Tomb of the First Priest: A Lost Origins Novel

by A D Davies

  Jules let go of Harpal. Pushed back minutely, enough to dismount. The soles of his feet hit the tarmac, but he was already running. He tucked, rolled, scraped his shoulder blade, but sprang up. With a midair flip, he righted himself.

  As the Ducati tore away, he took his telescopic baton and unscrewed one end as he trotted to the sidewalk where a line of mopeds were parked. People gawked, having just seen him stroll casually away after falling from a motorcycle.

  “Jules?” Harpal said. “What the hell did you just do?”

  “He don’t have the book.” Jules shook his stick, and a multitool landed in his palm—a grittier take on a Swiss Army knife designed for handymen. “He went the wrong way. He’s just keeping us busy. Charlie, you there?”

  “Still here. Where’s Dan? Bridget?”

  “They got away but probably hanging ’round the jamming zone. Cops’re all over it.” Jules nudged the handlebars of one motor scooter after another, each so far having locked its steering correctly. “They run, they’ll look suspicious. Right now, you gotta get eyes on the Palazzo Farnese.” Jules found one moped whose handlebars swung side to side. He crouched beside it and levered the ignition housing open with the screwdriver on his multitool. “Eyes on the piazza?”

  “Got it,” Charlie said. “Cops’ve cordoned it off. What do you need?”

  Jules stripped two wires and sparked them together, starting the motor. “Giovani Trussot. The cops got him?”

  “Not that I can see. Toby?”

  “Here.” Toby sounded distracted. “They’re engaged in counterterrorism measures. Securing the public, establishing a perimeter. No mention on the radio of anyone that sounds like Giovani.”

  “Running a search.”

  Jules didn’t wait for the results. He took off on the moped the wrong way against traffic using a cycle lane and turned correctly onto the main road that would take him to the airport.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jules ignored Toby’s and Charlie’s demands to turn around and regroup. The manuscript was leaving the country. With Toby, Dan, and Bridget stuck inside the security cordon and with Harpal still circling in search of Horse, Jules couldn’t even use the powerful bike he had abandoned earlier to speed out to the private airport. He considered stopping to pick up another, but there was no guarantee he’d manage to hot-wire it. Powerful bikes were usually fitted with alarms and LoJack, which could be activated remotely, and a car might get stuck in traffic, so he continued with what he had.

  When he was forced to refuel, he bought a crash helmet, partly to blend in, but also because he had no idea whether his image had been captured on cameras that the polizia might access.

  Jules got back on the road, and when it became clear he was not going to turn around, the LORI guys begrudgingly cooperated.

  Charlie said, “That piazza with the fountain, your whole episode was caught on camera, but it’s all automated, so no clear view of you guys. Or Horse for that matter. I’ll wipe it and do a video-site and social media sweep soon, make sure no camera phones got you.”

  “Not helpful right now,” Jules said. “Tell me something that matters.”

  Charlie made a noise that brought to mind the audible bristling of fur. “Back when you boys took off, I got Giovani leaving the scene. He’s carrying something up his shirt. Can’t see it perfectly, but it’s the right size you described. He’s out of frame now.” Typing. Clicks. “Okay, there we go. Police car pulls up on the edge of the piazza... I’m running the plates while I watch... he hands the package over... car’s gone. Okay, get this. It’s not a police car. Written off by a scrapyard two months ago. Must’ve been repurposed.”

  “Right,” Jules said. “They knew we’d follow Horse so they had Giovani pass on the manuscript. We gotta assume they’ll want it outa the country ASAP. Anyone wanna back me up at the airport?”

  “Negative.” Dan’s voice now joined them. “We regroup. We don’t rush headlong into this.”

  “Negative? Negative right back at ya. We know he’s at a private airfield twenty miles from Rome International cause that’s where the shell company’s flight came in. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. We can’t track him on a private plane. This is our only chance to get what we need.”

  No one spoke. Jules wasn’t about to break the silence. He’d made his point.

  “I’ll go,” Harpal said. “I’m mobile already.”

