by James Becker
“You think these ‘burglars’ will be back?”
Bronson nodded. “I’m sure of it. I hurt one of them badly last night, and probably the only reason they haven’t been back already is because they know we’ve got a pistol in the house. I suspect that they will be back, and sooner rather than later. And that stone”—he pointed—“is almost certainly what they’ve been looking for.”
“So what do you suggest? You think we should cover it up again?”
“I don’t think that would work. The fresh plaster would be obvious the moment they walked into this room. I think we need to do something more positive than simply hiding the stone. I suggest we leave the plaster just as it is, but take a hammer and chisel to that inscription and obliterate it. That way, there’ll be no clues left for anyone to follow.”
“You really think that’s necessary?”
“I honestly don’t know. But without that inscription, the trail stops right here.”
“Suppose they decide to come after us? Don’t forget, we’ve seen both these carved stones.”
“We’ll have left Italy by then. Jackie’s funeral is tomorrow. We should leave soon after that’s over, and be back in Britain tomorrow evening. I hope that whoever’s behind this won’t bother following us there.”
“OK,” Mark said. “If that’s what it’ll take to end this, let’s do it.”
Twenty minutes later Bronson had chipped away the entire surface of the block, obliterating all traces of the inscription.
II
Gregori Mandino arrived in Ponticelli at nine thirty that morning and met Rogan by arrangement in a cafe’ on the outskirts of the town. Mandino was, as usual, accompanied by two bodyguards, one of whom had driven the big Lancia sedan from the center of Rome, as well as the academic Pierro.
“Tell us again exactly what you saw,” Mandino instructed, and he and Pierro listened carefully as Rogan explained what he’d witnessed through the dining-room window of the Villa Rosa.
“It definitely wasn’t a map?” Mandino asked, when they’d heard the explanation.
Rogan shook his head. “No. It looked like about ten lines of verse, plus a title.”
“Why verse? Why are you so sure it wasn’t just ordinary text?” Pierro asked.
Rogan turned to the academic. “The lines were different lengths, but they all seemed to be lined up down the center of the stone, just like a poem you see in a book.”
“And you said the color of the stone looked different. How different?”
Rogan shrugged. “Not very. I just thought it was a lighter shade of brown than the one in the living room.”
“It could still be what we’re looking for,” Pierro said. “I’d assumed that the lower half of the stone would contain a map, but a verse or a few lines of text could give directions that will lead us to the hiding place of the relic.”
“Well, we’ll soon find out. Anything else?”
Rogan paused for a few seconds before replying, Mandino noticed.
“There is one other thing, capo. I believe that the men in the house are armed. When Alberti tried to break in and was attacked by one of them, he dropped his pistol. I think it’s in the house and that the men have found it.”
“We’re well rid of Alberti,” Mandino snarled. “Now we’ll have to wait until they’ve gone out. I’m not risking a gunfight in that house. Anything else?”
“No, nothing,” Rogan replied, sweating slightly, and not because of the early-morning sun.
“Right. What time’s the funeral?”
“Eleven fifteen, here in Ponticelli.”
Mandino glanced at his watch. “Good. We’ll drive out to the house and, as soon as these two men have left, we’ll get inside. That should give us at least a couple of hours to check what this verse says and arrange a reception committee for them.”
“I really don’t want—” Pierro began.
“Don’t worry, Professore, you won’t need to be anywhere near the house when they get back. You just decipher this verse or whatever we find in the place, and then I’ll get one of my men to drive you away. We’ll handle the rest of it.”
III
Like every day since they’d arrived in Italy, the morning of Jackie’s funeral presaged a beautiful day, with a solid blue sky and not the slightest hint of a cloud. Mark and Bronson were up fairly early, and ready to leave the house by a quarter to eleven, in good time to attend the service at eleven fifteen in Ponticelli.
Bronson locked his laptop and camera in the trunk of the Hamptons’ Alfa Romeo when he went out to the garage at a few minutes to eleven. As an afterthought, he went back into the house, collected the Browning pistol from his bedroom and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers.
