05
North Rome (Soviet sector)
Occupied Rome often suffered from brownouts and occasional full-blown power failures in the early evening, when demand peaked. The few streetlamps that ran off the city grid in this part of Rome flickered and died as the infiltrators emerged from the secret warehouse. Light spilling from the open windows and doors of apartments overlooking the alleyway died at the same time. Ivanov wasn’t sure whether this happened by mere chance or the design of his companions. He was grateful for the cover, whatever the case.
Franco introduced his companions as Marius and Giorgio. The Russian could see a strong family resemblance in the eyes of Marius and Franco. Marius, however, had none of the coarseness or bravado of a midlevel gangster about him. His English was more fluent, more sophisticated, than Franco’s, and when he spoke even briefly, he betrayed the cultured intelligence of a man who had been trained by an academic order. Perhaps the Jesuits. They were very active beyond the Wall.
He wore no clerical garb about him, but twice Ivanov saw him reach for a nonexistent rosary or scapula about his neck. Franco and Giorgio, on the other hand, gave the impression of men who had spent their entire adult lives in the lower orders of a criminal organization. Their banter was softly spoken and sparse, but littered with the crude argot and curses of the Roman street. It made sense that the Furedis should work together, he supposed. No bond was closer than blood. But an operational connection between the mafia and the Church? That would bear thinking about later—presuming there was a later.
The four men were only exposed to the street for half a minute as they hurried from the black-market warehouse to a run-down pensione across and a little way up the alley. Ivanov and Franco removed their night-vision goggles and returned their weapons to the satchels they carried, but the small, fast-moving procession—two dark-suited men and two in disgusting, soiled coveralls—would surely draw the attention of any patrols or informants.
Yet the street was deserted. The windows, balconies, and doors of the apartment buildings overlooking them remained empty. Had Ivanov been leading a platoon of troops down this narrow, deserted alley, his skin would have prickled with the sense of something being wrong, of the threat gathering just beyond the edge of perception. But here he felt … cloaked. As though the city itself had deliberately looked away from them, choosing not to see what was in plain sight.
This was probably one of those neighborhoods where Russian troops and the People’s Polizia trod quickly and lightly, and mostly around the edges. He would not have been surprised to discover that many of the bodies of the occupiers and collaborators that turned up in the river had breathed their last here.
Hurrying into the pensione, they passed by an old man smoking a hand-rolled cigarette who paid them no more attention than he did the scrawny black, one-eyed cat mewling and circling around his boots, looking for food. He didn’t even wrinkle his nose at the stench of their filthy coveralls. It was as though they were not there.
Marius led them down a narrow corridor smelling of boiled tomatoes and burned garlic. They passed through two apartments that appeared to have been turned into one by amateurs with sledgehammers. A hatchway under a flight of stairs led down to another flight, taking them back underground. Ivanov reached for his night-vision goggles, but Marius stayed his hand. The Russian heard a match strike, and half a second later it flared into light. The priest—not that he had identified himself as such—touched it to a candle. The taper took the flame and the mellow golden light bathed the men. Ivanov was careful not to look directly at it, trying to preserve at least some of his night vision.
They were back underground again, in some sort of storeroom. Wooden shelving lined the walls of a long, narrow chamber, close enough that Ivanov could not stretch both arms out. Glass jars and terra-cotta pots appeared to fill most of the shelf space, with tinned food and bags of rice, stamped A GIFT FROM THE PEOPLE OF THE USA, stacked near the entrance.
“This way,” said Marius, who had armed himself with his brother’s weapon. Silencer and all. Franco was now carrying an old British Sten gun. Unsilenced. Giorgio had procured a shotgun from somewhere, all of them tooling up as they made their way down here in darkness.
Ivanov retrieved his own weapon, the MP5, from his bag. He had to reattach the suppressor since the submachine gun would not fit in the knapsack with it screwed on. As a precaution, he also fetched out and fitted his NVGs, although he didn’t turn them on, keeping the lenses flipped up.
