Authors: Steven Savile
Noah vaguely remembered the uproar surrounding the Gospel of Judas when it was recovered. The Judas Iscariot of his own gospel was both the betrayer of the Bible the world knew and simultaneously the hero of his own life. It was that aspect of the story that captured the imagination of the world—from being the most infamous traitor of all time Judas was suddenly presented as the most loyal and faithful companion, the only one who could be trusted to make the great sacrifice.
It was the same with all of the so-called Gnostic gospels. They seemed to paint everything we knew in a different light. In Thomas, God didn’t need great houses of worship, since Thomas promised that God was beneath every stone and in every split piece of wood. God was in the details. God was in the stuff of life. That was the nature of His creation, and it was there in the middle of it, beneath the heavens, that He should be worshipped, not in houses of brick and stone.
It was as Abandonato had said, subtle changes in translation of an existing text, or a subtle shift in the message of a “new” one could send tremors out through the world.
Did the Church really
want
a sympathetic Judas?
Wasn’t it easier for him to be vilified as the betrayer, motivated by greed and jealousy and all of these most human of sins?
Did the martyring of Iscariot change the importance of the resurrection and the other miracles central to what had become the day to day faith of Christianity? Noah wasn’t a theologian, but it seemed to him that it did. It was a subtle shift, but it was a shift just the same. And then the natural extension of that line of questioning became: was that enough of a change for the Vatican to bury the secret?
Noah wanted to think it was, but surely, then, Abandonato wouldn’t have mentioned the
Testimony of Menahem ben Jair
at all? He didn’t have to say Nick Simmonds had had anything to do with the document. After all, it was easier to hide something when no one knew it existed. Abandonato had broached the subject himself, suggesting that some people believed the third secret of Fatima had been doctored before its publication. Why wouldn’t the Church do something like that? And if it would do that, why wouldn’t it hide any documentary evidence that might prove dangerous to its fundamental belief systems?
Noah’s head was spinning with it all.
The only thing he knew for sure was that Nick Simmonds had been on the dig at Masada, where the Testimony had been unearthed, and he had followed it here to the Vatican two years later. That went beyond circumstance into still-hot smoking-gun territory. The rest was irrelevant.
“Here we are,” Abandonato said. “If there is anything else I can do, you only have to ask.”
“I’d really like to know what is in that testimony,” he said, knowing he was asking the impossible of the priest.
One of the Swiss Guard stood watch over the exit. He was dressed in his regular-duty uniform of simple blue with a flat white collar, knee-length black socks and a brown leather belt. He wore a black beret tilted slightly to the right. The simple uniform marked him as a newer recruit to the Guard. The blue was a lot less gaudy than the red, yellow, orange and blue motley of the Guard’s official dress. Of course, had he been stationed on the other side of the door, that is exactly what he would have been wearing, along with a ceremonial sword and halberd like something stepped out of Renaissance Rome. The guard’s face was impassive to the point of being sorrowful.
Abandonato didn’t answer him. Instead he opened the door.
The guard nodded slightly to the priest and stepped aside to allow Noah to leave.
Noah wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing at first, but instinct quickly took over.
The door opened onto the piazza, a little way beyond the two dry fountains. Noah had expected to slip out of the same small side door he had entered the Vatican through. This door led out into the grand piazza of San Pietro. He was aware of the long snake of tourists lining up to go into the basilica, but that wasn’t what he was looking at.
Noah stared, fixated at a man as he lurched through the line of shadow The Witness cast across the center of the piazza. The man wore a long flapping raincoat completely out of keeping with the season. The coat was open and his body seemed to bulge disproportionately beneath it. The man clutched something in his right hand. Noah couldn’t see what it was. Something about the way the man was moving set all sorts of alarm bells ringing inside Noah’s head. He held his hand out in front of him like whatever he was holding was contagious. Noah saw the C4 strapped to his body before he saw the fear in his face. The packages of explosives were strapped around his belly with thick bands of gaffer tape. Noah couldn’t see the wires from where he was, but he knew that the device in his hand
had
to be a detonator. He didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t afford to wait for the Swiss Guard to react, and he had no idea whether they had a means to take the suicide bomber out anyway.
