Silver ota-1

by Steven Savile

  The guard looked at him as he approached. He felt sure the guard was going to stop him, to challenge him to prove his right to be there. He had every right, of course, his apartment was beyond the wall. This was where he lived. There were only one hundred and ten guards sworn in the service of the Holy See. He knew them all by sight. Likewise they knew him by sight. If they were looking for him, now was when he would find out. They didn’t stop him. The guard nodded slightly, then stepped back, allowing Abandonato through. It was ludicrously simple. Even after the assassination, they trusted the outfit. It was a costume, clothes, the familiarity of his face. He wanted to scream in the man’s face. It didn’t make him good! He might have had the olive-white complexion of the Mediterranean, but he was every bit as vile a terrorist as any Middle Eastern suicide bomber. The only difference was he was too much of a coward. His “bomb” was already in place, just waiting for the flame that would shrivel the plastic and release the toxic gas.

  He shuffled along quickly, heading for the Sistine Chapel.

  He didn’t know how he was going to stop the conclave.

  He hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  The washed-out colors of the murals and the corridors seemed so much more alive to Abandonato. It was almost as though knowing it was all going to end heightened his senses and made everything so much brighter and more vivid. He saw the paintings of Michelangelo’s apprentices and Bernini’s journeymen as though looking at them through new eyes. Every brush stroke was rendered exquisitely. He wanted to linger, to run his fingers over the colors as though he might soak up their brilliance and absorb it into his skin. But that was the Devil talking, trying to delay him while his evil work was done.

  He cursed himself and hurried on, following the path his feet knew so well, praying the Lord still believed in him. Give me the strength, he thought, coming around the final corner.

  He had made it. A surge of relief broke over him. He thought he was going to collapse under it. He stumbled into the antechamber. He was consumed by a single thought: get inside the chapel before they lit the coals.

  Six guards stood at the door of the Pope Sixtus’ chapel, the same six who had stood on the stage with Peter the Roman in Germany, the inner ring, the six most loyal. Five stared eyes front. The sixth looked at Abandonato as he buckled. For a moment he thought he was going collapse and go sprawling across the floor. He didn’t. The only collapse was internal, hope caving in to despair. It is always the most loyal, Abandonato thought, locking eyes with the man whose silver blade had slain the Holy Father. That had always been the Sicarii way.

  He was so close.

  One door away.

  But that door wasn’t merely chained and guarded, it was chained and guarded by Peter’s murderer, the last Sicarii assassin. The assassin had one final task: to see that the conclave’s seal would not be broken until the new Vicar of Christ had been chosen-by which time the College of Cardinal’s would be dead, murdered not by the assassin, but by Abandonato’s hand.

  He knew it was useless.

  He knew he had failed.

  Still he had to try.

  “I have to speak with the Cardinal Dean,” he demanded, breathless. There was no conviction behind his words, as though he expected to be denied. He barely had the air in his lungs to fuel the words. He was a broken man.

  “The conclave is sealed, Monsignor,” the assassin said. “It cannot be broken. That is the law of the conclave. Whatever your message, it must wait.”

  “No,” Abandonato pleaded. “It cannot. I must speak with the Cardinal Dean.” He stepped forward, reaching out to grab the guard’s uniform and shake him to make him understand-but of course he understood. He had engineered it. The man was Solomon’s left hand. Abandonato hesitated at the thought of “most loyal.” It seemed foul when he applied it to the murderer’s cause. The priest didn’t even know what his real name was. He wasn’t Swiss; his entire identity was a lie, though he did bare a passing resemblance to the young man whose life he had stolen. When the fire was lit he would leave the Holy See and return to his master, his job here done. Abandonato stopped himself from clutching the man’s double His hand just hung there between them, reaching out, while the guard stared at him. Abandonato could see the black hatred smoldering in his eyes.

