The Medici Dagger

by Cameron West

  “That’s what this is all about?” I spat. “Some fucking file?”

  “Have you heard of the Passive Coherent Location system?” Beckett asked.

  I remembered my first meeting with Heath in Milan. “I know what the PCL is,” I said, getting pissed. “Tell me what’s in the goddamn file!”

  Beckett’s face reddened.“Anequationis in thegoddamnfile, Reb. An equation for an electronic countermeasure that would allow aircraft and weapons systems to be modified to mask the disturbance of the broadcast channels that the PCL works on. If Heath sells it to Soon Ta Kee through Werner Krell, then Ta Kee can dictate U.S.-Chinese policy.”

  Shit,I thought, for the first time comprehending the magnitude of the vortex Ginny and I’d been sucked into.

  Mobright groaned. Beckett knelt by his side, comforting him.

  “After I went underground,” he continued, “Jack recruited Tim, who went along as my mole. Tim kept track of Heath, learned Krell had boxed himself in to an impossible delivery date with Soon Ta Kee, promising him a weapon which would be absolutely useless unless it had a housing that was ultralight and capable of withstanding the incredible temperatures generated by uncontrolled free-fall reentry through the atmosphere. Thereisno such modern material, but Krell is convinced there is; the alloy supposedly discovered five hundred years ago by—”

  “Leonardo,” I finished.

  “You were my means of getting to Heath before he got to Krell with the disk,” Beckett said. “It occurred to me to use you to roust him.”

  “It occurred to you touseme,” I seethed. “Toroustthat lunatic.”

  “This is much bigger than either of us, Reb. I had no alternative.”

  “So you played Greer, the courier. A crippled old man . . .”

  “We can be whoever we need to be,” Beckett said matter-of-factly.

  “You were dying in a hospice. . . . The nurse said you were dead.”

  Beckett stood. “I believe ‘is no longer with us’ were the words I chose for her. Look, we’re out of time,” he said, turning to Mobright. “Tim, tell me what you know.”

  Mobright gathered his strength. “Reb found the Dagger in the floor,” he said, “but Tecci showed up earlier than I’d told him to and took it away, spoiling our plan that you would arrive first. He andHeath left just moments ago. They’re heading for Krell’s Pullman. They didn’t give me the details. They expected me to come with Jocko and Lon.”

  “We’ve got to get to that train,” I said, panic and rage rising. “Ginny’s on that train.”

  Over by the door, Cardinal Lorro and Elverson were dead. Jocko lay still, a puddle of blood spreading under him. Just then Lon moaned. I’d thought he was dead, too.

  “Wha . . . ?” he mumbled.

  I could feel precious seconds ticking Ginny’s life away. I picked up the drill and stepped over to the goon, knelt and squeezed the trigger. The hole cutter whirred. Holding it an inch from Lon’s shoulder, I said, “Where’s the rolling palace?”

  His eyes cleared. “Fuck you, Flame Boy!”

  “You held my head while Nolo burned his initial in my neck. I’m going to like this more than you.” I revved the drill.

  “All right, all right,” he groaned. “It’s going to Zurich.”

  “Which train?”

  “IC382.”

  “Where does it stop in Italy?” I moved the drill a quarter inch closer.

  “Milan, I think,” he muttered, leaning as far away as he could from the bit.

  “Is Krell on the train?”

  “Of course.”

  “Is Antonia?”

  “Who?”

  I clamped my fingers on Lon’s thick jaw and snapped it toward me. “Miss Venice,” I hissed. “Is she on the train?”

  He nodded.

  “Where are my goddamn guns, Mobright?” I demanded.

  “On Krell’s plane, the one we took here. In the cabinet to the right of the sink.”

  Police sirens wailed outside. “Tim . . .” Beckett said to Mobright.

  “I’m all right, Inspector,” the injured man replied, aiming his weapon at Lon. “You two best be going. I’ll look after our friend.”

  Beckett said to me, “Well, then, let’s go get your guns.”

  “What about the pilot?”

  “Don’t worry about Halliday,” he said, withdrawing a small spray bottle from his coat pocket.

  “Then who’ll fly the plane?” I asked.

