by Jeremy Duns
Sarah had dropped to the floor, and I stepped forward and gently took the gun from her hands. It was a Browning, and it was still hot. I put it on safety and shoved it into my waistband. She looked up at me dully.
‘You understand?’ she whispered. ‘I couldn’t let him… I couldn’t let him own me any more.’
I nodded, and pressed my hand into hers. I didn’t blame her: he’d had it coming. What I didn’t understand were his parting words. What hadn’t I read? The documents, presumably. But I had read them all. Was there another dossier somewhere?
I leaned down and searched through his pockets, turning each of them out to see if he had any papers on him and padding him down in case he had secured them elsewhere. Then I took off his boots to check he hadn’t hidden anything in the soles. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.
I turned to Sarah and asked her to pass me the sheaf of documents again. She didn’t answer, so I knelt down next to her and repeated it and she nodded and unbuttoned the pocket and passed the packet to me. I flicked through the pages, trying to see if there were any clues as to what Severn had meant, but there was no mention of Turin, no specifics about this attack or its ramifications. Whatever it was I had missed, it would have to wait. We had to get rid of these bodies – the kitchen staff might be back any minute, and the conductor with them.
I jumped over to Zimotti and searched him. He didn’t have any papers on him, either, but he did have a wallet containing his identification badge. I took it, then stripped the trousers, shirt and jacket from him and hurriedly put them on over my own. I took off my now-ragged plimsolls and replaced them with his thick-soled boots.
There was a cargo hatch for goods near the door, and I leaned over and slid the cover to one side. Sarah was still dazed, but I persuaded her to stand and we lifted Zimotti’s body and heaved it through the hatch. There was a clump as it hit the sides and then it was gone.
We repeated the process with Severn, after which I cleaned up as much of the blood from the floor as I could with a rag. I threw it in the sink, then took Sarah by the hand and we ran back through the restaurant car, to the compartment with the nuns and the Mother Superior. Sarah stepped inside and I was about to follow her when I saw someone walking through the door at the far end of the corridor. It was the conductor.
He was a short, rotund little man with drooping shoulders and a ferrety moustache. I slid the door of the compartment shut and marched towards him. ‘Di Angelo,’ I said, flashing Zimotti’s identification in his face. ‘Servizio Informazioni Difesa. Have you seen my colleague? He’s with a British agent with fair hair. We’re looking for a couple of fugitives.’
He nodded eagerly. ‘I saw them heading this way a few minutes ago. I thought I’d better come and investigate myself because half the kitchen staff just barged into my quarters and told me there was trouble at this end of the train.’
I gave him a puzzled look. ‘I haven’t seen anything. Tell them to get back to their stations. It was a false alarm.’
He hesitated. ‘But one of them said he heard a shot.’
I looked at him, and his shoulders drooped a little more under my gaze. ‘Do what you are told,’ I said sharply. ‘This is urgent state business, and I have no time to explain the situation. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, officer. Shall I stop the train so you can conduct a search for the fugitives?’
If he stopped the train, it was all over. The carabinieri would come on board, and we would be delayed.
I gave him my coldest, most imperious glare. ‘If I had wanted you to stop the train, I would have asked you,’ I said. ‘Did you hear me make such a request?’
‘No, officer.’
‘Well, then…’ He looked up at me with ill-concealed resentment, and I pretended to soften. ‘I apologize. You are a good man, I know. We all have our jobs to do, and sometimes they’re not easy. I appreciate the suggestion, but I don’t think we need stop the train just yet – we’ll find them soon enough. In the meantime, can you keep your eyes open for me?’ He nodded gratefully, and I clapped him on the back. ‘Good man. I’ll start checking these carriages, and I suggest you go and tell the kitchen staff to return – there may be hungry passengers, and we wouldn’t want them to make a complaint, would we? If you see anything suspicious on the way, come and find me at once.’
He nodded and trundled away.
