The professor cleared his throat.
‘We’re … dumbfounded. When I say “we”, I mean the staff here at Niguarda. We don’t understand what has happened to Signor Di Luca.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Normally we don’t mind appearing all-knowing … far from it. But the truth is that we’re totally at a loss. Almost.’
‘Almost?’ Sabrina said, with a glimmer of hope snatched from the darkness.
‘Insofar as there are many causes of a coma which we can eliminate fairly easily: Signor Di Luca didn’t suffer a stroke, his brain hasn’t been subjected to trauma or violence, the MR scan of his brain was completely normal.’
The professor’s voice ebbed out.
‘Drugs?’ Sabrina asked. ‘Toxins?’
‘We haven’t had any definitive results back yet,’ he said, then added quickly, ‘That doesn’t mean that Signor Di Luca’s mind hasn’t been contaminated with some exotic substance. In fact, I believe it has. But we have yet to identify what it is.’
‘Did you notice his fingertips?’ she asked. ‘I understand that a type of glass dust was found in the car.’
‘Yes, fascinating, isn’t it? The fingertips were the entry point for what has now put him out of the running. Whatever it is.’
Sabrina and Giulio Forlani looked at him.
‘Fascinating?’ Forlani muttered, and Sabrina had a vision of the aristocratic professor dangling, half choked, from the physicist’s grip.
The professor held up his long hands.
‘We’ll have to wait and see, dottoressa.’
Behind them Massimiliano Di Luca smiled and said in a loud and clear voice, ‘Corfu, Negroponte, Chania, Adrianopolis, Cyprus.’
Then he fell silent.
The professor leaned over the patient.
‘He’s unconscious,’ he said. ‘What did the words mean, signorina?’
‘He’s a descendant of one of the Doges of Venice, professore,’ Giulio Forlani explained. ‘In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries their colonies included Corfu, Cyprus and Chania on Crete. He’s proud of his family.’
He looked at Sabrina.
‘He sounded happy when he said it, didn’t he?’
‘Definitely,’ she agreed.
While the professor, visibly excited, carried out his neurological examinations – pulling up eyelids, shining light at pupils, testing reflexes and muscle strength – Giulio Forlani stood there like an abandoned child on a train platform. Sabrina again picked up a yellow padded envelope which have been handed to her by one of the first Carabinieri officers on the scene. The envelope had been found on the passenger seat of the Bentley next to the unfortunate driver, and someone had written her name in capital letters on it with an ordinary ballpoint pen.
The officer had assured her that the mobile telephone found inside the envelope was completely harmless: there was no trace of the strange glass dust on the surface of the mobile, nor did it contain an explosive charge. It was a completely ordinary pre-paid mobile telephone of a well-known brand. The battery was fully charged and there were no stored numbers in its memory. Nor were there any fingerprints on it.
‘How is his driver, Alberto?’ she asked the professor.
‘The same. Except he hasn’t said anything at all.’
With a feeling of unreality, Sabrina heard Massimiliano Di Luca sing ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. With his eyes closed and still unconscious. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Noël Coward, sporting a cigarette in an elegant holder and wearing a dinner jacket, had entered the ward and started to mix Martinis.
‘I don’t think I can stay any longer,’ Giulio Forlani said.
‘I agree. Let’s go,’ Sabrina said.
The professor didn’t hear them. He was making a telephone call requesting microphones and tape recorders, trembling like a radio astronomer who has just received a clear Morse code message from Saturn.
Silently they walked along numerous long hospital corridors, down cool stairwells, until they reached the large courtyard. They found a bench, took a seat and watched some patients who were shuffling around. Most of them were alone, a few were with family or friends.
‘Now what?’ Forlani asked.
Sabrina kept turning over the envelope with the mobile. Then she put it down on the bench and had a look around.
The hospital’s main entrance on Via Carlo Moreschi would be besieged by the press, so Sabrina decided their best bet would be one of the side exits to Piazza dell’Ospedale Maggiore.
