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 a living.
"Churchill called it KBO-keep buggering on." He shrugged. "We do the best we can, Jack."
"I suppose I'd feel a hell of a lot better with a platoon of Marines to back my play."
"As would I, my boy, but one does the best one can with what one has."
"Tommy," Mrs. Sharp said. "What exactly are you two talking about?"
"Can't say, my dear."
"But you are CIA," she said next, looking at Jack.
"Yes, ma'am," Ryan confirmed. "Before that, I taught history at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and before that I traded stocks, and before that I was a Marine."
"Sir John, you're the one who-"
"And I'll never live it down, either." Why the hell, Jack wondered, hadn't he just kept his wife and daughter behind that tree on the Mall in London and let Sean Miller do his thing? Cathy would have gotten some pictures and that would have helped with the police, after all. No good-or dumb-deed ever went unpunished, he supposed. "And you can stop the Sir John stuff. I do not own a horse or a steel shirt." And his only sword was the Mameluke that the Marine Corps gave to its officers upon graduation at Quantico.
"Jack, a knight is ceremonially one who will take up arms in protection of the sovereign. You've done that twice, if memory serves. You are, therefore, entitled to the honorific," Sharp pointed out.
"You guys never forget, do you?"
"Not something like that, Sir John. Courage under fire is one of the things worth remembering."
"Especially in nightmares, but in those the gun never works, and, yeah, sometimes I have them," Jack admitted, for the first time in his life. "What are we doing tomorrow, Tom?"
"I have embassy work in the morning. Why don't you scout the area some more, and I can join you for lunch."
"Fair enough. Meet where?"
"Just inside the Basilica, to the right, is Michelangelo's Pieta. Just there at one fifteen exactly."
"Fair enough," Jack agreed.
"So, where is Ryan?" the Rabbit asked.
"Rome," Alan Kingshot answered. "He's looking into what you told us." All of this day had been occupied with uncovering what he knew of KGB operations in the UK. It turned out to be quite a lot, enough that the three-man Security Service team had positively drooled as they took their notes. Ryan had been wrong, Kingshot thought over dinner. This fellow wasn't a gold mine. No, he was Kimberly, and the diamonds just spilled out from his mouth. Zaitzev was relaxing a little more, enjoying his status. As well he might, Alan thought. Like the man who'd invented the computer chip, this Rabbit was set for life, all the carrots he could eat, and men with guns would protect his hole in the ground against all bears.
The Bunny, as he thought of her, had discovered Western cartoons today. She especially liked "Roadrunner," immediately noting the similarity to the Russian "Hey, Wait a Minute," and laughing through every one of them.
Irina, on the other hand, was rediscovering her love for the piano, playing the big Bosendorfer in the home's music room, making mistakes but learning from them, and starting to recover her former skills, to the admiring looks of Mrs. Thompson, who'd never learned to play herself, but who'd found reams of sheet music in the house for Mrs. Zaitzev to try her hand at.
This family, Kingshot thought, will do well in the West. The child was a child. The father had tons of good information. The mother would breathe free and play her music to her heart's content. They would wear their newfound freedom like a loose and comfortable garment. They were, to use the Russian word, kulturniy, or cultured people, fit representatives of the rich culture which had long predated communism. Good to know that not all defectors were alcoholic ruffians.
"Like a canary on amphetamines, Basil says," Moore told his senior people in the den of his home. "He says this guy will give us more information than we can easily use."
"Oh, yeah? Try us," Ritter thought out loud.
"Indeed, Bob. When do we get him over here?" Admiral Greer asked.
"Basil asked for two more days to get him over. Say, Thursday afternoon. I'm having the Air Force send a VC-137 over. Might as well do it first class," the Judge observed generously. It wasn't his money, after all. "Basil's alerted his people in Rome, by the way, just in case KGB is running fast on their operation to whack the Pope."
"They're not that efficient," Ritter said with some confidence.
"I'd be careful about that, Bob," the DDI thought out loud. "Yuriy Vladimirovich isn't noted for his patience." Greer was not the first man to make that observation.
"I know, but their system grinds slower than ours."
"What about the Bulgarians?" Moore asked. "They think the shooter is a guy named Strokov, Boris Strokov. He's probably the guy who killed Georgiy Markov on Westminster Bridge. Experienced assassin, Basil thinks."
"It figures they'd use the Bulgars," Ritter observed. "They're the Eastern Bloc's Murder Incorporated, but they're still communists, and they're chess players, not high-noon types. But we still haven't figured out how to warn the Vatican. Can we talk to the Nuncio about this?"
They'd all had a little time to think through that question, and now it was time to face it again. The Papal Nuncio was the Vatican's ambassador to the United States, Giovanni Cardinal Sabatino. Sabatino was a longtime member of the Pope's own diplomatic service and was well regarded by the State Department's career foreign-service officers, both for his sagacity and his discretion.
"Can we do it in such a way as not to compromise the source?" Greer wondered.
"We can say some Bulgarian talked too much-"
"Pick that fictional source carefully, Judge," Ritter warned. "Remember, the DS has that special subunit. It reports directly to their Politburo, and they don't write much down, according to what sources we have over there. Kinda like the commie version of Albert Anastasia. This Strokov guy is one of them, or so we have heard."
"We could say their party chairman talked to a mistress. He has a few," Greer suggested. The Director of Intelligence had all manner of information on the intimate habits of world leaders, and the Bulgarian party boss was a man of the people in the most immediate of senses. Of course, if this ever leaked, life might get difficult for the women in question, but adultery had its price, and the Bulgarian chairman was such a copious drinker that he might not remember to whom he'd (never) said what would be attributed to him. That might serve to salve their consciences a little. "Sounds plausible," Ritter opined. "When could we see the Nuncio?" Moore asked. "Middle of the week, maybe?" Ritter suggested again. They all had a full week before them. The Judge would be on The Hill doing budget business until Wednesday morning.
"Where?" They couldn't bring him here, after all. The churchman wouldn't come. Too much potential unpleasantness if anyone noticed. And Judge Moore couldn't go to the Nuncio. His face, also, was too well known by the Washington establishment.
"Foggy Bottom," Greer thought out loud. Moore went to see the Secretary of State often enough, and the Nuncio wasn't exactly a stranger there.
"That'll work," the DCI decided. "Let's get it set up." Moore stretched. He hated having to do work on a Sunday. Even a judge of the appeals court got weekends off.
