1635: The Papal Stakes as-15 Page 3

  “Damn, getting rusty,” muttered the ex-Marine from just behind Tom’s shoulder. He grinned suddenly. “Being honest, my street gang training didn’t really emphasize marksmanship.”

  Tom barked a little laugh. Like him, Nichols was no master of the handgun. The doctor had been trained as a sniper when he was in the Marines-with a proper damn rifle, with a proper damn caliber and real by-God telescopic sights.

  “Two out of three shots on time and on target are plenty good enough for me, Doc. Let’s get moving.”

  Tom’s wife Rita emerged from the Crotto Fiume, which was still silent. The muttering and then shouting of the startled clientele would start soon enough, no doubt. “Done making noise out here, honey?” Rita asked. Despite the levity of the words, her voice was shaky.

  “I sure hope so,” Tom replied. He also hoped his own voice didn’t sound as shaky as his wife’s-but he was pretty sure it did.

  Rita shuddered as she started stepping over the bodies. “I’m never going to get used to situations like this.”

  “And you shouldn’t,” put in Melissa Mailey, who emerged from the crotto, towing the shocked cardinal. “Accepting bloodshed is a necessary part of being human; failing to notice it means you’re becoming less than human. No offense, James,” she added with a glance at her Vietnam-veteran life-partner.

  “None taken,” James murmured as he snatched up the double-barreled fowling piece, searched for ammunition, and kept a swivel-necked watch on both ends of the street. That didn’t deter him from some gentle teasing: “Of course, darling wife, your own rhetorical peacenik robes are starting to fray at the edges.”

  “They’ve been reduced to threads and lint by living in this century,” Melissa responded grimly. Changing the direction and tone of her voice, she urged the cardinal, “Step quickly, Your Eminence; we need to move rapidly now.” The small, pudgy man nodded unsteadily, looking rather pathetic in the nondescript friar’s garb.

  Bringing up the rear-and scattering coins, apologies, and wildly implausible explanations in their wake-Arco Severi closed the door gently and turned toward them, smelling of old garlic and fresh sweat. “ Merda,” he breathed, “what now?”

  “Now,” said Tom, snapping up his pistol’s barrel assembly so that it closed upon the fresh cylinder he had loaded, “we run.”

  The small cardinal’s voice quavered: “Won’t that attract attention?”

  “Your Eminence,” Tom said through a patient smile while wondering if the cardinal could run, “we’ve fired almost ten shots. We are leaving four attackers dead in the street, and one unconscious in the crotto. I think we’ve probably attracted about as much attention as we possibly could. Speed is our only friend, now.”

  And setting his actions to match his words, Tom Simpson began running in the direction of the Mera River, trying to put aside the growing feeling that the pine-carpeted alpine peaks that soared up at every point of the compass-except due south-were closing in on, and even over, them.

  They stayed close alongside those buildings whose shadows were already long enough to start creeping up the opposite facades. Two blocks shy of reaching the river, Tom turned left, leading them into a small lane that paralleled the main road-the Viale Maloggia-which wound out of town to the northeast. It followed alongside the Mera, which, although merely a shallow gorge at present, had been a white-frothed flume only one month earlier, due to the spring Schmelzwasser that had come rushing down out of the swollen mountain cataracts.

  As the rest of the group caught up with him-Melissa wheezing almost as much as the cardinal-Tom looked downstream toward the town’s center: no reaction from there, yet. Good: with any luck, they might “Tom.” Melissa’s voice was very calm, low-pitched. Which meant disaster on the hoof.

  “What is it?”

  She pointed down. “That.”

  Tom and the rest followed her finger: a dark, brown-red stain was collecting near his feet, dripping down from his traveling cloak. As a watch whistle shrilled back near the crotto, Rita stepped closer to her husband, her worried eyes scanning his body.

  Tom shook his head. “But I’m not hit.”

  Melissa nodded. “Of course you’re not. That’s not your blood; that’s your soup.”

