Exodus Read online

  New York • London

  Copyright © 2016 Tom Fox

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

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  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to [email protected].

  ISBN 978-1-6814-4157-3

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Tom Fox

  Also by Tom Fox

  About the Book

  Dedication

  A Thought

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  Read on for an exclusive extract from Dominus

  About Tom Fox

  Tom Fox’s storytelling emerges out of many years spent in academia, working on the history of the Christian Church. A respected authority on that subject, he has recently turned his attentions toward exploring the new stories that can be drawn out of its mysterious dimensions.

  Praise for Tom Fox

  “All the pulsating pace and panache of a Dan Brown novel but with the added credibility of coming from the pen of an academic authority on the history of the Christian Church. Dominus, a twisting, turning thriller with an intriguing mystery at its heart, pits good against evil, faith against cynicism, truth against lies … and is guaranteed to keep the pages turning from the knockout opening sequence to a shocking and nail-biting conclusion.” —Yorkshire Post

  “Absolutely brilliant … so good I hardly wanted it to end. Brilliantly written.” —Goodreads review

  “The action here is relentless, a real thriller of a ride, and I for one can’t wait for the follow up.” —Amazon reader

  “[A] rollercoaster of a read.” —Goodreads review

  “Dominus is a fast paced thriller that keeps you entertained from the very start … the action was pretty much relentless.” —OMGThatBook

  By Tom Fox

  Dominus

  Digital Short Stories

  Genesis (prequel to Dominus)

  Exodus (sequel to Dominus)

  About the Book

  Fans of Dan Brown and Simon Toyne will be gripped by this high-octane novella, which follows hot on the heels of GENESIS and DOMINUS by Tom Fox.

  In just eight hours and forty-five minutes, an explosive device is primed to rock the foundations of Rome …

  When journalist Alexander Trecchio is awoken from dark dreams and called to the Vatican in the face of emergency, he knows just how much is at stake. Someone has desecrated the Sistine Chapel—and they have revenge in their sights.

  As Alexander is drawn deeper into the deadly web of lies, it’s clear he is about to come face-to-face with an evil force who will stop at nothing to succeed … Can he stop them in their tracks before it’s too late?

  Available exclusively in ebook, this is the sequel to Tom Fox’s electrifying debut novel, DOMINUS.

  Dedication

  To all those who have written reviews, posted tweets, blogged, blasted, and otherwise just enjoyed and talked about Dominus and Genesis—this novella is for you. Because a little bit of fear, tossed together with a few ponderous questions about life, can be an immense amount of fun.

  Since Gabriella Fierro went under the looking glass in Genesis, I thought Alexander deserved a bit of focus of his own. Even if, in the end, he might wish he hadn’t …

  A Thought

  The culmination of a life rarely comes with a countdown. Life surges. It ebbs and flows, and at some point—spontaneous, unforeseen—it snaps to its end. Will that end be heroic, stalwart and inspiring, pointing the way to other things? Will it be couched in cowardice? Or will it simply be silent, meaningless and unremarkable, fading into a darkness from which there is no retreat or return?

  Chapter One

  Sleep

  I am trying to escape, I am sure of it. I will my legs forward, commanding their action, but my feet fail me. They are obeying directives all their own, committed to their own action. Each footstep in the darkness sounds with a loud clank.

  Between the clanks, there is something ominous, foreboding in the nighttime silence. I look down. The leather soles of my familiar Dunhill Derbies collide with marble, one strange step after another. I am spinning, spiraling downward. There is thunder, thunder clapping like a drum—and I am struck with questions. Does the thunder come from my feet? From above? Why can’t I see clearly?

  There are strange noises now, scuffling in the silence. Dim lights begin to spot the darkness. They are haloed, humming. As if light can hum. I am suddenly aware that my chest is cold with sweat. High above, the sky is crowded with imposing figures, glowering down at me from perches in the shadows.

  Some power grips me, snaps me to attention, directing my vision. I am being aimed, like a camera. Like a gun. And then, suddenly, I behold it. The light surrounding it is brighter, beaming at me.

  The End. The End of All Things. The judgment none can ever escape.

