When we got squared away, we scouted the cathedral roof below. Sharpshooters had been posed at the lip of the roof at the front of the building, where they could train their high-powered rifles on the piazza. But otherwise there were no guards at all in sight. Everyone was watching the doors and nearby streets.
A jammer had been installed inside the cathedral to block anyone from using a radio or cell phone to set off a bomb. The system rendered conventional radios useless, so Trace and I had packed a line-of-sight laser unit to communicate with Doc and Danny, who were standing by in the MC-130 as backups in case we landed in the Coliseum by mistake. Hitting the plane with the laser would have been pretty difficult, so we set up a receiver unit on the roof of a building to the north. From there, the signal was transmitted via a conventional microwave to the aircraft. The sending unit, which looked a bit like a futuristic, sawed-off ray gun, had to be sighted into the general area of the receiver, and then guided with the help of a small set of indicator b.u.t.tons until the beam "locked" with the receiver device. It was a bit awkward to use, and it took me several tries before I got a lock tone and was able to give Doc the good word. He barked "good" and signed off. It would take at least an hour for him and Danny to get down and get close enough to play cavalry if something went wrong.
If we"d been tourists, we could have just opened the door and let ourselves in. But Trace"s traipse through the church on Friday had revealed new alarms and a video security system on all of the doors, including those on the dome and inside the cupola. Besides fixing the window I"d fallen through, they"d also installed alarms on it and all of the others. They"d even put alarms on the smaller eyebrow windows that opened into the dome interior. While at this hour it was likely that an alert would be disregarded as a malfunction, we couldn"t take the chance.
There was one set of windows that had no alarms: the windows at the base of the cupola. This made sense, since the doors leading to the cupola were locked and alarmed; even if you went through the window, you"d be stuck.
Unless, you went straight down three hundred feet to the balcony at the base of the dome.
With help from my gla.s.s cutter-the diamond-tipped kind, not my fist-I removed the panels and then cut out enough of the frame to slip through. Down below, a scattering of priests, brothers, and nuns were getting the interior of the church ready for the midnight ma.s.s. They were supposed to be done and out of the building at exactly 10 p.m. At that point, St. Peter"s would be swept by security forces one last time, with the doors opening for the ma.s.s at 11 p.m.
My watch read 9:08.
"Still want to go first, Spider-man?" asked Trace, getting our ropes ready. The dome is about three hundred feet high; we had 120 meters of 11mm rope with us*-just enough for me to kill myself with.
"Just make sure it doesn"t tangle," I told her.
"It"s the bar I"m worried about." She was referring to a long, flat piece of steel that fit outside the window and anch.o.r.ed the rope in place.
"That"ll hold as long as the cupola does," I told her.
"Exactly."
If it didn"t hold, I"d plop straight down into the bronze altar canopy, ending up a holy hood ornament. Which I"m sure would have fulfilled the prophecies of some of the nuns I"d had back at St. Ladislaus Hungarian Catholic School.
I made like a spider sneaking up on Miss m.u.f.fett, slipping through the window and lowering myself into the painted heaven above the altar. I had a rappelling harness on, and the process was a h.e.l.l of a lot easier than it sounds.
For the first ten feet. Then I slipped down a little faster than I thought I would. No biggie really, except that the shift in my momentum started me swinging on the line.
Swinging was fine; I had to get to the side of the dome anyway. What I didn"t like was spinning. And I started spinning so much I could have been a f.u.c.king ballerina. At the same time, I was twirling across the d.a.m.n dome, a pendulum gone crazy. Finally I slammed face-first into one of the prophets in the ceiling.
He didn"t seem to mind, or at least he didn"t hold it against me. He stopped me from spinning, though not from swinging, sending me back out into s.p.a.ce. Now I was like a stinking yo-yo, though headed in only one direction-down. The windows loomed closer and closer, and on one swing I thought I would put my left foot right through the one I had broken a few weeks before. I missed, however, and managed to get my foot onto the railing on my next pa.s.s. Not pretty, but I made it in one piece and without setting off any of the alarms.
