allowed to be here, and here I am,” Noah said.
“The seal has not been broken, sir.”
It wasn’t until he was on the steps of St. Peter’s and walking down in the piazza that it hit him: the priest was coming the wrong way. He wasn’t going to the chapel at all. He couldn’t have been. He had to have been coming back from it. Otherwise Noah would have come up behind him. There was only one way in and one way out of the Sistine Chapel.
He had checked Abandonato’s corpse. He had been clean. No bomb. No detonator. No gun. Nothing.
It didn’t make sense.
The guard had sworn no one had been inside the chapel after it had been sealed. Neri had assured him about all of the security measures the Vatican Police took before the Cardinals were locked away, sweeping for bugs and other devices. The place was a fortress. People had been telling him that all day. There was only one way in and one way out, and that was through the guards. The place couldn’t have been much safer if it was lined with lead and buried sixty feet under.
He twisted around to look back at the Basilica.
Black smoke billowed out of the chimney.
All around him disappointment murmured through the faithful.
There wouldn’t be a new Pope today.
And Noah relaxed because the smoke meant they were safe.
Behind him news crews began rorting the black smoke to the waiting world. The message was clear. The Cardinals had failed to reach agreement. There would be another election in three days.
Until then the faithful would be without a spiritual leader.
He walked away through the crowds.
All he wanted to do now was go home. He didn’t feel like being alone. He never felt like being alone. He didn’t like the dark hours. He didn’t like the silence. That was the dark country where his ghosts lived. That was why he drank. That was why he paid women to share his bed. He would face his dead when he joined them down in the fiery pits of hell. Until then he wanted to hear breathing beside him, as if the shallow rise and fall of someone else’s chest could stop the dead from finding him.
Blessed is the silence.
Noah was with Neri in the same cafe, drinking the same thick, strong coffees when the TV feed switched from the news anchor to one of the many on-the-spot reporters covering the conclave. Their conversation veered from Juventus to supermodels and fast cars. It was the easy chat of two men whose friendship had been forged in hell and had come out on the other side of the pit together. He checked his watch. He had four hours until Sir Charles’ G5 would be ready for takeoff, which meant plenty of time to look at the stunning beauty of the city or the stunning beauties of the city as they walked by. He opted for the less energetic option. There really was something about the twenty-something Roman women he watched laughing and joking and utterly self-absorbed as only twenty-somethings can be. It was as if the world around them didn’t exist. He appreciated the view. “Very easy on the eye,” he said to Neri.
“This is Rome, my friend,” Dominico Neri agreed. “Even the buildings have the good grace to look hot.”
Noah grinned. “I need to come back one day when there isn’t a crisis, take some time to appreciate the natural beauty of the city on the seven hills.”
“There is a couch with your name on it.”
There was the flicker of movement on the screen over Neri’s shoulder. It caught Noah’s eye. The face on the screen held it. xistim Caspi. Solomon. He was holding an RTL microphone and talking.
“Turn it up!” Noah shouted, dragging his chair back from the table and standing up.
Neri turned around trying to see what Noah was shouting about.
“Carabinieri! Turn the damned TV up!” Noah yelled at the barista behind the counter. She didn’t seem to know what to do. “Just give me the bloody remote!”
Noah dodged between the tables to stand beneath the television set. He could barely hear Solomon’s speech. He would hear it again and again over the coming days, but at that moment it was barely a whisper until the barista found the volume.
Neri came up beside him.
“You don’t know my name,” Solomon said to him through the TV speaker, “but you will. It will be on your lips every day now for the rest of your lives. I will tell you this, your church is built on lies and death. Its very foundation is not the rock of Peter; it is the glorification of a false messiah. Today I bring the death back to the door of Rome. For five hundred years Rome tortured my people. For five centuries and more it turned them into slaves. It drove them out of their own homeland. It tried to purge the name of them and their home from the earth, so deep and unreasoning was its hatred. Today that changes. It was my blade that killed Peter Romanus. That blade forged from the silver pieces of Judas Iscariot. The coins that bought the death of your Messiah spend just as well today. They have bought another death-this time the Roman Pontiff-and with his death the world is ready for the new Messiah.” He stared out through the screen. His beautiful face was made for Hollywood.
Behind him the picture broke into a grainy image from a pinhole spy camera hidden within the Sistine Chapel.
It took Noah a moment to realize what he was seeing.
The Cardinals were dead.
Some had died on their knees in prayer, staring down into the pits of hell itself. Others on their backs, staring blindly up at the beauty of Michelangelo’s ceiling, out of reach like heaven itself.
Solomon’s face came back onto the screen.
“I am Solomon. Remember my name.”
Then he was gone, and the camera was focused on Maderno's facade. A moment later the live feed broke and the grainy image of the dead in the chapel returned to fill the television screen.
Noah pushed out through the glass doors of the cafe into the rising heat of the afternoon. There were thousands of people still packed into the square. He could see the RTL mobile broadcast trailer. He started pushing through the people to get to it.
But by the time he reached it Solomon was long gone.
Noah slammed his fist off the side of the trailer.
He had been there.
He had stood right in the middle of them and as good as said your God is dead.
He opened the trailer door and climbed up and inside.
The female anchor lay dead and bloody in one of the chairs, her cameraman lifeless on the floor at her feet. The screens all showed the grainy live feed from inside the chapel itself. He had no idea how to kill the transmission, so he went down the banks of switches and dials, tripping them all until the picture died.
Neri came into the trailer behind him.
He looked like a living dead man. He was talking into his cell phone in rapid Italian, shaking his head and gesticulating.
Noah wasn’t listening to him.
He had found the gift Solomon had left for him.
The woman clutched a battered leather drawstring purse in her hands. Noah pried it from her lifeless fingers and emptied it out. Thirty pieces of silver spilled out across the bank of displays. There was a note. He unfolded it. The message was written in blood.
All debts paid in full.
“Not even close,” Noah said.
The truth of just how badly he had failed was only beginning to sink in.
Beside him, Dominico Neri made the sign of the cross.