"There's still the issue of what they can actually do with the information," Ritter warned them. "What is Basil doing?"
"He's got his Rome Station rooting around, only five of them, but he's going to send some more troops from London tomorrow just in case they try to make their hit on Wednesday-that's when His Holiness appears in public. I gather he has a pretty busy work schedule, too."
"Shame he can't call off the ride around the plaza, but I guess he wouldn't listen if anybody asked."
"Not hardly," Moore agreed. He didn't bring up the word from Sir Basil that Ryan had been dispatched to Rome. Ritter would just throw another conniption fit, and Moore wasn't up to that on a Sunday.
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?"
"When we come here Wednesday, we going to be carrying?"
"I certainly shall be," King said positively. "Nine-millimeter Browning. There ought to be a few more at the embassy. I know you can shoot accurately under pressure, Sir John," he added, with casual respect.
"It doesn't mean I like to, pal." And the best engagement range for any pistol was contact range, holding the gun right against the other bastard. Kinda hard to miss that way. It would even cut the noise down, too. Plus, it was a hell of a good way to tell someone not to do anything untoward.
For the next two hours, the five men walked the piazza, but they kept coming back to the same place.
"We can't cover it all, not without a hundred men," Mick King finally said. "And if you can't be strong everywhere, you might as well pick one place and be strong there."
Jack nodded, remembering how Napoleon had ordered his generals to come up with a plan for protecting France from invasion, and when a senior officer had spread his troops evenly along the borders, he'd heartlessly inquired if the guy was trying to protect against smuggling. So, yeah, if you couldn't be strong everywhere, then you planned to be strong somewhere, and prayed that you'd picked the right spot. The key, as always, was to put yourself into the other guy's head, just as they'd taught him to do as an intelligence analyst. Think the way your adversary thinks, and stop him that way. It sounded so good and so easy theoretically. It was rather different in the field, however.
They caught Tom Sharp walking into the basilica, and together they went off to a restaurant for lunch and a talk.
"Sir John is right," King said. "The best spot is over on the left side. We have photos of the bugger. We put you, John"-he said to Sparrow-"atop the colonnade with your cameras. Your job will be to sweep the crowd and try to spot the bastard, and radio your information to us."
Sparrow nodded, but his face showed what he thought of the job as the beers arrived.
"Mick, you had it right from the beginning," Sparrow said. "It's a pig of a job. We ought to have the whole bloody SAS regiment here, and even that would not be enough." The 22nd Special Air Service Regiment was actually just a company or two in size, brilliant troopers that they were.
"Ours is not to reason why, lad," Sharp told them all. "So good to know that Basil knows his Tennyson." The resulting snorts around the lunch table told the tale.
"What about radios?" Jack asked.
"On the way by courier," Sharp answered. "Small ones, they'll fit in a pocket, and they have ear pieces, but not small microphones, unfortunately."
"Shit," Ryan observed. The Secret Service would have exactly what they needed for this mission, but you couldn't just call them up and have them delivered. "What about the Queen's protective detail? Who does that?"
"The Metropolitan Police, I believe. Why-"
"Lapel mikes," Ryan answered. "It's what the Secret Service uses at home."
"I can ask," Sharp responded. "Good idea, Jack. They might well have what we need."
"They ought to cooperate with us," Mick King thought aloud.
"I'll see to it this afternoon," Sharp promised.
Yeah, Ryan thought, we'll be the best-equipped guys ever to blow a mission.
"They call this beer?" Sparrow asked after his first sip.
"Better than American canned piss," another of the new arrivals thought aloud.
Jack didn't rise to the bait. Besides, you went to Italy for the wine, not the beer.
"What do we know about Strokov?" Ryan asked.
"They faxed me the police file on him," Sharp reported. "Read it this morning. He's five-eleven, about fifteen stone. Evidently, he likes to eat too much. So, not an athlete-certainly not a sprinter. Brown hair, fairly thick. Good language skills. Speaks accented English, but reportedly speaks French and Italian like a native. Thought to be an expert with small arms. He's been in the business twenty years-age forty-three or so. Selected for the special DS assassination unit about fifteen years ago, with eight kills attributed to him, possibly more-we don't have good information on that."
"Delightful chap, sounds like," Sparrow thought aloud. He reached for one of the photos. "Ought not to be difficult to spot. Better to get some of these prints reduced to pocket size, so that we can all carry them with us."
"Done," Sharp promised. The embassy had its own little photo lab, mainly for his use.
Ryan looked around the table. At least it was good to be surrounded by professionals. Given the chance to perform, they probably wouldn't blow it-like a good bunch of Marines. It was not all that much, but it was something.
"What about side arms?" Ryan asked next.
"All the nine-millimeter Brownings we need," Tom Sharp assured him.
Ryan wanted to ask if they had hollow-point ammunition, but they probably just had military-issue hardball. That Geneva Convention bullshit. The nine-millimeter Parabellum cartridge was thought by Europeans to be powerful, but it was hardly a BB compared to the.45 Colt with which he'd been trained. So, then, why did he own a Browning Hi-Power? Jack asked himself. But the one he had at home was loaded with Federal 147-grain hollow-points, regarded by the American FBI as the only useful bullet to shoot out of the thing, good both for penetration and for expanding to the diameter of a dime inside the target's body, to make him bleed out in a hurry.
"He'd better be bloody close," Mick King announced. "I haven't fired one of the things in years." Which reminded Jack that England did not have the gun culture America has, even in their security services. James Bond was someone from the movies, Ryan had to remember. Ryan himself was probably the best pistol shot in the room, and he was a long way from being an expert. The pistols Sharp would hand out would be military-issue, the ones with invisible sights and crummy grips. The one Ryan owned had Pachmayr grips that fit his hand so nicely that it might have been a custom-made glove. Damn, nothing about this job was going to be easy.
"Okay. John, you'll be atop the colonnade. Find out how you get there, and arrange to get up there Wednesday morning early."
"Right." He had press credentials to make that easy. "I'll recheck the timing for everything as well."
"Good," Sharp replied. "We'll spend the afternoon going over the ground more. Look for things we may have overlooked. I'm thinking we put one man over on the side street to try and spot our friend Strokov coming in. If we spot him, we shadow him all the way in."
"Not stop him out there?" Ryan asked.
