02
May 6, 1955: North Rome (Soviet sector)
The church, a humble box of gray brick and slate and narrow, unglazed windows, sat on the point of a sharp turn in a nest of back streets and alleyways a few blocks north of the Vatican. Ivanov peered out through one of the slits, scanning the cobblestone passage outside their hiding place. A sewer had backed up nearby and flooded the alley with a shallow stream of excrement. Unpleasant, but useful. It meant that foot traffic, already light in this part of the Soviet sector, was unlikely to build up as the Romans took to the streets in an hour or so for passeggiatto, the daily late-afternoon/early-evening stroll enjoyed by civilized Italians up and down the peninsula. Even here, under the boot of the Communists, people tried to wriggle free at least once every day, dressing in whatever old, shabby finery they might yet possess to walk their local streets, to greet neighbors and friends, and wherever possible, to dine and drink and talk. If they were lucky, they might even push back the unpleasant realities of life behind the Wall, just enough to sleep a little easier that night.
He envied them.
For Pavel Ivanov, when he closed his eyes at the end of the day, only dreams of death and screaming waited. He would sometimes wake, biting back on a strangled cry, rubbing at the scar that ran down his right temple. It was an old wound, but full of phantom pains that haunted him between sleep and wakefulness.
His fingertips probed gently at the scar now. It was throbbing. Playing Russian roulette with a Makarov had seemed like a bright idea at the time. A beacon of reason, in fact, that had shone with unusual brightness in a very dark moment, many years ago. A shitty round had saved his life but left him scarred. Ever since, he had turned away from the solace of vodka and misery and focused on the mission.
Only the mission.
Today that mission was a man called Valentin Sobeskaia. A Russian businessman, and a boyar of the Party, free to travel to Rome for the GATT talks. And not just to the Soviet-controlled quadrant either; Sobeskaia was trusted enough to be able to cross over to Free Rome, the Allied sector. Free to cross over but not free to move around without an escort or constraints. In “free” South Rome, the NKVD would guard and watch him, holding him as closely as a newborn. Ironically, it was safer and much easier for Ivanov to contact him here, through his mistress, Anna, in the open-air prison of the city’s Communist-controlled north.
The special forces veteran scanned the streets outside again. Nothing moved.
Normal life, such as it was, was possible just a few short streets away, on the other side of the Roman Wall. Here in the Soviet-controlled sector, however, there were no privately owned trattoria or ristorante, no crowded bars hot and bright with life and celebration. There were “people’s canteens,” where you might get a drink if your tastes ran to toe-curling Bulgarian wine and thin, oily Moskovskaya vodka, but they were poorly patronized by the Romans. Only the lowest, most despised cadre of Party members were to be found there. Even the poorly paid junior officers of the occupying Red Army divisions avoided the canteens, preferring to eat and drink in their barracks. It was safer that way. A man was less likely to get a shiv in the neck or turn up floating in the Tiber with his belly sliced open and his innards trailing behind him.
Passeggiatto in Joseph Stalin’s Rome was a grim business indeed.
“Five minutes,” Franco warned him.
Ivanov granted him a curt “Thank you.” Franco Furedi, a trigger man from a minor but rising family of La Cosa Nostra, had guided him into the Soviet sector and hopefully would guide him out again. The common courtesy of a thank-you here and there was not simply good manners but good policy, in Ivanov’s experience. Especially with the mafia. They took the proprieties seriously.
He scoped out what little he could see of their target building, about a hundred yards away, before pulling back from the window. Full night was still an hour off, but it was dark enough inside the church that he fitted his night-vision goggles before stepping away from the window. The Trident Optics 4G headset was nowhere near as advanced as the satellite-linked combat goggles he’d worn back up in the twenty-first, but these were as good as accelerated 1950s technology got—and that was pretty f*cking good, he had to admit. They were the most advanced piece of equipment he carried under the Wall. Unfortunately, he had no live comms link or electronic overwatch on this mission. He would have to make do with his own eyes and ears. And with Franco, of course. His ally of convenience.
With the Trident’s low-light amplification mode powered up, the simple, unadorned interior of the little church emerged in lime-green luminescence around him. The Communists had boarded up the building years ago, as they had with so many in their sector of Rome. Not every church had been shut down, of course. Soviet dominion was ten years young in this part of the city and throughout the north of Italy. The ailing Stalin had not yet consolidated his rule to the point where he could glibly sweep aside two thousand years of culture and history, no matter how much his natural inclination would have been to do just that. And so for now, many churches remained open; but they tended to be the larger cathedrals, where the congregation could be observed en masse and the officiating clergy needed the approval of the Communist regime to practice. Attendance at these state-approved places of worship had been falling away for years. Exactly as planned, Ivanov noted. Most people, he knew, worshipped privately in their homes, tended to by priests who worked secretly, without state sanction, risking their freedom and occasionally their lives to do so.
