The Goliath Chamber - Vatican Knights 24 (2021), Rick Jones [e ink epub reader .TXT] 📗

bunker was open as though in invitation. He couldn’t recall if the door had been closed or open before, perhaps the invite new. Either way, and as someone who never wanted to disappoint, the Vatican Knight accepted it as encouragement, whether it had been openly granted or not.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The Apostolic Palace

Vatican City

Pope Clement XV was standing along the balcony that overlooked St. Peter’s Square. To his north and beyond the wall of the Barracks of Papal Gendarmes, he watched the black of the night sky become infused with the swirling colors of blue and white from the police cruisers. According to Father Auciello, the False Prophet had been discovered within eyeshot of Vatican City. And to underscore the risk of the situation, the device was in countdown mode with less than forty-five minutes left on its timer.

Fathers Auciello and Essex had pleaded with the pontiff to vacate the city along with the cardinals—the Princes of the Church—only for him to turn a deaf ear on their proposals. ‘God will intervene,’ he told them. ‘God will save us.’ Though noble in his belief that God would interpose His will to stop the destruction of Vatican City, Pope Clement XV still had a blackened soul.

As he stood on the balcony, he was consumed by thoughts of Kimball Hayden. Like the False Prophet, he believed that God would be just as generous in disposing Kimball Hayden as He would at neutralizing a weapon of mass destruction. On this night, the pontiff was sure that the Lord would simply sweep His Mighty Hand over the Vatican to cleanse it of sin and worry.

Closing his eyes, the pontiff prayed, believing that everything would turn out for the better. The church would be saved, and Kimball Hayden would be forever removed as the final thorn of his crown.

With risk remaining thick and heavy in the air as his fellow cardinals took flight, Pope Clement XV believed that God was working in mysterious ways. What was going on at the moment, he considered, was simply the Darkness before the Light. What he didn’t know, however, was that the Darkness was closer than he could ever imagine.

Upon the balcony where the night sky was awash with the lights from police cruisers, the pontiff continued to pray.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Piazza del Risorgimento

Rome, Italy

. . . 00:41:21 . . .

. . . 00:41:20 . . .

. . . 00:41:19 . . .

The best that the bomb-squad expert could determine was that the parts originated from Israel, and that the device itself had been modernized with the antiquated Russian parts replaced. This was not news to either Isaiah or Nehemiah. This was information that had already been passed down by Vatican Intelligence, along with the Mossad and other intel agencies. What no one could verify, including the Israeli connections, was if Abesh Faruk, while altering components in a revitalization project, added a tripwire system that if the device should be tampered with once the timer had been initiated, would the suitcase detonate upon any attempt to deactivate it.

. . . 00:40:37 . . .

. . . 00:40:36 . . .

. . . 00:40:35 . . .

Time had now become their biggest enemy. Even with the common sense to utilize the only option of driving the vehicle away from ground zero, Rome was still a big city with nearly three million people. A forty-minute drive, even with a speedy police escort, would only push the problem to another vicinity that would still be close to the heart of Rome. There was simply not enough time to create distance from a populated region. There would still be more than a hundred thousand lives caught within the blast radius at any given time, no matter the route taken.

“Give me your final assessment,” Isaiah finally asked the bomb-squad expert in fluid Italian.

“I cannot defuse the unit until I know what exactly each component is utilized for. The unit itself has been pieced together like Frankenstein’s monster, with a mishmash of Russian and Israeli components that may work together or counter each other, depending upon how the device has been programmed.”

Isaiah pointed to the timer. “You see that?”

. . . 00:40:09 . . .

. . . 00:40:08 . . .

. . . 00:40:07 . . .

“Even with a police escort,” Isaiah told him, “we wouldn’t have the time to clear the borders of Rome.”

“So, what are you asking? That I move ahead recklessly?”

“It won’t matter much in forty minutes, will it?”

The two tagged each other strongly with their eyes for a brief moment until Isaiah took the initiative. Reaching into the trunk, he closed the lid and clasped it locked. Then, to the field commanders of the Polizia di Stato and the Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza, he said, “Call in a chopper.”

But it was the commander of the Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza who objected by patting the air with his hand and saying, “Whoa-whoa-whoa. Wait a minute now. The Piazza del Risorgimento is not the jurisdiction of the Vatican. Your right to lead ends inside those walls.”

Isaiah pointed a finger towards Vatican City. “Do you see that wall?” he asked. “Behind that wall is one of the most valued religious leaders on the planet. His sits inside the Apostolic Palace refusing to leave his post. Now, we know for certain that this weapon cannot be defused, at least not here without the possibility of detonation, because we don’t have the time to break down its internal processes. So where does that leave us? It leaves us with no choice. We have to take the gamble by removing the unit from this location.”

“Moving the suitcase,” the team’s field commander firmly stated, “can also be the fuse that sets it off right here, inside this plaza.”

“Possibly. But there’s also a chance that it might not. Right now, it’s a fifty-fifty chance that it will not go off. We don’t have any other option at this point but one: