or more bird feeders had been strung up from the branches. The tree was hiding an entire flock of hungry birds.
That was interesting.
There was quite a crowd gathered in the square already. He checked his watch yet again, feeling like an obsessive compulsive. There was less time on it than before and no shooter. Individually, both facts were bad enough; together they were the worst of all possible worlds.
He checked out the gun itself.
That was when he knew for sure the entire thing was a set-up. There was a small timer set on the side of the stock and attached to the trigger guard. The timer was ticking down. It had 27 minutes left on it. Twenty-seven minutes would not only have placed the Pope in the square, it would have put him up on the stage. Konstantin checked his watch to be sure. The benediction was due to begin in 21 minutes. This gun was never intended to kill the Pope. Devere’s call to the cell phone here had triggered the timer, setting everything into motion. It was like that kids’ game, Mouse Trap. The shot would go off, itself triggered by the timer, the bullet would fly straight into the tree where it would startle the birds nesting there. The sudden explosion of movement and the ricochet of the gunshot would trigger panic in the crowd. In the seconds immediately after the shock of the gunshot someone close would then step in and kill the Pope while everyone else was looking frantically left and right for a shooter that didn’t exist.
He took the cell phone from his pocket and called Lethe to fill him in.
“I hate to say it, Koni, but it makes sense,” Lethe said in his ear. “Think about who we’re dealing with here. If they’ve modeled themselves on the Sicarii, surely they’ll mirror the Sicarii MO: get close, be trusted, and slip the knife in even as you’re calling out for help.”
“Great,” Konstantin grumbled. “Trust no one.”
He looked at his watch again: 19 minutes.
“What doesn’t make sense is why Devere would trigger the remote timer immediately after your visit… He must have known we’d trace it and find the gun. He’s not an idiot, you said so yourself. You don’t plan something as elaborate as this and then blow it on a single phone call.”
“But it wasn’t a single call was it? There were three. He played us. Mudak,” he cursed in his mother tongue. “He hid the important call in plain sight, giving us something closer to home to worry about.” He slammed the side of his fist off the window frame and cursed again. “Geneva!” he spat, the pain focusing his brain. “Swiss Guard! Every member of the Guard have to serve in the Swiss Army, right? That was the call. It’s one of the Guard. The inner circle’s been breached.” Konstantin realized the implications of what he had just said. He had 18 minutes before the papal cavalcade arrived at the stage, and the people he needed to trust the most to do their job, to protect the Pope, were the ones he could trust the least to do their job.
e looked out of the window. There were perhaps a thousand people congregated in and around the square now.
“What do we do?” Lethe asked.
The truth was Konstantin had no idea. He knelt and started to strip the timer away from the gun, but stopped. Devere had warned the assassin-that’s what the call to Geneva had been about-but it didn’t mean he had called the man off. But if the gun didn’t go off, the assassin wouldn’t strike. That was a stone cold certainty. If the assassin didn’t strike in the next half an hour, when they knew where he was, he could strike tomorrow or the day after or the day after, anywhere along the pilgrimage’s long road. And if he was right and the assassin was part of the Swiss Guard, he could wait until they were “safe” in the Holy See and no one would be any the wiser. No, this was the one place they knew something was planned to go down.
Knowing gave them a hand, if not the upper hand. There was a chance the assassin could take the gunshot to mean Konstantin wasn’t as good as he was, wasn’t as close. It was a risk. All he could do was get close to the stage. That way when the gun went off and the birds exploded from the trees in a flurry of wings and screams, he would be the one person watching the stage. It was a dangerous game to be playing, but he wasn’t about to throw his hand in now.
“We use the Pope as bait,” he said, realizing, even as he said it, the stakes of the gamble he was about to make. It wasn’t just one man’s life he was playing with here.
23
He wore the dagger in a ceremonial sheath nestled beneath his left armpit.
The crowds cheered and waved their flags as they pressed up against the barriers, hoping to get a glimpse of the Pope. The noise of the people sent a thrill through his skin. It had been so long in the planning, so long since there had been honesty in the world. But it was coming. It was close. And when it returned they would have something to see.
His fingers strayed toward the dagger. He felt its weight so close to his heart. It wasn’t an ominous weight. It wasn’t portentous. Like his task today, it was an honest weight.
They had found the silver dagger in one of the suicide tombs unearthed by the earthquake at Masada. It had been returned to them while the world adjusted to the new millennium. No truth can lay hidden forever. That is the way of great truths.
The tomb had contained the desiccated skeletal remains of a man, along with a document. They had no way of knowing exactly what the roll of papyrus actually was, what it said and whose words they were, because by the time they had unearthed it, it had been in such a wretched condition the individual folios had fused together, forming a thick pulp.
But they had suspicions.
How could they not?
The world knew what had happened as the Roman legions had built their ramp up the side of the mountainside of Masada. It was the last fortress of the Sicarii, the freedom fighters bound to the service of the bloodline of the true Messiah, Judas Iscariot.
And on the day when they took their own lives and ended the bloodline, it had been home to Menahem ben Jair and his brother Eleazar, the grandsons of Iscariot. If either of them had penned the testimony, the wisdom it contained would be priceless. What truths might it contain?
But the papyrus was ruined beyond anything they had the resources to salvage. Mabus had wanted to try anyway. They had skills, they could find people they could trust. But the other man-the one who had taken the name Akim Caspi after they had found the dagger-had said no, that they could not risk the truth, so long lost, being destroyed.
Caspi had brought the truth to him, and entrusted the silver dagger to his care. He welcomed the truth, pledging himself to the Disciples of Judas. They didn’t know the secret of the blade until they deciphered the Testimony.
They had turned it over to the Vatican’s experts, knowing even as they did that there was no way the Church of Lies would release the truth it contained. That meant they would have to steal it back, but not until it had been restored and translated. It had involved careful thought and planning, like everything else, but because it was driven by truth, God had seen them through. Of course, he had never doubted. Why would He not want the truth known? After all it was His truth. They had put their own man on the inside, a priest who worked in the library. He monitored the restoration, then, anted ext was ready to be deciphered, sent word to Caspi so he could send in his own expert to oversee the translation and spirit the Testimony out of the Vatican before the truth could be buried again.
The first revelation was its writer. What they had discovered in the hidden tomb was no less than the Testimony of Menahem ben Jair, grandson of Judas Iscariot, founder of the Sicarii zealots. Menahem ben Jair was the grandson of the true Messiah.
The second revelation came in the body of the text itself. Learning the truth had not been easy. There were levels of truth in the words: first the bloodline itself, Menahem son of Jair, Jair son of Judas and Mary, the same
