Authors: Steven Savile
“Knock yourself out,” Noah told him. “As to why the messages were different, we think they were telling us where they were going to hit first. And if we are right, Berlin today means Rome tomorrow.”
“Dio ci aiuti,” the Carabinieri breathed, part prayer, part absolute denial as he looked over Noah’s shoulder at the screen. Noah knew he was reading the numbers and imaging the same tragedy overlaid on his familiar streets. His hand trembled as he raised it to his lips and took a drag on the thin cigarette. It was a painfully human gesture, frail, frightened. This was outside of his philosophy. He was a man made for corruption,
mafioso
, narrow alleyways and the intrigue of an intimate death. Death with honor, as the old saying went. This faceless death was, for want of a better word, un-Italian. For that fraction of a second, when Neri let his guard down, Noah pitied him. He knew all too well the kind of hell that was coming to his city; he’d been shown it all across the television this afternoon. It didn’t take any imagination to switch the word Berlin for Rome.
Noah took a swallow on his Nasturo Azzurro. The beer was cold going down, which was just about all he asked of a beer. He wiped his lips and put the bottle back down on the table between them. He didn’t turn to look at the screen.
“How do we stop it, Noah?” Dominico Neri asked, using his given name for the first time.
He wished he knew.
“You came to me for a reason, so tell me, how do we stop it?”
He leaned forward, closing the gap between them. It was an intimate gesture, especially for a coffee-shop conversation. Noah didn’t want the wrong ears hearing what he was about to say, even if they couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about. The old adage of loose talk costing lives had never really been forgotten by the military services. “All of the victims were English,” he said instead of answering Neri’s impossible question. “We’ve got people looking into what, specifically, links them. Something has to. And we’ll find it. It’s what we do. And when we find it, we’ll find the people behind it.”
“But you won’t find them today, will you?” Neri said. It wasn’t a question. Not really. “Which means tomorrow . . .” his voice trailed off.
“Look at the messages,” he said. “Look at what they say. They’re a direct threat against one man, not against the city. It w
“You really do think they will move against His Holiness?” Neri asked, almost disbelieving. Only the television kept him from dismissing the idea as absurd. “Dear God, you do, don’t you?”
Noah nodded slowly.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, my friend, but I wish I’d never met you.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” Noah said, without the vaguest hint of amusement.
“I still don’t understand why you would come to me rather than NOCS.” The Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza was the Italian police’s counterterrorism unit. They were as good as it got, HALO-trained and worked side by side with the FBI Hostage Rescue, the Israeli YAMAM, the German GSG-9, the Danes, the Dutch, and other special forces groups across Europe. He was right, they were the logical place for Noah to go with this sort of global threat. They were also the least likely to believe him, he thought, but he didn’t say that. They might have taken him seriously if he had the weight of Six backing him up, but he didn’t. He was as good as alone in this mess.
“I’m just a policeman,” Neri said, preparing to start on his third cigarette
since he’d joined Noah at the table.
“This is outside of my . . . hell
, I don’t even know what to call it. I’m just a chain-smoking, womanizing Roman, my friend. I don’t wear my underwear on top of my trousers.” Noah caught the superhero in tights joke. For all his facetiousness Neri was right, the world could have done with a caped crusader right now. Instead it was going to have to make do with a chain-smoking, womanizing, Anglo-Italian alliance.
“What do you think I am?” he asked, instead.
The Roman laughed. It was a short, sharp grunt of a laugh, but it was a laugh just the same. “I have no idea what you are. That is part of the problem. And I have no idea what you want from me. You drop this bombshell in my lap and expect me to deal with it, knowing there’s nothing me or my people can do about it, not in time. You expect me to single-handedly protect the Pope? Do I look like the kind of man who would take a bullet for God’s Messenger? Look at me, Noah,”—Neri seemed happy enough to use his given name again. Noah guessed that meant they were friends now—“I’m not a hero, even without the tights. I do my job. I do it as well as I can without it stripping the humanity from my soul, but the years swimming in the filth of Rome have turned me cynical. I’m tired. I wake up tired, stiff. My bones are trying to tell me it is time to hand the city over to a younger man, and you’re preseting me with a secret that is only going to cause me a world of hurt. I don’t think I want to thank you for this. And do you know what the irony in all of this is?”
Noah shook his head. He didn’t have a clue.
“He’s not even in the city right now. He’s off on one of his holy pilgrimages somewhere.”
Noah looked at Neri. “Are you serious?”
“Does this look like the face of a man given to humor?”
It didn’t.
“Well that doesn’t change anything,” he said, trying to think through the precise implications of an absentee Pope. He hadn’t expected it to be a straightforward fix, but it wasn’t
Day of the Jackal
either. The original plan had been to make friendly with the locals, get the ear of the captain of the Swiss Guard, convince him of the seriousness of the threat, and get the Pope moved somewhere safe. The odds of their taking him seriously had always been slim at best. And while the religious types might stubbornly cling to the idea of God being their armor, the odds were that the Swiss Guard were a damn sight more practical. They’d be idiots not to take a threat on their man’s life seriously—at least until it was proven otherwise.
