by Gregg Loomis
The alternating spaces that admitted light came to an abrupt end. Jason and Adrian put on the helmets, turning on the light on each. The artificial illumination gave the yellow walls a reddish tint as though washed in blood. Every few feet a niche was carved into the stone, stands for ancient lamps, judging by the halo of soot above each.
A few more steps brought them to the end of the passage. To their left was a cavern, a low-ceilinged, square room carved into the rock. Lamp niches were on three of the four walls.
“The Sibyl’s cave,” Maria said, as she worked a small hand pump. “No sign of anything but normal air here, oxygen, nitrogen…”
Adrian held up a hand, a signal for silence.
Jason heard only the echo of his own breathing, then… a scrape, the sound of a shoe on stone or something hard against rock.
Maria and Adrian needed no signal to turn off the lanterns on their helmets as Jason did the same. “Any other way in?” he whispered.
He could only see Maria’s dull silhouette shake its head, no. “Not that has been discovered.”
Taking each by the arm, Jason eased Maria and Adrian back the way they had come. Even if they had no other means of escape, they had one advantage: the location of the Sibyl’s cave would force whoever had entered the passage to enter successive squares of light, while Jason, Adrian, and Maria remained in concealing darkness.
Pressing the two others against the wall, Jason drew his weapon. The slight rustle of clothing told him Adrian had unslung his Sten. Jason thumbed off the safety and heard the echoing snick of the Sten’s bolt being cocked.
Though he knew better, an eternity seemed to pass before Jason saw indistinct shapes flitting between the light and dark sectors of the long passage. Had he not reined it in, his imagination could easily have seen long-robed priests leading a young Roman to hear his fate foretold.
Instead, he made out four distinct figures, each moving with hands clasped in front as though carrying a weapon at the ready, each progressing in synchronized movements designed for a minimum of exposure to the sunlight and a maximum of coverage by his comrades.
Jason pushed Maria toward the first opening, speaking with his lips to her ear. “When they move next, you go through outside.”
He felt, rather than saw her nod.
When the four figures simultaneously slipped from one patch of dark to the next, Jason shoved Maria, knocking her forward and out of the corridor. He lunged after her, half expecting shots.
There were none.
Outside, Adrian stood, dusting himself off while holding the Sten, its stock still folded. He had it trained on the passage they had just exited. “Get a look at ‘em?”
Jason shook his head. “No. But they move like they’ve been trained, not some pickup gang of thugs.”
He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.
Adrian helped Maria to her feet. “Any way out of the area without passing by the entrance?”
Instead of speaking, she motioned. Jason followed, keeping the gun’s muzzle pointed at the slots in the cave’s side. Where were they, the people who had entered? Was it possible they were only tourists visiting an obscure place?
Not moving in concert, as he had seen. More like military.
Then why…?
Possibly they had been blinded by emerging into light; possibly they hadn’t seen Jason, Adrian, and Maria’s exit.
Possible, but unlikely.
They were walking up a stone-paved path that wound its way around the hill into which the Sibyl’s cave had been carved. Idly, Jason wondered if the rocks had ben worn smooth by the feet of ancient Romans. The trail ended at steep stairs carved into naked rock and long ago polished by use and the elements.
“Temple of Jupiter, highest point in the site,” Maria announced. “We should be able to see them when they come out of the cave.”
Jason started to reply and decided to save his breath for the ascent.
Minutes later they stood among broken and tumbled columns. From the stubs still in place, Jason guessed there had originally been six to a side, with two across the front and back. Rubble of columns and pediment were strewn around a large stone platform atop crumbling stairs that had led into the floor of the temple. To his right, Jason could see a number of figures slowly working in a field beyond two large arches.
“Archeological dig,” Maria explained, following his line of sight.
Adrian was looking the other way. “And that would be?” He was pointing to a similar collection of ruins slightly below and across a dirt path.
“Temple of Apollo.”
Adrian took a step back as four men emerged from below, turning their heads in deferent directions. The dark suits they wore were out of place, both as to location and climate.
“Th’ lot look like coppers,” Adrian observed.
“Whoever they are, we can bet they’re not here to help,” Jason said, squinting against the reflection of the afternoon’s sun on the ocean to his left. “Is there another way to get back to the car?”
Maria nodded. “We can go down to the excavation site”-she pointed-“and then around the bottom of the hill.”
“No good,” Jason observed. “They’ve split up. We’d run into at least two of them.”
“So much the better,” Adrian said. “We ken where they are. They dinna have but an idea as to us. I say we divide up, too, an’ take ‘em on.”
Maria looked nervously from Jason to Adrian and back again. “Surely you are not going to shoot these men when you do not even know
…”
Adrian grinned. “Na need to be shooting lass, if we right surprise ‘em.” He pointed. “Jason, you ‘n’ Maria go back th’ way we came. I’ll go ‘round.”
Jason wasn’t wild about the idea, but it made more sense than waiting to be surrounded. He nodded, and he and Maria set off down the hill, his hand on the weapon at his back as they descended the stairs.
