The Thieves of Heaven (16 page)

Busch had sent his son home with Jeannie, telling her not to wait up, then borrowed the assistant baseball coach’s Torino. Since the birth of their children, Jeannie had one rule. It was reasonable and, in this day and age, it was prudent. There were too many horror stories and she refused to let her family be a statistic. No guns around the kids. And so, Busch had left his gun, along with his wallet and badge, in the safe at home before the baseball game. He hadn’t bothered to pick them up on the way to the airport; he didn’t see the need.

Michael walked through the airport, his carry-on bag slung over his shoulder, slapping his thigh as the bag bounced with his stride. The black case he carried in his right hand was heavy. He flashed his ticket at the security gate, emptied his pockets, and placed his bags upon the conveyor belt. As he stepped through the archway, the alarms sounded. Michael froze. Flashbacks of being arrested coursed through his mind. They must be onto him, he thought; he was doomed. Before he left his apartment he’d made sure that there would be nothing incriminating in his bags or on his person: now he couldn’t fathom the problem. The guards moved forward to pat him down. He rechecked his pockets and sighed with relief as he found a stray nickel. He stepped back into the archway. This time, he was clear and free to go.

As Busch reached the security checkpoint, he caught sight of Michael heading quickly down the hallway toward the gates. Before he could decide on his next move, the guard asked him for his ticket. Of course he didn’t have one. Busch asked to be let through: he was a police officer on official business. The guard asked him for his ID, but of course he didn’t have that, either. Busch watched Michael blend in with the sea of outbound passengers. He looked around for a solution and decided he would continue to give Michael the benefit of the doubt; he’d speak to him when he came back in seven days. But then, he saw the sign:
INTERNATIONAL DEPARTURES.

Michael had just become a fugitive.

From the tarmac, in the shadows, a figure watched the 747 climb into the night sky. The man was alone and he wasn’t an airline employee. He walked back toward the hangar door passing the maintenance crews and luggage carts; no one paid him any mind, it was as if he belonged or had a special pass.

The figure stepped through the door and headed down the security tunnel. A guard stood at the exit. The guard looked up, puzzled at the unfamiliar man walking his way, but when the figure flashed his police badge it instantly became clear. Dennis Thal smiled as the guard bid him good night and walked out the exit.

Chapter 8

T
he raven-haired waitress placed the cappuccino
on the table next to Michael’s work papers. It was Michael’s second cappuccino and his new favorite drink. Starbucks didn’t hold a candle to the original made in its land of origin.

The cafe, Bourgino’s, was just outside Vatican City on Via del Campiso, an ancient Roman street of rutted cobblestone. For the past two days, it had been his destination of choice: tiny, off the beaten path, and completely absent from Fodor’s tourist guide. The clientele was a mixture of locals and expatriates, his presence was not even questioned. Fortunately, he was mostly black Irish. With his brown hair and tanned skin, he easily passed for Italian.

He had spent his first day in the city learning the narrow streets and alleys, his flawless memory his greatest tool. Committing buildings, security systems, and routes to his personal brain trust allowed him time to work out the intricate problems and details of his trade.

Michael had pored over every renowned work on the Vatican and its contents, but nothing he read had prepared him for the grandeur that met him as he walked up Via della Conciliazione. The massiveness of St. Peter’s Basilica dwarfed the images in his mind. The Piazza San Pietro’s width was just shy of three football fields: it could hold three hundred and fifty thousand people for the Pope’s Masses. It was framed by two vast semicircular colonnades that reached out from the basilica like welcoming arms. The 284 Bernini-designed Doric columns stood forty feet tall and ran four deep around the entire ten-acre open space. As Michael looked up, he couldn’t help but feel he was being judged by the scores of marble saints perched atop the colonnades, all staring down into the square.

In the center of the enormous piazza rose the obelisk brought to Rome by the Roman emperor Caligula, in
AD
37. Capping the eighty-five-foot structure was a cross and golden ball rumored to contain the remains of Julius Caesar. While such an ancient obelisk in any other city would have been the center of attention, here it was simply an afterthought. The Vatican was another world, a remnant from a nearly forgotten history, a fairy tale out of the past. This holy city was beyond the imagination of any one man. Rather, it was the magnificent achievement of some of the greatest artistic minds that ever lived. While Michael had researched its history, inside and out, he hadn’t grasped until this very moment its astonishing breadth. Back in the U.S., he had stayed intensely focused on saving Mary’s life, treating this mission as just another building to overcome, another security system to defeat, another police force to outsmart. He was unprepared for the grandeur of the world he now entered.