  “I said negative,” Dan hissed. “We regroup. We do the intel. No full-frontal assaults on an airport when the whole of Rome thinks a terrorist incident just hit.”

  Another pause before Charlie came back on the comms. “Giovani went home.”

  “Home?” Dan sounded confused. “Where’s home?”

  “The hotel. Tracing his last movements on the street cams, he was headed back in that direction.”

  “Then that’s where we should be,” Toby said. “But let’s see if we can avoid the police. Jules, may I make one final plea for you to stop what you are doing? It’s reckless, and may end up costing us more than we gain. Valerio is not a person to underestimate.”

  “Nor am I.” Jules slipped the phone from his pocket and tapped the command to kill the earbud and shut out further chatter, then focused on the road, hammering the scooter at full speed—a little below fifty miles per hour.

  He was on his own for now.

  Off-air, in the café opposite the Vatican View Hotel, Toby asked Dan to take it easy on Harpal after he’d lost first Jules then Horse. For now they needed clues as to where Saint Thomas’s manuscript might be headed, and Toby’s only remaining play was an unlikely one: Giovani Trussot himself. They moved from the café to a stakeout from the SUV up the street, where it didn’t take them long to spot him.

  Yes, Giovani returned to the hotel, to his bar. Dan posited that the instruction must have come from Horse and that, once the package was secure, Giovani would hear from his wife’s kidnappers. However, the polizia had arrived and swarmed the place, not to mention the paramedics and the Rome coroner, so Giovani retreated out the back—watched by Harpal in the buzzing lobby—and soon pulled out in a Fiat Punto.

  Dan had said little since rendezvousing with Toby, a faraway stare telling Toby not to speak to him unless absolutely necessary. The man took failure personally, and there was little anyone could say or do until he, in his own mind, made amends. So with Toby and Bridget as silent passengers, Dan pulled out after the little Fiat.

  Through thick traffic, exacerbated by the shut-off streets, they tailed Giovani’s car from six vehicles back. When Dan finally spoke, it was to voice a concern. “We’re too visible. Harpal, you still got that bike?”

  “Already on it,” Harpal’s voice replied. “I’m ten behind you.”

  Toby tried to spot him in the passenger mirror.

  Dan said, “And who ordered you to do that?”

  “I used my initiative,” Harpal said.

  “And what I needed you to—”

  “Can you two cut it out?” Bridget interrupted. “You need Harpal to swap with you in case Giovani makes us. Let him get on with it.”

  She’d been quiet since the shootout. Hugging her knees to her chest in the car, her hand over her mouth one minute, clasped in the other the next, and a frown bearing the lion’s share of expressions. She might well have been in shock. Yet she said she was fine, so Toby had to trust in that.

  Harpal trundled past them and pushed on. They’d know where Giovani was headed soon enough.

  Security wasn’t great at the airfield. Not nonexistent, but definitely not strong. As the sun dipped away, Jules stripped to his midnight bodysuit and gained access by circling to the north and running cross-country for a half mile into a densely populated wood. It was chilly. The grass between the tree line and the fence was untended and allowed him to crawl right up to the barrier. Using his multi-tool, he snipped two vertical lines three feet apart in the wire mesh, peeled it up, and slithered under. When the flap dropped behind him, a person would only no
tice if they were looking for it specifically. Which no one appeared to be doing.

  Four hangars large enough for medium-size passenger planes.

  Six smaller ones dotted around.

  High-end private jets parked in the distance, reminding Jules of the mopeds by the side of the road.

  Floodlights illuminated pretty much the whole airport.

  A single runway.

  The majority of security congregated at the gate with cameras pointing out on the surrounding fence, all of which he’d avoided. But this was a working airport, so there were around a dozen more cameras spread between the runway, what Jules assumed to be an office, and the various hangars. Not blanket coverage.

  Low-key.

  Not much security.

  This was very much a hub for the wealthy, for the “jet set” as his mom would’ve called them. And they likely had zero problems on a daily basis. That would make the sparse security lax. And was probably why a couple of the bulbs were out.

