“Si,” Furedi replied.
The mafia soldier turned away from him lest he be temporarily blinded. Ivanov thumbed the switch on his night-vision goggles, powering up a small cluster of light-emitting diodes. Instantly their surroundings sprang into bright relief. Ivanov squeezed his own eyes shut as the optical processors struggled for a second to adapt. After a moment, the gloomy subterranean scene was rendered in opalescent clarity.
The two men, dressed in the gray coveralls of municipal sanitation workers, stood in front of the collapsed remains of whatever building had once been a neighbor to the buried sepulcher beneath the old Roman Catholic church. The rubble provided a convenient series of stepping-stones up to the roof. Ivanov’s natural caution and years of experience demanded that he now survey the area for any change while they’d been topside. But the interred street remained as it had been from an hour earlier, as it had been for a millennium or more. Where once the citizens and slaves of Rome would have looked up into a hot blue Mediterranean sky, he now saw soil and roots and the scalloped brickwork of a vaulted ceiling that here and there gave way to flat slabs of granite and marble.
Franco’s people had done some work toward clearing the street in front of the temple of rock falls and shattered masonry, exposing the original paving stones in the process. But they had done so in order to provide themselves with a more convenient lay-up point rather than out of any interest in ancient history. A few steps away, the cobblestones and pavers were lost again under centuries of soil buildup. It was one of the stranger places that Major Pavel Ivanov had been to; preserved well enough that were he given to flights of imagination, he could very easily have closed his eyes and filled this entombed district with hundreds of long-dead Romans, with priests and acolytes chanting in the temple, with snorting oxen dragging carts laden down with produce from surrounding farmlands as the Republican-era client mobs of the optimates and populares swarmed around them, and legionaries stomped by, marching past in triumph-the only time soldiers were permitted in the city in full regalia.
Ivanov sometimes surprised himself that he could remember so much from his academy days in a future lost to eternity. What were the Communists thinking-that they could just sweep away the crush of so much history and culture? Probably. Stalin had shown himself to be more than willing to eliminate whole peoples if they proved inconvenient. The Romans were not the Chechens or the Cossacks, however, and the spear point of six NATO divisions was poised just a few miles away in Frascati.
No, the great game would be played out here by different rules. There would be blood and terror, but it would be shed quietly in the shadows by men like him. Ten years’ worth of screams and terror were painted onto the backs of his eyelids now. It made him feel uncomfortably warm, sick to his stomach, and a little dizzy.
“We go now,” said Franco. “I lead.”
“Of course,” said Ivanov. Yes, this was his mission and ultimately he would make all the important decisions, but one of the first such decisions was to place his trust in this man who was, in the end, nothing more than the indentured assassin of a small, somewhat pathetic criminal oligarchy. A clan of thieves and killers that just happened to be the most important rival power to the Soviets and their local collaborators in this part of the Eternal City.
Franco added the power of his own headset’s LED cluster to Ivanov’s, lighting up the bizarre surroundings as brilliantly as Piazza Navona on a festival night. The two men walked at a brisk pace through the empty, subterranean streetscape, slowing to climb and occasionally crawl over piles of rubble and earth that were otherwise impassable.
Ivanov was soon sweating with the exertion and found himself impressed again with Furedi’s quiet, obdurate ability to press forward at a steady pace without complaint. He had put the man’s age at just under fifty, perhaps, although it was sometimes difficult with Italians because of the privations they had suffered through the war. Many of them, particularly in the larger cities, looked older and more worn-out than would otherwise have been the case. Franco was gray-haired and hollow of cheek, with a mournful expression on his face most times. But he looked like a man whose hair had been silver from a young age and who had probably come into the world glaring at it with an evil eye. There was no questioning his fitness for this particular task, or his commitment. He had already put one body in the river while sneaking Ivanov into the Soviet sector. Furedi moved through the caverns and crawlways beneath Communist-controlled Rome with a surety and confidence that spoke of real familiarity.
“Down,” he said, pointing at a drainage pipe that disappeared under the collapse of what looked to have been another ancient temple, this one considerably larger than before.
The aperture was just big enough for Franco to be able to crouch deeply and shuffle into it without crawling. For Ivanov, the way through was not so easy, and he soon found himself on his hands and knees. He could hear water running in the distance, and after crawling for a few minutes, the dry, dusty bricks beneath his hands grew moist and slimy. The stench of sewage was much stronger now.
The drainage pipe narrowed and soon Franco was also on his hands and knees, while Ivanov stretched out onto his stomach, inching forward, pushing with his toes and elbows. The effluent on the crumbling brick walls of the old Roman drainage pipe was a blessing, reducing any friction he would have to fight against. He couldn’t help but think of himself as a giant Russian turd being squeezed through the bowels of the city.
“Why you laugh? Is funny, this?” his guide asked as he pulled himself over the lip at the narrowest part of the pipe, eeling down into a much larger drain.
“Toilet humor,” Ivanov deadpanned.
Franco nodded as if he understood exactly what the Russian meant. “We are nearly there,” he said, jutting his chin up at the curve of bricks above them as Ivanov prised himself out into the wider space.
A foul, contaminated stream of brown sludge ran a foot deep down the slight descent to the northeast. Huge black rats skittered and splashed away from them, and the walls seethed with worms and cockroaches and all manner of unidentifiable insect life. Franco turned off the LED cluster on his goggles. The artificial illumination provided by Ivanov’s headset was more than enough to light the way to their next objective, partly because a few shafts of weak, late-afternoon sunlight reached down from street level through a grate farther along. Ivanov turned off his LEDs too. The comparatively bright, green underground world became a darker, muted place again, but the night-vision goggles quickly adapted.
Ivanov could hear street noises close overhead, a truck rumbling through, and the crunch of hobnail boots stomping along a street in unison. A patrol of the People’s Polizia, no doubt. The authorities put extra men on the street about an hour before the traditional start of passeggiatto. A public-order measure, according to the mayor’s office, but in reality a bullying tactic. Increasingly the patrols had taken to arresting strollers for minor, summary offenses. Offenses that carried harsh punishments behind the Wall-in addition to the random beatings that often accompanied arrest.
The OSS operative took a moment to call up a mental map of the street above them. Albergo Grimaldi, the hotel where his contact, Anna, was staying, was less than two minutes’ walk from the church where they had just established an observation point. And it wasn’t the best observation point. A difficult angle in the turn of the street gave them only an impeded view of the Albergo’s top two floors, but it was the best they could do. Approaching the hotel from below, unfortunately, entailed a much longer and more arduous journey. one that had just deposited them, reeking of filth, another minute’s walk from their objective.