As the rest of the group caught up with him-Melissa wheezing almost as much as the cardinal-Tom looked downstream toward the town’s center: no reaction from there, yet. Good: with any luck, they might “Tom.” Melissa’s voice was very calm, low-pitched. Which meant disaster on the hoof.
“What is it?”
She pointed down. “That.”
Tom and the rest followed her finger: a dark, brown-red stain was collecting near his feet, dripping down from his traveling cloak. As a watch whistle shrilled back near the crotto, Rita stepped closer to her husband, her worried eyes scanning his body.
Tom shook his head. “But I’m not hit.”
Melissa nodded. “Of course you’re not. That’s not your blood; that’s your soup.”
Soup? Tom stared at the stain, remembering the flurry of action-and wide spray of soup-that had immediately preceded their exit from the crotto. We’re going to be tracked-tracked and killed-because I chose to have the soup? Had the situation not been so desperate, he would have laughed. His life-and the lives of his wife, his friends, and charges-now hung in the balance because he had chosen to have a bowl of soup.
Tom looked up from the bloodlike spatter on the ground, glanced behind them and then toward the Viale Maloggia. He tore off his cloak and threw it aside: “We’ve got to run. Fast. Now.”
“We just were running,” complained Melissa, her hand on her side, one corner of her mouth wrinkled in the attempt to suppress what Tom guessed was a wind-stitch.
“We run or we fight.”
“So what are we waiting for?” asked Melissa, stretching her long legs northward to run parallel to the bending course of the Mera.
Four minutes of near-sprinting put the sound of the whistles a little farther behind them. As they panted to a halt in front of their taverna, the whistles of the town watch stopped abruptly.
“They found the cloak,” panted James. “Figuring out where to search next.”
“I will get Matthias-”
“I am here,” said the young German from one of their windows on the second story. “I just reestablished contact with Padua, and am in the middle of sending an update to-”
Tom shook his head. “Break down the radio, Matthias. Keep the up-time transmitter separate, in your pack. I’ll send Arco and the ladies up to help you load our-”
“No need,” he assured them as he detached the wire he had hooked to a roof-tile as an antenna. “All our bags are packed. Trail gear only. Everything else I have left under the beds.”
“Matthias,” gasped Rita, “how did you know to-?”
“Why, Frau Mailey suggested I have our gear ready, in the event that the rendezvous would be-what is your word? — ‘compromised.’”
James straightened up. “It’s great to have a girlfriend who’s always thinking.”
“Particularly when no one else bothers to. Matthias, are you just about through?”
“Yes; could Herr Severi lend hands?”
Arco was inside before Matthias had completed the request.
Rita looked back down the road. “How long do you figure we’ve got?”
Tom shrugged. “Could be as much as ten minutes. They’ll have to gather together, see how many searchers they’ve got, and then eliminate which ways we definitely didn’t go. We’re near the northern limits of the town, here, and the lack of walls is a big help, but if we’re not moving soon-”
Matthias and Arco came bustling out the door, the latter adding, “Our account is settled, with a tip to encourage the owner’s tardy mention of our lodging here.”
“Excellent. Now, Matthias, dump the batteries in the river.”
“What? But Captain Simpson, they are priceless-”
“And make sure the jars break on the rocks. Everything else that will sink goes in the water as well. We can’t afford any extra weight and I don’t want them to learn that we had a radio. Did you get a general signal out?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And were the conditions right for it to be heard in both Padua and Chur?”
Matthias shrugged as he sent the battery-jars crashing down among the rocks of the Mera. “It is a good time for a signal…I think.”
Tom led them into a sustainable trot. “You think?”
Matthias shrugged as he jogged. “You can never know for sure, Captain.”
Well, that’s just great, thought Tom as he noted the cardinal already laboring to maintain the pace, and Melissa putting on a pain-proof, but increasingly pale, face.
Just great.
Odo leaned back from the radio, frowning. “No, Ambassador, it is neither a failure, nor meteorological interference. Matthias simply went off the air-like that.” He snapped his fingers sharply.
Sharon tried to keep the frown off her face. “Was there any word, any warning that-?”
Her husband put a fine, but very strong, hand on her shoulder. “Beloved, there was no warning. And nothing you could do that you have not already done.”
“I could have listened to you a week ago, Ruy, when you warned me against setting up this rendezvous. Getting our five people over the Alps is tricky enough with Spanish and Milanese troops watching the alpine approaches from Lake Como to Chiavenna. I should never have agreed to burdening them with the exfiltration of Cardinal Ginetti, as well.”
“My heart, it is most difficult to refuse a pope, particularly when his reasons are so compelling.”
A soft voice from the doorway echoed Ruy’s logic. “Indeed, Ambassadora Nichols, the fault-if any ill has befallen your father and your friends-is entirely mine.”
Sharon turned, wondering-given the very dark black complexion she had inherited from her father James Nichols-if the flush of heat she could feel in her face produced any visible sign. “Your Holiness, my apologies. I did not know you were standing there.”
“Hovering unseen outside doorways is, alas, a bad habit. It also provides much information one would otherwise not have.” Pope Urban VIII smiled. “I’m sure this bad habit had more to do with my becoming pope than any worthiness in the eyes of Our Savior.” His tone was jocular, but shaded with penitence, also. Urban had been more somber since his rescue from the Castel Sant’Angelo by Ruy and Tom. Or perhaps it was a result of learning that over a dozen cardinals who had been his friends, or at least allies, had been disappeared, and probably killed, by the Spanish invaders, based upon the thinnest of pretexts or, in some cases, outrageous prevarications. Urban seemed to feel their losses keenly, as though their deaths were an indictment of failure on his part.
Which, Sharon realized, was how Maffeo Barberini-now Urban VIII-had been brought up to think in relation to his allies. “Pontiff” had been a late addition to his many titles; first scion and incumbent head of the powerful Barberini family had been roles he inherited upon his birth. He had been trained to think in terms of stratagems against hereditary enemies, and sinecures for loyal vassals-and his ascension to the cathedra of the Holy See did not diminish his adherence to that modus operandi. Urban VIII, never forgetting his family or friends, had left a legacy (well-recorded in the up-timers’ books) of shameless nepotism-for which he was infamous, even among the many early modern popes that had been known for it.
But now, Sharon wondered, did she see some signs of regret? His brother Francesco was among the cardinals who had been slain attempting to flee Rome. His nephew, Antonio, had made good his escape to Sharon’s refugee embassy by only the slimmest of margins himself, and would not have succeeded at all had not her husband Ruy chanced upon him while he was trying to find a way to escape the city’s walls.