by Cindy Dees
“Probably down in the old kitchens using the wood-burning ovens and fireplaces to cook.” He headed for another door on the opposite side of the room and reached for the handle. I sighed in relief as it opened under his hand. No need to stand here fretting while he picked the lock.
We stepped outside into a high-walled garden. It wasn’t all that large, but was cunningly laid out to look much more expansive than it was. My eyes adjusted to the dim moonlight filtering through a thin layer of cloud cover. I began to pick out plants here and there. A pair of climbing roses were glossy and black on the trellis beyond a sage bush glowing silver beside me. And the tall wall of a box hedge towered straight ahead. Robert groaned under his breath and we headed for it.
Then I saw the telltale opening in the hedge. A maze. No wonder Robert had groaned. We didn’t have time for this foolishness.
“How big do you suppose the property is around this place?” he asked.
“Not very. We’re smack-dab in the middle of the city.”
“Let’s see if we can find another way out of the maze. Maybe if we’re lucky there’s a gate at the other side of this thing.”
We started off, and I did my best to keep my directions straight. But as soon as the paths started branching off at forty-five degree angles and even curving, I was done for.
Robert stopped, looking around in frustration. “Jeez. Where’s a ghost when you need her?”
I laughed quietly. “Maybe we don’t need her, yet. Her absence probably means nobody’s chasing us with the intent to do bodily harm to us.”
“Good point.”
Most garden mazes I’d seen were relatively simple affairs that, if you kept your wits even slightly about you, could be solved in a few minutes. Not so, this one. It was purely evil, more like a castle defense than an entertaining garden curiosity. The paths were narrow, the hedges dense and tall, and while I suppose we could’ve just pushed through them, we saved ourselves some serious scratching by walking the paths. And walking. This maze was huge. Either that, or we were retracing our steps. A lot.
Then, without warning, a hand clapped over my mouth and I was yanked back against something—someone—hard and hostile. Panic slammed into me. I tried to scream, but I could barely breathe, let alone make noise.
Horrified, I watched Robert take several steps forward. He hadn’t heard my silent attacker. Wasn’t aware I was in huge trouble back here. He was walking away from me!
I squealed then under the big, hard palm and fought like a maniac. My first impulse was to grab for the fingers over my mouth, but I belatedly remembered from my self-defense training that my strength would be useless against my attacker’s in that way.
So, I elbowed the guy’s ribs with all my might. He was wearing some kind of thick jacket if the dull, painless whump of my elbow against his side was any indication. I mule-kicked his knee next. That got his attention. He let out a grunt and cursed in Italian. But more to the point, he let go of me.
I whirled to face him, but something big and dark flashed by me. Robert barreled into my attacker and knocked him to the ground in the prettiest rugby tackle you ever saw. His shoulder drove straight into the guy’s solar plexus, and wool coat or no, the guy went down like an oak tree. Robert rolled off the attacker and scrambled to his knees, his fist drawn back. But the jerk didn’t move. Must’ve knocked himself out hitting his head on the ground, or something. We didn’t stick around long enough to find out.
We took off running, and now we did start crashing through hedges. It only took me about two painful, scary shoves to get the technique. You turn so your back takes the worst of it, and you try to fold yourself into the narrowest possible shape. Then, you slide around the big branches that get in the way and push through the twiggy stuff. Lots of scratches but fewer bruises.
Someone shouted behind us. They’d found my attacker. Crud. Now it sounded as if a whole bunch of men were in here with us. I sincerely hoped they were running around in circles, too. But odds were our pursuers knew their way through this insanity. And we did not. Sprinting for your life is one thing, but sprinting for your life in circles is quite another. Helplessness threatened to paralyze me as the voices behind us got closer and closer, and Robert just kept crashing through hedges and dragging me along behind him. I had no idea where we were or where we were going, and that scared me almost more than the fury tinging the shouting voices now all but surrounding us.