"Better to get him in closer," Sharp thought out loud. "More of us, less chance for him to bolt. If we're onto him, Jack, he won't be doing anything untoward, will he? We'll see to that."
"Will he be that predictable?" Jack worried.
"He's doubtless been here already. Indeed, we could just spot him today or tomorrow, couldn't we?"
"I wouldn't bet the ranch on it," Jack shot back.
"We play the card we are dealt, Sir John," King said. "And hope for luck."
There was no arguing with that, Ryan realized.
"If I were planning this operation, I'd be trying very hard to keep it simple. The most important preparation he'll be making is up here." Sharp tapped the side of his head. "He, too, will be somewhat tense, no matter how experienced he is in this business. Yes, he's a clever bugger, but he is not bloody Superman. The key to his success is surprise. Well, he doesn't really have that, does he? And blown surprise is the worst nightmare of a field officer. Lose that and everything comes apart like a wrecked watch. Remember, if he sees one thing that he doesn't like, he will probably just walk away and plan to come back again. There is no clock on this mission from his point of view."
"Think so?" Ryan wasn't the least bit sure of that.
"Yes, I do. If there were, from an operational standpoint, they would well have executed the mission already, and the Pope would already be chatting directly with God. According to what I've heard from London, this mission has been in planning for more than six weeks. So, clearly he's taking his time. I'll be very surprised if it happens day after tomorrow, but we must act as though it will."
"I wish I had your confidence, man."
"Sir John, field officers think and act like field officers, whatever their nationality," Sharp said with confidence. "Our mission is a difficult one, yes, but we speak his language, as it were. If this were a balls-out mission, it would have been done already. Agreed, gentlemen?" he asked, and got nods from around the table, except from the American.
"What if we're missing something?" Ryan wondered.
"That is a possibility," Sharp admitted, "but it's a possibility we have to both live with and discount. We have only the information we have, and we must design our plan around that."
"Not much choice for us, is it, Sir John?" Sparrow asked. "We have only what we have."
"True," Ryan admitted, rather miserably. There had come the sudden thought that other things might be happening as well. What if there were a diversion? What if somebody tossed firecrackers-to draw eyes toward the noise and away from the real action? That, he suddenly thought, was a real possibility.
Damn.
"What's this about Ryan?" Ritter asked, storming into Judge Moore's office.
"Basil thought that since BEATRIX was a CIA operation from the get-go, why not send one of our officers down there to take a look at things? I don't see that it can hurt anything," Moore told his DDO.
"Who the hell does Ryan think he's working for?"
"Bob, why don't you just settle down? What the hell can he do to hurt things?"
"Damn it, Arthur-"
"Settle down, Robert," Moore shot back in the voice of a judge used to having his own way on everything from the weather on down.
"Arthur," Ritter said, calming down a whisker, "it's not a place for him."
"I see no reason to object, Bob. None of us think anything's going to happen anyway, do we?"
"Well… no, I suppose not," the DDO admitted.
"So he's just broadening his horizons, and from what he learns, he'll be a better analyst, won't he?"
"Maybe so, but I don't like having some desk-sitter playing field spook. He isn't trained for this."
"Bob, he used to be a Marine," Moore reminded him. And the U.S. Marine Corps had its own cachet, independent of the CIA. "He's not going to wet his pants on us, is he?"
"I suppose not."
"And all he's going to do is look around at nothing happening, and the exposure to some field officers will not do his education any harm, will it?"
"They're Brits, not our guys," Ritter objected weakly.
"The same guys who brought the Rabbit out for us."
"Okay, Arthur, I'll give you this one."
"Bob, you throw a hell of a conniption fit, but why not use them for something important?"
"Yes, Judge, but the DO is my shop to run. You want me to get Rick Nolfi into this?"
"You think it's necessary?"
Ritter shook his head. "No, I expect not."
"Then we let the Brits run this mini-op and keep it cool here at Langley until we can interview the Rabbit and quantify the threat to the Pope, all right?"
"Yes, Arthur." And the Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency headed back to his office.
Dinner went well. The Brits made good company, especially when the talk turned to non-mission-related things. All were married. Three had kids, with one expecting his first shortly.
"You have two, as I recall?" Mick King asked Jack.
"Yeah, and number two arrived on a busy night."
"Too bloody right!" Ray Stones, one of the new arrivals, agreed with a laugh. "How did the missus take it?"
"Not too bad after Little Jack arrived, but the rest of the evening was subpar."
"I believe it," King observed.
"So, who told us that the Bulgarians want to kill the Pope?" Sparrow asked.
"It's KGB that wants his ass," Jack replied. "We just got a defector out. He's in a safe house, and he's singing like the girl in Aida. This is the most important thing so far. "
"Reliable information?" King inquired.
"We think it's gold-plated and copper-bottomed, yeah. Sir Basil has bought into it. That's why he flew you guys down," Jack let them know, in case they hadn't already figured that one out. "I've met the Rabbit myself, and I think he's the real deal."
"CIA operation?" This was Sharp.
Jack nodded. "Correct. We had an operational problem, and you guys were kind enough to help us out. I'm not cleared to say much more, sorry."
They all understood. They didn't want their asses exposed by loose talk about a black operation.
"This must go to Andropov himself-the Pope's giving them trouble in Poland, is it?"
"It would seem so. Maybe he has command of more divisions than they appreciate."
"Even so, this seems a little extreme-how will the world see the assassination of His Holiness?" King wondered aloud.
"Evidently, they fear that less than a total political collapse in Poland, Mick," Stones thought out loud. "And they're afraid that he might be able to bring that about. The sword and the spirit, as Napoleon said, Mick. The spirit always wins in the end."
"Yes, I reckon so, and here we are at the epicenter of the world of the spirit."
"My first time here," Stones said. "It is bloody impressive. I must bring the family down here sometime."
"They do know their food and wine," Sparrow observed, going through his veal. "What about the local police?"
"Rather good, actually," Sharp told him. "Pity we can't enlist their assistance. They know the territory-it is their patch, after all."
But these guys are the pros from Dover, Ryan thought, with some degree of hope. Just that there weren't enough of them. "Tom, you talk to London about the radios?"
"Ah, yes, Jack. They're sending us ten. Earpieces and lapel microphones to speak into. Sideband, rather like what the army use. I don't know if they're encrypted, but fairly secure in any case, and we'll use proper radio discipline. So at least we'll be able to communicate clearly. We'll practice with them tomorrow afternoon."