Two minutes later, Mark sat down in the passenger seat and strapped himself in as Bronson slipped the Alfa into first gear and drove away.
Mandino’s driver had parked the Lancia about a quarter of a mile down the road, between the Hamptons’ house and Ponticelli, in the parking lot of a small out-of-town supermarket, and Rogan’s car was right next to it. The site offered an excellent view of the road, and the gateway of the house.
A few minutes before eleven, a sedan car emerged from the gateway and headed toward them.
“There they are,” Mandino said.
He watched as the Alfa Romeo drove past them, two indistinct figures in the front.
“Right, that was both of them, so the house should be deserted. Let’s go.”
The driver pulled out of the parking space and turned up the road toward the house.
Behind them, one of Mandino’s bodyguards turned the opposite way out of the supermarket in Rogan’s Fiat and fell into place about two hundred yards behind the Alfa, following the vehicle toward Ponticelli.
The Lancia sedan swept in between the gateposts. The driver turned the car so that it faced back up the drive and stopped it. Rogan climbed out and walked around to the back of the house. He slipped a knife from his pocket and released the catch on one set of shutters outside the living room. As he had hoped, the pane of glass Alberti had broken during their last, abortive, attempt to break in still hadn’t been repaired, and he needed only to slip his hand through the window and release the lock.
With a swift heave, he pulled himself up and through the window, landing heavily on the wooden floor of the living room. Immediately, he pulled his pistol out of his shoulder holster and glanced around the room, but there was no sound anywhere in the old house.
Rogan walked through the room into the hall and pulled open the front door.
Mandino led Pierro and his remaining bodyguard inside, waited for one of them to shut the door and then gestured for Rogan to lead the way. The three men followed him through the living room and into the dining room, and then stopped dead in front of the featureless surface of the honey-brown stone.
“Where the hell is it? Where’s the inscription?” Mandino’s voice was harsh and angry.
Rogan looked like he’d seen a ghost. “It was here,” he shouted, staring at the wall.
“It was right here on this stone.”
“Look at the floor,” Pierro said, pointing at the base of the wall. He knelt down and picked up a handful of stone chips. “Somebody’s chiseled off the inscribed layer of that stone. Some of these flakes still have letters—or at least parts of letters—on them.”
“Can you do anything with them?” Mandino demanded.
“It’ll be like a three-dimensional jigsaw,” Pierro said, “but I should be able to reconstruct some of it. I’ll need the stone to be pulled out of the wall. Without that, there’s no way I can work out which piece goes where. There’s also a possibility that we could try surface analysis, or even chemical treatment or an X-ray technique, to try to recover the inscription.”
“Really?”
“It’s worth a try. It’s not my field, but it’s surprising what can be achieved with modern recovery methods.”
That was good enough for Man
dino. He pointed at his bodyguard. “Go and find something soft to put the stone chips in—towels, bed linen, something like that—and collect every single shard you can find.” He turned to Rogan. “When he’s done that, get the stepladder and start chipping out the cement from around that stone.
But don’t,” he warned, “do any more damage to the stone itself. We’ll help you lift it down when you’ve loosened it.”
Mandino watched for a few moments as his men started work, then walked toward the door, motioning to Pierro to follow him. “We’ll check the rest of the house, just in case they were helpful enough to write down what they found.”
“If they did that to the stone,” the professor replied, “I doubt very much if you’ll find anything.”
“I know, but we’ll look anyway.”
In the study, Mandino immediately spotted the computer and a digital camera.
“We’ll take these,” he said.
“We could look at the computer here,” Pierro suggested.
“We could,” Mandino agreed, “but I know specialists who can recover data even from formatted hard disks, and I’d rather they checked it. And if these men photographed the stone before they obliterated the inscription, the images might still be in the camera.”
