A Pius Legacy

by Declan Finn

  * * *

  Matthew Kovach, doing the running commentary for Fox News, smiled. “You see, Bill, that’s what I call a palpable hit.”

  His opponent, a Nancy Aiden, said, “Like that mattered—”

  Kovach almost laughed. “The church tossed him out for being a pederast. I think even this jury could see there’s bias in his testimony.”

  The host paused for a moment, listening to his earpiece. “They’re going to recess for the day.” He stopped looking thoughtful and smiled at the camera with his smug little smile that made people think he was up to something, and being arrogant about it. “Comments?”

  “Yes,” Aiden leapt in, “this entire defense is preposterous. No matter what ‘reasons’ he could come up with, everyone knows what the Catholic Church is about, and the initial accusations of some convoluted conspiracy to rob the Vatican? Please. Representatives of the International Community do not go about killing history researchers.”

  Kovach smiled and shook his head. “Funny, that’s not what happened when they tried to kill me.”

  Even the host stopped his next question and blinked, silent for a matter of several seconds—a record for him. “Excuse me?” Bill replied. “Are you saying that you were involved in all this?”

  Kovach nodded. “In looking through the Vatican Archives I got shot at for my trouble. I survived by having a dutiful wife that trained me to take care of myself.”

  The other commentator snorted. “That’s just the sort of sexist comment I’d expect from a Catholic like you—”

  Kovach leaned forward. “Listen, ma’am, I’m an Irish Catholic, we invented feminism before your family tree began, and if you don’t believe me, read the mythology. Second, my wife is—”

  “Oh please!” she whined. “I mean, come on, how butch must a girl be to win medals in martial arts?”

  His eyes went dark. “First of all, that was uncalled for, and I expect you to apologize; second, insult me all you want, I’m used to it, but leave her alone.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out a full-body photo and all but pressed it to the camera. “Now you tell me that she isn’t the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen, Bill.”

  His opponent started again, “Well, I—”

  “Is your name Bill?” Kovach snapped. “Now, Bill, let me tell you what happened, preferably in shorter rhetorical flourishes than the Italian ambassador did the other day…”

  * * *

  Ioseph Mikhailov glared at the television screen, and the author. He glanced at his watch and smiled. “We’ll see how you like it with your wife’s smoldering corpse sent to you in pieces.”

  Chapter XIX

  A Politic Response

  New York City.

  Day 6.

  As soon as Moira McShane didn’t emerge from the other side of the Roosevelt statue, Vsevolod Davidoff frowned. He didn’t like the look of it, and looked back at the two women in the car with him—Yana and Anaya. They were inseparable. The other Charm Schoolers speculated on why, but none of them were brave enough to do so within their earshot.

  Yana had a slender and smaller frame. Svelte might be more the term. When she walked, many people thought “seductress,” and that’s when she was out for a casual stroll. Vsevolod always thought she had a nice, perky chest, and some fine attributes for a woman so petite. Her eyes were so light a blue that they were almost lights, and she even had a cute pug nose. Hair darker than an oil slick outlined her white face.. She could be cute and adorable, or she could rip out your throat. She did that a lot.

  Anaya was larger built—in bone structure, anyway. Tall, statuesque, blonde, with sharp cheekbones, she was more beautiful than pretty. She was also as scary as hell—she killed for fun. She had lots of fun.

  The two women slid out of the van, and started moving across the street.

  * * *

  Alexei Yagudaev carefully positioned his ring. The little flip cap exposed a needle with just enough tranquilizer to make her docile for a few minutes—long enough to get her out of the line of sight of everyone else, and then she could be shot with more drugs. He twisted the ring so it faced his palm. All she needed to do was shake hands with him, and it was game over.

  And Alexei did just that—he extended his right hand to her.

  Moira’s right hand shot out and grabbed the outside of his wrist, jerking him towards her as she stepped forward. He was only off balance for a moment when her arm slammed into his upper chest the instant she had hooked her right leg around his right Achilles tendon. She swept his leg out from under him, but, more importantly, she maintained her grip on his right hand as she straight-armed him—and drove the ring straight into his chest.

