The Asset: Act II (An Isabella Rose Thriller Book 2)

by Mark Dawson

  They took shelter in a cave that Pope had spotted. There was a north–south road within a mile of their hiding place, and Isabella took Pope’s binoculars and watched vehicles passing along it. The helicopter was too far to the south to be visible to her, but it was obvious that the crash site was the focus of the attention. She was watching the comings and goings just as a series of concussive detonations rumbled across the bleak landscape, preceding a bright explosion that stained the horizon. She looked up and saw a black speck high in the sky. She found the speck with the binoculars: it was an ugly aircraft with big air intakes and wings that bristled with ordnance, flying high and fast.

  “What is that?” she asked Pope.

  He took the binoculars and looked up into the sky. “That’s an A-10 Warthog,” he said. “They’re clearing up the mess.”

  A pillar of black smoke reached up into the bright blue sky. Isabella put the binoculars down, retreated deeper into the cave and laid out to sleep.

  They pressed onward that night, moving much more quickly now that they were unencumbered by Aqil or Salim, and they reached the border at two in the morning. Pope checked their position on his GPS and told her that they were five hundred metres to the south of Ar Ra’i. There were five miles between them and the larger town of Elbeyli.

  The demarcation point was a barbed-wire fence suspended on concrete fence posts; Pope took a pair of pliers from his pack and snipped the wire to open up a hole big enough for them to slip through. There was nothing else to denote that they had crossed from one country into another, and although Pope warned her that they were far from safe, the psychological effect of crossing the border was marked. Isabella had flashed back to everything that she had been subjected to over the course of the last five days—the ambush, the helicopter ride, the interrogation and then the escape—and allowed herself a moment of relief that the worst of it all was behind her. The relief was followed quickly by pride. She had done it. She had taken the training that her mother had given her, the repetitive exercises that she had followed day after day after day both before and after her death, and she had deployed them to powerful effect.

  She knew that she had grown up in the last few days.

  And she knew, too, that she had begun to earn her legacy.

  They left their rifles and the majority of their ammunition in a culvert just outside Elbeyli. Pope still had his Beretta and enough ammunition for most eventualities.

  They stole a car and headed northwest, negotiating the whole of Turkey until they crossed the border into Bulgaria near Budakdoganca. They had no passports or any other travel documentation, but the border was open and they were able to drive across. They drove on through Bulgaria and made their way to a refugee processing centre on the border with Serbia that Pope said he had visited before. They abandoned the car and, obscured within a body of several dozen migrants from Syria and Iraq, were able to cross the border without having their documents checked.

  Isabella insisted that they take a train from Pirot to Belgrade. She could see that Pope would have found another car and driven on without stopping, and she had noticed, with mounting alarm, that he had started to have difficulty keeping his eyes open, regardless of the cups of strong coffee that he bought whenever they passed a roadside vendor. The train was basic, with firm seats and a lack of ventilation, but Pope had fallen asleep almost as soon as they had pulled out of the station. He had slept throughout the journey and, as the train finally pulled into Belgrade’s main station on Savska Street, Isabella gently shook him awake. He still looked tired, but the black pouches that had bulged beneath his eyes had receded.

  They found a public telephone, and Isabella waited patiently while Pope made a call. He had lost a little of the worry in his eyes by the time he emerged five minutes later.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Was that your wife?”

  He nodded. “They’re okay. But I’ll feel better when we get there.”

  Pope said that they would be able to continue by train through the rest of Serbia and then into Croatia and Slovenia. The train stopped at the border, but the checks were rudimentary. Pope led the way to the toilet and they hid there. They heard the official as he made his way along the train, but they had left the toilet door ajar to give the impression that it was unoccupied, and he did not check.

  They disembarked at Zagreb and continued into Slovenia by bus. The border checks were even less rigorous there: the bus stopped at the border post, the driver answered the questions of a bored-looking official who did not even board the vehicle and then they were waved through. They stole their second car, a Citroen Saxo, from a quiet public car park in Ljubljana and continued once again. They bent to the south and followed the E61 until they reached the Italian border at Sempeter pri Gorici. They abandoned the car, followed the border to the north, clambered over a six-foot-high wire fence and crossed the border into Italy on foot.

  The town of Montepulciano was three hundred miles to the south.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Montepulciano was a medieval town set atop a six-hundred-metre-high limestone ridge that overlooked the rolling vineyards that dominated this part of the province of Siena. The comune was eighty miles southeast of Florence and one hundred and twenty miles to the north of Rome.

  Pope drove their latest stolen car, a Peugeot, through the narrow, winding streets until they reached a car park. They left the car there and walked along the Corso, the main street that led into the Piazza Grande. It was a beautiful space, a wide cobbled square that was overlooked by the Duomo, the Palazzo Comunale, the Palazzo Tarugi and the Palazzo Contucci. Pope gazed across the square to a large stone building that looked as if it might have been adapted to accommodate apartments. His bearing, which had been a mix of anticipation and nervousness, now became pensive. They walked on and his face darkened with worry.