‘I’ve got to get you to Naples,’ she said. ‘I should have done that a long time ago.’
‘You could always call the police,’ he suggested.
‘I’ve tried that. They’re not taking my calls,’ she said.
She checked the mobile again: no messages.
The tall, dark figure slumped a little more.
Or maybe they could just stay on this bench, she thought.
‘I think we need to find a hotel room,’ she said and got up.
The Camorra picked them up five minutes later.
CHAPTER 43
Milan – Ospedale Maggiore, Niguarda Ca’ Granda
The abduction was so professionally executed that their attackers could have carried it out in their sleep – it was essentially utterly predictable, she thought while it happened. Because she totally deserved it; due to exhaustion or inexperience, she had forgotten the first rule of her profession, which her poor father, who was probably spinning in his grave, had drilled into her: ‘Never allow yourself to be reduced to a pawn in your opponent’s game, Sabrina. If you do that, you will lose everything: your advantage, your freedom and possibly your life.’
That was exactly what she had allowed to happen by fixating on the damned mobile that had been left for her. She had walked right into the trap, had convinced herself that the next move would come from the mobile. She had grown lazy and dropped her guard while she waited for instructions, as if she would magically be preserved from evil until the mobile rang. Which, of course, it never did.
They had walked past the lowest hospital buildings, which were in the east, passed a small rotunda to the left, continued past casualty and the ambulance stations and were taking a quiet little short cut, with trees and bushes on one side and the car park to the other. Sabrina congratulated herself on avoiding the throng of photographers, broadcasting vans and journalists in front of the main entrance. In the car park there was a hospital transport van, a kind of converted minibus, and a young ambulance driver was busy lowering the steel lift at the rear. Another ambulance driver was waiting with a young woman in a wheelchair.
He smiled to Sabrina and Giulio Forlani, who were level with the open side doors of the minibus, when the woman in the wheelchair looked up.
She was beautiful, dark-haired, and had an ambulance blanket over her legs. Sabrina remembered her eyes from somewhere, but couldn’t place them. The next few seconds were protracted, elongated and shimmering like a desert road because it wasn’t the woman’s eyes or features that Sabrina recognized – it was her character: her eyes were attentive, wide open, unblinking and ready. They were the stuff of nightmares. They were the eyes she had been searching for in her subconscious for the last eighteen months; the ones she had seen in that long second before the white flash from the bomb over Federico Renda’s car when L’Artista struck. The brake lights of the police motorbike, the face behind the visor of the helmet. Her memory had been wrong: she recalled the eyes as black, dead, devoid of expression – and not at all like this woman’s dark brown eyes, beautiful … animated.
The realization made her reach out for Giulio Forlani with her left arm while her right hand went for the Walther in her shoulder holster. As usual the physicist sensed nothing, lost in a world of his own.
Long arms from the inside of the minibus reached out for her and she left the earth and was lifted into the darkness.
‘Giulio …’
A paralysing white pain exploded in the back of her head as one of her abduc
tors struck her with a rubber cosh. The sound of the blow had a surreal clarity: she heard teeth gnash together, heard her skin and scalp give, and the bones of her skull groan. All strength and coordination left her body, she landed on the floor of the vehicle and looked out at Giulio Forlani’s face, which turned to the doorway in slow motion, his mouth beginning to open, when the young woman, in a long, fluid motion, flung aside the blanket and leapt to her feet holding an electric stun gun. The lunge for the physicist’s neck was uniquely graceful and effectively executed. There was a brief blue spark from somewhere under his left ear, and the huge man collapsed – slowly, surprised and with a strangely mournful expression – in mid-step.
That was all she saw.
A blackout-fabric hood was pulled over her head, she was kicked into a corner of the minibus, and her hands were tied in front of her body with a cable tie that dug deep into the skin and cut off the blood supply to her hands. She felt the Walther being removed from the shoulder holster.
