“I intend to haul our man to his car without being seen, but if someone stops us, we’ll pretend he’s drunk. For that, he needs to stink of beer.”
So he didn’t have a black helicopter on speed dial. But she didn’t have a better plan, so she might as well do her part.
By the time she reached the snack bar’s patio and dozen café tables, her doubts about Wulf’s plan had increased. With the Scandinavians departed for the next stop on their itinerary, this was arguably the busiest part of Ostia Antica, and the only place she could find a telephone.
A family eating gelato sat at the only occupied table. The father and the older child, a boy of eight or nine, seemed to be competing to blow paper drinking straw wrappers into an empty cup. The mother scooped a blob of berry pink off the front of her daughter’s sparkly T-shirt. Speaking to them was completely, utterly off-limits to a person with problems that included guns and drug smugglers.
Inside the café, a grandmotherly cashier sat by the register reading a magazine. If Theresa had gone to New Jersey for leave, she’d be shopping with her mother instead of staring into a refrigerator while mentally rehearsing how to ask for the polizia.
Between the crook of her elbow and her chest, she stacked two waters and two brown bottles of Italian beer. If she called the police, Wulf would undoubtedly vanish into the air, leaving her to be questioned while the authorities sorted out the facts.
The U.S. embassy would assist a captain in the United States Army, wouldn’t they?
When she thumped her purchases on the counter, the cashier barely looked up. The magazine cover showed a scantily clad woman and a glaring headline about the ministro della giustizia, the Minister of Justice. If she was arrested, would reporters from magazines like that camp out at her mother’s house? Would they discover her stepfather’s business connections? News scrutiny would ruin her life, and her mother’s. Carl, who, despite how he made a living, loved her, would go down too.
The request for the police died in her throat.
She left the snack bar with the bottles weighing on her forearms like shackles chaining her to Wulf. Holy Mary, Mother of God, she was in. This was how boys started with Carl.
Fifteen minutes later, their odd trinity paused at the edge of the ruins close to the parking lot. Jack-Jim-John lolled unconscious over Wulf’s shoulder, beer splashed on his shirt and shoes, while she carried the empties.
Wulf indicated the recycling bin thirty feet from the exit. “Drop the glass in. Loudly.”
“Now you’re a model citizen?” She rolled her eyes at him across the unconscious man.
“Diversion.” With his free hand, he slipped two buttons on her black-and-white shirt free of their holes. “Keep the ticket guy’s eyes on you while I stick Jack in his car.”
Each stride across the open space was harder than the one before. Her back felt exposed without Wulf next to her, and she expected to hear a shout or a siren, but she kept walking. At the kiosk, the ricochet of glass dropping into the metal cans jangled her nerves, but it caught the stare of the park attendant.
Keep his attention. Bending, she fiddled with her boot zipper and stuck her ass in the air in the pose that had once riveted Wulf’s team at movie night. This guy wasn’t any more stalwart. When she stood, she braced one hand on the bin, took her boot off and shook it upside-down as if it had a rock in it. The guy leaned over his desk, so she shook the boot and everything else that would jiggle right at him.
Wulf was halfway across the lot heading for the black Fiat. She had to fill more time. Sliding her foot into the boot, she lifted her water to her mouth and let liquid drip onto her shirt. After plucking the cotton away from her chest, she blotted an imaginary wet spot over her nipple.
Come on, Wulf, I’m running low on ideas.
He slammed the Fiat’s trunk closed and waved an all clear.
By the time she reached the car, both phones rested in the gravel next to the front tire.
“What are you doing?” She gripped the side-view mirror to keep from scrabbling for her plastic salvation.
“You copied the call history, so I’m destroying the hardware.” He pried her hands loose and brought them to his face, forcing her to look at him instead of the phones. “Even crap disposables can have internal GPS, and they triangulate location from towers.”
“We could turn it off.”
