Here he waited with Jordan.
Across the travertine square rose St. Peter’s Basilica, its dome the highest point in all of Rome. To either side, Bernini’s double colonnade swept out in two wide arcs, framing the keyhole-shaped plaza between. According to Bernini, the colonnade was supposed to represent the arms of Saint Peter reaching out to embrace the faithful into the fold. Atop these arms, a hundred and forty stone saints perched and stared down upon the spectacle below.
Rhun hoped they didn’t see him. He had chosen this place for a rendezvous, out in the open, under the sun, to hide in plain sight, so that if Bathory had reached Rome, her
Jordan rolled up his sleeves. The edge of a
Humans swirled around him. A mother bounced a fat infant on her hip. Next to her, a young man watched her breasts, his heart rate giving away his response. A group of schoolgirls in navy-blue uniforms chattered under the watchful eye of a middle-aged teacher wearing brilliant red-framed eyeglasses.
A woman in long jeans, a tight-fitting black shirt, a floppy straw hat, and sunglasses meandered around the crowded square. She snapped a few pictures, then stuck a tiny camera into the backpack that dangled by one strap on her shoulder. She looked like a tourist, but she wasn’t.
Rhun waited, not daring to cross the square until she signaled it was safe. He hated skulking around Vatican City. Rome had been his home for centuries. It had been the one place in the world where he had always walked freely—until now. Before this quest had started, he had considered retreating from the world, ensconcing himself in the meditative world that existed deep below the Basilica. Would such peace ever be afforded him again?
He strolled along the curved colonnade toward the ancient three-tiered fountain. Like many things in Rome, it was older than he was. A young girl played hide-and-seek among the Doric columns, chased by an energetic mother. They probably sought to get in one more game before heading home for their dinners.
Rhun’s sharp eyes picked out the red porphyry stone set among the sea of gray cobblestones. The red stone had been placed there to mark the spot of Pope John Paul II’s shooting thirty years before. The bloodred stone reminded him of the cobblestones enshrined in the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, a thought that seemed to call the specter of Rasputin into this holy place.
Rhun stopped next to the tall stone obelisk. This very pillar had witnessed the crucifixion of countless Christians in Nero’s Circus, even Saint Peter himself. But since the late 1500s, it had watched over the center of the Christian world. He calculated the time by the long shadow it threw across the square. They had less than two hours before sunset. If the Belial had
Nadia paused next to him.
“Where is the woman?” She angled her head back as if studying the cross that topped the obelisk.
“Erin,” Jordan said. “Her name is Erin.”
“She was taken, along with the book.” Rhun filled her in on the events in Russia, ending by handing her Jiang’s rosary and flask. She could bring them to the sanctuary beneath the necropolis of St. Peter’s Basilica, where the Order of the Sanguines made their home.
Nadia’s hands lingered on the flask before she slipped it into her backpack. She had often worked with Jiang. “The Cardinal has returned to Rome from Jerusalem. He’s been with the Cloistered Ones since he received word of your alleged death. Praying.”
Guilt wormed its way into Rhun’s gut. He hated having lied to Bernard. He had known that after Nadia told him of his death, Bernard would grieve. He would be furious and hurt when he found out how Rhun and Nadia had deceived him. But there had been no other way to conceal their actions from the Belial spy in their midst. Still, it would not get any easier to face Bernard. Rhun glanced toward the imposing stone Apostolic Palace rising above the colonnade. A few windows had been left open to let in the light and air.
“Can you take us to Bernard? We have no time for secrecy now that the Belial have the book.”
“And Erin,” Jordan put in. “They have Erin, too.”
55
“What do you mean we’re getting out of here?” Nate asked.
Erin stumbled over to him in the oily darkness and caught his hand to reassure him. “We’re going to
“What? How?”
She told him.
Earlier, when Bathory had waved her flashlight around the cell, Erin had spotted a possible way out. They certainly could never breach the stone walls, and the new steel bars looked strong, and the floor had been carved from solid rock. They wouldn’t be leaving by any of those ways.
But the ceiling!
Under the glow of Bathory’s flashlight, she had noted that the cell had no roof. It was just a sheer-walled black shaft that headed straight up.
Erin knew what that meant. In ancient times, Roman slaves used long poles to push caged animals down the stone tunnel that Bathory had sauntered along before. They were animals meant for the arena, but first their cages had to be pushed into the very cell that she and Nate now occupied.
Back then, a wooden platform would have covered the cell’s stone floor. Over the centuries, the platform had disintegrated into the slivers Erin had felt when she first woke up in the cell. Originally, planks had been nailed together in the shape of this room. Chains would have been attached to both sides of the platform and run up to pulleys at the top. Those chains would have traveled up slots on either side of the black rectangle above her.
Slaves rolled the caged animals on top of the platform. Later, on cue from above, other slaves used an elaborate rope-and-pulley elevator system to lift the platform and the cage from deep under the earth to the ground-level arena.
Erin and Nate had to hope that this shaft led to someplace safer than the prison they were stuck in now.
“Come over here,” she urged Nate, taking him by hand. “We can climb the steel gate to reach the shaft above.”
She helped him mount and clamber up the horizontal braces. Still, he trembled. Beaten and poorly fed, he was noticeably weak.
“Now for the interesting part.” Erin held him against the bars with one arm. “I saw a small vertical slot running up one wall of the shaft. Once upon a time, the slot held the pulley chains used to lift the elevator platform up that shaft. With any luck, we can climb that slot all the way to the surface. I’m going to go first. You come up after me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Nate’s voice had a sarcastic tone, and she was glad to hear it.
Her fingers explored the shaft overhead and found the slot. It was wide enough to jam into: legs on one side, back on the other. The climbing technique was called chimneying.
She pushed off with her legs from the cell’s gate and lifted herself up into the slot. Before she could fall back down, she jammed one leg against the side. Her back rested hard against the other side. She was in.
She moved up one foot, then another. “Okay, Nate. Your turn.”
Blind in the dark, she heard him hoist himself off the bars toward her—then fall back down to the stone floor
