by Tom Fox
“The full bomb squad’s en route for arrival here in five minutes,” the commandant added, “but you could save us time—time we don’t have—by just telling us how to kill it.”
“If I could, I would have told you already!” Alexander’s voice was as desperate as his emotion. The visions he’d gleaned from his dream had shown him the device, the location … but they’d not shown him anything about cancelation codes or disarmament, or whatever it was that had to be done to put a stop to this.
His memory raced again, automatically, through the events of the morning since he’d awoken. Nothing made sense. Nothing was clear.
And yet there was one element that haunted him most of all. Not the severed hand, but the note within it. The single word on the scrap of paper. Revenge.
His stomach wrinkled into a knot. Realization came like a physical blow. There was only one group that he could think of that would be bent on any kind of revenge involving him.
A group he’d been warned about by his uncle. A group that had ultimately taken his uncle from him, the result of a few drops of poison delivered in his tea—the first direct assassination in a plot that had aimed much higher.
The blow hit more fiercely. Alexander’s uncle had surprised him by an admission, only days before his murder, that within Vatican City an organization existed that sought to preserve old orders and powers and was willing to employ any means at its disposal to meet those goals. The Fraternitas Christi Salvatoris, or Fraternity of Christ the Savior, had been myth and rumor for generations, but in the events that had shocked Rome over the summer, those rumors had been shown to have more than just legend behind them. The Fraternity, it turned out, was connected to institutions inside the curia and out, and had been a powerful hand in the scandals that had rocked Rome for decades. They were men of tradition, of “the old ways,” as they liked to put it. But they were ultimately men of greed and lust for power, who preferred to move in the darkness.
They were willing to murder a cardinal. They had hoped to kill a pope.
But they had been taken down. Alexander’s breath raced with the memories. Their head, the former Cardinal Secretary of State, Donato Viteri, had been killed in the bloodshed of their final confrontation. Alexander had watched him die by the hand of a woman who’d formerly been his collaborator. It had been fitting, just. Sell your soul to the Devil, and the Devil will ultimately claim the prize.
But that had been the end. With the demise of its leader, the fabled Fraternity had crumbled. Its remaining members were identified and arrested. Frightened priests turned on each other like rats fleeing a waterlogged ship. Men whose only common bond had been self-preservation and the greed for power weren’t prepared to save anyone but themselves.
And so the Fraternity had ended. Its influence collapsed.
Alexander had been so sure. The police, the Swiss Guard, everyone. Certainty. Finality. We got them all.
But suddenly, in this instant, that certainty was gone. Gone because of a single hand bearing a single word.
Revenge.
It could mean only one thing. A member of the Fraternity was still alive and free, and with this action was making it known that he would no longer stay hidden in the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
7:21 a.m.
“Wait, right there, what was that?” Molinaro pointed toward one of the displays speeding through nighttime footage in front of them. “Stop it and roll forward.”
Bruno Nencini paused the scrubbing, highlighted the first corridor feed, angled from east to west, and switched the playback to a forward direction at 2x speed. The corridor was empty of any activity, as it had been throughout the night.
“I didn’t see anything,” he said as the playback continued. His eyes had been on one of the other feeds.
“Just a second,” Molinaro answered, his gaze fixed on the screen. “Just … Yes, here. Stop it and switch to normal playback.”
Bruno did as instructed, and the recording promptly changed to standard speed.
Halfway along the corridor, one of the unmarked brown doors swung open.
“That’s it, right? That’s Cardinal Trecchio’s study?” Molinaro asked, his voice approaching frantic.
“Yeah, that’s 77A,” Bruno answered.
“Why isn’t it opening on the other feed?” Molinaro tapped the display of the door itself, which remained closed.
“Their time stamps must not be linked. Here, give me a second.” Bruno ran a finger over the monitor to the bottom left-hand corner and found the precise time stamp of the corridor feed, then entered the same clock time into the recording of the door. An instant later its display fluttered. And changed.
The door was open.
“Resume playback,” Molinaro ordered. The feeds slipped into simultaneous motion.
Cardinal Rinaldo Trecchio’s door finished the arc of its outward swing. An instant later, there was activity. A man stepped out of the room, glanced both ways along the quiet corridor, then returned inside. Another moment passed, and he appeared again.
This time he was carrying the limp frame of Alexander Trecchio.
“I’ll be damned,” Bruno Nencini muttered.
“I knew it!” Molinaro exclaimed, relief clear in his voice. “I knew Alexander hadn’t done this.”
On the display, the man carried Alexander’s body toward a door a few dozen meters down the corridor, an exit sign faintly visible above it. Before he kicked it open, he stared back the way he’d come, surveilling his surroundings a final time. As he did so, his face came into almost perfect alignment with the camera.
“Freeze it!” Molinaro shouted. Bruno’s hand was already slamming down on the control pad, and the image suspended on the display.
“Can you zoom in?”
“It’s a recording, so it’ll have to be digital zoom. The quality will go down.”
“Just do it!”
