance he had to take, if it meant there was any possibility of ever seeing Andy alive again. His life for hers was a bargain he was more than ready to accept.

  55

  Houston

  Harry’s trip to the pound ended up being a total wash out. Almost all of the dogs there were pit bulls or pit bull mutts of some form or fashion, and until he could scrape together enough money to buy his own house, that just wasn’t going to fly. Every single apartment or rental he had looked at when he first came to Houston had a no pit bull policy, which might partially explain why so many of them had been abandoned.

  Sitting down at his desk with his first cup of morning coffee, Harry quickly plowed through all of the most unpleasant tasks he had on his to-do list, a practice he had picked up from a CLE class on the best habits of successful professional
s. It is far too easy to put off the tasks you least want to tackle in favor of the fun stuff, and that means they often wind up being ignored to the point that they fester into major problems. Better to tackle them first thing in the morning when you’re fresh, and then the rest of your day is bound to seem a whole lot easier in return.

  By a little after nine he had everything on his to-do list completely wrapped up, and the rest of his day was free. He pulled up a movie guide on his computer, but nothing seemed all that compelling, so instead he decided to head out for some Korean fried chicken at a small restaurant he’d been dying to try in Chinatown. Then he figured he might make the rounds at open houses, getting a jump on house hunting for Sam when she hit town in about a month. At the very least he could get a handle on what things cost and what was special about each of the different neighborhoods scattered around Houston. And he might even bump into a real estate agent that seemed promising. Promising in terms of Sam’s needs, he reminded himself quickly, all too aware that it had already been a long couple of months since everything had blown up with his ex-fiancé.

  Logging off his computer and grabbing the keys to his new Honda Ridgeline pickup, he trotted out the door whistling a tune to no one in particular.

  56

  Vatican City

  According to the morning intelligence briefing, the pope’s little speech had apparently set off a firestorm around the world. Already, angry mobs had begun attacking mosques throughout Europe and North America, and Muslims living in those countries had been advised to stay inside and not show their faces.

  Western governments had been completely caught off guard by the world’s reaction to the pope’s speech and were hardly any better at containing the outpouring of vitriol and violence than they had been in dealing with the years-long refugee crisis. In Southern Europe and especially along the U.S. / Mexico border, the local reaction had quickly swollen to levels seemingly impossible to control. And, of course, as Sir Isaac Newton once famously observed, for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. The unchecked rise in anti-Muslim violence triggered a similar upwelling of anti-Western violence around the world, even in countries that had long been friendly toward Europe and America. Pro-Islamic crowds forced the evacuation of American embassies across the Middle East and South Asia. Turkey itself was already on a full-bore war footing, even as it protested its innocence in the unthinkable attack on the Vatican, protests that fell on ever-deafening ears.

  Another pope might have regretted his role in sparking all of this, but to Pope Peter II the fault lay solely in the Islamic world’s refusal to listen to his Lord’s plaintive but unmistakable cries for restraint. The attack on the conclave was not in itself the impetus for the crisis, it was just the last in a long, unbroken stream of Islamic heresy and its service to the darkest enemies of God. Service to the Lord of Darkness himself.

  The pope picked up a news article from Houston, Texas, reporting that an oil refinery had been bombed, killing seven refinery workers and wounding dozens more, and that an Islamic terrorist had already been apprehended at the site and arrested. Another article covered an aborted bombing attempt at the Marble Arts underground station in London, and a third outlined a knife attack at a nightclub in Amsterdam by a crazed Muslim extremist.

  Archbishop Bianchi had asked how he planned to execute this war against Islam. Now it appeared that the world was quickly answering that question itself. This level of anger, this kind of violence did not spring up overnight. No, it had been there all along, a throbbing wound lurking just beneath the surface of polite society, waiting for the right moment, the right opportunity to burst forth into the light of day. And the Turkish plot against the last bastions of truth and decency in this world, against the heart and soul of Christendom itself, had turned out to be the Western world’s September 11th on steroids.

  No, his speech hadn’t caused any of this. He had only pointed out the obvious, pointed out the folly of a political correctness toward the Muslim world that had blinded all of God’s chosen people to the simple truth, a truth that had been suppressed for far too long. Satan had already raised up his army, the army of Dar al-Harb, Islam’s House of War, and the forces of Christendom—the forces of God—had been painfully slow to answer. But now that God’s war was finally upon this world, now that the Messiah was returning to vanquish Satan and his demons, to restore goodness and virtue to the earth and establish the Kingdom of God for all eternity, Islam’s days in the sun were numbered. Satan’s minions would not walk in the golden streets of the new Jerusalem, nor pass through that city’s twelve gates of solid pearl. No, they would spend eternity in darkness, the same darkness that lined the heart of their lustful fallen angel.

