The kids sprinted nearly as fast as Prichard could get the bike going. As the scooters sped away, Carver looked back at them. Two guys, probably 15 years old. One was short and stocky, the other lanky and handsome. He saw something in their faces as they gave up the chase, stopping in the middle of the street with hands on their heads. Not just anger. Not just shock. More than that. It was closer to emotional devastation.
“Turn around,” he told Seven.
“What?” Seven exclaimed. “Are you crazy?”
“Trust me. Just go really fast, and don’t stop.” She made a U-turn and gunned the motor. Prichard followed suit, nearly losing his balance in mid-turn. Carver reached into his inside jacket pocket, where he was carrying about 800 Euros pinched into a titanium money clip.
The boys suddenly looked scared. They split to either side of the street, giving wide berth as both bikes came blaring through. Carver tossed the neat bundle of cash into the shorter boy’s hands.
“Softie,” Seven shouted as they powered toward the Opera district.
*
They ditched the scooters a half-block from the church and proceeded up Via Agostino on foot. Carver spotted the church first. Of the 900 or so churches in Rome, it was easy to see why this one had been chosen for deconsecration nearly 150 years earlier. The rather inelegant building was built in the Baroque style, with a concave facade and a flat-roofed porch supported by a pair of columns that looked tacked on. Above the porch, two sculpted lions flanked the coat of arms of the House of Savoy.
The abandoned church was attached to a shuttered monastery. The front windows were all covered with iron mesh. Seeing no cameras, they approached the building and hopped the sidewall over an old sentry box. A black van with tinted windows was parked just inside the gated security entrance. Carver couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the one he had seen outside the palazzo.
The three operatives jumped down to the other side and waited a moment before proceeding further into the church’s concrete side yard. Carver put his left hand on the van’s hood. It was still slightly warm. Seven crouched at one of the cellar windows and began testing the fragile-looking frame to see if it might peel away. The American whistled softly and pointed to the church’s side door. It wasn’t shut all the way.
“How many of those devils are in there?” Prichard whispered.
“I saw two in the van.” Carver wished he knew for sure. And he wished that he had more resources at his disposal. A couple of throwable recon drones would have come in very handy.
Unfortunately, Father Callahan had been the Rome connection for gadgets and weaponry, and the priest wasn’t exactly in the circle of trust at the moment. Besides, there was no time. If they didn’t take a crack at this now, Nico might end up just like the others. Gutted at the end of a rope.
At least they had the element of surprise in their favor. The American pulled his SIG from his shoulder holster and chambered a round. Prichard and Seven both pulled out Walther P99s.
Prichard touched Carver’s shoulder to get his attention. “What’s the plan?”
“Nico Gold is the pale, skinny guy. Kill everyone except him.”
Prichard looked to Seven, then back to Carver. “That’s it?”
“Were you expecting Xs and Os? This church has been closed for 150 years. There’s no floorplan. All we’ve got in the way of weapons is what you’re holding. We’re just going to have to fight our way in.”
Carver gripped the handle of the heavy door. The hinges emitted a maddening, high-pitched squeal.
*
Nico’s hands were trembling. A sound upstairs had made his captors all squirrelly. There were two wide staircases leading up from the basement from the north and south sides of the room. Each goon took a staircase and stood at the ready with their machine pistols.
Fearing a gunfight, Nico scrambled toward the safety of a far corner of the stone room. “No!” one of the goons yelled, switching to English. “You keep working or I kill you!”
Hopeful as he was about the possibility of rescue, the sensation of being under siege weighed upon him. What if it wasn’t Carver up there? What if it was the guys from the Fellowship World Initiative? Weren’t those crazy bastards just as bad, if not worse?
Suddenly both goons started firing up both staircases. And then they were taking rounds too. Rounds ricocheted off the stairs and whizzed by. Nico squatted with his hands over his head.
“Keep working!” the longhaired zealot screamed at him, looking back over his shoulder. “Or I shoot you!”
He straightened up and tried to focus on the screen. Concentrate, he told himself, willing himself to be braver than he really was. Nothing else matters. Just this.
Onscreen, he had the FAA flight record database for Washington Executive airport, AKA Hyde Field. The little airport was just 30 minutes from D.C., and about 45 minutes from the Eden compound. Earlier he had discovered the name and registration of Wolf’s private plane, an eight-passenger Learjet he had picked up in the 1990s. Now he tried to run a simple query for the plane against the data set. His fingers and palms were slick with sweat. His arms ached, as if they would fall off at any moment. His hands seemed to move involuntarily. He had to keep retyping the simple command query again and again until he got it right.
Something exploded behind him, sending stone shards against his back. He turned in time to see the goon switching a new clip into his gun.
He heard a heavy object tumble down the stairs. He turned. The goon yelled “Got one!” in Russian.
Not Carver, Nico thought. Please, don’t let it be Carver.
And now the other one shouted something in Romanian and kept firing at something or someone else. The output of gunfire going upstairs seemed heavy in proportion to what was coming down. He hadn’t seen Carver with anything other than a handgun.
The database query he ran was impossibly slow. He hoped the connection would remain stable long enough to produce results. Another stray round, this time from the entrance at the other side of the room, bounced from the stairs to the ceiling, floor and back again.
“This is crazy!” he shouted.
“Shut up,” the goon closest to him growled before resuming the gunfight.
The rope was behind him. Waiting for him. It was only a matter of time, Nico felt, before these cretins strung him up. He would experience the hopeless sensation of both shoulders dislocating from his body.
He looked right. Broken pieces of a stone slab were piled near the empty body bays cut into the wall. Nico suddenly found himself in motion. He picked up a piece of cut stone that had once been a piece of a burial tomb, heaved it over his shoulder, and rushed the goon.
As Nico swung the slab, his captor turned. Suddenly the bastard looked surprisingly human. Brown eyes. Pimples on the forehead. A look of stunned surprise.
As the stone connected with his skull, a mural of blood splattered across the archway. All Nico’s adrenaline seemed to evaporate at once. His ears were ringing. He felt the urge to run, but there was nowhere to go.
*
From his position atop the first staircase to the crypt, Carver heard both machine pistols go silent. Seven and Prichard had been assaulting the other entrance. He was hoping one of them had breached the room. He had only come into this with two spare clips, and he was already two rounds away from empty.
Now gunfire resumed. It was coming from his side of the fight, but judging by the sound of the ricochet at the far end of the crypt below, it was aimed in the opposite direction. The shooter had been distracted by something behind him.
He had to make his move now.
Carver ripped a framed portrait of some long-dead archbishop from the wall beside him. It was approximately five feet in length, and three or so feet wide. Judging by the fact that it had been left behind in this gloomy place, he reckoned that it wouldn’t be missed.