Again she turned and scrambled towards the gun, but Tom, still coughing and trying to get his breath just managed to grab one of her ankles and drag her back, her leg thrashing wildly until she was able to kick herself free. Struggling to her feet, she reached down and grabbed one of the dislocated struts from the coffee table and then lunged at him with it, her face contorted with rage. Tom sidestepped the first downward swipe aimed at his head, but the second wild swing struck him with a painful thump at the top of his right arm, momentarily numbing it. Her attack provided him with an opening, however, because with his other hand he reached out and grabbed the end of the metal rod, and then yanked it sideways. The woman went with it, tripping over a small pile of books and collapsing on to her knees. By the time she was on her feet, the gun was in Tom’s hands and aimed at her stomach.
‘Trovisi giù,’ he wheezed. Her chest heaving, she gave him a long, hateful look and then lay face down on the floor as he’d ordered. Tom quickly patted her down, finding her wallet in her jeans pocket.
‘Siedasi là,’ he ordered as he opened it, waving the gun at a chair. Her eyes burning, she pulled herself to her feet, righted the chair he had indicated, and then sat in it.
‘Siete un poliziotto?’ he asked in surprise, the sight of her ID made him feel a little less embarrassed about his sore chin and throbbing arm. Tall and obviously strong, she was wearing jeans, a tight brown leather jacket and red ballet-style pumps. She was also very striking, with olive skin, a jet-black bob that was cut in a square fringe around her face and mismatched blue and brown eyes embedded within a smoky grey eye shadow. There was something odd about her appearance, though. Something that Tom couldn’t quite put his finger on yet, that didn’t quite fit.
‘Congratulations,’ she replied. ‘You’ve managed to assault a police officer and trespass on a crime scene before most people have got out of bed.’
‘Where did you learn English?’ Tom’s Italian was good, but her English, while slightly accented, was almost faultless.
She ignored him. ‘Put the gun down.’
‘You tell me what you’re doing here and I’ll think about it,’ he offered unsmilingly.
‘Who are you working for? Gallo?’ she shot back, ignoring his question.
‘Who’s Gallo?’
‘He didn’t send you?’ There was a hint of hope as well as disbelief in her voice.
‘Nobody sent me,’ he said. ‘I work for myself. I’m looking for Cavalli.’
A pause.
‘Cavalli’s dead.’
‘Shit,’ Tom swore, pinching the top of his nose and shutting his eyes as he gave a long, weary sigh. Cavalli had been his main hope of working his way back up the Delian League to whoever had ordered the hit. ‘How?’
She shook her head, eyeing him blankly, refusing to be drawn.
‘What does it matter, if he’s dead?’ Tom insisted.
Another pause as she considered this, before answering with a shrug.
‘He was murdered. Four days ago. Why?’
‘I wanted to talk to him.’
‘About what?’
‘This for a start-’ Tom held up the photocopied page showing the sketch of the symbol of the two snakes wrapped around a clenched fist. ‘I hoped he might…’
‘Where did you get that?’ she gasped.
‘You’ve seen it before?’
‘C-Cavalli,’ she stammered. ‘They found a lead disc in his pocket, that was engraved on it!’
‘Do you know what it means?’ Tom pressed, hoping that her obvious surprise might cause her to momentarily lower her guard to his advantage. But she quickly regained her composure, again glaring at him defiantly.
‘It means that you’ve got about five minutes to get out of here before someone comes looking for me.’
Tom studied her face for a few moments. She was bluffing.
‘Why wait?’ he said, offering her his phone. ‘Call it in.’
She gazed at the handset for a few moments, then lifted her eyes to his.
‘What are you doing?’
Tom smiled.
‘No one even knows you’re here, do they?’
She ignored his question, although the momentary flicker of indecision across her otherwise resolute face effectively answered it for him.
‘Just let me go,’ she repeated. ‘You’re in enough shit as it is.’
