Sanchez shrugged. "Maybe. I would perhaps be able to bring a small party within the inner ward and attempt something. This is not to say that the same idea will not occur to Quevedo, of course."
"He'd assassinate the pope?" Simpson's expression was one of honest curiosity. For all their cheerfulness and generosity, these Americans could take a bloodthirsty turn at times, Barberini reflected. The first thing he had thought of when Sanchez mentioned an infiltrator into the fortress was a gate being surreptitiously opened to let the besiegers in.
"Likely enough," Sanchez said, shrugging. "My heart," he went on, addressing the ambassadora, "this may be something we can do, or it may not. I will need to take a party of men back to Rome tonight and look more closely. With your permission?"
The ambassadora frowned a moment, then looked around the room at the other members of her party. "Comments?" she asked.
"Do it," Dottoressa Simpson said.
"Only if you can manage it without getting yourselves killed," Dottore Nichols added. "Forlorn hopes do no one any good. And I'll come along. Not in the raid itself, but you'll need someone holding horses outside, and a trained medic."
"You sure, Dad?" the ambassadora asked.
"I'm a shoo-in for this one," he said, leaving Barberini slightly confused. The sense of it was clear enough, though. "I've been a Marine, and I know my trauma medicine well enough to play corpsman. Although I could wish we had Harry along here."
"He's got a good resume for it," Signora Mailey added, smiling at some private joke, doubtless connected with the fact that she had escaped a similar fortress only the year before. Perhaps the infamous Harry Lefferts had been involved in that? "But like James said, don't do it if it looks too risky."
There were no further objections. "Do it, then," the ambassadora said. "I'll go and compose a dispatch for Magdeburg. They won't be able to tell us not to, fortunately."
Naturally not, Barberini thought. He wondered what diplomacy would be like when the day came that the great radio towers were built all across the world, and princes could speak to each other directly. Would peace result, once everything could be discussed at length, directly between rulers? More likely, Barberini thought, that such ease of communication would make it more likely that they would take offense more easily. A plenipotentiary could be disowned, deratified, apologized for. Insults direct from the prince's mouth were less easily remedied. The radio diplomacy his uncle had engaged in the year before had certainly caused plenty of trouble.
Magdeburg
"I thought you should see that before anyone else," Francisco Nasi said.
Mike was rereading the lengthy dispatch. "You weren't wrong. Did we have any warning of this?"
"None at all. Shortly after we last spoke on this subject, I received intelligence that confirmed our initial assessment. Borja's orders were to create political confusion in Rome, to prevent Urban from taking any further effective action. To create, as you remarked, a lame-duck pope. The troops came from Naples, but our news from there has been concentrating on the domestic turmoil. The troops were there to suppress trouble in that part of Spain's possessions, and moving them is a strategic error unless they can be returned swiftly enough that the rebellion is not encouraged by their absence. And plans to move them were closely held enough that we got no wind. I will admit that our assets in that part of the world are not as comprehensive as I would like. We are still not sure what Osuna is up to; he has become remarkably quiet these few months past."
"So basically the situation is that Borja got a wild hair up his ass and Olivares is going to be as surprised as we are?"
Nasi chuckled. Some rulers would not have been so understanding. A failure on this scale-and Nasi planned to light a few metaphorical fires under several figurative backsides come the morning, on general principles-would have seen him personally lucky to be allowed to resign alive. "Most succinctly put. More surprising still is the response of our embassy in Rome. Without for one moment wishing to ensure the embarrassment is spread as widely as possible, I think State will be responsible for the brick that will be found, come the morning, in the royal privy of Gustavus Adolphus. But we do have some radio time left. Do you wish me to instruct Sharon to call it off?"
Mike closed his eyes, and appeared to be thinking very hard and very fast. "No, she's done the right thing. She's given me a fait accompli that I've pretty much got to play along with. Remember, my sister signed off on that deal as well. Be kind of hard to go back on it now, and I'd prefer us to have a good name for keeping our bargains. We're helping the only friends we're likely to have in Italy for a long time to come, if Borja pulls this off, and we're trying to toss a wrench into the works for the biggest enemy we've got. I can't see that anyone's going to blame us, or even be surprised, much."
"So we go with it?"
"We go with it," Mike said. "Get a message back to Sharon, tell her that all her actions to date are ratified, to ask for a list of persons desiring asylum as soon as she can plausibly claim to have had a message back to us and, uh, wish her and the team she sent in to Rome luck."
"Luck?"
"Yep." Mike grinned, broadly. "How many divisions has the pope? Right now, quite a few, even if they're in the wrong place to do him any good. Next week, if he gets out of Castel Sant'Angelo, none. I think the results might be, ah, interesting. And very embarrassing for Spain."
Chapter 39
Rome
Frank clutched his left hand tight in against himself, squatting down and pressing it between his thigh and belly. It wouldn't be so bad if it would just settle down and hurt. But just when he thought he'd gotten used to it, it'd start throbbing again. And he'd get to thinking about the fact that he had only three fingers on his left hand now.
That was better than poor Benito, who had a splinter of one of the tables he'd waited take one of his ears off and rip his cheek down to the bone. Dino had taken a nasty crack to the head diving for cover when they sent the last volley of musket fire into the building. Both of them were sitting in back, watching the cellar stairs and feeling sorry for themselves. Everyone else had various cuts and bruises and there was a lot of coughing going on.
Sure, no one had been killed yet, on either side, as far as Frank could tell. And the two near-things they'd had with fires starting about the place had been put out before they did more than make the air in the place foul and vile to breathe. It had all just been one little accident after another. They had plenty of furniture to hide behind, and that, behind sold brick walls, made pretty effective protection against musket balls. Some of the ricochets were a little scary, but by the time they'd made a couple of bounces they were pretty much spent. One of Piero's friends had gotten hit in the ass, which had made him yelp, but the bullet hadn't even gone through his coattails. There was a bit of a scorch mark and he'd have a bruise, but everyone had gotten a laugh out of it.
They'd run out of lamp oil on the upper floors nearly an hour ago now, and the soldiers out front, who'd got themselves into positions in the house across the street so they weren't standing in the open to shoot, had settled down to occasionally letting fly with a few shots, as far as Frank could tell, just to let everyone inside know they were there.
"Time, yet?" Piero asked, "Only it's getting late, and there's this girl-"
"There's always a girl," Frank retorted, grinning back with only a slight flinch as another couple of musket balls splintered through the increasingly threadbare shutters to ping and whine around the room. "But, yes, it's getting about that time. Nearly dusk." They'd decided on that, earlier, so that when the women and kids and invalids were making their getaway they'd have the best chance they could. And the guys who surrendered could say they'd only been doing it to buy them some time to get away. That was assuming they hadn't got out already. There probably wasn't anything stopping anyone in one of the other houses on this street from just going out and walking away. None of the soldiers seemed to be paying any attention to them, either as places to sack or possible routes into Frank's place.