Steven Savile - Silver

“Precisely why it is least likely, then,” Konstantin said. “It is where security will be tightest. What about the parade route?”

“The cavalcade will run along the riverside and through the Old Town. The route’s a little over three miles with plenty of meet-and-greet spots. It’s going to be pretty exposed from what I can see on the computer screen. Hardly any of the streets have the same sort of blanket surveillance camera coverage we’re used to, so I’m not going to be a lot of use when the shit starts hitting the fan.”

“You do what you do, I will do what I do,” Konstantin said, and hung up.

The rhythm of the wheels on the tracks was soothing. He found himself dropping into a thought pattern that coincided with the duh-duh-da-duh duh-duh-da-duh vibration that shivered te floor beneath his feet.

Provided the train ran according to the schedule, he would arrive around two and a half hours before the Pope was scheduled to deliver evening prayers. That gave him a little time to walk the parade route, looking for possible vantage points a sniper might use and that kind of thing, but crowds would be gathering at the same time, making his job more difficult.

There was corruption here. The entire thing reeked of it.

Humanity Capital was big business. Devere Holdings was bigger business. That Miles Devere had been in Israel at the time of the quake and worked with the real Akim Caspi put him right at the middle of this particularly tangled knot Konstantin was trying to unravel.

He didn’t doubt for a minute that Lethe was right; Devere would want to see the endgame played out, but he wasn’t an ideologue like Mabus. Devere was a money man. Devere had money. Money bought people. It was a fairly simplistic worldview, but he’d yet to have it disproved. He had corporate muscle. He developed corporate strategies that exploited the system, and he loved the system quite simply because it allowed him to exploit it.

Mabus was a different beast entirely. He didn’t hire mercenaries to prolong a conflict or bribe men to hit a civilian ward so that he could be hired to rebuild it. He wasn’t a profiteer. He didn’t need to be. He was a zealot, just like the Sicarii had been two millennia ago. And like any zealot he relied upon fanaticism as his stock in trade. Mabus had a single core belief: the Church was founded upon a lie. The man history loathed as the great betrayer was in truth the real Messiah, a religio-martial liberator who made his sacrifice out of love, sealing it with a kiss.

That belief had caused Mabus to bring together thirteen others and forge them as self-styled Disciples of Judas. Those thirteen had cast their nets out, recruiting others to their faith. Together they formed the Shrieks. Their purpose? The only one that made any sort of sense to the Russian was an attack on the very foundations the Catholic Church was built upon. After all Judas was their Messiah, not Jesus. Why should the world pray to the cross and drink the blood of Christ if his entire life was a lie? What salvation was there in that? It was a seductive way of reasoning.

He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He checked it. Lethe’s data packet had arrived. He opened it, checking the locations, dates and times, and realized there were far too many for comfort. Protecting the man was going to be a nightmare. Even without walking the parade route he knew there would be far too many places an assassin could hide. Modern sniper rifles made it possible for a skilled shooter to be so far removed from the scene that chasing them was next to impossible if so many of the variables of the murder weren’t already fixed. So, of course, the last ting Konstantin was going to do was waste his time trying to protect the Pope. Besides, he had his personal guard, willing to take a bullet for him and earn their place in heaven. And of course, the entire BKA would be on high alert from the moment he stepped out into public. No, Konstantin would put his particular skills set to a slightly different use. As the old football adage went, attack was the best form of defense.

He would find the man and kill him before he could pull the trigger.

That gave him anything from three hours to two full days to find the assassin, depending upon when he had decided to take the shot.

The train rolled on. Konstantin found himself drowsing. He let himself slide into a shallow sleep. He had no idea when he might sleep again.

While he slept he dreamed in Russian. In his dream Mabus was the snake in the darkness, whispering with its forked tongue. He held his Glock but couldn’t see what he was aiming at. And then he saw it, the snake coming out of the darkness. He pulled the trigger again and again and again, making the snake writhe. He shot ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred bullets into its cold skin. He was a snake charmer, making it rise. Then the creature arced forward and bit him. He fired and fired and fired again.

He woke with a start, lurching forward in his seat.

The ICE train was pulling into a town that looked like it had been lifted straight from the fairy tale world of Grimms’ fables.

The driver announced the next station. It wasn’t Koblenz. He closed his eyes again. This time he did not allow himself to sleep. He was hungry, he realized. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. He walked along to the restaurant car and ordered a too-hot cup of black coffee and a microwaved pizza slice in a silver-lined box along with a cinnamon bun dripping white icing, and a candy bar. It was all sugar food. Fast energy junk. But he didn’t feel like a sit-down silver-service dinner, which was the only alternative, so it would have to do.

He worked his way back through the train, rolling with the motion of the car as it leaned into the long curves in the track, until he was back in his seat. He sipped at the coffee. He ate the pizza in six bites, barely taking the time to chew before he swallowed, he was so hungry. He licked the stringy cheese from his fingers.

If he thought like a Russian, it made sense that the Disciples of Judas would want the Church’s “papa” dead. It was a bold move. It was a strike right at the heart of their false messiah. It obeyed the Moscow Ru come hard, come fast and leave them frightened. It was just like breaking down the door at four a.m. and dragging a man out of bed, naked, kicking, screaming and, most important of all, helpless. But more than that, with the eyes of the world watching, it turned the murder of one man into a spectacle.

The driver announced Koblenz Hauptbahnhof.

Konstantin wrapped the bun in the napkin it came with and crammed it and the candy bar into his pocket and moved toward the door.

He stepped off the train straight onto the set of a macabre morality tale straight from the Grimms’ repertoire. It was fitting, given the gingerbread quality of the houses and the quaint narrowness of the cobbled streets. There were police waiting at the end of the platform. Instinctively Konstantin reached for his pocket for his papers. The fear was ingrained in him. It took him a moment to remember this wasn’t Moscow and these men weren’t looking for traitors to the Soviet cause. They didn’t care if he was a defector, but it was hard for him to forget that he was exactly that. He walked toward the station house. Not too quickly, not too slowly. The policeman nodded slightly as he past. Konstantin inclined his head a fraction.

The station house had that unique railway station smell, a combination of flowers, fast-food grease, diesel engines and the desperation of a place where people were forever saying goodbye.

There were ten uniformed officers that he could see spread out across the platforms and the main entrance. In the few minutes it took him to walk across to the coffee stand beside the ticket office, buy a piping hot Americano that came served in a paper cup thin enough to burn the fingers, sit down on a bench and drink it, they didn’t challenge a single traveler. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but they obviously didn’t see it in the faces of the bald businessmen, the skinhead in the torn Clash tee-shirt that said London was calling, or the woman in the high heels and A-line skirt whose powerful calf muscles turned all the heads as she walked by. They didn’t see it in the bearded man in his college professor jacket with worn-out elbows, or the lanky student with his sunglasses and dyed-black hair that hung down past his shoulders.