1635 The Papal Stakes (79 page)

Ruy heard the two off-duty Hibernians he had awakened along with Hastings cursing at buckles and lanyards. “Can you equip yourself no faster?” he hissed in their direction, then leaned an eye around the corner at the head of the staircase to look down into the great room.

Drifts of oily smoke. Puddles and spatters of blood. The bodies of men and women with whom he had shared almost two months’ worth of meals, laughter, and fear lay scattered about. Being a lifelong professional, he cordoned off the emotional consequences of what he was seeing with the suddenness of snapping down the safety of a gun. What remained was tactical data, all seen in a second.

The firebomb the attackers had heaved into the room had not been particularly effective at spreading flame, and several of the slain had fallen into the densest part of the smoldering olive oil, largely smothering it. Given time, it might start a house-threatening fire, but that was at least ten minutes off: an eternity, in a combat such as this one. Only two Marines of the ready guard in the great room were still alive, one of them armed with a Hibernian’s black powder revolver. If it wasn’t for that fellow, the whole band of cutthroats would probably be halfway up the stairs by now—but the Marines could not hold out much longer. Ruy could hear the rush of feet, some heading straight for their makeshift parapet of tables, others angling toward the staircase itself. Which was, of course, their ultimate objective. They—rightly—presumed that the pope would not be housed on the ground floor. The Marines needed some assistance—and right now.

As Ruy raised the heavy weapon in his right hand, he saw the Marines begin to fire in a panic, saw the leading edge of assassins come into view, two of them falling dead or wounded, but others preparing to push over the top of the tables. Another one appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
What fortuitous timing
, Ruy thought as he looked down the sights of the up-time weapon and began to fire.

Ruy was used to the kick of the S&W .357 magnum revolver that Sherrilyn Maddox had forced upon him when she arrived, and upon which she had trained him. However, having only shot at targets, he had never seen what a lead hollow-point would do to a man at a range of less than fifteen feet.

The two assassins who had been about to clear the table barricade, swords readied, went sideways as if hit by a battering ram. The red crater each bullet punched into the side of a torso was startling enough, but the wide spray of blood and tissue from both of the exit wounds was more reminiscent of the effects of grapeshot, to Ruy’s mind. Still, he decided, as he tracked over until his sights were centered on the openmouthed assassin frozen in shock halfway up the stairs, it was a most inelegant weapon. He squeezed the trigger and saw another red crater appear where the base of the cutthroat’s neck had been.

He leaned back behind the corner as the inevitable spattering of inaccurate counterfire from the rest of the blackguards snapped and bit away at the mortar. Well, he reflected, that will give them something to consider for a few moments—but only a few moments. He calmly thumbed the release, swung out the cylinder, fingered a readied speed loader out of his bandolier, and turned at the sound of the approaching Hibernians.

Except it was not them; it was his wife.

Ruy was not often surprised, but this was the exception that made the rule. “Sharon, you are back? I told you to run, sent Hastings and George to assist you!”

She stared at him, her own, rather diminutive, revolver in hand. “And since when do you tell me what to do?”

“That very spirit—which may now be the death of you—is also why I adore you so. But if you refuse to leave, then you must perform a crucial task.” He shook his head when she raised the revolver tentatively. “No, my heart, as ambassadora, you must send word to our friends: you must rouse Odo and begin signaling.”

That stopped her—as Ruy had knew it would. “But—but, the staff downstairs—”

“Are beyond help, dear wife. Those who were able to flee, have. The others are no more.”

Sharon swallowed. “Then we don’t have the time to send radio signals. We’ve got to—”

“Dearest,” he interrupted, “I am your chief of security, yes?” From the corner of his eye, Ruy saw her nod as he snapped the cylinder back into place and strained to hear the orders being shouted back and forth downstairs.

“Yes,” she allowed grudgingly.

“Then, wife, trust me in this,” he said, as the two Hibernians finally—
finally!
—came out of their billet, lever-action rifles and revolvers ready. “Your superiors will want all the information you can send on this event. And any survivors among us may need help, or may be fleeing for our lives. The more your superiors know, the more swift and effective their first assistance will be. Now—and prettily I ask it—please go.”