Franco’s brother, Marius, was one such man. His SIS file was surprisingly thick for that of a humble Catholic priest. (British intelligence, unlike their cousins across the pond, still kept most of their records on paper. They said it was to avoid the sort of breaches that had become commonplace uptime, but everyone in the business knew they simply did not have the budget that the CIA’s forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services, enjoyed for information technology.) Ivanov was familiar with the British and American files on the Furedi brothers, and the networks for which the two men toiled. The Trimbole family in Franco’s case; the Vatican’s ad hoc security apparatus, the Circostanze Particolari, for his brother.
Presumably there was another file, at least on Marius, held somewhere within the local directorate of the NKVD. It was he who had provided the location of this abandoned and shuttered holy place that could be accessed via a buried part of the old city, a pitch-black warren of subterranean passages, catacombs, aqueducts, and even intact but entombed buildings from the late Roman Republican era, about two hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ. A small world lost to time during one of the periodic eruptions of civil conflict that wracked the city and the Empire at that point.
All this Ivanov had secondhand from his guide. They never met with Franco’s brother, who was away somewhere else in the north, on “the pontiff’s business.” The former Spetsnaz officer had no doubt that whatever the holier Furedi sibling was up to, it was almost certainly as dangerous as their mission this evening.
The less spiritually inclined Furedi had already fitted his own NVGs and was playing with the setting, switching between LLAMP mode and infrared.
“Low light is best,” Ivanov said quietly, “especially when we get down below street level. Less drain on the battery too.”
“Sì, okay,” Furedi answered.
Ivanov appreciated the man’s ability to take an order, or at least a suggestion. He had known many soldiers to bristle when he pointed out the obvious to them. But the mafia man was in his mid to late forties and seemed content to take as much instruction from Ivanov as he could get. It was not surprising really. The Russian’s equipment was high-spec and valuable. Furedi would not be allowed to keep the goggles once the mission was over—assuming they survived. But Ivanov knew from his long experience of working with insurgents that giving them access to this kind of equipment simply brought forward the day when they would acquire it for themselves. On that day, a man like Franco Furedi, a man with operational experience of its use, would find himself much valued by his overlords.
“It is time,” said the Italian. A few quiet strides took him over to the window where Ivanov had stood vigil. After a final check of the street outside, he returned, collected the small backpack on the stone floor between them, and led the way into the vestry.
Where the main body of the church had been empty but clean, if very dusty, the small room to the left of the altar space where the priests had once prepared for mass was strewn with rubble. Even using the goggles, picking a path through the shattered flagstones and granite was hazardous. You couldn’t trust your depth perception; it would always be just a notch off.
Both men carefully climbed over the debris to the far corner, to a small hole in the floor, just wide enough for Ivanov to squeeze through. Franco went down first. He was thin and agile enough to lower himself through the opening and drop into the darkness wearing his little backpack. They already knew that Ivanov, about twice his size through the shoulders and chest, would have a tight squeeze. The Russian dropped his satchel down before carefully lowering himself after it. He had been much larger, years ago, back when he still lived in the gym, pumping iron by day and vodka by night. Years on the move had made him considerably leaner, yet he was still an impressive-sized man. That, he suspected, would be a problem in the Roman underground.
He felt Franco’s hands grip his boots and guide them to a piece of unbroken ground. Or rather, unbroken roofline. An hour before, they had come up into the vestry by climbing onto the roof of an ancient temple, on top of which the church had been built, perhaps a thousand years ago. An archaeologist could doubtless spend his entire career studying this small, buried neighborhood, but for the special forces operator it was of interest primarily because of the hidden access it provided to their target.
Once he had regained his footing, Ivanov followed Franco across the temple of some long-dead god, or gods, crouching at one point to duck beneath the rough red bricks of the vaulted ceiling that had buried this part of the old city. A few feet ahead of him, Franco swung over a low line of carved stones with the assurance of a man who had done the same thing many times before.
A couple of cigarette butts, some discarded chocolate-bar wrappers, and an empty fifth of Johnnie Walker, all scattered around the cold ashes of an old campfire in a small cleared area in front of the temple, spoke of previous visits. Ivanov wondered what business his mafia guide must have had with the Church that he should have been entrusted with such useful information.
There was virtually no ambient light down here, not even a few stray photons leaking down from the vestry.
“I am turning on my LEDs,” he warned Franco.
“Si,” Furedi replied.