"And Wednesday?"
"We'll arrive about nine in the morning, pick our individual surveillance areas, and mill about while the crowd arrives."
"This isn't what they trained me for in the Corps," Ryan thought aloud.
"Sir John," Mick King responded, "this isn't what they trained any of us for. Yes, we are all experienced intelligence officers, but this really is a job for someone in the protective services, like the police constables who guard Her Majesty and the PM or your Secret Service chaps. Hell of a way to earn a living, this is."
"Yes, Mick, I expect we'll all appreciate them a little more after this lot," Ray Stones observed, to general agreement around the table.
"John." Ryan turned to Sparrow. "You've got the most important job, spotting this motherfucker for the rest of us."
"Lovely," Sparrow replied. "All I have to do is examine five-thousand-plus faces for the one that might or might not be there. Lovely," the spook repeated.
"What will you be using?"
"I have three Nikon cameras and a good assortment of lenses. I think tomorrow I might buy some seven-by-fifty binoculars also. I just hope I can find a good perch to scan from. The height of the parapet worries me. There's a dead space extending out from the base of the columns about thirty yards or so that I can't see at all. That limits what I can do, lads."
"Not much choice," Jack thought out loud. "You can't see shit from ground level."
"That is the problem we have," Sparrow agreed. "Our best choice would be two men, one-actually, more than one-on each side with good spotting glasses. But we lack the manpower, and we'd have to get permission from the Pope's own security people, which is, I gather, quite out of the question."
"Getting them involved would be useful, but-"
"But we can't let the whole world know about the Rabbit. Yeah, I know. The Pope's life is secondary to that consideration. Isn't that just great?" Ryan growled.
"What is the security of your country worth, Sir John, and ours also?" King asked rhetorically.
"More than his life," Ryan answered. "Yeah, I know, but that doesn't mean I have to like it."
"Has any Pope ever been murdered?" Sharp asked. Nobody knew the answer.
"Somebody tried once. The Swiss Guards fought a stonewall action to protect his retreat. Most of them went down hard, but the Pope escaped alive," Ryan said, remembering something from a comic book he'd read at St. Matthew's in the-what was it? Fourth grade or so?
"I wonder how good they are, those Swiss chaps?" Stones asked.
"They're pretty enough in the striped uniforms. Probably well motivated. Question of training, really," Sharp observed. "That's the difference between a civilian and a soldier-training. The chaps in plainclothes are probably well briefed, but if they carry pistols, are they allowed to use them? They work for a church, after all. Probably not trained to shoot people outright."
"You had that guy jump out from a crowd and fire off a starter pistol at the Queen-on the way to Parliament, wasn't it?" Ryan remembered. "There was a cavalry officer on a horse right there. I was surprised he didn't cut the asshole in half with his sabre-that would have been my instinct-but he didn't."
"Parade sword, just for ceremonial occasions. You probably couldn't cut cold butter with it," Sparrow said. "Nearly trampled the bastard with his horse, though."
"The Secret Service would have dropped him on the spot. Sure, the gun was loaded with blanks," Ryan said, "but it damned sure looked and sounded like the real thing. Her Majesty kept her head screwed on pretty tight. I would have shit myself."
"I'm sure Her Majesty availed herself of the proper facilities at Westminster Palace. She has her own loo there, you know," King told the American.
"In the event, he was some disturbed fellow, doubtless cutting out paper dolls in a mental hospital now," Sharp said, but, like every other British subject, his heart had stopped cold watching the incident on TV, and he, too, had been surprised that the lunatic had survived the event. Had one of the Yeomen of the Tower been there with his ceremonial fighting spear-called a partisan-he surely would have been pinned to the pavement like a butterfly in a collection box. Perhaps God did look after fools, drunks, and little children after all. "So, if Strokov does show up, and does take his shot, you suppose the local Italians will do for him?"
"One can hope," King said.
Wouldn't that be just great? Jack thought. The professionals can't protect the Pope, but local waiters and clothing salesmen beat the fucker to death. That'll look great on NBC Nightly News.
Back in Manchester, the Rabbit and his family finished yet another superb dinner from Mrs. Thompson.
"What does an ordinary English worker eat?" Zaitzev asked.
"Not quite this well," Kingshot admitted. He sure as hell didn't. "But we try to take decent care of our guests, Oleg."
"Have I told you enough about MINISTER?" he asked next. "Is all I know." The Security Service had picked his brain pretty thoroughly on the subject that afternoon, going over every single fact at least five times.
"You've been most helpful, Oleg Ivan'ch. Thank you." In fact, he'd given the Security Service quite a lot. Most often, the way you caught such penetration agents was by identifying the information he'd transferred. Only a limited number of people would have access to all of it, and the "Five" people would observe all of them until one did something difficult to explain. Then they would see who arrived at the dead-drop site to retrieve the package, and from that they'd get the bonus of identifying his KGB control officer, and get two breaks for the price of one-or perhaps even more, because the case officer would be working more than one agent, and the discoveries could branch out like the limbs of a tree. Then you tried to arrest a peripheral agent before going after the main target, because then the KGB could not know how their main penetration agent had been exposed, and that would protect the primary source, Oleg Zaitzev, from discovery. The counterintelligence business was as baroque as medieval-court intrigue and was both loved and hated by the players for its intricacy, but that just made the apprehension of a real Bad Guy that much more rewarding.
"And what of the Pope?"
"As I said the other day, we have a team in Rome right now to look into the matter," Kingshot answered. "Not much we can say-in fact, not much we can really do, but we are taking action based on your information, Oleg."
"That is good," the defector thought out loud, hoping it hadn't all been for nothing. He'd not really looked forward to exposing Soviet agents throughout the West. He'd do that, to safeguard his own position in his new home, of course, and for the money he'd get for turning traitor to his Motherland, but his highest concern was in saving that one life.
Tuesday morning, Ryan slept later than usual, arising just after eight, figuring he'd need to bankroll his rest for the following day. He'd sure as hell need it then.
Sharp and the rest of the team were already up.
"Anything new?" Jack asked, coming into the dining room.
"We have the radios," Sharp reported. There was, indeed, one at every place at the table. "They're excellent-the very same sort your Secret Service use-same manufacturer, Motorola. Brand new, and they are encrypted. Lapel microphones and earpieces."
