The Dark Chronicles

by Jeremy Duns

  He was quiet for a moment, then put out a skeletal hand to Sarah again. She returned the papers, and he looked down at them once more.

  ‘Impossible,’ he muttered.

  I looked at him in despair, and started wondering if we could perhaps risk running past him. But then I remembered something. ‘Last month,’ I said. ‘There was a warning about a bomb here.’

  He looked up at me, surprised. ‘Yes – but nothing was found.’

  ‘Because they didn’t know where to look. Someone planted it then, and it’s due to go off today.’

  His eyes widened. He looked back down at the document, and then he seemed to reach a decision.

  ‘Do you know where they have placed it?’

  I nodded.

  He gestured to the lead Swiss Guard. ‘Take this man wherever he wants to go – and quickly!’

  ‘The dome,’ I told him. He glared at me for a moment, then bowed to the cardinal and showed us to a door at the side.

  ‘Follow me, please.’

  *

  The Guard took us quickly up a flight of stairs, then down a long carpeted corridor. We passed a magnificent statue of a horse and then pushed through a doorway into a small courtyard. There was a long queue of people waiting to take the lift up to the top. I had thought that the Pope’s address would have thinned the crowd inside the church, but by the looks of things it hadn’t made much difference. We rushed to the front of the line, and the Swiss Guard pulled aside the rope and asked the clerk in the ticket booth how long it would be until the next lift arrived. The clerk shrugged expansively.

  ‘Five minutes?’

  Too long. I nodded to the Swiss Guard, and the three of us raced ahead to the staircase. I reached it first and started climbing the narrow steps, turning past walls scratched with names and dates: tourists who wanted to leave their mark for posterity, I supposed. There were several other people making their way up the stairs, and I weaved my way around them, wondering how far behind Severn and Zimotti were.

  I came out onto another courtyard, and there was the dome directly ahead, the cross and ball lit by the morning sun. To the left, beyond some pieces of scaffolding and canvas, the statues of the Apostles gazed out over the city. Could the bomb be here somewhere? I didn’t think so – not enough impact. In the dome, Barchetti had said. Keep going.

  I could hear a low burring noise behind me and realized it was the lift descending – Severn and Zimotti might soon be coming up in it. I crossed the courtyard to the next flight of stairs, which was surrounded by white railings. A short flight up and I reached a narrow balcony that gave spectacular views both down into the church and up into the dome. Tourists were pressed along the balcony deciding which to photograph first, and I squeezed past them to the next archway. The stairs led down, confusing me for a moment, but then I saw the archway on the right. The sign above it read ‘INGRESSO ALLA CVPPOLA’, and I leapt through it and saw the next flight leading up.

  Christ, it was narrow. There was barely room to move, and as my leg muscles started to pulse with pain I regretted not taking the lift for the first part of the journey – I’d be lucky if I had any energy left by the time I reached the top. Then again, if we had waited for the lift Severn and Zimotti might already have caught up with us. I had to climb at a slower pace now because I was stuck behind an Australian woman complaining to her husband that she hadn’t had any breakfast and couldn’t climb on an empty stomach. I heard shallow breathing behind me, and turned to see Sarah, the palm of one hand resting against the wall for support as she climbed.

  The staircase began spiralling, and through narrow slits in the walls I caught glimpses of pink tiles, white statues, green trees. The stairs straightened again, and then started angling to one side as we squeezed between the inner and outer drums of the dome. It was getting warm, and a surge of dizziness flooded through me – I blinked and shook it away.

  There was another spiralling stairwell, now with a rope instead of banisters, but it was mercifully short and we came out onto another balcony, this one in the open air. A mass of tourists stood by the low railings, and beyond them the city stretched out in the sunshine. I turned to see both Sarah and the Swiss Guard and raised my chin. The Guard pointed ahead, and I saw an iron ladder a few feet away, hanging almost vertically. I pushed through the crowd of people and grabbed hold of it, my heart racing. How long did we have until the bomb went off? I climbed hand over hand, until finally I was right in the copper-plated ball. I took a few seconds to recover my breath, then looked around.