  “We’re taking Dracco’s.”

  “Dracco? You mean that was you in Milan? You gave the card to Ginny?”

  “Mm-hmm. I nailed those two by the bus for you, passed the business card to her. Let’s move. Dracco’s at the airport. We’ve got to get to Krell’s train.”

  There was no time to ponder. I slipped into the hall behind Beckett and followed him to Pendelton’s Benz, which he pointed out was closer than his own car.

  The big-shouldered man was slumped over behind the wheel— dead. “He spotted me,” Beckett explained.

  We pulled him out and rolled him behind some bushes. Beckett took the wheel and we blasted for the airport.

  Heath’s pilot was in the hangar. He was surprised to see me and even more surprised to see Beckett. Two minutes after incapacitating him, I had the mini strapped to my arm and the two Sigs hanging under my jacket.

  We found Dracco shaving in the bathroom in his hangar, his Gulfstream ready for travel.

  “Hey, Beckett,” he chuckled. “You hooked up with Hollywood Reb. How about that?”

  “We’ll be needing your services right now,” Beckett told him. “Full fare. Milan. Linate Airport is closest to the Stazione Centrale.”

  “Linate it is,” Dracco answered, toweling off his rugged face. “Let’s boogie.”

  Once airborne, Beckett and I stared uneasily at each other from our leather seats. Thoughts and feelings swooped down on me like Hitchcock’s birds. Four days ago I’d sat on Emily’s carpet dents, crying homeless tears to my picture of Ginevra de’ Benci. Since then I’d punched and shot and burned and bled and kissed and felt. I’d soared with Leonardo da Vinci, held his Dagger for my father, and all as the unwitting actor in Beckett’s little drama.My hands shook; I willed them to stop, grabbing the ends of my arm-rests. Beckett turned to me, but I spoke first, my eyes burning into his.

  “You played me, you prick. I told you at the hospice nobody plays me.”

  He didn’t have to answer.

  “The night you called me with that raspy put-on voice, you said you knew my father. You didn’t know him at all, did you?”

  “I had a complete file on him.”

  “Why would you have a file on my father?”

  “Because of what we found on Greer’s plane.”

  “What?”

  “The story I told you about Greer and Tecci on the train was true, except Greer didn’t ditch his plane and his legs weren’t broken in the fall. He did try to sell Leonardo’s page and Tecci double-crossed him— slashed his arm badly and was going to throw him off the train at the St. Roddard Pass.

  “Greer jumped early with the money and the notes, made his way back to his plane, and took off for America. He didn’t get far; apparently he went unconscious from loss of blood and ditched. I picked him up in no time because I was tracking him.”

  “Why were you tracking Greer?”

  “Because in addition to transporting Leonardo’s precious page, Greer was carrying secret documents to a contact in Greenland. You see, he was a courier for hire. He worked for everyone from theNational Gallery to the KGB. My job was to make sure those documents never reached Greenland.

  “I arrived at the plane, which was still afloat and not badly damaged, and removed Greer, the documents, and the satchel. Greer was unconscious and bleeding profusely. He never would have made it to Greenland, much less Washington, D.C.

  “As I got him onto the ship, he revived long enough to tell me about the Medici Dagger and pass me the page of Leonardo’s notes. My missi
on was, of course, secret. I couldn’t let those notes surface; I certainly couldn’t mail them to your father in an unmarked envelope. There was too much at risk. At that time a magic dagger and an eccentric munitions manufacturer didn’t seem like much of a threat. So I sank the plane and the notes went into a vault, along with the satchel of money, to be buried forever beside a thousand other extraordinary artifacts.”

  I shook my throbbing head. “Buried forever . . .”

  “Well, not forever,” Beckett said. “Until two weeks ago. When the second page of Leonardo’s notes surfaced in Italy, it brought back the memory of the incident with Greer, the satchel in the vault, and the page of notes. I knew the money would be an asset. I didn’t know of what use the page would be, so I researched the Medici Dagger. Of course your father’s file came up, along with the family photo that had run in the newspaper at the time of the fire. Without knowing why, really, I looked into what had become of you. When I found out you were a stuntman, well, that’s when my plan gelled.”