Mandino yanked the power cable and connecting leads out of the back of the desktop computer’s system unit and picked it up. “Bring the camera,” he ordered, and led the way to the hall, where he carefully placed the unit beside the front door.
They walked back into the dining room, where Rogan and the bodyguard were just lifting the stone clear of the wall. When they’d lowered it to the floor, Mandino examined the surface again, but all he could see were chisel marks. Despite Pierro’s optimism, he didn’t think there was even the remotest chance of recovering the inscription from the pathetic collection of chips and the surface of the stone itself.
The best option they had was to talk to the men themselves.
Funerals in Italy are normally grand family affairs, with posters pasted around the town announcing the death, an open casket and lines of weeping and wailing mourners. The Hamptons knew few people in the town—they’d only been there, off and on, for a matter of months, and had spent most of that time working on the house rather than getting to know their neighbors.
Bronson had arranged for a simple service in the anticipation that there’d be only three people there—himself, Mark and the priest. In fact, there were about two dozen mourners, all members of Maria Palomo’s extended family. But it was, by Italian standards, a very restrained, and comparatively brief, ceremony. Within thirty minutes the two men were back in the Alfa, and heading out of the town.
Neither of them had noticed the single man in a nondescript dark-colored Fiat who had followed them into Ponticelli. When they’d parked near the church, he’d driven past but within moments of Bronson pulling away from the curb, the car was behind them again.
Inside the vehicle, the driver pulled a cell phone from his pocket and pressed a speed-dial number. “They’re on the way,” he said.
* * *
Mark had barely said a word since they’d left Ponticelli, and Bronson hadn’t felt like talking, the two men united in their grief for the death of a woman they’d both loved, albeit from different perspectives. Mark was trying to come to terms with the final, irrevocable chapter of his short marriage, while Bronson’s aching loss was tempered by guilt, by the knowledge that for the last five years or so he’d been living a lie, in love with his best friend’s wife.
The funeral had been Mark’s last farewell to Jackie and, now it was over, he was going to have to make decisions about his life. Bronson guessed that the house—the property the Hamptons had intended to retire to—would go on the market. The memories of their time together in the old place would probably be too painful for Mark to relive for very long.
As he neared the house, Bronson noticed a Fiat sedan coming up fast behind them.
“Bloody Italian drivers,” he muttered, as the car showed no signs of overtaking, just maintained position about ten yards behind the Alfa.
He braked gently as he approached the gateway, turned on his blinker and turned in. But the other car did the same, stopping actually in the gateway and completely blocking it. In that instant, as Bronson glanced toward the old house, he realized they were trapped, and just how high the stakes really were.
Outside the house, a Lancia sedan was parked, and beside the front door—which looked as if it was slightly ajar—was an oblong gray box and a cubical sandy-colored object. Behind the car, two men were standing, staring at the approaching Alfa, one with the unmistakable shape of a pistol in his right hand.
“Who the hell . . . ?” Mark shouted.
“Hang on,” Bronson yelled. He swung the wheel to the left and accelerated hard, powering the car off the gravel drive and across the lawn, aiming straight for the hedge that formed a boundary between the garden and the road.
“Where was it?” Bronson shouted.
Strapped into the passenger seat, Mark immediately guessed what Bronson was asking. When they’d bought the house, the driveway was U-shaped, with two gates, but they’d extended the hedge and lawn across the second entrance. And that was now their only way out. He pointed through the windshield. “A little farther to the right,” he said, braced himself in the seat and closed his eyes.
Bronson twitched the wheel slightly as the Alfa rocketed forward. He heard the cracks of two shots behind them, but he didn’t think either hit the vehicle. Then the nose of the car tore into the hedge, the bushes planted barely a year earlier. Beyond the windshield, their view turned into an impenetrable maelstrom of green and brown as the Alfa smashed the plants under its chassis, branches whipping past the side windows. The front wheels lifted off the ground for a moment when the car hit the low bank that formed the base of the hedge, then crashed down again.
