He took another breath.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Olivia would later reflect on those seconds and tell herself Andrew transformed. He was a gunslinger in that hard moment caught in time. His overflowing coat spread behind him darkly. His crew-cut hair and bled out face both gave him a hard wild west look that stuck to Olivia’s head for a long time.
He was fast too. The gun became an extension of Andrew’s arm, and he gave the advancing man instant death.
The assassin’s head jerked back a single smoking hole appeared in his forehead, he froze in place. Then he fell.
Andrew wasted no time, “come on, let’s go.”
They rushed forward and fell against the wall there. Andrew quickly began searching around the marbled floor there. There was the opening Miller and Olivia had noted the first time around.
Andrew put his hand against the metal mesh there. He shook it and looked at Olivia.
“I think it’s down there somewhere.”
“But we checked before, there’s nothing down there.”
He smiled, “once again, I haven’t checked.”
How he did it, beat Olivia’s imagination, but Andrew pulled open the metal mesh, and an opening appears there. He returned Olivia’s gun, slithered in, and was gone from sight.
Olivia gazed at the scene before her. It was strange that these professionals were not really trying to take over the church. At least fifteen minutes has last since the shooting began. The Financier is even more powerful than she thought.
She looked into the hole Andrew had just gone in through. She hadn’t seen the steps the other time, but now she saw there was a step there.
Andrew appeared again presently. A grave expression was on his face.
“It’s here.”
“What’s there?”
“The tomb.”
Fresh sweat broke out on Olivia’s forehead. When she looked at Tami’s face, she saw the woman’s face color brightly. She grinned, and she looked so pretty.
“But it’s going to be a heavy haul.”
“How heavy are we talking about,” Olivia whispered.
Andrew glanced at something out of sight below him. Then his head disappeared down that hole in the concrete. When he came back, there was a light on his face. Olivia didn’t know what it was.
“Just huge,” he said.
Olivia glanced at Diggs, he was out of ammo. Miller covered him as he ran across the aisle, he jumped two fallen pews. He dove to the ground just as slugs dug sharp splinters of marble in the air.
He slid to a stop on the other side of the opening in the pulpit.
“What’s up?” asked Olivia.
“They are just shooting, they ain’t trying to get in, what the fucks going on?”
“Beats me.”
Someone was playing a different sort of game with them. Diggs wriggled over. There was a blood scratch on his cheek where a bullet had taken the skin off.
“What’s going on down there? We’ve gotta get out of here before this guy’s decided to change the game again. I’m out of ammo.”
“Andrew is trying to get the gold up—”
“The what?”
“The gold, he found it. But he’s gonna need help.”
Diggs stuck his head into the hole to see. When looked back at the church entrance, something strange had happened; the assassins were falling back. One after the other.
Still no cops yet.
Anabia, Borodin, and Liam crouched and ran across the church. Together with Miller, they came over to the front of the pulpit.
“You have got to be kidding me, there’s an opening down there?” Liam said.
Olivia crawled away from the pulpit towards the door, she went over the dead body of the guy Andrew shot in the head. The puddle of blood around his head was turning pink. She refused the urge to open the mask on the face. Andrew had said a Catholic prayer before shooting him, right in the church, before the pulpit. It was no time to think about her spirituality.
There was no one there at the steps. Or lurking behind the wall. Olivia had her Colt clutched in her hand. Quite unbelievably, it still felt warm in her hand. She took the step one at a time, her eyes trying to see everywhere at once. She went along the high wall and stopped when he saw the men smoking by the black van. She even saw the steam rose from a coffee cup in the van.
This is wrong, she thought.
—
Olivia was back in the church seconds later with the news of the assassins waiting outside in the parking lot.
“We won’t leave here alive with the gold, the moment we step outside, we’d be dead,” she said.
“What’re we gonna do?” Miller asked.
She glanced at her brother who’s head stuck from the opening under the pulpit.
“He will find some way.”
Andrew nodded.
The last person to go in was Lawrence Diggs. He pulled the mesh after him.
—
11
The cave was shaped like a box with stone walls on both sides. There was a metal ladder in the wall that went up into the roof of the cave. The same went up to the pulpit of San Lorenzo church.
Olivia estimated the wall to be at least a hundred years old, part of a network of ancient secret underground passageways. She touched the wall, the texture was clay that was fired over thousands of degrees. It was now blackish, far from its original neutral color. To the right was a low archway. Beyond it, darkness.
Her team stood around a pavement in the middle of the room. The pavement was of the same material as the walls. On the pavement, there was a tomb of irregular size. It was smaller than most tombs she’d seen. Olivia peeked over the opening, she held her breath against the stale smell of an old corpse.
Time had so dealt with the corpse so much it looked like an effigy. It looked like the mort of a sizeable prehistoric rodent. Deep lines drew from the temples to the mouth where prongs of teeth meet each other in a burst of silent and mirthless laughter.
The carcass clutched a sack on its chest. It was an old woven type of sack used in the ancient world. When Andrew pulled the scrawny hands apart, they broke with a dry crack, like sticks in the wood.
“There goes old Poussin’s hands. Andrew, how cruel of you,” said Liam. He whispered earnestly, “the Lord is not happy with you, Andrew, say seven holy Mary’s, will you?”
Andrew held the sack to the light, it had holes in them. And through the holes shone a metallic yellow. It looked like a yellow lump of dough. The group took turns touching the roof surface.
