It was just Mathieu. He raced toward Lars, his eyes impossibly huge. “They’re here!” he yelled.
“Who’s here?” a voice behind him shouted. Lars turned. It was Nicolas. He had just come from one of the interior chambers.
“Black Order!” Mathieu said, exasperated. “I don’t know how many. I saw three, maybe four before the cameras went out.”
Lars was furious. “Why didn’t you call?”
“I tried! Communications are out!”
That figured. After having spent tens of millions acquiring and installing the lab into this ancient place, the communications equipment was comparably archaic. With wireless communications next to impossible from level to level, they had purchased a 1980s-era intercom system that had been salvaged from an abandoned Soviet missile bunker. As with everything down here, they had been too afraid of cave-ins to embed the wiring into the walls. It had worked great, but, as Lars had warned from the beginning, all it would take to cut off multi-floor communication was a pair of wire cutters.
Now he had no way to warn anyone else. “Let’s go,” he urged. Even if they made their stand there, the others could escort the Shepherd out the emergency hatch. It was time to release the bots.
Suddenly the nightingale floors were screaming one long, inharmonious note. God help us, Lars thought. The passageway was full of Black Order operatives.
*
Lang’s international force of holy warriors advanced through the subterranean maze of catacombs, long-buried cobblestone streets and escape routes carved though the ages by the Roman Empire, various resistance movements and later, the Vatican itself. As they had agreed, Carver, Seven, Father Callahan and Heinz Lang trekked behind them.
To forge the unlikely alliance, Carver had provided Lang with the location of the ossuary. Per their agreement, Lang would be permitted to retrieve the ossuary and return it to the Vatican. In turn, Lang had agreed to reveal the identities of Senator Preston’s killers. As a gesture of good faith, Lang had offered to hand them over before the assault even started. Carver, however, preferred to wait. He expected heavy security at the Roman villa where Sebastian Wolf was completing his life’s work. They would need every gun they had.
The tunnels twisted this way and that. The porous walls seemed to have tear ducts, weeping water that was at times pure and at other times putrid. With only their headlamps for illumination, they trekked through passageways lined with the bones of long-dead Romans.
Time and again he flashed to the kill zone beneath Washington D.C. where he had lost Megan O’Keefe. The sight and sound of her stiff, waterlogged corpse had haunted his sleep endlessly. And now he relived the nightmare as they waded through three feet of water and the rats — hundreds of them — scurried up the walls around them. On his insistence, Seven walked behind him. As he turned to check on her, his heart skipped as he projected the face of his dead partner on hers.
Seven’s voice broke through the quiet. “How far down are we?”
“About 60 meters and counting,” Callahan replied. He had used the tunnels many times over the years. Dressed in olive green cargo pants, a black turtleneck and felt-bottom boots that would not slip on the wet earth below Rome, Father Callahan’s preparation was admirable. Callahan carried a pack containing spare ammunition, guns, night vision goggles and other items that they had handpicked from the trunk of his car.
As he had told Blake, he was here not as an operative, but as a Christian. Callahan had been just a boy when his uncle had been killed in a torrid stretch of Protestant on Catholic violence in Belfast. The trouble over the ossuary would only bring more blood to the streets around the world. They had a chance to stop it tonight, once and for all.
“If we find Sebastian Wolf,” the priest asked, “What exactly are we going to do with him?”
“That’s for Lang to decide,” Carver said. “We aren’t allowed to touch him.”
“And Adrian Zhu?”
“We have reasonable cause to apprehend him. That goes double for Mary Borst.”
Finally they breached the immense reception room of the grandiose residence near Piazza del Popolo. It was to this stately address that Symplexicon Labs had shipped enough laboratory equipment to clone a herd of woolly mammoths. Lang’s force quickly dispatched two armed guards in the Renaissance-era foyer, the blood spatter scarcely noticeable against the crimson-colored walls. Overhead, an enormous white glass chandelier swung back and forth. Portraits of long-dead Vatican royalty seemed to stare at them from all sides.
The high ceilings and ornate molding told of a structure that had been breathtaking before it had been prepared for siege. Looking up the mahogany staircase, Carver saw that the entrances to the second and third floors had been sealed off with razor wire, and the dining room was piled high with floorboards, dirt, nails and other debris that pointed to a sizable construction project that extended both above and below ground. The fact that the debris had been piled here, inside the palatial residence, only added further confirmation they had come to the right place. Someone had gone to great pains to hide the project from outsiders.
The ratatatat of automatic 9mm gunfire broke out from the fourth floor. Carver grabbed Seven and Lang and scurried to the far side of the cavernous room. Lang’s fighters held nothing back as they returned fire.
Within seconds, they were already down a gun. A young, bearded Slovak had taken a round in the middle of his face, obliterating his nose and collapsing his airway. He fell sideways, narrowly missing Carver’s lap. As he pushed the body away, Carver saw into the man’s open pack. He had been carrying a double-braided polyester rope, eight-inch eyebolts and a heavy-duty portable hand wench.
They don’t just want to eliminate Wolf, Carver thought. They want to punish him. Just like the others.
The Villa
Carver and Seven carried Heckler amp; Koch G36 assault rifles that they had taken from Callahan’s stash of trunk treasure. Seven had used one while training with the Special Air Service, and spoke highly of the weapon’s reflex sight, which used adjustable battery-powered illumination in low-level light situations. But for now, Lang’s men would do the fighting. If all went according to plan, Carver wouldn’t need to fire a shot until it was time to collect on his end of the deal with Lang.
Father Callahan carried all the explosives in his pack. He whistled at one of the Black Order mercenaries and tossed him a standard grenade. The priest pointed a finger up at the fourth floor.
The mercenary smiled, gave Callahan thumbs up, and hurled it to the top of the stairs with the expert accuracy of a center fielder.
“You idiot!” Callahan screamed. “You have to pull the pin first!”
The priest’s words were gravely prophetic. Within seconds, the grenade flew back over the fourth floor balcony toward Callahan and the 10 surviving warriors.
Carver grabbed Seven and Lang and pushed them into an open coat closet. “Everyone down!”
The frag grenade exploded five feet above the surface of the chestnut marble floor. A burst of shrapnel hit the solid wood door protecting Carver, Seven and Lang. All was quiet for several seconds, during which Carver wondered whether they were the only remaining survivors.
Then two guns started up again, and he could tell by proximity — and by the sound of their weapons — that they were Black Order. The relief he felt at knowing there were survivors was an odd and unnerving sensation. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, he thought. No, that was bullshit. He and Lang were not friends. They were merely using each other.
He opened the closet and spotted Callahan unfurling himself from a cramped shelter position underneath a magnificently carved wooden chaise. All gunfire stopped, followed by a sickening thud. A body had fallen from the fourth floor landing, having been picked off by one of Lang’s men.