to block Noah, Noah pushed off on his left and darted past him. He ran with the cheers of the crowd at his back, delighted in the fact one of their number had just humiliated the poe-faced guard in his motley. Noah didn’t hesitate or risk a backward glance. He ran flat out for the center of the piazza.
The fudgepacker turned at the sudden surge of noise and saw Noah coming for him.
exactly what it meant. Abandonato knew the rug muncher. What that meant… well, that was what Noah didn’t want to know.
Someone saw the gun and screamed.
He didn’t care.
There was maybe thirty yards between him and the asswipe. He threw himself forward, running on pure adrenalin.
His feet slapped the concrete. He yelled, a primitive tribal roar, using the anger of it to spur him on.
He was running out of names to call the bozo.
It didn’t matter.
The gap between them narrowed to twenty-five yards.
He ran straight through the middle of a flock of pigeons, startling the birds into flight. They exploded into the sky in a flurry of wings and feathers, beating frantically at the air as Noah charged through them. They changed direction slightly, toward the main portico. Noah chased him past the statue of St. Peter and up the steps and through the doors of the great cathedral into the nave. They weren’t alone, but no one moved to stop them as they barreled down the central aisle toward the Papal Altar.
Noah felt like the guy behind the Pied Piper, the first rat suckered in by the sweet music. He didn’t need to look back to know that they had quite the pack of rats chasing them, though in this case the rats had guns, swords and halberds instead of sharp teeth. He concentrated on reaching the man in front of him as he ran headlong toward the altar.
Before they reached it, the muppet skidded, arms pinwheeling as his momentum continued to carry him forward. He twisted, angling toward the gallery stairs that led up to the dome walkway. Cursing, Noah followed him up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. His entire body screamed at the exertion. He felt his vision swimming and his heart hammering. Sweat stung his eyes. “Just give up, will you!” Noah yelle His voice echoed all around the dome, startling loud in the silence.
The bastard started laughing manically, as though it were the funniest thing he had ever heard.
Noah heard others coming up the stairs behind him.
He stopped running and turned to face Noah. “You’ll never take me alive, you do know that, don’t you?” he said, sounding hideously reasonable as he spoke, and barely out of breath, which was just insulting. Noah was surprised he spoke English.
“Give it up,” Noah said, walking toward him. He aimed the gun at the center of the man’s gray tee-shirt.
“Or what? You’ll shoot me? In here?” His accent was curious, not Italian, but definitely not English, and not quite American, like he had learned it from watching MTV maybe.
“I’ll shoot you anywhere, pal, I really don’t give a damn. This isn’t my church, and me and God are a long way from being pally.”
“You can’t stop us,” he said. “It’s too late for that. It’s too late for all of you.” He looked at his watch. It was a curious gesture, but seeing the time, he nodded as though the hours and minutes had proved him right, and that it really was too late.
“I already did,” Noah said. “Look around you, where can you go? It’s over.”
The terrorist shook his head. “No, you’ve turned me into a martyr, the first saint of the new Messiah, the first angel of Judas. That’s all you have done. You’ve lost. You’ve lost everything. And you’ve done it here, of all places. For that, I thank you.” He turned on his heel, seemed almost to bounce, buoyed by new found purpose, took two steps and then launched himself up over the railing and into the nothing but air. For a heartbeat he seemed to hang there, suspended by the air itself, but without wings. And he fell.
Noah lurched forward, reaching out with the gun still in his hand.
It was a hopeless gesture.
The sound of impact, flesh on stone, echoed sickeningly throughout the entire inside of St. Peter’s.
Noah leaned over the walkway railing and looked down, knowing exactly what he was going to see down there.
Blood puddled around the dead man, staining the consecrated ground.
The blood of the martyr was like a halo around his ruined head.
Noah had no other names left to call him.
He leaned on the railing, breathing hard, huge gulping breaths. His chest heaved. All he could hear in the silence was the ragged sound of his own breathing.
Priests and soldiers had begun to gather around the body. His arms and legs bent and broken into a whorish sprawl, but his head stared straight up at the vault of the ceiling, straight up at Noah. The dead man didn’t look much like an angel or a saint. He looked like a dead terrorist.
Noah turned his back on the blind eyes and the blood.
He wanted answers, but everywhere he turned he found more questions.
All he had left was the look that had passed between the dead man and the priest. He looked up at the ceiling and said, “Give me this one, eh?”
Pushing through the rats that had swarmed up onto the gallery behind him, he went in search of Abandonato, and the truth.
He only found one of them.
27
Jude Lethe watched the world unravel in glorious Technicolor over and over again. The German television cameras had captured the assassination from three different angles. It didn’t look good for Koni from any of them. Lethe froze the frame as the first glint of silver caught the low sun. It was too difficult to call where the knife had originated from. He wasn’t a body language expert. He knew where it had come from-the Swiss Guard closest to the Holy Father had been concealing it within the folds of his clownish armor-but proving it was a different thing all together.
Suddenly they were two men down, and there was nothing the old man could do. His hands were tied by the very deniability that allowed them the freedom of movement their mandate granted them. He couldn’t go to the Foreign Secretary and appeal, he couldn’t contact the British ambassador in Germany. Ogmios didn’t exist on any official charter. They had no right of recall. The embassy wasn’t going to order an extradition for Konstantin, and for the same reason they weren’t going to mount an assault to recover Orla. They were deniable. They screwed up for Queen and Country, but that didn’t matter in the slightest. They screwed up. That was what it boiled down to.
Konstantin was on camera, prime suspect in the assassination of the Pope. The BKA would want a quick result, justice seen to be served. They wouldn’t want an international incident. They wouldn’t want him being extradited to the UK to stand trial. It had happened on German soil; it would be dealt with on German soil, with Germanic efficiency. In the eyes of the world Konstantin was already guilty-they’d seen it happen. Lethe needed to find proof that they hadn’t, that their brains had connected the dots and filled in the blanks but got it all horribly wrong. And the damned cameras weren’t helping.
Neither was the fact that when they started running their background checks the first thing they’d find out about Konstantin Khavin was that he was a defector from the old Soviet Republic. Two and two would make four, or an approximation of it, and they’d leap to the only logical conclusion: that you could take Konstantin Khavin out of Mother Russia, but you couldn’t take Mother Russia and her black heart out of Konstantin Khavin. He was a spy-a deep plant-still at the beck and call of Moscow. Because no matter how enlightened everyone was now that the Wall had come down, it didn’t take a lot to reignite all of the old fears and that deep-seated distrust. It was easier for people to believe that the old enemies were still enemies than it was to turn the blame around and point the