Eyes shiny, and without another word, she turned and ran back the way she had come.

Ruy spent a split-second appreciatively watching—savoring—her movements seen from the rear. Then he began giving orders to the Hibernians. “They will come again any second, attempting to overrun both the Marines down in the great room, and us at the head of the stairs. They may also try to send someone farther into the villa, down the corridor into the north wing. You, Corporal, see if you can get an angle on the hallway into the north wing; we need to keep all their men bottled up in the great room for as long as we can…”

“
Minge!
” swore Valentino as he surveyed what had become of the men he had sent charging forward toward the tables and the stairs. At least half of them were down, most wounded and so severely shocked that they could barely move or moan. “Linguanti, get another of those firebombs ready.”

“
Si
, but—”

“Just do it.” Valentino spent a precious second considering the claustrophobic battlefield. He could send more men to rush the barricade of tables again, but now that tactic had become very expensive—perhaps cripplingly so. Either the gunman hidden near the top of the stairs was very good, was not alone, or both.

Besides, men who fought for riches—even such as his had been promised—were more savage than stalwart. At this range, firearms could hardly miss and the damage they inflicted was shocking to see, even for hardened killers. True, far more of those who had fallen were wounded rather than killed outright, but here, in a villa at the ass-end of nowhere, those wounds were a death sentence, anyhow.

Which meant he needed to keep the men moving, fighting, busy—too busy to count their losses, and hear the keening moans of their dying fellows. Fortunately, the wailing would only start when the wounded tossed off the shock, by which time this battle would be over. Unless Valentino tarried here in this great room. So he had to act—now. Waiting for all his men to reload cost too much time, too—so the fire bomb was best. And once he got past the last two Marines…

Valentino measured distances: once his men reached the tables, the entry to the kitchen was only ten feet farther along to the right. About twelve feet directly behind the tables was the door leading out to the rear of the villa, where the firing had finally stopped; from the sound of it, Arturo’s group had run into one of the revolver-armed guards.

Valentino needed to secure those two areas—the rear door and the kitchen—even though his ultimate target was probably up the stairs. However, once he cleared the Marines, he could, so to speak, turn the tables on the defenders; the trestle tops would not protect his men from up-time ammunition at that range but they would provide full concealment until they popped up to shoot. And if he could get a half dozen sheltered there to send a volley up the stairs…

“The firebomb is ready,” said Linguanti.

“Good, get ready to throw it just short of the base of the stairs on my count of three.”

“But, Valentino, there is no target there. And it might prevent us from assaulting up the stairs once we—”

“I don’t want the bomb to kill people; I want its smoke to blind them. And don’t throw it
on
the stairs, but a few feet in front, so we can still get up them. Now, Odoardo, look there—” Valentino pointed. “You see that corridor just to the right of the main entrance?”

“
Si
.”

“It apparently goes off into the north wing. There might be another staircase back there. At any rate, when you take a group in that direction, it will distract the bastards at the head of the stairs.”

“I’m not putting myself in the sights of that—”

“If you go first, you won’t be the one shot—not if you move fast enough. Just make sure the next man is close behind you.”
He needed to get Odoardo out of there before he started balking at the casualties. If the big man did so then others would, too. Every man Odoardo took with him was one more who wouldn’t be looking nervously around to see if his mates were fearful, if they were starting to think more about retreat than riches.

“Okay. And if there’s no staircase?”

“Come back here, report, and prepare to assault up the stairs.”

“I told you, I’m not going to—”

Valentino wished Odoardo was dead already. “Idiot. Listen: we will have the stairs blocked by smoke, and will have cleared whoever is at the corner. And you’re not to be in the lead; you command from the second rank.”

Odoardo smiled. “I’ll get a dozen men.” He turned to inspect the clutter of faces behind him. “Hey, you three, and you—”

Valentino turned to Linguanti. “On my count of three, you throw the bomb where I told you. And then, you follow the last of Odoardo’s group. Two seconds after they’ve crossed the open area. Keep that oaf on the objective, do you understand?”