Trace, of course, came down perfectly a minute later. Sometimes that woman is so d.a.m.n good all I want to do is smack her.
We slipped into the hallway out of sight, pulled off our jumpsuits, and donned more appropriate garb-a monk"s robes for me, and a white nun"s habit for Trace. I shaved off my beard for the mission-the sacrifices you make for this job. I hadn"t seen my face in almost twenty years, and I looked about as ugly as a breeding cow"s p.u.s.s.y. I"d also had my hair cut monk-style, with a tonsure at the back. (It"s a bald spot to make it easier for G.o.d to aim his thunderbolt if you mess up.) But there was one consolation: After all this raping and sc.r.a.ping, I wouldn"t have to do any more novenas to get my ticket through the pearly gates. St. Peter wouldn"t recognize me.
I pulled out the handheld explosives detector and turned it on; it took roughly a minute to warm up and get ready. The alert was piped through an earbud; I arranged the cowl to make the wire less conspicuous. Trace"s habit was one of the old-fashioned kinds and covered her head, making her earpiece easy to conceal.
Backa.s.s"s people had set up an impenetrable perimeter around the cathedral, which meant that once you penetrated it you were home free. But just to keep the people on the perimeter from getting bored, I had arranged a small diversion. As Trace and I made our way down the staircase from the dome, a taxi raced up Via Della Conciliazione toward Piazza San Pietro in front of the basilica. The driver, though certainly as crazy as any native Italian (which says a lot), was in fact Sean Mako, who"d stepped off a plane a few hours before at Leonardo da Vinci airport. Hailing a taxi, he had struck a deal with the driver, who agreed to show Sean the city for "only" two thousand Euros and as much vino as he could drink. This proved to be only a gla.s.s and a half after Sean slipped a little GHB into his first Chianti. (GHB is gamma hydroxybutyric acid, better known as the "date-rape drug." Not FDA approved.) Sean left the driver in the bar where they had stopped and continued the tour in do-it-yourself mode. At precisely 9:15, he raced down the broad avenue in front of the basilica, dodged two roadblocks, and veered across the circle. He then cut back to the right, swung completely around the obelisk at the center of the square and managed to get up one of the long, shallow-rise steps before his wheels and caltropshredded tires finally gave out.
Sean had picked up a pa.s.senger along the way-supposedly for authenticity, though personally I think he was trying to make a little money on the side. The pa.s.senger got out calmly and began walking away, ignoring the forty or fifty armed guards who rushed them. Sean claims that at this point he began singing "O Sole Mio" at the wheel. I take that with a grain of salt, though I believe him when he says the Vatican drunk tank is a cheap place to spend the night.
As more than a hundred law enforcement officials completed the arrest, Trace and I reached the hallway behind the Altar of St. Leo the Great on the main floor of the church.
"You look lovely in white, Sister," I told her.
"Up yours, Brother," she said, grabbing a bouquet of flowers from a box near the archway and walking into the church.
I gave her a few seconds, then followed, head bent and hands folded, walking toward the center of the church. If I looked like I was praying, it wasn"t an act-at this point I figured that if I didn"t find the bomb, I"d be blown up.
The area around the Pope"s Altar and the huge bronze canopy over it had been cordoned off with thick velvet ropes, but there were no security guards to stop anyone from getting past. In fact, the only people in this part of the church were two brothers in black robes arranging microphones at an ornate kneeler at the center aisle. They were uttering bits of Latin prayers to test the devices.
I walked to the rear of the Pope"s Altar, genuflected, then unhooked the velvet rope so I could pa.s.s. The altar was on a platform that would make a perfect hiding place for a bomb; packed with enough explosives the force would easily lift the roof above. I knelt as if praying, then slipped the probe of the sniffer out, moving my hand steadily across the step.
No bing.
I made my way around the platform, from right to left pretending I"d been a.s.signed to smooth the rug so His Holiness wouldn"t trip. If there were stray molecules of explosive, the sensor wasn"t finding them. I moved up and checked the altar itself, arranging the candles as if I"d noticed one out of alignment. The earphone remained silent.