If the strike was against the Pope directly, his being out of the country would just move the locus of danger. They would be looking to get word to those closest to him, step up security and, more likely than not, arrange an evacuation to a safe house while the threat was neutralized. If it was against the Seat of the Catholic Church it didn’t matter if the Pope was in residence or not, the attack would go ahead. The manner of the attack itself would be the only real difference. To be sure one man died, the most effective way was something intimate: a sniper, poison, a car-bomb, something that could be aimed. To take out something as nebulous as the faith itself was moving back into the realm of spectacle. A bomb most likely. A series of bombs. Something big that was going to make a lot of very visible mess.
Noah was back to thinking about terror as a sort of performance art, all the world’s a stage and all that. It had to be visible, it had to be shocking and it had to shake the believers to the core. Seeing the rescuers picking through the rubble, desperately looking for survivors while all of their relics and their hopes burned would send a statement to the faithful. He said as much to Neri. The policeman nodded, thinking it through for himself.
Terror as spectacle. That was the one thing that bothered Noah about all of this. These attacks were causing terror, but to what end? What was the cause? What did these people hope to achieve beyond instilling fear in Europe? There should have been videos going viral on the Internet already. Someone out there should be claiming responsibility and telling the world what they wanted in return for ending the fear. That was the way it worked.
“Whichever way it goes, we need time,” Neri said. He left the second half of that sentence unsaid. “We can sweep the perimeter of the Vatican, but assuming they’ve not left us a nice rust bucket with a sign painted on the side that says ‘bomb,’ it’s going to take time. And if they’ve planted it across the border in the land of Great God Almighty, we’re shit out of luck.”
“They’ll listen to you, surely?” Noah said.
“This is Rome. They’ll stick their fingers in their ears and make like they can’t hear a damned thing we’re saying because they think they’re all invincible. They’re part of God’s Army. There’s nothing worse than the grand delusions of True Believers. They either think they’re immortal, or they are quite happy they’re off to a better place. As far as I can tell it doesn’t really matter to them if they’re heading there in a million little pieces.” Neri’s grin was lopsided.
“How long has this trip been planned?”
“No idea. But given the kind of performance a papal visit is, months, six, ten?” Neri shrugged.
Noah tried to think.
How would he approach it in their place?
He covered his entire face with his calloused palm.
“Think, think, think,” he grunted, running his hand up through his hair. He shook his head. From the very first calls nothing about this was how he would have done it. For a start he sure as hell wouldn’t have broadcast he was going after the Pope. That was stupid. You misdirect with smoke and mirrors, you don’t set up that Scooby Doo moment unless you
really
want to mutter “if it wasn’t for you meddling kids” as they lead you away in handcuffs. So what the hell was really going on here?
Out of Vatican City the papal bodyguards would naturally be on a state of heightened alertness—that much made sense. Anywheretside of the Holy See would have to be considered hostile territory in these conflicted days. So, best case scenario, the Pope had people around him willing, as Neri had so eloquently put it, to take that bullet. His daily routine would be less predictable, making it a more difficult hit. You’d need good information flow, someone on the inside feeding schedules to you with enough time to get there ahead of the entourage; otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able scout out possible vantage points. Noah closed his eyes. As the assassin you wanted to minimize the random elements, control what could be controlled. The kill was about being patient and methodical. Chance had to be removed from any equation.
In Basrah Noah had lain hidden in a blind for five days, pissing into the water bottles he’d drunk dry, defecating into the wraps that had held his rations. Noah had made the shot on the third day and watched them tear the desert apart looking in all the wrong places for him for another day, but it wasn’t until the day after they gave up looking for him that he walked out of the desert. When he tore down the blind he took it all with him. There wasn’t a single sign he had ever been there. He heard three of the Mahdi call him the ghost killer. He liked that. He had it tattooed onto his left arm when he got home—it was the only thing he brought out of Iraq with him.
That was the kind of patience an assassination demanded.
The natural-environment kill was easier. The target was at ease. They followed their habits. Habits were patterns.
So if it had been him, Noah would have wanted to walk the land. Study the set up. He would have wanted to be sure he knew where the target was coming from, exactly, and where it was leaving to. Each terrain had its own issues that needed to be contended with. The last thing you wanted was something as stupid as a stray beam of sunlight reflecting off the wrong pane of glass to make the shot any more difficult than it had to be.
Control the variables.
Every way he looked at it, Rome was the perfect location for an attempt on the Pope’s life.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Noah said, opening his eyes again. Neri looked at him expectantly. “There are just so many things wrong with this scenario. This can’t be about the Pope, not yet. This is about Rome, just like today was about Berlin. It has to be.”
“But the quatrain the suicide called in?” Neri said.
“Roman Pontiff beware of your approaching, of the city where two rivers water, your blood you will come to spit in that place, both you and yours when blooms the Rose.”
He quoted te piece perfectly. Noah wondered how many times the Roman had read those four lines of prophecy in the last forty-eight hours.
“It’s the smoke and mirrors part,” Noah said, sure he was right. It was the only thing that made sense. He had let himself become distracted with everything else. “Gets us barking up trees, it has to be. You said it yourself, the Pope isn’t here. These guys are meticulous. They have to be to have orchestrated thirteen to-the-minute suicides in thirteen cities, and then duplicate the feat in the U-Bahn today. There’s no way they’d make such a blatantly amateurish mistake as to not know exactly where His Holiness is right down to the bloody minute. Think about it,”—he shook his head, something approaching admiration in his voice—“the message might have been about the Pope, but we keep forgetting that so was the one in Berlin. Those were the long-term threat; the fact that they were different earmarked Berlin and Rome as targets.