Tom went to reply and then paused, having suddenly realised what it was about her appearance that had been troubling him earlier. It was her hair, or rather the ragged way it had been cut, especially around the back, which seemed at odds with the rest of her. She’d clearly cut it herself. Recently. Probably dyed it too, given its unnaturally deep lustre.
‘Where did you put the bottles?’ he asked.
‘What?’ She shook her head, as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard him properly.
‘The empty dye bottles and the hair you cut off. Did you lose them somewhere safe? Because if you didn’t and whoever’s looking for you finds them, it won’t take them much to figure out what you look like now.’
Allegra gave him a long, curious look.
‘Who are you?’
‘Someone who can help,’ Tom said with a tight smile. ‘Because right now, I’m guessing you’re in a lot more shit than me.’
Leaning forward, he offered the gun to her, handle first.
THIRTY-TWO
Headquarters of the Guarda di Finanza, Viale XXI Aprile, Rome 19th March-7.22 a.m.
‘Colonel? We’ve got her.’
‘About time!’ Gallo grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair, pausing in front of the mirror to do up the silver buttons and centre his tie. ‘Her phone?’
‘She switched it on about ten minutes ago,’ Salvatore nodded, still standing in the corridor and leaning into the office.
‘How long for?’
‘Long enough. The signal’s been triangulated to a street in Travestere.’
‘Cavalli’s house?’ Gallo snapped, looking up into the mirror to seek out Salvatore’s eyes over his left shoulder.
‘Could be.’
Salvatore flinched and then relaxed into an uneasy smile as Gallo turned and raised his hand and gave him a sharp clap on the back.
‘Well done.’
Fixing his peaked cap on his head, he strode towards the lift. Twenty seconds later they stepped outside and walked outside towards two waiting cars. They climbed in, but just as Gallo was about to turn the key in the ignition, Salvatore’s phone rang. Gallo paused, glancing across questioningly as he took the call.
‘We know where she stayed last night,’ Salvatore explained, still listening, but with his hand shielding the microphone.
‘A hotel?’ Gallo guessed.
‘Out near the airport. The manager saw her picture this morning and called it in.’
‘They ran the story?’
Salvatore reached across to the back seat and handed Gallo a copy of that morning’s La Repubblica. Allegra ’s face dominated the front page under a single shouted headline:
Killer cop on the run.
‘Apparently she checked in late last night and paid in cash. I guess we got lucky.’
‘Funny how much luckier you get when you load the dice,’ Gallo growled as he scanned through the article. He wouldn’t normally have leaked the details of a case, but he’d seen enough of Allegra to realise that, for all her inexperience, she was smart. And in a city of 2.7 million people, that was more than enough to hide and stay hidden. The more people who knew what she looked like, the better. As long as he found her first.
Salvatore ended his call. Gallo turned the key.
‘Who else is running it?’
‘Everyone.’
‘What about the old man?’
‘Professor Eco?’
‘Is that what he calls himself?’ Gallo shrugged as he checked his mirrors and swung out, tyres shrieking.
‘According to him, she took off before telling him anything.’
; ‘I want him watched anyway,’ Gallo insisted. ‘Just in case she tries to contact him again.’
‘She’s probably armed now, by the way. Eco had a gun. Illegal. Says he can’t find it any more.’
‘Even better.’ Gallo gave a satisfied nod. ‘Gives us an excuse to go in heavy.’
Smiling, he punched the siren on.
THIRTY-THREE
Vicolo de Panieri, Travestere, Rome 19th March-7.27 a.m.
Allegra wasn’t about to take any chances. Snatching the gun from Tom’s grasp, she immediately turned it back on him. Unflustered, he settled into his chair.
‘Who are you running from?’ he asked.
The easy thing, the smart thing, she knew, would be to walk away right there and then. She had enough of her own problems already, without getting swept up into his.