“From here on we must be quiet,” Marius said. “As quiet as the grave—unless you wish to find your grave today, Russian.”
Ivanov replied with a flat stare. For the moment he felt numb, a dangerous place where his temper had been known to slip in the past.
The elder Furedi was unaware of Ivanov’s state of mind. He gestured for them to follow. The four men crept down between the long lines of preserves and American food aid, stacked high on both sides of them. The far end did not culminate in a rock wall, as it had first appeared in the dark, but in old, gray, woolen blankets, hung over an exit that had been carved into the bedrock of the city perhaps a thousand years ago, perhaps more.
As he had been doing for most of the day, Ivanov crouched low to avoid hitting his head on the roof. Franco had cleaned out his scalp wound and applied a salve. They didn’t bother with bandages since they wouldn’t adhere to his sweat-soaked, dirty scalp anyway. Still, he did not care to reopen the wound before heading down into the sewers again. Assuming that’s where they were headed. There was no telling underground. He might spend the next hour belly-crawling through a drainage pipe, or creeping across the roofline of a long-buried village.
Marius led them deeper into a series of tunnels that seemed to have been carved out of the city’s foundations for the very purpose of concealed movement. It was possible, even likely, that Marius knew of these tunnels because they remained in the collective memory of his Mother Church. The early Christians were, at times literally, an underground movement.
It seemed they walked, and occasionally crawled, for nearly half an hour. At first, Ivanov wondered how these Romans could possibly know where Skarov and his men were anymore. The NKVD would not have given up the chase, and might well have poured more searchers into the hunt. But there wasn’t the slightest chance that Skarov would have remained in the chamber close to the hotel laundry, where he had first forced his entry into the underground world.
That small mystery resolved itself soon enough, when Marius stopped a few minutes into the journey to speak into another voice tube, exactly like the one Franco had used back in the warehouse. Clearly, the Furedis were receiving updates on the Russians’ whereabouts from allies elsewhere in the tunnel system. Alerted to the presence of the speaking tube, Ivanov began to see them sprouting from the wall at seemingly random intervals. Minutes might go by without encountering one, then two or three would appear at the juncture of a couple of tunnels. The priest and his bandit companions appeared to be intimately familiar with the layout of the ancient passageways and their crudely effective communication system. Ivanov wondered when it had been installed. Obviously not when the tunnels were dug.
The fetid stink of the sewers and drains was not nearly as powerful down here. Not initially anyway. When his nostrils flared and his nose twitched at the first strong whiff of raw effluent, Ivanov wondered if they might be approaching their destination. The candle Marius was using to light their way had burned down about half its length. Their pace slowed and eventually he brought them to a halt where the tunnel widened slightly before splitting into two diverging passages. He motioned for the others to gather closely around him.
“We must be very quiet now,” he said in a voice so low, Ivanov was forced to lean forward to make out each word. “We will separate here. Franco, you will take the Russian to the upper gallery. Giorgio and I will join Stefan and Marco on the southern terrace.”
The last two names meant nothing to Ivanov, but he assumed these were the men Marius had consulted. Were there more of them around? he wondered. Did they work for the priest, and for his masters in the Vatican, the warrior monks of Circostanze Particolari? Or were they from Franco’s “other” family. He hoped the latter. If they were about to do battle with an NKVD strike team, he preferred to have killers and thugs on his side rather than ecclesiastical agents. Although, for all Ivanov’s certainty that Marius Furedi was a soldier of God, the man had about him the cold, detached air of an actual soldier who had seen enough death to become fatalistic about his own chances.
“Franco will lead you, Russian,” said the priest. “Follow him and do as he says. The Communists have reinforcements. We have counted fifteen of them in the chamber ahead and more on the way.”
He must have seen the look on Ivanov’s face.
“It matters not,” he assured the Russian. “We shall kill them all.”
“But not Skarov,” warned Ivanov.
“No. He is not there.”
