Gideon's Spies полностью

At five o’clock precisely, the popemobile drove out of the courtyard. Ahead, from St. Peter’s Square, the cheering began. As the campagnola approached the Arch of the Bells, the Vigili were joined by Rome city policemen, who walked ahead and immediately behind the vehicle. As the popemobile emerged into the piazza, the crowd noise rose to a roar. John Paul waved and smiled; his time as an actor in his youth had given him a powerful stage presence.

At two miles an hour, the pope turning from one side to the other, the vehicle moved toward the Egyptian obelisk in the center of the piazza. At exactly 5:15 P.M. the campagnola began a second circuit of the square under the watchful eyes of Cibin; the security chief was trotting behind the popemobile. The crowd’s cheering was even wilder. Impetuously, John Paul did something that always made Cibin nervous. The pope reached into the crowd and plucked out a child. He hugged and kissed the little girl and then handed her back to her ecstatic mother. It was part of the pontiff’s routine. Cibin’s concern was that a child would wriggle free of the pope’s grasp and fall, creating a nasty accident. But John Paul had dismissed all such concerns.

At 5:17 P.M. he once more reached out to touch the head of another little girl, dressed in communion white. Then he straightened and looked about him, as if wondering who else he might greet. It was his way of personalizing the papacy in even the largest of crowds.

Furthest from his mind at that moment were the dangers he had faced in other crowds. Only three months before—in Pakistan, on February 16, 1983—a bomb had exploded in Karachi’s municipal stadium shortly before he began his journey among the faithful. In January 1980 the French secret service had warned of a Communist plot to kill him. It was just one of scores of threats the Vatican had received against the pope’s life. All had been investigated as far as was possible. Later Magee said: “In reality we could only sit and wait. Short of enclosing the Holy Father in a bulletproof cage whenever he appeared in public, something he would never agree to, there was not much else we could do.”

At 5:18 P.M. the first shot rang out in St. Peter’s Square.

John Paul remained upright, his hands still gripping the handrail. Then he started to sway. Mehmet Ali Agca’s first bullet had penetrated his stomach, creating multiple wounds in the small intestine, the lower part of the colon, the large intestine, and the mesentery, the tissue that holds the intestine to the abdominal wall. Instinctively, John Paul placed his hand over the entry wound to try to stop the spurting blood. His face increasingly filled with pain and he slowly began to collapse. Only seconds had passed since he had been hit.

Agca’s second bullet struck the pontiff in his right hand, which fell uselessly to his side. Bright red blood spurted over his white cassock. A third 9-mm bullet hit John Paul higher up on the right arm.

The campagnola driver twisted in his seat, his mouth open, too stunned to speak. Cibin was screaming at him to move. A papal aide shielded the pope with his own body. The vehicle began to lurch forward. The crowd itself was swaying as if buffeted by a giant wind. One shocking sentence rippled outward from the scene of carnage. In a score of different languages came the same disbelieving words, “The pope has been shot.”

Cibin and his Vatican security men and city of Rome policemen were waving their guns, shouting orders and counterorders, looking for the gunman. Agca had burst through the crowd, running very fast, holding his gun in his right hand. The crowd continued to open before his waving pistol. Suddenly he tossed the gun away. At the same moment, his legs were cut from beneath him. A Rome police officer had made the arrest. In a moment both men were buried beneath other policemen in a scene that resembled a rugby scrum. Several policemen kicked and punched Agca before he was dragged away to a police van.

The popemobile had continued at an agonizingly slow speed toward the nearest ambulance stationed by the Vatican’s Bronze Door. But the ambulance had no oxygen equipment, so the pope was transferred to a second ambulance nearby. Vital moments were lost.

Lights flashing and sirens wailing, the ambulance raced to Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, the nearest to the Vatican, completing the journey in a record eight minutes. During the drive the pope uttered no sound of despair or resentment, only words of profound prayer, “Mary, my mother! Mary, my mother!”

At the hospital, he was rushed to a ninth-floor surgical suite that comprised an induction room, an operating room, and a recovery area. Here, at the center of the crisis, there was no panic, no wasted movement or word. All was quiet urgency and tightly controlled discipline. Here the stricken pontiff could have felt the beginning of hope.