“Defy the will of the Holy Spirit? Is that really your counsel, Father Keegan?” Receiving no answer, Donati checked his old Hamilton wristwatch. “Shall we?”
“Yes, Holiness. It’s time.”
Donati waited ten additional seconds, then stepped in front of the open window.
It was pandemonium.
***
He stood there for a long moment, his arms extended over the rapturous throng in the square, seemingly unaware of the fact that someone was shooting at him. So deafening were the cheers that Gabriel only noticed the gunfire when he spotted the wound in the palace facade about a meter to Donati’s right. The next shot splintered the open shutter, and the third struck Donati in the center of his chest, directly above his silver pectoral cross.
Gabriel was unaware of precisely what happened next because he was knocked to the paving stones of the square by a tsunami of panicked faithful. When he found his footing again, he realized that Veronica was no longer at his side. He spotted her a few seconds later. She was desperately trying to pry a weapon from the grasp of a slender figure wearing a black clerical suit and raincoat. Then there was another gunshot, and she collapsed as though a trapdoor had opened beneath her.
The slender figure in a clerical suit and raincoat then leveled his gun toward Gabriel, and an instant later he heard two more shots. It would take him a moment to realize that both shots had been fired by Luca Rossetti and that he was not in fact dead. He fought his way through the fleeing crowd to the spot where Veronica lay next to the assassin in a pool of shared blood. “Please hold me,” she said before losing consciousness. “The girl doesn’t want to die alone.”
Part Four
Non Finito
56
The Gemelli
It was Luca Rossetti who lifted Veronica from the blood-soaked paving stones of St. Peter’s Square and Gabriel who frantically fought to clear a path through the panicked crowd. Five long minutes elapsed before they managed to reach the ambulance parked just beyond the border barrier. Two EMTs, after placing Veronica on a stretcher, immediately attempted to restart her heart. Gabriel lifted his eyes briefly toward the third-floor window on the eastern corner of the Apostolic Palace. Once again it was closed tight.
Another ten critical minutes would slide by before the ambulance reached the Agostino Gemelli University Policlinic, the renowned Rome teaching hospital located five kilometers northwest of Vatican City. By the time Gabriel and Luca Rossetti arrived—in a commandeered Carabinieri cruiser with blue lights flashing—Veronica was on the operating table. She would remain there until four o’clock that afternoon. Doctors described her condition as guarded, though for reasons never made clear they withheld her name from their public statement. The chief surgeon said the next twelve hours would likely determine whether she lived or died.
Of more immediate concern to the news media and a billion Roman Catholics around the world was the exact condition of HisHoliness Luigi Donati. Videos of the incident, recorded by professional photojournalists and thousands of faithful gathered in the square, left little doubt that he had been struck by at least one projectile, perhaps two. And yet for six long hours after the incident, the Vatican Press Office inexplicably had nothing to say about what had transpired in St. Peter’s Square. Clearly, said the well-sourced American correspondent from a prominent Catholic news service, the Holy See was hiding something.
A flurry of dubiously sourced stories and social media posts only added to the confusion. A usually reliable German publication was the first to report that His Holiness had been killed in the attack. Minutes later a New York tabloid quoted “a Vatican insider” as saying the Holy Father’s body was stretched out in the Sala Clementina with a rosary in its hands. An American cable news network played somber music while reporting that cardinals from around the world had been summoned to Rome for the Holy Father’s funeral. A London betting parlor declared Cardinal Matteo Bertoli, the Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, to be the odds-on favorite to emerge from the forthcoming conclave dressed in white.
By five o’clock that afternoon, even Gabriel feared that Donati might well be dead, for all attempts to reach Father Keegan or Colonel Alois Metzler had proven fruitless. Alone in a VIP waiting room at the Gemelli, he watched the live coverage on Italian television and scoured the Internet for reliable sources of information. CNN had obtained a cell phone video of Luca Rossetti killing the black-clad assassin. It was clear the gunman had been aiming his weapon at someone in the square. Someone who would now be dead, thought Gabriel, had Rossetti not fired his weapon first.
The Press Officebollettino, when it finally appeared, was notable for its lack of detail, stating only that the Holy Father was restingcomfortably and praying for the woman who had been wounded in the incident. Shortly after 9:00 p.m., she was moved from the postsurgical critical care unit to a suite of rooms on the Gemelli’s eleventh floor—rooms that were reserved for the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. Gabriel arrived twenty minutes later to find His Holiness Luigi Donati kneeling on a simple wooden prie-dieu at the foot of her bed. There were two bullet holes in the front of his white cassock. And he was still very much alive.
***
“Body armor?” asked Gabriel.
“A lightweight vest. It’s perfect for the busy pontiff on the go.”
“How often do you wear it?”
“When there are specific and credible threats against my life. When I was in the United States, I never set foot in public without it.”
“But you weren’t wearing it yesterday in Lampedusa or Palermo.”
“You noticed?”
“My hand was on your back while you were working the crowds.”
“Which is why I didn’t feel the need to wear the vest. You were at my side. I knew that nothing was going to happen to me.”
They were alone in a small, comfortably furnished sitting room. There was a papal seal on the door and a crucifix on the wall. From the adjoining room came the occasional bleep of a respirator and the hushed voices of nurses. The muted television seemed to be playing the same thirty seconds of video on a loop. A pope under fire as he stood in an open window of the Apostolic Palace. Mayhem and bloodshed in the square below.
“What made you put on the vest today?” asked Gabriel.
“An important part of my job is to lead a life of prayer andmeditation. I spend several hours a day talking to God. And on occasion God speaks to me.”