  Soup? Tom stared at the stain, remembering the flurry of action-and wide spray of soup-that had immediately preceded their exit from the crotto. We’re going to be tracked-tracked and killed-because I chose to have the soup? Had the situation not been so desperate, he would have laughed. His life-and the lives of his wife, his friends, and charges-now hung in the balance because he had chosen to have a bowl of soup.

  Tom looked up from the bloodlike spatter on the ground, glanced behind them and then toward the Viale Maloggia. He tore off his cloak and threw it aside: “We’ve got to run. Fast. Now.”

  “We just were running,” complained Melissa, her hand on her side, one corner of her mouth wrinkled in the attempt to suppress what Tom guessed was a wind-stitch.

  “We run or we fight.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” asked Melissa, stretching her long legs northward to run parallel to the bending course of the Mera.

  Four minutes of near-sprinting put the sound of the whistles a little farther behind them. As they panted to a halt in front of their taverna, the whistles of the town watch stopped abruptly.

  “They found the cloak,” panted James. “Figuring out where to search next.”

  “I will get Matthias-”

  “I am here,” said the young German from one of their windows on the second story. “I just reestablished contact with Padua, and am in the middle of sending an update to-”

  Tom shook his head. “Break down the radio, Matthias. Keep the up-time transmitter separate, in your pack. I’ll send Arco and the ladies up to help you load our-”

  “No need,” he assured them as he detached the wire he had hooked to a roof-tile as an antenna. “All our bags are packed. Trail gear only. Everything else I have left under the beds.”

  “Matthias,” gasped Rita, “how did you know to-?”

  “Why, Frau Mailey suggested I have our gear ready, in the event that the rendezvous would be-what is your word? — ‘compromised.’”

  James straightened up. “It’s great to have a girlfriend who’s always thinking.”

  “Particularly when no one else bothers to. Matthias, are you just about through?”

  “Yes; could Herr Severi lend hands?”

  Arco was inside before Matthias had completed the request.

  Rita looked back down the road. “How long do you figure we’ve got?”

  Tom shrugged. “Could be as much as ten minutes. They’ll have to gather together, see how many searchers they’ve got, and then eliminate which ways we definitely didn’t go. We’re near the northern limits of the town, here, and the lack of walls is a big help, but if we’re not moving soon-”

  Matthias and Arco came bustling out the door, the latter adding, “Our account is settled, with a tip to encourage the owner’s tardy mention of our lodging here.”

  “Excellent. Now, Matthias, dump the batteries in the river.”

  “What? But Captain Simpson, they are priceless-”

  “And make sure the jars break on the rocks. Everything else that will sink goes in the water as well. We can’t afford any extra weight and I don’t want them to learn that we had a radio. Did you get a general signal out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And were the conditions right for it to be heard in both Padua and Chur?”

  Matthias shrugged as he sent the battery-jars crashing down among the rocks of the Mera. “It is a good time for a signal…I think.”

  Tom led them into a sustainable trot. “You think?”

  Matthias shrugged as he jogged. “You can never know for sure, Captain.”

  Well, that’s just great, thought Tom as he noted the cardinal already laboring to maintain the pace, and Melissa putting on a pain-proof, but increasingly pale, face.

/>   Just great.

  Odo leaned back from the radio, frowning. “No, Ambassador, it is neither a failure, nor meteorological interference. Matthias simply went off the air-like that.” He snapped his fingers sharply.

  Sharon tried to keep the frown off her face. “Was there any word, any warning that-?”

  Her husband put a fine, but very strong, hand on her shoulder. “Beloved, there was no warning. And nothing you could do that you have not already done.”

  “I could have listened to you a week ago, Ruy, when you warned me against setting up this rendezvous. Getting our five people over the Alps is tricky enough with Spanish and Milanese troops watching the alpine approaches from Lake Como to Chiavenna. I should never have agreed to burdening them with the exfiltration of Cardinal Ginetti, as well.”

