escape plan would quickly fall into place. He wasn’t all that worried.
Glauser saw Zazo and stiffened.
‘Celestino! You’re suspended. Who let you in here?’
The costumed Swiss Guards at the Sistine Chapel door clutched their ceremonial pikes tightly and looked to Glauser for instructions.
Zazo tried to control his tone lest he should sound deranged. ‘Glauser, listen to me carefully. We have to evacuate the Chapel. There’s a bomb.’
‘You’re out of your mind!’ The small man began to lift his arm to speak into his cuff microphone but Zazo stopped him by pulling Lorenzo’s SIG from his waistband, breeching a round and pointing it at Glauser’s head. There was a commotion in the Sala Regia as people murmured and backed away.
‘Glauser, keep your hands folded in front of you,’ Zazo ordered. ‘I’ll shoot you if I have to.’ He spoke to the Swiss Guards. ‘Men, there’s a traitor in your midst. Your duty is to protect the Pope. One of the cardinals inside the Sistine Chapel will soon be that man. Help me clear the area.’
Glauser seethed at him. ‘The only traitor is you, Celestino. I’ve always had my suspicions about you. You’re going to rot in jail for this.’
Glauser reached inside his suit jacket for his weapon and Zazo reacted. He fired a bullet into Glauser’s right knee and when the man fell screaming Zazo reached inside the jacket and ripped out Glauser’s Heckler & Koch MP5A3. He clicked the safety off and pointed the weapon at the stunned Guards. He barked at one of them: ‘You, put a tourniquet on him or he’ll die. And you other men – for God’s sake clear the Sala Regia!’
At the other end of the hall Capozzoli was at the Pauline Door, yelling for everyone to get out. Clergy and laity streamed urgently toward him.
Zazo kept the sub-machine gun aimed at the Guards and kicked at the door of the Sistine Chapel with his heel. ‘It’s an emergency!’ he shouted. ‘It’s Major Celestino of the Gendarmerie! Let me in!’
It seemed to take an eternity but eventually he heard the bolt slide back.
Cardinal Franconi was at the door with an expression of equal parts apprehension and confusion on his face. The sight of a non-uniformed man holding a sub-machine gun sent him into a state of panic.
Zazo rushed past him into the Chapel. A hundred elderly men wearing red hats stared at him in stunned silence and put down the pens they were using to mark their ballot papers.
Zazo had been inside the Chapel hundreds of times, perhaps thousands, and he hardly noticed its majesty anymore. But he’d never seen it like this, steeped in the gravitas of all the Cardinal Electors fulfilling their ancient duty. The magical ceiling was softly illuminated by afternoon light pouring through the high windows. Zazo stopped in the center of the Chapel. Directly above his head the hand of God reached to the outstretched hand of Adam, bestowing life.
Cardinal Diaz rose from his desk and straightened his spine. He recognized Zazo. ‘Major, why have you come to this holy place with a weapon and interrupted our sacred rites?’
Zazo’s voice reverberated in the chamber and sounded, to him, other-worldly. ‘I’m sorry, Your Excellency. But everyone must leave immediately.’
‘We are in the midst of a ballot. We cannot leave.’
‘There’s no time to explain but I believe there’s a bomb inside the Chapel.’
Diaz scanned the faces of his fellow cardinals.
Cardinal Aspromonte rose. ‘Why do you believe this? Who has told you?’
‘A nun. A nun named Elisabetta.’
Some of the cardinals tittered nervously.
‘You’ve committed this great sacrilege because of the word of a nun?’ Diaz roared. ‘Leave us! Leave at once!’
Zazo looked at Diaz and placed the tip of the gun under his own chin. He curled his thumb around the trigger. ‘I’m sorry. I won’t leave. This nun, she’s my sister, and I believe in what she says with all my heart. If I can’t save you, I’ll die trying.’
Hackel sat in his favorite chair. The vantage point gave him a simultaneous view of the television and, through his window, the Dome of St Peter’s. That way he’d see the flash twice. He’d hear the explosion twice. He’d feel the percussion ripple through his body once.
The night of the Pope’s death, in the basement of the Sistine Chapel, he had placed his utility bag on one of the simple wooden tables, unzipped it and removed a continuous roll of rubberized sheeting which resembled some kind of building material. Primasheet 2000. An RDX-based plastic explosive, two millimeters thick and with a sticky backing. Military-grade and lethal, particularly within a vaulted space.
The width of the Primasheet had been perfect but it had needed to be cut to the right length and then stuck to the underside of the table. Hackel had plucked a component from a plastic bag and firmly pressed a thumbnail- sized RF microchip into the sheet, firmly anchoring it. He had turned the table back on its feet and inspected the job.
Each of the chips was set to discharge at the same frequency. One switch on a remote detonator would do the job. Over the next hour he had repeated the process 108 times, one for each Cardinal Elector in the Papal Conclave.
They had a man inside the security-contractor company. The Alsatian dog he used for the explosive sweeps wouldn’t have detected Primasheet if it had been crammed up its rear.
Hackel extended the antenna on the Combifire detonator to its full extent.
He flipped the on switch and pushed the red detonate button.
The high windows of the Sistine Chapel were the first to go.
They blew out in an orange flash, the old glass fragmenting into millions of shards.
Then the shock wave took the ceiling.
The brightly painted frescoes which had taken Michelangelo four years to paint, vaporized in an instant into a fine, colorful mist.
The vault of the Chapel came down in great chunks, burying everything beneath under tons of ugly grey rubble. A vast cloud of smoke rose over St Peter’s Square, blotting out what was left of the sun and turning day into night.
THIRTY-TWO
THE BLAST CAUGHT Zazo like a train hurtling through the Sala Regia, pushing him through the Pauline Door well into the Palace. Because he was the last one out he took the hardest hit but some of the cardinals closest to the explosion were toppled like bowling pins.
Concussed and unconscious, he missed the immediate aftermath of ambulances and first responders. Loreti and Sonnenberg immediately activated a disaster plan called Code Citadel which summoned the full resources of the Italian state. The Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza, the SWAT Team of the Polizia di Stato, and the Carabinieri swarmed through Vatican City and with the assistance of the Vatican Gendarmerie evacuated the traumatized crowds in St Peter’s Square.
Though there were injuries from flying glass and chunks of masonry, most of the casualties came from the subsequent stampede, though, miraculously, at the end of the day there was not a single fatality. Zazo was among those more seriously hurt. A broken rib lacerated his liver and within an hour he was in an operating theater undergoing abdominal surgery. In an adjoining suite, Glauser was getting his knee reconstructed.
The Swiss Guards closed ranks around the cardinals and those who didn’t require medical triage and hospitalization were bundled onto coaches and brought back to the Domus Sanctae Marthae, which was cordoned off by a ring of armed men. A Polizia di Stato helicopter hovered overhead.
Lorenzo, soot-streaked and shaken, found Loreti and Sonnenberg outside the Domus.
Loreti asked him, ‘You were there. What the hell happened?’
