“You know this man?” Genrikhovich asked, goggle-eyed. His complexion had turned gray with terror, beads of sweat putting a sheen of moisture on his forehead.
“Of course he knows me,” said Pesek, smiling. “I saved his life not too long ago. We are the best of friends. Isn’t that right, Colonel?”
“Not anymore.” Holliday blindly squeezed the trigger of the Serdyukov in his pocket. The automatic made a sound like a loudly barking dog. A smoldering hole appeared in Holliday’s jacket, and the single round gouged a trough like a giant ice-cream scoop in the left side of Anton Pesek’s head from his eye socket to the back of his skull.
Blood and brains fountained, spraying the ceiling and the wall behind the assassin, spattering against the mounted icons. Pesek slipped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. Once upon a time Holliday had slit this man’s throat on a tossing boat in Venice Lagoon, but this time he was dead for good.
There was a long, stunned silence in the room. The only thing left of the gunshot was the ringing in Holliday’s ears. Bizarrely, a quote from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly popped into his mind: “When you have to shoot, shoot-don’t talk.”
“You fool! You stupid American fool! You killed him!” Genrikhovich moaned.
“I could have let him kill you,” said Holliday. “Would you have liked that better?”
“He was coming for you, not for me!”
“You seem awfully sure of yourself.”
“I am sure!”
“Why?”
“Because your. .” Genrikhovich stopped abruptly.
“Because why?” Holliday asked.
The Russian shook his head. “There is no reason, but you said you knew this man, and I have never seen him before. You must have been his target.” Genrikhovich folded his arms across his chest and closed his mouth firmly. The discussion was clearly over.
Ivanov the priest continued to stare at the crumpled corpse on the floor as though it were as hypnotic as a weaving cobra in a basket. Eddie sat in his chair for a moment, then stood and left the room.
Holliday got up from his chair, crossed to the body and squatted down, careful to keep out of the blood-and-muck puddle behind what was left of Pesek’s shattered skull. He quickly went through the man’s pockets and came up with a passport, a wallet stuffed with euros and a cell phone.
The phone was obviously a throwaway-it had only two numbers in its directory, one with a 420 country code and a 2 area code-Prague. The other had a country code and no area code: 39. There was only one country in the world with that prefix.
“He was working for the Vatican,” said Holliday.
“Why would he be doing such a thing?” asked Genrikhovich.
“The Vatican does not employ assassins,” said Ivanov, shocked.
“You are very naive if you believe that, Father,” said Holliday. “This man has tried to kill me before. The Vatican does whatever it needs to do to protect itself. They also have a long-standing quarrel with me.”
“The Vatican does not have people killed,” said the Orthodox priest firmly. “It goes against everything that any Christian faith stands for.”
“You have never heard of the Assassini? They date back to Pope Callixtus and the Borgias.”
“They are a myth,” said the priest.
“The man on your floor is no myth.” Holliday grunted, rolling the body over and taking the automatic out of Pesek’s hand.
“This is madness,” said Genrikhovich.
Eddie reappeared with a towel in one hand and a large plastic garbage bag in the other. “I have emptied the frio, the refrigerator,” said the Cuban.
“Good thinking.” Holliday nodded.
“Why have you emptied my refrigerator?” the priest asked, looking at the Cuban strangely.
Instead of answering, Eddie went and knelt down beside Holliday. He eased the towel around Pesek’s ruined head and wrapped the rest of the towel around the face and neck. He then spread out the plastic bag beside him, and together he and Holliday lifted the dead man’s shoulders onto it. Without speaking the two men each grabbed one of the dead man’s feet and dragged him out of the room, the towel and the plastic bag keeping too much mess from spreading across the old pinewood floor. Genrikhovich and the priest followed them as they dragged the body into the kitchen.
The door to Ivanov’s refrigerator was sagging open. Everything had been removed, including the shelves, and had been laid out on the narrow counters. Holliday and Eddie manhandled Pesek’s body in front of the refrigerator and then wrestled it into a sitting position.
“What are you doing!?” Ivanov asked, gazing at the piles of food stacked around the small room.
“Putting the body inside.” Holliday grunted as they lifted Pesek’s shoulders, pushing his ruined, towel-covered head and his upper body into the refrigerator. They pushed a little more until they’d folded the dead man’s legs underneath his buttocks and squeezed in the dangling left arm. Panting with the effort, Holliday and Eddie closed the door and leaned on it until the latch clicked.
“What have you done?” Genrikhovich whispered.
“We’ve bought ourselves some time,” said Holliday. There was a tea towel hanging over the bar of the stove and he wiped his hands on it. “It’s October. If you keep the heat off in the apartment and the refrigerator on, the body’s not going to start to stink for a while. It won’t stop decomposition forever, but maybe long enough for us to get away.”
“Get away?” Ivanov said. “This is where I live! We must call the police! It was self-defense; I will testify to it.”
“Really?” Holliday said. “As I understand it, you’re the son of one of the most infamous defectors in KGB history, and there’s a corpse with half its head blown off in your apartment. Do you really want to advertise that fact? Your friend Genrikhovich here is already wanted by the FSB, and so are Eddie and I. We’re both in this country on fake passports, which, by definition, makes us spies-you really want to call the Moscow police about this? The public prosecutor would hand you over to the ghouls in the Lubyanka within five seconds. Do you really want that, Father Ivanov?”
“I am afraid he’s right,” said Genrikhovich. “I am very sorry, Anatoliy.”
“But I was so close!” the priest said. “I’m sure I have it right this time. The coins prove it!”
“What coins?” Holliday asked.
“Come with me,” said the priest. He gave a last long look at the closed refrigerator and then turned back to the living room. There was a large gilt-and-silver icon on tin of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child hanging on the wall next to the couch. Ivanov took it down, revealing a strip coin holder taped to the back. He showed the strip of coins to Holliday and Eddie, his glance occasionally slipping toward the mess on the floor and the wall made by the exploded remains of Anton Pesek’s head.
There were ten coins, all gold, all the size of a quarter, all showing the profile of a man with long curling hair. “Who is he?” Holliday asked.
“Constantine the Eleventh, Dragases Palaiologos,” said the priest.
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“He was the last emperor of the Byzantines,” said the priest. “When his daughter Sophia married Ivan the Terrible, Constantine gave him his great library as a gift so it would not fall into the hands of the Vatican.”
“And?”
“The great library was Sophia’s dowry. It was brought here.”
“Here as in Russia?”
“Moscow,” said the priest.
“According to experts it was buried in an underground chamber beneath the Kremlin.”
“And is hasn’t been found?”
“Stalin looked for it, Khrushchev looked for it and so did Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Now Putin searches for it,” said Genrikhovich. “If Putin and his cronies find it they will have the power to destroy the Western world.”
“Why?”
“It holds the secret of the fifth sword,” said the Russian. “Everything we have been looking for.”
“And you think you’ve found it?”