In the Wind: Out of the Box, Book 2 (24 page)

“Seriously, man,” J.J. says. “I know you’ve been through a few rodeos by now, but maybe this one’s a little different since Sienna is on the sidelines.” He pauses, and I can hear his tone soften. “Just lettin’ you know I’m here for you, man. In whatever way you need.”

I stay silent for a handful of moments. “It is different,” I say. “You’re right. It’s all on me this time, and it kind of is my first rodeo. At least the first one I’ve been in charge of.” I shake my head as I survey the avenue. “I don’t want to do this, man. I don’t want to go toe to toe with Anselmo, that crazy bastard. I don’t want to think about Diana or Father Emmanuel getting killed while trying to fight this off.” I shiver under my coat and know it has nothing to do with the weather. “I don’t know how Sienna does this, keeps putting her jaw out there for people to take aim at it over and over.” I think about Gail Roth and that interview, how my sister got picked apart by the news afterward. “This is not my scene.”

“Then why are you there?” J.J. asks.

I laugh. Something about the situation seems totally absurd. “Because no one else is gonna show.”

“They’re following your lead this time, bro,” he says.

I thrust my hands deeper in my pockets. “I’m feeling a little like Dorothy here—I just want to go home.”

“You’ve faced off with some of the nastiest metas in the world, dude,” J.J. says. “You sure aren’t lacking for courage.”

“I feel like I am,” I say. “I feel like a coward for questioning everything—every angle, every action.”

“I think that just makes you a leader.”

His words resonate through me, and I think about all the times Sienna has put herself on the line without looking like she put any thought into it. If I compare myself, bravery-wise, to my sister, I look like a chicken. She’s fearless guts, endless courage, so much brass it puts every man on earth to shame.

I’m not her. I’m scared witless right now. Not so much for myself—maybe a little bit—but for what happens if I fail. What happens if my little fledgling team of near-strangers fails here.

“You gonna make it, man?” J.J. asks. “Do I need to find, like, an inspirational video from YouTube and link it to you?”

I laugh again, sincerely this time. He really does want to help, and this guy—this geeky dude who speaks my language—he makes me feel braver just talking to me. “I think I got it now, pal. Thanks.” I settle against the wall. “Let me know when you get something.”

“Prime Minister’s motorcade is about a half mile away,” J.J. says. “They’re moving at a decent clip, should be at your position in about two minutes. I mean, I’m estimating, but—”

“That’s fine,” I say, “just keep me apprised.” I wave an arm at Diana as she makes the circuit back in my direction, and she crosses the street toward me. She moves at a steady pace, and she takes less than a minute to reach me.

“The Pope has a processional coming out now,” she says. “Father Emmanuel is with them.”

“Nice eagle eyes,” I say, and I see a glimmer in the green. “Is your power—”

“Precision muscle control,” she says abruptly, and I see her face become masklike.

“Oh,” I say, nodding. “Okay, then.”

“And before you ask, because you men always do,” she says, cocking her head slightly at me, nearly completely inscrutable, “yes, it does extend to all muscles.”

I blink, and she turns away. “That was … uh … informative.”

“Did she just say what I think she said?” J.J.’s voice blares in my ear. He sounds like a hungry dog panting over the line.

“Not now,” I cut him off. “Anything to report?”

“Sorry,” he says, “I didn’t catch that. I was too busy thinking about—”

“J.J.!” I snap. “Head in the game.” There’s a hard wind that blows down the Via della Conciliazione, and it prickles the hairs on the back of my neck.

“I got nothing on the Via,” he says. “The software is running on every camera I can scoop access to, but unfortunately, I’m working with limited server resources, so I’ve only got about six square blocks worth of camera feeds running at the moment. I could try and get broader access to some NSA servers, but it would take—”

“Do it,” I say.

“Dude,” he says, almost pleading, “you didn’t let me finish telling you what it would take to make it happen. Rocha. I’m going to have to talk to Rocha.”

“You talk to Rocha every day,” I say.

“I email with him whenever possible,” he says. “Man’s a dragon. A man-dragon. He breathes fire and smoke, leaving the charred bones of lost souls outside his cubicle in broken mounds—”

“Spare me the epic fantasy imagery,” I say, “and do it.”