*
As we slowed into Turin’s Porta Nuova station, I braced myself for the next hurdle. There was a group of carabinieri waiting at the barrier on the platform: no doubt they were armed with our descriptions. I wasn’t sure I could bluff them with Zimotti’s identification badge – they might look a little more closely at the photograph than the conductor had done, and while there were a few flecks of grey in my hair, it wasn’t nearly enough of a likeness. But a bigger problem was Sarah, who had no disguise: her long blonde hair stood out a mile.
The train came to a standstill, and we stepped off and joined the crowd heading for the exit. As I had feared, the carabinieri were examining everyone as they came through. I adjusted my collar and took a deep breath. We walked towards the barrier, shuffling through the crush. Any moment now someone would catch sight of Sarah’s hair.
I swivelled on my heels to face the person behind me, a hollow-cheeked young man, and flashed my identification at him. Puzzled, he slowed down, and I quickly reached out and grabbed the cap from his head, then threw it to Sarah.
‘Put this on!’ I told her. ‘Try to get through!’
She clamped the cap down over her head, tucking as much of her hair as she could into it, then pushed forward into the crowd.
My victim, in the meantime, had swiftly turned from puzzled to angry and started shouting at me. One of the carabinieri at the barrier flicked his head up and began moving towards us. I could see Sarah a few feet ahead, but she had not yet made it through to the other side.
‘Venite subito!’ I shouted. ‘Someone has been stabbed here!’
The carabinieri froze for a moment, then shouted back at one of his colleagues and the two of them began thrusting their way through the crowd towards the imaginary scene of the crime. It left a gap on one side of the barrier. I pushed past a middle-aged couple and started heading for it. By the time the carabinieri had reached the perplexed man, who tried to explain what had happened, I was in the station concourse.
I ran across it and through the colonnaded exit, where Sarah was waiting for me. There was a queue for the taxis, but we didn’t have time to wait. We ran to the front, holding up Zimotti’s badge to the astonished line of customers. I opened the door of the front taxi and jumped in.
‘Il Duomo,’ I said.
The driver gave a curt nod and put his foot down.
XXIV
The city swept by in a blur, and my eyes fixed on the clock on the dashboard of the taxi. It read a quarter to eight – we had fifteen minutes to find the bomb and stop it. As we came into Piazza San Giovanni, the cathedral rose in front of us, the façade a mass of white marble glinting in the evening sun. And, just visible above it, the tip of the chapel pierced the evening sky.
I paid the driver and we got out and started running towards the square. The crowd was much bigger than I’d hoped, a great crush of people queuing to enter in advance of the service. I waved Zimotti’s identification above my head, and people reluctantly let us pass, until we finally reached the doors and entered the cathedral.
Incense hung heavily in the air. A procession of purple-robed priests were walking through the central candle-lit aisle, their chanting echoing around the space. At the far end of the nave there were two massive stairways with signs indicating that they led up to the Chapel of the Holy Shroud. We took the one on the right.
The stairs were steeper than I had expected, and halfway up I was nearly overcome by dizziness. Sarah grabbed my arm, and I shook the feeling away. She gave a taut smile and we carried on climbing, until we were in the chapel. Black and white marble and gilded bronze gle
amed, and light shone through the cupola above, striking the ornate altar in the centre like a spotlight. Inside the altar was a magnificent silver chest, and inside that lay the Holy Shroud itself. I looked up at the frescos in the dome above. Barchetti had said ‘in the dome’, so that was where we had to go.
Sarah pointed to a staircase on the right. As we rushed towards it, I heard a disturbance from below. I looked down and saw one of the priests detaching himself from the procession. He’d seen us. He called out to us to stop, but we ducked into the staircase and started climbing, and then I heard him call out again and the sound of his footsteps echoing on the marble. There had been a tinge of panic in his voice, and I guessed that he was the inside man, the guard to make sure nobody came near the bomb.
