The Italian girl and her Russian charge ghosted across the roofline, crouched over, careful not to expose their silhouettes any more than was necessary. Ivanov could see a major gap coming up and wondered whether he would be expected to make such a giant leap. But Eva pulled up before they reached the edge, turned to him, and pointed to an old wooden ladder.
“Lay it across to the next building. It will reach.”
It did, but the journey across was nerve-racking. The experience took him back to his earliest days of special forces training, when instructors had forced a young Pavel Ivanov and his fellow superheroes-in-waiting to perform any number of gravity-defying feats of life-threatening stupidity. He forced himself to forget the memories of one young friend who had fallen and snapped his spine like a twig. Best just to look ahead, keep the eyes level, breathe.
He stepped off the ladder just behind Eva, pulled it in toward them, and laid it down carefully in the gutter. The building beneath them overlooked a small square, into which now drove an army truck and a BMP tank-an unwelcome sight that immediately had the rooftop pair crouch-scuffling around to the reverse slope. The helicopters were far enough off that they could hear the crash of the truck’s tailgate as a platoon of soldiers alighted, the crunch of their boots on the cobblestones, the shouts of officers and NCOs.
Eva and Ivanov stayed low and hidden on the lee side of the roofline before dropping down onto a building next door, leaping across a small gap to the one beyond it, and repeating the trick with another ladder after that. It took well over an hour but eventually the girl delivered them to a church overlooking a section of no-man’s-land between the Allied and Soviet sectors. Work on the Roman Wall was incomplete here. A minefield and rows of razor wire still separated the different worlds, and here on the northern side of the divide, an armored personnel carrier idled away next to an incomplete guard tower. The soaring concrete battlements that bisected the ancient settlement elsewhere had not yet been raised here. Ivanov could see that the Communists had made inroads with earthmoving equipment, but they were still many months from completing one of the last links in the giant prison wall.
He leaned back against the steeply pitched roof of the old church, looking back to where they had come. Half of North Rome seemed to be blacked out. Fires burned here and there, and four gunships snarled and swooped and occasionally spat out long tongues of fire.
“I did all this?” Ivanov asked quietly.
A few steps ahead of him, Eva paused before edging her way around the bell tower at the front of the church. “No, Russian, you did not do this,” she replied. “Stalin did.”
Having delivered her rebuke, she pushed on, leaving Ivanov to ponder where this girl had been and what she had done in her brief life to see so deeply into things. Eva Furedi-if that was her name-looked like she was only eleven or twelve years old, but it was possible, he supposed, that she’d had a few more years on the planet than that. She grew up in the postwar years, when food was scarce, even more so than now. Perhaps the urchin was a young woman. Or perhaps life in the slave city had simply squeezed all the youth from her at a very early age.
He carefully followed Eva around the tower installation, just as the troop carrier grunted and rumbled before suddenly lurching forward and driving off. He cursed softly and wondered aloud what was happening, and was surprised to be answered by a familiar voice.
“A pig can always be led to the smell of a tasty treat somewhere else.”
Marius … Ivanov cursed again, louder this time.
“Please, please,” said the priest, from his comfortable repose against the small twin to the tower around which the Russian had just edged. “The young lady does not need to hear such language.”
Ivanov was about to point out that the young lady was one of the more ruthless females he had met since encountering the black widows of Chechnya, far off in the future. But he held his tongue. Eva was staring at Marius with rapt attention. The Russian had seen that sort of devotion before. And it would’ve been oafish to speak ill of her. Ivanov owed her his life, in all probability.
“So, where to now?” he asked instead.
“Into the light,” said Marius, waving one hand toward the glitter and sparkle of Free Rome.
He reached down beside him and lifted up an old bolt-action rifle. Ivanov recognized the cumbersome attachment at the end of its muzzle: the priest intended to shoot a line over the Wall. Heavy black climber’s rope ran down from the sabot into a small window of the belfry behind him.
Furedi braced himself and casually fired the weapon. Hundreds of meters of light, high-strength nylon twine snaked out across the gap between the divided city.
“It will take a moment for my brethren in the holy city to make fast the line.” Even as he spoke, though, the rope went taut.
“The girl should go first,” said Ivanov.
“The girl will stay here, Russian. With me. We have the Lord’s work to do.”
Ivanov started to protest, to insist that it would be too difficult and dangerous for her to remain undetected, with Skarov and Beria raking at the city for any sign of him. He turned toward Eva to ask if she wanted to escape with him, but the girl was already gone. She had disappeared inside the belfry through another window.
“Bastards,” Ivanov spat. “You would use a little girl — ”
“Like you just did?” Marius said, not unkindly. “You would not have escaped the city without her help, my friend. Without all of our help. Good men and women died for you today. They died for Rome and for their God too, lest you feel you cannot bear the burden of their sacrifice alone. Eva Corleone has her part to play in God’s design, as do we all. She will play her part here, with me. You have another path to walk.”
The line was secure now. The priest tested it and nodded.
“But their lives were wasted,” said Ivanov with real bitterness. “My mission was a failure.”
Furedi shook his head and gestured for the Russian to come forward, as he slung a glider over the line.
“We have poked the bear today,” said the priest. “Bled him well-a cut here, a cut there. Even the largest and most ferocious bear cannot sustain itself while it bleeds constantly. You did not achieve your goals perhaps. But we did well today, and those of us who died can go to our judgment knowing that we died well, for a good cause. For our city, and for God. Now go, Russian. Time is short.”
Ivanov took a grip on the glider mechanism. He turned to speak to Marius one more time, but the priest gave him a push and out he sailed, away from the church tower and across the wasteland toward the free city.
13
South Rome (Allied sector)
While Plunkett guarded the entrance to the dining room, and Viv scouted the service lane behind Babington’s as an escape route, Harry pushed Sobeskaia up against the wall again, next to a freezer unit. Kitchen staff gave them a wide berth. Harry was covered in blood, but then again the sight of blood was not unusual in a large commercial kitchen. The murderous look in his eyes was a little less commonplace, however.
“Comrade Sobeskaia,” said Harry, as calmly as he could manage, “I am going to do my very best to get you out of here alive and in one piece, and back to the embassy with the nice Mr. Plunkett over there …” He nodded to where the SIS agent had braced himself against the kitchen doors. “And Mr. Plunkett will then do his very best to make you disappear.”
The short, rotund man, with a waxy sheen to his skin that seemed almost permanent, nodded gratefully. “Thank you, thank you,” he began again.