“I’m gonna have to wake him up. Wake the dragon. Dude. The things I do for you—”

“Thanks, J.J.,” I say.

“Whoa,” he says, before he can even finish his thought. “Um. Hooboy. Okay, so I got good news and bad—”

I frown, turning to look at Diana, who is lingering nearby, clearly listening to my conversation even as she scans the Via della Conciliazione. “Good news first,” I say.

“I’m not gonna have to wake the dragon.”

I feel my eyes roll with exasperation. “Seriously? This is not—”

“And the bad,” he steamrolls me, which J.J. never does. “I’ve got your boy Lorenzo as well as Anselmo, like an 80% match. No, 90%. Oh, and there’s Fintan. But—and this is the bad news—”

I start to reach for Diana, but she’s already tensed, listening to every word, waiting for the axe to fall.

“—they’re in St. Peter’s Square,” J.J. says. “About a hundred yards from the Pope, and holding position.”

My head turns involuntarily, swiveling the long blocks to the basilica, far down the way. It’s at least a minute’s run, at meta speed. I see movement out of the corner of my eye as the Prime Minister’s motorcade passes, and I suddenly realize that we’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake in assuming we could even come close to guessing what Anselmo has planned.

The moment is arriving, and Anselmo is utterly prepared. The Prime Minister’s motorcade is coming into sight even now, and the Pope is standing only feet away.

Yes, this is about to be a great day. A day of destiny.

Anselmo looks neither right nor left at his lackeys, but straight ahead. Into his future. “Remember what you must do,” he says, his words carrying more than a hint of what will happen to them should they fail. “Do not fail me now. Soon, these countries will be ours, and this fortress will be our capital, the place from which we will repel any attempt to take back what we have won.”

The car approaches, slowly, taking its sweet time, like it is out for a Sunday drive through a countryside village. Anselmo can wait, though. Soon enough, it will arrive here, at its final destination.

It’s only in the last moments before it all goes down that I realize, rather suddenly, how deeply I’ve underestimated Anselmo. I’ve been operating from the assumption all along that he’s a grandiose but sane gangster, looking to corrupt the institutions of man by trying to take over a country. With a meta behind it, especially one with his sort of invincibility, it almost seems possible. They send an army after Anselmo, he shrugs off their bombs and bullets and personally kills every one of the men that come after him. It seems almost like he could do it, if he acted intelligently, chose the battlefields himself, and had enough of the country’s movers and shakers on his side. Fear and intimidation, as well as the established institutions, these would be his allies. A judicious use of force, intelligent application of terror—I mean, it’s kind of low odds, but I can see the possibility that someone could pull it off.

But here’s where I underestimate Anselmo, and where I finally realize what it takes to be a Bond villain—you’ve got to be out of your damned mind.

There’s no way Anselmo’s scheme—even if it worked, which is a mighty big if—will go unanswered by the rest of the world. The EU is about as likely to let Italy fall off the map unanswered, dropped under the heel of some meta dictator, as I am to just blithely chop off my own arm. But he’s standing near the Pope for a reason, and I’ve finally realized in this moment why he’s chosen to do this at this time, at this location.

He’s going to kill the Pope as well, and try and take over the Vatican as part of his campaign. Like the place is just some country that you can roll over and not some deeply significant spiritual nation state with ties to more governments than you can count. Arguably, what he is planning to do to the Vatican might produce more international outrage than a simple attempt at takeover by force of Italy.

Either way, it’s breathtaking in its scope, and it’s in this moment that I realize that Anselmo is completely effing nuts. It’s like his version of a big dog pissing all over the place to mark his territory, without any regard for how he’s going to defend it from a legion of wolves. It’s every bit as much about intimidating the lesser mammals—and I think we’re all lesser mammals to him—as it is about killing the Prime Minister and the Pope. This is public. This is visual. It’s about as high profile as you can get. Anselmo is spraying his impotent little hose everywhere, and I, for one, am not impressed.

Unfortunately, in the short term, my team and I are all the response that there is for what he’s about to do, and so I’m sprinting down the Via della Conciliazione while all this is rushing through my head. I shoot past the Prime Minister’s car at meta speed, only a few dozen yards behind Diana (she’s fast, I remember as she takes a lead). I can hear hastily applied brakes behind us as we book it down the Via, and I hope that the Prime Minister’s security detail takes this blatant meta activity as a hint to get the hell out of Dodge.

