Red Rabbit

Ryan arose early, as usual, had his breakfast, and caught a taxi to St. Peter’s. It was good to walk around the square—which was almost entirely round, of course—just to stretch his legs. It seemed odd that here, inside the capital of the Italian Republic, was a titularly sovereign state whose official language was Latin. He wondered if the Caesars would have liked that or not, the last home of their language also being the home of the agency that had brought down their world-spanning empire, but he couldn’t go to the Forum to ask whatever ghosts lived there.

The church commanded his attention. There were no words for something that large. The funds to build it had necessitated the indulgence selling that had sparked Martin Luther to post his protest on the cathedral door and so start the Reformation, something the nuns at St. Matthew’s had not approved of, but for which the Jesuits of his later life had taken rather a broader view. The Society of Jesus also owed its existence to the Reformation—they’d been founded to fight against it.

That didn’t much matter at the moment. The basilica beggared description, and it seemed a fit headquarters for the Roman Catholic Church. He walked in and saw that, if anything, the interior seemed even more vast than the outside. You could play a football game in there. A good hundred yards away was the main altar, reserved for use by the Pope himself, under which was the crypt where former popes were buried, including, tradition had it, Simon Peter himself. “Thou art Peter,” Jesus was quoted in the Gospel, “and upon this rock I shall build my church.” Well, with the help of some architects and what must have been an army of workers, they’d certainly built a church here. Jack felt drawn into it as though it were God’s own personal house. The cathedral in Baltimore would scarcely have been an alcove here. Looking around, he saw the tourists, also staring at the ceiling with open mouths. How had they built this place without structural steel? Jack wondered. It was all stone resting on stone. Those old guys really knew their stuff, Ryan reflected. The sons of those engineers now worked for Boeing or NASA. He spent a total of twenty minutes walking around, then reminded himself that he wasn’t, after all, a tourist.

This had once been the site of the original Roman Circus Maximus. The big racetrack for chariots, like those in the movie Ben-Hur, had then been torn down and a church built here, the original St. Peter’s, but over time that church had deteriorated, and so a century-plus-long project to build this one had been undertaken and was finished in the sixteenth century, Ryan remembered. He went back outside to survey the area once again. Much as he looked for alternatives, it seemed that his first impression had been the correct one. The Pope got in his car there, drove around that way, and the place of greatest vulnerability was… right about there. The problem was that there was a semicircular space perhaps two hundred yards long.

Okay, he thought, time to do some analysis. The shooter would be a pro. A pro would have two considerations: one, getting a good shot off; and two, getting the hell out of here alive.

So Ryan turned to see potential exit routes. To the left, closest to the facade of the church, people would really pile up there in their desire to get the first look at the Pope as he came out. Farther down, the open vehicle path widened somewhat, increasing the range of the shot—something to be avoided. But the shooter still needed to get his ass out of Dodge City, and the best way to do that was toward the side street where Sharp had parked the day before. You could stash a car there, probably, and if you made it that far, you’d go pedal-to-the-metal and race the hell off to wherever you had a backup car parked—a backup, because the cops would sure as hell be looking for the first one, and Rome had a goodly supply of police officers who’d run through fire to catch whoever had popped a cap on the Pope.

Back to the shooting place. He wouldn’t want to be in the thickest part of the crowd, so he wouldn’t want to be too close to the church. But he’d want to boogie out through that arch. Maybe sixty or seventy yards. Ten seconds, maybe? With a clear path, yeah, about that. Double it, just to be sure. He’d probably yell something like “There he goes!” as a distraction. It might make him easier to identify later, but Colonel Strokov will be figuring to sleep Wednesday night in Sofia. Check flight times, Jack told himself. If he takes the shot and gets away, he won’t be swimming home, will he? No, he’ll opt for the fastest way out—unless he has a really deep hidey- hole here in Rome.

That was a possibility. The problem was that he was dealing with an experienced field spook, and he could have a lot of things planned. But this was reality, not a movie, and professionals kept things simple, because even the simplest things could go to shit in the real world.

He’ll have at least one backup plan. Maybe more, but sure as hell he’ll have one.

Dress up like a priest, maybe? There were a lot of them in evidence. Nuns, too— more than Ryan had ever seen. How tall is Strokov? Anything over five-eight and he’d be too tall for a nun. But if he dressed as a priest, you could hide a fucking RPG in a cassock. That was a pleasant thought. But how fast could one run in a cassock? That was a possible downside.

You have to assume a pistol, probably a suppressed pistol. A rifle—no, its dangers lay in its virtues. It was so long that the guy standing next to him could bat the barrel off target, and he’d never get a good round off. An AK-47, maybe, able to go rock-and-roll? But, no, it was only in the movies that people fired machine guns from the hip. Ryan had tried it with his M-16 at Quantico. It felt real John Wayne, but you just couldn’t hit shit that way. The sights, the gunnery sergeants had all told his class at the Basic School, are there for a reason. Like Wyatt Earp shooting on TV—draw and fire from the hip. It just didn’t work unless your other hand was on the fucker’s shoulder. The sights are there for a reason, to tell you where the weapon is pointed, because the bullet you’re shooting is about a third of an inch in diameter, and you are, in fact, shooting at a target just that small, and a hiccup could jerk you off target, and under stress your aim just gets worse … unless you’re used to the idea of killing people. Like Boris Strokov, colonel of the Dirzhavna Sugurnost. What if he was one of those who just didn’t rattle, like Audie Murphy of the Third Infantry Division in WWII? But how many people like that were around? Murphy had been one in eight million American soldiers, and nobody had seen that deadly quality in him before it just popped out on the battlefield, probably surprising even him. Murphy himself probably never appreciated how different he was from everybody else.

Strokov is a pro, Jack reminded himself. And so he’ll act like a pro. He’ll plan every detail, especially the getaway.

“You must be Ryan,” a British voice said quietly. Jack turned to see a pale man with red hair.

“Who are you?”

“Mick King,” the man replied. “Sir Basil sent the four of us down. Sussing the area out?”

“How obvious am I?” Ryan worried suddenly.

“You could well be an architecture student.” King blew it off. “What do you think?”

“I think the shooter would stand right about here, and try to boogie on out that way,” Jack said, pointing. King looked around before speaking.

“It’s a dicey proposition, however one plans it, with all the people sure to be here, but, yes, that does look the most promising option,” the spook agreed.

“If I were planning to do it myself, I’d want to use a rifle from up there. We’ll need to have somebody topside to handle that possibility.”

“Agreed. I’ll have John Sparrow go up there. The chap with short hair over there. He brought a ton of cameras with him.”

“One more man to camp out in the street that way. Our bird will probably have a car to skip town with, and that’s where I’d park it.”

“A little too convenient, don’t you think?”

“Hey, I’m an ex-Marine, not a chess master,” Ryan replied. But it was good to have somebody second- guessing him. There were a lot of tactical possibilities here, and everybody read a map a little differently, and Bulgarians might well study out of a different playbook altogether.

“It’s a pig of a mission they’ve given us. Best hope is that this Strokov fellow doesn’t show up. Oh, here he is,” King said, handing Ryan an envelope.

It was full of eight-by-ten prints, actually of pretty good quality.

“Nick Thompson told me he has lifeless eyes,” Ryan said, looking at one of them.

“Does seem rather a cold chap, doesn’t he?”