I started around to the front of the platform, between the altar and the Tomb of St. Peter. As I did, one of the priests asked what I was doing.
I"d been so intent on using the sniffer that I had lost track of who was around me. The priest stood at the railing that surrounds the tomb. Bowing my head in his direction without answering, I genuflected-when in doubt, kneel, as the nuns used to say.
"Brother, what are you doing?" demanded the priest. He was speaking Italian.
"I"m looking for bombs," I told him, lowering my head slightly and pulling my sleeve up to show him the device. "This tool looks for traces of certain molecules in the air."
As I looked up, the priest"s eyes seemed to snap into mine and hold them. "You"re not a priest, are you?" he said in Italian.
"No, I"m a security expert from the U.S. The robes are meant to make me less conspicuous."
Now the priest"s stare made me feel as if I were in the confessional at St. Ladislaus, having to confess-well, never mind what I had to confess. I would have felt more comfortable staring down the barrel of a machine gun than holding the gaze of the white-haired shepherd of G.o.d. Finally, he nodded solemnly.
"Do your best, my son," he told me.
If he said something else, it was drowned out by the distinct buzz from the unit as I reached the front of the altar, the probe pointing over St. Peter"s Tomb.
Time out for a second if you haven"t seen the inside of the basilica. St. Peter"s Tomb is a large semicircular area in front of the Pope"s Altar, one level down and set off by a railing. (Technically, it"s called "Il Confessio," a term for a crypt that has linked pa.s.sages.) It looks more like an elaborate chapel than a tomb, and includes the niche where the saint"s bones are preserved.
St. Peter"s Tomb sits like the tip of the iceberg at the peak of a large underground necropolis or burial ground that the basilica and its predecessor were built over. The grottoes or tombs of the popes flank St. Peter"s. Around and below them are the remains of the Roman graveyard that St. Peter was interred in. Mausoleums and pa.s.sages through the city of the dead extend beneath the basilica. The grottoes and the necropolis-called Scavi, Italian for excavations-lay beneath the floor beyond the tomb and are ordinarily reached through small stairways in the pillars beneath the dome.
A temporary platform had been placed across part of the Tomb near the altar to make it easier to celebrate ma.s.s. This was where I was standing when I got the alert.
The sniffer had found an extremely minute trace of PETN-an important ingredient in Semtex and similar plastic explosives. But it was a fleeting hit. I reset the device and failed to get another alert, even when I selected specifically for PETN.
Two false positives in the same area?
An area not accessible to the public?
I squatted down and slowly wanded the temporary platform but got nothing. Then I went across the platform to the railing, leaning over the side. A fence-like grille had been installed around the area below the temporary platform, blocking off the metal doors at the sides. As I put one foot over the railing, trying to find a s.p.a.ce between the ring of candles to get over, a voice behind me said, "No, brother."
I turned slowly. The priest I"d spoken to a few moments before stood a few feet away, frozen. Next to me was the other cleric who"d been with him, holding a 9mm Ruger.
*Coded as opposed to encrypted. The latter involve (usually) complex mathematical formulas that translate plain text into what looks like hieroglyphics. These are great-but like any mathematical problem, can be "solved" given enough time and computational power. A code relies on a prearranged meaning, and if used properly can be impossible to break by math alone. If you and I agree that the word Easter in an email will signal an attack, only you or I can figure that out.
*The copy editor wants to see my math on terminal velocity, contending I could have been doing "only" 150 or so. I told him he can do the math himself. Not only will I supply the calculator and parachute, I"ll kick him out of the airplane for free. [The copy editor graciously yields to superior knowledge and/or firepower.-Copy Editor]
*Don"t try this at home.
14.
"Very slowly," said the padre with the pistol, "move back from there."
"Here?" I said loudly. I held my hands out at my side and stepped back.
"That way," he said, pointing toward the left side of the nave.
"Why?"
