‘Better than most,’ he said. ‘What about your Italian? Not bad either.’
‘Night school,’ she replied.
They walked on in silence. Buitoni seemed deep in thought. ‘I just don’t get it,’ he said after a while. ‘I mean, a lot of people had their suspicions about Tassoni. There have been allegations about him for years, never proven. But to gun the man down in his home . . . And why? How is this Hope even involved?’
‘I don’t care if Tassoni was shaping up to be the next Mussolini,’ Darcey said. ‘I don’t care if Hope was doing the world a favour taking the guy out. And I don’t care why he did it. He’s mine, and he’s going down.’
Buitoni turned to look at her as a flash of torchlight passed across her face. He noticed the expression in her eyes and was going to say, ‘I can see why they sent you,’ then thought better of it and kept his mouth shut.
Another twenty minutes passed. ‘This is no use,’ Buitoni said as they trudged on in the dark. ‘I’m sure Hope was never here.’
‘He was here. Can’t you smell it?’
‘Don’t tell me. The SAS instructors also taught you to detect the scent of your prey, like a hunting predator.’ That wouldn’t have surprised him. He was beginning to get a pretty sharp idea of what kind of person his new commander was.
She didn’t reply. Buitoni sniffed at the stale, humid air. ‘All I can smell in this hellhole is rats and filth and damp and the sweat of fifty Carabinieri.’
‘I can smell something else as well,’ she said. ‘Burnt lighter fluid.’
Chapter Forty
The flickering yellow flame of a Zippo wasn’t quite as useful as a torch for finding your way up a black tunnel. Better than groping about blindly, though it had other disadvantages. The lighter’s brushed steel body was getting uncomfortably hot in Ben’s fingers, and he was beginning to worry about the fuel-soaked cotton inside reaching flashpoint. But singed fingers were some way preferable to zapping yourself into a piece of crispy bacon in about a millisecond when you happened to step on the electrified rail in the dark.
He reckoned enough time had passed by now for the police to seal off the whole underground network. Call it instinct, call it experience, but his sense of growing unease as he’d ridden the near-empty tube train through two stations had made him want to bail out before reaching the third. Three was pushing his luck. And he was fairly sure that, before too long, they’d be swarming through these tunnels like ferrets down a rabbit hole.
As he walked down the dirty gravel path between the rails, his shoe scraped against something solid and heavy. In the dim flame he saw that it was an old wrench. It was rusted and pitted and had probably been dropped by a workman decades earlier. A thought came to him, and he picked the wrench up and lobbed it gently against the electrified rail.
No flash, no bang. The wrench lay against the dead steel. He had suspected that would happen, and it could only mean one thing – that he’d been right, and that the cops had shut down a section of the line and were already coming after him on foot. The next station back down the track was probably swarming with them by now, and they’d be working their way back to trap him in the middle. ‘At least, that’s what I’d do,’ he muttered to himself.
And he couldn’t afford to be spotted. He snuffed out the lighter, dropped it in his pocket next to the Ruger, and pressed on in darkness. At least he didn’t have to be concerned about where he stepped. He passed the dim light of a service lantern, then moved on blindly. Every few metres he reached out his left arm to touch the tunnel wall to orientate himself. The stonework felt gritty and loose against his fingers. A few hundred metres further, his hand brushed something smooth and soft, that gave way with a rustling crackle when he pressed it. It was a thick plastic sheet, and it was covering a hole in the wall that seemed to go on for quite a few metres, nearly as wide as the tunnel itself. He found the edge of the plastic and pulled it away from the stonework. A breath of cooler air chilled the sweat on his face.
Wherever this was leading him, it was taking him away from where he didn’t want to be. He stepped through the hole into even blacker darkness. Taking small, careful steps, he found his way to the nearest wall. After a few minutes’ groping around he came across what he quickly realised was a plastic switchbox attached to the wall. He threw the lever, and blinked as a dozen powerful floodlights came on. He looked around him, shielding his eyes from the blinding glare. He saw towering lattices of scaffolding. Heavy earth shifting equipment. Electrical cables as thick as anacondas snaking across the floor, hooked up to humming transformers the size of small cars. Keep-out and hard-hat-zone warning signs everywhere. It was a construction site for a new tunnel, branching off perpendicular to the one he’d just walked up. The heavy plastic sheeting had to be there to screen off the site so that work could carry on while the trains were in service.
