Barely a Crime Page 12

  “We need a weapon.”

  “We’ll have one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ll have one. Trust me.”

  “I love it when I don’t know what the hell’s going on. You going to tell me?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Crawl said. “Your knee’ll fly off. Look at that thing. When did you start that?”

  Kieran noticed his knee. He stopped shaking it.

  “I’ll stay on the doctor,” Kieran said. “Make sure all he’s doing is pushing some tape against the thing.”

  Crawl nodded.

  Traffic was light. What little there was seemed to be leaving Turin rather than heading in.

  Crawl looked again at Kieran’s right knee. It was jittering up and down again, even faster than before.

  Turning the empty corner from the Plaza Castello, they drove past the Turin Cinema Museum onto the Via Roma on the west side of the cathedral at 2:48 A.M., the doctor still in the lead, his Mercedes moving slowly.

  The square bell tower of the unadorned sandstone cathedral, with its red-tiled roof, rose sixty-five feet off the ground in front of them. It was near the southwest corner of the building, forty yards from the iron-reinforced front doors. Tall, narrow stained glass windows lined the sides of the darkened cathedral. There were no windows on the front wall. At the top of the tower were a pair of open belfry windows.

  Kieran checked his watch. In seventeen minutes, at exactly 3:15 A.M., the armed security guard inside the cathedral would shut off the sanctuary’s motion-sensor alarm system to make his second security round of the night. They would have to be inside and in position to take him out before 3:10.

  His knee was steady but his heart was pounding. He pulled again on his tight-fitting gloves and held his backpack to his chest as Crawl rolled the car next to the tower. Kieran’s free hand was tight on the handle of the door. He checked the roads, front and rear, quickly, and said, “Clear.”

  Crawl checked the roads as well, then slowed the car to a full stop.

  “Go for it,” he said, and Kieran was out of the car, running to the base of the tower.

  Crawl pulled away, still following the doctor, Antonio now at his rear bumper.

  Directly across from the northwest corner of the cathedral, he knew the vehicles would turn left onto the Via Basilica and park facing away from the cathedral. Parking was never a problem on the Via Basilica in the middle of the night.

  At the base of the bell tower, already breathing hard, Kieran clipped a thin black rope to the base of an eight-fingered arrowhead. His glanced up every three seconds. He wished that his heart would stop pounding so hard, but it didn’t. Biting his lip, he forced himself not to rush too fast, to be calm, to remember that everything was going to work out fine.

  No weapons. No one hurt. Nothing stolen but traces the police wouldn’t even notice. And, if each kept his head and did his job, maybe some risk, but not much.

  He fit the arrowhead into the fat barrel of what looked like a long flare gun and checked again for oncoming traffic or late-night pedestrians. Seeing no one, he stood up and fired the arrowhead at the open belfry window at the top of the tower.

  The window was large, six feet high and four feet wide, and he had practiced well. The eight-inch-long hardened-steel fingers of the arrowhead released on impact, latching onto the shelf at the window’s base on Kieran’s first try. The rope hung like a spider’s silk from the window to the ground.

  Kieran heard a horn blow in the plaza and crouched down, ready to lie flat, holding his breath. But five seconds trudged by, seeming like twenty, and no car appeared. He heard himself mutter, “Please, just two more minutes.”

  He stuffed the firing device back into his backpack and extracted two fitted handclasps, which he locked onto the rope. He thought of Brenna, and he wondered what she was doing while he was in Italy using clasps to pull himself up a rope to an open belfry window, his breath exploding in short, sharp bursts. Was she thinking about him? He hoped that she was. He would tell her what he was thinking about as he reached the top of the tower, if and when he got home again.

  Inside the tower, he caught his breath and took out a black rope ladder with four-inch studs that would hold the ladder out from the tower wall. He hooked the ladder to the belfry’s ledge and tumbled it out for the others, who were already moving from the shadows of the north wall of the cathedral to the base of the tower.

  He heard himself whispering out loud again, saying from what seemed like far away, “Give us one more minute.”