  The pope finished off the last of his corrections to his next proclamation, then set down his pen and rang for an assistant to bring him a glass of brandy to help soothe his agitated soul so he could finally drift off to sleep, sleep that had been very elusive ever since his return from the hospital. As he waited for his aide he glanced over a report he had missed earlier, about a secret lab hidden in the warehouse complex deep beneath the Vatican grounds. A lab run by a Muslim. And a Jew. On sacred Vatican grounds. He made a note to look into that further.

  57

  Houston

  It was late in the day, and Harry was scoping out the last open house on his list, a three-bedroom cottage in the University area near Rice. It seemed just about perfect for Sam and Maddie, modest and unpretentious yet large enough for company, plus it came with a big back yard for Barley. And compared to the Heights or Montrose, older neighborhoods that had fallen prey to the hipster trendiness of the millennials that were now swarming into Houston, the demographics of the area were still dominated by professorial types with their intellectual sensibilities and interests. Just up Sam’s alley.

  He was checking out the last bathroom when his cell phone rang. A local number, but one he didn’t recognize. He hesitated, but decided that a local number was probably not going to be yet another fundraising call from Baylor law school or some politician.

  “Hello? Harry Crawford here.”

  “Yes, sir, are you the lawyer? Did I get the right number?” The voice sounded foreign, maybe faintly Middle Eastern.

  “I’m a lawyer, yes. How can I help you?”

  “My—my husband’s been arrested, and he—he needs a lawyer. I’ve called almost everyone, but nobody wants to help, even though he’s innocent. I got your number from someone who says you take on the tough cases.”

  Innocent? They’re all innocent until they’re proven guilty. “Okay, I’m willing to talk, see what you have to say. But look, it’s Sunday night. Why don’t you swing by my office in the morning, say around nine? We can talk then.” He quickly gave her the address for his office downtown.

  “Thank you, sir. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your taking on Nabil’s case—”

  “I haven’t promised to take him on just yet, we’re just going to talk about it, okay?” Nabil. Definitely Middle Eastern. “But be at my office on time tomorrow morning and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “Nine o’clock. Right. Thank you, sir!”

  Harry killed the call and shoved his phone back into his pocket. The realtor was making motions indicating that she was closing up and it was time to leave, so he stole one last glance around the room and headed for the front door.

  A case so ugly nobody wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Sounds like something that’s right up my alley. For the first time all weekend, a faint smile began to creep across his face as he hopped into his pickup. He pushed the button to start the engine, then tuned the radio to a local country station. Rolling down the road with the windows down, singing along to the radio, Harry was filled with the excitement and uncertainty that he always felt at the onset of a new case. And the lingering suspicion that this might turn out to be yet another pro bono client, leaving him working once again for the publicity instead of a paycheck. Well, when you can
’t afford a billboard, free publicity is better than nothing …

  58

  Venice - Monday

  It had taken over an hour to get everything lifted carefully off the yacht and stored away in an extra-secure section of the bank’s vault, a section that had been reserved for over four centuries for the Ricciardelli family’s private use. And in all that time, no use had ever been more private than this one. Accepting the key to the sealed chamber from BancItalia’s head of security—the other key had been given to the bank’s president—Sam stuffed it into her purse and called for a water taxi to take her to her house near the Teatro La Fenice, the ancient opera house that, like the Phoenix for which it was named, had risen proudly from the ashes of three devastating fires.

  Sam glanced at the waterside entrance to the theater as her taxi glided past. Opera held little attraction to her—her tastes ran more to Star Trek and old musicals, and her limited command of the Italian language made following along with the action next to impossible—but she knew she needed to take in at least one performance someday soon, if nothing else than to say she had tried it.

  Finally they pulled up to her private landing. Metal gates rose up out of the water to let them pass inside, and the small water taxi eased in next to the mooring. Stepping ashore, she paid the fare with an app on her phone, adding a generous tip, then headed indoors.

  Seeing her enter through the main, waterside entryway, her head butler rushed to greet her. “Signora, signora! I am so sorry. You have a visitor. I told him you wished to be alone, but he insisted on staying anyway. He is waiting for you in the sitting room.”

  “No, no problem, Alessandro. Who is it, may I ask?”