couldn’t shoot an unarmed and terrified man—and also that if he died, which a gunshot wound and the subsequent fall would all but guarantee, there was no way to discover who had paid him to photograph the Kallikrates text. All she could do was watch in impotent frustration as he reached the opening and squeezed inside.
“Son of a bitch!” she spat as she realized where his escape route led.
Into the Vatican.
The city-state’s own catacombs—those that had been mapped, at least—were centered beneath the vast basilica of St. Peter. If Agnelli had discovered a way into the Vatican’s lower levels, from there he could enter the basilica itself … and then simply walk out into the streets of Rome.
Nina shoved the gun into a pocket and started after him. “Two places in two days where I’ve been shot at,” she muttered as she climbed. “If I get back to New York and someone tries to kill me there, I’m gonna kick their ass so hard …” She reached the uppermost niche and took hold of the column set into the wall. It didn’t look the least bit safe—though the fact that someone of Agnelli’s bulk had scaled it without breaking it apart gave her some limited reassurance.
Without the secure footing of the loculi, her ascent was now much slower. As she inched her way closer to the opening, the muffled sounds of Agnelli’s passage through the narrow tunnel faded. He was getting away from her.
“No you goddamn don’t,” she growled, pulling herself higher and refusing to succumb to the awful temptation to look down at the ever-increasing drop. Instead she fixed her eyes on the dark hole as she brought herself within reach. It was a few feet to the pilaster’s side—she would have to stretch across to it, taking her weight on one hand.
No choice. Nina took a deep breath, then clutched the ancient stone as tightly as she could with her left hand as she reached out with her right, hooking her fingers over the lip of the new passage—
Her left hand slipped.
She screamed, clawing desperately at the wall. Her right foot jolted from its hold, leaving her suspended and straining between two very precarious points like a human tightrope. She scraped her toe against the ancient stonework for a terrifying eternity before finally finding purchase on a jutting brick. That gave her just enough leverage to bring her left hand up to the hole and grip the edge. A few seconds to recover her breath, then she pulled herself into the low passage.
Heart rate dropping from that of a frightened rabbit, she looked ahead. The passage, what she could see of it in the dim light from below, was about thirty inches wide and slightly lower, angling upward into darkness. She could hear a distant rustle as Agnelli crawled up the incline.
The gun was a hard lump pressing into her side. She drew it and headed after him.
Very quickly she was in total darkness. An instinctual fear rose: simple unreasoning terror at being in a confined space, unable to see. “If he can fit,” she whispered to herself in an attempt at reassurance, “so can I. I don’t have a fat ass. Well, it’s not huge or anything. I mean, I work out. Kind of. When I have the time …”
The distraction did its job, the encroaching panic retreating. Looking ahead, she saw a faint glimmer of light marking the tunnel’s end. It was mostly obscured by the silhouetted form of Agnelli—who as she watched pulled himself out and disappeared.
Her anxiety returned, but now for a more concrete reason. Agnelli might be waiting in ambush at the top of the shaft. She slowed as she drew nearer, listening intently. Nothing. Had he already fled—or was he preparing to smash a brick down on her head?
She hesitated a foot short of the exit … then scrambled through as quickly as she could.
No stones dashed out her brains. Agnelli had already left the softly lit chamber. It appeared to be an archaeological excavation, crumbled walls having been dug out of the pale brown soil. But there was no indication that the dig was an ongoing project; instead it seemed frozen in time, as much a part of history as the ruins it had unearthed …
Nina suddenly knew where she was.
Beneath the Vatican, uncounted tombs and burial chambers dated back as far as Imperial Rome, layer built upon layer over centuries. The passage from the Brotherhood’s maze of archives emerged in