  “My heart, it is most difficult to refuse a pope, particularly when his reasons are so compelling.”

  A soft voice from the doorway echoed Ruy’s logic. “Indeed, Ambassadora Nichols, the fault-if any ill has befallen your father and your friends-is entirely mine.”

  Sharon turned, wondering-given the very dark black complexion she had inherited from her father James Nichols-if the flush of heat she could feel in her face produced any visible sign. “Your Holiness, my apologies. I did not know you were standing there.”

  “Hovering unseen outside doorways is, alas, a bad habit. It also provides much information one would otherwise not have.” Pope Urban VIII smiled. “I’m sure this bad habit had more to do with my becoming pope than any worthiness in the eyes of Our Savior.” His tone was jocular, but shaded with penitence, also. Urban had been more somber since his rescue from the Castel Sant’Angelo by Ruy and Tom. Or perhaps it was a result of learning that over a dozen cardinals who had been his friends, or at least allies, had been disappeared, and probably killed, by the Spanish invaders, based upon the thinnest of pretexts or, in some cases, outrageous prevarications. Urban seemed to feel their losses keenly, as though their deaths were an indictment of failure on his part.

  Which, Sharon realized, was how Maffeo Barberini-now Urban VIII-had been brought up to think in relation to his allies. “Pontiff” had been a late addition to his many titles; first scion and incumbent head of the powerful Barberini family had been roles he inherited upon his birth. He had been trained to think in terms of stratagems against hereditary enemies, and sinecures for loyal vassals-and his ascension to the cathedra of the Holy See did not diminish his adherence to that modus operandi. Urban VIII, never forgetting his family or friends, had left a legacy (well-recorded in the up-timers’ books) of shameless nepotism-for which he was infamous, even among the many early modern popes that had been known for it.

  But now, Sharon wondered, did she see some signs of regret? His brother Francesco was among the cardinals who had been slain attempting to flee Rome. His nephew, Antonio, had made good his escape to Sharon’s refugee embassy by only the slimmest of margins himself, and would not have succeeded at all had not her husband Ruy chanced upon him while he was trying to find a way to escape the city’s walls.

  Urban’s hands were folded passively on the front of his cassock. “I shall pray for your friends and father, Ambassadora. I owe them all a great debt. And, in the case of Thomas Simpson, I owe him my very life-along with you, Senor Casador y Ortiz. If it was not for your bold rescue of me from Sant’Angelo, the rubble of Hadrian’s tomb would surely be my burial mound, now.”

  Urban extended one hand and placed it briefly upon Ruy’s head. Then he turned and left. When Ruy rose, his face was transformed-utterly open, utterly without pretense-rather like a man who remembers, for one brief instant, the innocent hope and faith he had as a young boy. Sharon felt the strangest rush of both tenderness and arousal, seeing him so stripped of his facade for that moment-and then Ruy as she knew him was back: he smoothed aside one wing of his mustaches and turned to her, his dark brown eyes glittering and alert. “We should send word to the exfiltration team in Switzerland,” he said.

  “Word to-? Yes, of course!” Sharon turned to the waiting radio operator. “Odo, raise the exfiltration team. Let them know that contact has been lost with both the group they are to extract and Colonel North’s security detachment. They may have been monitoring and heard it themselves, but it’s also possible that the signal didn’t get through to Chur.”

  “And is there any other message for Chur?”

  “Yes. The extraction team there is to start for the rendezvous point now.”

  “Ambassador, it will be night before they arrive. And if they reach the site early, and must loiter-”

  “Odo. I understand the risks. To all three groups. But if Dad and the rest are on the run, they probably won’t be able to signal again. So we’ve got to consider the abrupt end of their transmission as a call for extraction.” She drew in her breath. “Send the message to Chur-and tell them to move as fast as they can.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “So, you see,” said Estuban Miro to the other two men, “the USE in general, and the State of Thuringia-Franconia in particular, is most interested in discussing mutual political and fiscal interests with the powers here in Chur.”

