“Okay,” he said into his lapel. “Ryan is here. Who else is on the net?”
“Sparrow in place on the colonnade,” a voice answered immediately.
“King, in place.”
“Ray Stones, in place.”
“Parker, in place,” Phil Parker, the last of the arrivals from London, reported from his spot on the side street.
“Tom Sharp here with Ryan. We’ll do a radio check every fifteen minutes. Report immediately if you see the least thing of interest. Out.” He turned to Ryan. “So, that’s done.”
“Yeah.” He checked his watch. They had hours to go before the Pope appeared. What would he be doing now? He was supposed to be a very early riser. Doubtless the first important thing he did every day was to say Mass, like every Catholic priest in the world, and it was probably the most important part of his morning routine, something to remind himself exactly what he was—a priest sworn to God’s service—a reality he’d known and probably celebrated within his own mind through Nazi and communist oppression for forty-odd years, serving his flock. But now his flock, his parish, straddled the entire world, as did his responsibility to them, didn’t it?
Jack reminded himself of his time in the Marine Corps. Crossing the Atlantic on his helicopter-landing ship—unknowingly on his way to a life-threatening helicopter crash—on Sunday they’d held church services, and at that moment the church pennant had been run up to the truck. It flew over the national ensign. It was the U.S. Navy’s way of acknowledging that there was one higher loyalty than the one a man had for his country. That loyalty was to God Himself—the one power higher than that of the United States of America, and his country acknowledged that. Jack could feel it, here and now, carrying a gun. He could feel that fact like a physical weight on his shoulders. There were people who wanted the Pope—the Vicar of Christ on earth—dead. And that, suddenly, was massively offensive to him. The worst street criminal gave a priest, minister, or rabbi a free pass, because there might really be a god up there, and it wouldn’t do to harm His personal representative among the people. How much more would God be annoyed by the murder of His #1 Representative on Planet Earth. The Pope was a man who’d probably never hurt a single human being in his life. The Catholic Church was not a perfect institution—nothing with mere people in it was or ever could be. But it was founded on faith in Almighty God, and its policies rarely, if ever, strayed from love and charity.
But those doctrines were seen as a threat by the Soviet Union. What better proof of who the Bad Guys were in the world? Ryan had sworn as a Marine to fight his country’s enemies. But here and now he swore to himself to fight against God’s own enemies. The KGB recognized no power higher than the Party it served. And, in proclaiming that, they defined themselves as the enemy of all mankind—for wasn’t mankind made in God’s own image? Not Lenin’s. Not Stalin’s. God’s.
Well, he had a pistol designed by John Moses Browning, an American, perhaps a Mormon—Browning had come from Utah, but Jack didn’t know what faith he’d adhered to—to help him see about that.
Time passed slowly for Ryan. Constant reference to his watch didn’t help. People were arriving steadily. Not in large numbers, but rather like a baseball crowd, arriving single, or in pairs, or in small family groups. Lots of children, infants carried by their mothers, some escorted by nuns—school trips, almost certainly—to see the Pontifex Maximus. That term, too, came from the Romans, who with remarkable clarity likened a priest to a pontifex—bridge builder—between men and what was greater than men.
Vicar of Christ on earth was what kept repeating in Jack’s mind. This Strokov bastard—hell, he would have killed Jesus Himself. A new Pontius Pilate—if not an oppressor himself, then certainly the representative of the oppressors, here to spit in God’s face. It wasn’t that he could harm God, of course. Nobody was that big, but in attacking one of God’s institutions and God’s personal representative—well, that was plenty bad enough. God was supposed to punish such people in His own good time . . . and maybe the Lord chose His instruments to handle that for Him . . . maybe even ex-Marines from the United States of America . . .