Except that it looked as if no work had gone on here for a while. A fine layer of black soot had found its way in around the edges of the plastic sheeting and settled over everything. No prints or marks on any of the machinery to suggest they’d been used lately. There was mould growing inside an abandoned Thermos flask of coffee.
The new tunnel curved away to the left. Ben was about to check it out when he heard a sound from beyond the plastic curtain. He stiffened, listening. Voices. An echo of footsteps. Maybe ten people, maybe twenty, maybe more. A walkie-talkie fizzed. The sounds were still a long way down the main tunnel, but closing steadily.
He ran back to the electrical switch and threw it. The hum of the transformers died and he was plunged back into total darkness. Glancing again from behind the sheeting, he saw the first trembling pool of torchlight sweep the curved tunnel wall in the distance.
They’d be here in minutes.
Tracing a path from memory in the dark, Ben made his way across the construction site and followed the line of the new tunnel – and his heart sank when, just forty or fifty metres down the line, he bumped into another wall of plastic sheeting. Dead end.
Only, it wasn’t quite. He pushed against the plastic and could feel another opening in the solid wall. He reached for his Zippo, risking a little light. Punched a hole in the plastic and tore his way through.
What he found there was something that definitely hadn’t been part of the subway network plans. His flame shone off massive stone blocks that were craggy and pitted with age and looked as if they’d been here since biblical times. It was some kind of chamber, and from the jagged hole he’d just climbed through and the fresh scrape marks on the stone, he guessed that one of the excavation machines had made an unexpected discovery down here.
The chamber was long and narrow, just a metre and a half wide, disappearing into darkness. Its ceiling was a high arch, the floor compacted earth thick with the dust of centuries. Long, deep recesses were set into the walls at intervals, stretching all the way up to the ceiling. The recesses housed towering, crumbling wooden structures with stacked platforms like shelving.
The place smelled dank and ancient. Like a grave.
And when Ben walked on a few metres down the passage, he realised that was exactly what it was. By the amber glow of his lighter flame, thousands of sightless eyes stared at him from the darkness. He was looking at human remains. Mountains of them, heaped high on the wooden towers either side of him; fibias and tibias and femurs and others he couldn’t identify, stacked carefully like firewood kindling. Many of the skulls were intact, grinning at him, while others were missing jawbones or bore the marks of the injuries that had killed them.
How long had they been here? Two thousand years? Three?
Ben kept moving along the passage as it opened up in front of him. He came to a fork, then another. A whole labyrinth of corridors. He couldn’t begin to estimate how many dead had been stored down here. Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, a million.
He pressed on. There had to be a way out of here.
The Zippo gave a sputter, then seconds later the flame choked and died. He stopped,
his heart beginning to beat hard. He shook the lighter, flipped the hot striker wheel a couple of times. Nothing except a strong smell of evaporating fluid. He swore, and his voice sounded dead and flat in the cramped underground space.
He fumbled and groped his way forward. His fingers caressed something brittle and jagged. Teeth raking his skin. He jerked his hand sharply away from the skull’s mouth and stumbled on. He was fighting hard to deny it, but the realisation was growing on him.
That he was lost and buried in a forgotten mass grave beneath the city.
The lingering petrol scent of her prey had been subtle at best, and now Darcey couldn’t smell it at all any more. She’d lost the trail, and that perplexed her.
Where have you gone, Hope?
She didn’t want to say it out loud, didn’t want Buitoni or the others to know what she was thinking. She kept walking, feeling the tension in her neck spreading to her shoulders. The tramping footsteps of the Carabinieri echoed around her. Her heart jumped and her fist tightened on the Beretta when she saw the glimmer of light ahead in the tunnel – but the flush of excitement quickly died to disappointment when she realised it was the torches of the police team coming the other way down the tunnel. At least forty of them, to add to the fifty with her and Buitoni. The place had never been so crowded.