  “I know the rest,” I murmured to the window.

  “You were the perfect appendage, Reb. My God, how powerful a force vengeance is,” Beckett said to himself.

  My hands were shaking again, not from the heights, but from pent-up rage, at the tragedy of greed and malice, the dominoes of death. Was it raw circumstance or preordained that my parents would die, that I would become Leonardo’s mighty traveler, that I would be sitting now, at this moment, across from the man who’d rescuedLeonardo’s first page of the Circles of Truth from being lost at sea only to imprison it in a steel vault until it was time to set it—and me—free?

  I looked up to see Beckett staring at me with the same dispassionate-grin he’d had on his face when I’d left him dying in his hospice bed.

  He seemed to read my thoughts. “Survival of the fittest,” he said. “I needed to survive and you were—”

  “Fit,” I finished.

  “Yes. I couldn’t conceive at the time just how extraordinarily fit you were. You actually found the Medici Dagger.”

  “And Tecci and Krell and Heath have it.”

  “For the moment.”

  “And they have the woman I love.”

  Silence over the whine of jet engines, wind over wings. I couldn’t believe I’d said those words. The woman Ilove. Tears fought for their freedom. Turning my face toward the window, I blinked them back, but Beckett saw.

  “If anything has happened to her . . .” I managed. “If she’s in any way . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I faced him again. “There will be a reckoning. Do you hear me? If I’m not dead, there will be a reckoning.”

  Beckett looked at me solemnly. “If we don’t catch them, Reb, it will be the Prince of Darkness himself who will reckon with me. So,” he said, plugging his laptop into a modem. “Let’s focus on the problem at hand.”

  Beckett dialed into the Internet and connected with the Ferrovie Dello Stato, Italy’s national rail company. In short order, he had a printout of every train leaving Italy for Zurich that afternoon. He made an anonymous call to the FS office and confirmed that the IC382 was pulling a private car and that it was departing from Milan in an hour and fifteen minutes.

  He told me it would take us at least an hour to get to Linate Airport, which was six kilometers from the Central Station, a dicey six kilometers; by car it could take a full half hour to reach the station once we touched down.

  I asked if he could pull any strings to delay the train.

  He said he couldn’t, and that even if he could, a move like that would only alert them and cause them to flee. “Where would we be then?” he added.

  He was right. I had to get my brain clear. The only way to get on the train was to catch up with it. To do that, I’d need speed. Jungle speed. I saw myself streaking for the IC382. Beckett wasn’t in the picture. I felt the familiar sensation of resolve. One way or another, I was going alone.

  I asked Beckett to print out a map of the roads that followed the train route. Inside a minute I was poring over them.

  The train stopped in Lugano, about eighty kilometers north of Milan. After that, it was a straight shot to Zurich.

  “Does Dracco have firepower?” I asked.

  Beckett got up from his seat and opened a closet. “He’s fairly well stocked, actually,” he said. “Automatics, sniper rifle, an assortment of knives—”

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a large futuristic black plastic weapon.

  “This,” he said, handing it to me, “is a Pancor Jackhammer. Hmm . . . loaded. It’s a gas-operated automatic shotgun that’ll turn anyone it’s pointed at into a cave painting. Useful, but a little difficult to conceal. I can’t see an application for it in this mission.”

  “Hand it over.”

  I leaned forward and stashed it down the back of my jacket, tucking the barrel into my pants. It fit. “How about transportation in Milan?”

  “I’ll check with Dracco,” Beckett said, stepping toward the cockpit.

  I closed my eyes, felt the muscles in my face tighten, the grit in my gut. Krell, Tecci, Heath—Old-Spiced and pin-striped . . . why hadn’t I spotted him as a fake? “No one is merely who they seem to be,” he’d said. “Isn’t power intoxicating?” Heath was dying to tell me it was a sham. That son of a bitch had sat next to me, told me where to breakthe Circles. He’d massaged my temples, for chrissake. Then he’d sent me to my doom, standing next to his former lover. Damn! And Greer . . . I mean Beckett . . . he’d sucked me in with a cough and a phone call, had me dancing like a marionette.