“Some can be turned on remotely by the service provider. I’m done taking chances.” He started the car and forced her to step away to avoid being bumped by the open driver’s door as he rolled forward and back. The phones became bits of black plastic and broken electronics. Finished, he flicked pieces of the SIM cards into the weeds.
“Come on.” He circled to the passenger side and held open the door. “We’re out of here.”
Minutes ago he’d tipped an unconscious prisoner into the trunk of a car they were about to steal, and now he was holding the door for her. It was absurd. But not funny.
“Theresa.”
She had a credit card and cash. A road arrow next to the parking lot pointed to a train station.
He read her mind. “I can’t guarantee you’ll be safe if you walk away. That’s all I want right now—to get rid of this guy and get you somewhere safe. Please let me.”
Carl always wanted to keep her mother safe. That’s what her childhood had been about. And her mother—every time they video-chatted, her mother always ended with stay safe. Usually it annoyed her, but right now it sounded pretty damn good.
She slipped into the passenger seat.
As Wulf started the car, she managed a steady voice despite the scratch in her throat. “Where are we going?”
“We’re taking our passenger to a cleaner.”
She doubted he meant a place that did shirts.
* * *
Shortly after they left the express highway that circled Rome, their prisoner started thumping the rear seat, so Wulf turned up the radio volume. The front-seat conversation, already limited, fizzled while Theresa sipped water and considered where exactly she should have walked away to avoid ending up in a stolen car with a drug smuggler stowed in the trunk.
The neighborhood outside was the type where dense trees clustered behind brick walls and gatehouses fortified the entrances to unseen homes. She broke the silence with a question she’d chewed over for miles. “What if there’s a GPS hidden on this car too?”
“It’s a risk.” Wulf turned between two stone lions and rolled down the car window to type on a security pad. “Most people aren’t paranoid enough to track themselves.”
The iron gates swung open. Two lines of poplars led to a white stucco mansion. The grand effect of a three-tiered fountain, complete with Neptune and cavorting naiads, inside the circular drive was lessened by a lack of water. The place felt vacant. “Where are we?”
Instead of answering, Wulf followed a spur of the driveway to a garage tucked behind the house. Its keypad required a palm-print verification to activate a steel roll-up door.
“Do you know these people? Is this some Special Operations safe house?” She stood in the garage bay and slammed the car door.
“Yes to the first, no to the second.” He left the prisoner’s identifications, the gun and the list of numbers on a shelf. “In about an hour, a man should arrive who’ll take care of Jack for us and trace the phone records. You—we—need to be gone.”
“That’s it?” She ducked under the descending garage door. “We’re leaving?”
“Yep.” He double-timed up the driveway.
“Where are we going?” Her frustration rose as she followed. She wanted many things, starting with real answers and proceeding directly to a shower, clean clothes and a meal. Bashing her head against his solid wall of super secret nonanswers was not on the list.
“Planning that now.”
>
He truly didn’t have a backup plan? His squared shoulders exuded authority she wanted to rely upon, but he was apparently as clueless as she was. Well, shit.
“We can’t talk here. You wouldn’t enjoy meeting the owner.” He had to use a third security system to open a person-size exit door concealed among the dense laurels.
“Then I’m going to my hotel.” Her room had pressed sheets and hot water, and the management left biscotti and fruit on a side table near the elevator.
“Negative.” Without pause, he strode downhill, away from the walled compound.
“Since you knocked this morning, I’ve been chased, stalked, bashed around and scared.” She trotted to stay up with him. The direction seemed likely to lead toward the Tiber River and thus to familiar scenery. “I’m filthy and I want a nap. Ergo, my hotel.”
“Where do you think they tagged my motorcycle?” Like he was making a double-tap execution, he fired the question at her and then answered it. “Your hotel.”
She stopped dead. She hadn’t connected the dots until he said it.
“Down!” Hands out, Wulf sprang and shoved her sideways to the ground.