Bruno clicked a few keystrokes and the image zoomed in. It was grainy but still easily clear enough to see.
And Molinaro saw two things in particular.
“After this door, another series of camera feeds covers the exit and surrounding areas,” Bruno muttered. “I can call those up and we can try to track their progress once they leave the Palace.”
But Molinaro wasn’t listening. His eyes were fixed on the two sights. One surprised him. The other entirely confused him.
“It might be the only way we can track him down and get an identity,” Bruno continued.
“We won’t need to do that,” Molinaro answered, finally pulling his stare from the monitor and turning toward the other man. “I already know who it is.”
“You know him?” Bruno was rising, incredulous.
“No, not personally, but I recognize the face. And it’s not so much that I know who he is, but where.”
He turned back to the frozen image on the screen. The man carrying Alexander’s body had a distinctive face, but that wasn’t what surprised him. His hair was mildly disheveled, his clothing stained with the evidence of what he’d done in the museum. And then there were his eyes. They were strangely wild, wide, and set slightly too far apart.
What surprised Carlo Molinaro was that he had seen this man before. Just a few minutes ago. He was one of the crowd of onlookers he’d passed, standing in the rain outside the museums.
What confused him was that, in this image, the man was wearing a Roman collar.
Molinaro was staring into the eyes of a priest.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sleep
I am in the blackness once again. The earth is covered by all the inhabitants of Heaven, sparkling in the soft light. They come in every size, clinging high above my head.
Above me, the great Judgment, haunting and foreboding. A hand is painting it with blood, like it’s washing away its sins. Then the hand is opened, a symbol drawn upon its palm. It’s repositioned; its fingers clutch a scroll, fiercely, unendingly, and it takes its perch high above.
And then there is a voice, crying at me, speaking in my ear, into the very depths of my soul.
“I want you to remember …”
Chapter Thirty
4 hours 12 minutes ago
“I want you to remember,” the man with the slender fingers whispered in the betrayer’s ear. “I want you to remember, when memory finally comes, that it was you who did all this. My hands, yes, but you, you have caused this to come about.”
He allowed his victim’s gaze to sway over the horrific scene he’d made of the Sistine Chapel. He could only imagine how its forms were interpreted by his drug-affected mind.
“I want you to remember my cause, my mission, my life. Everything you worked to take away. Decades of effort to preserve centuries of tradition. We had built it all up, and you cast it all down.”
His memories raged within him, causing a shiver to pass through his body. The deliverer—and yes, damn it, that’s what he truly was—had been one of the Fraternity’s most devoted members. He’d been spotted early, praised for his “interior flexibility of virtue,” and drawn into its ranks. He’d served with particular fervor, letting his youth and natural talents find a new home. He’d excelled. He’d been set to rise, and rise far. Perhaps all the way to the top.
And then this man, now crouched before him, had ripped it all away from him. Him and his godforsaken girlfriend. He’d make her pay soon enough. Better to let her suffer first. Add to her agony a bit. Give her a taste, through everything that would take place this morning, of the suffering he felt for his own people. Let her know what it meant to lose someone.
Even if she only lost this one man, whereas the deliverer had lost nearly everyone.
They’d pursued his brethren relentlessly, this pair. And ultimately they had been successful. All that was right and true had been overthrown. The betrayer and his great whore had won.
But not for good. This moment, this night, was proof of that. Proof that out of despair, hope could yet come. That a little bit of vengeance was still good for the soul, and that the pathway to new life could be opened by the obliteration of the old.
The deliverer raised the betrayer’s eyes to the altar scene once again, to the severed hand of Beatrice Pinard that now held its position atop it. Poor creature, he thought once more. The almost-innocent sheep. At the end of the day, her role here was little more than to set the stage, to help make the betrayer’s torture more exquisite. But she wasn’t wholly without blame, either. Without her setting the betrayer and his partner on their course during the summer, without her providing them with material that proved crucial to their investigations, perhaps their advance against the Fraternity would never have been made. Perhaps the leaving behind of everything they had known, being forced now to set off on a new mission and role, wouldn’t have been necessary …
His guilt evaporated. Pinard’s severed hand no longer bothered him. At last, she has earned her just reward.
The man leaned down so he could whisper directly into the betrayer’s ear.
“I want you to remember, Alexander, that what I am doing to you now is only the faintest glimmer of what I’m going to do to the woman you love.” The betrayer seemed to writhe slightly in his chair, and the man with the slender fingers smiled at the hint of recognition. “Ah yes,” he added, a little louder, “you understand what I’m saying to you. I know all about your woman. About Gabriella.”
He let her name slither out of his mouth, prolonging the vowels and exaggerating the consonants, taking delight in how he imagined the sound must torture the other man. He watched as Alexander Trecchio’s body twitched, recognition pulling its weight even through the drugs.
The man turned Alexander’s groggy eyes directly into his.
“This, you bastard, is what revenge looks like.”
Chapter Thirty-One
7:27 a.m.