But it wasn’t that simple. For a start, it was hard to ignore that, whoever this man was and whatever dark secret had drawn him to this place, it seemed to involve Cavalli and the mysterious symbol that had been linked to three different corpses. What’s more, he’d just placed his fate in her hands by handing her the gun. It was, she knew, a rather unsubtle attempt to win her trust. But it was a powerful gesture all the same, and one that had, if nothing else, earned him the right to be heard.
‘How can you help me?’ she demanded, answering his question with one of her own.
There was a pause, and she guessed from the slight twitch of his left eye that he was debating how much he should tell her.
‘Thirty-six hours ago a friend of mine was murdered,’ he said eventually. ‘Shot by a sniper in a casino in Vegas. I think they were killed because they were closing in on someone.’
‘“Closing in”? What was he, a cop?’ Allegra guessed with a surprised frown. This guy didn’t look or feel like any policeman she’d ever met.
‘She was FBI,’ he corrected her. ‘Special Agent Jennifer Browne. Cavalli was fingered by a man she arrested in New York. A dealer for a tombaroli smuggling ring. She found a drawing of the symbol I showed you in his trash. I’ve got the case file, if you want to see it,’ he offered, leaning forward to reach into his bag.
‘Wait,’ she said sharply. ‘Kick it over here.’
With a shrug, he placed his bag on the floor and slid it towards her with his foot. Keeping her eyes fixed on him, she felt inside it, her fingers eventually closing around a thick file that she pulled on to her lap. Seeing the FBI crest, she shot him a questioning, almost concerned look.
‘Don’t tell me you’re FBI too?’
‘No,’ he admitted.
‘Then where did you get this?’
A pause.
‘I borrowed it.’
‘You borrowed it?’ She gave him a disbelieving smile. ‘From the FBI?’
‘When one agent gets killed, another one gets blamed,’ he said, an impatient edge to his voice for the first time. ‘Everyone was too busy covering their own ass to worry about finding Jennifer’s killer. I did what I had to do.’
‘And came here? Why? What were you hoping to find?’
‘I don’t know. Something that might tell me why Jennifer was murdered, or what this symbol means, or who the Delian League is.’
‘The Delian League?’ she shot back. ‘What do you know about them?’
‘Not as much as you, by the sound of things,’ he replied with a curious frown.
‘I just know what it used to be,’ she said, his story so far and the reassuring weight of the gun in her hand convincing her she wasn’t risking much by sharing a little more of what she knew.
‘What do you mean, “used to be”?’
‘There was an association of city states in Ancient Greece. A military alliance, formed to protect themselves from the Spartans,’ she explained. ‘The members used to throw lead into the sea when they joined, to symbolise that their friendship would last until it floated back to the surface.’
‘Lead. Like the engraved disc you found on Cavalli?’
‘Not just on Cavalli,’ she admitted, trying not to think of Ricci’s sagging skin and Argento’s tortured smile. ‘There have been two other murders. The discs were found with them too.’
‘Did Cavalli know them?’
‘I doubt it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Cavalli was an attorney based in Melfi. Adriano Ricci was an enforcer for the De Luca crime family. While Giulio Argento worked for the Banco Rosalia, a subsidiary of the Vatican bank. A priest would have more in common with a prostitute than those three with each other.’
‘But the same killer, right?’
Allegra’s eyes snapped to the door before she could answer, the sound of approaching sirens lifting her to her feet.
‘You must have been followed,’ Tom glared at her accusingly.
She ignored him, instead picking up a chair and swinging it hard against one of the sliding glass doors. It fractured on the third blow, the safety glass falling out in a single, crazed sheet. They leapt through the frame as they heard three, maybe four cars roar up the street outside.
‘Here-’
Tom cradled his hands and gave Allegra a boost, then reached up so she could help haul him up on to the garden wall beside her.
‘You’ll slow me down,’ she said with a firm shake of her head.
‘You need me,’ Tom insisted.
‘I’ve done okay so far.’
‘Really? Then how do you explain that?’ Tom glanced towards the muffled sound of the police banging on the front door.
