I frown, glancing at her. “Wait … did you know Sovereign?” She looks at me with contempt. “You knew him.”
“My brother knew him better,” she says. “But I knew him, yes.”
“Huh,” I say, a little surprised. “You don’t seem much like the socializing type.”
She regards me impassively for a moment. “This fight is not like what you did with Sovereign. If Anselmo takes Italy—assuming he can even pull it off—that doesn’t change your life at all. Why are you fighting this battle?”
I can’t help but give her a frown. “How can you even ask me that? People are going to die if I—if we—don’t stop Anselmo.”
“People die,” she says, “it is their signature and trademark. It is what they are born to do, the common fate that none of us can escape.”
“But not today,” I say. “They don’t have to die today.”
She nods almost reluctantly then nods at the end of the street near St. Peter’s Square. “I am going to start patrolling between here and the basilica. You should stay at this end of the street and keep watch.”
I give that a half second’s thought. “Okay. Seems reasonable. If anything happens, I’ll dial you up.”
“Good,” she says and hesitates. Then she looks me in the eyes, and I get a full dose of garden green. “You are a good man, Reed Treston. Your father, Jonathan Traeger—he was a good man as well. You are like him in that regard.” And then she just stalks off down the street, head down.
She gets about a hundred feet away before I manage to get my wits about me. “Wait,” I call after her, “what?”
71.
For the next few hours, Diana pulls an elliptical orbit up one side of the Via della Conciliazione and down the other, neatly avoiding me by about a hundred yards each time. I consider intercepting her, but even I know that hashing out something as distracting as how she might or might not have known my father would probably be best saved for later.
But not too much later.
At about seven, my phone buzzes, the vibration function shaking me out of a stupor. I fish it out of my pocket to see that it’s J.J. I answer.
“All aboard the Reed-ing Railroad,” he says as I answer, “next stop, Boardwalk and Park Place, cha-ching.” I kinda get what he’s going for with that one, but he’s struggling with the most tenuous connections at this point. I guess it’s hard to constantly come up with something new to make a pun out of my name.
“Isn’t it like half past the middle of the damned night there, J.J.?” I ask, staring down the street as Diana makes another lap. She’s changing her pattern and path as she goes. Crowds are starting to gather, and the Carabinieri shows up to block the street about an hour before go time. They ignore me, and her for good measure. I doubt it’s as much a commentary on their policing skills as it is the seriousness of their threat consideration. Or maybe it’s both. Either way, they’re pretty disinterested in what’s going on here, which benefits us.
“Burning the midnight oil, yes, indeed,” J.J. says. “I know you’re going to need help, and I’m here for you, buddy. Tireless, sleepless, whatever. I am your fearless Q, ready to crack some codes and hack some … well, whatever needs hacking, man. I am with you in spirit. And by spirit, I mean digitally, because I’m looking at you on a surveillance cam on the Vaya … della … concilia—whatever.” He gives up.
“Conciliazione,” I finish for him. “Like conciliation. But with a -zione at the end.”
“Mad linguistics, my friend,” he says. “You’re practically like a native-born Italian. But seriously, though, I’m looking right at you. You’re dressed to rumble in a polo and jeans? I like your confidence. Because nothing says you’re down to fight like showing up in casual.”
I lean against the wall awkwardly, suddenly self-conscious about being watched. “I, uh … do you have eyes on Diana?”
“Is she the power walker in the hoodie doing laps down the street?” he asks. “Because if so, I have a lot more than eyes for her.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that,” I say, “or you’re likely to lose the eyes and all else.”
“The sensitive kind,” he says. “Err … about her looks … you know, that doesn’t sound right either. She’s touchy. Err, not like touching … aw, forget it.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “She’s quick to anger.”
“Yes!” he says. “You speak my language, brother from another mother.”
“Mmm,” I say. “You see any signs of the bad guys of our piece?”
“Nothing on facial recognition, and I’m scanning the whole area,” he says. “Or would that be recognizione?”