“I understand—enough to hate the task already.”

“My sympathies.” Louder: “Odoardo, stand ready. The bomb will be thrown in one, two, THREE…”

Half-blind in the darkness of the staircase, Cardinal Luke Wadding tried to control how rapidly he was breathing. Even back in Ireland, sought by English bounty hunters, he’d never been as close to being murdered as this. To keep his teeth from chattering, he muttered at Hastings’ broad back: “Where does this passage lead?”

“There are two exits,” the lieutenant explained. “The first comes out behind a wall-hanging in the hallway of the north wing, just beyond the stone wall of the kitchen. The other goes down into the kitchen’s basement.”

“What? There’s no outside exit?”

Hastings’ dim outline shrugged. “They never finished that part of the escape route. You can see, on the west wall, where they obviously planned to run a tunnel out into the back. But it’s almost solid rock there.”

Antonio Barberini’s voice quavered in fear. “But we have no reason to go down to the cellar—just into the north wing and out the side exit, there.”

Hastings shrugged as he neared the landing that would give them access to the first door. “If the north wing isn’t secure, then we’ll have to head down into the cellar, come up into the kitchen and run to get out the back door of the great room.”

Wadding calculated, swallowed. “We’d have to cross about eight feet of open space.”

“I know,” said Hastings with a nod. “And I know you are all brave men. Now, quiet, all of you.”

Odoardo ran across the smoky, blood-spattered room. He was in front of the main entrance when a new weapon spoke from up at the head of the staircase behind him: a deeper, powerful, spiteful report, followed by two more in rapid succession and a faint
click-clack
,
click-clack.

The two mercenaries immediately behind Odoardo sprawled, one screaming, the other ominously silent.

Odoardo reached the northern hallway, which evidently led to the servant’s quarters. He spun, leveled his short-barreled fowling piece at the head of the stairs, and fired. The gun sounded like a small cannon going off. The charge of pellets tore up the rude railing, the top step, caused jets of ruined plaster to gush sideways out of the landing’s far wall. It killed no one, but his shot still had the desired effect: the gunman flinched back long enough for the rest of Odoardo’s ten men to cross the open space to safety.

Linguanti, the last over, skipped an extra step when another round from the lever-action rifle roared at his heels. Odoardo looked at him. “Now what?”

“Now we check down the hall.”

They hadn’t gone ten steps before fire chipped divots out of the right-hand wall of the corridor; they threw themselves snug against the left-hand wall.

“Damn it!” Odoardo complained.

From farther down the hall, another spattering of small-arms fire went away from them, toward the door on the northern end of the villa. Odoardo thought he heard Verme, the Corsican, shouting about a lost finger. “They’re holding off Ignatio’s boys, too, from the sound of it.”

Linguanti nodded. “Probably a very narrow doorway from the servants quarters to the outside. Easy to defend.”

“Yeah,” Odoardo sighed. “And I guess we can’t get to them, either. Unless we want to get slaughtered.” He finished tamping the wadding down against the single-aught sized pellets with which he had reloaded his weapon. “So who do we kill now?”

Sherrilyn Maddox felt two aches in her legs: one came from the knee that now surged with pain at every careful step, and the other was a painful tautness in her calves that came from wanting to continue to sprint, flat out, to help her friends.

But that was the fool’s move, despite the sounds of a firefight emanating from inside the house. The exchanges outside had been ominously brief, even though the Hibernian guarding the back doors had unleashed a steady stream of lever-actioned lead at the assassins who had been sent to neutralize him. Judging from the cries and fitful writhing of several indistinct shadows, he had killed or wounded at least two of them, but then a quartet of muskets had volleyed in the general the direction of his muzzle flashes—and all was stillness.

That had been only twenty seconds ago, so perhaps the murdering bastards had not yet sorted out their casualties and their next move, but Sherrilyn had decided to spend that time closing the distance quietly, not starting a running gun battle. With almost no moon out, and no light source behind the attackers, targets did not become distinct until you were within fifteen, even ten yards. And even then…