when he talked, he laid so much of that hardship at the door of Rome.
It was the Romans who had occupied his country for years, the Romans, who, following the bar Kokhba revolt, had killed more than half a million Jews, razed fifty fortified towns and nine hundred and eighty-five villages. It was slaughter, and all because Hadrian sought to root out Judaism; more atrocities in the name of religion. Hadrian prohibited the Torah, outlawed the Hebrew calendar, systematically hunted and killed Judaic scholars. And still he wasn’t content. Hadrian sought to purge the name Judaea from public consciousness. His first step was to burn it off the map, naming the ancient country Syria Palaestina after the Philistines, the ancient enemy of the Jews. And since that time it had been known as Palestine, not Judaea, not Canaan, or Iudaea. It was the Romans who had created Palestine and took the holy city of Jerusalem away from them. Hadrian renamed it Aelia Capitolina and forbade Jews from entering it.
This was not a proud history.
How could he not be sympathetic to the horrors perpetrated against these people in their homeland? How could he not feel a historian’s distant, diluted guilt? He would have to be a monster not to. In his head he heard the mocking cries and laughter of the Herodians and the Roman legionnaires calling Jesus King of the Jews.
It was a long time ago, he told himself, trying to make it less vile by adding the filter of time. It was difficult when Rome itself was still full of reminders of Hadrian’s rule, the Pantheon, even his mausoleum, Castel Sant’Angelo. His touch was everywhere in modern Rome.
Abandonato was a scholar.
He had dedicated his life to discovering the truth.
And then it had all started happening and the truth had stopped feeling so important. People started suffering. And it became real. It was different when it was academic, when it was conjecture, a puzzle, something to occupy his brain.
All of Solomon’s talk of a messiah coalesced into murder on a grand and sickening scale.
He hadn’t agreed to that. He hadn’t sought to be a party to it.
And now all he could do was think, and all he could think was that soe truths were better left hidden.
That was what he was supposed to do now. Remain hidden.
When Nick Simmonds had given him the small plastic sheath and bade him hide it amongst the coals in the fire grate of the Sistine Chapel two weeks ago he hadn’t known what he was really being asked to do.
Now he did.
Now he understood.
He knew what he had to do, even if it meant surrendering his own life. It was a sacrifice he would have to make. He couldn’t live, knowing more deaths were on his hands. He wasn’t a murderer any more than the Apostles were. They had been saving their friends immortal soul. That was the only way the testimony of ben Jair made sense. They were angry, hurt, but they knew he could not live with his betrayal, and suicide would forever bar him from the kingdom of heaven. So they had saved him. Or so Abandonato believed.
But did Gianni Abandonato have it in him to save anyone?
He was a scholar. His world was paper. Words. Stories.
To step outside of that world would damn him as a traitor, just as Judas himself had made the sacrifice that cast him forever as traitor. Abandonato had hidden that small plastic sheath in the fire pit, beneath the coals so no one would disturb it until they lit the coals. He hadn’t known what was inside the sheath until the stories started to emerge from Berlin. Poison gas on the subway. He knew then what it was that he had hidden beneath the coals. And when the fire was lit to say the new Vicar of Christ had been chosen he would be responsible for the murder of the entire College.
He had been used.
He was a fool.
But stupidity was no excuse.
Abandonato knew himself.
He wouldn’t be able to bear life if that fire was lit while the plastic sheath was still hidden inside it.
He was living-if it could be called living-in what had been Nick Simmonds’ apartment down by the old ring of the Circus Maximus. That had always been the plan. It was a truth his masters had learned from years of fighting. The police didn’t return to a place of interest once they had discounted it as abandoned. Simmonds’ apartment offered him sanctuary. He had stocked up on bottled water and lived frugally without light or sound. He didn’t want to reveal himself. It was ironic that he was hiding in the shadow of what had once been another Roman Emperor’s playground. More than ironic, it was poetic, the scholar thought: of all the places in Rome, Circus Maximus was used to make decisions of life and death.
He knew what he had to do.
He couldn’t stay hidden.
He had to get a message to the Cardinal Dean. They couldn’t light the fire.
Noah Larkin begged Neri to get him inside. He had to get inside the Vatican. That was all there was to it.
He was useless out here.
Nothing was going to happen in the square. That had been obvious from the start. It was always going to be inside the walls of the Holy See.
How did you break a man’s faith?
You did something spectacular, that’s how. You did something even God would take notice of.
“For all His omnipotence, what one place is God watching now?” Noah said, trying to reason with the man. “And even if God isn’t, everyone else is?”
Neri looked at him. The grizzled Italian didn’t like the way the conversation was going. “I don’t know, you tell me.”
He pointed right across the square from their table in the overpriced coffee shop at Maderno’s facade. “The Vatican. Just like everyone else, God’s looking at the chimney of the Sistine Chapel waiting for the whitoke to say His new best friend has been chosen.”
“The Vatican is a fortress, my friend. There is no safer place on earth. No one is getting in, no one is getting out.”
“That’s called hubris, you know that? Forget the whole ‘they aren’t soldiers, they’re following a divine calling’ nonsense of the Swiss Guard. They’re men! They aren’t mythological heroes. They’re fallible. End of discussion. One thing we’ve seen is, these guys we’re up against are clever. They’re patient, and they have pulled off the ‘impossible’ more than once in the last few days. They had already put the plan in motion to poison the water long before the first victim was found. So the Vatican’s a fortress? So what? We don’t know if they caught the real assassin, do we? We don’t know if Abandonato’s being sheltered by them. There’s a snake in the garden, my friend-a bloody big one with poisonous fangs, just waiting to take a chunk out of some holy ass.”
“I hear what you are saying, but the conclave is sealed. No one can get in or out once it has begun. The doors were sealed at the end of the nine days of mourning. They will not be opened again until the bell rings and white smoke billows from the chimney. There’s no way in and no way out. The chapel’s even swept for bugs. This isn’t the Middle Ages. The security is state of the art.”
“This only reinforces my argument, Neri. There couldn’t be a more shocking target, could there? Everyone thinks it is impenetrable. So what happens if it is penetrated? What happens in the worst case scenario? Can you imagine? Think like the other side for a minute. Does the difficulty outweigh the reward? If it does, it’s got to be worth it, hasn’t it? Hitting the Sistine Chapel during the election of the new Pope would send shockwaves around the world. You want to cause fear? This is how you cause fear! You want to break people’s faith? This is how you do it! ‘How could God let it happen?’ You can hear all the questions can’t you? You can see them in the square with their rosaries out, wailing and beseeching the heavens. With every Cardinal gone, hundreds of the most holy, the most faithful, wiped out.
“Let’s extend the thought: What if it was never about the Pope as a person? What if it was always about the Pope as an office?”
Dominico Neri looked at Noah, hard. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we are way passed the point where I wished I’d never met you.”
“You already said that. You know it makes sense.”
