the souls of his murderers.
Konstantin crawled toward him, unable to believe what he saw.
The entire front of his white cassock was stained red with holy blood.
The Vicar of Christ looked up at him without seeing him. His eyes already had the gloss of death stealing over them.
Konstantin was too late.
There was nothing he could do.
After everything, he had failed. He lifted his head to the sky and screamed one long terrible roar of guilt, agony and despair. He had come so close. Close enough to cradle the dying man in his arms as the BKA agents rushed the stage. “Please,” Peter the Roman said. Konstantin didn’t know what he meant, what he was asking for. The old man swallowed and the light in his eyes went out. He was dead.
Konstantin tried to pull his hand out of the way. The last thing he wanted to do was contaminate the evidence. But even as the Pope slumped into his arms and his blood soaked into his clothes, the knife clattered to the ground. The blood spatter fell like a handful of coins on the red carpet. He didn’t need to count them. There would be thirty. Thirty splashes of red life to mark the betrayal.
The BKA men ran at him, guns aimed at his face and body, yelling, “Get down!”
“On your stomach!”
“Down!”
“Get your hands where we can see them!”
e saw their guns and the rage in their faces.
There was hate there. Burning. Blazing.
Outrage.
Each one of them wanted to pull the trigger.
And who could blame them?
Konstantin reverently lowered the dead man to the carpet. He didn’t look at any of the others on the stage. He didn’t hear the screams of the onlookers. He put his hands behind his head, interlacing his fingers.
The Judas dagger lay on the red carpet beside him, blood on its silver blade.
The Swiss Guard who had delivered the fatal blow looked at it, then at Konstantin, at the blood on his hands; and the ghost of a smile reached his lips as he cried, “Murder!”
Konstantin stared at the man, memorizing every inch of his face.
And then someone hit him from the behind, taking him down.
They pressed his face into the bloody carpet and stretched his arms out. Someone hissed in his ear, “Just give me an excuse to pull this trigger.”
Konstantin closed his eyes and waited for the bullet.
He didn’t realize it was happening until the man closed his hand around the dagger. Even with his weight pressing down on to his back he flinched instinctively, the blade lying inches from his face, smeared with bloody fingerprints.
26
Noah ran, head down, as he raced across the cobbled streets. He was gasping hard.
He had been chasing the joker for the best part of five minutes. It was a long time to run that hard. He knew every twist and every turn of the streets, which meant he was local, well enough acquainted with the city to know all of its byways and backstreets. Noah pushed between tourists looking at their street map and didn’t slow down as they shouted at his back. The guy was fast. He wasn’t just fast, he was lithe, agile, fit. He went over low walls as easily as a gase monkey up a pole and came down on the other side already running. Noah was out of shape. He hadn’t realized just how badly until the clown led him a merry dance past the steps of the Castel San Angelo. They had run an entire circuit around the Vatican walls, the length of Via Vaticano and through Piazza Risorgimento, dodging traffic down Via Crescenzio and through the shadow of Archangel Michael’s sword to the River Tiber.
As Noah chased the asshole, he ran all the bad names under the sun through his head, dickwad, dirtball, slime-bag, scum bucket, prick, spitting them all like arrows at the guy’s back.
He raced the length of Piazza Cavour and over the Cavour Bridge. Noah stumbled as he came to the steps that led the way down beside the bridge, looking left and right. Somehow he’d lost the son of a bitch. There were five roads he could have taken, three that fanned out into the heart of the old city and the labyrinth of close-pressed houses or two that ran along the river. Then he saw a bundle of clothing beside the foot of the bridge. He ran down the short flight of steps. It was the hoodie. He scanned left and right along the riverside, looking for a flash of gray from the bastard’s tee-shirt. He was still running all of those names through his head, biting on them.
Then he saw him. He had slowed down and was walking as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Had he not glanced back to see if Noah was still chasing him, he might have gotten away with it. Swallowing a deep breath, Noah set off after him.
Like Lot’s wife, the asshat glanced back over his shoulder one time too many, saw Noah coming for him and bolted. The names were still coming thick and fast, and he was getting more and more inventive with them. The short walk had given the dick munch whatever rest he needed to gather his second wind. Noah raced, arms and legs blur, along the river bank past the first two bridges, then hurdled over the iron rail and took the steps up to the Vittorio two and three at a time.
If he hadn’t wanted to take the guy alive, he would have pulled his gun and put a dozen slugs in his back out of spite. He really didn’t appreciate the workout. As it was, he needed to get information.
It was all Noah could do to keep up.
It took him a moment to realize the tool was doubling back on himself to the broad street of Via de Conciliazoine, which in a few hundred yards opened back up into the elliptical ring of the Piazza di San Pietro, where the suicide bomber still lay in the street. He could see the tall obelisk of The Witness mocking him as every muscle in his body burned, and beyond it the ambulance and the crowd that had gathered. Gritting his teeth he tried to close the gap between them, forcing a burst of speed out of his legs. Every breath blazed in his lungs as he spat it out. The cordon the Swiss Guard had set up to isolate the square had already begun to break up. The flock of tourists was already forty or fifty rows deep, and people were losing their patience. Disgruntled mutterings came in a dozen languages. The guards were doing all they could to keep the people back.
“I really want to shoot you!” he yelled at the douchebag’s back as his legs tied up. Noah stopped running and bent over, hands braced on his knees. He muttered into the paving slabs, “And I’ve got no problem with putting that cap in your ass,” but the threat had no power. He doubted the numbnuts even heard him.
The pole smoker slowed, almost skipping as he moved now, and turned to offer another mocking salute and disappeared into the crowd of people, one more tee-shirt-clad tourist among the press of tee-shirt-and-jeans- wearing pilgrims.
For a moment the crowd parted and Noah saw the way people melted away from the jerkoff. He couldn’t hear what he was saying as he pushed through them, but whatever it was it was working. No one stayed in his way for more than a second.
Noah followed him into the crowd, shouting, “Io sono con lui!” in pigeon Italian as he tried to force his way through the press of people.
Suddenly the crowd opened up and he was confronted by a brow-beaten Guard with his ceremonial halberd leveled squarely at Noah’s chest. He didn’t seem all that eager to let Noah through. Behind him, Noah saw the butt monkey jogging toward The Witness. Whatever he had said had been enough to get him through the security cordon, and the only thing Noah could think of that would do that wouldn’t be words at all, or at least not alone. Words and a badge. The bonehead had pulled rank, making him either a really good liar, or the law.
Noah stared at the Guard and said simply, “I’m coming through, so you either stab me or you get the hell out of my way. One or the other,” and he surged forward, dropping his shoulder as though to go right, wrong-footing the guard. It was a clumsy maneuver, but he executed it quickly and efficiently. As the guard rocked to go to his left
