*
There would be no going back to the palazzo. Although Carver rather liked the new suits he’d bought in Munich, retrieving them was hardly worth a bullet in the brain. Besides, everything he needed to find Nico Gold existed on the mission cloud.
He would have to ensure his freedom first. The Vatican police were moving across the square now, straining their necks to track Carver’s movements over a swarm of tourists. Callahan had been right. After the burglary in the Apostolic Palace, they were on high alert.
Technically speaking, Carver had done nothing wrong. There was no crime in chasing a vehicle down the street. But if the police caught him, and chose to pat him down, they would quickly find an unregistered, concealed firearm under his jacket. By the time he talked his way out of the holding cell, Nico would be dead. And so would untold political leaders as the war between the Fellowship and the Black Order raged on.
One of the policeman tapped his earpiece and looked up, motioning to a Swiss Guard stationed high on the city walls. The guard’s elevated position made him the perfect spotter. Carver had to get out of his line of sight, and fast.
He changed directions and walked into the middle of a tour group that was moving toward an exit in the Vatican walls. Stooping slightly to blend in among them, he went with the flow until they passed underneath a massive archway. Several meters above him was the Passato, the elevated walkway where popes throughout the ages had fled the Royal Palace for the relative safety of Castel Sant'Angelo. Before him was Via del Mascherino, a bustling thoroughfare lined with restaurants, shops and apartment buildings.
He looked at his watch. He was supposed to meet Prichard and Seven in an hour. It was a good thing that they had set their meeting place ahead of time. Even if he managed to escape, he was going to be unreachable for a bit.
When the group was free of the city walls, Carver bolted right into a corner gift shop, where he saw a black baseball cap with the papal keys imprinted on the front. He grabbed it from the rack, pulled it over his scalp, and laid a 20 Euro note on the counter without stopping for change. He exited a side street that was scarcely wide enough for a scooter and walked casually down the street with his hands in his pockets.
He sprinted until he came to the next big street. There he removed the SIM card from the phone Father Callahan had given him and crushed it under the heel of his shoe. Next he removed the battery and dropped the remaining hardware into a rubbish bin.
Now free of Vatican City, he walked north, looking for a communications store. He had to get in touch with Roth.
*
Carver knew that his freshly purchased prepaid phone would never meet agency security standards, but at least he knew that it hadn’t been tampered with since leaving the factory. He headed toward Via Crescenzio, dialing Arunus’ cell phone number from memory.
Roth answered. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Carver said. “I need help.”
The kid hesitated. “Sorry, bro, can you please authenticate?”
“Don’t call me bro!”
“Okay, okay, Carver. What’s up?”
“Listen carefully. I need you to do a remote data wipe of all classified documents on Nico’s machine.”
“Are you all right?”
Carver had no time for small talk. He had just 20 minutes until he was due to meet Carlisle, Seven and Prichard. “Repeat back to me what I just said.”
“I need to completely wipe Nico’s machine.”
“No,” Carver corrected. “Just sensitive information. Leave all non-classified docs, the OS and any software.”
Nico had been taken, not killed. That implied that his captors wanted something from him. They wanted Wolf, and they wanted his help finding him. Carver had to be careful not to wipe the entire machine. If that happened, they might kill him.
“Just the classified data,” Roth repeated. “Got it.”
“First I need you to give me permission to access the mission cloud on this device.”
“Okay. Hold on.”
In less than a minute, Carver’s new phone buzzed with the arrival of a text message that used a single-use link to the cloud location, where he would be able to access his credentials.
He spotted a cab slow to the curb in front of him. A pair of girls stepped out. Carver slipped into the back seat before the seat cooled, telling the driver to take him to the Trevi fountain, where he was to meet his MI6 counterparts.
By the time the cab stopped at the next traffic light, he was able to log into the mission cloud on his new phone. He clicked on the RFID icon that Arunus Roth had set up, which launched global map. Carver watched as the map quickly localized to a satellite image of Rome.
A blinking dot showed the location of the tracking chip in Nico’s arm. He was near the opera house, and he didn’t appear to be moving. That could be bad, Carver realized. It could mean they were already interrogating him. Nico had never been trained for this sort of thing. If he was lucky, the Black Order would hold him while they waited for someone of authority to conduct the interrogation.
With the matter of Nico’s tracking device solved, he looked in the mission cloud’s upload folder, hopeful that Nico had been uploading his work continuously throughout the day.
The Deconsecrated Church
Rome
The goon touched the tip of the knife against Nico’s ear. The pain was followed by a warm sensation that spread into his ear canal.
“I’m working, I’m working!” Nico began typing some java code into a notepad screen. The effort seemed to satisfy the goon, who retracted the knife, turned away and skulked back to the shadows.
He stood before a concrete slab, where his computer was jacked into an old-school Internet cable. His upper arms were swelling from the beating they had given him. His captors were surprisingly young. Barely out of high school, Nico guessed. The one in charge of minding him wore a black T-shirt and utility pants with the pixilated digital camouflage patterns that had been used, most ineffectively, by the U.S. military for a decade before being finally phased out. Nico had done his best to avoid looking directly at either man’s face, so as not to give either another excuse to kill him. He knew only that his minder was clean-shaven, with muscle-bound arms and wire frame glasses. A plain wooden cross hung from his neck.
Even from the shadows, the goon was watching Nico’s every move, ensuring that he didn’t send a message to the outside world.
All Nico knew for sure was that they were in some sort of crypt that felt ghostly and unloved. Judging by what he could see from the battery-powered lanterns, the frescos had been pried from the walls long ago. On the far wall, a Chi-Ro — an ancient Christian symbol that fused a cross with letters — was all that was left of its former inhabitants.
There were two sarcophagus-size bays on the wall to his left. Bits of stone and marble were crumbled around the edges. Whoever had been buried there had been exhumed and taken elsewhere.
Behind him, a rope dangled from a pulley somewhere in the rafters. Anchors had been set up on a sort of concrete platform so that the ropes could be tied off. Nico wished he didn’t know what those were for. Carver had shown him the crime scene photos from D.C. and Seattle as an incentive. Just knowing they were meant for him made it difficult to concentrate. He’d lived the last few years in fear of being extradited to Saudi Arabia, where they’d cut off his hands at the wrists. Now this.
Nico’s first mistake had been answering the knock at the palazzo suite. He’d been expecting a piece of cheesecake from room service. His second mistake was pretending he didn’t know Italian. For that, he had taken a beating, although the goons were careful not to damage his hands or face.