He answered by raising the pistol. I took a slow step backward. Trace was somewhere nearby, and I hoped that if I moved slowly enough she would hear what was going on and ambush him. I took another step, and then tripped on one of the rugs.
I honestly lost my footing, but if the pretend priest had been close enough I would have bowled him over. He"d remained several feet away, lowering his pistol with a slight grin as he sighted down the barrel.
The grin was knocked off his face by a roundhouse to the side of the head by the priest who had stopped me earlier. The gun fired as he fell, the bullet ricocheting off the floor a few feet from my chest.
"Run, my son!" said the good priest. "Get help!"
And then he dove on the other man. The pistol flew across the floor. I scooped it up as two monks-or I should say, two men dressed as monks-ran from the back of the church, pulling Rugers from beneath their robes.
I dropped the first with one shot. The second man slid off to the right, out of my line of fire-but right into Trace"s; she took him down with her Kimber Compact.
"Get upstairs and get to the radio!" I yelled to her. "The bomb is in the crypt somewhere!"
"Are you sure?"
"Go! And don"t take the elevator-they may cut the power."
The good priest had pinned the bad priest by his arms and was kneeling over him on the floor. I administered a dose of anesthetic-a quick kick to the bad priest"s skull-then gave the Ruger to the other man. "There"s a bomb below! Don"t let the pope into the building!"
"By G.o.d, I won"t."
I bolted over the railing, sliding down the steps. It took all of two seconds for me to realize there was no way I was getting into the crypt area from here. But the sniffer got strong hits from both sides of the tomb area; I"d been walking back and forth over the explosives.
I jumped back over the railing and headed in the direction of the entrance Karen had used during our earlier visit, now hidden behind a row of pew grandstands. Somebody shouted as I ran. Gunshots followed. I slid down in front of the entrance-which, of course, was locked. Luckily, it was only the standard bra.s.s lock, easily picked. I reached beneath my monk"s cloak and took out my lock picks. I could hear the security people running up the center of the church as I found the right one and fit it into the lock.
Only to lose my grip and have it drop to the floor, whereupon Mr. Murphy gave it good kick under the locked gate.
So where was Trace while Murphy and I were dancing on the main floor?
I thought she was upstairs somewhere, retracing her steps to the balcony and the rope or maybe out on the roof, where she could climb up to the dome and then the cupola from the outside. But she wasn"t.
As she headed toward the staircase, she found a group of nuns-real ones-lying on the floor in one of the side chapels. Trace got them up to their feet, thinking to herd them to safety. A wave of security officials appeared just as they began to move; Trace ducked to the right and the sisters went with her, following her into a side chapel and then behind an altar into a short hallway and an empty room, which turned out to be a dead end.
The good priest must have seen me drop the pick, because he began yelling to the security people to attract their attention. Meanwhile, I fitted a slightly smaller one into the lock. No more tootsie fingers this time: I clicked open the lock and grabbed at the metal bars of the door. A few yards away the security people reached the priest, hauling him to his feet as I closed the door behind me, locking it.
"Marcinko!" yelled someone as I slammed the door shut. "It"s Marcinko!"
I rushed down the steps, my way lit by a dull yellow emergency bulb at the top of the pa.s.sage. I twisted with the staircase, turned right and then left, then hopped down a short flight of steps that took me below the level of the papal crypts to the more ancient necropolis. By now I was completely in the dark; I pulled out my LED pinlight and pushed ahead into a narrow pa.s.sage. After three or four steps, I found my way barred by a security gate, which had been installed very recently; shavings from a masonry drill used to put in the anchors lay on the floor. I picked the lock, slipped past, then pushed it closed quietly as I heard guards coming down behind me.
The walls of the hallway looked like the sides of a Roman street, with the mausoleums to the left and right. There were crypts and huge masonry walls as well, a collection of graves and parts of the first St. Peter"s Basilica intermingling. I went down the narrow hallway in what I thought was the direction of St. Peter"s Tomb. The sound of the guards grew louder; they were at the gate I had just come through. I found an opening between two Roman sarcophagi in the wall and tucked into it, thinking it was a shallow niche I could stage an ambush from. But as I pushed in, I saw a pa.s.sage behind the shadows on my right. The narrow metal door swung open easily. I went through pistol first, stooping to fit into the hallway.