We ran even faster, the green walls leaning in on us, hemming us in on all sides. It seemed no matter which way we turned more hedges always loomed, determined to snare us in their leafy arms.
Footsteps pounded very close behind us, but where they were exactly, I couldn’t tell. My head was spinning. I had no idea which way was forward or back. I was barely keeping up and down straight.
And then I heard someone breathing heavily in the next row over. Robert froze instantly, one foot suspended in the air in the act of taking a step. I did the same behind him. He gestured me to come up beside him, and he began to creep forward, placing each foot down with exquisite care. We approached the next intersection, and he moved ahead to peer carefully around the corner. Then he waved his hand at me and we darted forward.
I have to say, I wasn’t aware of just how much ambient light there is in a city, even if all the lights directly near you are turned off. But I noticed its loss acutely in this power outage. A band of thicker clouds had drifted in front of the moon, and at the moment it was pitch-dark out here. I had to squint to make out Robert’s back, and he was only a few feet ahead of me. Thankfully, the dark seemed to sharpen up our hearing considerably. When the heavy breathing came again, from our right this time, Robert and I darted to the left down the intersection. And hit a dead end.
“Push through,” I whispered frantically.
“Can’t. Stone wall behind it.”
Oh, God. Well, at least we’d found a wall. I prayed it wasn’t a wall back into the palazzo. It would be ironic, indeed, if we ended up right back where we’d begun.
Robert leaned over and breathed in my ear, “If there’s a gate at the edge of the property, it has to be to our right and behind us.”
That was no help. We would still have to move back toward our pursuers to get to it. At that moment, I experienced rare regret that I didn’t have my Interpol-issued firearm with me tonight. We crept along the wall of bushes to our right, keeping to the thickest, darkest shadows we could find.
And then with a tremendous crash of noise something—someone—exploded out of the bushes behind us, grabbing Robert around the throat from behind. I watched in horror as the two men struggled. I looked for an opening to dive in and clobber the guy now wrestling with Robert. The attacker rolled to the top, his hands wrapping around Robert’s throat. I made a fist and swung it backhanded as hard as I could at the side of the guy’s head.
It knocked the guy a little silly, at least enough for Robert to rip the guy’s hands off his neck, give a heave and toss the attacker off him. Both men jumped to their feet. And then I saw it. A long, wicked-looking knife slid down out of the attacker’s right sleeve and into his hand.
I screamed then. I’m not usually a screamer, but the shock of seeing a deadly weapon aimed at Robert was tremendous, and my terror over the idea of him being killed overwhelmed me. The attacker’s eyes flickered in my direction, and Robert leaped, wrapping his hands around the wrist holding the knife. So maybe screaming wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
The two men locked arms overhead, the bad guy trying to stab Robert for all he was worth, and Robert holding the blade at bay for all he was worth. It looked just like a fight scene in the movies. Except in the movies, the helpless heroine doesn’t step in and kick the snot out of the bad guy’s nearest knee.
I did.
I’m sorry, but I wasn’t about to fight fair when Robert’s life was at stake. The bad guy’s leg collapsed and he went down to the ground hard. The knife skittered away in the dark and the guy rolled on to his
belly to scramble after it. Robert chopped the guy across the back of the neck with the side of his hand, and the jerk went limp on the ground.
“Let’s go,” Robert bit out.
My attention suddenly expanded beyond the life or death struggle I’d just witnessed to the maze and the pursuers around us. My God, they were practically on top of us now!
We ran then. Like the wind. We ran straight ahead until we hit a wall of green, and Robert shoved straight through it. I threw my arm up in front of my face and charged after him. I had effectively destroyed Elise’s silk shirt by now, but that was the least of my worries. We ran again, and shoved through again, silence be damned.
Shouts erupted all around us. How they hadn’t caught us yet, I couldn’t imagine. Maybe the darkness and the featureless walls of green all around had disoriented them, too. I felt like a fox trapped by a pack of braying hounds with nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. I looked around frantically.