“This bad guy,” I say, sorting a thread out of my thoughts. “Anselmo. He’s a …” I labor for an appropriate descriptor. “He’s a real sonofabitch.”
“Oh yeah?” J.J. asks. “What’d he do to piss in your Kool-aid?”
“Just has one of those personalities,” I say. “Let me put it this way—clearly, he was the inspiration behind Tom Jones’ song for Thunderball.”
“Ooh,” J.J. says. “That’s bad.”
I grunt. “Tell me about it.”
There’s a moment’s pause. “How you feeling there, champ?”
I feel the skeptical frown crease my brow in the early morning cool. “Gee, coach, I dunno. I guess I’m about ready to go in to the big game.” I let every word drip with irony.
“Seriously, man,” J.J. says. “I know you’ve been through a few rodeos by now, but maybe this one’s a little different since Sienna is on the sidelines.” He pauses, and I can hear his tone soften. “Just lettin’ you know I’m here for you, man. In whatever way you need.”
I stay silent for a handful of moments. “It is different,” I say. “You’re right. It’s all on me this time, and it kind of is my first rodeo. At least the first one I’ve been in charge of.” I shake my head as I survey the avenue. “I don’t want to do this, man. I don’t want to go toe to toe with Anselmo, that crazy bastard. I don’t want to think about Diana or Father Emmanuel getting killed while trying to fight this off.” I shiver under my coat and know it has nothing to do with the weather. “I don’t know how Sienna does this, keeps putting her jaw out there for people to take aim at it over and over.” I think about Gail Roth and that interview, how my sister got picked apart by the news afterward. “This is not my scene.”
“Then why are you there?” J.J. asks.
I laugh. Something about the situation seems totally absurd. “Because no one else is gonna show.”
“They’re following your lead this time, bro,” he says.
I thrust my hands deeper in my pockets. “I’m feeling a little like Dorothy here—I just want to go home.”
“You’ve faced off with some of the nastiest metas in the world, dude,” J.J. says. “You sure aren’t lacking for courage.”
“I feel like I am,” I say. “I feel like a coward for questioning everything—every angle, every action.”
“I think that just makes you a leader.”
His words resonate through me, and I think about all the times Sienna has put herself on the line without looking like she put any thought into it. If I compare myself, bravery-wise, to my sister, I look like a chicken. She’s fearless guts, endless courage, so much brass it puts every man on earth to shame.
I’m not her. I’m scared witless right now. Not so much for myself—maybe a little bit—but for what happens if I fail. What happens if my little fledgling team of near-strangers fails here.
“You gonna make it, man?” J.J. asks. “Do I need to find, like, an inspirational video from YouTube and link it to you?”
I laugh again, sincerely this time. He really does want to help, and this guy—this geeky dude who speaks my language—he makes me feel braver just talking to me. “I think I got it now, pal. Thanks.” I settle against the wall. “Let me know when you get something.”
“Prime Minister’s motorcade is about a half mile away,” J.J. says. “Th
ey’re moving at a decent clip, should be at your position in about two minutes. I mean, I’m estimating, but—”
“That’s fine,” I say, “just keep me apprised.” I wave an arm at Diana as she makes the circuit back in my direction, and she crosses the street toward me. She moves at a steady pace, and she takes less than a minute to reach me.
“The Pope has a processional coming out now,” she says. “Father Emmanuel is with them.”
“Nice eagle eyes,” I say, and I see a glimmer in the green. “Is your power—”
“Precision muscle control,” she says abruptly, and I see her face become masklike.
“Oh,” I say, nodding. “Okay, then.”
“And before you ask, because you men always do,” she says, cocking her head slightly at me, nearly completely inscrutable, “yes, it does extend to all muscles.”
I blink, and she turns away. “That was … uh … informative.”
“Did she just say what I think she said?” J.J.’s voice blares in my ear. He sounds like a hungry dog panting over the line.
“Not now,” I cut him off. “Anything to report?”
“Sorry,” he says, “I didn’t catch that. I was too busy thinking about—”
“J.J.!” I snap. “Head in the game.” There’s a hard wind that blows down the Via della Conciliazione, and it prickles the hairs on the back of my neck.