He stepped out into the piazza. The sun streamed down, suddenly, horribly bright after the darkness of the Vatican’s endless corridors.
“On your knees! Get down
now
!” Noah yelled, drawing his Heckler and Koch USP 9mm and pointing it straight at the bomber’s chest. He tensed, ready to pull the trigger. He couldn’t allow himself to think, not with hundreds of people in the piazza queuing up to file into St. Peter’s. Judging by his misshapen body, there was enough C4 strapped to the bomber to make a hell of a mess. One life for many; it wasn’t even a question.
The man stumbled forward another step.
And then another.
People in the square were starting to look, drawn by the sound of Noah’s voice. Even if they didn’t understand his words, their delivery cut across the chatter and stopped them dead in their tracks.
“You don’t have to do this!” Noah shouted at him, moving a step closer to meeting the bomber halfway. “Just put down the detonator, get down on your knees and put your hands behead your head!”
He locked eyes with the man, willing him to open his hand and drop the detonator. But the man didn’t. He took another step closer to Noah. Noah could see the red of the button poking out from his clenched fist.
“This doesn’t have to end this way!”
The man shook his head violently. Noah could see the strain in every inch of his body. He was wired. Sweat peppered every inch of his skin, streaming down his face. He looked down at his hand and started to raise it.
Noah dropped him. Three shots punched a neat triangle into the area around the bomber’s heart. The man jerked and spasmed, his body thrown into a violent pirouette. He twisted and hit the ground hard, face first. Blood spread around his head where his nose had opened up from the sickening impact. Noah walked toward the bomber, his H&K still aimed directly at him. He wasn’t taking any chances, not with the detonator still clasped in the man’s hand. All it needed was the slightest twitch and the whole place would go up.
He didn’t hear the screaming. He didn’t hear the shouts of the Swiss Guard yelling for him to put the weapon down.
He knelt beside the would-be bomber and pulled open his coat. There were wires sticking up from the blocks of C4, but they didn’t go anywhere. They were cut. The C4 wasn’t connected to the detonator in his hand. There was no way the bomb could have gone off. Noah tried to pry the detonator out of the man’s fist but couldn’t. It had been glued around the detonator. He couldn’t have dropped it if he had wanted to.
Everything about this stank.
He had killed an innocent man.
Noah couldn’t afford to think about it.
Even as he knelt down to rifle the dead man’s pockets, looking for a wallet or some form of identification, he knew he was missing something. Something important. Why did he keep walking? All he had to do was kneel down. He couldn’t detonate the C4 strapped to his body, so why did he carry on walking? There was only one reason for that: someone made him. Noah scanned the piazza. There were literally thousands of people, and they were all looking his way. One of them had scared this man so much he had carried on walking even though he knew the next step would be the death of him. Which meant it had to be more than fear for himself that kept him moving. Noah scanned the faces closest to him as though he might be able to pick the monster out of the crowd. Real life wasn’t like that. As long as the real terrorist in the square did nothing to reveal himself he could have been any Tom, Dick or Harriet looking at him.
“Close the square off!” he barked over his shoulder. He twisted to see the guard. The man stood rooted to the spot in shock. “Snap out of it! I need you to close off the damned square. The man who poisoned the city’s here!”
“Where—” the guard started to ask when Noah cut him off.
“Move!”
The Guard snapped to attention and stepped back through the door. He picked the radio up from the table and called in what had just happened.
No one seemed able to believe what they had just witnessed. The bloodshed had shattered the sanctity of the place. Two more of the Swiss Guard had left their station and were running across the square toward them. He saw otherso ming, gesticulating that the piazza should be closed off. Behind him, Abandonato was rooted to the spot. A look of abject horror twisted his face. This was not in his philosophy. This kind of madness made no sense to the holy man. It was, however, the world in which Noah lived.