Then I see movement ahead, a frenzied level of activity as something happens near the Pope’s security detail. The sound of gunfire fills the air, sharp and terrifying, and the crowd falls into screams all up and down the Via della Conciliazione as whatever insanity Anselmo has planned starts in earnest.

He can see the Treston boy running up the Via toward St. Peter’s Square, and it fills his throat with a raw, scratching hate. Anselmo wishes he could breathe fire, but there’s a deeper, sicker pleasure he feels at the sight of the lad. The fool is charging into death, into confrontation, into a three-on-one battle that will see him forced to watch as Anselmo’s brilliance is shoved into his face once more, and he is forced to—

Anselmo catches a blast of water like a hydrant turned loose, right into his face. He loses his footing, feels the square collide with his back, a dim hint of where the concrete has struck him. He blinks the water out of his eyes, feels it coursing out of his nose, is sputtering and gasping in surprise.

“Capo,”
Lorenzo says from above him, reaching a hand down to help him up. Fintan lies to his left, shaking it off, the ground around them wet from whatever has just happened.

As Anselmo takes Lorenzo’s hand, he sees another blast of water come his way, dispelled by Lorenzo with his wind. It comes from a priest—an African priest, of all things! With Swiss guards, machine guns at the ready, advancing slowly behind him. The Pope is gone, long gone, already hustled off across the square by bodyguards whose step is quick enough to suggest they are not all of them human.

He looks down the Via again, and this time he sees the Premier—that pig—his motorcade already moving in reverse back toward the Castle Sant’Angelo. The timing has gone wrong.

Everything has gone wrong. Because of—

“Your mother was a whore,” Anselmo breathes to the priest. “Your Virgin Mary was—”

A blast of water as thick as the spray from a fire hose makes hard contact with Lorenzo’s shield of air, and there is a dispersal that turns the air damp from the force. They are evenly matched, turning loose what they have, this priest with his water against Lorenzo’s air, and the stalemate is a distraction from everything Anselmo intends—

His gaze alights once more upon the fleeing motorcade, and he shakes Lorenzo by the shoulder, turning his attention back to what matters. “Forget the priest,” he whispers. “We have more urgent matters to attend to.” He spins his head to look at Fintan, who is now back on his feet, drooling water. “Keep this fool occupied,” he says and sprints toward the Via della Conciliazione without so much as a look back. He shoves Lorenzo in front of him as the first shots from the Swiss Guards ring out, and he can feel the bullets upon his skin as others might feel the touch of a thrown pebble as he runs to catch the Italian Prime Minister’s motorcade and fulfill at least one part of his plan. The pope, after all, will remain in his fortress, and can be dealt with later. But this?

This can still be done, very publicly—and very painfully.

I shout ahead to Diana as I see Anselmo and Lorenzo coming our way. “You might want to get out your bow or whatever you’ve got hidden up your sleeve for this!”

“I use a bow when I want to be quiet,” Diana says. Her hands fall into the pockets of her hoodie and come out bearing dual Micro-Uzis. “No need to be quiet now.” She swoops ahead the last hundred feet and starts firing at Lorenzo, who barely gets his hands up in time. I see at least two bullets skim through his wind barrier and draw blood, but he manages to divert them into grazing wounds.

I see Anselmo charging ahead like a runaway bull, ignoring Diana and hauling ass with his full attention focused on the motorcade, and I suspect he’s not going to so much as pause to swat me if I stand in his way. He’s plowing over the few people from the crowd who are running in front of him, and it’s not pretty. A few of them die immediately, others get injured pretty critically, and I know that somehow I need to stop this metaphorical running of the bull.

I halt in the middle of the avenue, dig in, and prepare myself. The sound of Diana’s guns ripping off shot after shot, is hard to ignore, but I focus. I see Anselmo charging me down, not even really cognizant of the fact that I’m in his path, and I know for a fact if he keeps going that I’m going to end up exactly like everyone else he’s callously run over in pursuit of his overarching goals. This dude does not give a shit about anyone but himself, and the rest of us are simply objects to be moved, used or ignored as he goes about his life.