“I got nothing on the Via,” he says. “The software is running on every camera I can scoop access to, but unfortunately, I’m working with limited server resources, so I’ve only got about six square blocks worth of camera feeds running at the moment. I could try and get broader access to some NSA servers, but it would take—”
“Do it,” I say.
“Dude,” he says, almost pleading, “you didn’t let me finish telling you what it would take to make it happen. Rocha. I’m going to have to talk to Rocha.”
“You talk to Rocha every day,” I say.
“I email with him whenever possible,” he says. “Man’s a dragon. A man-dragon. He breathes fire and smoke, leaving the charred bones of lost souls outside his cubicle in broken mounds—”
“Spare me the epic fantasy imagery,” I say, “and do it.”
“I’m gonna have to wake him up. Wake the dragon. Dude. The things I do for you—”
“Thanks, J.J.,” I say.
“Whoa,” he says, before he can even finish his thought. “Um. Hooboy. Okay, so I got good news and bad—”
I frown, turning to look at Diana, who is lingering nearby, clearly listening to my conversation even as she scans the Via della Conciliazione. “Good news first,” I say.
“I’m not gonna have to wake the dragon.”
I feel my eyes roll with exasperation. “Seriously? This is not—”
“And the bad,” he steamrolls me, which J.J. never does. “I’ve got your boy Lorenzo as well as Anselmo, like an 80% match. No, 90%. Oh, and there’s Fintan. But—and this is the bad news—”
I start to reach for Diana, but she’s already tensed, listening to every word, waiting for the axe to fall.
“—they’re in St. Peter’s Square,” J.J. says. “About a hundred yards from the Pope, and holding position.”
My head turns involuntarily, swiveling the long blocks to the basilica, far down the way. It’s at least a minute’s run, at meta speed. I see movement out of the corner of my eye as the Prime Minister’s motorcade passes, and I suddenly realize that we’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake in assuming we could even come close to guessing what Anselmo has planned.
72.
Anselmo
The moment is arriving, and Anselmo is utterly prepared. The Prime Minister’s motorcade is coming into sight even now, and the Pope is standing only feet away.
Yes, this is about to be a great day. A day of destiny.
Anselmo looks neither right nor left at his lackeys, but straight ahead. Into his future. “Remember what you must do,” he says, his words carrying more than a hint of what will happen to them should they fail. “Do not fail me now. Soon, these countries will be ours, and this fortress will be our capital, the place from which we will repel any attempt to take back what we have won.”
The car approaches, slowly, taking its sweet time, like it is out for a Sunday drive through a countryside village. Anselmo can wait, though. Soon enough, it will arrive here, at its final destination.
73.
Reed
It’s only in the last moments before it all goes down that I realize, rather suddenly, how deeply I’ve underestimated Anselmo. I’ve been operating from the assumption all along that he’s a grandiose but sane gangster, looking to corrupt the institutions of man by trying to take over a country. With a meta behind it, especially one with his sort of invincibility, it almost seems possible. They send an army after Anselmo, he shrugs off their bombs and bullets and personally kills every one of the men that come after him. It seems almost like he could do it, if he acted intelligently, chose the battlefields himself, and had enough of the country’s movers and shakers on his side. Fear and intimidation, as well as the established institutions, these would be his allies. A judicious use of force, intelligent application of terror—I mean, it’s kind of low odds, but I can see the possibility that someone could pull it off.
But here’s where I underestimate Anselmo, and where I finally realize what it takes to be a Bond villain—you’ve got to be out of your damned mind.
There’s no way Anselmo’s scheme—even if it worked, which is a mighty big if—will go unanswered by the rest of the world. The EU is about as likely to let Italy fall off the map unanswered, dropped under the heel of some meta dictator, as I am to just blithely chop off my own arm. But he’s standing near the Pope for a reason, and I’ve finally realized in this moment why he’s chosen to do this at this time, at this location.