  “What is it?” Isabella said.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he led the way to an outdoor café next to a fountain with an ornamental lion and griffin. Pope led the way to an empty table in the shade of an awning and held out a chair for Isabella.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I need you to stay here,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Something’s not right.”

  “Mr Pope—tell me.”

  “The shutters are closed.”

  “So?”

  “It’s midday, Isabella. The apartment looks out onto the piazza. It’s beautiful. Rachel would never leave them closed this late.”

  “Let me come with you,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Just stay here,” he said.

  “Mr Pope—”

  “Isabella,” he snapped, “first of all, stop calling me Mr Pope. It’s Pope. Or Michael. Second of all, just do as you’re told for once.”

  She frowned at him.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t argue with me. I’ll come and get you.”

  Pope reached the door to the building. It was self-locking, but something had happened to the mechanism and it was ajar. That was strange, and it added another layer to Pope’s underlying anxiety. He pushed the door open and went inside. The entrance was communal, leading to a flight of stone steps that offered access to the rest of the building. There were four flats that had been created within the building’s six storeys, each one accessed from a wide stone landing. The flat that he and his wife had purchased fifteen years earlier was on the top three floors.

  The reception was cool, the stone cold to the touch. Pope waited there for a minute and listened. He heard nothing. His pistol was pushed into the waistband of his trousers, the barrel pushed up against his coccyx and covered with the tails of his jacket. He reached around and withdrew it, crossed to the start of the stairs and ascended.

  He stopped on the landing that offered access to the two lower flats. It was open, with a parapet overlooking the square. He listened again: he heard the sound of c
onversation from the piazza below, the siren of a police car in the distance, but nothing out of the ordinary. The couple who lived in one of the flats had a sausage dog, and he heard its claws as it scrabbled at something behind the door. He stopped at the door to the other flat on this level and listened again, but he heard nothing. It sounded as if it was empty.

  He climbed again until he reached the third floor. A corpulent pigeon was resting on the parapet, and it resentfully flapped away as he ascended the final stair.

  The doors to both flats were closed.

  He crossed to the door of the neighbouring flat and listened.

  Nothing.

  He went back across the landing until he was outside the door to their flat. The key was hidden inside a plant pot that they left on the parapet; lax security, but Pope had never felt that their security was something that he needed to be particularly concerned about here. No one knew that he owned the flat. His nonchalance bothered him now, though. He wished he had given the safeguarding of the apartment a little more care and attention. It suddenly felt very vulnerable.

  He put the key into the lock, turned it and pushed the door open.

  He went inside and shut the door behind him.

  The Asset had been waiting in the square ever since Pope had made contact with his wife. They had known that he was coming, and Maia had been able to make her way south from London in plenty of time. The grounding of civil airliners in light of the downing of British Airways Flight 117 had lasted for two days, but commercial pressures had been impossible to resist, and a limited service had been resumed. Maia had flown from Southampton because it was a smaller airport and security was less rigorous. The short flight to Orly took an hour and a half; she continued to Rome aboard an Air France Airbus A320 and touched down two hours later. From there, she hired a car and drove north.

  Maia was dressed as a tourist, with a pair of jeans, a tight black polo neck jumper, and a leather satchel around her shoulder. She knew that she was as anonymous as she could be as she made her way across the busy square. She had forced the door when she had visited the apartment the previous evening, and it had not been fixed yet. She pushed it open and slipped inside.

  She had a camera around her neck, but she took it off and left it on the wooden table that the owners of the apartments used as a repository for their uncollected post. She paused to take out a pair of latex gloves and overshoes from her pocket. She carefully pulled the gloves onto her hands and unrolled the overshoes over her boots. She would leave no trace of herself after her work was done—no fingerprints, no footprints—just as she had left no trace when the snatch team had visited before. There would be nothing that could be followed back to her. Her caution might not even have mattered. Maia’s fingerprints had never been taken and her unusual DNA was not in any database. She had no friends. The list of people who might recognise her likeness was very limited. But her training had instilled in her an almost constitutional aversion to even the slightest possibility of detection.

  She removed a shoulder holster from the satchel and put it on, pulled out her pistol and started to ascend the stairs.

  Isabella exhaled in frustration, but she did as Pope had instructed. She settled back against the wooden chair and watched as Pope crossed the piazza. He was cautious, making a slow approach and stopping several times to ensure that he wasn’t followed or observed. But it would have been almost impossible to be certain of that. The square was busy with tourists and locals going about their business. Isabella watched as Pope approached the building’s studded wooden door, opened it and went inside.

  “Signorina?”

  Isabella looked up. A waiter was standing by her table, a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other.

  “Cosa vorresti?”

  Isabella did not speak Italian. “Excuse me?”

  “What do you want, Miss?”

  The waiter was standing at the side of the table between her and Pope’s building. He was blocking her view. She thought that she saw movement behind the waiter. Someone was at the door to the building. She craned her neck to look around the waiter, but there was no one there.

  “Miss? You can’t just sit here. You must order.”