No one spoke a word.
The blood trickled from the back of her head under the hood, down inside the collar of her anorak, and spread, with a not entirely unpleasant warmth, to her shoulders.
There was heavy breathing from the fake ambulance men and Sabrina felt the warmth and the weight of Forlani’s body when they dragged him into the vehicle. The side door was rolled shut with a bang and the minibus started. Behind her she could hear the hum of the electric motors as the lift was raised and slotted into place at the back of the minibus.
It would have been so easy to surrender to this total defeat, to the fear and the torrent of self-reproach – to hope for a long period of unconsciousness and a quick end to it all – but she couldn’t. She fought her nausea with a series of deep breaths, scared of choking on her own vomit if she gave in, while those of her senses which were still working explored the inside of the minibus.
There was a man close to her. Probably on the rear seat to the left, facing backwards to the platform and the rails to which wheelchairs could be attached and from which frail patients could be monitored. Garlic on the man’s breath. Tiny sounds from clothes against clothes, clothes against the vinyl seat covering, boots against the floor. In front of the man there had to be two unoccupied double seats and then the driver’s seat.
Where were L’Artista and the other ambulance driver? Not inside the bus. She felt sure of that. Desperately she flicked through her last visual impressions before she was dragged into the vehicle and found a long, dark blue European car with tinted windows parked roughly fifty metres away.
‘Giulio,’ she muttered, slowly turning on to her back.
‘Shut up,’ said the man in front of her without sounding especially angry.
His voice gave her some idea of his location. Very close.
‘Are you awake?’ she asked and got a whack across her forehead with the rubber cosh. Garlic breath close up. The man had leaned forwards.
She could hear Forlani breathe. Her hands were numb and thick, and she wondered how long she had before they became completely useless. Her belly was exposed to her midriff and she knew that the man on the back seat had a clear view of her stomach, her hip bones and her white knickers. The tip of the rubber cosh slid slowly across her skin; from her midriff, left around her belly button, and down to the zip of the low-cut jeans.
Sabrina knew that she had a very nice stomach.
Now.
Or never?
Now.
‘Giulio?’
She turned her head again towards the paralysed physicist.
‘Shut your mouth,’ the man said. This time clearly excited. Either from her skin, his omnipotence or her disobedience.
Garlic breath and a squeaking from the seat as the man’s weight shifted from his backside to the soles of his feet. He was now leaning forwards.
While contemplating a suitable punishment, she assumed.
Sabrina pulled her knees up to her face and the man began to warn her. She kicked out and the soles of her boots hit something heavy and rubbery which prompted a satisfactory outburst. She pulled her legs up again and snatched the Colt from her ankle holster with both hands. The barrel nearly slipped from her numb fingers and she bit her lower lip until it bled in concentration. With her left thumb she released the safety catch and proceeded to fire three shots diagonally across and up.
There was a quick and surprised exhale of breath, and her abductor crashed down on top of her as the minibus suddenly accelerated. She wiggled free from under the man, who was still moving. She got to her knees and nearly fell when the minibus turned left. She pushed against the floor and rested her forearms on the back of the seat in front of her. She didn’t waste time trying to remove the hood, but aimed at where she thought the back and neck of the driver ought to be.
One shot.
And one left in the cylinder.
The driver never made a sound, but the minibus went out of control and collided a second later with something immovable and solid.
Sabrina was thrown forwards into the back of the seat in front of her, so violently that her neck cracked and she nearly did a forward somersault. The bus keeled very slowly on to its off-side wheels, balanced for a moment at an incline of forty-five degrees before it crashed on to its side with the screeching sound of metal mixed with the short, crisp cracking of breaking windows. Shards of glass rained down over Sabrina and drummed against the floor.