He’s going to kill the Pope as well, and try and take over the Vatican as part of his campaign. Like the place is just some country that you can roll over and not some deeply significant spiritual nation state with ties to more governments than you can count. Arguably, what he is planning to do to the Vatican might produce more international outrage than a simple attempt at takeover by force of Italy.
Either way, it’s breathtaking in its scope, and it’s in this moment that I realize that Anselmo is completely effing nuts. It’s like his version of a big dog pissing all over the place to mark his territory, without any regard for how he’s going to defend it from a legion of wolves. It’s every bit as much about intimidating the lesser mammals—and I think we’re all lesser mammals to him—as it is about killing the Prime Minister and the Pope. This is public. This is visual. It’s about as high profile as you can get. Anselmo is spraying his impotent little hose everywhere, and I, for one, am not impressed.
Unfortunately, in the short term, my team and I are all the response that there is for what he’s about to do, and so I’m sprinting down the Via della Conciliazione while all this is rushing through my head. I shoot past the Prime Minister’s car at meta speed, only a few dozen yards behind Diana (she’s fast, I remember as she takes a lead). I can hear hastily applied brakes behind us as we book it down the Via, and I hope that the Prime Minister’s security detail takes this blatant meta activity as a hint to get the hell out of Dodge.
Then I see movement ahead, a frenzied level of activity as something happens near the Pope’s security detail. The sound of gunfire fills the air, sharp and terrifying, and the crowd falls into screams all up and down the Via della Conciliazione as whatever insanity Anselmo has planned starts in earnest.
74.
Anselmo
He can see the Treston boy running up the Via toward St. Peter’s Square, and it fills his throat with a raw, scratching hate. Anselmo wishes he could breathe fire, but there’s a deeper, sicker pleasure he feels at the sight of the lad. The fool is charging into death, into confrontation, into a three-on-one battle that will see him forced to watch as Anselmo’s brillia
nce is shoved into his face once more, and he is forced to—
Anselmo catches a blast of water like a hydrant turned loose, right into his face. He loses his footing, feels the square collide with his back, a dim hint of where the concrete has struck him. He blinks the water out of his eyes, feels it coursing out of his nose, is sputtering and gasping in surprise.
“Capo,” Lorenzo says from above him, reaching a hand down to help him up. Fintan lies to his left, shaking it off, the ground around them wet from whatever has just happened.
As Anselmo takes Lorenzo’s hand, he sees another blast of water come his way, dispelled by Lorenzo with his wind. It comes from a priest—an African priest, of all things! With Swiss guards, machine guns at the ready, advancing slowly behind him. The Pope is gone, long gone, already hustled off across the square by bodyguards whose step is quick enough to suggest they are not all of them human.
He looks down the Via again, and this time he sees the Premier—that pig—his motorcade already moving in reverse back toward the Castle Sant’Angelo. The timing has gone wrong.
Everything has gone wrong. Because of—
“Your mother was a whore,” Anselmo breathes to the priest. “Your Virgin Mary was—”
A blast of water as thick as the spray from a fire hose makes hard contact with Lorenzo’s shield of air, and there is a dispersal that turns the air damp from the force. They are evenly matched, turning loose what they have, this priest with his water against Lorenzo’s air, and the stalemate is a distraction from everything Anselmo intends—
His gaze alights once more upon the fleeing motorcade, and he shakes Lorenzo by the shoulder, turning his attention back to what matters. “Forget the priest,” he whispers. “We have more urgent matters to attend to.” He spins his head to look at Fintan, who is now back on his feet, drooling water. “Keep this fool occupied,” he says and sprints toward the Via della Conciliazione without so much as a look back. He shoves Lorenzo in front of him as the first shots from the Swiss Guards ring out, and he can feel the bullets upon his skin as others might feel the touch of a thrown pebble as he runs to catch the Italian Prime Minister’s motorcade and fulfill at least one part of his plan. The pope, after all, will remain in his fortress, and can be dealt with later. But this?
In the Wind (Out of the Box Book 2) Page 19