Noon. It would be a warm day. What had it been like to live here in Roman times without air-conditioning? Well, they hadn’t known the difference, and the body adapted itself to the environment—something in the medulla, Cathy had told him once. It would have been more comfortable to take his jacket off, but not with a pistol stuck in his belt. . . . There were street vendors about, selling cold drinks and ice cream. Like money changers in the Temple? Jack wondered. Probably not. The priests in evidence didn’t chase them away. Hmm, a good way for the bad guy to get close with his weapon? he suddenly wondered. But they were a good way off, and it was too late to worry about that, and none of them matched the photos he had. Jack had a small print of Strokov’s face in his left hand, and looked down at it every minute or so. The bastard might be wearing a disguise, of course. He’d be stupid not to, and Strokov probably wasn’t stupid. Not in his business. Disguises didn’t cover everything. Hair length and color, sure. But not height. It took major surgery to do that. You could make a guy look heavier, but not lighter. Facial hair? Okay, look for a guy with a beard or mustache . Ryan turned and scanned the area. Nope. Nothing obvious, anyway.
Half an hour to go. The crowd was buzzing now, people speaking a dozen or more languages. He could see tourists and the faithful from many lands. Blond heads from Scandinavia, African blacks, Asians. Some obvious Americans . . . but no obvious Bulgarians. What did Bulgarians look like? This new problem was that the Catholic Church was supposed to be universal, and that meant people of every physical description. Lots of possible disguises.
“Sparrow, Ryan. See anything likely?” Jack asked his lapel.
“Negative,” the voice in his ear answered. “I’m scanning the crowd around you. Nothing to report.”
“Roger,” Jack acknowledged.
“If he’s here, he’s bloody invisible,” Sharp said, standing next to Ryan. They were eight or ten yards from the interlocking steel barriers brought in for the Pope’s weekly appearance. They looked heavy. Two men to put them on the truck, or four? Jack wondered. He discovered that the mind liked to wander at times like this, and he had to guard against that. Keep scanning the crowd, he told himself.
There’s too many goddamned faces! the self responded angrily. And as soon as the fucker gets into place, he’ll be looking away.
“Tom, how about we edge forward and sweep along the railing?”
“Good idea,” Sharp agreed at once.
The crowd was difficult, but not impossible, to slip through. Ryan checked his watch. Fifteen minutes. People were now edging against the barriers, wanting to get close. There was a belief from medieval times that the mere touch of a king could cure the ill or bring good fortune, and evidently that belief lingered—and how much more true if the man in question was the Pontifex Maximus? Some of the people here would be cancer victims, entreating God for a miracle. Maybe some miracles actually happened. Docs called that spontaneous remission and wrote it off to biological processes they didn’t yet understand. But maybe they really were miracles—to the recipients they certainly were exactly that. It was just one more thing Ryan didn’t understand.
People were leaning forward more, heads were turning to the face of the church.
“Sharp/Ryan, Sparrow. Possible target, twenty feet to your left, standing three ranks back of the barrier. Blue coat,” Jack’s earpiece crackled. He headed that way without waiting for Sharp. It was hard pressing through the crowd, but it wasn’t a New York subway crush. Nobody turned to curse at him. Ryan looked forward. . . .
Yes . . . right there. He turned to look at Sharp and tapped his nose twice.
“Ryan is on the target,” he said into his lapel. “Steer me in, John.”
“Forward ten feet, Jack, immediately left of the Italian-looking woman in the brown dress. Our friend has light brown hair. He is looking to his left.”
Bingo, Jack thought in silent celebration. It took two more minutes and he was standing right behind the cocksucker. Hello, Colonel Strokov.
Hidden in the thickness of the crowd, Jack unbuttoned his jacket.
The man was farther back than he would have done it, Jack thought. His field of fire was limited by the bodies around him, but the woman directly in front of him was short enough that he could easily draw and fire right over her, and his field of view was fairly unrestricted.
Okay, Boris Andreyevich, if you want to play, this game’s going to surprise you some. If the Army or the Navy ever look on heaven’s scenes/They will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines, motherfucker.
Tom Sharp took the chance to slide through the crowd in front of Strokov, brushing past as he went. On the other side, he turned in Ryan’s direction and reached up with his fist into the sky. Strokov was armed.