Ryan looked at his. The earpiece was clear plastic, curled up like a phone cord, and nearly invisible. That was good news. "Batteries?"
"Brand new, and two sets of replacements for each. Good to know that Her Majesty is well looked after."
"Okay, so nobody can listen in, and we can swap information," Ryan said. It was one more piece of good news set against a big black pile of the bad sort. "What's the plan for the day?"
"Back to the piazza, do some more looking, and hope we see our friend Strokov."
"And if we do?" Ryan asked.
"We follow him back to his accommodations and try to see if there's a way to speak with the chap this evening."
"If we get that far, just talk to him?"
"What do you suppose, Sir John?" Sharp replied with a cold look.
You really willing to go that far, Mr. Sharp? Jack didn't ask. Well, the bastard was a multiple murderer, and as civilized as the Brits were, under all the good manners and world-class hospitality, they knew how to do business, and while Jack wasn't entirely sure that he'd be able to go all the way, these guys probably didn't have his inhibitions. Ryan figured he could live with that, as long as he wasn't the trigger man himself. Besides, they'd probably give him a chance to change countries first. Better a talking defector than a silent corpse.
"Would that give anything away?"
Sharp shook his head. "No. He's the chappie who killed Georgiy Markov, remember? We can always say it is a case of visiting Her Majesty's justice on someone who needed to learn about it."
"We don't approve of murder at home, Jack," John Sparrow advised. "It would indeed be a pleasure to have him answer for that."
"Okay." Ryan could live with that, too. He was certain his dad would approve.
Oh, yeah.
The rest of the day, they all played tourist and tested their radios. It turned out that the radios worked both inside and outside the basilica, and, better yet, inside to outside the immense stone structure. Each man would use his own name as an identifier. It made more sense than setting up numbers or code names that they'd all have to remember-one more confusing factor that they wouldn't need if the shit hit the fan. All the while, they looked around for the face of Boris Strokov, hoping for a miracle, and reminding themselves that miracles did occasionally happen. People really did hit the lottery-they had one in Italy, too-and the football pools every week, and so it was possible, just damned unlikely, and this day, it did not happen.
Nor did they find a better or more likely place from which to take a shot at a man in a slow-moving vehicle. It seemed to them all that Ryan's first impression of the tactical realities of the place was correct. That felt good to Jack until he realized that if he'd blown it, then it was his fault, not theirs.
"You know," Ryan said to Mick King-Sharp was back doing Deputy-Chief-of-Mission business for the British ambassador-"more than half the crowd is going to be in the middle there."
"Works for us, Jack. Only a fool would take the shot from in there, unless he plans to have Scotty beam him up to the starship Enterprise. No escape possible from that place."
"True," Jack agreed. "What about inside somewhere, get the Pope on the way to the car?"
"Possible," Mick agreed. "But that would mean that somehow Strokov or someone under his control is already inside the Papal administration-household, whatever one calls it-and is thus free to make his killing whenever he wishes. Somehow I think that infiltrating that organization would be difficult. It would mean maintaining a difficult psychological disguise for an extended period of time. No." He shook his head. "I would discount that possibility."
"Hope you're right, man."
"So do I, Jack."
They all left at about four, each catching a separate cab to within a few blocks of the Brit Embassy and walking the rest of the way.
Dinner was quiet that night. Each of them had his own worries, and everyone hoped that whatever the hell Colonel Strokov of the DS had in mind, it wasn't for this week, and that they could all fly back to London the following evening none the worse off for the experience. One thing Ryan had learned: Experienced field spooks that they were, they were no more comfortable with this mission than he was. It was good not to be alone in his anxiety. Or was that just schadenfreude? What the hell, was this how it felt the night before D-Day? No, there was no German Army waiting for them. Their job was to prevent a possible murder, and the danger was not even to themselves. It was to someone else who either didn't know or didn't care about the danger to himself, and so they had assumed responsibility for his life. Mick King had gotten it right from his first impression the day before. It was a pig of a mission.
"More stuff from the Rabbit," Moore reported at the usual evening get-together.
"What's that?"
"Basil says there's a deep-penetration agent in their Foreign Office, and the Rabbit gave them enough information to narrow him down to four potential individuals. 'Five' is already looking at them. And he gave them some more on this CASSIUS guy over here. He's been working for them just over ten years. Definitely a senior aide to a senator on the Intelligence Committee-sounds like a political adviser. So it's probably somebody who's been briefed in and has a clearance. That cuts it down to eighteen people for the Bureau to check out."
"What's he giving them, Arthur?" Greer asked.
"Sounds like whatever we tell The Hill about KGB operations gets back to Dzerzhinskiy Square in less than a week."
"I want that son of a bitch," Ritter announced. "If that's true, then we've lost agents because of him." And Bob Ritter, whatever his faults, looked after his agents like a mama grizzly bear with her cubs.
"Well, he's been doing this long enough that he's probably pretty comfortable in his fieldcraft."
"He told us about a Navy guy-NEPTUNE, wasn't it?" Greer remembered.
"Nothing new there, but we'll be sure to ask him about it. That could be anybody. How careful is the Navy with their crypto gear?"
Greer shrugged. "Every single ship has communications people, petty officers, and a commissioned communications officer. They're supposed to destroy the setting sheets and circuit boards on a daily basis, and toss them over the side-and not just one. Two people have to see it, supposedly. And they're all cleared-"
"But only people with clearances can fuck us in the ass," Ritter reminded them.
"Only the people you trust with your money can steal from you," Judge Moore observed. He'd seen enough criminal cases along that score. "That's the problem. Imagine how Ivan's going to feel if he finds out about the Rabbit."
"That," Ritter said, "is different."
"Very good, Bob," the DCI reacted with a laugh. "My wife says that to me all the time. It must be the war cry of women all over the world-that's different. The other side thinks they're the forces of Truth and Beauty, too, remember."
"Yeah, Judge, but we're going to whip 'em."
It was good to see such confidence, especially in a guy like Bob Ritter, Moore thought.
"Still thinking about THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, Robert?"
"Putting some ideas together. Give me a few weeks."
"Fair enough."
It was just one in the morning in Washington when Ryan awoke on Italian time. The shower helped get him alert, and the shave got his face smooth. By seven-thirty, he was heading down for breakfast. Mrs. Sharp fixed coffee in the Italian style, which surprisingly tasted as though someone had emptied an ashtray into the pot. Jack wrote that off to differing national tastes. The eggs and (English) bacon were just fine, as was the buttered toast. Someone had decided that men going into action needed full bellies. A pity the Brits didn't know about hash brown potatoes, the most filling of unhealthy breakfast foods.