There was a gallery directly under the dome, like the Whispering Gallery in London. I looked down and saw that the procession was entering the chapel below, heading for the altar with the Shroud. Ignore them. Concentrate. I looked around frantically. A large enough bomb here would not only destroy the Shroud, but might kill or maim people in the church – perhaps even some of the crowd outside. But where the hell had they put it? As in St Peter’s, there was nothing but a bench, which Sarah was now sitting on, catching her breath.
‘Stand up!’ I told her, and she did so with a guilty start.
‘You think it’s here?’
‘Perhaps.’
I knelt down and took a closer look. Yes, there was a lid to it – it was a chest as well as a bench. Perhaps this was where they usually kept spare parts or cleaning equipment or some such. It had a sliding lid, but I couldn’t get it open. I looked for a lock, but there was none. It was simply jammed at one end, and it wasn’t budging. I tried to place my nails into the tiny gap between the lid and the rest of the bench to lift it a fraction, but they weren’t long or strong enough. Sarah shuffled over and tried with hers, but with no better result. It was useless.
Footsteps were now echoing up the stairs, and they were getting louder by the second. In frustration, I hit the palm of my hand against the lid. It moved. Just a tiny amount, but now there was enough space for me to use my fingers. I formed my hand into a claw and tried again. Slowly, the lid glided open.
I looked down into the chest. There was a bag inside, a faded leather hold-all. Perhaps it had tools in it. Or perhaps a chunk of plastic explosive connected to a timer. I leaned down and unzipped it.
There was nothing there.
I looked again, rummaging my hand around the sides and bottom. It was completely, mystifyingly empty. So where the hell had they planted it? I looked around desperately, at the columns and the pillars and the procession swaying below.
‘Any ideas?’ I asked Sarah.
She didn’t respond, and I glanced up at her. She was sweating, shivering, with a panic-stricken expression on her face. That was understandable, but something about it seemed wrong, like she was terrified of something I wasn’t aware of. She placed a finger to her head and said something, but her mouth couldn’t seem to form the words, and my skin started to crawl as I realized why. She’d lost her hearing.
‘Have you had any muscle pain since you were last here, or sore eyes?… Have you had any more bouts of deafness?’
There was no bomb here. Because they weren’t using a bomb.
They were using me.
I looked up. There were three of them, all wearing black robes with masks over the lower half of their faces. The figure nearest to me stepped forward and I saw he had a syringe in his hand. I tried to stand to make a run for it, but I didn’t have any strength left and there was nowhere to run anyway, not any more. The other two men held me down, and as the needle plunged into my arm I imagined I felt the liquid pulsing through my bloodstream. They stepped over and I watched as they performed the same task on Sarah, and then my vision started to blur and my eyes closed.
XXV
I was in my dressing gown, waiting. It was night, and we were all assembled in Library, waiting anxiously. Moonlight shone through the window onto the ragged armchairs, and I felt like sneezing from the dust of the books. Thousands of others had made their way through this process over the years – so would I, I told myself. We had been woken and brought down here hours ago. I stared down at the pattern of the carpet, which was brown and red with little flecks of white in it, curlicues, like pieces of gristle in a slice of salami, like sea-horses in an ocean of wine, and I tightened the cord of my dressing gown around my body. It was like a rope, the cord, and I pulled it tight, chafing my skin, already raw from the winter night – there was little heating these days. It was a navy-blue dressing gown, bought by Mother at Harrods before the war, with my label sewn inside the collar. Outside I thought I heard the drone of the planes in the night. Somewhere out there, Father was waiting for me to grow up and become a man…
And now the big door opened to reveal Mason, impossibly tall Mason with his great hooded eyes, and he pointed to me.
I stepped forward. He placed the blindfold around my eyes, and I followed him.
I ran through everything in my mind one last time, all the words and facts I had studied obsessively for a fortnight, in the hope that it would soothe my nerves a little.
