by Zoe Sharp
Orosco jerked his head to a side street. If anything, this was even narrower. Fifty yards along, it opened out into a wider space where half a dozen cars were parked up against the buttressed wall of what might have been a castle. I’d lived in New York for long enough for this blatant display of history to have the appearance of a movie set.
He thumbed the remote on the keys and the lights flashed on a little Fiat Cinquecento. His mouth fell open.
“What the fuck?”
I disengaged, picked the keys out of his hand. “I’ll drive.”
“Now wait a minute—”
“You happy with a manual transmission on something the size of a golf cart?”
His mouth clamped shut again.
“OK,” he said. “You drive.”
I pocketed the bloodied corkscrew and slid behind the wheel, clipping my seatbelt in place. The little Fiat cranked into life at the first turn of the key.
“OK, where to?”
“What the fuck do you mean?” he demanded sourly as he slammed the passenger door. “You were the one who wanted out of there.”
“Yeah, well, it would help if I had any idea where we are.”
“Place called Montisi,” he said at last. “One-horse town. Doesn’t even have a stop light.”
I backed out and headed carefully along the side street. The car’s mirrors barely seemed to clear the foliage from the flower pots on every window sill. At the end, Orosco reluctantly gestured to the left. With no better plan, I followed his directions, picking up speed as the street widened. Ahead was a junction with a main road. Blue signs gave distances in kilometres to Sinalunga and Trequanda. I recognised both names from studying the maps before we landed. Both were to the west of Lago Trasimeno by forty or fifty klicks. We were the best part of an hour away—further from where the Gulfstream had landed at Perugia. I put my foot down. The Fiat’s engine note rose, but there was little noticeable difference in our speed.
“Do you have a phone?” I asked Orosco.
“Yeah.”
There was a pause. I sighed. “May I use it?”
The sneer was back. He’d pushed one hand behind him, under his jacket. Now, he pulled it out and inspected his fingers. There was blood on them. Only a small amount, but blood nevertheless.
“You, lady, can go fuck yourself.”
“Oh, so you’d rather your daughter was left unprotected?”
“Than be in the care of a psycho like you? Yeah.”
“You arrange to have her kidnapped by a bunch of guys who are happy to blow up a helicopter in the process, and you call me a psycho?”
“If you hadn’t stuck your nose in, she’d be safe with me right now.”
I shook my head. Reasoning with him was impossible, and I hated the fact he’d reduced me to the level of a schoolyard squabble. Next thing you knew, we’d be insulting each other’s mothers.
I shut up and drove, winding along fast twisty roads, keeping the Fiat hustling as fast as it could manage. Other traffic didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry and I hopped past it whenever the opportunity presented itself. Maybe because of that, after about twenty minutes I noticed the big Renault doing the same in order to stay only a vehicle or two behind us.
It was hard to say if they were following. We were on a main cross-country route. Chances were that any traffic would be heading in the same direction. But it was the fact the Renault driver had overtaken the same vehicles I had—a couple of times in places that were marginal on safety. When there was only one car left between us, he suddenly seemed happy to stay in the line of traffic. Open sections came and went, and still he didn’t move further up the line.
I jammed my foot down and bullied my way past the van ahead of us, despite the fact there wasn’t really the room to do so, and the visibility was poor. The oncoming driver flashed and blew his horn, gesturing with an arm out of the window as we passed within inches of one another.
“Are you trying to fucking kill us?” Orosco squawked, knuckles white around the grab handle on the passenger door.
I ignored him, keeping one eye on the rear-view mirror. Sure enough, the Renault hustled past the car that had been between us, but stayed put behind the van. I caught enough of a glimpse to see there were men in both driver and passenger seats. I could see the outline of someone in the rear, too.
“We’ve picked up a tail,” I said shortly. “Looks like your friends don’t trust you to keep your word.”
Orosco screwed round in his seat. “The Renault?” he asked a moment later.
“Uh-huh.”
“Bastards.”
“Yeah, that about sums it up.”
He still had the Beretta in his hand. He glanced at it, then across at me. “You gonna give me the bullets back for this thing, hey?”
The words “rock” and “hard place” sprang into my mind.
“Take the magazine out and give me the weapon,” I said.
He threw me a bitter look but complied. I wedged the empty Beretta under my thigh and dug in my pockets for the loose rounds, dumping them into Orosco’s lap. He fumbled for them, feeding them into the magazine until it was full.
When he’d finished I held my hand out. Reluctantly, he slapped the magazine into it. I shoved that under my thigh and handed the body of the Beretta back.
“Now what?”
“If it comes to it, I’ll give you the magazine back,” I said. “But if you think I trust you with a loaded weapon before then, you’ve got another think coming.”
If looks could kill, I’d have been ready for the pathologist’s opening Y incision right about then.
“Bitch,” he muttered.
39
We drove into the outskirts of Trequanda on a road lined in places with cypress trees. Past fields scorched pale brown by the sun, through groves of vines laid out in neat, wired rows. Traffic ebbed and flowed. The Renault stayed with us, at least one car behind, sometimes two.