“God, it’s half as heavy as it should be,” Andrew frowned.
Olivia asked, “what do you mean?”
“I’m saying, someone got here before us, they took a part of it.”
Liam shrugged, “but how would you know that Andrew, have you been down here before?”
“Nathaniel Poussin came here every new moon to see if the secret remained hidden as it should. When he died, his son took over. But he was killed in Morocco very recently, as you may know, and his patch of the painting taken from him. I was appointed as an alternative by his hand, should that happen. I have only been here once.”
The group was in apparent shock.
Olivia spoke after a moment, “it doesn’t matter. We have to leave Andrew, come on.”
Andrew kept the lump of gold back in the bag, and then in a bigger one provided by Diggs. They followed Diggs as he led them through the darkness.
Olivia held Tami’s hand, “we did it,” she whispered.
Tami’s face in the dark was aglow with happiness and gratitude.
“You think this is what Gabby would have wanted?”
“Decisamente, definitely.”
Olivia smiled. She breathed the fresh air of the underground world.
“Decisamente,” she sang.
—
Ten minutes after many turns and stone steps, the passageway opened to the st
reet in the Borgo. They went up a ladder that ended up in a room in an apartment some two hundred meters away from the church of San Lorenzo.
The apartment smelled of disuse, was empty except for a table and chair near the wall of peeling blue paint.
“Here we are, guys,” said Olivia from the window.
The other guys were walking around the room, getting a feel of it. There was a door set in the wall like a closet, Liam went to it, he turned the knob and said, “I hope we lost those fuckers—”
The door banged open, and standing behind it was Talbot.
“Oh well, you don’t think you’re the only ones with a map of the city, huh.”
Behind him was the bogey man. The street door was locked open too.
Guns came in first, then the men holding them.
Talbot walked over to Andrew, “thank you, priest, I’m gonna hold on to this, please.”
The Bogeyman cocked his head to the side, “Tami, come give me a kiss now, will you?”
Tami dropped Olivia’s grip and strutted away, her luscious hips swayed. She put her hands around the assassin, and they kissed, wet, and sloppy.
Olivia gasped, she felt a pang in her chest.
“Tami?” she whispered.
“Yes, Olivia,” the woman said, “surprised?”
She looked at all the men. Miller, Liam, Anabia, Borodin, and Diggs. Andrew remained calm.
“You know,” Liam opened his mouth, “I was beginning to like that ass, thinking maybe I might tax it on a beach in the Bahamas.”
“Liam and his big mouth,” Talbot jeered, to Olivia, she said, “well, we had a deal. You get me the gold I give you your brother, we are even, don’t you think?”
“And Tami, how about you, what’d you get from this, huh, Gabby was your husband—” said Olivia.
“No, he wasn’t, I didn’t love him. He was stupid, he could take this gold, but he chose a small life. I don’t want a small life. So I had I went with Sean’s plan,” she touched the bogeyman’s hand.
“You were like Gabby, Olivia, you were stupid, gullible. I let them track us with my cellphone all the time we were together. You’ve been played.”
Talbot said, “its nothing personal, okay, just business. I’m off.”
He tapped the Bogeyman on the shoulder, “kill them all, somewhere private and hide the bodies.”
He went out into the night.
—
The bank of the Tiber.
The western side of the river slanted away from the city. The Bogeyman brought them there, each one with their hands tied behind them.
He was alone. It would be quick, and then he can go back and shag Tami Capaldi.
“Wait!”
It was Andrew. He turned around.
“Before you do this evil, I should pray for your soul, to redeem it from eternal damnation.”
The Bogeyman snickered. “You need the prayer, not me.”
“No, we don’t, cos tonight, you are dying, not us.”
Andrew gritted his teeth and whispered. Something darted thought the dark air and struck the Bogeyman in the throat. His gun fell from convulsive hands. His head jerked to the side. His knees buckled, and he fell forward. White foam bubbled from the corner of his mouth, and he was dead.
“Well, you are a badass priest, aren’t you?” Diggs smiled, this time, his eyes did too.
Andrew untied the rest of them.
Looking at the dead assassin’s body, Olivia asked Andrew, “will he find peace?”
“I doubt it.”
—
Epilogue
Tami Capaldi waited another half hour before she called Sean’s cellphone again. Someone answered the call, but that someone put the phone beside some radio. The news was on, and it was about dead bodies found in a church.
“Hello, Sean, where the hell are you?” she fumed.
A minute and a half after, she punched the red button.
She was running out of time. Sean would meet her at the airport.
She packed and left her hotel.
—
“Did you get it?” Olivia asked.
“Yes.”
Lawrence Diggs punched a button on his console, and a pulsating red dot stopped at a hotel in Municipio III.
Ten minutes after, a black van parked in the street. Three people crossed the road to the small hotel on via del Amar’e: Olivia, Diggs, and Andrew.
They knocked and heard the voice of Tami behind the door.
“Sean, is that you?”
Diggs cocked his gun and kicked the door in.
Tami didn’t make it to the gun on the dresser on time.
“Freeze, Tami. Where’s the gold?” Olivia ordered.
Twenty minutes passed, and Tami still whimpered through the gag over her mouth, while Olivia’s jet flew towards Miami. With half the Templars gold.
END OF BOOK 3
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