  “Control yourself, Monsignor. Conclave will not be broken.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “You have to open the doors. You have to let me in. Please,” Abandonato begged. He didn’t know what else to say. All the way here he had thought about nothing more than reaching the doors, as though God would see them break open before him, like the waves of the Red Sea for Moses. He hadn’t expected the assassin to bar his way. He had thought he would simply throw himself on their mercy. He was so close. One door was all that stood between him and redemption. He couldn’t bear it. He reached out for the chains, but two of the guards beside him closed ranks and took hold of his arms, restraining him physically. They weren’t gentle. “There is a traitor,” he said, barely able to say the words. “The conclave is breached…”

  “Impossible,” the assassin said, reasonably. His black eyes burned into Abandonato. “We have been on duty since the doors were sealed. No one has entered. No one has left. That is the law of conclave. You are mistaken. There is no traitor here. If you insist on trying to force your way in to the chapel, we will have no choice but to think you are the one with treachery in your heart, and we would have to stop you. I take no pleasure in this, Monsignor, but the law is the law.”

  Abandonato felt every ounce of strength drain out of him. “Have mercy,” he pleaded. But there was no mercy here, and no redemption. His sins would find him out.

  The assassin stepped in close, his lips no more than a few inches away from Abandonato’s ear and said, “Return to your chambers, Monsignor. Let God’s will be done. I will come to look in on you when my duty is done. I will see you are taken care of. I understand your grief and pain, but you must abide by the will of Our Father, just as we all must.”

  Abandonato slumped.

  “Go with God, Monsignor,” the assassin said, and from his tone Abandonato knew he was mocking him.

  He wanted to scream, but all he could do was turn his back. He wasn’t a fighter. He didn’t have a gun and even if he had, he would not have been able to wield it. Force went against everything he believed in. But there was so little left for him to believe. He wanted to believe he had been seduced, like Eve, tempted into the path of evil. He had chosen his path. He had set his foot on it. It was his choice. There was a serpent, but the choice was his. The Lord had given him free will and he used it to betray Him.

  There was nothing Abandonato could do to force them to break the seal and pull back the chains. This was his punishment. He had brought death into the House of the Lord, and death would not be appeased by begging, prayers or guilt. Its hunger was rapacious. It would only be sated by the inevitable. More than one hundred souls would find the glory of God ahead of their time. That is my doing, he told himself.

  The two guards who held his arms escorted him to the end of the passageway, then crossed their halberds across the entry, barring any possible return.

  He looked at them each in turn. “You have to break the conclave,” he pleaded. “They can’t be allowed to vote. They will all die.” He knew he sounded like a crazed man. He was desperate. That stripped him of his reason.

  Their gazes didn’t waver. It was as though he had already become a ghost.

  Finally he had no choice but to walk away. There was no second way into the chamber. The assassin was right when he said it was a fortress. If he couldn’t get past them, there was no way he could stop the vote. And if he couldn’t stop the vote, he couldn’t stop the fire.

  He was damned.

  He had failed the living.

  He would inevitably fail the dead.

  Names had power. He was named true. Gianni Abandonato, Gianni the Forsaken.

  There would be no place at
the Lord’s side for him. Not with their blood still fresh on his hands. How apt that he had fallen for the silver tongue of Solomon and the so-called truth of Judas. He laughed bitterly. The sound chased him through the Holy See.

  He knew then how Iscariot must have felt, trapped into the only possible course of action left to him at the end.

  Abandonato shuffled through the corridors, lost in grief, his head down, hands clutched together in prayer, but those prayers failed to reach his lips. He resolved to kill himself, not that his one death would sate the beast he had loosed within the Holy See.

  “Fater, forgive me,” he said, doubting that even the Almighty’s capacity for forgiveness could be so vast as to accommodate his crime.

  And then someone shouted his name.

  He looked up.

  Noah couldn’t believe his eyes.

