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 fucking 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.”
“Si, 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.