  There was nobody here, just a wooden bench, smooth from a billion tourists’ arses, and tiny slats looking down at the city. And somewhere, I was sure, a bomb. But where? Had I guessed wrong? Perhaps they had placed it in the church itself, or on the balcony the Pope would be standing on shortly… No. Barchetti had specifically mentioned the attack in the dome.

  There was a clanging at the ladder and the Swiss Guard climbed into the space. Sweat was pouring down his face, and I felt a pang of sympathy – I hadn’t made the climb in that outfit. He glanced at me and immediately registered my confusion.

  ‘I told you, signore,’ he said. ‘We checked thoroughly this morning.’

  My sympathy vanished. Triumphant little shit. But he was wrong. It had to be here.

  There was another clang, and Sarah emerged, very out of breath.

  ‘What’s the programme now?’ I asked the Guard. ‘The Pope’s address is at noon, and then what? Mass?’ Perhaps they hadn’t planted the bomb yet, but would do shortly.

  The Guard shook his head.

  ‘It is a much shorter Mass today, because at one o’clock there is a special service for the feast day of Santa Sindone.’

  ‘How much shorter?’ I asked. ‘Will the Pope be…’ I stopped. ‘What was that? The feast day of what?’

  ‘Santa Sindone.’ I stared at him blankly. ‘The Holy Shroud of Turin – the cloth Christ was buried in.’

  May the fourth was the feast day of the Shroud. That was an iconic religious event, all right – even more so than the Pope’s regular Sunday address.

  ‘The Shroud. Where is it?’

  ‘In Turin,’ said the Guard, exasperated at my ignorance.

  ‘In the cathedral?’

  He nodded. ‘The chapel attached to it. Every May the fourth, they remove the Shroud from the altar and—’

  He stopped. There had been a loud noise below us. I glanced down the ladder and saw Zimotti emerging onto the gallery, holding up his identification wallet and shouting as he made his way through the crowd. The Guard turned to descend, but I grabbed him by the lapel and gestured for Sarah to stay where she was, too.

  ‘Does it have a dome?’ I asked. He looked at me uncomprehendingly, and I shook him. ‘The chapel housing the Shroud! Does it have a dome?’

  He nodded, and tried to move a hand towards his rapier. I pushed it aside.

  ‘What time?’ I shouted at him. ‘What time is the service?’

  There was more noise, and I could hear Zimotti’s voice below us. The Guard stared back at me blankly.

  ‘They begin at eight o’clock…’

  The world slowed to silence, and I knew I had made a terrible mistake. I brushed past the Guard and reached for Sarah’s hand.

  We were in the wrong place – the wrong bloody city. The attack wasn’t planned for here. It was planned for Turin, in less than nine hours’ time.

  XXII

  Sarah began to climb back down the ladder, and the Swiss Guard and I rapidly followed. I could hear Zimotti making his way through the crowd, and I pushed Sarah the other way, cursing myself for leading us up here. I had foolishly presumed that the next attack would revolve around an individual. But it wasn’t Christ’s representative on Earth that was the target, but Christ himself – or rather his followers. The documents had mentioned that religious events had an ‘easily understood and revered symbolism’. It was hard to think of anything more revered or symbolic than the Turin Shroud: million
s of people around the world believed it to be the cloth Christ had been wrapped in after his crucifixion. It was perhaps the greatest icon of the Catholic Church, and an attack on its holy feast day would create headlines around the world. In Italy, the idea that the Communists were prepared to blow up innocent worshippers in a church would scare everyone away at the next election. And if they damaged the Shroud itself… but could they really be prepared to do that?

  As we moved through the crowd looking for the stairway leading down, I spotted Severn coming round the other way, and froze. I grabbed Sarah by the wrist and ran in the only direction available, pushing through the crush of tourists until I reached the railing. The outside of the dome curved away, and I peered over to see the statues of the Apostles on the courtyard below, and beyond them the crowd in the square undulating like a giant moving carpet.

