1635 The Papal Stakes (78 page)

He seemed to be manipulating something gently when, suddenly, there was a splash of liquid on the floor: blood.

Castro y Papas flinched forward, clearly following an instinct to help, stopping himself as he inevitably realized that there was nothing to be done.

The smaller assistant asked, “Do you need the water or spirits, yet?”

“No, but have them ready. And you”—Asher looked up at the taller assistant—“be quick with that knife.”

In the same instant that Owen Roe O’Neill took his last, long step to close with the slow-eyed guard, he drew his dagger and thrust straight forward.

The weapon’s point entered the man’s heavy neck just where the Irish colonel had intended: at the larynx. As the guard wheezed horror and dismay, Owen withdrew the knife at an angle, dragging its keen edge sharply across the jugular vein. Dark blood spurted and the man, in the midst of scrabbling after his own weapon and trying to rock up to his feet, suddenly grabbed at the mortal wound.

Owen knew the man was dead, but this way he would die neither quickly nor silently: in the time it took him to exsanguinate, the guard might tip over boxes, flail about destructively, and thereby, bring other soldiers to investigate.
Can’t have that.
Owen, arm coming back from the exit slash, shot forward again into another thrust.

This time, the man was on his knees, moving feebly, when the Spanish dagger sunk almost four inches of its length into his temple. The guard’s struggles ceased abruptly; he fell forward, face down on the paving stones, the blood leaking out of him in an ever widening pool.

Owen turned to Dillon at the door. “Have you locked it?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Then get over here, on the double.”

Dillon did, and together they quickly found the box of spare culverin balls that had been placed square atop the trapdoor into the exit tunnel. Lifting the balls out, they lightened the crate and moved it aside, exposing the trapdoor.

Locked. They could blow the lock off, but that was loud—and besides, this room was for storing tools, also, wasn’t it? “Dillon, keep watch outside. Tell me when those late-night strollers are at the other side of the arms yard.”

“They’re over there now, Colonel.”

Owen quickly found what he was looking for: a hammer and chisel. He set the nose of the chisel in place, tried a test blow.

Nothing more was needed. Evidently the trapdoor had not been used in many decades, nor cared for in the meantime; the lock, its securing arm almost rusted through, came flying off with a dull clatter. He tapped a sequence of knocks on the door’s beams, a tattoo that the up-timers called “shave and a haircut.” He got the “two bits” response—and yanked open the trapdoor.

Thomas North’s dusty face looked up at him. “About bloody time, bog-hopper.”

“Get your lazy
sassenach
ass up here and sort out the men. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”

North came up in two bounds, swapped his nine-millimeter for his SKS, and stared at the locked door. “Any sign of the other element yet?”

Owen received his armor and the rest of his weapons from the oldest of the Wild Geese, Anthony Grogan, and shook his head. “No, we’re still waiting for Harry’s signal.”

“And what is the signal?” asked North’s
xueta
guide, looking up at them from his position in the secret tunnel.

Surely there’s no harm in telling the fellow now
, Owen thought, but North only said, “Even down there, you’ll know it when you hear it.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Valentino led the main charge toward the villa, approaching it at an oblique angle to stay out of the sightline of the fifteen men who had volleyed at the external guards. That fusillade did its job, dropping the four enemy silhouettes all at once, like an invisible wave knocking over straw men.

At the head of almost fifty mercenaries and assassins, Valentino reached the side door into the villa, which he guessed was a secondary entry into a great room. Never having been inside, and not having dared pump local inhabitants for information, his attack depended upon overwhelming force, not advance intelligence. However, even his profound superiority in numbers would not be sufficient if the fight became a protracted gun battle.

“This group has up-time weapons,” he hissed at his men, “so they will win if we keep our distance. But we will win a melee. So we volley and charge. Now, Arturo, take your group to the back of the villa; Ignatio, take your men around the front. Kill any external guards, keep anyone inside from getting out. Use any up-time weapons you find to hold off reinforcements from their perimeter patrols. Now go!”