Molinaro walked at a pace surprising for an eighty-year-old as he led Bruno Nencini through the rain back to the courtyard leading into the museums. Beyond the perimeter of yellow tape, the crowd of onlookers had grown. One of Bruno’s junior colleagues stood his post at the guard station, keeping the masses at bay.
“If you really think he’s here, in this group,” Bruno said to Molinaro as they approached the station, “then we need to get help from the officers inside. We can’t go after him ourselves.”
Molinaro glanced down at his old watch.
“No time, no time, Bruno. That bomb’s on a clock. If he’s stayed on, it’s only to watch the effects of his work, and that’s got to mean the bomb’s for real, and so is the timer.” He remembered watching a television special some years ago about the propensity of criminals to return to the scenes of their crimes—especially crimes that continued to unfold. Arsonists standing next to members of the fire brigade as a building burned, kidnappers hovering in crowds at police press conferences about the unknown fate of their victims, that sort of thing. It had all seemed incomprehensible to him back then. Today it didn’t.
“We don’t have time to get anyone else. Besides, he won’t be expecting us.”
“So you think.”
Molinaro turned to him sternly, out of breath. “If we come out of the main entrance and head in his direction with a troop of officers, you can bet he’ll run. But he’s been standing at that perimeter, watching, for at least the last half-hour, and apart from our trip to the control room, you were at the guard station almost that whole time. He’s used to seeing museum security staff around him.” He paused. “And he certainly isn’t going to expect me.”
“Let me at least radio in first.”
Molinaro shook his head. “No, there’s something more important you need to do.” He shifted his feet anxiously. “The man on the tape was removing Alexander’s body from the room. Alexander awoke this morning at home …” He hesitated. He was thinking as he spoke. “The man must have taken him there, back to his flat. And that means …” He nodded, confirming to himself that he was on the right track. He looked forcefully at Bruno. “Alexander’s girlfriend would have been there too.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Or fiancée, or lover. I have no idea. She’s called Gabriella. They’ve been together a few months. I can only assume—young people these days—that she’s been living with him.” His eyes grew more anxious. “Call the city police. She works for them. Send them to his flat—they’ll want to check on one of their own. Have them make sure she’s okay.”
Bruno reached into a pocket to retrieve his mobile.
“And make it quick,” Molinaro urged, already back in motion. “We still need to find this man.”
The phone call took only seconds. Carlo didn’t know Alexander’s home address, but he remembered being told once that he lived on Via Varese, in a redbrick block of flats. That would have to be enough for the Polizia di Stato to go on, and it ought to be ample. He relayed the information to Bruno as they walked.
The moment the call ended, he stopped and turned to the other man. His eyes focused on Bruno’s face.
“Do you carry handcuffs?”
“Handcuffs? Of course not. My job consists chiefly of giving people street directions and communicating our opening hours.”
Molinaro wasn’t in the mood for sarcasm. “Do you have access to any?”
“I think there might be a pair in the drawer of the guard station inside.” Bruno motioned to his left. “Not sure if they’re there as a joke or just old stock. They haven’t been touched in years.”
“Grab them,” Molinaro ordered, pushing him toward the station.
A few seconds later, Bruno returned, a pair of outdated steel cuffs in hand.
“Old, but they still seem to function.”
“Then let’s put them back to work.”
Molinaro turned and began to walk toward the crowd of onlookers clinging to the perimeter and trying to gain a better view of the action inside. He forced
himself to slow his pace, to appear as interested in the scene as everyone else. The last thing he needed was to spook the man with the slightly too wide eyes.
Where is he? He scanned the crowd. The place would have been busy by this time of morning in any case, but the possibility of catching a glimpse of whatever was attracting so much police presence was drawing ever more passers-by and swelling the ranks. Walking behind them as they gazed toward the cars and patrolmen, it was hard to make out identifying features.
In the video footage he was wearing a collar. A priest. But I didn’t see a collar when I came out.
Molinaro searched as best as he could through the onlookers. There were too many of them. He was ever more conscious of the passing of time, and despite the drive to remain inconspicuous, he could only afford to be covert to a degree. He had to get a better look at the people here, one way or another.
He moved to a new position, allowing him to glance back toward the faces of the crowd rather than inconspicuously from behind or within, and shielded his eyes from the rain with his left hand. The assortment of humanity before him was motley, surprising.
A woman who for some reason had two small children in tow.
A man, keeping to himself—of the appropriate build. Good. Molinaro began to take a step forward, but stopped himself an instant later. The first glance had been encouraging but the second was not. The hair was too long, too neat. It wasn’t his man.
He turned toward another figure nearby, hoping for better fortune, but was frustrated again. And again. And then again. He could feel his anxiety beginning to mount.
“I thought you said you’d recognize him,” Bruno whispered into his ear. Molinaro avoided responding. The situation was unnerving and frustrating enough without commentary.
He scoped out the crowd once more through the pelting rain. A possibility drew his attention: another man, again of appropriate build. He moved forward, his pulse escalating, but in less than a second he knew the approach was for naught. He caught sight of the man’s face, enough to see that he was at least as old as Molinaro himself.