  I turned my attention to the dome itself. A couple of feet down there was a horizontal ring of small windows, like portholes in a ship. And between the windows, vertical mouldings circled the dome, jutting out from the surface like giant white centipedes. Fixed to the roofs of the windows and running down the centre of the centipedes were dozens of small iron discs, reddish brown with rust. They stirred a dim memory – wasn’t the dome illuminated on certain occasions? Perhaps these discs once held the torches. At any rate, they were fastened to the surface with iron spikes. I glanced over at Sarah, and her eyes bulged as she realized what I had in mind. But Severn and Zimotti were jostling through the crowd on either side of us, calling out that it was a public emergency. They would be here any moment. We had no choice.

  I took a firm hold of the railing and hoisted myself over, ignoring the screams of a woman behind me. Once on the other side, I jammed my right plimsoll down and under the nearest disc. Would it take my weight? There was only one way to find out. I worked my way down to the bottom of the railing with my hands, flattening the front of my body against the side of the dome as I did. Close up, the surface was covered with threads of black grime and pigeon droppings. I lifted my left leg away for an instant and the disc didn’t budge beneath my right foot, so I lowered myself once more and wedged my left shoe into the next disc down.

  I took a breath, then looked up, expecting to see Sarah descending the same way. But she was still astride the railing, and she wasn’t moving. She had frozen to the spot.

  ‘I can’t!’ she said, almost sobbing with fear. ‘I… can’t move.’

  But she was moving – her legs were shaking. Any moment now and she would lose her balance and fall.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘But you have to come now.’

  As if in answer to this, there was some sort of a commotion to the left, and I looked up and saw Severn leaning over the side of the railing, one hand raised to hold back frightened tourists. There was a pistol in the other, and he was aiming it straight at her.

  ‘Everyone around you ends up dead…’

  Not this time. Please not this time.

  I shouted up to Sarah that she had to move and she shook her head violently, but then something made her realize she had no choice and she brought her legs over and lowered herself down onto the centipede to the left of mine, her shoe reaching the first disc as the shot came, sending a blast of sparks off the railing. This church might not be the target of the operation, but Severn and Zimotti clearly weren’t squeamish about damaging it.

  I looked up at Sarah, whose face was flushed from the effort. We had a moment’s breathing space, because we were now out of Severn’s line of sight and he couldn’t shoot around curves. But only a moment: he had probably ordered some of his men to take the staircase and wait for us at the bottom, but the crowds would hold them up and there were several exits. His best chance to catch us now was to follow us over the railings, and I was pretty sure he’d realize it.

  I started climbing down the rest of the way, my hands now clutching the spikes that kept the discs in place, which were blisteringly hot after a few hours in the sun. In principle it was easy, like climbing down a step-ladder. But the ladder was curved, and if we made one slip we would fall to our deaths.

  We made our way down our separate ladders as quickly as we could and reached the rim of the dome, where there were plinths large enough to stand on. There was a jump of several feet to the next level, but I could see a relief of stone flowers jutting out from the wall between my section and the next plinth along. It looked like a safer bet, so I shimmied over to the next ledge, clutching at a thinner line of centipedes descending from the top, and then crouched and hung my legs over the side. I glanced down and saw that the relief wasn’t protruding as much as I’d thought it would, so I let go and tried to angle my body in as I dropped.

  My right knee crunched down on the top of the relief, and I let out a cry and threw my hands up to gain a hold before I slipped over the edge. My fingers gripped something, and I looked up to see that they had hooked around the lower lip of the mouth of a fierce-looking stone lion: a relief just above the flowers that hadn’t been visible from my vantage point on the ledge. I pulled my other knee up until I was kneeling firmly on the top of the floral relief. Once I was comfortable, I turned around and prepared to lower myself again and jump the final few feet to the ledge beneath.