And then they were through. Bronson lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal and hit the brakes for an instant as the car lurched across the grass verge, checking the road in both directions. It was just as well he did.
A truck was lumbering up the hill directly toward them, just a few yards away, a black cloud of diesel belching from its exhaust. The driver’s face wore an almost comical look of shock, having just seen the bright red car materialize from a hedge right in front of him.
Bronson slammed the accelerator pedal down again, and the Alfa shot straight across the road, missing the back of the truck by perhaps three feet. He hit the brakes, swung the wheel hard left and, the moment the car was aiming down the hill, accelerated again. The Alfa fishtailed as he fed in the power, but in moments it was screaming down the road at well more than sixty miles an hour.
“What the hell’s going on?” Mark demanded, turning around in his seat to look back toward his house. “Who were those people?”
“I don’t know who they were,” Bronson said, “but I know what they were. That cubical object was the stone from your dining-room wall, and the gray box was the system unit from your computer. They were the people who broke in to read the first inscription, and who’ve been trying to get back inside ever since to find the second one.”
Bronson glanced in his mirror as he accelerated hard down the hill. About two hundred yards behind them he saw two cars emerge from the gateway one after the other and start chasing them. The first was the Fiat that had blocked the drive behind them, and the second was the Lancia.
“I don’t—” Mark began.
Bronson interrupted. “We’re not clear yet. Both cars are chasing us.”
His eyes were scanning the instruments, checking for any abnormal readings that might have been caused by the harsh treatment he’d given the car, but everything seemed OK. And he hadn’t detected any problems with the handling, though there appeared to be various bits of greenery attached to the front of the car.
“What do they want?”
“The inscription, obviously. They know we erased it, so n
ow we’re their only lead, simply because we saw it. Whatever it means, it must be a hell of a lot more important than I thought.”
Bronson was pushing the Alfa as hard as he dared, but the roads were fairly narrow, twisting and not that well surfaced and, though he couldn’t see the other cars behind him, he knew they had to be close. He was a very competent police-trained driver, but he wasn’t familiar with the car or the area, and he was driving on the “wrong”
side of the road, so the odds were stacked against him.
“You’ll have to help me, Mark. We’ve got to get the hell away from here, as quickly as possible.” He pointed ahead to a road sign indicating a crossroads. “Which way?”
Mark stared through the windshield, but for a moment he didn’t respond.
“I need to know,” Bronson said urgently. “Which way?”
Mark seemed to rouse himself. “Left,” he said. “Go left. That’s the quickest route to the autostrada.”
But as Bronson paused in the center of the road, waiting for a group of three cars coming in the opposite direction to pass, the Fiat appeared in his rearview mirror about a hundred yards behind.
“Shit,” Bronson muttered, and accelerated as quickly as he could the instant the road was clear.
“A quick check, Mark,” he said. “My laptop and camera are in the car, and my passport’s in my pocket. Is there anything you have to collect from the house?”
Mark felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet and passport. “Only my clothes and stuff,” he said. “I hadn’t finished packing.”
“You have now,” Bronson said grimly, alternating his gaze between the road in front and his mirrors.
“We need to take the next road on the right,” Mark instructed. “Then the autostrada’s only a couple of miles away.”
“Got it.”
But though Bronson slowed as the Alfa neared the junction, he didn’t take the turn.
“Chris, I said turn right.”
“I know, but we need to lose this guy first. Hang on.”
The Fiat had closed to less than fifty yards behind the Alfa when Bronson acted. He slammed on the brakes, waited until the car’s speed had dropped to about twenty miles an hour, then released the brakes, spun the wheel to the left and simultaneously pulled on the handbrake. The car lurched sideways, tires screaming in protest as it slid across to the other side of the road. The moment it was facing the opposite way, Bronson dropped the handbrake and pressed on the accelerator. The Alfa shot past the Fiat, whose driver was still braking hard, and moments later they passed the Lancia as well, which had just caught up.