A spiderweb so thick it felt like a hand reached out to grab my face and shoulders. I fell back against the wall in the dark, listening to see if the guards were close. They sounded as if they were pounding on the security gate, so I pulled out my light to see where I was. I half expected to find the room piled with bones. But instead I found myself in what looked like a large, bricked room. There were dust-covered indentations in the walls, each numbered with Roman numerals. At the right of the room, a doorway about five feet high and maybe two feet across opened into another hallway. I squeezed through, half walking, half stooping like the hunchback of Notre Dame.
The pa.s.sage stopped at another hallway. I had the choice of left or right. As I examined it for some hint on what the right direction might be, I saw a thin black wire against the wall ahead of me.
I turned to the right and followed the hall and the wire for about thirty feet before realizing I was moving upward. If the wire was attached to the bomb-a big guess, granted, but how many Romans ran speaker wire into their sarcophagi?-the bomb logically would be the other way. Retracing my steps, I reached the original pa.s.sage, where I heard the m.u.f.fled sounds of the security people who were pursuing me. I kept going, softening my breath not only to make as little sound as possible but also to hear better. The darkness had a hollow hum to it, the sort of sound that you hear in your head when you wake up in a Cambodian hotel at 3 a.m. with the AC going full blast, though it pumps nothing but hot air. The hush seemed to grow louder as I went; it was the echo of machinery from somewhere above, deadening sound throughout the underground pa.s.sages.
After about twenty feet, the pa.s.sage widened enough so that my arms no longer sc.r.a.ped the sides. I still had to stoop, though not quite as steeply. Caged lights were hung along the top of the ceiling, running in a metal strip but not turned on; if there was a switch anywhere nearby, I didn"t see it and wouldn"t have turned it on if I did.
A draft let me know there was another pa.s.sage ahead, and sure enough, twenty or so paces after the intersection I came to it. It had been gated off not only with a security fence but thick wire-mesh fencing. It had been bolted on angled pieces of iron, so there was no way to loosen it from my side.
As I examined the gate, my flashlight beam caught dark-colored bottles about the size of water coolers stacked high to the ceiling, inters.p.a.ced with thick black pads. Large boxes ringed what I could see of the room, and the bottles filled the rest of the s.p.a.ce.
I"d found the bomb.*
I knelt down and picked up the wire. I could cut it easily, with my teeth if I had to, but it was likely that whoever had rigged the bomb had taken that into account. Cutting the wires might set it off rather than rendering it inert.
I had maybe an hour to decide which it would do. In the meantime, I either had to find the detonator, or get inside the room and figure out how it worked.
As I rose, something cold smashed my shoulder, pushing me into the fence.
It wasn"t the hand of G.o.d, or a devil"s claw. It was the business end of a Minimi machine gun.
"He has a pistol in his front belt, and there"ll be at least one more, probably two. Shoot him if he resists."
"Now why the f.u.c.k would I do that?" I growled as light flooded into my face.
"Because you think you"ll escape eventually."
"I don"t think, I know."
Backa.s.s laughed. Two plainclothes Vatican security agents-Backa.s.s plants-were standing about six feet from me, holding machine guns with high-powered lights where scopes would normally be mounted. The lights were bright enough to blind me.
"You haven"t changed, Marcinko. Still the arrogant American he-man, a walking, talking Superman."
I"d have thanked him for the compliment, but I was too busy rebounding from the sharp poke to the side of the head another of his henchmen had delivered. I started to grab for him, but he"d jumped back out of reach.
"It"s not a problem for us to kill you here," said Backa.s.s. "Take his gun."
I pulled my pistol out and slid it along the floor. Then I rolled up my right and left pants legs and took out the Glocks I had strapped there.