The mafia soldier turned away from him lest he be temporarily blinded. Ivanov thumbed the switch on his night-vision goggles, powering up a small cluster of light-emitting diodes. Instantly their surroundings sprang into bright relief. Ivanov squeezed his own eyes shut as the optical processors struggled for a second to adapt. After a moment, the gloomy subterranean scene was rendered in opalescent clarity.
The two men, dressed in the gray coveralls of municipal sanitation workers, stood in front of the collapsed remains of whatever building had once been a neighbor to the buried sepulcher beneath the old Roman Catholic church. The rubble provided a convenient series of stepping-stones up to the roof. Ivanov’s natural caution and years of experience demanded that he now survey the area for any change while they’d been topside. But the interred street remained as it had been from an hour earlier, as it had been for a millennium or more. Where once the citizens and slaves of Rome would have looked up into a hot blue Mediterranean sky, he now saw soil and roots and the scalloped brickwork of a vaulted ceiling that here and there gave way to flat slabs of granite and marble.
Franco’s people had done some work toward clearing the street in front of the temple of rock falls and shattered masonry, exposing the original paving stones in the process. But they had done so in order to provide themselves with a more convenient lay-up point rather than out of any interest in ancient history. A few steps away, the cobblestones and pavers were lost again under centuries of soil buildup. It was one of the stranger places that Major Pavel Ivanov had been to; preserved well enough that were he given to flights of imagination, he could very easily have closed his eyes and filled this entombed district with hundreds of long-dead Romans, with priests and acolytes chanting in the temple, with snorting oxen dragging carts laden down with produce from surrounding farmlands as the Republican-era client mobs of the optimates and populares swarmed around them, and legionaries stomped by, marching past in triumph—the only time soldiers were permitted in the city in full regalia.
Ivanov sometimes surprised himself that he could remember so much from his academy days in a future lost to eternity. What were the Communists thinking—that they could just sweep away the crush of so much history and culture? Probably. Stalin had shown himself to be more than willing to eliminate whole peoples if they proved inconvenient. The Romans were not the Chechens or the Cossacks, however, and the spear point of six NATO divisions was poised just a few miles away in Frascati.
No, the great game would be played out here by different rules. There would be blood and terror, but it would be shed quietly in the shadows by men like him. Ten years’ worth of screams and terror were painted onto the backs of his eyelids now. It made him feel uncomfortably warm, sick to his stomach, and a little dizzy.
“We go now,” said Franco. “I lead.”
“Of course,” said Ivanov. Yes, this was his mission and ultimately he would make all the important decisions, but one of the first such decisions was to place his trust in this man who was, in the end, nothing more than the indentured assassin of a small, somewhat pathetic criminal oligarchy. A clan of thieves and killers that just happened to be the most important rival power to the Soviets and their local collaborators in this part of the Eternal City.
Franco added the power of his own headset’s LED cluster to Ivanov’s, lighting up the bizarre surroundings as brilliantly as Piazza Navona on a festival night. The two men walked at a brisk pace through the empty, subterranean streetscape, slowing to climb and occasionally crawl over piles of rubble and earth that were otherwise impassable.
Ivanov was soon sweating with the exertion and found himself impressed again with Furedi’s quiet, obdurate ability to press forward at a steady pace without complaint. He had put the man’s age at just under fifty, perhaps, although it was sometimes difficult with Italians because of the privations they had suffered through the war. Many of them, particularly in the larger cities, looked older and more worn-out than would otherwise have been the case. Franco was gray-haired and hollow of cheek, with a mournful expression on his face most times. But he looked like a man whose hair had been silver from a young age and who had probably come into the world glaring at it with an evil eye. There was no questioning his fitness for this particular task, or his commitment. He had already put one body in the river while sneaking Ivanov into the Soviet sector. Furedi moved through the caverns and crawlways beneath Communist-controlled Rome with a surety and confidence that spoke of real familiarity.
“Down,” he said, pointing at a drainage pipe that disappeared under the collapse of what looked to have been another ancient temple, this one considerably larger than before.
The aperture was just big enough for Franco to be able to crouch deeply and shuffle into it without crawling. For Ivanov, the way through was not so easy, and he soon found himself on his hands and knees. He could hear water running in the distance, and after crawling for a few minutes, the dry, dusty bricks beneath his hands grew moist and slimy. The stench of sewage was much stronger now.
The drainage pipe narrowed and soon Franco was also on his hands and knees, while Ivanov stretched out onto his stomach, inching forward, pushing with his toes and elbows. The effluent on the crumbling brick walls of the old Roman drainage pipe was a blessing, reducing any friction he would have to fight against. He couldn’t help but think of himself as a giant Russian turd being squeezed through the bowels of the city.
“Why you laugh? Is funny, this?” his guide asked as he pulled himself over the lip at the narrowest part of the pipe, eeling down into a much larger drain.