  Suddenly lights swerved around the corner from the plaza in front of the cathedral.

  The doctor was at the base of the tower, already reaching for the ladder. He dropped flat to the ground in the shadow of the wall. Crawl and Antonio did the same against the north wall of the cathedral, near the chained and bolted northern sanctuary door.

  The car swung onto the Via Roma and drove past them without slowing down.

  More importantly, it was a light blue Opel sedan, not the Turin police.

  The doctor went up the ladder, struggling with his footholds. Crawl went second and made it up quickly. Antonio was right behind him, moving just as quickly.

  Kieran pulled the ladder up, as the Italian tumbled to the floor with a grin and gasped, “That went good.”

  Crawl pulled a sheer black cloth from the pocket of Kieran’s backpack. The doctor helped him hang it over the opening of the window with adhesive putty. Kieran stuffed the arrowheads and ladder against the wall of the belfry, out of their way. They would leave them; they couldn’t be traced. Antonio had the two lasers out and was already hunched over the bolted trapdoor that would give them access to the staircase of the tower.

  With the window shield in place, the doctor flipped on a small flashlight.

  Antonio had one of the lasers in hand. Kieran took the second and knelt beside him.

  He would tell Brenna about this part too. Her eyes would dance like a little girl’s.

  It took them nearly four minutes to cut through the door. It took another thirty seconds to descend with flashlights to the heavy ground-level door that separated the tower from what had long ago been converted from a small clergy-vesting closet into the cathedral’s souvenir storage room, tucked into the northern corner of the cathedral vestibule.

  The door to the souvenir room took another four minutes to open, but suddenly, there they were: together with miniature flashlights and black backpacks and dangerous plans in the crammed company of countless small boxes of holy cards and brochures and miniature plastic replicas of the shroud with paper photos pasted on their front. Mounds of four-color leaflets about the holy and mysterious artifact and the ancient cathedral that housed it lined the shelves on either side.

  “Clockwork,” Crawl said, checking his watch, obviously pleased.

  The doctor checked his watch too. “We have eight minutes,” he whispered. He got down on his knees in front of the door that would lead them into the front vestibule of the cathedral, and lit a small fluorescent cartridge he placed on the floor next to the door, illuminating the room with a yellow glow. “Be ready to go immediately, just in case.”

  Kieran surprised himself by thinking about picking up a souvenir pamphlet. He decided against it.

  “Absolute silence.” The doctor slipped a stethoscope from the side pocket of his backpack. He inserted its earbuds and pressed its hard black circle against the door leading into the vestibule and the main body of the cathedral. Then he waited.

  Antonio, who was squatting next to a large opened box of rolled linen miniatures of the shroud, pulled a black ski mask from his backpack.

  Crawl and Kieran picked up the lasers and went into a silent crouch, Crawl to the left of the door, behind the doctor, Kieran to the right.

  Kieran listened to himself breathe. He told himself, don’t think about Brenna, don’t think about anything except what you do next. No mistakes, no risk.

  They waited, glowing yellow
from the light. The pamphlets, postcards and little linen shrouds glowed yellow behind them. No one moved.

  Seven minutes went by. Seven and a half.

  The doctor stiffened and hunched forward, listening to a distant thud: the door that led from the cathedral rectory to the sacristy behind the main altar at the other end of the church being closed and echoing through the empty cathedral. Then he heard the popping of switches in the sacristy, fourteen of them, as the security guard turned on the cathedral’s lights before making his rounds.

  “Motion sensors off,” he whispered. “Mark the time.”

  They did. Their countdown had begun. In exactly twenty more minutes, if the guard did not turn the motion sensor system back on from its secure location in the rectory, the system would engage automatically and a cautionary alarm would sound in the clergy’s quarters.

  “Lasers,” the doctor said, quietly but sharply. He slid away from the door, making room. Kieran and Crawl closed in. As they cut through the two sliding bolts on the souvenir room door leading into the corner of the vestibule, the doctor prepared a hypodermic needle.

