The Templar Salvation (2010) by Raymond Khoury

and charged forward. The road was narrow and lined with parked cars, hugging the long facade of the Apostolic Library.
    “Nice move on that mechanic back there,” Reilly remarked as he slid a sideways glance at the Iranian professor.
    “My country’s been more or less constantly at war ever since I was born,” he shrugged. “Like everyone else, I had to do my time in the army.” Glancing around, he asked, “You know where we are?”
    “More or less. The gate’s on the other side of this building,” he said, pointing at the library rushing past them on the left. “If I’ve got it right, there should be a passage into the courtyard with the parked cars just about here—”
    He had it right—and swerved into the narrow tunnel that led into the Belvedere Courtyard.
    He slewed the car around the parked cars, startled visitors scrambling out of the way of the lumbering Popequarium bearing the license plate SCV 1—for Stato della Citta del Vaticano , meaning Vatican City State, though most Romans joked that it really stood for Se Cristo Vedesse , meaning “If only Christ could see this,” a jab at how, over the centuries, the popes had completely overturned Jesus’s original message of possession-free preaching. Another vaulted passage on the opposite side of the courtyard led them out on the other side of the library complex—and onto a clear run down the Via Del Belvedere to the Porta Sant’Anna and out of the city.
    “We can’t stay in this thing,” Sharafi said. “It’s like a beacon.”
    “We’re not out of here yet.” Reilly was staring dead ahead.
    Two carabinieri cars—sleek, dark blue Alfa Romeos with menacing, sharklike grilles, spinning blue lights on their roofs, and shrill sirens—burst out of a side street between them and the gate and were rushing toward them.
    Definitely not going according to plan , Reilly thought, scowling at the prospect of playing chicken with the Italian police in a stolen Popemobile. But he was doing it. And they were coming right at him, and didn’t look like they were about to blink first. And in that moment, Tess’s face burst into his consciousness—his mind picturing her in some vile lockdown, chained to some radiator, helpless, the psycho lurking nearby. He couldn’t back down, nor could he not get them out of there with the book. He had to make it—for her.
    He kept his foot down.
    “Agent Reilly—” Sharafi tensed up, his right arm clamping down on the armrest.
    Reilly didn’t blink.
    He was a nanosecond away from slamming head-on into them when the road opened up into a wide piazza outside the Tower of Nicholas V, a massive round fortification that was part of the original Vatican walls. Reilly jerked the wheel to the right—swerving off his arrowlike path just as the two black police cars shot past—then left again to get back on track. He glanced into his mirror to see the two Alfas do some synchronized hand-brake turns that lit up their tires and spun them around before they resumed the chase.
    The road ahead was all clear, the gate less than a hundred yards away now. It was the way Reilly had been driven into the Vatican, twice now, a grand entrance with twin marble columns topped by a solemn stone eagle on either side of the heavy wrought iron gates—gates that some Swiss Guards were now rushing to close.
    Not good.
    Reilly kept the pedal jammed down, feeling a hardening in his gut. With the two Alfas close behind, he cannoned past a few cars that were waiting to be ushered out of the gate onto the main road, ramping the SUV’s left wheels over the curb to squeeze by, before blasting through the gates and obliterating them in a deafening frenzy of twisted iron and steel—instantly followed by an eruption of glass as the Popequarium’s tall viewing box slammed into the intricate overthrow that spanned the top of the gate and burst into smithereens.
    Pedestrians on the busy street outside the Vatican wall scattered frantically, leaping