  It took him a moment and a double-take to recognize that the man shuffling quickly towards them down the narrow passage was Gianni Abandonato. He had walked out of one of the smaller passageways that fed into this one. Abandonato had his head down, his fingers laced in front of him as though in prayer, but when Noah called out his name his head snapped up and he stopped dead in his tracks. There was no mistaking the man.

  “Abandonato!” His voice swelled to fill the hand-painted chamber. The Monsignor looked like a startled rabbit, trapped, and he backed up a step. Noah saw the sweat, the nervous twitches, the almost robotic walk-they were all classic signs of a suicide bomber. He had a split second to think. His hands were hidden in his cassock. They could be holding a detonator; they could be empty. He didn’t have the luxury of being able to make a mistake.

  Abandonato’s robes were bulky enough to hide a vest under. A bomb didn’t have to be a complex thing. If he got into the chapel, even the least sophisticated ball bearings and nails sewn into a stockade of dynamite would take out everyone in the blast radius. And it would be messy. There was no way for Noah to tell whether the priest was wired to blow. He was walking unevenly. He seemed to be favoring one side, his right over his left. That could mean he was packing something heavy, something that changed his walk. He had a split second to weigh it all up.

  “On your knees! Now!” he yelled. When Abandonato didn’t go down, he didn’t yell again. He couldn’t risk what would happen if he insisted on taking the martyr’s way out.

  Abandonato seemed trapped in indecision for a moment, then turned and bolted.

  That one desperate action told Noah all he needed to know.

  He drew and fired in a single smooth motion.

  Beside him, the man who wanted to be best friends with James Bond put three shots into the Monsignor as his body jerked and jived and fell. He put another one in him as he hit the floor. Abandonato twitched once, a violent spasm, then lay utterly still.

  Noah approached the body cautiously, his gun aimed at the man. Anything, the slightest movement, and he would put another bullet into him. Noah felt the adrenalin flood his system. That was always the way, the sudden kick, too late to do any good, the rush of the chemical in his blood. He felt good. He’d done his job. He’d succeeded where Konstantin had failed. He’d saved the Cardinals. He knew then and there he was going to gloat. Just once. Just to see the Russian’s face. He smiled to himself, imagining the look his wisecrack would earn him. He had the entire journey from Rome back to Nonesuch to come up with a killer line.

  He stood over Abandonato and looked down at him. The priest wasn’t quite gone. He held on for dear life. Noah crouched down beside him, pulling his hands out from the folds of his cassock. There was no detonator. The holy man’s last breaths made a curious whistling noise as they leaked between his teeth.

  Abandonato was trying to say something.

  “No last rites, Father,” Noah said, kneeling down beside him. “It’s too late for that. You’re going to hell.”

  “Please,” Abandonato managed. It was barely a breath. Noah leaned in closer until he could feel the dying breath on his cheek. Words came out with it like ghosts. “Fire.”

  “That’s right, pal. That’s where you’re going. You’re going to burn in hellfire.”

  Abandonato didn’t hear him.

  He was already dead.

  Noah checked for a pulse at his throat. Barring resurrection, Abandonato wasn’t getting up again.

  He didn’t close his eyes.

  He patted the dead man down. He wasn’t wearing a bomb belt or anything else. He checked his pockets. There was no detonator. If he a suicide bomber, he wasn’t a particularly good one. He’d only managed fifty percent of the job.

  Noah pushed himself back up to his feet.

  “You better get someone to clean this mess up,” he told the young soldier beside him.

  He had done it.

  Had he been a religious man, he would have given thanks to God.

  He wasn’t.

  Instead he took the cell phone from his pocket and dialed home. “It’s over,” he told Lethe. “The priest’s dead. I got to him before he could finish it.”

  “Then I’d say today’s a good day, wouldn’t you?” Lethe said.

  “One of the better ones,” he agreed. “Sometimes it’s nice to be on the side of the angels.”

  “Amen to that, brother man, time to come on home.”

  Noah hung up the phone.

  “Humor me,” he said to the soldier. “I want to go check out the chapel, make sure everything is okay. You stay here. If that guy moves, shoot him again.”

  The young guard nodded earnestly.

  Noah followed the passageway all the way to the doors of the Sistine Chapel. There were only five guards standing sentry. One of the guards came toward him. He recognized the man vaguely, but horribly, he had already begun to think that one joker looked pretty much the same as the other.

  He saw the ceremonial chain looped through the silver door handles. From where he was he couldn’t see whether the seal had been broken.

  “Has anyone entered the chapel since the conclave began?” Noah asked.

  “No one is permitted to break the conclave, sir,” the guard said, his English slightly accented. The man’s smile was just as slight.

  “I know. But just because no one is allowed to go in doesn’t mean no one has gone in. I mean, I’m not allowed to be here, and here I am,” Noah said.

  “The seal has not been broken, sir.”

  It wasn’t until he was on the steps of St. Peter’s and walking down in the piazza that it hit him: the priest was coming the wrong way. He wasn’t going to the chapel at all. He couldn’t have been. He had to have been coming back from it. Otherwise Noah would have come up behind him. There was only one way in and one way out of the Sistine Chapel.

  He had checked Abandonato’s corpse. He had been clean. No bomb. No detonator. No gun. Nothing.

  It didn’t make sense.

  The guard had sworn no one had been inside the chapel after it had been sealed. Neri had assured him about all of the security measures the Vatican Police took before the Cardinals were locked away, sweeping for bugs and other devices. The place was a fortress. People had been telling him that all day. There was only one way in and one way out, and that was through the guards. The place couldn’t have been much safer if it was lined with lead and buried sixty feet under.

  He twisted around to look back at the Basilica.

  Black smoke billowed out of the chimney.

  All around him disappointment murmured through the faithful.

  There wouldn’t be a new Pope today.

  And Noah relaxed because the smoke meant they were safe.

  Behind him news crews began rorting the black smoke to the waiting world. The message was clear. The Cardinals had failed to reach agreement. There would be another election in three days.

  Until then the faithful would be without a spiritual leader.

  He walked away through the crowds.

  All he wanted to do now was go home. He didn’t feel like being alone. He never felt
like being alone. He didn’t like the dark hours. He didn’t like the silence. That was the dark country where his ghosts lived. That was why he drank. That was why he paid women to share his bed. He would face his dead when he joined them down in the fiery pits of hell. Until then he wanted to hear breathing beside him, as if the shallow rise and fall of someone else’s chest could stop the dead from finding him.

  Blessed is the silence.

  Noah was with Neri in the same cafe, drinking the same thick, strong coffees when the TV feed switched from the news anchor to one of the many on-the-spot reporters covering the conclave. Their conversation veered from Juventus to supermodels and fast cars. It was the easy chat of two men whose friendship had been forged in hell and had come out on the other side of the pit together. He checked his watch. He had four hours until Sir Charles’ G5 would be ready for takeoff, which meant plenty of time to look at the stunning beauty of the city or the stunning beauties of the city as they walked by. He opted for the less energetic option. There really was something about the twenty-something Roman women he watched laughing and joking and utterly self-absorbed as only twenty-somethings can be. It was as if the world around them didn’t exist. He appreciated the view. “Very easy on the eye,” he said to Neri.

  “This is Rome, my friend,” Dominico Neri agreed. “Even the buildings have the good grace to look hot.”

  Noah grinned. “I need to come back one day when there isn’t a crisis, take some time to appreciate the natural beauty of the city on the seven hills.”

  “There is a couch with your name on it.”

  There was the flicker of movement on the screen over Neri’s shoulder. It caught Noah’s eye. The face on the screen held it. xistim Caspi. Solomon. He was holding an RTL microphone and talking.

  “Turn it up!” Noah shouted, dragging his chair back from the table and standing up.

  Neri turned around trying to see what Noah was shouting about.