‘They got lucky,’ she said with a shrug, readying herself to jump down.
‘You mean they got smart. Let me guess. You turned your phone on just before you got here, right?’
‘How did you know…?’ she breathed, Tom’s question pulling her back from the edge. She had briefly switched it on. Just long enough to see if Aurelio had left her a message. Something, anything, that might explain what she had overheard. But all there had been was a series of increasingly frantic messages from her boss to turn herself in.
‘It only takes a few seconds to triangulate a phone signal. You led them straight here.’
She took a deep breath, a small and increasingly insistent voice at the back of her head fighting her instinct to just jump down.
‘Who are you?’
‘Someone who knows what it’s like to be on the run,’ he shot back. ‘Someone who knows what it takes, keep running fast enough to stay alive.’
Sighing heavily, she reached down, her hand clutching on to his.
THIRTY-FOUR
Verbier, Switzerland 19th March-7.31 a.m.
It had snowed last week-recently enough for the village’s blandly functional concrete heart to still be benefiting from its decorative touch, long enough ago for the briefly pristine white streets to have been turned into a dirty river of slush and mud-stained embankments.
Faulks had never seen the point of skiing, never understood the attraction of clamping his feet into boots that in another age would have likely been in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, and then hurling himself off a mountain on two narrow planks just to only to get to the bottom so that he could have to queue and pay for the privilege of repeating the whole infernal experience again. And again.
Glancing up from his phone as they drove past, he almost felt sorry for them, a few early starters clomping noisily down the street trying not to break their necks on the ice, skis balancing precariously on their shoulder, their edges sawing down to the bone. It seemed a heavy price to pay to ensure you could hold your own at the school gates with the other parents or be able to join in with the dinner party circuit chit chat.
Still, if there was one thing he’d learnt over the years it was that there was no limit to people’s ingenuity when it came to devising irrational ways to spend their money. And the richer they were, the more irrational and ingenious they seemed to become. It was a status symbol. A badge of honour. In fact, compared to some things he’d witnessed over the years, skiing was almost sane.
&nbs
p; Chalet Septième Ciel was perched in an isolated spot high above the village, facing westward and with a breathtaking view over the valley below. Converted from an old school, its name meant Seventh Heaven; strangely inappropriate, given that most of its occupants, Faulks was fairly sure, were fated for a far warmer destination when their time came. Maybe that was why they chose here, Faulks mused. The prospect of an eternity roasting in the fires of Hell was perhaps all the incentive they needed to pay the extortionate fees this place charged. Anything to spend their final days somewhere cold.
Faulks’s silver 1963 Bentley S3 Continental pulled up and Logan got out to open his door for him. A former paratrooper from the outskirts of Glasgow, he’d done two tours in Afghanistan before realising that he could make more in a year as a private bodyguard than ten being shot at for Queen and country. Wearing a suit and his regimental tie, he had straw-coloured hair and a wide, round face, his nose crooked and part of one earlobe missing. His jaw was permanently clenched, as if he was chewing stones.
A female voice answered the intercom.
‘I’m here to see Avner Klein,’ Faulks announced in French.
The door buzzed open and he stepped inside, a dark-haired nurse in a white uniform rushing forward to greet him, a stern expression on her face.
‘Visiting hours aren’t until nine,’ she informed him icily.
‘I know, but I’ve just flown in from Los Angeles,’ he explained apologetically. ‘And I have to be back in Geneva mid morning. I knew that if I didn’t at least try to see him now…’
‘I understand,’ she relented, her face softening as she placed a comforting hand on his sleeve. ‘In this case…well, time is short. I’m sure he’ll see you. He’s not been sleeping well recently. Follow me.’
She led him downstairs and down a long, dark corridor, Faulks marking every third step with the sharp clip of his umbrella against the wooden floor. Reaching the last door she knocked gently. From the other side came a faint call that seemed barely human to Faulks, but which the nurse clearly took as permission to enter, nodding at him to go in.
The Geneva Deception Page 14
