The Illumination (23 page)

“Basically, you're telling us that the
tzohar
is a trapped particle
of pure creative energy.” D'Amato's forehead furrowed in concentration.

Calo nodded. “And just imagine what one could generate with that kind of energy.”

“It could make oil obsolete as our chief source of energy.” Caserta's face lit with excitement. “It could be a God-given source of limitless clean fuel. Or,” he added grimly, “humans could subvert it to manufacture horrific weapons.”

“I shudder to contemplate the kind of destruction something so powerful could unleash.” The rabbi looked stricken. “In the wrong hands . . .” His voice trailed away.

“If the
tzohar is
inside this pendant,” Natalie said slowly, “I haven't seen any evidence of its power yet. Still . . . if others in the world believe it's as powerful as you've described, then I can understand why every nation, every power in the world would want it.”

Reflexively, she clamped the pendant in her fist again. Was it her imagination, or was there really a tingling running from her fingertips all the way to her wrists, her arms, her shoulder blades?

“What does Daniel's scroll say about the
tzohar
?” she asked.

But before anyone could answer, the rabbi's cell phone interrupted. He spoke into it briefly, frowning with concern.

He tucked it back into his pocket with a sigh. “One of our guards. He says the Vatican police are at the museum.” He looked at Natalie and D'Amato. “They're inquiring about the two of you.”

Natalie stiffened, her gaze swinging to D'Amato.
Sir Geoffrey called them.
The same thought flowed instantaneously between them. Then it was forgotten as a slight scraping sound from the sanctuary reached her ears.

Apparently everyone heard it—they all turned toward the door.

“Somebody's out there,” D'Amato whispered. He crept toward the door, signaling Natalie to draw the curtains across the lone window facing onto the graveyard.

“It could be a parishioner,” Rabbi Calo murmured.

The scraping sound came again. Softer. Someone was working very hard not to be heard on the smooth stones.

“Is there a back way out?” D'Amato's voice was a breath.

“Not exactly.” Father Caserta was staring in shock at the Glock that had suddenly materialized in D'Amato's right hand. “There's a door off the robing room, but that's on the other side of the altar. There's one other exit.” He hesitated. “But it hasn't been used in years.”

“Where is it?” Natalie whispered, as she plunged the pendant back into the pouch and stuffed both once again into her shoulder bag.

“It's beneath the altar. It's actually a trapdoor that leads down to an underground passage,” the cleric said softly. “A leftover from the original church. The early Christians used it to escape the Romans back in the day. There's a circular tile that swivels aside—”

“How do we open it, Giuseppe?” Calo breathed. D'Amato was listening intently at the door. Natalie glanced frantically around the room, the words of her Krav Maga instructor ringing in her head.
Use whatever is at hand as a weapon.

Then, in the blink of an eye, D'Amato was gone. The office door clicked closed behind him. She grabbed an embossed silver letter opener from the priest's desk and edged toward the door—freezing an instant later as gunfire roared off the high hollow ceiling of the sanctuary.

Then all hell broke loose. More gunfire thundered—and suddenly the glass window behind them shattered. A man dove through the splintered opening into the center of the room. He was young, dressed all in black, and he had a gun.

He lunged straight for Natalie. She struck out instinctively with the letter opener, aiming for his eyes, but he ducked just in time and escaped with only a shallow slash across his left cheekbone. She had a quick impression of dark malevolent eyes before he swung the gun up level with her heart.

“Give me the Eye of Dawn!”

“Didn't your mother ever teach you to knock?” Natalie's heart was pounding. She knew she had to distract him, to get out of his line of fire. As another burst of shots exploded from
the sanctuary, she used his momentary distraction to take a step to the side.

At the same instant, Father Caserta dove low, hitting the gunman in the back of the knees and knocking him off balance. His shot went wide and ricocheted, pinging off the stone wall and slamming into the desk. Both Caserta and the gunman tumbled to the floor.