"All ready?" Sharp asked, coming in.
"I guess we all have to be. What about the rest of the crew?"
"We rendezvous at the front of the basilica in thirty-five minutes." And it was only a five-minute drive from there. "Here's a friend for you to take along." He handed over a pistol.
Jack took it and slid the slide back. It was, fortunately, empty.
"You may need this, too." Sharp handed over two loaded magazines. Sure enough, they were hardball-full-metal-jacketed-cartridges, which would go right through the target, making only a nine-millimeter hole in and out. But Europeans thought you could drop an elephant with them. Yeah, sure, Jack thought, wishing for a.45 Colt M1911A1, which was much better suited for putting a man on the ground and leaving him there until the ambulance crew arrived. But he'd never mastered the big Colt, though he had, barely, qualified with it. It was with a rifle that Ryan could really shoot, but nearly anyone could shoot a rifle. Sharp didn't provide a holster. The Browning Hi-Power would have to go in his belt, and he'd have to keep his jacket buttoned to conceal it. The bad thing about carrying a pistol was that they were heavy damned things to port around with you, and without a proper holster he'd have to keep adjusting it in his belt to make sure it didn't fall out or slide down his pants. That just wouldn't do. It would also make sitting down a pain in the gut, but there wouldn't be much of that today. The spare magazine went into his coat pocket. He pulled the slide back, locked it in place, and slid the loaded one into the butt, then dropped the locking lever to release the slide. The weapon was now loaded and "in battery," meaning ready to fire. On reflection, Ryan carefully dropped the hammer. A safety might have sufficed, but Ryan had been trained not to trust safeties. To fire the weapon, he'd have to remember to cock the hammer, something he'd fortunately forgotten to do with Sean Miller. But this time, if the worst happened, he would not.
"Time to boogie?" Jack asked Sharp.
"Does that mean go?" the Chief of Station Rome asked. "I meant to ask the other time you said that."
"Yeah, like, boogie on down the road. It's an Americanism. 'Boogie' used to be a kind of dance, I think."
"And your radio." Sharp pointed. "It clips on the belt over your wallet pocket. On/off switch"-he demonstrated-"earpiece fastens to your collar, and the microphone onto your collar. Clever bit of kit, this."
"Okay." Ryan got everything arranged properly, but left the radio off. The spare batteries went into his left-side coat pocket. He didn't expect to need them, but safe was always better than sorry. He reached behind to find the on/off switch and flipped it off and on. "What's the range on the radios?"
"Three miles-five kilometers-the manual says. More than we need. Ready?"
"Yeah." Jack stood, set his pistol snugly on the left side of his belt, and followed Sharp out to the car.
Traffic was agreeably light this morning. Italian drivers were not, from what he'd seen so far, the raving maniacs he'd heard them to be. But the people out now would be people heading soberly to work, whether it was selling real estate or working in a warehouse. One of the difficult things for a tourist to remember was that a city was just another city, not a theme park set in place for his personal amusement.
And damned sure this morning Rome wasn't here for anything approaching that, was it? Jack asked himself coldly.
Sharp parked his official Bentley about where they expected Strokov to park. There were other cars there, people who worked in the handful of shops, or perhaps early shoppers hoping to get their buying done before Wednesday's regularly scheduled chaos.
In any case, this most expensive of British motorcars had diplomatic tags, and nobody would fool with it. Getting out, he followed Sharp into the piazza and reached back with his right hand to flip his radio on without exposing his pistol.
"Okay," he said into his lapel. "Ryan is here. Who else is on the net?"
"Sparrow in place on the colonnade," a voice answered immediately.
"King, in place."
"Ray Stones, in place."
"Parker, in place," Phil Parker, the last of the arrivals from London, reported from his spot on the side street.
"Tom Sharp here with Ryan. We'll do a radio check every fifteen minutes. Report immediately if you see the least thing of interest. Out." He turned to Ryan. "So, that's done."
"Yeah." He checked his watch. They had hours to go before the Pope appeared. What would he be doing now? He was supposed to be a very early riser. Doubtless the first important thing he did every day was to say Mass, like every Catholic priest in the world, and it was probably the most important part of his morning routine, something to remind himself exactly what he was-a priest sworn to God's service-a reality he'd known and probably celebrated within his own mind through Nazi and communist oppression for forty-odd years, serving his flock. But now his flock, his parish, straddled the entire world, as did his responsibility to them, didn't it?
Jack reminded himself of his time in the Marine Corps. Crossing the Atlantic on his helicopter-landing ship-unknowingly on his way to a life-threatening helicopter crash-on Sunday they'd held church services, and at that moment the church pennant had been run up to the truck. It flew over the national ensign. It was the U.S. Navy's way of acknowledging that there was one higher loyalty than the one a man had for his country. That loyalty was to God Himself-the one power higher than that of the United States of America, and his country acknowledged that. Jack could feel it, here and now, carrying a gun. He could feel that fact like a physical weight on his shoulders. There were people who wanted the Pope-the Vicar of Christ on earth-dead. And that, suddenly, was massively offensive to him. The worst street criminal gave a priest, minister, or rabbi a free pass, because there might really be a god up there, and it wouldn't do to harm His personal representative among the people. How much more would God be annoyed by the murder of His #1 Representative on Planet Earth. The Pope was a man who'd probably never hurt a single human being in his life. The Catholic Church was not a perfect institution-nothing with mere people in it was or ever could be. But it was founded on faith in Almighty God, and its policies rarely, if ever, strayed from love and charity.
But those doctrines were seen as a threat by the Soviet Union. What better proof of who the Bad Guys were in the world? Ryan had sworn as a Marine to fight his country's enemies. But here and now he swore to himself to fight against God's own enemies. The KGB recognized no power higher than the Party it served. And, in proclaiming that, they defined themselves as the enemy of all mankind-for wasn't mankind made in God's own image? Not Lenin's. Not Stalin's. God's.
Well, he had a pistol designed by John Moses Browning, an American, perhaps a Mormon-Browning had come from Utah, but Jack didn't know what faith he'd adhered to-to help him see about that.