They had just reached the last step when two men rounded a bend in the path below. Both were red-faced from the exertion. The older of the two, overweight and white-haired, was puffing loudly and was watching carefully where he placed each footfall.
His companion was the first to see Jason and Maria. His right hand went inside his suit jacket. Jason glimpsed a flash of blue steel.
The advantage of carrying a weapon in the small of the back rather than a shoulder holster was that the shooter could assume a firing position without waiting for his gun to come to bear. Jason was in a two-handed stance, the SIG Sauer covering both men, before the other man had cleared his Beretta.
Both of the suited men slowly raised their hands.
Jason turned his head in Maria’s direction, unwilling to take his sight off the men for an instant. “Tell them to use their left hands to take their guns out and drop them on the ground.”
They complied, the older man speaking angrily as Jason kicked the two automatics well out of reach down the slope.
“He says they are National Security Service and that you will never see the outside of prison if you do not put your gun down immediately and surrender.”
Italians knew the second-person form of the verb?
“Ask him to show identification. Slowly.”
Before Maria could translate, both men were holding wallets with badges attached. Jason looked carefully, aware that he wouldn’t recognize the bogus from the real. Again the older man spoke irately.
“He says you are Jason Peters and you are wanted for questioning by the British and Italian authorities. He also wants to know about an incident that occurred on the highway in Sardinia day before yesterday.”
Sardinia? How could he…? The Volvo’s tag-the car was registered in Sardinia. Jason leaned closer to read the name on the official ID. From the men’s quick response to the request for identification, he suspected one or both understood a fair amount of English. “Please tell Signore Belli he’s not exactly in a position to make demands, and ask him
what makes him think I’m the person he’s looking for.”
This time, Maria translated in full before there was a response. Belli jutted out a defiant jaw in a manner reminiscent of pictures Jason had seen of Mussolini. In fact, take away the white hair and he might have been looking at Il Duce himself.
Maria translated. “It is no consequence how he knows who you are. You are arrested.”
Jason’s gaze followed the line from his gun muzzle to the security man’s head. “Maybe. But I’m the one holding the gun.” He jabbed it forward in a threatening manner. “And I’m not afraid to use it. Tell him he’s got about ten seconds to answer my question.”
Jason was now certain the older man understood English. He puffed out his chest in the pose that had become associated with the Italian dictator, as he spoke to Maria.
“He doesn’t, er, submit to threats from criminals. To do so would dishonor his country, his service, and himself.”
With studied indifference, Jason squeezed off a shot that missed Belli’s ear by no more than an inch, close enough that the man could feel its hot breath as it whined by and chipped a piece of rock from the incline behind him. Both Italians were flat on the ground before the first echoes bounced from hill to hill like a volleyed tennis ball.
Maria’s eyes were larger than Jason would have imagined nature allowed.
“Tell him the next two will take his ears off one at a time.”
Dishonor, it seemed, was preferable to disfigurement.
Belli spoke quickly, shifting an uneasy glance from his prone position from Jason to Maria as he talked.
“The chief of their agency was notified of the body of what appeared to be a Russian in the house in Taormina. Since the bureau I work for is the owner and I had suddenly taken holiday time, they wanted to question me. Then that wreck in Sardinia with all those bullet shells and more dead lying about-he made a connection. You were the only person Interpol suspected of killing Russians, at least outside of Russia, and…”
Jason held up a hand. He had heard enough.
Maria was looking at him warily. “Jason, what are you going to do
…?”
“Do?” A voice came from behind them. Adrian was marching the other two suits in front of a pointed pistol Jason recognized as a government-issue Beretta. The Sten was again slung over his shoulder. One of men looked somewhat worse for the wear. “We’ll leave ‘em in their bleedin’ car an’ toss the keys.”
“Good idea,” Jason concurred.
Moments later the four Italians were stripped of their cell phones and handcuffed inside a black Lancia from which the radio had been removed.
Adrian stuck his head in the open window, making sure all were secure. “Nice ‘n’ comfy, ‘r ye?”
” Vaffancula!” the oldest one muttered.
Adrian grinned. “He’s suggestin’ I commit an anatomical impossibility.”
The tone had suggested as much to Jason. “C’mon; let’s get outta here before more show up.”
“But they have our license plate number,” Maria protested. “Will we not be stopped by the first policeman we see?”
Jason was already climbing into the driver’s seat. “It’s not the tag that helped them find us, believe me. Besides, isn’t Baia just over those hills? We’ll be there before dark.”
Minutes later, Jason pulled off the pavement beside one of several roadside restaurants, partially shielded from view by a row of plane trees. He waited until two cars, a Smart and a Fiat 1500, parked and disgorged what looked like local workmen.
“On th’ way home from work, I’d guess,” Adrian said, stuffing his pipe. “Stoppin’ by f their pint.”
“Grappa’s more like it,” Jason observed, hoping the pipe wasn’t going to get lit until he could get upwind.
He was disappointed. He smelled the sulfur of a match, followed by a sour stench that reminded him of the time Pangloss had gotten too close to a charcoal grill. On second thought, he was maligning the aroma of scorched dog hair.
It was as if Adrian had read his mind. Or seen the wrinkled noses of both the other passengers. “Na’ t’ worry.”