‘Shit,’ Buitoni said. As they all met, he began talking in rapid Italian to the officer in charge. There was a lot of arm-waving, and pretty soon a general argument had broken out and shouts were echoing through the tunnel.
Darcey left them to it. This couldn’t be right. She doubled back on herself. A hundred metres back down the tunnel, her torchlight flashed against shiny plastic. She cursed herself. How could they have missed it? She poked the torch through the hole, then called Buitoni over. He came running.
She showed him. ‘This is where he went.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘It’s where I would have gone.’
Buitoni shouted for the rest of the team. In moments he and Darcey were running across the construction site with ninety uniformed officers in their wake. Darcey flashed her light from side to side, following the path of the beam with the muzzle of the Beretta. They followed the bend in the tunnel and came to the second plastic curtain. ‘Gotcha,’ she muttered, seeing the ripped hole in it. ‘Come on.’
There was no Ben Hope on the other side, but her light flashed on the passage’s other, more permanent, occupants and she let out a breath. ‘Jesus. What the hell is this place?’
‘Some kind of crypt or catacomb,’ Buitoni said, looking around him in fascination. ‘Why do you think the Rome metro is still so underdeveloped after all these years? They’re forever having to suspend digging because of some unexpected archaeological find. There may still be thousands of archaeo-logical sites under the city, just waiting to be discovered, and armies of conservationists and historians lobbying for the protection of our ancient heritage. A treasure trove for them, but a nightmare for the city planners.’
But Darcey wasn’t listening to him. ‘It’s hot down here.’ She quickly peeled off the polo-neck and tossed it away. She was wearing a tight black sleeveless vest underneath. ‘Let’s go.’ She took off at a run down the passage with her pistol out in front of her.
Buitoni sighed, then followed.
Chapter Forty-One
Ben was making slow progress, and he wasn’t happy about it. His muscles were quivering with pent-up adrenalin as he inched his way up the dark passage.
His heartbeat jumped up a notch as he heard the sound behind him and whirled round. Torchlight flashing from around a bend, just fifty metres back. He moved faster, but he was running blind and his pursuers weren’t. Seconds later, the torchlight filled the tunnel behind him.
The sound of a woman’s voice cut sharply though the dead atmosphere. Hard, calm, controlled. ‘Armed police. Stop right there. Get your hands where I can see them.’
Ben stopped, turned, strained his eyes against the searing white light. The woman wasn’t alone. He could make out her silhouette in the torch beam of the man trotting to catch up with her. Her arms were bare, the muscles toned and tight, and the gleaming steel in her fist was as rock steady as her voice. She was breathing hard and looked like a panther ready to spring at him. Even without seeing her face, he could tell this was no lightweight they’d sent after him.
‘I’m Commander Darcey Kane of SOCA,’ she said. ‘Ben Hope, you’re under arrest.’
Two heartbeats went by and nobody moved. Then Ben raised his hands to chest level.
‘Lose the weapon,’ she said.
As Ben slowly hooked out the Ruger from his jacket pocket and let it dangle from a finger through the trigger guard, he was wondering what a SOCA agent was doing on a case that should have been a matter for Italian police. He tossed the pistol down in the dirt near his right foot.
‘Kick it away. Hands high.’
Ben nudged it a few inches with his toe. ‘I didn’t kill Tassoni. He was dead when I got there.’
‘Innocent men don’t run.’ Her tone was matter-of-fact. Someone just doing their job.
‘You have the wrong person, Darcey.’
‘Then you have nothing to fear.’
‘There’s more to it.’
‘I don’t want to know. Tell it to the judge.’
As she spoke, she stepped closer to him. Now just a few metres away, he could see her more clearly by the torchlight bouncing off the stone walls in the narrow space. Her jaw was set tight and there was a glint of quiet ferocity in her eyes. A stray wisp of black hair had broken out from under her cap. Without letting the gun waver a millimetre, she tucked her torch under her right arm. Reached into her back pocket with her left hand and fished out a pair of cuffs. Her partner was just one step behind. Ben didn’t think he looked as confident as she did. Then there was more clamour behind them, and torchlight flooded the passage as a whole pack of uniformed Carabinieri appeared around the corner guns drawn. Seeing the situation ahead, they crouched and took aim as more came up from behind. It looked like a whole army of them.
