Nineteen

LOOKING INTO THE WINDOW, EMILY COULD SEE THERE WAS NO one inside the Ufficio Scavi, the telephone booth–sized office tucked against the side of the building. Tourists would stand in line for hours waiting to get tickets so that they could visit the tomb of St. Peter beneath the Basilica.

She noticed with a twist of fear that there were no tourists lined up outside the tiny office. Just two Swiss guards standing outside the closed door. She swallowed. The same two guards who’d lifted the gate so that Norcroft’s car could pass through the Holy Office Gate, through the colonnade to the left, on Via Paolo VI. The moment their car had passed through, the gate was lowered.

Taking a better look at the two men in their Swiss costumes Emily knew immediately that they were no more Swiss guards than she was. While they wore the colorful uniforms, their jaws weren’t smoothly shaved, and their hair was too long. Norcroft’s men?

Yeah. Without a doubt.

Since there was nowhere for her fear to go, she got a grip on it. Panicking and getting hysterical, while appealing at the moment, wouldn’t get her anywhere. There must be some big event about to happen, she thought almost absently, glancing at the crowd. The Pope making a special showing or something? The oval Piazza San Pietro was filled to capacity with thousands upon thousands of milling people, and the noise of their raised and agitated voices was deafening.

As soon as the car had stopped, they’d boxed her in, giving her no chance to make a break for it. Red Lips, carrying a black duffel bag, instantly came up to take her position behind Emily. The two men flanked her. Norcroft linked his arm with hers, a small handgun pressed against her ribs.

The cacophony of the masses gathered in the Piazza beyond the gate precluded conversation. Which was fine with Emily. She really, really didn’t want to hear any more of Norcroft’s sick stories. She wanted to use every atom of her concentration to wait for, and take, the first opportunity for freedom.

Norcroft guided her inside the opening to the Necropolis.

Emily’s window of opportunity slammed shut with a reverberating thud.

 

“I DON’T GIVE A RAT’S ASS IF THERE IS A F—IS A TRAFFIC JAM,” MAX snarled into the lip mic. He was lying on his back on the floor near the Chapel of the Column, west of the left transept, checking beneath the pews. “I want every man, woman, and child not actively involved off this property in the next hour. No, I don’t give a shit how. Just do it.”

There was going to be collateral damage. No logistical way around it. People would die today. A lot of people. Max knew that no matter how good, how organized, or how motivated, his people couldn’t move thousands of confused and frightened pilgrims, worshipers, and tourists out of range fast enough. He could only hope to God that they were able to move most of the crowds a safe distance away in time. They’d estimated that there were over sixty thousand people on the Vatican City’s grounds. Sixty thousand people to mobilize without panic.

Christ.

He hoped God was paying attention today.

He listened to the odd conversation on his headset, but pretty much everyone was quiet, heads down, searching. Every now and then he’d hear one of the bomb-sniffing dogs give a sharp bark, and he’d feel a shaft of anticipation spear through him that they’d found something. But so far no one, not even the dogs, had found the bomb.

They might not have discovered its hiding place, but Max heard every tick of the timer in his head. He counted off the minutes. He had the actual countdown on his visual headset, but for now it was off. He knew to the second how much time was left.

And then he’d be done.

He should, he thought, sliding back another few feet, have spent five more minutes with Emily yesterday. Five minutes and the truth. She deserved that much from him.

It was a damned joke that he’d tasted love while kissing her. But he couldn’t think about that, and regret left a bitter aftertaste on his tongue. He ran his fingers slowly beneath the ancient wood as he used his feet to inch his body along, used his eyes and his fingers to search for wires, for plastique, for any sort of detonation device.

All he could do now was his job. If he survived, then he’d consider his uncertain future.

He found nothing more under the pew than a bunch of little wads of chewing gum stuck to the wood. And he inspected those as well.

“AFTER YOU,” NORCROFT GESTURED FOR EMILY TO DESCEND THE narrow metal stairs ahead where a Ray-Banned man, looking like he’d stepped straight out of the movie Men in Black, stood cradling a mean-looking gun in his muscle-bound arms.

He shifted slightly to let them pass, then repositioned himself to guard the opening to the scavi.

Emily moved past him and started down the stairs, the others behind her. The Bataan Death March. Their footsteps echoed in the quiet as they descended into the crypts beneath the Basilica, single file.

To keep her mind off how thirsty she was, and oh, yes, how freaking terrified she was, Emily tried to remember what she knew about the Necropolis, other than that the complex of mausoleums under the foundation of the church had been built in the early part of AD 160. That was it. And she hadn’t remembered that. She’d seen a small plaque with the information near the entrance.