  Alexei went down, and Moira followed up with a fist driven into his face.

  When she was certain he was going to stay down, she flipped him over and found his gun—a .22 at the small of his back. She drew it and wheeled around the statue of Roosevelt, taking careful aim at the glass of the van pursuing her. She cracked off a three-round burst, smacking against the van’s driver-side window. The gun, however, didn’t make any noise, but she felt the kick. She blinked and frowned at the gun.

  “Silenced ammunition,” came the voice in her ear. “Russian design.”

  “Cool,” she muttered back, right before she started shooting again.

  The van sped off in a hurry, but there were two women on approach, crossing the street in a sudden rush to get to her. They were still in the middle of the road. Moira didn’t want to risk gunfire until they were closer—but did she really want to get close? She could run into the museum, but she couldn’t take the gun in with her.

  Moira sighed and dropped the gun before charging up the front steps. “I’m going inside,” she said softly, speaking into the Bluetooth earpiece.

  A block away, Michael Finn was already on approach, nearly breaking into a run as he saw his nephew’s wife running for the museum doors. He had spotted Moira’s initial stalker, and had pointed it out to her via cell phone while he was shadowing her. “Don’t approach security,” he ordered, “it’ll be a bloodbath.”

  “I’m heading for the lady’s restroom, first floor.”

  Moira pushed through the front door, waving a ticket that Michael had bought for her earlier that day as she rushed through the lobby. “I’ll be about five minutes,” she called to the guard. “I left something near the crystals.”

  The guards were about to pursue her as she blew by them, but they were caught off guard by two new intruders, also women, who also blew past them.

  * * *

  Moira’s first action upon getting into the bathroom was to check that it was empty. She promptly locked herself into one of the stalls, flipped the toilet seat upright, and kicked it. The lid popped off and she grabbed it before it fell to the floor. With any luck, the people after her would continue to settle for keeping her alive—if they wanted her dead, they could have killed her in any number of ways before now (snipers, bombs and poison came to mind as popular favorites). If they were no longer interested in kidnapping her, then any pursuers would simply spray gunfire into the stalls.

  Moira slid down to the floor, knees bunched up against her chest, toilet seat under her butt, hands braced against the base of the toilet. Two sets of footsteps echoed down the hall right before the door burst open. They took their time getting into the washroom, cautious.

  They tested the other doors, until they decided no one else was in the room, and finally, Moira could see two sets of feet. One set was off to the side as the other braced against the floor in front of the stall, obviously about to kick.

  As the foot left the ground, McShane kicked out, both legs thrust out under the stall door as she pushed back on her hands. The effect sent her sliding along the floor with the toilet seat under her. Both feet caught the target—the one leg that the assassin was standing on as she kicked the door open. Yana tumbled down with a startled yelp, coming down on top of Moira. The little brunette assassin had tried to redire
ct her vector in mid-air, but it did little good, and when she came down on her intended victim, she lashed out with both hands to break her fall.

  It didn’t help that Moira pulled the toilet seat lid from under her bottom and whipped it across the side of the short brunette’s head, felling her—and leaving a tall blonde with a handgun leveled at her head.

  Anaya’s eyes flared with rage, and she committed to pulling the trigger. Her teeth were bared and her stance set.

  Moira knew that rolling out of the way would do no good, but she did anyway, mainly out of habit.

  When she came to her feet, she wondered why Anaya hadn’t even fired yet…the blonde’s mouth was now frozen open, her eyes wide as the gun tumbled from her fingers. Her back was bowed, and she hung there a moment like that, right before she fell to the ground, dead.

  Leaving behind a harmless-looking blonde man with soft green eyes, soft cheekbones, and a knife.

  “Kidney shot,” Michael Finn said. “It works.” He wiped the blade on the blonde’s shirt. “I suppose you should call your father, so he could have a small army of cops down here, right?”