The noise of the crowd rose in frequency, and the languages all melded into one murmuring hiss of noise that suddenly went dead still. A bronze door had opened out of Ryan’s view.
Sharp was four feet away, just one person, an adolescent boy, between him and Strokov . . . easy for him to dart right and get his hands on the man.
Then a cavalcade of screams erupted. Ryan inched back and pulled out his pistol, thumbing the hammer back, putting his pistol fully in battery. His eyes were locked on Strokov.
“King, the Pope is coming out now! Vehicle is in view.”
But Ryan couldn’t answer. Neither could he see the Popemobile.
“Sparrow, I see him. Ryan/Sharp, he will enter your field of view in a few seconds.”
Unable to say a word, unable to see His Holiness approach, Jack’s eyes were locked on his target’s shoulders. You can’t move your arm without having them move, too, and when he did that . . .
Shooting a man in the back is murder, Jack. . . .
In his peripheral vision, Ryan saw the front-left corner of the white jeep/golf cart slowly moving left to right. The man in front of him was looking in that general direction . . . but not quite . . . why?
But then his right shoulder moved ever so slightly. . . . At the bottom of Ryan’s field of view, his right elbow came into view, meaning that his forearm was now parallel to the ground.
And then his right foot moved back, ever so slightly. The man was getting ready to—
Ryan pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the base of his spine. He could feel the vertebrae of his backbone on the muzzle of his Browning. Jack saw his head rock back, just a few millimeters. Ryan leaned forward and rasped a whisper into his ear.
“If that gun in your hand goes off, you’ll be pissing into a diaper the rest of your life. Now, real slow, with your fingertips, hand it back to me, or I will shoot you where you stand.”
Mission accomplished, Ryan’s brain announced. This fucker isn’t going to kill anybody. Go ahead, resist if you want. Nobody’s that fast. His finger was so tight on the trigger that if Strokov turned suddenly, the pistol would go off on its own accord, and sever his spine for all time to come.
The man hesitated, and surely his mind was running at the speed of light through various options. There were drills for what to do when someone had a gun in one’s back, and he’d even practiced them in his intelligence academy, but here, now, twenty years later, with a real pistol against his spine, those lessons with play guns seemed a very distant thing, and could he bat the gun away so fast to keep it from destroying a kidney? Probably not. And so, his right hand came back just as he’d just been told. . . .
Ryan jumped at the sound of one-two-three pistol shots, not fifteen feet away. It was the sort of moment in which the world stops its turning, hearts and lungs stop functioning, and every mind has an instant of total clarity. Jack’s eyes were drawn to the sound. There was the Holy Father, and on his snow-white cassock was a spot of red, the size of a half-dollar, in the chest, and on his handsome face was the shock of something too fast for him yet to feel the pain, but his body was already collapsing, slumping and turning to the left, folding into itself as he started to go down.
It required all of Ryan’s discipline not to squeeze the trigger. His left hand snatched the pistol out of his subject’s hand.
“Stand still, you motherfucker. Don’t take a step, don’t turn, don’t do anything. Tom!” he called loudly.
“Sparrow, they have him, they have the gunman. The gunman is down on the pavement, must be ten people on him. The Pope took two, possibly three, hits.”
The reaction of the crowd was almost binary in character. Those closest to the shooter jumped on him like cats on a single unlucky mouse, and whoever the shooter was, he was invisible under a mound of tourists, perhaps ten feet from where Ryan, Sharp, and Strokov stood. The people immediately around Ryan were drawing away—rather slowly, actually. . . .
“Jack, let’s get our friend away from here, shall we?” And the three men moved into the escape arch, as Ryan had come to think of it.
“Sharp to all. We have Strokov with us. Leave the area separately and rendezvous at the embassy.”
A minute later, they were in Sharp’s official Bentley. Ryan got in back with the Bulgarian.
Strokov was clearly feeling better about things now. “What is this? I am member of Bulgarian embassy and—”
“We’ll remember you said that, old man. For now, you are a guest of Her Britannic Majesty’s government. Now, be a good chap and sit still, or my friend will kill you.”