The attacker was younger and more nimble and was the first to scramble to his feet. But before the assailant could straighten, Rabbi Calo lunged for the gun. To Natalie's horror, the intruder swung the weapon up into Calo's chin, connecting with a sickening crack. Blood spurted from between the rabbi's lips as he toppled sideways against the bookcase.

Panting, the man wheeled again toward Natalie, but she attacked before he could take aim. With all of her strength, she drove the letter opener into his throat. This time she made more than a surface cut.

He let out a gurgled scream. As he struggled to pull the blade from his bloody throat, Natalie grabbed for the gun, wrenching his wrist at a forty-five-degree angle and wresting the gun away by its butt.

Good, pull the letter opener out, you bastard. You'll bleed to death all the faster.
But her hands shook as she leveled the gun at his forehead. She couldn't allow herself to think that she'd inflicted a mortal wound.

“Give me the
hamsa
you took from my sister.”

He was pressing his hands against his gushing throat. “That . . . Hasan's . . . trophy.” He was having trouble getting the words out, but his baleful stare was one of pure malice. He seemed unaware of the amount of blood drenching his black shirt. “You . . . will . . . never. . . .”

Natalie jerked her head toward the sanctuary. “Hasan,” she bit out. “Is he out there?”

He staggered to his knees, defiance blazing in his eyes. “The khalifate . . . will return,” he gasped. “Hasan . . . will . . . succeed. Al Quds . . .” He fought for air. “. . . will be ours. And . . . the Eye . . . of Dawn . . .
Allah-hu akbar
. . . Allah . . . is great!”

Behind him a trembling Father Caserta was helping Calo to his feet. The rabbi's face was pale, his shirt smeared with blood. “Don't worry, I'll be alright,” he gasped. He spit a tooth from his mouth. “Right now,” he said shakily, “D'Amato needs our help.”

The gunshots had halted.
There's either a standoff or everyone out there is dead,
Natalie thought. She pushed away the thought.

But even as she turned toward the door, the gunman collapsed, sprawling across the broken glass. Natalie pivoted and hurried toward him. Her stomach churned as she nearly slid on his blood.

“Check to see if he has other weapons,” the priest cautioned.

Taking a deep breath, she felt for a pulse. Found none. She was afraid she was going to be sick. She'd never killed anyone before, let alone touched a dead body.

She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. She couldn't fall apart. She forced herself to focus. Gingerly, she patted the man's pockets, then remembered something else from her Krav Maga training—and yanked up the hems of his pants. Sure enough, there was a knife concealed in a leather holster lashed to his right calf.

She slid it across the polished wooden floor toward the priest.

“You might need this if we're going to get out of here, Father. Where does that underground passageway lead?”

 

 

 

D'Amato was crouched behind a statue of the Virgin Mary. He was hiding in one of the two front alcoves carved into the stone walls. He was a third of the way down the sanctuary, on the same side as the door to Caserta's office, pinned down by the gunmen.

He knew there were two of them out there. No more—unless there were others stationed outside. And unless he was mistaken, he'd wounded at least one of them. He'd heard a stifled cry after the first round of shots. They were hiding now like he was, concealed in an alcove on the opposite wall—not the alcove directly across from him—the one nearer the back of the church.

D'Amato was worried about the crash and the gunshot he'd heard in the priest's office. Thirty feet away, he could see the door—it was closed, exactly as he'd left it.

His throat was dry. He prayed Natalie was still alive and that she still had the pendant.

There was no way he could get from the alcove to that door without stepping into the line of fire. He couldn't get to the trapdoor beneath the main altar either. A beam of sunlight colored by the stained-glass windows slanted directly across the path he'd have to take.

The only other light in the gloom of the church was the
flicker of the votive candles lined up before the saints in each of the four alcoves.

He stared hard at the door to the priest's office, willing it to open. Slowly, stealthily, it did. His gaze swung to the alcove where his assailants were crouched.

He wondered if they'd noticed it, too.

He could see Natalie, Caserta, and Calo from the corner of his eye. They were sprinting low toward the main altar. Seizing an unlit votive cup, candle and all, D'Amato lobbed it across the pews like a baseball. It crashed not three feet short of the alcove from where the last shots had been fired.