The odds were definitely getting interesting, but Ben guessed he had more to worry about from Darcey Kane than from the rest put together. He moved forward a step. To his left, the hundreds of piled skulls watched like silent witnesses from an alcove as he held out his wrists to be cuffed.
‘Looks like you got me.’
She smiled. ‘Wasn’t hard, either.’
‘No bones about it,’ he said.
And lashed out with his left foot. His shoe connected with one of the supporting struts holding up the tall wooden framework on which the human remains were heaped. A few centuries ago, the wood might have been solid. Not any more. Ben’s kick cracked it in two with an explosion of dust and the whole towering edifice gave a lurch and came crashing down in a splintering bony avalanche that filled the passage. Ben threw himself back out of the way as a hundred bouncing skulls rained down where he’d stood a second before.
Darcey barely had time to react before she was swiped off her feet and half buried in the slide. Her torch fell and rolled away from her, cutting a milky swathe in the billowing dust. Her face and hair were white with it. Coughing and spluttering, she tried to struggle to her feet. Her partner was down on his knees and elbows, a streak of blood above his eye where a section of the falling wooden framework had caught him a glancing blow. The passage behind them was almost completely blocked with debris and swirling dust.
Ben snatched up Darcey’s Maglite and swung it like a club, knocking the Beretta out of her hand. She cried out in pain as the weapon clattered away from her.
‘Sorry, Darcey,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe another time.’ His Ruger was buried. He grabbed her Beretta instead and bolted away up the passage, leaving the agents floundering among the wreckage.
Chapter Forty-Two
Ben ran hard through the passages, shining the Maglite this way and that, searching for a way out. Gleaming metal flashed in his beam,
and he spotted a ladder running up through an open shaft in the ceiling. A winch cable dangled down from above, holding up a platform with a safety rail around its edge. At the foot of the ladder was scattered an assortment of cases and boxes. He guessed they contained whatever kind of archaeology equipment was needed for the excavation of the discovered catacomb. He stuck the torch in his belt and climbed the ladder.
The next level up was still underground, some kind of gloomy circular tunnel that was just about high enough to stand up in. It looked like a disused sewer. It was getting hard to believe there was any solid ground at all under Rome. Maybe one day the city would just cave in and disappear.
Ben shone his torch around him. There was more equipment lying about near the shaft, and across on the other side of the tunnel. Next to it was another ladder, climbing up to a freshly-cut trapdoor that he was certain led to street level.
He was halfway to the ladder when the tunnel filled with the stunning noise of a gunshot and a bullet wailed off the stonework near his head. He whipped round to see Darcey Kane clambering out of the shaft behind him, clutching a Beretta identical to the one he’d taken from her.
There wasn’t time to stick around to say, ‘You just don’t give up, do you?’ There wasn’t even time to draw the gun from his belt and return fire. He’d have been dead before he could release the safety lever. He took off at a zigzagging run, keeping low.
She fired again. The ricochet howled off the wall and rattled around the tunnel like a pinball. She was shooting at the light. He ditched the torch. Heard the clatter behind him as she did the same. Not stupid, that Darcey Kane.
Rats slithered out of Ben’s path as he sprinted through the gloom. He was a fast runner, but it was clear that his pursuer had been putting in some serious track practice. Her pounding footsteps weren’t far behind him as he went flying around a corner, nearly losing his footing on the slippery stone. His shoulder connected painfully with the tunnel wall, and he felt the hard edge of an iron rung embedded in the brickwork. He hauled himself up, found another, then another. There was a cast iron manhole cover above him. He punched out hard with the heel of his hand, praying the lid wasn’t rusted in place or bolted down. It gave way with a grinding clang. He shoved it aside, and fresh air flooded down the round hole. He clambered up to the top rung, thrusting his head and shoulders out into the night air.
The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET Page 186