The air was close and humid and smelled of damp earth. The lighting was dim, but bright enough to see where she was going. Emily didn’t like where they were they going, but at least she could see it, she thought a little hysterically. Thirty or forty feet under the floor of St. Peter’s.

She’d been here years ago with a school group, but she didn’t remember her way around the labyrinth of old streets and dead ends. And she’d forgotten this glass door that required a handprint scan on the pad to enter. Very James Bond.

Very T-FLAC.

God. Where was Max? Was he at this very moment in Denver searching for Norcroft? She took some consolation that if psycho Norcroft was here with her, Max was somewhere safe. Cold comfort. She’d rather they were both safe, and together somewhere.

They couldn’t go any farther, she thought with relief.

Behind her Georgiou rustled some plastic, and Emily flattened her body against the side wall and closed her eyes. Because she knew he was fishing another damned body part out of his pocket to hold up to the scanner. The thought made her stomach roll as she waited.

It was warm down there. Warm and just a little bit claustrophobic. Sweat prickled around Emily’s hairline as she leaned against the gritty wall, her eyes closed so she didn’t have to see what was being used to open the damn door. She wiped her damp palms down the borrowed black cotton pants she wore.

The security system accepted whatever it was Georgiou held up, and the door swung open with a soft whoosh.

The air inside the Roman Necropolis, the City of the Dead, was a little more musty smelling, and smoky, with the dust from previous centuries hanging in the still air. The hillside city of the dead had been built to look like a city in miniature, where wealthy pagan families entombed their dead in houses so they could continue their new lives. Eventually, hundreds of years later, a church had been built on the site, and hundreds of years after that St. Peter’s had been constructed, and the tombs had been forgotten.

It was the last place anyone would look for her. If anyone was looking at all. She’d never felt more alone in her life.

“Keep walking. Then take the stairs,” Norcroft instructed from directly behind her, jabbing her in the back with his gun.

“You don’t have to press that damn thing into my spine so hard,” Emily informed him. “I’m not going anywhere.” There was nowhere to go . She was going to die here with the pagans and Christians who’d been entombed in this cemetery for centuries.

She should have forced Max to stay for five more minutes yesterday morning. Forced him to stand still long enough for her to tell him that she loved him. That she wanted more time to build a real relationship with him. That whatever his problem was with commitment, she’d stick by him and they could work it out. Together.

Tears stung behind her lids, and it wasn’t because Norcroft kept the muzzle of his damn gun pressed against her middle vertebra.

Despite everything that had happened to her in the past few weeks, she’d never really believed on a visceral level that she would die.

Now she did.

She’d wanted a lifetime with Max.

Now it was too late.

Two abreast, they walked through the winding streets lined with tombs. Red Lips and Greek guy walked a few steps behind Emily and Norcroft, who moved the gun to jab at a rib instead of her spine. Hardly an improvement.

The rough brick walls of the tombs rose to the ceiling. Niches cut into the stone held tombs and sarcophagi with pagan inscriptions and ancient Christian graffito carved side by side into the worn marble. It was as if the Christians had taken over, and just added to the existing decoration. A tiny sarcophagus had a mournful relief carving of a man and his wife holding their infant son. Emily tried to interpret some of the ancient carvings as she passed them.

Loss. Loss. And more loss. But also love. The tombs abounded with flowery declarations of love of every kind. Mothers for their children, husbands for their wives, a child for a well-loved pet. The carved pictures painted relatable scenes of human lives hundreds of years before.

Side streets branched off and held bigger mausoleums, where the wealthy were buried with their servants to wait on them even in death.

After walking along a fairly level surface, they came to a second narrow staircase and climbed down. There was another James Bond-like door that the Greek activated, allowing them to pass through. Emily vaguely remembered that the doors were to keep the humidity down. A prosaic reason, but it was a suitably creepy touch to this surreal expedition, and a chilling indication that, for her, this was a one-way trip.

The stone street veered off to the left, then opened into a small, very small, courtyard. It was crowded with the four of them.

And the chair.

A banged up, metal kitchen chair, with a cracked red plastic seat and a snake pit of ominous leather straps attached to it sat in the middle of the cramped space.

Norcroft grabbed her by the arm, and shoved her toward the only seat in the house. “Sit.”

She resisted the downward pressure of his hand on her arm. “I don’t think so.” She had nothing to lose. She was going to die here, right beside the small hole in the wall covered with Plexiglas behind which lay St. Peter himself.

She’d rather be shot, get the execution over with, than continue to be played with. “Go to hell.” She backed away from them, but Georgiou grabbed her other arm. She wasn’t going anywhere, it had been stupid to even try.

Norcroft shot a glance at Red Lips. “Just a light cocktail for her please, Greta.”