Did Margaux’s spell save me from death by black fog?
The doctor would never understand that Margaux had made him immune to il Dragone, that he never burned in the sun, and that he never used sunblock, never had to. He was tanned even in a New York winter. Women were always touching his skin.
He almost told the doctor these things, but fortunately, the Falcon in him was waking up.
“How long have I been out?”
“You’ve been here for twenty-four hours. You’re going to be fine. You’re in great shape. I wish all my concussed patients were in your condition. Are you in the service?”
“He’s a runner,” Granger supplied.
The doctor gave Granger another quelling glance. Granger gave the doctor a beneficent smile.
“I was out running when I slipped and fell.” Falcon smiled at the doctor and then winced in pain again. “I should have worn my shoes.”
“The paramedics said there were tire tracks on the curb. You did come in barefoot and shirtless.” The doctor frowned again. “When they brought you in, you were wearing pajama bottoms.”
He nodded and then grimaced with the pain. “I like to run at night.”
Granger mouthed ‘shut up’. Falcon did.
Only the guilty feel the need to explain themselves.
“I’d like to keep you under observation today. Tomorrow you can go home.”
“I need to go home today.” Falcon glanced at Granger, but his partner’s expression was unreadable.
“Tony, as your doctor, I have to advise against that. You are…”
“It’s an emergency. I’m leaving now.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll watch him, Dr. Colacarro.”
This time the doctor glared at Granger, who showed the physician his teeth again.
“You will have to sign a release.” The doctor left the room, promising to return shortly.
Granger’s smile disappeared. “Two nights ago, I held the line open for an hour waiting on you. I checked with the local polizia, found a John Doe at the Naples hospital. When I got here, the doctor wouldn’t let me see you, said come back in the morning. So, I spent the night in your apartment, on the phone with Rome and New York. I watched the monitors focused on your girlfriend’s apartment, but it looks like she made a clean getaway. I’ve been here all day, waiting for you to wake up.” Granger shook his head, watching him put on his clothes. “Are you up to this?”
“It was the blue Fiat…”
“It’s a fake plate.” Granger cut him off. “And Angelina Natale is a fake name. When were you going to tell me about that?”
Falcon grabbed his shirt.
“Listen,” Granger said, “Darien’s bringing a couple of guys, you rest until you’re a hundred percent…”
“No,” Falcon said. Along with an impressive conviction record, Darien came with an ironclad code of honor as he worked those legal processes to send the bad guys away.
Falcon had always appreciated that about Darien, until now. There was no gray area with Darien. With a stellar background in law and a heart full of righteous wrath, Darien wouldn’t hesitate to send Angelina away. That’s why he had to tread carefully around Darien and Granger.
“Did you get the violin?”
“It’s in the trunk. Falcon, we still don’t know if anyone’s ‘got’ her. This could have been staged.”
“It’s one of Giovanni Natale’s brothers of the order il Dragone. I’m going to Forlì.” He turned to Granger.
The computer genius looked angry, tired and relieved all at once. His blue eyes were red now and his thin lips were set in a line of frustration.
“I’m fine, Grange. I just sat up too fast. It’s the drugs they gave me. When did you get the buzz cut?”
“Don’t try to change the subject. Now, hold on a minute, will you? Darien and I think you should go back to New York. Let a team handle this.”
“No. No team.” Falcon put on a sneaker.
“You have a personal interest in the suspect.”
Falcon let the other sneaker drop. Yes, he was defending a woman whose name he didn’t know, but she was his past. He knew her then, he remembered. He hadn’t been able to save her from the blaze that killed her entire family, but he would save her now.
“Angelina is no longer a suspect. She was kidnapped.”
“We don’t know that for sure, do we?” Granger held up a hand when Falcon started to protest. “She could be in on this.”
“She is not part of it…”
“What if this is a trap? She goes with her people, makes it look like she’s in trouble so you follow her. They take you out and she gets away with the Strad.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.” Falcon finished putting on his shoes.
“I don’t know what I’m saying? Listen to yourself, man. You’re in love with her!” Granger accused.
“I am!” he shouted back. “But I’m right about her. Don’t ask me to explain because I can’t. You just have to trust me on this.”
Granger cursed, shaking his head in disgust. “All right.” He raised his hands in surrender. “All right. But if you’re going after her, you’re going to be wired so I know where you are every minute. And I’m coming with you.”
* * * *
When Falcon opened Angelina’s apartment door, there was a plain white envelope lying on the floor.
The name Tony Russo was typed in caps across the front. Dated today, a simple directive inside…‘The Stradivarius for your girlfriend in seventy-two hours. Come alone.’
An address in Forlì was written below that.
“Today’s already gone. Two days left. Whoever sent the note knows I was in the hospital and they’re not getting the Strad without my help.”
“You were right. We are dealing with religious fanatics,” Granger said. “Unpredictable, but thorough. They didn’t even try to get into the apartment for the violin.”