  Moira sighed and dropped the lid. She concentrated briefly to come down from the adrenaline buzz, when the door creaked open again.

  Finn wasn’t even prepared as the butt of the pistol slapped against the back of his head, sending him to the floor on top of his victim. Moira wasn’t prepared as the newcomer barged into the room, gun ready to fire.

  “Don’t, move,” Vsevolod Davidoff said in a firm, commanding voice, untainted with any accent. He looked at the two women on the floor, then at Finn. “I wondered why you knew you were being followed. Him, huh? CIA? FBI?”

  M-O-U-S-E? Moira thought, amused.

  Outwardly, she rolled her eyes, and fell sideways.

  Vsevolod smiled. The poor thing had passed out…well, that wasn’t unexpected. She was a civilian, not trained for that sort of thing. Obviously, the man he had knocked out was someone official, using her for bait. Probably someone from DDO Grant, the old bastard. McShane had gone along with the plan quite well, especially since this new player had dispatched three of the finest Mikhailov had.

  Vsevolod walked over to the woman. She could have been faking it. There was a solution to that. He raised one leg to stomp on her, when her arm suddenly hooked behind the Achilles tendon of his base leg and jerked, taking his only leg out from under him.

  Moira McShane rolled deliberately, and with purpose, so she could be lying next to Davidoff when he fell. When he landed, he was about to roll out of the way, or roll into her, so he could best use his gun. Instead, he found himself locked into place.

  Vsevolod had landed so that his neck fell on Moira’s arm. She wrapped her arm around his throat, so that his chin was locked into the crook of her elbow. Her other hand lashed out and grabbed his gun, and she locked her arm straight, keeping the barrel away from her as she rolled over him. As she rolled, her arm continued to move, taking Davidoff’s chin with it.

  There was a loud snap as Moira rolled to the other side of Vsevolod, and his chin had already made nearly a complete revolution around his shoulders. He was quite dead.

  She almost smiled. “Matt will be overjoyed—whoever sent these guys will be pissed.”

  * * *

  Matthew Kovach squeezed his bleary eyes shut, trying to think of what else to write. It was midnight, and he was tired, but this was the World Wide Web, the Great and Terrible Blue Nowhere. Someone was still online somewhere. He had even made several arrangements with a few comedy blogs.

  Petraro had set up a deal with several blogs and news journals online to link to every one of Kovach’s ongoing blog commentaries about the trial of the Pope, the events going on around him, etcetera. The great thing about blogs is that it caught him while his memory of the events was still fresh. Granted, he could post and edit in more detail later, but his first impressions always captured the best, and disseminated most often.

  He smiled to himself. Blogs had managed to topple governments, end careers, fact-check things that before could only have been found by months in an archive. He had even heard a rumor that one blog had single-handedly taken out the left-wing government of Canada that had started the new millennium.

  Kovach’s goals weren’t that grand. He simply thought he could provide enough hot air and mirrors to reflect out to the world exactly what was going on behind the mirrors and the smoke machines of the “United Nations” conspirators.

  By now, he ranted about the UN in general:

  The UN Security Council is filled with corrupt ambassadors from even more corrupt governments—France, Germany, Russia. The French don’t want to be bothered with the Sudan, refusing to allow the word “genocide” to even be uttered in their ambassador’s presence. And Tsar Putin is having far too much fun cracking down on his own country and selling weapons. And then there are over 100 countries in the UN run by dictatorships and other brutal men.

  Human rights giants like Sudan and Lebanon are on the Human Rights Commission; Syria and Iran are on the weapons proliferation board (which makes me wonder if it’s supposed to be for or against proliferation).

  Even if they were NOT corrupt, would they be relevant? During the Cold War, the CIA and KGB had wiretapped the UN. They discovered that, in transmissions sent from the UN ambassadors to their home countries, there was NOTHING. That’s right, during the Cold War, outside of the US and USSR, no one cared about what happened at the UN.

  So, it’s irrelevant and corrupt, the UN doesn’t care about large issues with genocide in the millions, why should it care about anything else?