“Interesting tool of diplomacy, this.” Ryan lifted the gun he’d taken from Strokov—East Bloc issue, with a large and awkward can-type silencer screwed on the business end. Sure as hell he’d been planning to shoot somebody.
But whom? Suddenly, Ryan wasn’t sure.
“Tom?”
“Yes, Jack?”
“Something was more wrong than we thought.”
“I think you’re right,” Sharp agreed. “But we have someone to clear that up for us.”
The drive back to the embassy illustrated what had been to Ryan a hidden talent. The Bentley had an immensely powerful engine, and Sharp knew how to use it, exploding away from the Vatican like a drag-racing top fuel eliminator. The car screeched to a halt in the small parking lot next to the embassy, and the three of them went in through a side door, and from there to the basement. With Ryan covering, Sharp handcuffed the Bulgarian and sat him in a wooden chair.
“Colonel Strokov, you must answer for Georgiy Markov,” Sharp told him. “We’ve been after you for some years now.”
Strokov’s eyes went as wide as doorknobs. As fast as the Bentley had gone, Tom Sharp’s mind had been driving faster still.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we have these photos of you leaving Heathrow Airport after killing our good friend on Westminster Bridge. The Yard was onto you, old boy, but you left minutes before they got permission to arrest you. That’s your bad luck. So, now, it was our job to arrest you. You will find us rather less civilized than the Yard, Colonel. You murdered a man on British soil. Her Majesty the Queen does not approve of that sort of thing, Colonel.”
“But—”
“Why are we bothering to talk with this bastard, Tom?” Ryan asked, catching on. “We have our orders, don’t we?”
“Patience, Jack, patience. He’s not going anywhere at the moment, is he?”
“I want to have a phone to call my embassy,” Strokov said—rather weakly, Ryan thought.
“Next he’ll want a lawyer,” Sharp observed humorously. “Well, in London you could have a solicitor to assist you, but we are not in London, are we, old boy?”
“And we are not Scotland Yard,” Jack added, taking his lead from Sharp. “I should have just done him at the church, Tom.”
Sharp shook his head. “Too noisy. Better we just let him . . . disappear, Jack. I’m sure Georgiy would understand.”
It was clear from Strokov’s face that he was not accustomed to having men discuss his own fate in the way
that he had so often determined for himself the fates of others. It was easier to be brave, he was finding, when he was the fellow holding the gun.
“Well, I wasn’t going to kill him, Tom, just sever his spine below the waist. You know, put him in a wheelchair the rest of his life, make him as incontinent as a baby. How loyal you suppose his government will be to him?”
Sharp nearly gagged on the thought. “Loyal, the Dirzhavna Sugurnost? Please, Jack. Be serious. They’d just put him in a hospital, probably a mental hospital, and they’ll wipe his ass once or twice a day if he’s lucky.”
That one went through the hoop, Ryan saw. None of the East Bloc services were big on loyalty-down, even to those who’d shown a lot of loyalty-up. And Strokov knew it. No, once you screwed the pooch, you were in very deep shit, and your friends evaporated like the morning mist—and somehow Strokov didn’t strike Ryan as one who had all that many friends anyway. Even in his own service he’d be like an attack dog—valuable, perhaps, but not loved or trusted around the kids.
“In any case, while Boris and I discuss the future, you have a flight to catch,” Sharp told him. It was just as well. Ryan was running out of impromptu lines. “Give my regards to Sir Basil, will you?”
“You bet, Tommy.” Ryan left the room and took a deep breath. Mick King and the rest were waiting out there for him. Someone at Sharp’s official residence had packed his bags, and there was an embassy minibus waiting to take them all to the airport. There, a British Airways Boeing 737 was waiting, and they caught it just in time, all with first-class tickets. Ryan was next to King for the flight.
“What the hell,” Jack asked, “are we going to do with him?”
“Strokov? Good question,” Mick replied. “Are you sure you want to know the answer?”
CHAPTER 32
MASQUED BALL