And then there was Father Callahan. He pushed his backpack through first, and then his weapon. This was going to be tight.
Carver peered through the gap from the other side. The swarm had descended now perhaps five feet from the orb, and they were dispersing horizontally, a squadron of drones preparing for attack. “Hurry!” he implored Callahan.
Like Lang, the stocky priest came feet-first, perhaps anticipating that his midsection would prove to be the most challenging piece. His knees and thighs cleared, but sure enough, 16 vertical inches wasn’t quite enough to get his potbelly through the space.
“Suck it in!” Carver yelled.
“I’m trying!”
The priest tried to make himself thin as Carver pulled from the other side. Within seconds Callahan was bleeding from broken skin at his waistline. He screamed for Carver to stop.
“It’s no use!” he cried.
The American stuck his head under the space. The swarm had spread wide, and was now sweeping the room from above, as if they were a single collective.
“Lie still!” he commanded. “Those bots can’t be individually controlled. Maybe they’re motion-activated.”
Callahan tried to quiet his body and minimize his breathing. No small task given that he was half inside, half outside the room, wedged underneath a steel door, with a threat of death hovering overhead.
Carver reached into Callahan’s pack and pulled out two stun grenades. They were eight inches long with openings in the black matte metal casing designed to prevent defragmentation during the explosion. When Carver had pulled them from the priest’s trunk, he had imagined using them on human beings. He wasn’t sure whether they would effectively disrupt the nanobots, but he was out of both ideas and time.
“Everyone close your eyes and ears,” he said, then tapped one of the priest’s boots, “Except you. Just close your eyes, there Padre. Be very still.”
Carver pulled both pins simultaneously and rolled the stun grenades into the center of the room. Carver used his index fingers to plug his ears. He felt a twinge of pity for the additional pain Callahan was about to endure. That was assuming he didn’t die. Stun grenades weren’t designed to be lethal, but they occasionally killed people all the same.
The blast came hard and fast. The shockwave belched a blast of hot air out the gap and into the staircase. Even kneeling just outside the room, Carver felt the fluid in his ears in flux, putting him slightly off balance.
He heard the priest screaming, which was a good sign. He peered under the gap. The swarm was gone.
“I’m blind,” Callahan screamed.
“I told you to close your eyes,” Carver chided him. The blinding light from the grenades caused all the light sensitive cells within the eye to activate at once. It would, however, pass.
“Agent Carver,” Lang called from within the iron staircase. “We have to go.”
Carver patted the priest on the leg. “Hang tight. We’ll be back.”
*
They descended the iron helix that went ever deeper into the porous, spongy earth that had allowed Rome to be so easily tunneled in ancient times. A mechanical hum — gas generators, perhaps — droned somewhere in the distance. A series of construction lights strung along the walls provided adequate illumination.
Carver and Seven moved behind their unlikely assault partners warily, and always on guard. After all, this was merely an alliance of convenience. Carver had every expectation that they too planned on violently ending the partnership once they found what they had come for.
A series of ancient slabs, piles of broken pottery and pieces of sculpture were clustered near the far wall. Relics unearthed during the recent construction, Carver presumed. A bit further in, they approached a security post that looked much like the TSA stations at the airports in American megacities. Sheets of transparent blast-proof glass flanked a full-body scanner.
“Nobody here,” one of Lang’s soldiers said in wonderment.
A bad sign, Carver knew. By his count, they had killed only eight guards in the villa. Surely their numbers had been greater in recent days. Why had they already abandoned these underground security posts? Had the ossuary already been moved? Zhu would have had a week at most to work with the DNA samples.
At the end of the cavern, an open-air lift moved slowly up and down at regular intervals. There were no doors, no buttons. Getting on and off it appeared to be a matter of careful timing, much like a department store escalator.
He crossed to the other side, where a straight, smooth pole descended into another chamber where the facility’s emergency lights glowed. The dog bark he thought he had heard earlier had not repeated. If their prize had escaped, there was no telling where they would go. Equipped with a map such as the one Callahan had, it was possible to walk from one end of Rome to the other using only the ancient tunnels.
“Wolf is here,” Lang insisted. The old man was out of breath, but the thrill of the hunt propelled him forward. “I can feel him in my bones.”
Lang’s soldiers helped him onto the lift, which descended at an uneven pace. Carver and Seven joined them. The ride down to the bottom took approximately 10 seconds. Carver had lost all sense of depth. Were they a hundred yards below ground? Five hundred? The only thing he was sure of was that he didn’t like this. The lighting had grown erratic, twittering on and off at irregular intervals. He hoped the generators weren’t running low on fuel.
“The lab!” Seven said as they neared the bottom. She pointed at what appeared to be a decontamination chamber. Behind additional panes of transparent glass was the shining equipment that Nico had tracked to the villa.
Opposite the lab was an astonishing cavern. Vaulted ceilings. Spring-fed fountains. Walls decorated with faded frescoes of wildlife and chariots. And at the rear, a small throne room, perhaps 500 square feet.
Sebastian Wolf sat on an ancient throne that had been carved out of rock. It was easy to see why Wolf had built the lab here. Carver imagined him sitting there, observing Zhu’s work through the transparent lab walls like some omniscient God supervising the creation of a new world.
The cult leader appeared to be unguarded, unarmed and unafraid. The Alsatian at his side barked ferociously. Wolf whistled one short, sharp tone that snapped the dog into quiet obedience.
The white chalk ossuary rested on a marble platform before him. Although Carver had seen the dimensions on Lang’s illustration, it was still smaller than he had imagined, roughly the size of his nephew’s toy chest.
Carver watched Lang carefully. He appeared to be almost as mesmerized by the sight of his old friend as he was by the ossuary. Lang had sworn a blood oath to protect this relic, and yet he himself had never actually laid eyes on it.
“Go on, Heinz,” Wolf said. “See what your papal masters have hidden from the world for these two thousand years.”
Lang walked forward, stretching his right hand out before him. He touched the chalk box, running his fingertips gingerly over the faded engravings on its side. And then he touched the inscription. Yeshua bar Yehosef. Jesus son of Joseph. Just as Wolf had claimed.
“Although we’ve had our differences,” Wolf said, “We did the right thing in Venice, you and I. It would not have been right to let Himmler have this.”
Wolf’s Judas looked up at his former friend. “He would have had nothing. Just as you have nothing now.”
Wolf chuckled. “My old friend. My Judas. If you did not believe this was the Holy Ossuary, then you would not be here.”
“We’ll have to cut the reunion short,” Carver said. “Where’s Zhu?”
Wolf smiled pityingly. “I’m afraid you are too late to catch Mr. Zhu. Our friend’s time in Rome is already complete. He has left to complete his destiny.”