Time passed slowly for Ryan. Constant reference to his watch didn't help. People were arriving steadily. Not in large numbers, but rather like a baseball crowd, arriving single, or in pairs, or in small family groups. Lots of children, infants carried by their mothers, some escorted by nuns-school trips, almost certainly-to see the Pontifex Maximus. That term, too, came from the Romans, who with remarkably clarity likened a priest to a pontifex-bridge builder-between men and what was greater than men.
Vicar of Christ on earth was what kept repeating in Jack's mind. This Strokov bastard-hell, he would have killed Jesus Himself. A new Pontius Pilate-if not an oppressor himself, then certainly the representative of the oppressors, here to spit in God's face. It wasn't that he could harm God, of course. Nobody was that big, but in attacking one of God's institutions and God's personal representative-well, that was plenty bad enough. God was supposed to punish such people in His own good time… and maybe the Lord chose His instruments to handle that for Him… maybe even ex-Marines from the United States of America…
Noon. It would be a warm day. What had it been like to live here in Roman times without air-conditioning? Well, they hadn't known the difference, and the body adapted itself to the environment-something in the medulla, Cathy had told him once. It would have been more comfortable to take his jacket off, but not with a pistol stuck in his belt… There were street vendors about, selling cold drinks and ice cream. Like money changers in the Temple? Jack wondered. Probably not. The priests in evidence didn't chase them away. Hmm, a good way for the bad guy to get close with his weapon? he suddenly wondered. But they were a good way off, and it was too late to worry about that, and none of them matched the photos he had. Jack had a small print of Strokov's face in his left hand, and looked down at it every minute or so. The bastard might be wearing a disguise, of course. He'd be stupid not to, and Strokov probably wasn't stupid. Not in his business. Disguises didn't cover everything. Hair length and color, sure. But not height. It took major surgery to do that. You could make a guy look heavier, but not lighter. Facial hair? Okay, look for a guy with a beard or mustache. Ryan turned and scanned the area. Nope. Nothing obvious, anyway.
Half an hour to go. The crowd was buzzing now, people speaking a dozen or more languages. He could see tourists and the faithful from many lands. Blond heads from Scandinavia, African blacks, Asians. Some obvious Americans… but no obvious Bulgarians. What did Bulgarians look like? This new problem was that the Catholic Church was supposed to be universal, and that meant people of every physical description. Lots of possible disguises.
"Sparrow, Ryan. See anything likely?" Jack asked his lapel.
"Negative," the voice in his ear answered. "I'm scanning the crowd around you. Nothing to report."
"Roger," Jack acknowledged.
"If he's here, he's bloody invisible," Sharp said, standing next to Ryan. They were eight or ten yards from the interlocking steel barriers brought in for the Pope's weekly appearance. They looked heavy. Two men to put them on the truck, or four? Jack wondered. He discovered that the mind liked to wander at times like this, and he had to guard against that. Keep scanning the crowd, he told himself.
There's too many goddamned faces! the self responded angrily. And as soon as the fucker gets into place, he'll be looking away.
"Tom, how about we edge forward and sweep along the railing?"
"Good idea," Sharp agreed at once.
The crowd was difficult, but not impossible, to slip through. Ryan checked his watch. Fifteen minutes. People were now edging against the barriers, wanting to get close. There was a belief from medieval times that the mere touch of a king could cure the ill or bring good fortune, and evidently that belief lingered-and how much more true if the man in question was the Pontifex Maximus? Some of the people here would be cancer victims, entreating God for a miracle. Maybe some miracles actually happened. Docs called that spontaneous remission and wrote it off to biological processes they didn't yet understand. But maybe they really were miracles-to the recipients they certainly were exactly that. It was just one more thing Ryan didn't understand.
People were leaning forward more, heads were turning to the face of the church.
"Sharp/Ryan, Sparrow. Possible target, twenty feet to your left, standing three ranks back of the barrier. Blue coat," Jack's earpiece crackled. He headed that way without waiting for Sharp. It was hard pressing through the crowd, but it wasn't a New York subway crush. Nobody turned to curse at him. Ryan looked forward…
Yes… right there. He turned to look at Sharp and tapped his nose twice.
"Ryan is on the target," he said into his lapel. "Steer me in, John."
"Forward ten feet, Jack, immediately left of the Italian-looking woman in the brown dress. Our friend has light brown hair. He is looking to his left."
Bingo, Jack thought in silent celebration. It took two more minutes and he was standing right behind the cocksucker. Hello, Colonel Strokov.
Hidden in the thickness of the crowd, Jack unbuttoned his jacket.
The man was farther back than he would have done it, Jack thought. His field of fire was limited by the bodies around him, but the woman directly in front of him was short enough that he could easily draw and fire right over her, and his field of view was fairly unrestricted.
Okay, Boris Andreyevich, if you want to play, this game's going to surprise you some. If the Army or the Navy ever look on heaven's scenes/They will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines, motherfucker.
Tom Sharp took the chance to slide through the crowd in front of Strokov, brushing past as he went. On the other side, he turned in Ryan's direction and reached up with his fist into the sky. Strokov was armed.
The noise of the crowd rose in frequency, and the languages all melded into one murmuring hiss of noise that suddenly went dead still. A bronze door had opened out of Ryan's view.
Sharp was four feet away, just one person, an adolescent boy, between him and Strokov… easy for him to dart right and get his hands on the man.
Then a cavalcade of screams erupted. Ryan inched back and pulled out his pistol, thumbing the hammer back, putting his pistol fully in battery. His eyes were locked on Strokov.
"King, the Pope is coming out now! Vehicle is in view."
But Ryan couldn't answer. Neither could he see the Popemobile.
"Sparrow, I see him. Ryan/Sharp, he will enter your field of view in a few seconds."
Unable to say a word, unable to see His Holiness approach, Jack's eyes were locked on his target's shoulders. You can't move your arm without having them move, too, and when he did that…
Shooting a man in the back is murder, Jack…
In his peripheral vision, Ryan saw the front-left corner of the white jeep/golf cart slowly moving left to right. The man in front of him was looking in that general direction… but not quite… why?
But then his right shoulder moved ever so slightly… At the bottom of Ryan's field of view, his right elbow came into view, meaning that his forearm was now parallel to the ground.
And then his right foot moved back, ever so slightly. The man was getting ready to-
Ryan pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the base of his spine. He could feel the vertebrae of his backbone on the muzzle of his Browning. Jack saw his head rock back, just a few millimeters. Ryan leaned forward and rasped a whisper into his ear.