The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica reached up to Heaven, like an enormous bejeweled crown. At the foot of the wide entrance steps stood the enormous statue of St. Paul. He held a sword, defending the Church against those who wished to bring her harm. On the left stood an equally massive marble statue of St. Peter, the first Pope, in his hands a cluster of keys.

Looking in every direction around him, he saw nothing but architectural genius, not only in form but in function. The Vatican City’s immense, imposing wall ranged from forty to over one hundred feet in height, its medieval design capable of repelling even a modern-day military strike. Vatican City held everything you would expect of a country, even one that was only a little over one hundred acres—banks, post office, radio stations, a newspaper, and even a helicopter pad. It had its own currency and judicial system, and it was presided over by Europe’s only true absolute monarch, the Pope. While the Vatican welcomed the public into certain of its areas, the majority of the Vatican was isolated within the walled enclave. Access to this area was permitted only to a select few.

Michael spent two days in the more public areas of the Piazza San Pietro, the Sistine Chapel, and the host of museums photographing and observing, learning and planning. He hadn’t realized until he commenced his research the breadth of the Pope’s cultural domain. The Vatican included a twelve-museum complex; one, some claimed, was the largest in the world, a title debated by both the Louvre and the Smithsonian. The Vatican Museums encompassed fourteen hundred rooms. They stretched along corridors totaling over four miles. A sightseer could spend an entire year there and still not see the vast collection, one accumulated over two thousand years. Every interest could be satisfied: Etruscan art, classical statuary, archaeology, Middle Eastern artifacts, Renaissance paintings, books, maps, manuscripts, tapestries, furnishings. Treasures that no one man could imagine and precious items collectors everywhere coveted. From the three-hundred-and-sixty-foot-long Gallery of Maps to the Gallery of the Candelabra overflowing with Roman classical sculptures to the mummy- and sarcophagi-filled Egyptian Museum, every square inch of the museum complex held some of the world’s most irreplaceable objects.

While most had heard of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the side walls of the chapel itself were masterpieces in their own right. Here, the greatest artists of their age—Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Rosselli—had created magnificent frescoes that spanned the entire length of the chapel. In other halls could be found entire rooms painted by the likes of Raphael, Pinturicchio, and Signorelli, And though the Sistine’s ceiling cast its shadow over the other works, their perfection was never in dispute.

The great collection had initially overwhelmed Michael, but he had forced himself to focus. Now he paid particular attention to the Museo Storico-Artisticoe e Tesoro. Known as the Sacristy and Treasury Museum, the ten-room complex was adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica and housed many of the greatest relics of the Christian empire and Papal State; the Crux Vaticana, containing fragments of Christ’s cross; innumerable reliquaries; the diamond-encrusted Stuart Chalice donated by England’s King Henry IV. Manuscripts and decrees passed down from pontiff to pontiff, staffs, crucifixes, and weapons. And of particular interest to Michael, a section devoted to the first Pope. Here, too, were artifacts from the days St. Peter himself walked the streets of Rome: a copy of the Chair of St. Peter; the rusted chains that had bound him prior to his crucifixion at the hands of the Roman emperor Nero. But of greatest interest to Michael was a hallowed corner where stood a single display case. Its pedestal was made of ebony, the dark wood merging into the surrounding shadows and yet standing out in sharp contrast to what it supported. The glass case that sat upon it was two feet square, the glass an inch and a half thick. A ceiling-mounted, pencil-thin spotlight cut through the gloom to illuminate the purple velvet pillow upon which sat the targets of Michael’s mission here. Their design was simple, reflecting their two-thousand-year-old age. They were given to St. Peter by Jesus and were the origin for the symbol of the Pope. Their image was reflected frequently throughout the Vatican, most particularly in the Vatican’s crest. To millions of people they were the true symbol of St. Peter and his Papal heirs, the leaders of the Church Christ himself had founded. To Michael, however, they held a different meaning: the one chance he had to save his dying wife.

Their design was simple, slightly larger and thicker than one would expect today. And though they did appear to serve a function at one time, today they were clearly displayed to inspire awe. They were the gold and silver keys; the keys to Mary’s survival.