“I’m just a policeman,” Neri said, preparing to start on his third cigarette since he’d joined Noah at the table.“This is outside of my… hell, I don’t even know what to call it. I’m just a chain-smoking, womanizing Roman, my friend. I don’t wear my underwear on top of my trousers.” Noah caught the superhero in tights joke. For all his facetiousness Neri was right, the world could have done with a caped crusader right now. Instead it was going to have to make do with a chain-smoking, womanizing, Anglo-Italian alliance.
“What do you think I am?” he asked, instead.
The Roman laughed. It was a short, sharp grunt of a laugh, but it was a laugh just the same. “I have no idea what you are. That is part of the problem. And I have no idea what you want from me. You drop this bombshell in my lap and expect me to deal with it, knowing there’s nothing me or my people can do about it, not in time. You expect me to single-handedly protect the Pope? Do I look like the kind of man who would take a bullet for God’s Messenger? Look at me, Noah,”-Neri seemed happy enough to use his given name again. Noah guessed that meant they were friends now-“I’m not a hero, even without the tights. I do my job. I do it as well as I can without it stripping the humanity from my soul, but the years swimming in the filth of Rome have turned me cynical. I’m tired. I wake up tired, stiff. My bones are trying to tell me it is time to hand the city over to a younger man, and you’re preseting me with a secret that is only going to cause me a world of hurt. I don’t think I want to thank you for this. And do you know what the irony in all of this is?”
Noah shook his head. He didn’t have a clue.
“He’s not even in the city right now. He’s off on one of his holy pilgrimages somewhere.”
Noah looked at Neri. “Are you serious?”
“Does this look like the face of a man given to humor?”
It didn’t.
“Well that doesn’t change anything,” he said, trying to think through the precise implications of an absentee Pope. He hadn’t expected it to be a straightforward fix, but it wasn’t Day of the Jackal either. The original plan had been to make friendly with the locals, get the ear of the captain of the Swiss Guard, convince him of the seriousness of the threat, and get the Pope moved somewhere safe. The odds of their taking him seriously had always been slim at best. And while the religious types might stubbornly cling to the idea of God being their armor, the odds were that the Swiss Guard were a damn sight more practical. They’d be idiots not to take a threat on their man’s life seriously-at least until it was proven otherwise.
If the strike was against the Pope directly, his being out of the country would just move the locus of danger. They would be looking to get word to those closest to him, step up security and, more likely than not, arrange an evacuation to a safe house while the threat was neutralized. If it was against the Seat of the Catholic Church it didn’t matter if the Pope was in residence or not, the attack would go ahead. The manner of the attack itself would be the only real difference. To be sure one man died, the most effective way was something intimate: a sniper, poison, a car-bomb, something that could be aimed. To take out something as nebulous as the faith itself was moving back into the realm of spectacle. A bomb most likely. A series of bombs. Something big that was going to make a lot of very visible mess.
Noah was back to thinking about terror as a sort of performance art, all the world’s a stage and all that. It had to be visible, it had to be shocking and it had to shake the believers to the core. Seeing the rescuers picking through the rubble, desperately looking for survivors while all of their relics and their hopes burned would send a statement to the faithful. He said as much to Neri. The policeman nodded, thinking it through for himself.
Terror as spectacle. That was the one thing that bothered Noah about all of this. These attacks were causing terror, but to what end? What was the cause? What did these people hope to achieve beyond instilling fear in Europe? There should have been videos going viral on the Internet already. Someone out there should be claiming responsibility and telling the world what they wanted in return for ending the fear. That was the way it worked.
“Whichever way it goes, we need time,” Neri said. He left the second half of that sentence unsaid. “We can sweep the perimeter of the Vatican, but assuming they’ve not left us a nice rust bucket with a sign painted on the side that says ‘bomb,’ it’s going to take time. And if they’ve planted it across the border in the land of Great God Almighty, we’re shit out of luck.”
“They’ll listen to you, surely?” Noah said.
“This is Rome. They’ll stick their fingers in their ears and make like they can’t hear a damned thing we’re saying because they think they’re all invincible. They’re part of God’s Army. There’s nothing worse than the grand delusions of True Believers. They either think they’re immortal, or they are quite happy they’re off to a better place. As far as I can tell it doesn’t really matter to them if they’re heading there in a million little pieces.” Neri’s grin was lopsided.
“How long has this trip been planned?”
“No idea. But given the kind of performance a papal visit is, months, six, ten?” Neri shrugged.
Noah tried to think.
How would he approach it in their place?
He covered his entire face with his calloused palm.
“Think, think, think,” he grunted, running his hand up through his hair. He shook his head. From the very first calls nothing about this was how he would have done it. For a start he sure as hell wouldn’t have broadcast he was going after the Pope. That was stupid. You misdirect with smoke and mirrors, you don’t set up that Scooby Doo moment unless you really want to mutter “if it wasn’t for you meddling kids” as they lead you away in handcuffs. So what the hell was really going on here?
Out of Vatican City the papal bodyguards would naturally be on a state of heightened alertness-that much made sense. Anywheretside of the Holy See would have to be considered hostile territory in these conflicted days. So, best case scenario, the Pope had people around him willing, as Neri had so eloquently put it, to take that bullet. His daily routine would be less predictable, making it a more difficult hit. You’d need good information flow, someone on the inside feeding schedules to you with enough time to get there ahead of the entourage; otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able scout out possible vantage points. Noah closed his eyes. As the assassin you wanted to minimize the random elements, control what could be controlled. The kill was about being patient and methodical. Chance had to be removed from any equation.
In Basrah Noah had lain hidden in a blind for five days, pissing into the water bottles he’d drunk dry, defecating into the wraps that had held his rations. Noah had made the shot on the third day and watched them tear the desert apart looking in all the wrong places for him for another day, but it wasn’t until the day after they gave up looking for him that he walked out of the desert. When he tore down the blind he took it all with him. There wasn’t a single sign he had ever been there. He heard three of the Mahdi call him the ghost killer. He liked that. He had it tattooed onto his left arm when he got home-it was the only thing he brought out of Iraq with him.
That was the kind of patience an assassination demanded.
The natural-environment kill was easier. The target was at ease. They followed their habits. Habits were patterns.
So if it had been him, Noah would have wanted to walk the land. Study the set up. He would have wanted to be sure he knew where the target was coming from, exactly, and where it was leaving to. Each terrain had its own issues that needed to be contended with. The last thing you wanted was something as stupid as a stray beam of sunlight reflecting off the wrong pane of glass to make the shot any more difficult than it had to be.
Control the variables.
Every way he looked at it, Rome was the perfect location for an attempt on the Pope’s life.