He got out of the car and lay down to look under it.
“There she is!”
He stood, the pipe clinched in his teeth, puffing in exultation. He exhibited a small square of metal about the size of the bar of soap Jason would expect in a hotel bathroom. He trotted off across the parking lot, smoke trailing behind him like a locomotive. He stopped and knelt beside the Fiat.
“What is he doing?” Maria wanted to know.
“Replanting the bug.”
Her expression said he might as well have been speaking in Aramaic, Swahili, or jet-propelled Sanskrit.
“The bug, that little black thing he took from under this car. The reason the police didn’t have to follow us is because they had a homing device stuck somewhere underneath. Some satellite did their surveillance for them. Good thing about that kind of satellites, though, is that they only ‘see’ the impulses from the tracking equipment. They don’t see whose car it may be attached to.”
“But where…?”
“My guess is at the observatory.”
“Why not arrest us there?”
“Then they wouldn’t know where we were going or if others might be involved in whatever they think we’re doing, would they?”
“I guess not. But that car over there, the one Adrian is attaching-”
“Somebody’s going to have a real surprise on the way home.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
Via Delia Dataria
Rome
That night
Inspectore Santi Guiellmo paced the floor of his office, oblivious to the late hour. Zuccone! Belli was a fool! Had it not been for a couple of teenagers on bicycles looking for a deserted place to fornicate, Belli and his men would have spent a miserable night handcuffed to their own police car. Guiellmo almost wished they had. They certainly deserved it!
Belli had followed that farce with an even greater one.
He had commandeered one of the lovers’ cell phones, checked in with his headquarters, and called every available polizia and carabiniere within a hundred kilometers in the name of the forze dell’ordine, a security force that was now the joke of every cop south of the Alps. It had required nearly thirty armed officers to apprehend two elderly, unarmed, and grappa-besotted stonemasons on their way home from work in a Fiat.
Guiellmo had little sense of humor, none where his agency was involved. Under Italy’s civil service, firing someone was even more impossible than it was in the private sector, but Belli would reach retirement in Italy’s remote northeastern Adriatic coast, the Marche, chasing Gypsy sheep thieves.
No doubt they, too, would outsmart him.
At least the imbecile had been able to give descriptions. The woman was certainly Dr. Bergenghetti, something already known. What remained a question was her involvement with the two men, and in what were they involved? Judging by the Volvo’s registration, one of the men was a Scot named Adrian Graham, who had retired from the British army and resided in Sardinia. Belli had heard the woman call the second man Jason, confirming his identity.
What was going on? Peters was likely responsible for the death in Sicily and four more in Sardinia. But why? Surely the man was not on some campaign of his own, simply out to reduce the Slavic population. Such a goal might be commendable, albeit illegal, but certainly profitless. Peters was after something else.
But what?
Guiellmo spread a map of the Bay of Naples across the top of his desk, his forehead wrinkled in thought. What was Peters doing at Cumae, seeking aid from a Sibyl who had not been in residence for two thousand years? What else was there at Cumae other than ancient Greek ruins that could be of interest? He ran a finger along the crescent of the coast. If archaeological sites were of some sort of significance, the closest to Cumae would be Baia.
There was something about Baia… He couldn’t rem
ember.
Stepping across his office, he opened the drawer of a small table, taking out a number of tourist guidebooks. He had always intended to take a summer vacation, exchange the sauna that was Rome in August for the sea breezes of the Amalfi coast. These books were the closest he had come to fulfilling what he now realized was little more than fantasy.
He flipped pages of bright photographs until he came to Baia. What he read sounded more like myth than fact. Fact or fiction, whatever had brought Peters to Cumae was likely to take him to Baia or Pozzuoli next. Both were sites of significant Greek ruins. Only one, though, was likely to require self-contained breathing apparatus.
He went back to his desk and picked up the telephone. This time he would lead the operation himself, confide in no one, and have only himself to blame for failure.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Port of Savannah
Savannah, Georgia
0942 EST of the same day
The rusty freighter left a creamy wake in the mocha-colored waters as its Liberian flag hung limply in the morning’s increasing humidity. There was nothing to distinguish the ship from any of the others plowing along within yards of the cobbled streets of the city’s historic waterfront area, certainly no clue that the ship was owned and operated by Pacific Oriental Shipping, a partnership of entities that included the Sheikh of Dubai and Hutchinson-Whampoa. HW had controlled ports at both ends of the Panama Canal since one of America’s lesser lights had used his presidential office to give that waterway to Panama. The idea could have come to him only as dementia from a peanut field’s heat and been mistaken for divine inspiration. After all, God frequently gave him personal direction.
What had not been revealed from on high was that Hutchinson-Wampoa was owned by the Chinese army, hardly a force friendlier to the United States than its partner from the United Arab Emirates.
The containers stacked on deck, equally ordinary, would draw no attention, either. Specially ordered form plastic and auto parts from Japan, exotic wood from Malaya, and reproduction antiques from Taiwan (the Chinese saw no reason to let a political quarrel with the latter interfere with Western-style profit).