Her hip and shoulder slammed the pavement at the base of a stucco wall. Wincing, she blinked her eyes clear. A white sedan wove along the curb with Wulf hanging from the passenger door, both his arms thrust into the open window while he grappled with a man inside.
Pop-pop. The passenger held a gun fitted with a long black cylinder that she belatedly recognized as a silencer. And he’d fired. At them.
Wulf smashed the man’s forearm against the window frame, bending it backward from a point on the lower arm that no ulna bone could withstand. Three things happened in an instant, but she saw each one flicker separately, as if she were channel surfing. The pistol fell in the road. The man screamed, high and screechy like a zoo peacock, as his arm flopped at an angle that equaled compound fracture. The driver floored the gas.
As the car hurtled forward, Wulf released the man’s broken arm and dropped off the vehicle, rolling harmlessly as the sedan squealed around a corner.
She reached her feet a second after Wulf found his. Perhaps ninety seconds had passed since she’d asked about going to her hotel. Silence wrapped around them.
“You said—” Her chest heaved as she struggled to control her breathing and repress a scream. “You said people don’t track their own cars.”
“To quote a former boss, I misunderestimated.” Handling the abandoned pistol with his shirttail, he tossed it over a wall into dense shrubs, then towed her across the street. Ahead, several businesses and cafés lined an intersection.
As she moved faster than a walk, but not at a flat-out run, her senses sharpened. Her hearing became especially acute, until even a vehicle honking blocks away caused her to jump.
“Lots of cars in Rome,” Wulf muttered. “Don’t panic.”
“I’m not.” She slowed to match his pace as they reached the first shop. “I’m not panicked.” No, that would be calmer than the churning stomach and puppet-on-a-string jerkiness she felt in her shoulders and arms. She’d welcome mere panic.
Up the block, two men stared into a convenience store’s plate-glass window.
“Italians don’t wear loose jeans.” Wulf pulled her through the closest entrance and into a men’s clothing store. The middle-aged proprietor stared while Wulf spoke in rapid Italian.
As they followed the man’s gesture toward the rear, she glimpsed herself in a wall mirror. Her jaunty shirt had come untied, her hair had morphed from flowing to unkempt and her pants had turned splotchy with whitish-gray dust.
“We’re disappearing. Somewhere no one will follow.” Wulf dropped a ten-euro bill on a shelf next to the exit and grabbed a broom and a can of cleaning spray. In an alley too narrow for American garbage trucks, he stopped over a manhole cover, shoved the broom handle into an opening on the edge of the iron circle and pushed on the lever.
Understanding dawned, then disbelief. “A sewer?”
* * *
Wulf wondered exactly what would cause Theresa to stop arguing. Clearly he wasn’t going to find out today. “Yes.” Thor’s hammer, this drain needed to open right now, but in the last sixty years it had rusted shut tighter than his brother’s smile. “Find something. Help me.”
He heard scrabbling by a garbage bin, and within seconds she returned and shoved a second piece of wood, tapered as if it had been a chair leg, into another notch on the cover’s rim. Force and levers. Simple physics.
Veins popped in his forearms as they raised the iron circle an inch. He couldn’t break his promise to keep Theresa safe. His tongue pushed the back of his teeth, pushed with the rest of him, until he tasted blood.
With a noise like an armored vehicle scraping cement bollards, the lid popped free and skittered half off the hole, leaving him on his hands and knees next to a sickle-shaped opening.
“Hey!” a man shouted from the end of the alley. “I found them!” He spoke in English.
Uninvited guests had arrived for this shit barbecue.
Wulf jammed Theresa’s legs through the opening, trying to be more gentle than he was when he shoved a door ram home during an entry. But it was the same concept: Get in. Fast.
“Aiiyy—” She flailed, torso sliding after her legs, but he caught her arm and slowed her in time to keep her chin from bouncing on the edge of the hole. Her eyes, so wide with fear he could see the full circle of white, held on to him although the rest of her had sunk into the dark.