  Its majestic, imposing reality fills my gaze, seeming to stretch to every corner of the universe. Bodies are in agony. Bodies rejoice. They stare upward and outward, meeting me face to face. It’s a cold, damning reality, tormenting, haunting and …

  Red. That’s strange. Even in my state, I know it shouldn’t be red. The thundering in my head is growing louder, my heart thumps inside me, but my eyes in this moment are faithful and true. The familiar scene is red, dripping with blood. It oozes out of mouths and eyes, off extended hands. It flows down to cover the stone table that sits before it, drenching the ancient white rock with thick, congealing torrents.


  And atop the ancient stone, a hand.

  There is a hand, violently severed from its arm, perched alone on the table of sacrifice. Its fingers are curled inward, a loose fist.

  My vision is blurring in the strange light, sweat pours into my eyes, but I sense the vision is not complete. There is something more. There, in the fist. I can’t quite make it out, but there is something there, clutched in the bloodied fingers …

  Then, an explosion in my head. The world goes white and my neck surges with pain. No more sight, only the haunting image, tortured in my memory, of that hand, that judgment, that sea of blood.

  And then the great, wild sea of nothing.

  Chapter Two

  4 hours 49 minutes ago

  A timer of eight hours and forty-five minutes would suit the situation nicely.

  Eight hours forty-five minutes, and an explosion to exact payment for all that had been stolen.

  A man with slender fingers pushed them gently through a mass of wires, delicately clasping a loose end requiring connecting. The fourth in the sequence. Redundancy was critical.

  All the fires of Hell to consume him.

  The explosive was as high a grade as the man had been able to purchase on the Italian black market, and was fitted into a device that bore the marks of a one-man job. For a larger operation, like those he’d helped plan before—before the world had been stolen from him—there would have been international involvement. Had such devices been required, components would have been custom-designed, the necessary compounds sourced through those blacker troughs that flowed behind back channels. Money would have appeared without end, financing every need. Powers would have bent. Officials would have cooperated. There would have been no home-crafted bundles of wire, no plastic ties fastening components on to a hand-sanded board. Dime-store nails wouldn’t have been used to stabilize canisters made from leftover tins and store-bought supply shelves. Things would have been grander—they would have been majestic. That was the way it had always been. How it was supposed to be.

  But for this, he was alone. There were no powers to assist him; there was no finance to support him. The back channels were dry. Only a remnant was left, and in the task of leading them back to life, he was alone.

  Damn it. Alone. It was not how things were supposed to have gone. But one dealt with what came, that was the way the world worked. And what had come to him was this solitude and this new, fiery will.

  Alone he might be, yet he was more than able to make do with what was at hand.

  His slender fingers went about their work.

  The last remaining actor. The only one with boldness still in his heart.

  The wire slid into place, and with a twist of the fingers the man locked it down with a plastic clamp. Its place between the twin canisters was hard to reach, and the jumble of components was already displeasingly disorderly, too many pieces held together in a makeshift fashion. Yet the digital timer—a white plastic model from a hardware store, intended to perch on a countertop and time the baking of cakes—blinked to life all the same, juice from the nine-volt battery now flowing through its circuitry.

  He removed his fingers from the device’s interior, careful lest a misplaced gesture send the fragile contraption disintegrating into its component parts. Then, cracking his knuckles, he extended his right pointer to the gray keys of the plastic pad and entered the digits he required.

  The hours on the cheap LCD display gradually advanced to eight. The minutes, in turn, to forty-five.

  The silent press of the start button in the lower right corner.

  The countdown to consolation began.

  8:45:00

  8:44:59

  8:44:58

  Chapter Three

  The present: 4:05 a.m.

  Alexander Trecchio awoke shaking. In the temporary disorientation that came with the sudden onset of reality, he didn’t recognize his surroundings. But one by one his mind took note of the objects around him. The brown-and-gold Victorian lamp on the nightstand to his right. The faux Kandinsky print hanging on the wall to his left. The photographs from a long-ago reception somewhere near the Trevi Fountain. The beige sheets clutched tightly in his grasp, 300 thread-count and light as always, his knuckles white from the grip.

  The woman—the woman, impossible as that seemed—draped loosely in what little of the sheets he hadn’t pulled away from her, breathing softly, her heavy sleep undisturbed.

  His bedroom, his bed. Home.

  Alexander calmed his breathing and forced open his fingers. He was still fully clothed, the fabric of his shirt and cotton trousers clinging wet to his body. He felt shrink-wrapped in the stickiness, and a sudden embarrassment accompanied his discomfort. Gabriella had regularly accused him of being semi-puritan, terrified of physical romance—but it seemed prudish even to him to have gone to bed fully dressed. But foul dreams had been plaguing Alexander, disturbing his nights and draining the energy from his days for weeks, and his behavior hadn’t been altogether normal.