Gunfire roared toward the splintering glass, and he dove from his alcove, flattening himself against the cold slate floor. He fired furiously at the alcove catty-corner from him, covering Natalie and the clergymen as they scurried and ducked beneath the altar.

Then a man's voice rang out.

“Natalie Landau!”

It boomed through the cold vaulted space. D'Amato recognized it at once. The voice on his cell phone in New York, the voice that had demanded the Eye of Dawn.

“I'm not a greedy man,” the voice called out. It was an arrogant voice, thickly accented. An Iranian accent, D'Amato thought, as he began crawling noiselessly along the sides of the pews, inching his way toward the main altar.

“I offer you a trade, Natalie Landau,” the man continued. “An eye for an eye. Your sister's necklace for the Eye of Dawn. If you come forward now and bring it to me, I'll even let you and your friends leave this place alive.”

Silence met his words.

D'Amato crabbed on, hidden by the shadows and the low pews. The altar was only a dozen feet away. He heard the soft scrape of stone on stone coming from behind it. They were opening the trapdoor leading to the passageway.

“You couldn't shoot your mother if she was standing right in front of you!” D'Amato called. His words drew gunfire, but he was already rolling, propelling himself another ten feet closer to his goal as the bullets began to fly.

He heard footsteps crossing the church, hard shoes running on slate, and then, surprisingly, more shots, this time coming from behind the altar.
Which one of them got hold of a gun?

Crouched behind the front pew, he spotted two men in silhouette slinking down the aisle on the other side of the church. Despite the shots Natalie, Calo, or Caserta had fired to slow them, they were still making for the altar.

The man in the rear was limping—wounded—just as he'd thought. D'Amato took aim and counted, noting how many seconds it took for the injured man to appear in the gaps between the pews. An instant before he knew his target would be in position, he fired. The bullet pierced the man's spine, and he went down like a puppet whose strings had been slashed.

One down. One to go.
D'Amato had no idea if he'd shot the ringleader with the Iranian accent or a sidekick.

Suddenly, more shots rang out from behind the altar. As D'Amato saw the surviving gunman dive for the floor, he scrabbled across the remaining distance to the altar, up the three marble steps, and rolled behind it. Natalie, Calo, and Caserta knelt in the shadows, staring at him, white-faced.

Calo was injured. His mouth was swollen and caked with blood, but Natalie and Caserta looked okay. The priest had a Walther in his hand, and looked like he knew exactly what to do with it.

With relief he spotted the gap in the marble floor, only two steps to the right of where Caserta would stand to celebrate Mass. The large, circular trapdoor had been rotated away, revealing an opening just large enough for one person at a time to slip down into the dark recess.

“I'll wait and try to get this guy, you start—”

“We're all going down together,” Natalie whispered frantically, but before she could finish the sentence, more men burst through the doors of the church, shouting in Arabic.

A hail of bullets rained into the altar.

“Natalie, you go first,” the priest implored. “You have the
tzohar.
”

Natalie slung her shoulder bag across her chest, and Rabbi
Calo steadied her as she slid her legs into the narrow opening, scrabbling for a toehold.

“The ladder is to your right. It's rusted, but it's strong,” Caserta whispered, as D'Amato leaned around the altar to fire off another round.

“Get them! They have no escape,” the Iranian bellowed at the newcomers. “The woman has the Eye of Dawn!”

Natalie's head disappeared below the floor as D'Amato fired again, trying to pinpoint the shooters' locations, alert for any sounds of approach.

“Can I lock this thing behind me?” he asked Caserta as the priest swung himself through the trapdoor after the rabbi.

“You'll find the lock as soon as you slide it back in place. Hurry,” the priest urged.

And then he, too, dropped from sight, and the only sounds D'Amato could hear were the soft scrapes of leather soles against the ancient metal rungs and the insistent pumping of blood in his ears.

He fired off a hailstorm at the three men charging toward him, emptying his chamber. And then he dove toward the opening, swung himself down, and heaved the heavy tile back into place above him.