Something in her chest must have been dislocated or broken because every time she tried breathing, she felt a stabbing pain. She lay still, curled up and waited for the glass shower to subside. Finally she managed to ease her thumbs up under the cord of the hood, to loosen it and pull it back. She let it dangle from her soaked hair at the back of her neck and found she was looking straight into the face of the man with the rubber cosh. His head lay at an unnatural angle to his neck. He might still be alive because his pupils were contracted and she thought she could see an artery pulse under the skin on his neck. She had hit his left shoulder and the left side of his chest. She had no idea where the third shot had ended up, but she was content with the first two. She noticed a large automatic pistol in his shoulder holster. She dropped the Colt, which skidded along the sloping floor and took the man’s pistol.
‘Waste not, want not,’ she muttered to herself, and crawled across Forlani’s limp figure, which lay wedged against the side door. Through the minibus’s missing side windows she could see blue sky. She pushed off with her boots against a seat leg and eventually managed to wriggle through a narrow window. She ignored the broken glass in the window frame, which was trying its best to prevent her escape.
‘Stop! Stop, God damn you!’
In disbelief Urs Savelli leaned forwards and put his hand on Claudio’s shoulder. The young man hit the brakes and the large Audi skidded to a halt with its disc brakes squealing in the middle of the road, fifty metres from the now wrecked minibus. The fake ambulance man next to the driver was thrown forward against his seatbelt and swore loudly.
Up until then everything had gone seamlessly. As planned, L’Artista had paralysed Giulio Forlani and had then – as was her habit – made herself scarce. Presumably she was now driving home in her Berlingo. Perhaps she was listening to music in the car, planning what to buy for tonight’s dinner – what did he know? Her part of the mission was over.
The intolerable little assistant public prosecutor had been dragged into the minibus and rendered harmless and … now this: For no known reason the bus had veered out of control, scaled a high kerb, just about avoided a tree, but had then driven across the pavement and crashed into the outpatients building. And turned over on its side. They had heard shots fired.
Jesus, Joseph, Mary and the donkey … !
The windows of the outpatients building filled with faces.
They heard sirens.
The three men sat absolutely still as they silently watched the small, dishevelled and bloody figure squirming her way through a broken windo
w in the minibus. She was like an insatiable, unstoppable alien who had just consumed the crew of a spacecraft and was now looking for fresh prey. She swung her legs up from under her and for a moment sat quietly on the bodywork. Then she turned her head slowly like a robot to locate them: her face was as white as chalk where it wasn’t red. There was no expression in that face, but her eyes were wide open and all seeing. She slid down the bodywork, landing heavily on her feet, and started limping towards them. In the middle of the road. Shedding glass splinters with every laborious step as if she were wearing cracked ice armour.
And though it looked as heavy as original sin, she raised the black automatic pistol to eye level. She started shooting as she walked.
The Audi’s windscreen turned milky white around a star-shaped hole and an invisible hand tore off an ear from the ambulance man.
The man screamed and the Audi rocked when the next two shots went through the bonnet and into the engine. Savelli let himself slide down to a lying position.
‘I think we should leave the area now, Claudio,’ he said quietly, and pulled a face as the stuffing of the passenger seat was blasted away right above his head. ‘And if you can hit that stupid bitch in the process, I really would appreciate it.’
The Audi leapt forwards with a roar and Savelli raised himself on to his elbow and looked out of the side window. He saw Sabrina D’Avalos get back on her feet after rolling across the pavement. The tiny fury looked straight at him with a strangely determined expression in her cloudy, grey eyes. Mesmerized, he kept watching her – now through the rear window. He had seen that promise before: in the eyes of her father, General Agostino D’Avalos. Then the terrible woman lifted her pistol again and Urs Savelli slipped back on the floor.
CHAPTER 44
Ospedale Maggiore, Niguarda Ca’ Granda, Milan
She heard his voice outside the curtain, but felt nothing. She was totally spent. The doctor injected a little more local anaesthetic into her back and clucked like a worried hen.
When the Dead Awaken Page 27
