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.
Forty days of terror they promised, and at the end of it all of our gods will die-Christian, Muslim, bloody Norse, it doesn’t matter.” Noah grunted. “The clock’s ticking. Tomorrow they will strike against Rome. I don’t know where, I don’t know when, but I am prepared to bet my bloody life on the fact it will be spectacular. And in thirty- eight days they’ll make their move on the Pope. Right now they’re in the blind, waiting,” he said, thinking back to Basrah.
“You paint a bleak picture,” Neri said. “Assuming you are right, what do you want from my people?”
“This is your city. Where would you hit? What would you do? Think about it. Whoever it is, they’re in Rome right now. They will have been here for a while, going over the minutia of their strike, dry runs, timing every twist and turn and exhausting every eventuality, because that’s what these people are like. Someone has seen them. Someone knows who they are. Nothing goes unseen in a city this size. You need people out on the streets, asking the right questions. These people will look Italian. They’ll sound Italian. They’ll have normal lives that they’ve worked for years to secure. They could be married, have kids in good Roman schools. They’re playing a long game.”
Neri screwed up his already battered face, as though understanding for the first time that anyone from the young couple with the tourist guide to the old man with the paper to the waitress with her promising eyes, or the guy in the street wrestling with a hot, overly tired toddler could be their terrorist. You couldn’t tell just by looking at them, you couldn’t read their thoughts. They were just like everyone else, perfectly so, cultivated to be so.
“And with that, I think it’s time for me to go haunt my countryman’s ghost.” Noah pushed back his chair and made to stand. Neri stubbed out the dog-end of his latest cigarette.
“The victim rented a garret in one of the poorer parts of the city proper under the name Nick Simmonds. No doubt you already have the address. You seem very well connected for someone who doesn’t work for your government,” Neri said wryly, “but there’s nothing there. The place was empty when we got there. And not just empty. It had been thoroughly disinfected and every last trace of Nick Simmonds removed. There was absolutely nothing left of a personal nature. Nothing to say he had ever lived there. Not so much as a strand of hair to run against his DNA.”
That gelled with what Konstantin had found in Berlin. That similarity in itself made this garret in the poor quarter worth following up.
“His work?” Noah asked. He knew that Simmonds had been interning with the Vatican archivist, but beyond that it was anyone’s guess.
“I’ve got one of my team trying to make inroads over there,”-he nodded across St. Peter’s Square toward the dome of the basilica-“but between you and me, I suspect Dante was writing about that place when he designed his Purgatory.”
“That good?”
“Trust me,” Neri said, reaching for his tobacco tin yet again. “It’s enough to make a guy like me believe in the Devil.” He nodded to the older man reading his newspaper. The man returned the gesture and folded the broadsheet neatly before paying his bill and leaving the table. Smiling wryly, Neri nodded toward the young couple who, likewise, put away their Rough Guide and settled their bill, leaving a generous tip as they vacated the table.
“They were your people?”
“They were.”
“Trusting soul, aren’t you?” Noah said.
“This is Rome, Noah,” Dominico Neri said with an almost friendly smile. “You can’t trust anybody. Faces of angels, morals of devils.”
10