Noah used the frozen moment of shock to get things done.
He found a wallet and went through it quickly. There was no driver’s license, no credit cards, no store cards or Blockbuster cards, nothing that might identify the man. The only thing in the wallet was a single piece of folded paper. He teased it out and opened it up. It had two short lines written on it:
We
have tested your faith. Today we break it.
He stood up and looked around the square again, slowly, his eyes moving from face to face. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he hoped to hell that he’d recognize it when he saw it. Horror? Fear? Shock? He chewed on his bottom lip. He had three thousand, four thousand possible suspects, and they were all just milling around like little lost sheep.
Then, halfway across the square, he saw a solitary figure leaning against The Witness. Their eyes met for half a second and, smiling, the man saluted him. The gesture was laced with irony so thick it smacked of loathing. The man, dressed simply in jeans, plain white sneakers and a gray tee-shirt and blue hoodie was utterly unremarkable with his close-cropped, dark hair and five o’clock shadow. He had wanted Noah to see him. He pushed away from the obelisk. He was well built, muscular. The gray material of the tee-shirt strained across his pecs and biceps. Possibly ex-military, Noah thought, watching the way he moved. The notion was only reinforced by that mocking salute. He turned and started to walk toward the thickest part of the crowd.
“Call Neri,” Noah shouted, taking off after the man. He knew it was a trap, but he really didn’t have a choice in the matter. He wasn’t about to leave it to the jesters of the Swiss Guard in the motley to chase the man through Rome, and he wasn’t about to let him disappear into the crowd. So even if it meant chasing him all the way into whatever trap he had waiting, that was exactly what Noah was going to do. “Tell him I’m about to get myself killed!”
22
The Birth of the Truth
The ICE train from Berlin to Koblenz took six hours.
Konstantin Khavin chose the first airline-style window seat in the silent carriage. The seat backed onto the restroom, meaning no one could sit behind him and he could see anyone walking toward him. It was an ingrained habit. He didn’t want noise. He didn’t want people pretending they were important and talking into their mobile phones for the entire journey. He didn’t want kids with their annoying little computer games chirping and bleeping at him. And most of all he didn’t want someone sitting next to him and talking at him for six hours. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts, either looking out of the window at the world rolling by or with his eyes closed, pretending sleep.
The carriage was five degrees cooler than it was outside, and maintained at a constant sixty-eight by precision German engineering. The air was lifeless, pumped into the car as though it were an airplane.
Konstantin breathed deeply, letting the manufactured air leak slowly out of his nose.
Lethe had briefed him an hour ago. He had filled him in on everything the rest of the team had discovered. It was a lot to digest.
When Lethe finally stopped talking Konstantin said simply, “And I am to kill them, yes? That is what the old man wants?”
That was the Russian way. Already his mind was running through possible scenarios. He could walk into Devere’s office and take him out of the picture. One bullet was all it would take. Not even that, men like Devere were seldom fighters. Konstantin could simply walk up behind him and snap his neck as brutally and efficiently as that. Or he could wait for him in the street, drag him down a dirty alley and leave him in a stack of garbage sacks for the rats to gnaw on. He could rent a car, run Devere off the road, then stand over his flashy sports car while it burned. There were as many different ways to die as there were hours in a year. The end result was the same. That was all that mattered.
There was a certain elegance to the Russian solution sometimes.
It would be different with Orla. Extraction not execution. It would need more thoughtful planning. He didn’t have time to thoroughly case the area, so he would have to rely upon shock. Hit them before they had a chance to react. Come at night. Make lots of noise. Full of fury. In the dark of night fear was as good a companion as a second shooter. But he would need more than just his Glock 19.