  He’d never been a great dreamer, whether of the pleasant or haunting shape in which dreams came. His sleep was usually deep and still. The advent of these nightmares had troubled him more than he consciously knew it ought to, but the nature of dreams was that they could not be controlled.

  And yet, in all the disturbing dreams he’d had of late, he had never experienced anything like this. Never had a nightmare been so … vivid.

  He pulled himself upright, cast the sheet away and dropped his legs over the side of the bed. Two feet on the floor. Reality. The carpeting was soft and warm between his toes. Familiar. He glanced back at Gabriella, expecting the stirring signs of morning life to be roused by his activity, but her rest was as deep as he had ever seen it, her breathing rhythmic and steady.

  Alexander’s head throbbed. Not everyone’s sleep was so peaceful.

  He had tried, over the past two weeks, to analyze the onset and content of his dreams—or at least to determine their source. Perhaps they arose from the loneliness of a man who realized that love for another person had finally come into his life, but that he still didn’t know entirely what to make of it. More specifically, he still didn’t know how to approach a future with her, apart from the fact of agreeing that their flats would be shared—that the physical space of their lives, at least, would be common. Women, he’d opined on an almost daily basis, as if the whole sex were a collective, singular mystery to the ex-priest in him. What the hell am I to do with, with … with …? He didn’t know how to complete the question. And he had no answers, however it ended, though the shiver that racketed through his spine every time he thought of her, much less saw or touched her, made him aware that the mystery wasn’t going to go away.

  Maybe it was simply stress. Or maybe the oddly unexpected shock of the normal that came after traumatic events: the mind’s variation on a body feeling the cramps of the withdrawal of adrenalin. That was far more likely. Trauma had certainly played a part in his life over the past two months. Trauma like he’d never expected he would—

  Alexander’s chest constricted every time he permitted the memories entrance. His breath shortened, fiery and uncomfortable. The strange events that had rocked Rome—that had rocked the world—earlier in the summer … they were realities his mind still couldn’t grasp. He’d buried an uncle. He’d witnessed things he could never explain. He’d fought. He’d hoped. He’d prayed.

  He’d killed.

  The knot in his stomach pulled with too much force for a human to bear. He’d killed. He’d felt hope like he’d never known, but he’d also had guns fired at him as he ran through the night. He’d held one at a woman’s temple.

  He’d pulled a trigger.

  Alexander’s pulse threatened to beat him into hysteria. He couldn’t let his thoughts keep taking him away like this.

  It’s done. Finished. You have to move on.

  It was easier commanded than accomplished.

  Normal life had resumed, at least in outward form. Ale
xander was again a reporter for La Repubblica. The attempts of his editor to remove him had been overturned by the paper’s owner, given Alexander’s none-too-unimpressive role in the events that had transpired in Vatican City. He was back at his desk, his cubicle. His routine. And for better or for worse—and inside he knew it was for better—a romance that had died long ago, with the woman who had been at his side as he’d left the Church nearly five years previously, had been resurrected. Emotion, something Alexander Trecchio hadn’t been sure he’d ever truly feel again, was back in his life.

  But he was no longer quite himself. At least, not the version of himself that had sat at his desk before the stranger had appeared in St. Peter’s and thrown his world into disarray. Before he’d been drawn out of a solitude that had oppressed him for years.

  So he had opted to work long shifts at the paper, often into the darkness of evening, craving the time he would spend with Gabriella in the morning or over lunch, yet dreading the thought of every pending night and the sleep that had become so upsetting. Gabriella had her own long shifts in her precinct, so the situation hadn’t become too awkward, and Alexander made of it as much as he could. Evenings at La Repubblica were quiet, solitary, and allowed him to work without interruption until the annex building closed. Then, its proximity to Vatican City meant he could easily pop into his uncle’s former office—the Pope had given him his blessing to use it as his own, at any hour of day or night, as long as he wanted—and keep working into the darker hours.

  If he could not altogether avoid his thoughts, at least this presented a way to remain distracted from them. And his experiences had given him a new vigor for work that had formerly been only a tedium. He found himself actually interested in stories. Actually researching. Actually writing, not merely vomiting out words in a format that would satisfy the typically low expectations of the paper’s religion column. He had a new zeal, which played its own part in helping his worries to fall away.