The numbness disappeared, replaced with a low, boiling cauldron of anger deep behind his eyes. Ivanov let some of the tension loose from his left hand before squeezing it into a fist, so tightly that knuckles popped. So now they were off on a forlorn hunt to bag a few foot soldiers for no apparent end.
“Do not concern yourself with him,” said the priest. “He has returned to the surface. We are watching him, and we will take up our business with him when we are done here. If you want your foe, you must draw him back down. And making a sacrifice of his men will do just that.”
Fury and murder burned behind Ivanov’s eyes, but he had not survived so long in this game by allowing himself to vent his feelings uncontrollably. More than ever he was beholden to these Italians. Not just to guide him through the world beneath the streets of the city but to guide him back toward his original objective—the contact at the Grimaldi. And now also to Skarov, who seemed to be using Sobeskaia as bait. Ivanov diverted his anger and used it to clear his mind, burning away fear, extraneous thoughts, and any desire he had to slit the throats of his Roman companions. With a deep breath, he clamped down on ill feeling and turned his wits to the task at hand.
“It is for the best,” Marius told him. Franco nodded solemnly beside him, at least having the good grace to look a little ashamed. Giorgio remained as he always had—a stone-faced killer.
Marius blew out the candle and Ivanov reached instinctively for his NVGs. Still set to infrared, they picked out the heat signatures of the three Italians but little of the background detail. The men appeared like three red ghosts floating in the vacuum of space. Switching to low-light amplification was a surprise. The tunnels were more brightly illuminated than he would have imagined when the priest extinguished the candle. A hot wash of photons was leaking from a powerful light source nearby.
The Furedis and Giorgio moved off without apparent difficulty. Franco trailed his fingertips along the ceiling and the rough-hewn rock face of the ancient shaft. The other two disappeared before Ivanov could see whether they were negotiating their way in the same fashion. For the moment, he decided he would stick with LLAMPS vision, adjusting the photon gain as they drew closer to the light.
The tunnel took a sharp turn to the left and climbed steeply up a flight of worn steps carved directly out of the granite floor. A millennium or more of foot traffic had smoothed the edge of the steps and eroded a deep bowl in each of them. Franco was moving very quietly now, reminding Ivanov of an old and mangy but dangerous cat. He drew to a stop a few paces beyond the top step.
Another man awaited them there.
Or rather, a boy, to judge by his prominent cheekbones and the fiery eruption of acne that covered most of his face. His eyes shone brightly in the NVGs, like poisonous green stars, making him a monstrous visage that was not helped by his vulpine smile. Precisely the sort of creature who might live in the underworld, with greasy, matted hair and a mouthful of crooked teeth.
The boy gestured at Franco, who turned and pointed at Ivanov’s combat goggles, indicating that he should remove them. The OSS operative did so, surprised to discover that after a few seconds of squeezing his eyes closed to adjust, he could see quite well. He could also hear the voices of a number of NKVD troops somewhere below their position.
Franco had led him into a cavern just large enough to accommodate the three of them. To Ivanov’s dismay, the boy was armed with a Great War–vintage bolt-action rifle. There was no time to change that now.
A careful peek around the entrance of their cave confirmed that the troopers had gathered in a much larger cavern beneath their vantage point, and were all toting reengineered AKM-74s with folding stocks and rails loaded with LED tactical lights, laser sights, and, in some cases, grenade launchers. They were also illuminated by battery-powered camp lights and appeared to be setting up a base from which to conduct a systematic search. Ivanov closed his eyes and did his best to recall every detail of the site picture he had snapped in his mind.
He saw three camp lights, a stack of bedding, two foldout tables covered in rolls of paper—drawings and maps of the sewers, from the city engineers perhaps?—a couple of modular-frame tents, and even a portable cooking stove. There were at least twelve to fifteen men down there, similar to the report Marius had received.
What Ivanov did not see was any sign of Skarov, of course. The spy catcher had run where the trail was hot. Back to the hotel, as Furedi had said, to secure the only link to Ivanov that he had. The boyar.