  The guard, they knew, would still be in the sacristy, which was directly behind the main altar and separate from the main body of the cathedral. But he would be in there for less than a minute more. At that point, his round would take him in a counterclockwise sweep of the cathedral, starting at the ivory pillars and gold-tramed glass doors of the Chapel of the Shroud.

  He would check the security of the chapel first, then move to assure the well-being of the saints and the angels and the Jesus figures portrayed in the six stained glass windows of the cathedral’s north wall. He would glance through the nearly blackened wooden pews and red-curtained confessionals near the back of the nave. Then he would enter the front vestibule to check on the chains and bolts of the front doors.

  From there, on every night but this one, he would go back toward the main altar area, moving this time past the south confessionals. He would return to the sacristy and turn off the lights in the main body of the cathedral itself, leaving just two as security lights. Then he would reenter the secured rectory, where he would turn off the sacristy lights and reengage the motion sensors and alarm system. The entire round was mapped to take him just under thirteen minutes. It would take him two of those minutes to double check the Chapel of the Shroud and work his way to the front vestibule.

  The door leading into the vestibule was open in two minutes, twenty seconds. The doctor and Antonio slipped on ski masks and moved out. They crossed the gray stone floor on padded feet and stood behind the nearest of the four twelve-foot-high doors to the sanctuary. Each door was magnificently carved and as thick as a man’s arm.

  Soft steps in the church, but still far away.

  They didn’t look. They didn’t have to. The guard would come to them.

  A humming sound. The guard was a tenor.

  Inside the souvenir room, Kieran rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He was sweating.

  The doctor and Antonio braced themselves, the doctor standing, Antonio crouching low.

  Crawl and Kieran stiffened too, unblinking and silent, ready to spring if there were any sound of trouble.

  The guard, a blue-uniformed middle-aged man with a thin mustache and a pudgy build, checked the north confessionals, swept a worn glance through the church’s last half-dozen pews and walked casually into the vestibule, just as he had done a thousand times before on a thousand other nights when there had been no one hiding in a ski mask to grab him and to thrust a hypodermic needle into his neck, freezing his throat and sinking him to the floor, unconscious.

  After the guard was subdued, the doctor said, “Move quickly now.” He sounded out of breath.

  Kieran rushed past him and handed one of the lasers to Antonio. Together they ran down the side aisle toward the chapel.

  The doctor jogged after them.

  But Crawl stopped. In a single quick sweep, he removed the guard’s Beretta 9mm 92D from its holster and stuffed it under his belt in the small of his back. Then he pulled his hunter’s vest down to cover it and ran after the others as silently as he could, as fast as he could, given his limp.

  The Chapel of the Shroud was tucked into a small alcove between the main altar and the north wall of the building. It was adorned like an architect’s vision of the gates of heaven: red velvet and gold plating and white marble, with great winding pillars marking the entrance and six-foot gold-plated candleholders lining the side walls. The aluminum cover of the shroud’s encasement was mounted sideways against the back wall of the chapel, as if the man whose blood had made the stains was lying down directly over the white marble Altar of the Shroud.

  At the chapel’s locked doors, Kieran forced himself not to look at the gold and velvet and aluminum and marble. Just focus, he told himself. He held the laser waist high and cut through the first of two brass bolts that held the chapel doors locked.

  Antonio cut the other at the same time, a smaller bolt located at floor level, built into the lower gold-leafed panel of the doorframe.

  Crawl came up to stand next to the doctor, first surveying the altar in the chapel, then turning to examine the chains on the nearby side door of the church, through which they’d make their exit.

  The doctor stood like a man transfixed, staring at the long molded casing of the shroud on the chapel’s wall, with its raised, shining figures telling so clearly the terrible, wonderful story of the passion and death of Jesus, and, on the far right, the wrapping of his body in the shroud itself.

  The doors swung open like great glass curtains.

  Kieran rushed for the altar, Crawl and Antonio right behind him.

  Antonio said, “Twelve minutes, forty seconds left.”

  The doctor blinked, hesitating for the briefest moment, then rushed forward with the others.