Lethe killed the fantasy before he could lock the slide on the imaginary gun. “No. You’re not to kill anyone, Koni. At least I hope you’re not. The old man’s got other plans for you. Devere’s in Koblenz. He’s the money—he isn’t likely to do the thing himself, but he’s going to want to watch what he’s paid so much for. He won’t be able to resist. It’ll be like the Kennedy Assassination. Everyone will say ‘where were you when the Pope got shot?’ and Miles Devere wants to be able to say ‘I was there. I saw the whole thing with my own two eyes.’ Koblenz fits the prophecy—it’s a city split by two major rivers, the Rhine and the Moselle—and the Pope is scheduled to be in the city for the next forty-eight hours before moving on to an engagement in Krakow. Your job is simple,” Lethe said without a hint of irony. “You stop it from happening at all costs. Whatever it takes, Koni. Keep him alive. It’s as simple as that.
“I’ll be raising flags on the Bundeskriminalamt INPOL database. I’ll give them every face from that photograph in Masada, every name from the dig. I’ll build them as complete a profile to work off as I possibly can in the time, and meanwhile the old man will be calling in the cavalry. You won’t be alone, Koni, but here’s the kicker: you won’t be able to trust anyone. As far as we can tell Orla spoke to no one outside of the IDF in Israel, and Mabus took her. If they can infiltrate the Israeli Defense Force, they can sure as hell infiltrate the BKA, or at least know how to pose as some down-at-the-heel German detective. Trust no one, my fine Russian friend.”
“It will be just like old times,” Konstantin said.
“I thought you’d like that,” Lethe said.
Konstantin thought about it.
It made sense.
Orla was in trouble. But Orla was a big girl, big enough to look after herself. She had done it before, and she would do it again. She was a soldier. She was trained for this. She was resourceful. Capable. The old man had chosen her for a reason. He trusted the old man’s judgment. For that reason he shunted her out of his thoughts. He needed to focus on the things he could influence.
“I appreciate the irony of the situation,” Konstantin said, “but I do not like it. I would be much happier going to Tel Aviv and killing the men who have taken our girl.”
“Me too, my friend. You doing the killing, obviously, not me. I could barely crush a wasp. Look after yourself, Koni. I’m going to send a data packet to your cell phone in a minute; it’s got the Pope’s itinerary on it for the next forty-eight hours—who he’s meeting, where, and how he’s getting there. I’ll also send you the parade route. His Holiness is scheduled to lead prayers tonight in the Florinsmarkt. The dais is being constructed on the exact same spot where the gallows used to stand. Part of the prayer service will also be to sanctify the unholy ground. I’m thinking, if anything is going to happen, this is the most likely place. It’s a crowded square overlooked on all sides. Plenty of angles of opportunity.”
“Precisely why it is least likely, then,” Konstantin said. “It is where security will be tightest. What about the parade route?”
“The cavalcade will run along the riverside and through the Old Town. The route’s a little over three miles with plenty of meet-and-greet spots. It’s going to be pretty exposed from what I can see on the computer screen. Hardly any of the streets have the same sort of blanket surveillance camera coverage we’re used to, so I’m not going to be a lot of use when the shit starts hitting the fan.”
“You do what you do, I will do what I do,” Konstantin said, and hung up.
The rhythm of the wheels on the tracks was soothing. He found himself dropping into a thought pattern that coincided with the
duh-duh-da-duh duh-duh-da-duh
vibration that shivered te floor beneath his feet.
Provided the train ran according to the schedule, he would arrive around two and a half hours before the Pope was scheduled to deliver evening prayers. That gave him a little time to walk the parade route, looking for possible vantage points a sniper might use and that kind of thing, but crowds would be gathering at the same time, making his job more difficult.
There was corruption here. The entire thing reeked of it.
Humanity Capital was big business. Devere Holdings was bigger business. That Miles Devere had been in Israel at the time of the quake and worked with the real Akim Caspi put him right at the middle of this particularly tangled knot Konstantin was trying to unravel.