  Safe in the darkness of the outer shadows, Jules watched for another ten minutes, wishing he’d brought binoculars, then glided along the perimeter until he came level with one of the smaller hangars. This was the only one with no label, but two people circled it, dressed in overalls and orange high-visibility vests.

  From the way they carried themselves, Jules could tell they were armed. When he sneaked nearer, he concluded they had holsters at both shoulder and ankle. They stayed separate, though, not a pair.

  Five hundred meters of tarmac stood between him and the hangar’s side door.

  The men replicated their route every three minutes. But not every time. Sometimes it took a touch longer or a touch less.

  That meant the side door was unattended for a maximum of ninety seconds at a time, and a minimum of eighty.

  One minute, twenty seconds.

  The world record for a two-hundred-meter sprint is 19.19 seconds, and Jules was some way behind that at twenty-four seconds, but that was under optimal conditions. Five hundred meters is two hundred multiplied by 2.5, so 2.5 times twenty-four is an even sixty.

  One minute.

  Add on ten seconds for muscle fatigue, lack of energy thanks to not eating for the past six hours, and to cater for the untested running surface.

  A ten-to-twenty-second margin of error over five hundred meters was acceptable.

  One more test to be sure.

  The first man passed the target area. As soon as he left that side of the hangar, Jules started counting. The second one strolled by, a clipboard in hand for the sake of the casual observer. Eighty-six seconds after his colleague left.

  One more.

  The second man feigned observing something and headed the same way as his fellow guard. Ninety-one seconds until the first guy showed again.

  Okay. This is it.

  The first guard was less subtle. He smoked as he moved, bobbing his head as if listening to music as he rounded the corner out of sight.

  Jules launched.

  It wasn’t his best time out of the blocks, but over this distance, it shouldn’t matter. His feet pounded, thighs and ankles in sync, torso high, arms pumping. He was now exposed should any random employee or passenger happen to look that way. His shadow splayed in several directions at once because of the various floodlights.

  He made the door in sixty-six seconds, a pleasing time given his poor start.

  His hand wrapped around the knob. Turned. It was locked.

  In less than thirty seconds, a guard would reappear.

  Giovani’s apartment building proved difficult to break into. Dan scouted it and found ten stories of luxury and alarms, so he suspected the Fiat that Giovani had driven here was part of his cover: a guy who ran a bar, not an international fence for smuggled antiquities. That he parked a block away rather than behind his building’s gates added to that theory. Whatever, Dan was going to make someone pay for what happened today. He didn’t care who.

  Harpal had gone rogue, taking to that roof on the bar hut, a dumb-ass move that left them fragmented, and more specifically, it left Dan trying to keep three idiots safe.

  Okay, that was uncharitable to Bridget. She was just inexperienced. And at least she followed his instructions.

  As for Jules, if Dan ever saw that guy again, he’d slap him so hard his head would fly back in time.

  What really drilled into the meat of Dan’s throat, though, were his own errors. At least when he served in the Rangers, errors leading to casualties were usually due to poor intelligence received, not his own judgment. No one was perfect, though, so living with mistakes was a lesson you had to learn early, especially in Spec Ops units.

  One lapse in particular stung today: he’d fallen for a stalling tactic. The Italian bartender-cum-middleman put on a genial show until Horse and Valerio’s other people were in position.

  Now Bridget had come up with an idea. Dan didn’t like it, but he was out of ideas. She’d stripped to her underwear in the SUV and changed into Dan’s shirt. He watched as she mussed up her hair and trotted over the road to the street entrance.

  She hit each buzzer in turn until she found someone who spoke a smattering of English, then presented herself to the camera so they could see her in full: a beautiful young American redhead in a man’s shirt and—it seemed from her appearance—nothing else. “I’m with Gio. On the top floor? I came down for a smoke, and he’s in the shower. Please let me in. I swear I won’t say anything.” She put her hands together in prayer, and the English-speaker released the door.

