Steven Savile - Silver

Or none of them.

He could be wrong.

No. The Sicarii made themselves invaluable to their targets. They stood at their side as best friends, then slipped their daggers into their “friends.” This place, this crowd was perfect.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have been played by Devere, steered into another mistake-this one fatal. The man was playing a long game, and each move was thoughtful and well planned. The set-up here was perfect. It could have been a fake, luring him into the open, turning him into the “assassin” and allowing the BKA to take him out, allowing the Pope to die another day when their guard was down.

He glanced to the right and saw two more BKA agents running along the side of the crowd, following the route the cars had taken to the stage. The pair had their guns drawn and held low so as not to startle the crowd.

They were staring at him as they ran.

He pushed between another couple with their heads bowed in prayer. He didn’t let them slow him. He couldn’t afford to. He looked up at the big clock. He had a minute. Two. It was difficult to tell precisely. There would be a small disparity between the timer, his watch and the church clock, but he had no way of knowing precisely how big it would be until the gunshot came. And by then it would be academic.

There was less than a minute.

He reached the stage as the first of the BKA men reached the steps.

Four things happened at once. The gunshot cracked, followed a fraction of a second later by two more, and the trees exploded in feathers and fear, a hundred birds startled into flight. Peter II’s head came up, his prayer broken. There was naked fear in his eyes. He knew tsound. Of course he knew it; it was hard-coded into the DNA of every man, woman and child under the sun. He stopped talking, so the speakers all around the square fell silent. There was a lull for a heartbeat as the shock registered, then people reacted, torn from their prayers by the unmistakable sound of the gunshot. At first there were screams of shock as the birds exploded from the trees, then the screams changed in nature and pitch from confused to frightened. On the stage the Swiss Guard reacted, lunging forward to protect the Holy Father. Konstantin saw the glint of silver in the nearest guard’s hand.

He couldn’t let the man reach the Pope-even though that meant throwing himself up onto the stage.

Konstantin shouted out a warning as he hit the red cloth of the stage.

He thought a second silent prayer then, gambling that the BKA agents wouldn’t take a shot through the crowd for risk of hitting some innocent bystander. In their place he would have taken the shot, risking the collateral damage to protect the principal. He had to hope they were better men than he was. Because that was what it was going to come down to: How much did they value human life? Pope Peter II’s, his, the crowd’s? For this instant, this second, everything hung in the balance. Another shot would almost certainly cause a stampede as frightened people ran for their lives, and in such a tight enclosure more than a few of them would be hurt in the crush.

Konstantin hit the stage and rolled, coming up on his knees, hands pressed flat against the red cloth.

Two of the Swiss Guard reacted while the others seemed trapped in indecision. They came forward to stop him, halberds leveled at his chest. The only other guard moving reached the Pope and seemed to be protecting him from the madman that had rushed the stage. Konstantin saw the silver dagger clenched in his fist.

He didn’t have a choice. He didn’t even have time to reach around and pull his Glock. All he could do was launch himself toward the Pope and pray his momentum took the pair of them out of the range of the Judas dagger.

He threw himself at the pair of them full on, hitting the old man in the chest, both hands hard to the ribs and barreling him off his feet. The collision sent all three of them-Pope, assassin and savior-sprawling. Konstantin fell on top of the old man, his weight throwing him down hard. They landed on the red carpet together. All around them screams and shouts erupted. He couldn’t hear any individual words. He didn’t need to. There was no doubting what they were for.

It didn’t matter.

He had done it. He had reached the Holy Father in time. He had beaten the clock, beaten the assassin. He had saved Peter II’s life. He closed his eyes, waiting for the hands to grab him and haul him off the white-haired Pontiff. He felt the man breathing beneath him. It wasn’t a smooth regular rise and fall of the chest; it was erratic, desperate, like a man struggling desperately to draw his next breath.

Konstantin rolled away from the old man.

It wasn’t his weight that had winded the priest.

There was blood on his hands when they came away from the Pope. He looked down at him. The old man lay sprawled across the red of the stage. It took Konstantin a second to see it. There was blood where the silver blade had pierced the Pope’s white cassock. The hilt of the damned dagger jutted out through the purple tippet wrapped around Peter II’s neck, driven in through the gold cross woven into the cloth. There was a lot of blood, too much. The gold and purple quickly stained red as the blood pumped out through the wound. The Holy Father clutched at the dagger’s hilt. His lips moved. Konstantin heard the barest whisper of a prayer on his lips: “Father, forgive… know not… what…” It was the last prayer of Jesus as he hung dying on the cross, the prayer to his father to save the souls of his murderers.

Konstantin crawled toward him, unable to believe what he saw.

The entire front of his white cassock was stained red with holy blood.

The Vicar of Christ looked up at him without seeing him. His eyes already had the gloss of death stealing over them.

Konstantin was too late.

There was nothing he could do.

After everything, he had failed. He lifted his head to the sky and screamed one long terrible roar of guilt, agony and despair. He had come so close. Close enough to cradle the dying man in his arms as the BKA agents rushed the stage. “Please,” Peter the Roman said. Konstantin didn’t know what he meant, what he was asking for. The old man swallowed and the light in his eyes went out. He was dead.

Konstantin tried to pull his hand out of the way. The last thing he wanted to do was contaminate the evidence. But even as the Pope slumped into his arms and his blood soaked into his clothes, the knife clattered to the ground. The blood spatter fell like a handful of coins on the red carpet. He didn’t need to count them. There would be thirty. Thirty splashes of red life to mark the betrayal.

The BKA men ran at him, guns aimed at his face and body, yelling, “Get down!”

“On your stomach!”

“Down!”

“Get your hands where we can see them!”

e saw their guns and the rage in their faces.

There was hate there. Burning. Blazing.

Outrage.

Each one of them wanted to pull the trigger.

And who could blame them?

Konstantin reverently lowered the dead man to the carpet. He didn’t look at any of the others on the stage. He didn’t hear the screams of the onlookers. He put his hands behind his head, interlacing his fingers.

The Judas dagger lay on the red carpet beside him, blood on its silver blade.

The Swiss Guard who had delivered the fatal blow looked at it, then at Konstantin, at the blood on his hands; and the ghost of a smile reached his lips as he cried, “Murder!”

Konstantin stared at the man, memorizing every inch of his face.

And then someone hit him from the behind, taking him down.

They pressed his face into the bloody carpet and stretched his arms out. Someone hissed in his ear, “Just give me an excuse to pull this trigger.”