Mason walked me round the building, took me up one flight of stairs and down another, spun me round, shouted at me from different directions and after a while I stopped trying to figure out where we were going. It didn’t matter. Every so often I reacted too slowly to his instructions and felt a swish against my calves and heat rising through the prickles. He had some sort of a whip with him.
I was being lifted into light. There was a moment of release as the cooler air hit my eyes and forehead, the sweat evaporated, and then a terrific blast of heat. Move, look away. Swish.
‘Whenever you look away from the light, we will use this,’ I heard someone say. He was holding the thing up in front of my face, but everything was a blur.
‘We call it the Cat,’ said the voice, and I recoiled as it brushed against my face. ‘Keep looking at that light.’
Just a lamp, a common or garden lamp. Fix on something else, not on the bulb, or you will damage the retina. Fix just above and to the left and let the light become the background. Then I caught a glimpse of the boy holding the Cat, and realized it was Charles Severn, and I sat up with a jolt, my lungs heaving, sweat pouring off my face.
A nightmare. It had been a nightmare. My Notions test had been fine. I had passed. No bones broken. I was an adult. Severn was dead. A nightmare.
I looked down. A grey blanket and white sheets covered me, but it didn’t feel sturdy enough for a bed: a stretcher, then. I moved to step off it, but found that I was strapped down.
As I took my bearings, questions started to flood through my mind, but before I could order them I was pulled up short by the sound of movement very close by. I looked up to see a young man in the uniform of a carabinieri standing by the edge of the stretcher. He wasn’t wearing a mask, which something told me was a good sign. He was flicking his hand against a catheter tube attached to the stretcher. I followed the line of the tube, and lifted the sheet to see it leading into my wrist.
The man scribbled something down on a board he was holding, and then started walking away from me. I made to call out to him, but then noticed in my peripheral vision that there was something in the place he had been a moment ago. It was another stretcher, and lying on it, her eyes closed peacefully, was Sarah.
‘She’s fine.’
I looked up, startled, to see a man ducking his head down and entering the room. My stomach tightened.
‘Hello, Paul,’ he said.
‘Hello, Sasha,’ I replied.
*
He looked much the same as when I’d last seen him in London – could it really have been only a week ago? – but instead of his usual tweed get-up he was also dressed as a carabinieri. I tried to untwist what this meant. They had donned these uniforms in order to get into the cathedral… so they could take us out again without ar
ousing any suspicions. But the sheer scale of organizing that meant that they must have been following events very closely for some time. And that they had gone to a lot of effort to rescue us. Why?
Something about the ducking movement he had made suddenly alerted me to the rest of the space I was in. Glancing upward, I saw that the roof was rather low, as grey as the blankets, and metal, and I realized I was in the hold of a plane. There was a porthole in the wall, and I looked out of it with a sense of mounting dread.
But… no. There was a stretch of black tarmac. We were still on the ground. We hadn’t taken off yet.
Sasha came over to my stretcher and handed me a glass of water, which I gulped down eagerly.
‘How fine?’ I asked. ‘You have to tell me—’
‘Better than we hoped,’ he said quietly, taking the glass from my hands and placing it on a small trolley at the foot of the stretcher. ‘You have both fully recovered and are no longer contagious. It was a fortuitous escape.’ He paused for a moment, and something about the pause made my stomach lurch. ‘But there are some… consequences to your having been infected.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’
He ran his tongue around his teeth as he considered how to broach it.
‘Sarah has not yet regained her hearing,’ he said, finally. ‘I am afraid she may never do so.’
I looked across at her, sleeping peacefully in her own world, and felt something break deep inside me.
‘But if we had not reached you when we did,’ Sasha was saying, ‘you would both be dead, as might many others. We were monitoring the Italians’ radio communications, and the message about Turin came in very late. But it seems we gave you the antidote just in time. Our doctors tell me that you were within an hour or two of optimal transmission, and that if we had arrived a little later everyone within a few feet of you would have been infected.’