The former Spetsnaz officer shook his head, unhappy with the way this was playing out, with him being pushed across the chessboard as somebody else’s pawn. He was used to moving other people around—not being played by them. Resolving to speak to the priest before this whole thing went completely off the rails, he had just moved toward Franco, intending to whisper to him that he urgently needed to see his brother, when a Russian voice shouted out in alarm. Within a second, two explosions roared and shook the ground underfoot, knocking Ivanov slightly off balance.
The boy snarled as his rifle began cracking out single shots, then Franco’s shotgun boomed, and the whole world went up in a roar of gunfire and a string of grenade explosions. Ivanov cursed, once, in Russian, and swung the muzzle of his submachine gun around the mouth of the small cave. He fired controlled, short bursts at first from his MP5 in the general direction of where he remembered small knots of NKVD troopers had been standing, less than a minute before. The suppressor did its job, deadening the muzzle flash and the report of his weapon, but making him feel slightly ridiculous in the devastating uproar of pitched battle that had erupted all around them.
Bullets hummed and whizzed past, stitching the rocks, bricks, and concrete around his position. Someone had zeroed in on his position and began to lay down suppressive fire. An explosion far to his right blew out a chunk of the ceiling, probably from a grenade launcher.
Ivanov gave up on short bursts and emptied the hundred-round drum in a general arc from left to right. Expended in a few seconds, he dropped the drum and replaced it with a conventional magazine. Repeating the process four times, Ivanov sprayed the bulk of his ammunition into the cavern below before throwing a grenade or two of his own into the fray.
The boy grunted and gurgled as his throat exploded, painting Ivanov’s face with a splash of hot gore. His body dropped and rolled over the lip of the cave mouth, tumbling away into the firestorm below. Franco racked shell after shell into his shotgun, raining hundreds of pellets down on the Russians, never once speaking, even to curse, while he did so.
An enormous explosion, seemingly volcanic in the confined space, stabbed Ivanov’s eardrums like hot knitting needles. The blast was far too large for a hand grenade; and after a moment’s disorientation, he surmised that one of the gas cylinders attached to the camp stove had ruptured and exploded. The volume of fire trailed off immediately.
Dark shapes emerged from the far side of the large cavern. Marius’s men. They drew sharp blades and knelt before the ones who still cried for their mothers, gagging on their own foamy blood. Throats were slit, carotids stabbed, and hearts popped in much the same workmanlike fashion one might go about strangling a chicken for dinner.
“We go now—hurry!” shouted Franco. Ivanov could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears. They dived back into the tunnel system, navigating by the light of fires burning behind them.
This is bullshit, he thought, before realizing that he had spoken or perhaps even shouted aloud. Furedi ignored him, charging forward, navigating as he had before by running his fingers along the walls and the rock face above his head. When the flickering orange light of burning equipment and bodies was no longer sufficient, Ivanov slipped his NVGs back on before swapping out a magazine from his weapon.
Unsurprisingly, Marius and Giorgio were waiting for them at the junction of the two tunnels. The priest—if that was indeed what he was—seemed entirely unperturbed by the action. He accepted the death of the boy with a quick nod and the sign of the cross.
“This will bring many more of the Communists,” he said. “They are already in the tunnels and catacombs.”
Ivanov could not help himself. “A brilliant plan then, Padre. Kill a few stupid troopers so that we can get ourselves killed by many more.”
Giorgio skinned his lips back from his teeth like a dog, but neither Franco nor Marius reacted. Nor did the elder Furedi demur at being addressed as “Padre.”
“It all serves a purpose,” he replied calmly. “God’s purpose and yours. The man you seek, this businessman, I am told he is no longer guarded by one hundred of Stalin’s attack dogs. Only a small squad remains.”
Ivanov looked at him as though he were a particularly stupid child.
“Because they are all down here hunting for us.”
“Exactly,” said Marius. “You can thank me later.”