Silver

by Steven Savile

  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.

  "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.

  Steven Savile's Ogmios Team will return in 2011 with

  GOLD

  From Variance Publishing Author's Note Silver is a work of fiction, which, by necessity, means I have taken liberties with the facts to suit the purpose of my story--that is, to entertain, to thrill, to shock, to scare, to keep you turning pages, in other words; and every now and then, to make you think. However, where possible, I haven't told any "lies." Even so, where I have taken liberties, like the very best of lies, I have done everything I could to keep the story's basis in what could well be the "truth." Or, at the very least, aspects of it. That's not to say that Menahem and Eleazar did inherit the thirty pieces of silver, nor to suggest that in the final days of Masada that they forged them into a silver dagger and hid it away. That's a bit of creative license. The truth is that there are many conflicting explanations of what happened to those Tyrian shekels. But the one enduring impression is that, try as he might, Judas Iscariot could not rid himself of the damned things.

  That set me to thinking.

  This is how I work. Something gets under my skin and won't leave me alone. Right around the same time as this started niggling at me, I read The Gospel of Judas, published by The National Geographic Society, and was, like a lot of the rest of the world, fascinated by the idea that the Great Betrayal could, in fact, have been the Ultimate Sacrifice.

  I knew immediately that I wanted to tell the story from the other side.

  Actually we need to go back a little further in time. It was the middle of the night, 3 or 4 am, September 1996, Counting Crows' Aust and Everything After was on the CD player, and the yellow-faced Simpsons were flickering away on the small portable TV in the corner. I lay on a bed in a seedy student apartment in Newcastle (just around the corner from the place Ronan breaks into in the opening chapters, actually) with my then two best friends, Gary and Dene, when Gary flicked through the channels on the TV, bored, and stumbled across Henry Lincoln telling his fabulous story about Rennes-le-Chateau and Berenger Sauniere (check out Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh if you haven't already). I was hooked. I kept thinking 'this would make an awesome novel,' but I knew I was a long way from accomplished enough to tackle something like that, so I filed it away, always intending to come back to it.

  Move on the best part of a decade . . . move from the seedy apartment in Newcastle to a baking beach in Egypt . . . and dripping with sweat, I am finishing the last few pages of Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, and instead of closing the book on the final scene, I skimmed the ads in the back (don't tell me I am the only one who does this, I won't believe you) and saw the write up for his next novel, The Da Vinci Code, which, while being nothing like the story I had spent ten years imagining (being as I wanted to do it as an historical, from the perspective of the Templar Knights guarding the road to Jerusalem and holing themselves up in the temple before emerging with both mother and child they must smuggle out of the Holy Land), pretty much killed the idea stone dead. My wife tells me I actually threw my paperback into the sea. I do admit to feeling a huge amount of frustration. And of course, The Da Vinci Code had been out for several years by this point, but somehow I had managed to avoid hearing what it was all about.

  Apparently I am very good at avoiding spoilers.

  So, flash forward to London as 2005 became 2006 . . . I walked into Waterstones on Oxford Street, determined to find research material to write a thriller about Antarctica being the foundation for the lost civilization of Atlantis, and found hundreds upon hundreds of copies of Stel Pavlou's Decipher everywhere. A quick glance at the back and my heart sank. Yet again, a great idea torpedoed by arriving late to the party. I think this is every writer's nightmare. We could literally stop ourselves from writing a word if we discounted every idea that has been done before. On the shelf beside Decipher, however, was the very striking hardcover of the Gospel of Judas. I bought both books and had finished the Gospel before I went to bed that night. The beginnings of Silver were with me when I awoke the next day.

  I didn't talk about it with anyone, but decided I needed to do some research. Like most people, I had a passing familiarity with the biblical Gospels, and thanks to the millennial fear that had gripped the world around 1999, was au fait with a lot of end-of-the-world prophecies, the Gnostic gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls and such.

  Having decided I wanted to tell the story of Judas in some way, my mind went back to the shekels. It was a short step from 'he can't get rid of them' to turning them into a cursed inheritance his children couldolor get rid of, but I am getting ahead of myself here. One of my very first research days was spent looking at the name Iscariot and its etymology. It was one of those days when, as a writer, you start to think not only does your story make sense, you've stumbled onto the truth . . .

  The most likely explanation derives from the Hebrew yshqryvt (Is-Qriyoth) or 'Man of Kerioth,' Kerioth being the name of not one, but two Judean towns.

  The second theory, and the one that I chose to exploit in Silver, is that Iscariot identifies Judas as descending from the line of Sicarii assassins, who were almost certainly the world's first terrorist group. Historians argue that the Sicarii did not come into being until the fifth or sixth decades of the first century, which would mean Judas himself could not have been a member. . . but this is where fiction and reality blur so well.

  Very few reliable histories exist fr
om the day, obviously, but a lot of what we take as truth comes from the writings of Jospehus, i.e., The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. The Jewish War is an account of the Jewish revolt against Rome (AD 66-70), and whilst reading this, I came across one reference to Menahem ben Jair, the grandson of Judas Iscariot. Until that point I had never considered the idea that Judas would have had children. It was as alien a concept as the idea that Jesus' bloodline might have been smuggled out of the Holy Land. Menahem, grandson of Judas, leader of the Sicarii assassins.

  Suddenly things began to formulate, threads of a story pulled together, and the idea of the cursed coins becoming a 'family inheritance' was born. But of course, with the revelations of the Gospel of Judas fresh in my mind, how cursed would these coins truly have been? Wouldn't they have been more like a treasured reminder of just how much their grandfather had sacrificed? And how better to remember that sacrifice and honor the man 'of the sicarii' than to forge them into a silver dagger?

  Of course silver makes a very impractical weapon because it is so soft, but as a ceremonial piece it makes perfect sense.

  The next moment of synchronicity came in discovering that there had been an earthquake in the Masada region a few years earlier, and with that I knew not only how I would lose the dagger for two thousand years, but how I would recover it.

  It was one of those beautiful moments where research gives us an answer every bit as good as any our creative subconscious could dream up. Give me a truth to lay down as a foundation for the building blocks of story every day of the week.

  But, of course, ilver as a novel demands many more foundations.

  Another moment of wonderful synchronicity came about on the 24th of February 2009, right in the heart of the writing. The green comet, Lulin, an astrological phenomenon that many had taken to calling Nostradamus' comet, blazed across the night sky. Actually, it was a wonderful collision of The Book of Revelation and just about every end-of-the-world prophecy out there. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are traditionally said to be riding a white horse, a red, a black and a pale horse. Now, considering white has already been taken by the first horse, the Fourth Horseman's (Death) mount is written khloros (khloros) in the original Koine Greek, which translates as pale, ashen, pale green or yellowish green. The color is indicative of a corpse's pallor. Now, given the biblical links of astrological phenomena (the Wise men's star, for instance), it is unsurprising that many consider the Four Horsemen to actually be astrological events; so, a green comet, like Lulin, could be interpreted as Death riding straight out of Revelation upon his pale horse.