  The more animated of the two men leaned forward eagerly, dark hair framing a pale, deceptively soft-featured face, out of which shone two very dark, but very bright, eyes. “And what- specifically what-would those interests be?”

  Miro looked into those intense, unblinking eyes and thought: yes, this was the Georg Jenatsch he’d read about in the Grantville library, the man who killed a political rival with a savage axe-blow and then left the corpse pinned to the floorboards.

  Well, Miro amended, it hadn’t been Jenatsch himself who’d swung the axe that killed the night-shirted Pompeius von Planta as he stood, stunned, in his castle’s main bedroom suite. At least, that’s what the later histories of the up-timers claimed. Most of them, that is.

  Either way, Miro was fairly sure that anyone foolish enough to ask Jenatsch about it now would get their hair parted in a similar fashion. Jenatsch, despite his charming public persona, sent out an aura of mortal determination which radiated a message best verbalized as: do not toy with me; I shall kill you, if you do. This man might well be a patriot, but he was also a creature of immense ambition and ego: no slights were forgotten, no vengeances left untaken.

  “Herr Miro, your expression is-whimsical?” Jenatsch’s prompt was polite and sounded casual. Indeed, a person less versed in the nuances of negotiations and personalities might have attached no special significance to it. But Miro had maintained the secrecy of being a “hidden-Jew”-a xueta from the Balearic island of Mallorca-for ten years while trading with the nobles of Spain and Portugal and around the far rim of the Mediterranean; he did not miss the intent focus behind Jenatsch’s inquiry. The Swiss powerbroker knew that whatever thoughts had flitted through Miro’s mind a moment ago could provide him with valuable insight into his interlocutor.

  But Miro had dealt with far more subtle negotiators than Jenatsch, and waved a dismissive hand. “I was distracted for a moment, trying to decide which of our mutual interests I should present first.”

  Jenatsch’s smile said he knew that Miro was lying. Miro returned a smile that congratulated Jenatsch on the correctness of his perception, and assured him that no further insights were to be gained from this line of inquiry. The third man in the room stared at them with the stolid, unimaginative detachment of a very capable factotum who had absolutely no imagination, and even less awareness of social subtleties.

  This third man, a burgomeister who was also the hand-picked representative for the Bishop of Chur, set two meaty fists squarely upon the table. “I presume these mutual interests have something to do with your-unusual-method of transportation, Herr Miro.”

  “Indeed they do, Herr Ziegler. The airship by which my party traveled here is merely the first of many which will be traversing the Alps to facilitate the USE’s business in Venice.”

  Ziegler’s brow lowered a bit.
“So. Given Venice’s traditional support of Reformists in the Valtelline, this is to be a relationship favoring Protestants? Hardly a surprise, since the Swede is your king.”

  Careful, now. Miro spread his hands. “First, we hope to trade with Tuscany and Rome, as well as Venice. If Rome is difficult to trade with at this moment-well, that is hardly our doing.”

  Ziegler almost winced: only arch-Catholics-the kind who daily hungered after any excuse to go abroad at night and string up their Protestant neighbors-found Borja’s recent occupation and sack of Rome to be anything less than ghastly. Ziegler was not of this extreme papist stripe; indeed, few in the Alps were. But that had not prevented bloody sectarian massacres from creating deep chasms of mistrust in the region, particularly where Miro found himself now: the capital of the Gray Leagues, or Graubunden, of Grisons. Originally a promising social experiment in both democracy and religious tolerance, the last fifteen years had seen the coalition erupt into vicious religious warfare, largely through the machinations of both the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs. In the “old history,” the one the Americans’ books depicted, further wars had been fought here, with the French driving out the Spanish this very year. But in this world, with France and Spain ostensibly at peace, that course of events had been derailed. All parties were now in historical and political terra incognita, and deeply suspicious of all the impending possibilities.