“Carabinieri! Turn the damned TV up!” Noah yelled at the barista behind the counter. She didn’t seem to know what to do. “Just give me the bloody remote!”
Noah dodged between the tables to stand beneath the television set. He could barely hear Solomon’s speech. He would hear it again and again over the coming days, but at that moment it was barely a whisper until the barista found the volume.
Neri came up beside him.
“You don’t know my name,” Solomon said to him through the TV speaker, “but you will. It will be on your lips every day now for the rest of your lives. I will tell you this, your church is built on lies and death. Its very foundation is not the rock of Peter; it is the glorification of a false messiah. Today I bring the death back to the door of Rome. For five hundred years Rome tortured my people. For five centuries and more it turned them into slaves. It drove them out of their own homeland. It tried to purge the name of them and their home from the earth, so deep and unreasoning was its hatred. Today that changes. It was my blade that killed Peter Romanus. That blade forged from the silver pieces of Judas Iscariot. The coins that bought the death of your Messiah spend just as well today. They have bought another death-this time the Roman Pontiff-and with his death the world is ready for the new Messiah.” He stared out through the screen. His beautiful face was made for Hollywood.
Behind him the picture broke into a grainy image from a pinhole spy camera hidden within the Sistine Chapel.
It took Noah a moment to realize what he was seeing.
The Cardinals were dead.
Some had died on their knees in prayer, staring down into the pits of hell itself. Others on their backs, staring blindly up at the beauty of Michelangelo’s ceiling, out of reach like heaven itself.
Solomon’s face came back onto the screen.
“I am Solomon. Remember my name.”
Then he was gone, and the camera was focused on Maderno's facade. A moment later the live feed broke and the grainy image of the dead in the chapel returned to fill the television screen.
Noah pushed out through the glass doors of the cafe into the rising heat of the afternoon. There were thousands of people still packed into the square. He could see the RTL mobile broadcast trailer. He started pushing through the people to get to it.
But by the time he reached it Solomon was long gone.
Noah slammed his fist off the side of the trailer.
He had been there.
He had stood right in the middle of them and as good as said your God is dead.
He opened the trailer door and climbed up and inside.
The female anchor lay dead and bloody in one of the chairs, her cameraman lifeless on the floor at her feet. The screens all showed the grainy live feed from inside the chapel itself. He had no idea how to kill the transmission, so he went down the banks of switches and dials, tripping them all until the picture died.
Neri came into the trailer behind him.
He looked like a living dead man. He was talking into his cell phone in rapid Italian, shaking his head and gesticulating.
Noah wasn’t listening to him.
He had found the gift Solomon had left for him.
The woman clutched a battered leather drawstring purse in her hands. Noah pried it from her lifeless fingers and emptied it out. Thirty pieces of silver spilled out across the bank of displays. There was a note. He unfolded it. The message was written in blood.
All debts paid in full.
“Not even close,” Noah said.
The truth of just how badly he had failed was only beginning to sink in.
Beside him, Dominico Neri made the sign of the cross.
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Silver ota-1 Page 41