  Jules wouldn’t make it back to the perimeter, and he’d left his lockpick with his luggage on LORI’s jet. It was supposed to have been a simple exchange after all.

  The lights were fully on here, so someone merely had to glance his way to see him.

  Ten seconds max, maybe five until the first guard sauntered around that corner.

  Jules looked up: corrugated steel outer, sheer face, nowhere to go.

  So he followed the same route as the guards took, gambling that the second man’s slightly quicker pace would mean he was alone. He reached the end in three seconds, nipped around the corner, and froze.

  The man patrolling the building was about to turn the next corner but hadn’t made it yet.

  Jules resisted the urge to pin himself flat to the wall. Sudden movement was worse. All he shifted were his eyes, calculating his escape if needed, his run to the fence, his jump over, his dash through the woods...

  The man continued out of sight, and Jules breathed.

  But he only had a few seconds’ grace. He didn’t think following the guy again was a good idea, a sort of farcical sneaky approach with too many variables.

  Up again?

  Yes!

  There was a window ten feet up. Jules was almost six feet and could easily jump four feet off the ground. All he needed to add a couple of inches was a running start.

  Without debating further, he took a throwing knife from his belt, bit it between his teeth, backed away far enough, and then ran forward. He pushed off, swung his arms up for maximum height, landed his rubber soles silently on the wall, and pushed himself up the final inches to catch the ledge one-handed.

  The window measured a couple of feet, and as expected, it just required him to stab his blade into one side to flick it open. He pulled himself up. But he did so too quickly.

  Desperate to swing his legs inside, he didn’t concentrate on his hands and caught the throwing knife on the frame.

  It dropped. And metal landing on the hard walkway would give him away for sure.

  He snatched at the air. The blade tumbled end over end until it was away from him. Falling. He moved to catch it with one foot, but that was useless as it might stab him, so he angled his toes inward and kicked.

  The knife flew out over the tarmac, just far enough to land noiselessly on the grass beyond.

  It took a lot to raise Jules’s heart rate, but that had done it. He performed breathing exercises as he wriggled inside, focused on a
calm center, and once his rhythm steadied, he found himself in a bare office lit only by the ambient glow from outside.

  He prowled over to the door and cracked it open, finding a dark mezzanine with thin carpet over the metal shell and a handrail overlooking a Gulfstream jet. The hangar floor was almost devoid of the usual business of setting up for flight, meaning it was already prepped.

  A suited man with a shock of blond hair and a yellow complexion paced beside a metal-topped table where a woman of approximately fifty turned an object over in her hands. She laid it on a wad of crinkled brown paper. It was the package from Giovani, unwrapped, the book lying right there. The woman wore white cotton gloves and a jeweler’s loupe wedged to her eye.

  She said, “It is real.” Her Italian-accented voice echoed up into the metal building. “The age is correct, and I believe it is the item you want.”

  “And you can translate it?” Valerio Conchin asked, still pacing.

  “I think so. Most. But you must free my husband. I am doing nothing until then.”

  Valerio appeared satisfied, but it was hard to discern a smile or annoyance from Jules’s distance. Valerio pulled out a phone and dialed. Held it to his ear. “Horse, you may inform Mr. Trussot that his wife is cooperating. Disarm the bomb, but—” Valerio exhaled through his nose as he listened. Turned his body to the woman. “Disappointing.” He shrugged. “Is the new kid with them?” Pause to listen. “He intrigues me. I wonder if he might be important.” Another pause. “Yes, that glowing thing… it might be nothing, but…” Valerio paused again, this time in thought. “You mentioned the Trussots have grown-up children living nearby?”

  The woman stood, hands waving no before her chest, her face strained.

  “Okay, do it,” Valerio said. “Then leave some men with the daughter and get back here. Tina will translate for us in the air.” He hung up and gestured for Tina Trussot to sit. When she shakily sat back in her chair, he said, “I’m sorry, but we won’t be disarming the bomb in your apartment after all. Your husband is consorting with a really annoying bunch of people, so...” He slapped his hands together. “Boom. You’re a widow.”