Steven Savile - Silver

Did the Church really want a sympathetic Judas?

Wasn’t it easier for him to be vilified as the betrayer, motivated by greed and jealousy and all of these most human of sins?

Did the martyring of Iscariot change the importance of the resurrection and the other miracles central to what had become the day to day faith of Christianity? Noah wasn’t a theologian, but it seemed to him that it did. It was a subtle shift, but it was a shift just the same. And then the natural extension of that line of questioning became: was that enough of a change for the Vatican to bury the secret?

Noah wanted to think it was, but surely, then, Abandonato wouldn’t have mentioned the Testimony of Menahem ben Jair at all? He didn’t have to say Nick Simmonds had had anything to do with the document. After all, it was easier to hide something when no one knew it existed. Abandonato had broached the subject himself, suggesting that some people believed the third secret of Fatima had been doctored before its publication. Why wouldn’t the Church do something like that? And if it would do that, why wouldn’t it hide any documentary evidence that might prove dangerous to its fundamental belief systems?

Noah’s head was spinning with it all.

The only thing he knew for sure was that Nick Simmonds had been on the dig at Masada, where the Testimony had been unearthed, and he had followed it here to the Vatican two years later. That went beyond circumstance into still-hot smoking-gun territory. The rest was irrelevant.

“Here we are,” Abandonato said. “If there is anything else I can do, you only have to ask.”

“I’d really like to know what is in that testimony,” he said, knowing he was asking the impossible of the priest.

ne of the Swiss Guard stood watch over the exit. He was dressed in his regular-duty uniform of simple blue with a flat white collar, knee-length black socks and a brown leather belt. He wore a black beret tilted slightly to the right. The simple uniform marked him as a newer recruit to the Guard. The blue was a lot less gaudy than the red, yellow, orange and blue motley of the Guard’s official dress. Of course, had he been stationed on the other side of the door, that is exactly what he would have been wearing, along with a ceremonial sword and halberd like something stepped out of Renaissance Rome. The guard’s face was impassive to the point of being sorrowful.

Abandonato didn’t answer him. Instead he opened the door.

The guard nodded slightly to the priest and stepped aside to allow Noah to leave.

Noah wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing at first, but instinct quickly took over.

The door opened onto the piazza, a little way beyond the two dry fountains. Noah had expected to slip out of the same small side door he had entered the Vatican through. This door led out into the grand piazza of San Pietro. He was aware of the long snake of tourists lining up to go into the basilica, but that wasn’t what he was looking at.

Noah stared, fixated at a man as he lurched through the line of shadow The Witness cast across the center of the piazza. The man wore a long flapping raincoat completely out of keeping with the season. The coat was open and his body seemed to bulge disproportionately beneath it. The man clutched something in his right hand. Noah couldn’t see what it was. Something about the way the man was moving set all sorts of alarm bells ringing inside Noah’s head. He held his hand out in front of him like whatever he was holding was contagious. Noah saw the C4 strapped to his body before he saw the fear in his face. The packages of explosives were strapped around his belly with thick bands of gaffer tape. Noah couldn’t see the wires from where he was, but he knew that the device in his hand had to be a detonator. He didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t afford to wait for the Swiss Guard to react, and he had no idea whether they had a means to take the suicide bomber out anyway.

He stepped out into the piazza. The sun streamed down, suddenly, horribly bright after the darkness of the Vatican’s endless corridors.

“On your knees! Get down now!” Noah yelled, drawing his Heckler and Koch USP 9mm and pointing it straight at the bomber’s chest. He tensed, ready to pull the trigger. He couldn’t allow himself to think, not with hundreds of people in the piazza queuing up to file into St. Peter’s. Judging by his misshapen body, there was enough C4 strapped to the bomber to make a hell of a mess. One life for many; it wasn’t even a question.

The man stumbled forward another step.

And then another.

People in the square were starting to look, drawn by the sound of Noah’s voice. Even if they didn’t understand his words, their delivery cut across the chatter and stopped them dead in their tracks.

“You don’t have to do this!” Noah shouted at him, moving a step closer to meeting the bomber halfway. “Just put down the detonator, get down on your knees and put your hands behead your head!”

He locked eyes with the man, willing him to open his hand and drop the detonator. But the man didn’t. He took another step closer to Noah. Noah could see the red of the button poking out from his clenched fist.

“This doesn’t have to end this way!”

The man shook his head violently. Noah could see the strain in every inch of his body. He was wired. Sweat peppered every inch of his skin, streaming down his face. He looked down at his hand and started to raise it.

Noah dropped him. Three shots punched a neat triangle into the area around the bomber’s heart. The man jerked and spasmed, his body thrown into a violent pirouette. He twisted and hit the ground hard, face first. Blood spread around his head where his nose had opened up from the sickening impact. Noah walked toward the bomber, his H amp;K still aimed directly at him. He wasn’t taking any chances, not with the detonator still clasped in the man’s hand. All it needed was the slightest twitch and the whole place would go up.

He didn’t hear the screaming. He didn’t hear the shouts of the Swiss Guard yelling for him to put the weapon down.

He knelt beside the would-be bomber and pulled open his coat. There were wires sticking up from the blocks of C4, but they didn’t go anywhere. They were cut. The C4 wasn’t connected to the detonator in his hand. There was no way the bomb could have gone off. Noah tried to pry the detonator out of the man’s fist but couldn’t. It had been glued around the detonator. He couldn’t have dropped it if he had wanted to.

Everything about this stank.

He had killed an innocent man.

Noah couldn’t afford to think about it.

Even as he knelt down to rifle the dead man’s pockets, looking for a wallet or some form of identification, he knew he was missing something. Something important. Why did he keep walking? All he had to do was kneel down. He couldn’t detonate the C4 strapped to his body, so why did he carry on walking? There was only one reason for that: someone made him. Noah scanned the piazza. There were literally thousands of people, and they were all looking his way. One of them had scared this man so much he had carried on walking even though he knew the next step would be the death of him. Which meant it had to be more than fear for himself that kept him moving. Noah scanned the faces closest to him as though he might be able to pick the monster out of the crowd. Real life wasn’t like that. As long as the real terrorist in the square did nothing to reveal himself he could have been any Tom, Dick or Harriet looking at him.

“Close the square off!” he barked over his shoulder. He twisted to see the guard. The man stood rooted to the spot in shock. “Snap out of it! I need you to close off the damned square. The man who poisoned the city’s here!”