Red Rabbit

It wasn’t big; it was vast.

Sharp went to the left side of the cathedral, ending up in what looked like an area of shops—jewelry, it seemed—where he parked.

“Let’s take a look, shall we?”

Ryan took the chance to leave the car and stretch his legs, and he had to remind himself that he was not here to admire the architecture of Bramante and Michelangelo. He was here to scout the terrain for a mission, as he had been taught to plan for at Quantico. It wasn’t really all that hard if you spoke the language.

From above, it must have looked like an old-fashioned basketball key. The circular part of the piazza looked to be a good two hundred yards in diameter, then narrowed down to perhaps a third of that as you got away from the monstrous bronze doors to the church itself.

“When he sees the crowd, he boards his car—rather like a cross between a jeep and a golf trolley—just there, and he follows a cleared path in the crowd along this way,” Sharp explained, “around there, and back. Takes about, oh, twenty minutes or so, depending on whether he stops the car for—what you Americans call pressing the flesh. I suppose I shouldn’t compare him to a politician. He seems a very decent chap, a genuinely good man. Not all the popes have been so, but this one is. And he’s no coward. He’s had to live through the Nazis and the communists, and that never turned him a single degree from his path.”

“Yeah, he must like riding the point of the lance,” Ryan murmured in reply. There was just one thing occupying his mind now. “Where’s the sun going to be?”

“Just at our backs.”

“So, if there’s a bad guy, he’ll stand just about here, sun behind him, not in his eyes. People looking that way from the other side have the sun in their eyes. Maybe it’s not all that much, but when your ass is on the line, you play every card in your hand. Ever been in uniform, Tom?”

“Coldstream Guards, leftenant through a captaincy. Saw some action in Aden, but mainly served in the BOAR. I agree with your estimate of the situation,” Sharp said, turning to do his own evaluation. “And professionals are somewhat predictable, since they all study out of the same syllabus. But what about a rifle?”

“How many men you have to use for this?”

“Four, besides myself. C might send more down from London, but not all that many.”

“Put one up there?” Ryan gestured to the colonnade. Seventy feet high? Eighty? About the same height as the perch Lee Harvey Oswald had used to do Jack Kennedy… with an Italian rifle, Jack reminded himself. That was good for a brief chill.

“I can probably get a man up there disguised as a photographer.” And long camera lenses made for good telescopes.

“How about radios?”

“Say, six civilian-band walkie-talkies. If we don’t have them at the embassy, I can have them flown in from London.”

“Better to have military ones, small enough to conceal—we had one in the Corps that had an earpiece like from a transistor radio. Also better if it’s encrypted, but that might be hard.” And such systems, Ryan didn’t add, are not entirely reliable.

“Yes, we can do that. You have a good eye, Sir John.”

“I wasn’t a Marine for long, but the way they teach lessons in the Basic School, it’s kinda hard to forget them. This is one hell of a big place to cover with six men, fella.”

“And not something SIS trains us to do,” Sharp added.

“Hey, the U.S. Secret Service would cover this place with over a hundred trained agents—shit, maybe more —plus try to get intel on every hotel, motel, and flophouse in the area.” Jack let out a breath. “Mr. Sharp, this is not possible. How thick are the crowds?”

“It varies. In the summer tourist season, there are enough people here to fill Wembley Stadium. This coming week? Certainly thousands,” he estimated. “How many is hard to reckon.”

This mission is a real shitburger, Ryan told himself.

“Any way to hit the hotels, try to get a line on this Strokov guy?”

“More hotels in Rome than in London. It’s a lot to cover with four field officers. We can’t get any help from the local police, can we?”

“What guidance on that from Basil?” Ryan inquired, already guessing the answer.

“Everything is on close hold. No, we cannot let anyone know what we’re doing.”

He couldn’t even call for help from CIA’s local station, Jack realized. Bob Ritter would never sanction it. Shitburger was optimistic.

Chapter 31. Bridge Builder

Sharp’s official residence was as impressive in its way as the safe house outside Manchester. There was no guessing what—whom—it had been built for, and Ryan was tired of asking anyway. He had a bedroom and a private bathroom, and that was enough. The ceilings were high in every room, presumably defense against the hot summers Rome was known for. It had been about 80 during the afternoon drive, warm, but not too bad for someone from the Baltimore-Washington area, though to an Englishman it must have seemed like the very boiler room of hell. Whoever had written about mad dogs and Englishmen must have lived in another age, Jack thought. In London, people started dropping dead in the street when it got to 75. As it was, he thought he had three days to worry, and one in which to execute whatever plan he and Sharp managed to come up with—in the hope that nothing at all would happen, and that CIA would come up with a way to warn His Holiness’s security troops that they needed to firm up their means of seeing to his physical safety. Christ, the guy even wore white, the better to make a perfect sight picture for whatever gun the bad guy might use—like a great big paper target blank for the bad guy to put his rounds into. George Armstrong Custer hadn’t walked into a worse tactical environment, but at least he’d done it with open eyes, albeit clouded by lethal pride and faith in his own luck. The Pope didn’t live under that illusion. No, he believed that God would come and collect him whenever it suited His purpose, and that was that. Ryan’s personal beliefs were not all that different from the Polish priest’s, but he figured that God had given him brains and free will for a reason—did that make Jack an instrument of God’s will? It was too deep a question for the moment, and besides, Ryan wasn’t a priest to dope that one out. Maybe it was a lack of faith. Maybe he believed in the real world too much. His wife’s job was to fix health problems, and were those problems visited upon people by God Himself? Some thought so. Or were those problems things God merely allowed to happen so that people like Cathy could fix them, and thus do His work? Ryan tended to this view, and the Church must have agreed, since it had built so many hospitals across the world.

But for damned sure, the Lord God didn’t approve of murder, and it was now Jack’s mission to stop one from happening, if that was possible. Certainly he wasn’t one to stand by and ignore it. A priest would have to limit himself to persuasion or, at most, passive interference. Ryan knew that if he saw a criminal drawing a bead on the Pope—or, for that matter, anyone else—and he had a gun in his hand, he wouldn’t hesitate more than a split second to interrupt the act with a pistol bullet of his own. Maybe that was just how he was made up, maybe it was the things he’d learned from his dad, maybe it was his training in the Green Machine, but for whatever reason, the use of physical force would not make him faint away—at least not until after he’d done the act. There were a few people in hell to prove that fact. And so Jack started the mental preparation for what he’d have to do, maybe, if the Bad Guys were in town and he saw them. Then it hit him that he wouldn’t even have to answer for it—not with diplomatic status. The State Department had the right to withdraw his protection under the Vienna Convention, but, no, not in a case like this they wouldn’t. So whatever he did could be a freebie, and that wasn’t so bad a deal, was it?

The Sharps took him out for dinner—just a neighborhood place, but the food was brilliant, renewed proof that the best Italian restaurants are often the little mom-and-pop places. Evidently, the Sharps ate there often, the staff was so friendly to them.

“Tom, what the hell are we going to do?” Jack asked openly, figuring that Annie had to know what he did for