Ivanov held up his hand. “All right. We will go back down. But there is a man down there, a Communist called Skarov …”
“We have heard of him,” said the leader, almost dismissively. “A man with many sins to answer for. Perhaps today he will answer for them.”
“Perhaps,” Ivanov conceded. “But first he needs to answer to me. Killing a handful of Beria’s snakes means nothing if you do not clean out the viper’s nest. If I can get to Skarov, find out from him what happened to the man I was supposed to meet, I might learn something that will bring us all much closer to the day we can kill or drive away all of the Communists. Not just the few down in the sewer below us.”
The other man’s face was becoming lost in the gloom. His eyes, already dark and sunken, seemed to disappear as the last of the light faded away.
“All right then,” he said. “I can make no promises about what will happen. Only the good Lord can know that. But we will try to preserve the life of this Skarov so that he might make his confessions to you.”
The man’s strange choice of words and his demeanor gave Ivanov pause for a moment. There was something about this man, something familiar, he thought. He was no mere killer. He seemed more than that. And then Ivanov caught the resemblance as Franco turned slightly to listen to the street outside.
It was Marius Furedi. The priest. It had to be.
5
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.