  Remember the food-for-oil program? Now, as you may know, the stated purpose of food-for-oil was to create enough revenue for Saddam Hussein to feed his starving population. We should’ve known something was up when 1.5 million people starved to death in Iraq during the ’90s. Or maybe we should’ve known when he started building very large palaces, or when he started paying Palestinians to blow up family members in Tel Aviv. And this is exactly one program. What would an ethics commission find now? Cue up the theme for Jaws. The hunt is on, the game’s afoot, and a leg, and whatever other body parts will be found in the wood chipper when they’re done.

  Matthew sent it in and blinked, ready to pack it in, when his phone rang. He immediately grabbed it, without thinking. “Hello.”

  “Matt, they tried. We got two alive, two dead.”

  Kovach blinked a moment … it was Moira. Crap.

  “Are you all right?” he said with urgent concern, now wide-awake. What time was it over there? Around six o’clock or so? Which means they had tried to attack her coming from work.

  “I’m fine,” she answered. “Uncle Mike was there. We dealt with it…how are you?”

  “Fine,” he said, his voice tight.

  In New York, an ocean away, McShane could almost feel her husband’s tension. He treated her like an equal every day of their relationship, and most days he treated her like his superior.

  Despite that, he reacted poorly to her being threatened, attacked, or looked at sideways.

  “Matt, take a breath.”

  Kovach smiled broadly to himself. “Don’t worry, I’m just going to hurt them. Did any of these bozos have diplomatic immunity, by any chance?”

  “Two of them…Matt?”

  “Moira…I love you.”

  She sighed. “Go get ’em.”

  Matt closed the phone and turned around, Captain Williams still in the room. He thought of the old army man as a babysitter, in case someone had tried to attack Kovach directly in Rome—unlikely, but it gave Wayne something to do, and covered all of their bases.

  “Captain, it’s still the six o’clock hour in New York, right?”

  He looked up from the novel in his hand. “Yes, why?”

  “So the vultures will still be out there?”

  Wayne Williams smiled. The reporters had soon gathered in front of the Vatican after the Pope had been taken. Once Sean Rya
n had threatened them with an automatic pistol, pretending to be some crazy man that the Swiss Guards held back, the reporters decided life would be safer taking up residence in Matthew Kovach’s hotel lobby.

  “Good. I’m going to go piss someone off.”

  * * *

  Ioseph Mikhailov was not happy even before his men had brought his attention to the news feed coming in from the Internet. The burly assassin grumbled. The day with the Pope had not gone well and the prosecution’s case was severely mishandled.

  The video clip started off simply. A group of reporters were practically lounging outside of a hotel, waiting for something to stir at the Vatican, across the street and down a block, when a voice from off camera bellowed, “Yo, vultures, I have something for you.”

  It was the author. Ioseph’s eyes narrowed. Shouldn’t Vsevolod have radioed in by now?

  “Someone in America just tried to kidnap my wife,” the author began. “Someone utterly incompetent and moronic, and supported by the United Nations.”

  Mikhailov nearly gave a strangled gasp. “Not possible,” he whispered.

  The author’s gaze was steady as he held the camera’s focus. “Apparently, someone decided that I was inconvenient with my press coverage and commentary on the events. Obviously, they couldn’t have just sent me an email on my blog. They are probably illiterate.”

  Kovach smirked. Smirked. “I want these bastards to know that I will not give in to such petty terrorism. It’s obvious we’re dealing with a bunch of children who can’t tolerate being beaten soundly in the realm of ideas, so they lash out into the realm of bullets. After all, these are the same people who, instead of going to the Vatican and asking for the Pope, to see if he would come quietly—priests have a bad tendency to do that—they decided to wage a small war in the middle of Rome. Even President George W. Bush asked Saddam Hussein to surrender before the invasion of Iraq. These people were dumber. Thank you.”

  The author turned and walked away.

  Ioseph Mikhailov roared and smashed his fist through a tabletop. “How did this happen?” he bellowed.