  The pain came from nowhere. My throat felt thick and constricted, and I was being dragged back upward. He had his boots wrapped around my neck and he was trying to crush my windpipe. My eyes rolled upward and I saw a pair of boots and the first few inches of a pair of trouser-legs hanging from the ledge directly above me. The trousers were midnight blue – not Severn, then, but Zimotti. I suddenly felt very cold, and realized that my teeth were chattering.

  Zimotti was shaking his legs frantically, trying to swing me out so he could drop me over the ledge and to the ground far below. My fingers started slipping as my breathing began to suffer and I tried to call out to Sarah, who I could hear was still in the next section along, but nothing came from my throat.

  Above me, Zimotti was grunting and cursing, but his voice sounded peculiar and I realized that it wasn’t, in fact, Zimotti but his hawk-faced hatchet man. I hadn’t seen him on the gallery earlier. Among his curses, I heard the word ‘Fratello’ repeated several times and with a shock it hit me that he meant the sniper in St Paul’s, who was either literally his brother or a brother in arms, and that he blamed me for his death and wanted vengeance for it. Vengeance for a man who had been given the task of assassinating me, and who had thought nothing of using a defenceless child as a shield.

  Fury pulsed through me and I used the strength of it to jerk my head down violently in an effort to dislodge his boots from around my throat. But it didn’t make any difference. They were locked there, and squeezing tighter by the moment. As I started to choke and felt my vision beginning to black out, I did the only thing I could think of: I lifted my left hand from the relief for a moment and punched up between the Bird Man’s legs, towards his groin.

  He screamed, and I quickly reached to grab hold of the relief once again. Stone scratched against my nails and then my fingers gripped tightly, and as they did, the pressure around my neck floated away, and I realized that the Bird Man was starting to fall. I gripped tighter with my hands, and the scream intensified and wind brushed against me and I looked down as his torso cracked against the rim of the ledge beneath and he spun towards the courtyard below, sending a group of tourists screaming.

  For a moment I thought it might not have been enough of a fall to kill him, but then the stone beneath him began to turn red and vomit rose in my throat. I winced and gulped it down. My shirt was now soaked in sweat and clinging to my back. And I could hear the sound of someone moving above. It wasn’t over. We had to get down before the others came.

  My fingers started to slip, and finally I let go. I landed on the ledge and my thighs clenched with the pain, so sharp it took my breath away. But nothing was broken and I was safely in the centre of the ledge. I took a deep breath and looked up to see Sarah preparing t
o make the same jump a few feet away. Directly below us – within easy reach – was the white-railinged flight of stairs we had come up, and below that the courtyard with the dead man sprawled across it. We just had to reach that courtyard. After that, we could take the stairs down.

  I could sense Sarah hesitating again and decided to lead by example, to show her how close we were. There was a tiled roof a couple of feet from the ledge. I scurried over, then levered myself onto it using the chimney, after which I began creeping down the tiles like a crab.

  ‘See?’ I called. ‘It’s easy.’

  There was a thud above me and I looked up, expecting to see Sarah landing on the ledge. But instead I saw Barnes. Christ, they’d brought the lot of them. He was wearing the same fatigues he’d been in at the base in Sardinia, and his pale blue eyes were blazing with hatred. He stood to his full height and his mouth formed a grim smile: he thought he had me. He was grasping something in his hand, and it glittered momentarily in the sun. It had a long, thin blade: a stiletto knife? Severn must have given it to him, because he couldn’t have brought it through… I stopped. We hadn’t come through customs. He could have had it strapped to his leg the whole time.

  I looked past him, trying to see where Sarah had gone, but she seemed to have disappeared and the move was a mistake because Barnes saw his chance and leapt forward, pushing me further down the roof and towards the line of railings that enclosed the flight of stairs. As he jerked the knife down, I threw my arms up and grabbed hold of his wrist, managing to stop the blade a few inches from my neck. He grunted, his mouth clamped shut and a hissing noise emanating from his nostrils, and the blade moved closer. I pushed back against him with every sinew and fibre, but I knew that I could only hold out for another second or two at the most. He was older than me, but he was fitter, better trained and, like the Bird Man, he wanted revenge – in his case, justifiably.