“They want me to come to them,” Falcon said. “They don’t just want Angelina. They want me, too.” He turned away before Granger voiced the questions in his eyes. “Let’s get to it.”
They sifted through the Maestro’s things for some clue of who they were looking for in Forlì.
There were boxes of sheet music and files and he was frustrated knowing that he had only forty-eight hours to find Angelina. The only clue they had was a grainy aerial map.
“I can’t find Paolo Ignacio’s land like this.”
Granger looked up from a box full memorabilia from the Maestro’s heyday. “Whose land?”
“Buono’s—I mean—Natale’s land. I can’t find it like this. I need more to go on. This could be anyone’s land.” He waved a hand in disgust at the black and white aerial photo. “Those fields all look the same out there. There are miles and miles of olives and corn…” Falcon stopped. Granger was looking at him intently.
You really should shut your mouth.
“You sound like you know the place,” Granger said. “You been there before?”
“I read about it in that book on the Arians.”
Granger continued to stare at him. “Uh-huh.”
Falcon started rummaging through a brown leather satchel. He was stressed and agitated. And the thought of how frightened Angelina must be now that she knew the truth made his eye twitch so that he kept blinking.
She’d better be all right…
But he wasn’t sure that was going to do it for him. He felt like killing somebody.
Better keep quiet about that, too.
Darien, the conscience of the Organization, frowned on killing for killing’s sake. But Falcon had never seen the sense in that policy. He brought them in, dead or alive. He was already thinking of ways to make whatever happened in Forlì look as necessary as self-defense.
When he found a black leather case the hair on his neck prickled.
Granger, whose radar was all over him, was already making his way over to see what he’d found.
Falcon o
pened the case the size of a notebook and an identification card slipped out.
“Beady, black eyes,” he murmured, staring at the man in the photo ID.
Giovanni Natale was bald and he’d let himself go. But the eyes were the same.
Baldoni.
“What?” Granger asked.
The enormity of the situation was stunning. Falcon couldn’t immediately respond.
Il Dragone had been around Angel all this time, watching, waiting, and mentoring her.
This is a game to them. This entire journey had been inevitable.
Falcon covered by opening the record book in his hand. A record book for the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.
He whistled. “Natale left Angelina over two million euros. Some gift.”
Granger picked up a little black leather key chain with the bank’s emblem on it. “Safe deposit box.”
“What would Natale be doing with that kind of money stashed in Italy when he fled the country, presumed dead ten years ago?” He started rifling through papers in the case. He found a yellow carbon copy of a wire transfer. “Bingo.”
Falcon deciphered the faded numbers by rubbing the side of a pencil over the carbon and a piece of paper.
Granger dug into the satchel. With a grim smile, he pulled out a business card for the world-famous winery Uva Dolce. “Alfonso Ruggiero, Proprietor. With an address in Forlì.”
Falcon took the card. On the back was a date and time ten years ago, the same date the wire transfer of two million euros had been made to Giovanni Natale’s account in the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.
“We’ve got our man,” Granger said, holding up a glossy eight-by-ten photo of the Stradivarius.
After packing up, they headed over to his apartment. It was time to do some digging on the computers and piece together the story of the Stradivarius.
Chapter Two
This must be Hell.
Angelina rocked back and forth on the bed, her breathing exercises keeping her sane.
When she woke from the drug they had given her in the car, she was in this huge cavern. A fire roared up to the stone ceiling and for a moment, she thought she was still trapped in the nightmare that woke her. But she was not in the blazing mansion of her dreams. She was underground.
Without the fire, the air whipping through the cavern would be frigid.
The blaze warmed even the far corner where she sat on a huge bed covered in red velvet.
The mute had shown her a small pit in one of the alcoves in the cavern where she could relieve herself. She’d hardly ventured that far from the bed on the dais, a luxurious island in this stone prison.
Angelina felt as if she had stepped into another time. Somewhere ancient and mysterious, a long ago age of runes and soothsayers.
In her weakened state, she could imagine a demonic priestess stood before the roaring blaze across the cavern, with arms upraised casting spells on doomed villagers in some forgotten language.
Without natural light to distinguish between night and day, she could not tell how long she had been locked in this subterranean room. It seemed like forever.
She stared across the cavern at the great pit of fire. She had stopped screaming at her captors hours ago. It did no good. If they heard her through these stone walls, they chose to ignore her.
Now that she’d woken, her old fears of entrapment surged, threatening to suffocate her. Though somewhat dulled by hunger, her fears took shape in the flickering reflections of the fire on the cave walls. There was no escape from the twenty-foot high specters that she imagined to inch along the wall toward her. Or from the fire itself that seemed to lash out at her with orange claws.
But in the midst of terror, her survival instinct remained strong. The only way to live through this was to stay calm. She concentrated on taking slow, deep breaths and closed her eyes tight against the shadows on the walls. She kept them closed until she fell asleep.
Margaux…
Angelina opened her eyes. Someone had called that name again.
