He had chosen his path. He had set his foot on it. It was his choice. There was a serpent, but the choice was his. The Lord had given him free will and he used it to betray Him.
There was nothing Abandonato could do to force them to break the seal and pull back the chains. This was his punishment. He had brought death into the House of the Lord, and death would not be appeased by begging, prayers or guilt. Its hunger was rapacious. It would only be sated by the inevitable. More than one hundred souls would find the glory of God ahead of their time. That is my doing, he told himself.
The two guards who held his arms escorted him to the end of the passageway, then crossed their halberds across the entry, barring any possible return.
He looked at them each in turn. “You have to break the conclave,” he pleaded. “They can’t be allowed to vote. They will all die.” He knew he sounded like a crazed man. He was desperate. That stripped him of his reason.
Their gazes didn’t waver. It was as though he had already become a ghost.
Finally he had no choice but to walk away. There was no second way into the chamber. The assassin was right when he said it was a fortress. If he couldn’t get past them, there was no way he could stop the vote. And if he couldn’t stop the vote, he couldn’t stop the fire.
He was damned.
He had failed the living.
He would inevitably fail the dead.
Names had power. He was named true. Gianni Abandonato, Gianni the Forsaken.
There would be no place at the Lord’s side for him. Not with their blood still fresh on his hands. How apt that he had fallen for the silver tongue of Solomon and the so-called truth of Judas. He laughed bitterly. The sound chased him through the Holy See.
He knew then how Iscariot must have felt, trapped into the only possible course of action left to him at the end.
Abandonato shuffled through the corridors, lost in grief, his head down, hands clutched together in prayer, but those prayers failed to reach his lips. He resolved to kill himself, not that his one death would sate the beast he had loosed within the Holy See.
“Fater, forgive me,” he said, doubting that even the Almighty’s capacity for forgiveness could be so vast as to accommodate his crime.
And then someone shouted his name.
He looked up.
Noah couldn’t believe his eyes.
It took him a moment and a double-take to recognize that the man shuffling quickly towards them down the narrow passage was Gianni Abandonato. He had walked out of one of the smaller passageways that fed into this one. Abandonato had his head down, his fingers laced in front of him as though in prayer, but when Noah called out his name his head snapped up and he stopped dead in his tracks. There was no mistaking the man.
“Abandonato!” His voice swelled to fill the hand-painted chamber. The Monsignor looked like a startled rabbit, trapped, and he backed up a step. Noah saw the sweat, the nervous twitches, the almost robotic walk-they were all classic signs of a suicide bomber. He had a split second to think. His hands were hidden in his cassock. They could be holding a detonator; they could be empty. He didn’t have the luxury of being able to make a mistake.
Abandonato’s robes were bulky enough to hide a vest under. A bomb didn’t have to be a complex thing. If he got into the chapel, even the least sophisticated ball bearings and nails sewn into a stockade of dynamite would take out everyone in the blast radius. And it would be messy. There was no way for Noah to tell whether the priest was wired to blow. He was walking unevenly. He seemed to be favoring one side, his right over his left. That could mean he was packing something heavy, something that changed his walk. He had a split second to weigh it all up.
“On your knees! Now!” he yelled. When Abandonato didn’t go down, he didn’t yell again. He couldn’t risk what would happen if he insisted on taking the martyr’s way out.
Abandonato seemed trapped in indecision for a moment, then turned and bolted.
That one desperate action told Noah all he needed to know.
He drew and fired in a single smooth motion.
Beside him, the man who wanted to be best friends with James Bond put three shots into the Monsignor as his body jerked and jived and fell. He put another one in him as he hit the floor. Abandonato twitched once, a violent spasm, then lay utterly still.
Noah approached the body cautiously, his gun aimed at the man. Anything, the slightest movement, and he would put another bullet into him. Noah felt the adrenalin flood his system. That was always the way, the sudden kick, too late to do any good, the rush of the chemical in his blood. He felt good. He’d done his job. He’d succeeded where Konstantin had failed. He’d saved the Cardinals. He knew then and there he was going to gloat. Just once. Just to see the Russian’s face. He smiled to himself, imagining the look his wisecrack would earn him. He had the entire journey from Rome back to Nonesuch to come up with a killer line.
He stood over Abandonato and looked down at him. The priest wasn’t quite gone. He held on for dear life. Noah crouched down beside him, pulling his hands out from the folds of his cassock. There was no detonator. The holy man’s last breaths made a curious whistling noise as they leaked between his teeth.
Abandonato was trying to say something.
“No last rites, Father,” Noah said, kneeling down beside him. “It’s too late for that. You’re going to hell.”
“Please,” Abandonato managed. It was barely a breath. Noah leaned in closer until he could feel the dying breath on his cheek. Words came out with it like ghosts. “Fire.”
“That’s right, pal. That’s where you’re going. You’re going to burn in hellfire.”
Abandonato didn’t hear him.
He was already dead.
Noah checked for a pulse at his throat. Barring resurrection, Abandonato wasn’t getting up again.
He didn’t close his eyes.
He patted the dead man down. He wasn’t wearing a bomb belt or anything else. He checked his pockets. There was no detonator. If he a suicide bomber, he wasn’t a particularly good one. He’d only managed fifty percent of the job.
Noah pushed himself back up to his feet.
“You better get someone to clean this mess up,” he told the young soldier beside him.
He had done it.
Had he been a religious man, he would have given thanks to God.
He wasn’t.
Instead he took the cell phone from his pocket and dialed home. “It’s over,” he told Lethe. “The priest’s dead. I got to him before he could finish it.”
“Then I’d say today’s a good day, wouldn’t you?” Lethe said.
“One of the better ones,” he agreed. “Sometimes it’s nice to be on the side of the angels.”
“Amen to that, brother man, time to come on home.”
Noah hung up the phone.
“Humor me,” he said to the soldier. “I want to go check out the chapel, make sure everything is okay. You stay here. If that guy moves, shoot him again.”
The young guard nodded earnestly.
Noah followed the passageway all the way to the doors of the Sistine Chapel. There were only five guards standing sentry. One of the guards came toward him. He recognized the man vaguely, but horribly, he had already begun to think that one joker looked pretty much the same as the other.
He saw the ceremonial chain looped through the silver door handles. From where he was he couldn’t see whether the seal had been broken.
“Has anyone entered the chapel since the conclave began?” Noah asked.
“No one is permitted to break the conclave, sir,” the guard said, his English slightly accented. The man’s smile was just as slight.
“I know. But just because no one is allowed to go in doesn’t mean no one has gone in. I mean, I’m not