“Jane!” I screamed in a bare whisper. “Help!”
“This way,” Robert bit out, no longer bothering to be quiet.
We ran to our left this time, into a section of the maze I was sure we’d traversed before. The voices were getting closer. Quickly. And they sounded as if they were converging on our position with confidence now. We crashed through a couple more hedgerows, and then, all of a sudden, a stone wall loomed in front of us. A really big one with extremely unfriendly looking spikes at the top. We were trapped!
I felt her before I saw her. A wisp of air moving past where there should be no breeze. And then the faintest shimmer of gray off to the right. About sixty feet away. I opened my mouth to tell Robert, but apparently he saw her, too, for he took off running right for her.
We reached the spot where she’d been and screeched to a halt. Now what? She’d disappeared. I thought I’d seen her drift to our left, which would have taken her into the bushes. Except a stone wall rose on the other side of the shrubs.
Robert threw me a questioning look and I shrugged. His guess was as good as mine as to why Jane had brought us down here. He plunged into the leaves and I stared after him for a second. He had more faith than I to blindly follow Jane like that into a corner where we would be not only trapped but immobilized.
And in that millisecond I learned something startling about myself. I trusted Robert. Completely. Much more so than a figment of my imagination that occasionally took the form of a ghostly woman.
What the heck. I took a deep breath and plunged in after him.
Chapter 16
W e stood there, pressed against the cold wall, the hedges thick in front of us, and didn’t breathe. At least, I didn’t. Only seconds later, three men ran past where we stood, frozen. After they’d disappeared, Robert eased off to his left, slipping between the hedge and the wall. I followed as quietly as I could.
We’d only gone about ten feet when Robert stopped. He turned around so his face was to the wall. And then, very carefully, he crouched down. What in the world was he doing?
Two more men passed our hiding spot, this time moving more slowly. The clouds thinned a bit just then, and I saw the distinctive shape of a pistol in one of the men’s hands through a tiny gap in the leaves. And given the way the other guy was walking with his right forearm extended in front of him, they must both be armed.
I held my breath again. And again, these two guys walked right past us without seeing us. How they weren’t spotting my light colored clothing, I couldn’t fathom. But I wasn’t complaining.
After those two goons passed out of hearing range, I risked turning my head to see what in the world Robert was up to. And was stunned to see him picking a lock. What in heaven’s name was a lock doing set into the middle of a stone wall covered by bushes? I noticed the wall looked slightly different where he stood. I reached out to touch it, and instead of the cold roughness of stone, my fingers brushed against smooth wood. Hallelujah. A forgotten—or at least old and overgrown—gate. We’d found the back door, and not a moment too soon. Or rather, Jane had. God bless friendly ghosts.
We froze while three more pairs of guards passed our position, each team looking more frustrated than the last one. The guards were shouting back and forth, trying to figure out where we’d disappeared to. They’d just started shouting about looking in the bushes themselves when Robert eased to his feet beside me. We started hearing the sounds of leaves rustling as the guards literally shook the bushes.
Robert gave a pull and a blindingly loud, rusty squeak split the night. He yanked the gate then, managing to open it about six inches against the force of the hedge blocking it. As more shouts erupted behind us, I squeezed through that tiny gap without the slightest difficulty. Funny how running for your life makes such things possible. Suddenly, the ability of rats to squeeze through impossibly narrow spaces made sense. I popped out onto a street with Robert right behind me. A regular, boring, city street lined with shops and apartments. It was a total shock to my system after the green purgatory we’d just spent the last half hour racing around in.
Robert yanked the gate shut behind us, then jammed a stick into the lock and broke it off.
And we ran again.
But this time no feet pounded after us. No shouts echoed behind us. No armed men chased us with the intent to arrest or kill us. We’d made it. Sort of.