  Stripping the altar of its candles and cloth, all four of them climbed on it to stand face-to-face with the shroud’s aluminum casing.

  The others heard the doctor breathlessly whisper, “Concentrate!”

  Kieran turned, then realized the doctor was saying it to himself, not to them. He looked at his watch.

  Crawl and Antonio locked the roller-guided lasers in place at the top of the two sides of the encasement, then turned them on.

  Antonio announced, “Twelve minutes, ten.”

  Crawl and Antonio moved the lasers straight down, top-to-bottom. The beams cut through the aluminum covering and the four hinges that held the covering in place easily and quickly, just as the doctor had promised.

  Together, the four men lifted the covering and slid it to their right across the top of the altar. Kieran and Crawl jumped down to prop it up against the wall.

  The doctor didn’t move. Still on the altar, he stared at the shroud. He was captured by it, wide-eyed and ashen in the presence of the cloth and the history and the mystery and the blood.

  Kieran snapped him out of it. “Eleven and thirty.”

  The doctor whispered it again: “Concentrate.” Then he willed himself to nod to Crawl and Antonio.

  Kieran shook himself loose from his own desire simply to stare at the shroud and its possibilities and helped Crawl to lock his laser to the top-right corner of the polycarbonate cover. Antonio locked his to the bottom-left corner.

  The lasers’ red eyes clicked on again, this time with their beams angled to allow the removal of the polycarbonate once it was cut, but not angled so severely that their beams would touch the shroud itself.

  Crawl moved left, Antonio moved right.

  Kieran knew the job would be this way when it actually happened: the simplest tasks would seem as though they were taking forever; his breath would be harder to keep slow and steady; his heart would be pounding too hard and racing too fast; every background noise, no matter how slight or insignificant, would sound like the police storming the chapel. He tried to think about the fifty thousand pounds to steady himself, then told himself, no, think about removing the po
lycarbonate once it’s cut. Everyone does his job. No mistakes, no risk.

  The doctor opened his backpack. He handed Kieran two power-suction handles, which Kieran positioned firmly on the shroud’s fourteen-foot polycarbonate cover. Then two more, and two more, and a final two.

  By the time Crawl and Antonio finished cutting the shroud’s protective cover across the top and bottom and moved to cut down the two sides, eight handles spanned the face of the cover.

  Kieran checked his watch, his heart pounding. He whispered, “Six and forty-five.”

  “There’s time,” the doctor said sternly.

  “Foot to go,” Crawl said softly.

  The doctor whispered, “Don’t rush.”

  Antonio finished cutting down the right side and backed off. He lowered the laser carefully to the altar and positioned himself next to the doctor and Kieran, who had each grabbed two of the suctioned handles.

  Crawl said, “Done,” and dropped his laser to the altar to grab the two remaining suction handles.

  “Together now,” the doctor said. They braced themselves and pulled.

  The heavy cover lifted out more easily than they had expected. They lowered it to the altar, then let it lean forward as they lowered it to the floor.

  “My God,” Kieran whispered, staring at the shroud, breathing hard, “there it is.”

  Crawl stared. Antonio stared. The doctor whispered, “What’s our time?” without taking his gaze from the shroud.

  “Four and fifteen,” Antonio said.

  The doctor said, “Quickly,” and mounting the altar once again, opened the canvas case which hung from his side. His face was nearly as white as the marble of the altar.

  Antonio grabbed the two lasers, one in each hand, and walked quickly out of the chapel.

  Kieran started after him, but Crawl told him, “No. Change of plans.” He started after Antonio, pulling the guard’s Beretta from his belt and saying loudly to Kieran, over his shoulder, “You watch the doc.”

  Kieran hesitated, stunned to see Crawl with a weapon, then turned just as the doctor removed a four-inch roller tape from its casing. Pressing it against one of the eight major patches of blood on the shroud, he rolled it quickly back and forth one time, pressing hard. Then he did the same, with the same roller, to another patch of dried blood, after which he quickly put the roller back into its case and withdrew a second roller, identical to the first, from a case of its own.