The fire was larger now. Shadows loomed over the bed on the cavern walls.
“Who’s there?”
No answer. Must be the blaze shifting the way the shadows moved off towards the fire.
But she felt as if someone had been watching her.
Angelina jumped as the bolt on the heavy, wooden double doors was thrown.
A hooded man came through the stone archway carrying a tray.
She gathered the velvet bedspread around her as he shut the doors behind him.
The man crossed the cavern in silence in a curious brown robe. It was tied with a length of rope around his waist and skimmed the flagstones.
The man carried a basin of water and a garment hung over his arm. He placed the tray on the nightstand. Small pastel-colored crescents were laid out on linen. The scent of sweet-smelling soap swirled in the air.
The man shrugged off his hood. “You will feel much better once you are out of those clothes,” Detective Luciano Biagi said.
She backed against the pillows as if the tray was full of snakes, and he was the devil. He may as well have been, for he was no detective, but part of this medieval nightmare she was trapped in. His hair was much longer than she’d thought, loose about his shoulders.
How had I ever thought this Neanderthal was a detective?
The slow smile that spread across his face was as disturbing and intimate as his words. “I meant you will be more comfortable in these.” He held out a red satin nightgown and wrapper.
Angelina looked down at her dirty sweatpants and flimsy tank top, and pulled the bedspread around her shoulders. When she didn’t respond, but stared past him into the flames, he nodded and placed the clothes on the foot of the bed. Instead of leaving, he sat down on the edge of the bed.
She went rigid.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Angelina.”
“Leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that, but I can save your life.”
“You won’t kill me. You want the Stradivarius.”
Luciano reached out to wrap a lock of her hair around his hairy finger. “Bellezza, you have no idea what I want.”
She moved across the bed, and her hair slipped from his hand.
He chuckled, a rumble in his chest, terrifying in depth. She never wanted to hear that sound again.
“Well, maybe you do.” His hand smoothed the bedspread. “And maybe you will be more willing to give me what I want once you meet the man you and your father have stolen from.”
“I have stolen nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about! And who is Margaux?” She was breathing hard. He was too close, too big and the cave was getting smaller.
Luciano’s fingers stopped inches from her leg. He shook his head. “I have upset you.” Sheets of dark hair slapped against his tree-trunk neck. He slipped a hand in the folds of the brown robe.
“No, please!”
Angelina lowered her eyes, because it wasn’t helping her anxiety to see what was in his. For all the compassion in his eyes, there was dominance in equal measure. His civility in this was frightening.
Luciano took his hand out of the pocket. “As you wish, but I think it would help you sleep.” His eyes traveled over the velvet bedspread Angelina held against herself. It was as if she were sitting naked before him.
I will never sleep in this cavern again.
“Get cleaned up,” was his gruff command. “You must be hungry. You’ve slept an entire day.”
That she’d been unconscious for so long wasn’t as disturbing as the thought of him in here, watching her. She didn’t want to think what he may have been doing on his visits to the cavern.
“I’ll return with food,” he said.
She winced when the heavy bolt on the other side of those wooden doors slammed into place with such finality.
It was some time before she stopped trembling. Only then, did she bathe herself and change into the nightgown. It was best for her comfor
t. She had no idea how long she would remain a prisoner and her own clothes held the stench of fear mingled with her ripe scent. They only served as a reminder of her dire circumstances, for which she had only herself to blame.
The next time the heavy doors opened, she feigned sleep.
Heavy footsteps came closer until they stopped by the bed.
It was all Angelina could do to keep her eyes closed.
Silverware jangled her nerves as a tray was set down on the nightstand.
A tantalizing aroma wafted on the air. Steak for lunch? Dinner?
She didn’t know what time of day it was. Her stomach growled, but she kept her eyes closed.
A hand as big as her forehead brushed bangs off her face, and then cupped her chin. “Do not fear me, Angelina. I will be gentle with you. But now, you must eat.”
You make my skin crawl. She lay still until he moved away. Once again, her appetite was gone along with Luciano Biagi.
She stared into the fire with its red-orange talons, wishing she could rewind these last days of her life to before she ran from Tony.
* * * *
Falcon might never know how Giovanni Natale acquired the violin in the first place, but one thing was clear. The virtuoso had made a deal to sell it to Alfonso Ruggiero for two million euro.
Ruggiero had held up his end of the bargain. For some reason Natale scammed him, supposedly dying in a blaze that he’d probably set himself. Why Natale didn’t take the money to England with him was a mystery.
From what Granger came up with in an extensive search of financial and civil records, it would seem that Natale was not poor. He hadn’t exactly lived a life of luxury over the past ten years, either.
Although Natale had done very well for himself with his career earnings and professor’s salary, he’d led a spartan existence. The money he’d earned seemed to have disappeared into charities over the years. Granger was still digging to find out where.
The maestro had a twisted sense of honor. He could steal a valuable Strad that he had no right to and keep the money from a sale that never happened, but spending it would have weighed on his conscience.
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