There was no bang, merely a thup, as a round hit and sent stone chips to shred his cheek and neck. These men also had suppressors.
“Now.” He loosened his grip and let her elbow, her wrist and finally her hand slip through his fingers, but he reminded himself that she wasn’t gone. She was safer.
Another round hit the cobblestones near his body, driving him headfirst into the sewer without time to be sure she’d stumbled clear.
“Are you okay?” She crouched between him and the crescent of light above, and one hand stroked his cheek. The illumination gilded her nose and cheeks with a halo as ethereal as a painted Madonna. “Wulf?”
“I’m...” The landing had knocked the wind out of him. Moving was a bitch, as if he’d dislocated his left shoulder, but he hadn’t crashed on top of her. “Good to go.” He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had cared about his injuries. Theresa’s fuss beat Cruz’s all to hell, and he wanted to let her coddle him, but they had to put distance between them and the men above. “I’ll take rear. Head downstream, left hand on the wall.”
He heard men above, indistinct but excited. “Don’t dawdle.”
“No chance of that.” Judging by the splashing, she was already moving.
“Cover your ears.” He reached under his jacket.
The face that popped into the opening above his head disintegrated with a direct round from his Mark 23. A hollow point at ten feet does that. After seeing their buddy pulped, it’d be a while before someone else dropped in, so he followed Theresa.
About seven feet high, the walls were close enough to touch without pulling his elbows off his sides and as solid as everything else the Roman Empire had built. While counting paces, he tried to recall subterranean diagrams of the neighborhood. Even though it was near his brother’s house, he hadn’t worked the tunnels in this area much after the fascists seized Ivar’s mansion. His brother had expected to lose their Italian properties once he committed to structuring sales of England’s war bonds, so the return of the house and castle in 1946 had been a bonus. Ivar had always possessed a knack for turning a profit while doing the right thing.
Wulf’s talent was fighting.
“Is it okay to talk?” Theresa’s question interrupted his memories.
“Sure. What’s the weather forecast up in front?”
“Partly damp with a chance of rats.”
Listening to her voice was like having a light even in the dark.
“So why doesn’t it stink down here?”
“This is a storm sewer, not a sanitary one.” The tunnel smelled no worse than a leaky basement—a fresh Christmas tree compared to Fort Bragg’s portable toilets in July.
“Then I’m glad it’s been dry.”
So was he. The puddles of water accumulated in the bottom were far better than the knee-deep torrents of the winter of 1942, when he’d lost two Allied agents to pneumonia.
Under another manhole, pencils of light poked through ventilation spots. Theresa paused, looking up. “How do we get out?”
Seeing her scan the dark for him, he moved into another thread of light, within arm’s reach. “With proper tools, it’s not hard to find a cover in a quiet alley or courtyard, hook into a rim hole and crank.”
“Tools?” Her voice rose.
“That’s our problem. Most lids are too high to exert sufficient force pushing from below with our bare hands, even if they weren’t rusted shut. There are places where street regrading has exposed the system.” Not that he knew if they’d been covered in the last seventy years. “Or we could revisit the Mouth of Truth. It might even bite you now.”
“What?” Her question echoed off the stones.
“The side sewers eventually connect to the main sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which empties into the Tiber River near Ponte Palatino and the Mouth.”
“Wonderful.” Her laugh rose and fractured as it bounced off the walls and doubled to echo in his ears. “Exactly what I was hoping for. A do-over.”
“A do-over?” He wrapped his arms around her and realized her thin shirt was useless in the damp. Like shivering, laughter was one of the body’s ways to generate heat. She needed more, so he shrugged out of his leather jacket and maneuvered her into the sleeves. “You’re not having fun?”
She snuggled into his coat with a sound that reminded him of guys breathing steam off coffee post-night patrol, and her laughter subsided into full-body hiccups. That type hurt like hell.
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