“Toilet humor,” Ivanov deadpanned.
Franco nodded as if he understood exactly what the Russian meant. “We are nearly there,” he said, jutting his chin up at the curve of bricks above them as Ivanov prised himself out into the wider space.
A foul, contaminated stream of brown sludge ran a foot deep down the slight descent to the northeast. Huge black rats skittered and splashed away from them, and the walls seethed with worms and cockroaches and all manner of unidentifiable insect life. Franco turned off the LED cluster on his goggles. The artificial illumination provided by Ivanov’s headset was more than enough to light the way to their next objective, partly because a few shafts of weak, late-afternoon sunlight reached down from street level through a grate farther along. Ivanov turned off his LEDs too. The comparatively bright, green underground world became a darker, muted place again, but the night-vision goggles quickly adapted.
Ivanov could hear street noises close overhead, a truck rumbling through, and the crunch of hobnail boots stomping along a street in unison. A patrol of the People’s Polizia, no doubt. The authorities put extra men on the street about an hour before the traditional start of passeggiatto. A public-order measure, according to the mayor’s office, but in reality a bullying tactic. Increasingly the patrols had taken to arresting strollers for minor, summary offenses. Offenses that carried harsh punishments behind the Wall—in addition to the random beatings that often accompanied arrest.
The OSS operative took a moment to call up a mental map of the street above them. Albergo Grimaldi, the hotel where his contact, Anna, was staying, was less than two minutes’ walk from the church where they had just established an observation point. And it wasn’t the best observation point. A difficult angle in the turn of the street gave them only an impeded view of the Albergo’s top two floors, but it was the best they could do. Approaching the hotel from below, unfortunately, entailed a much longer and more arduous journey. one that had just deposited them, reeking of filth, another minute’s walk from their objective.
“Come,” said Franco, taking a knife from his boot. “His woman will be waiting for us in the laundry block at the rear of the building.”
Ivanov followed him, careful not to splash through the sewage. As they moved quietly along the drain toward the grate, he took up his own weapon—a silenced contemporary-era MP5. A bit on the heavy side because of the lack of composites, but the OSS Field Operations shop had produced a credibly effective copy. He was happy to have it.
Franco whistled through the grate. Ivanov heard the rumbling of steel-shod wheels and, a moment later, a fishmonger parked his cart overhead and reached down to lift the grate for them. The smell of brine and fish gone too long without ice drifted down on them. With a quiet word of thanks, Furedi and Ivanov climbed up and squeezed through into the street.
It was deserted, save for their nameless helper, who nodded briefly, holding the bill of an old fisherman’s cap, before taking himself off down the narrow, cobblestoned conduit. Moving swiftly, they reached the rear of the laundry. Franco, with his knife palmed for immediate use, opened the door and led the Russian past a group of women working through steaming piles of white sheets. As they moved, the women grunted and wrinkled their noses in disgust yet said nothing. It was as though the men were not there. An older woman, bent over and swaddled in black rags, hobbled after them with a bucket and mop. She set to cleaning the sewage they tracked behind them.
Franco looked around, concern on his face.
“What is it?” Ivanov asked.
“I’m not sure.”
A woman screamed and the first shots barked out at exactly the same moment. The washerwomen screamed too, all of them scattering for cover and squawking like startled birds. Ivanov snapped out the stock of his weapon and pulled the bolt back.
The doors to the laundry block crashed open to reveal two NKVD operatives in cheap Russian suits. Their eyes scanned the room, quickly falling on the two men, rank with excrement and filth, standing in the middle of a mountain of white linen.
Ivanov snapped his MP5 up to his shoulder and squeezed off a burst that caught the man to the left in the chest, dropping him in a bloody mess onto a basket of pillowcases. The other operative, a taller, shaven-headed man, dived to the floor, protected by a knot of screaming women blocking Ivanov’s line of sight. The laundry workers stampeded for the door as he and Franco knocked them out of the way, searching for a clear shot.
A pistol roared and bullets ricocheted off the tile near Ivanov’s ankles. The security man unloaded his clip from down low, near a table at the back of the room. Franco circled around a mound of linen, now stained with blood spray, and fell upon him as the hammer of the hapless Russian’s weapon fell on an empty chamber. The mafioso stabbed his knife deep into the man’s throat and ripped it out through the trachea.
Taking his cue, Ivanov ran over to the door leading to the hotel and attempted to peer inside—only to have to pull back when the doorframe splintered from a fusillade of incoming rounds. Changing mags, he quickly emptied three thirty-round clips into the hallway, chasing them with a pair of grenades. The entire room shook when they detonated.
Franco ran up to grab him. Ivanov brushed him off.
“GO!”