The two units of half a dozen men rushed off into the darkness just as the fifteen musketeers caught up with the rest of the group along the southern wall of villa. “So if we’re supposed to charge, why not charge in now?” panted Odoardo.

“Because we have to seal all the possible exits first. Remember, no one is to be left alive. No one. Now, Linguanti, let’s give them something else to worry about.”

Valentino’s wiry lieutenant nodded and produced a ceramic bottle of olive oil about the same time a few shots spatted back and forth at the front of the house. He lit the linen wick jammed into the top of the bottle and nodded to Odoardo, who drew back his immense, trademark axe and smashed open one of the two shuttered windows along that stretch of wall. Two reports—pistols probably—boomed in futile retaliation the same instant that Linguanti lobbed the fire bomb inside.

Sherrilyn Maddox heard the volley, turned on her heel and started sprinting eastward, back toward the villa. Too focused on her job to be scared or surprised, she assessed the situation quickly: the attackers had infiltrated past, or eliminated, an outpost. Probably the southern one, since the sound of gunfire—and now, shouting—was spreading from the south of the villa.

She was about two hundred yards out and, fortunately, the root cellar lay right along her most direct approach to the villa’s rear entrance, which opened into the building’s great room. The four men walking the perimeter like she was might arrive in time to be useful, but not if they came rushing directly back toward the villa; whoever was attacking was professional, and would be sure to have set up ambushes to interdict reinforcements.

And damn it, she could already start to feel her knee stiffening like a rusted door hinge: unwilling to bend, threatening to break. But that was just too bad. Even if she was doing irreparable damage to it, she had to push it to the limit; the next five minutes could, quite literally, decide the future course of the Western World.

Refusing to limp, she glanced north toward the western skirts of Monte Cengio; two lamps burned brightly there. That signal meant Taggart had heard the attack and was even now collapsing inward toward the villa with most of his pickets. But there had been too little warning; he would not arrive in time, given how quickly the attackers were pressing their advantage. Sherrilyn could already see wisps of smoke rising up from the villa and heard gunfire at the front and then the back.

As she reached the root cellar and knocked a “shave and a haircut—two bits” tattoo on the door, she calmly accepted that she was the only relief force in a position to rescue her friends.

The cellar’s storm door banged back, and Rolf, the largest of the hidden reserve of three Hibernians emerged. She drew her Glock, waved it toward the villa, and resumed running. “Follow me,” she hissed at the forms already trailing her at a crouch.

As soon as the defenders’ two pistols fired pointlessly out the window, Valentino sent his men through the southern door of the villa.

Gunfire—flintlocks and one or two up-time weapons—barked a lethal salute as his men went through; three fell, a fourth staggered, but the next wave was in and firing back into a vast chamber seething with desperate, human chaos.

From what Valentino could make out as he entered in the third rank and dodged quickly to the side, they had been lucky enough to come directly into the villa’s large, and surprisingly plain, great room—which, to his eyes, was appointed more in the style of a vast, well-to-do farmhouse. The long, plain tables were littered with trenchers, utensils, a few pewter plates, all in the process of pre-cleaning, the leavings mostly scraped into feed buckets bound for whatever livestock they had out back. A dozen—maybe a score—of domestics of all shapes, sizes, and sexes were now running to and fro, some focused and purposeful, most shrieking and confused. A few were pushing smaller trestle tables over for cover; a few more—workers who had no doubt been furnished with the weapons of off-duty Marines—were attempting to reload, their quiver-fingered haste and inexperience ensuring that they would likely be dead before they even got the wadding snugged down against the ball.

Valentino yelled, “Fire at will!” but hardly needed to: the murderous pack he had brought with him only needed the scent of blood to start killing indiscriminately. The second and third ranks had already fired their pistols into the milling crowd, many throwing the discharged weapons aside. Valentino conceded they were probably right in their implicit assumption that they would not have the time, opportunity, or need to reload them. Swords out, they began hacking through the mob. Men fell, the pink-froth of their rent lungs exposed; women screamed, run through, their bodies’ own weight dragging them off the swords that had mortally transfixed them. One, a heavy, sweat-stained cook, came roaring out of the press, a frying pan held ready behind her shoulder. Odoardo watched her approach with a sneer, and as she drew close, used one hand to casually flap his axe at her midriff. The woman stopped suddenly, stared down, saw her entrails coiling out, went down to her knees.