  “Coffee,” she said.

  The waiter muttered something in Italian but scribbled down her order and moved out of the way as Isabella leaned back in her chair to look around him to the other side. She had been sure she had seen someone—a woman, she thought it was a woman—but there was no one there now.

  She looked out across the piazza. There was nothing that stood out. Tourists milled around, taking photographs of the Duomo. A small delivery van was parked next to a delicatessen as the driver unloaded produce from the back. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  She had promised Pope that she would wait for him at the café, but she knew better than to doubt her instincts. There had been someone there.

  She got up.

  Chapter Sixty

  The apartment was set out across three generous storeys that provided a thousand square feet of accommodation. The first level, equipped with a pellet stove and a fireplace, included a large living area, a large eat-in kitchen, a bathroom and a storeroom. Pope moved from room to room. The shutters were all closed. Rachel would never have left them like that during the day; one of the things she loved about the apartment was the way that the sunlight streamed inside. He paused in the living room. He gazed around at the familiar Tuscan decor: exposed wood beams, Cotto d’Este floors, brick and Cotto frames, wood thresholds and ancient exposed stones in the walls. The place was the same, yet the warmth and comfort that he had always associated with the place was missing now. He saw things that he recognised from home: a jacket that his elder daughter, Flora, had left over the back of a chair; the iPad that his younger daughter, Clementine, had asked for last Christmas; the book that Rachel had been meaning to read, left splayed spine up on the arm of one of the comfortable chairs. Pope picked the book up and riffled through the pages. He realised that his nervousness had mutated into something much worse. Pope was terrified.

  He climbed the stairs to the next floor. It was composed of two adjacent bedrooms, a bathroom and another storage room. He went into the bedroom he shared with Rachel and saw the old details that had charmed her when she had taken a week off work to view the selection of apartments that the realtor had chosen for them. He looked down at the beautiful herringbone parquet flooring and then up at the wood ceiling in their bedroom. He stopped, his stomach falling. The bedside lamp that he had chosen from one of the boutiques on the Corso was missing. He went over to the empty table, got down onto his knees and ran his hand beneath the bed. Something sharp abraded his fingertips. He lifted the valance and saw a scattering of small fragments. He took the largest piece and held it up. It was a piece of cream ceramic, the same colour and the same material as the lamp that had once stood there. It had been knocked off.

  He went outside to the landing again. He felt sick. There was a telephone handset on the small table that was pushed up against the wall. He put his Beretta on the table, picked up the handset and put it to his ear. There was no dialling tone. Someone had cut the line.

  When he turned back to the stairs, he saw that he wasn’t alone.

  There was a woman standing at the other end of the landing. She was taller than average, perhaps five nine or five ten. She was slender, with long dark hair that had been weaved into a French braid. She was wearing jeans, desert boots and a tight black polo neck top that clung to her curves. She was wearing a brown leather shoulder rig with a double holster.

  The holsters were empty.

  The woman was pointing a Sig Sauer P226 at Pope’s stomach.

  They looked at each other for a moment. She was attractive, her face given additional character by a slight roundness and a flattened nose. Her eyes were brown and distracting; not because they had any particular distinctiveness, save the complete absence of life. They were soulless. It was like looking into a black mirror.<
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  She spoke first. “Step away from the gun.”

  Pope paused a moment just to gauge her reaction; she raised her aim a little, aiming just below his throat, and he saw her finger start to tighten around the trigger. She wasn’t kidding around.

  Pope slowly raised both hands and took three steps away from the table. The woman advanced as he retreated, until she was next to the table. She took his pistol with her left hand and shoved it into the holster beneath her right shoulder.

  “Downstairs,” she said, inclining her head towards them.

  “Where is my family?”

  She angled her head again. “Do you want to see them again?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then do exactly as I say.”

  She spoke with the faintest trace of an American accent; other than that, Pope couldn’t place it. It was neutral and almost without inflection. In its own way, it was as disconcerting as her dead eyes.

  Pope stood his ground. He looked over at his confiscated gun in her holster and felt stupid and hopelessly vulnerable. He had been careful inside the apartment, stopping to listen at regular intervals, yet this woman had been able to approach without giving herself away.

  Pope was at the end of the landing that was farthest from the stairs. The woman was halfway along it, next to the table, her back to the stairs. She was looking at Pope, her attention focussed on him, so she didn’t see Isabella as she ascended the stairs.

  Isabella was clutching a kitchen knife in her right fist.

  Pope played for time. “Tell me what’s happened to them and I’ll go wherever you want me to go.”

  The woman kept her eyes on Pope and took a backward step that brought her closer to the stairs, and closer to Isabella.

  Isabella closed her fist around the knife and raised it.

  She was silent and obscured by the dim light in the stairwell, but Pope saw the woman’s eyes flick across to the freestanding mirror in the bedroom. It was angled so that it reflected the door and, beyond that, the archway that opened onto the stairs. The woman saw Isabella as she lunged out of the darkness, and at the last possible moment, she angled herself away from her.