He didn’t doubt for a minute that Lethe was right; Devere would want to see the endgame played out, but he wasn’t an ideologue like Mabus. Devere was a money man. Devere had money. Money bought people. It was a fairly simplistic worldview, but he’d yet to have it disproved. He had corporate muscle. He developed corporate strategies that exploited the system, and he loved the system quite simply because it allowed him to exploit it.
Mabus was a different beast entirely. He didn’t hire mercenaries to prolong a conflict or bribe men to hit a civilian ward so that he could be hired to rebuild it. He wasn’t a profiteer. He didn’t need to be. He was a zealot, just like the Sicarii had been two millennia ago. And like any zealot he relied upon fanaticism as his stock in trade. Mabus had a single core belief: the Church was founded upon a lie. The man history loathed as the great betrayer was in truth the real Messiah, a religio-martial liberator who made his sacrifice out of love, sealing it with a kiss.
That belief had caused Mabus to bring together thirteen others and forge them as self-styled Disciples of Judas. Those thirteen had cast their nets out, recruiting others to their faith. Together they formed the Shrieks. Their purpose? The only one that made any sort of sense to the Russian was an attack on the very foundations the Catholic Church was built upon. After all Judas was their Messiah, not Jesus. Why should the world pray to the cross and drink the blood of Christ if his entire life was a lie? What salvation was there in that? It was a seductive way of reasoning.
He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He checked it. Lethe’s data packet had arrived. He opened it, checking the locations, dates and times, and realized there were far too many for comfort. Protecting the man was going to be a nightmare. Even without walking the parade route he knew there would be far too many places an assassin could hide. Modern sniper rifles made it possible for a skilled shooter to be so far removed from the scene that chasing them was next to impossible if so many of the variables of the murder weren’t already fixed. So, of course, the last ting Konstantin was going to do was waste his time trying to protect the Pope. Besides, he had his personal guard, willing to take a bullet for him and earn their place in heaven. And of course, the entire BKA would be on high alert from the moment he stepped out into public. No, Konstantin would put his particular skills set to a slightly different use. As the old football adage went, attack was the best form of defense.
He would find the man and kill him before he could pull the trigger.
That gave him anything from three hours to two full days to find the assassin, depending upon when he had decided to take the shot.
The train rolled on. Konstantin found himself drowsing. He let himself slide into a shallow sleep. He had no idea when he might sleep again.
While he slept he dreamed in Russian. In his dream Mabus was the snake in the darkness, whispering with its forked tongue. He held his Glock but couldn’t see what he was aiming at. And then he saw it, the snake coming out of the darkness. He pulled the trigger again and again and again, making the snake writhe. He shot ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred bullets into its cold skin. He was a snake charmer, making it rise. Then the creature arced forward and bit him. He fired and fired and fired again.
He woke with a start, lurching forward in his seat.
The ICE train was pulling into a town that looked like it had been lifted straight from the fairy tale world of Grimms’ fables.
The driver announced the next station. It wasn’t Koblenz. He closed his eyes again. This time he did not allow himself to sleep. He was hungry, he realized. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. He walked along to the restaurant car and ordered a too-hot cup of black coffee and a microwaved pizza slice in a silver-lined box along with a cinnamon bun dripping white icing, and a candy bar. It was all sugar food. Fast energy junk. But he didn’t feel like a sit-down silver-service dinner, which was the only alternative, so it would have to do.
He worked his way back through the train, rolling with the motion of the car as it leaned into the long curves in the track, until he was back in his seat. He sipped at the coffee. He ate the pizza in six bites, barely taking the time to chew before he swallowed, he was so hungry. He licked the stringy cheese from his fingers.
If he thought like a Russian, it made sense that the Disciples of Judas would want the Church’s “papa” dead. It was a bold move. It was a strike right at the heart of their false messiah. It obeyed the Moscow Ru come hard, come fast and leave them frightened. It was just like breaking down the door at four a.m. and dragging a man out of bed, naked, kicking, screaming and, most important of all, helpless. But more than that, with the eyes of the world watching, it turned the murder of one man into a spectacle.
The driver announced Koblenz Hauptbahnhof.