"If that gun in your hand goes off, you'll be pissing into a diaper the rest of your life. Now, real slow, with your fingertips, hand it back to me, or I will shoot you where you stand."
Mission accomplished, Ryan's brain announced. This fucker isn't going to kill anybody. Go ahead, resist if you want. Nobody's that fast. His finger was so tight on the trigger that if Strokov turned suddenly, the pistol would go off on its own accord, and sever his spine for all time to come.
The man hesitated, and surely his mind was running at the speed of light through various options. There were drills for what to do when someone had a gun in one's back, and he'd even practiced them in his intelligence academy, but here, now, twenty years later, with a real pistol against his spine, those lessons with play guns seemed a very distant thing, and could he bat the gun away so fast to keep it from destroying a kidney? Probably not. And so, his right hand came back just as he'd just been told…
Ryan jumped at the sound of one-two-three pistol shots, not fifteen feet away. It was the sort of moment in which the world stops its turning, hearts and lungs stop functioning, and every mind has an instant of total clarity. Jack's eyes were drawn to the sound. There was the Holy Father, and on his snow-white cassock was a spot of red, the size of a half-dollar, in the chest, and on his handsome face was the shock of something too fast for him yet to feel the pain, but his body was already collapsing, slumping and turning to the left, folding into itself as he started to go down.
It required all of Ryan's discipline not to squeeze the trigger. His left hand snatched the pistol out of his subject's hand.
"Stand still, you motherfucker. Don't take a step, don't turn, don't do anything. Tom!" he called loudly.
"Sparrow, they have him, they have the gunman. The gunman is down on the pavement, must be ten people on him. The Pope took two, possibly three, hits."
The reaction of the crowd was almost binary in character. Those closest to the shooter jumped on him like cats on a single unlucky mouse, and whoever the shooter was, he was invisible under a mound of tourists, perhaps ten feet from where Ryan, Sharp, and Strokov stood. The people immediately around Ryan were drawing away-rather slowly, actually…
"Jack, let's get our friend away from here, shall we?" And the three men moved into the escape arch, as Ryan had come to think of it.
"Sharp to all. We have Strokov with us. Leave the area separately and rendezvous at the embassy."
A minute later, they were in Sharp's official Bentley. Ryan got in back with the Bulgarian.
Strokov was clearly feeling better about things now. "What is this? I am member of Bulgarian embassy and-"
"We'll remember you said that, old man. For now, you are a guest of Her Britannic Majesty's government. Now, be a good chap and sit still, or my friend will kill you."
"Interesting tool of diplomacy, this." Ryan lifted the gun he'd taken from Strokov-East Bloc issue, with a large and awkward can-type silencer screwed on the business end. Sure as hell he'd been planning to shoot somebody.
But whom? Suddenly, Ryan wasn't sure.
"Tom?"
"Yes, Jack?"
"Something was more wrong than we thought."
"I think you're right," Sharp agreed. "But we have someone to clear that up for us."
The drive back to the embassy illustrated what had been to Ryan a hidden talent. The Bentley had an immensely powerful engine, and Sharp knew how to use it, exploding away from the Vatican like a drag-racing top fuel eliminator. The car screeched to a halt in the small parking lot next to the embassy, and the three of them went in through a side door, and from there to the basement. With Ryan covering, Sharp handcuffed the Bulgarian and sat him in a wooden chair.
"Colonel Strokov, you must answer for Georgiy Markov," Sharp told him. "We've been after you for some years now."
Strokov's eyes went as wide as doorknobs. As fast as the Bentley had gone, Tom Sharp's mind had been driving faster still.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, we have these photos of you leaving Heathrow Airport after killing our good friend on Westminster Bridge. The Yard was onto you, old boy, but you left minutes before they got permission to arrest you. That's your bad luck. So, now, it was our job to arrest you. You will find us rather less civilized that the Yard, Colonel. You murdered a man on British soil. Her Majesty the Queen does not approve of that sort of thing, Colonel."
"But-"
"Why are we bothering to talk with this bastard, Tom?" Ryan asked, catching on. "We have our orders, don't we?"
"Patience, Jack, patience. He's not going anywhere at the moment, is he?"
"I want to have a phone to call my embassy," Strokov said-rather weakly, Ryan thought.
"Next he'll want a lawyer," Sharp observed humorously. "Well, in London you could have a solicitor to assist you, but we are not in London, are we, old boy?"
"And we are not Scotland Yard," Jack added, taking his lead from Sharp. "I should have just done him at the church, Tom."
Sharp shook his head. "Too noisy. Better we just let him… disappear, Jack. I'm sure Georgiy would understand."
It was clear from Strokov's face that he was not accustomed to having men discuss his own fate in the way that he had so often determined for himself the fates of others. It was easier to be brave, he was finding, when he was the fellow holding the gun.
"Well, I wasn't going to kill him, Tom, just sever his spine below the waist. You know, put him in a wheelchair the rest of his life, make him as incontinent as a baby. How loyal you suppose his government will be to him?"
Sharp nearly gagged on the thought. "Loyal, the Dirzhavna Sugurnost Please, Jack. Be serious. They'd just put him in a hospital, probably a mental hospital, and they'll wipe his ass once or twice a day if he's lucky."
That one went through the hoop, Ryan saw. None of the East Bloc services were big on loyalty-down, even to those who'd shown a lot of loyalty-up. And Strokov knew it. No, once you screwed the pooch, you were in very deep shit, and your friends evaporated like the morning mist-and somehow Strokov didn't strike Ryan as one who had all that many friends anyway. Even in his own service he'd be like an attack dog-valuable, perhaps, but not loved or trusted around the kids.
"In any case, while Boris and I discuss the future, you have a flight to catch," Sharp told him. It was just as well. Ryan was running out of impromptu lines. "Give my regards to Sir Basil, will you?"
"You bet, Tommy." Ryan left the room and took a deep breath. Mick King and the rest were waiting out there for him. Someone at Sharp's official residence had packed his bags, and there was an embassy minibus waiting to take them all to the airport. There, a British Airways Boeing 737 was waiting, and they caught it just in time, all with first-class tickets. Ryan was next to King for the flight.
"What the hell," Jack asked, "are we going to do with him?"
"Strokov? Good question," Mick replied. "Are you sure you want to know the answer?"