It was a pretty good bet we were fugitives now. Obviously, someone back at the palazzo had put two and two together and figured out we were the thieves from the Vatican archives. Arrest warrants would no doubt be issued for us, and we’d have a whole lot of explaining to do if and when they caught us.
We must have run a mile before Robert finally slowed down to a walk. I panted, “One thing I can say for hanging out with you. You’re good for my health. All this running will whip me back into shape in no time.”
He grinned at me, and I nearly swooned as his dimples caught the moonlight.
“Come on,” he said. “I see a phone over there.”
“And who are we calling?”
“Your pilots. We need to get out of town. Fast.”
Right. Before the authorities traced us back to Elise’s private jet and put surveillance around it or impounded it.
I made the call. The first thing I noticed when the pilot answered his cell phone was he didn’t sound as if I’d woken him up. It was after midnight, and I’d assumed he’d be asleep in preparation for tomorrow’s flight home. And then he called me “sir.” That’s when I knew something was terribly wrong.
“Ah, hello, sir. Thanks for returning my call,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” I replied. “Is everything okay?”
“Not exactly. The police are here and they just searched the plane.”
Thank goodness I didn’t leave the Black Madonna on the jet!
“Seems the passengers we flew down here yesterday have gotten into some sort of scrape with the law.”
Oh, crap.
The pilot continued, “The authorities are with us now. They’re asking us to leave the country as soon as power is restored, which they think should happen by around noon tomorrow.”
Noon? Wow. This power outage must have completely collapsed the power grid in this area.
The pilot spoke again, startling me mightily with his next question. “Where do you need us to position the jet to pick up our next clients, sir?”
“Uh, just a second.” I covered the mouthpiece of the phone and relayed what the guy had said so far to Robert.
“Tell him Algiers,” Robert said after a moment of thought.
“Algiers?”
“Yeah. There’s a big underground railroad into France from there for illegal aliens. If we miss the jet, we can still catch a freighter and sneak in that way. Besides, the authorities will be looking for us to return to France, not head for Africa.”
I pulled the phone back down to my mouth. “How about Algiers?”
“Right away, sir,” the pilot answered crisply. “I’ll tell the police we’re he
aded back to Paris first thing in the morning.”
“You’re the best,” I replied. “We owe you huge. We’re not criminals, by the way, at least not usually, and the reason we need to get home fast is to save Madame Villecourt’s life.”
“Then by all means, we’ll do our best to help the authorities,” the pilot replied.
I got his meaning.
When I hung up, Robert said, “We’ve got to get off the street. I would suggest we leave Rome right now, but we’ll have a whole lot more camouflage in the morning when everyone’s trying to get to work. Let’s go back to the hotel and get some rest. We’ll head for Algeria tomorrow.”
We walked the rest of the way back to the hotel. Thank goodness Robert had such an unerring sense of direction, because in the winding medieval streets of Trastevere, I was totally turned around. I might have been okay if there had been street lights and landmarks I could reference, but every building looked the same in the heavy night, just another ancient pile of stone squatting beside its neighbor.
The front door of the hotel was locked when we got there, and there was no sign of either the doorman or a night manager. Robert tried our room key, and thankfully, it opened the lock. We passed through the deserted lobby and up the great stone staircase to the second floor—or as Europeans would call it, the first floor.
We tiptoed down the long, dark hallway to our room and slipped inside. I was startled to see a red glow around the edges of the door as Robert opened it. He was cautious, too, spinning into our room fast and low. But no one was there. The glow came from a dying fire in the fireplace that someone had laid several hours ago if the pile of glowing embers was any indication. A basket of firewood stood on the hearth, and Robert laid a couple more logs from it on the fire.
I looked down at my clothes and abruptly realized why nobody had spotted me hiding in the bushes. The skirt and blouse were covered with mud and green stains—juice from the leaves we’d crushed as we slammed through the bushes. My clothes were nearly as dark as the night outside.