Screaming, crying, fists flailing, a young boy appeared from behind her, assaulting Odoardo, who barked out a laugh as his axe came down, hard.

The mortally wounded woman folded down over the small, ruined body with a great wail, and Valentino watched as Odoardo paused for the briefest of moments, clearly considering whether he should finish the job. An equally short-lived smile curled the left side of the ogre’s mouth; having evidently decided to let her die in both emotional and physical misery, he moved on—just as the discharge of an up-time gun cut down the mercenary who had been standing behind him.

Valentino peered through the falling bodies. His men were doing a lot of damage, but not to the right people. There were at least four of the renegade embassy’s Marines, now sheltered behind overturned tables near the base of the only obvious staircase to the upper level. As Valentino watched, the Marine with the up-time weapon put a bullet into any of the assassins who tried dodging through the thinning crowd to engage them directly. In the meantime, the other three were reloading their USE regulation flintlocks. If this went on—

“You men,” Valentino shouted, beckoning toward the musketeers who had just followed them in, “look there: the Marines behind the tables. Volley at them on my command—”

Valentino watched another of his own men fall to the Marine with the revolver, who then ducked down, apparently preparing to swap a freshly loaded cylinder into his weapon. As he did, there was a momentary break in the press of running, falling bodies—

“Now! Fire!”

Four miquelet muskets roared just to Valentino’s left. Two of the Marines went down, one trailing a rooster-tail of blood behind him as he fell.

Now almost deaf in his left ear, Valentino rose up, pointed with his sword, and screamed, “At them! Quickly!”

Sharon, having led the four clerics into her suite, moved purposefully toward its large, rough-hewn armoire against the wall. “Larry,” she said, “give me a hand, here.” One of the two Wild Geese guarding the doorway hastened to help; she shook her head, jerked it back towards his post. “You keep protecting us; Cardinal Mazzare can help me move the furniture.”

Larry Mazzare, deciding that the composure with which she made the odd request indicated that she was not succumbing to hysterical distraction, jumped over to comply—

—but was interrupted by the sound of heavy footfalls crossing the threshold. Looking up, expecting to see the approach of his death, he instead saw Lieutenant Hastings—in armor—with George Sutherland limping eagerly after him.

Sharon stepped away from the armoire at Hastings’ gesture.

The lieutenant grabbed his end of the armoire and nodded to Larry. “Your Eminence, if you would be so good, on the count of three…One, two—”

Larry heaved at the wooden mass; it creaked away from the wall—

—and revealed a narrow, five foot high by two foot wide faded section of wall.

Sharon gestured toward the secret door. “Apparently put in by the first builders. Who never finished the job. But it should be enough to—”

“Ambassador,” Hastings interrupted with an apologetic tone, “your husband sent me back here, in part to help you lead these men out to safety, but also to ensure that you did, in fact, come with us. He is concerned about your—”

Without a word, Sharon turned and ran—surprisingly quickly, for someone of her size—back towards the staircase and Ruy.

Hastings sighed, shrugged, went to the panel and pushed; it swung into the wall, revealing a black, narrow staircase leading down at a precipitous angle. “Your Eminences, you will forgive me if that is the last time I bother with formal titles; time is short. I will lead the way, Mr. Fleming will follow.” The more plain-faced of the two Wild Geese nodded. “Then Cardinal Mazzare, His Holiness, the father-general, and Cardinal Barberini. Mr. McEgan and Mr. Sutherland will bring up the rear. We move until we are out of the villa. Once there, those of us who can will run north toward Lieutenant Taggart’s outpost. Any questions?”

“Yes,” said Larry. “Why weren’t we told about this secret passage the first day we got here?”

Hastings looked at him squarely. “So you couldn’t tell anyone else about it. A secret passage is only useful if it stays secret. Any other questions? No? Then follow me.”