  When I opened my eyes, Beckett was sitting in his seat staring at me. “When I lay in that bed playing a dying American pilot, I admit I felt a pang of regret, and I feel it again now. By nature I’m not a panderer of men. Of course, you have no reason to believe me at this point.”

  It was my turn to not answer.

  “I’m sorry for what happened to your throat,” he said.

  I ignored the statement. “What did Dracco tell you?”

  “He’s got an assortment of vehicles at his private hangar. One hell of an accommodating mercenary.”

  “We’ll rent a car from him. That shouldn’t cost more than two, three grand.”

  “Four. I’ll cover it, of course.”

  “From Greer’s satchel, right? When I got it, it had two million in it. How much when you got it?”

  Beckett crossed his legs, folded his hands. “Three.”

  We touched down at Linate Airport, taxied over to Dracco’s hangar, and slowed to a stop. I deplaned first, while Beckett settled up with Dracco. Inside the hangar were a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, a black Mercedes sedan, and a brand-new red Harley with the key in it. I looked back at the jet and saw Beckett stepping off.

  I saw his jaw drop in the Harley’s rearview mirror.

  nineteen

  In eighteen minutes the mauling city gave way to brown earth and bulging Alps. I screamed up E35 on Dracco’s Harley, wondering what I’d face aboard the IC382. I’d killed I-don’t-know-how-many on the boat in Venice; five bought it in Little River; Lon and Jocko were out of the picture. Who was left? Tecci and Krell and Heath? Had to be more than that.I pictured Krell from the description Lois had given me by phone the last time I’d flown into Milan: bald, not bad-looking. What was clanking through his crazy head? He had the Dagger; he had Ginny; Soon Ta Kee was on his tail; and he was cruising through the Alps in a silver Pullman?

  In Krell’s eyes, everyone had to be dispensable. No way they’d hand Ginny the Dagger in Zurich and say they were sorry. I remembered the story Beckett told me about Greer. Tecci on the back platform, the high bridge, the rolling wheels, the double-cross. And then, with the force of an asteroid, a thought struck: Tecci was going to toss Ginny off the back of the Pullman at the St. Roddard Pass.

  I checked my watch. It was going to be tight. They’d be pulling into the station in fifteen minutes. Followed by a ten-minute stop. That gave me twenty-five minutes. I could just make i
t.

  I roared by the flow of traffic on the winding road, dipping into the breakdown lane, kicking up gravel and bottle caps. I was ahead of everybody, in the clear, until I tore around a corner and ran smack into the Swiss border at Chiasso.

  I’d forgotten about the goddamn border! Instantly, I regretted havingthe Jackhammer. Too late. I slowed to a stop and sat up straight, arching my shoulders back to make space for the shotgun.

  It was a small station: four uniformed guards, probably bored, certainly not waiting for me. I smiled at the young one who approached me and asked for my papers, hoping he’d have some sympathy for a hunchback. I wondered if I should say hello. Opting for silence, I handed him my passport.

  The guard flipped it open, matching the picture with the face.

  “American on a Harley,” he said with an Italian accent. “I ride a Honda. Are you renting or owning?” He eyed the bike with admiration.

  I told him a friend of mine had loaned it to me.

  “Really?”he said, surprised.“It looks new. Must be a very good friend.”

  “Wonderful guy. Very generous,” I assured him.

  “Hmm, what is in the back of your jacket?”

  Time ticked irrevocably by, steel wheels rolling for Lugano.

  “It’s a back support,” I said. “I have a very, very bad back.”

  The guard scratched his chin with my passport. I checked his countenance from behind my shades. Curiosity or concern?

  “What is this bump?” he asked, frowning. He called to a middle-aged guard who was checking a Saab. “Luigi!”

  The man waved the car through to Swiss freedom. I felt envy, fear, anger. The guard walked quickly toward us, his hand moving to his holstered gun.

  Ticking clock, pounding heart, sweating hands.

  Luigi pointed his chin grimly at my back.Time’s up.

  I squeezed the clutch, dropped it into gear, spun the throttle, and peeled out, lifting the front wheel a foot off the ground. Over the thunder of the Harley’s huge engine, I could barely hear the shouts.