I considered my options, which weren’t extensive.
At one point, Orosco asked, “Can’t you lose them?”
“In this?” I threw him a disgusted look. “Not unless they run out of fuel or break down.”
Equally, I didn’t particularly want to let them follow me all the way back to the airport. It was not my preference to lead the bad guys directly to the people I was charged to protect, even if there might be more of us there to deal with the problem they presented.
That was assuming, of course, that Schade had managed to get everyone away from Isola Minore unscathed. If that were the case, I reasoned, he would not have waited for me, anyway. After what had happened, he could not afford to delay their departure, possibly putting both principals in further danger, just because one of their bodyguards had done the job they were hired to do.
I did not expect them to have made any moves to find me, either. For all they knew, I could be dead.
I tried not to give headroom to the thought that, for all I knew, they could be dead.
There was a truck up ahead. He was moving slowly and I was gradually reeling him in. I glanced in the rear-view mirror again. Now, a single car remained between us and the Renault—an elderly Citroën. As I watched, the Citroën’s right-hand indicator came on. It slowed and turned off onto what looked more like a cart track than a side road.
“I don’t like this,” Orosco announced tightly.
I might not like him, but I couldn’t fault the guy’s instincts.
He ducked down a little to get a good view of the Renault in the door mirror on his side, bit out, “Gimme the mag.”
I hesitated. In the rear-view mirror, I saw the Renault move up closer to our rear end when I’d expected—hoped, anyway—that they’d drop back further.
Orosco tried to reach across me, grabbed at my leg. I twitched reflexively, chopped down onto his wrist with the side of my fist. He punched me in the ribs. Not hard enough to make me lose control of the car, but hard enough to sting, then held his hand out.
&
nbsp; “What, you think I’m going to shoot you? Give me the fucking mag.”
Silently, I handed it over. Orosco palmed the loaded magazine into the pistol grip of the Beretta and pinched back the slide to chamber the first round. He made a noise of satisfaction in his throat while he did so, like a man having his first sip of beer at the end of a long day. It did not fill me with confidence.
“That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” he muttered. Before I could do anything to counter, he’d opened the passenger door about a foot, twisted round in his seat to lean out through the gap, and fired three shots into the front end of the Renault.
My turn to roar, “What the fuck are you doing?”
He turned back, a feral grin on his face, letting the wind force slam the door shut again with a clang.
“Letting those bastards know they gotta back off.”
I checked the road behind. The Renault had backed off, but not for long. In fact, his front end was now growing rapidly larger in my mirror as the driver floored the accelerator.
I stamped on the Fiat’s throttle pedal. Once again, not much happened. I locked my arms to wedge against the steering wheel and just had time to yell, “Brace!” before they hit us.
The driver of the Renault was no amateur. It felt like he rammed into the driver’s side rear corner of the Fiat hard enough to lift our rear wheels clean off the road.
As we thumped down I tried to keep the car straight, but it was way off balance. The Renault ploughed on, thudding harder into the same corner, shunting the rear end of the Fiat out to the left. I tried opposite lock to steer into the skid, but lacking the grunt to power out of it, we were pretty much doomed from the outset.
Skinny tyres howling in protest, the Fiat slewed violently to the right. I stamped on the brakes, but by now we were heading sideways towards the edge of the road. It dropped away at an alarming angle into a wooded embankment.
We bounced over the low kerb and launched into the trees.
Almost at once, the Fiat crunched into a low tree stump. Our own momentum flipped the little car up into the air. I let go of the redundant steering wheel, wrapped one arm around my head and gripped the seatbelt with the other, anchoring me. The car barrel-rolled several times. I shut my eyes to the kaleidoscope images of ground, leaves and sky flashing past. The noise was horrific—like somebody walloping a kettledrum with a broom handle. Broken glass, twigs, stones, and dry earth rained in around us.
The Fiat finally slammed to a stop with my side buckled around a tree trunk. The impact flung me about like a chew toy in the mouth of a big dog. Miraculously, we were the right way up. The engine had stalled. I reached automatically for the key and turned off the ignition.
The dust around us was so thick that I briefly feared the car was on fire. Sense kicked in. No smoke, no acrid smell of burning fuel and plastic. When I cautiously wriggled my arms and legs, they were still attached. The cabin had stood the abuse remarkably well, all things considered. At least nobody would need a hydraulic jack to get me out of the car, although using the driver’s door was a non-starter.
I didn’t think I’d been out of it, but when I glanced across, the passenger door was open. There was no sign of Orosco. I remembered him cracking the door to fire at the Renault. He might not have latched it fully—or put his seatbelt back on. Or there was a good chance he’d been flung out of the car as we rolled down through the trees. Either that, or maybe he’d got his wits about him far quicker than I had after the crash.
Like I needed to now.
Somewhere above me, perhaps at road level, I could hear voices, shouting.
Come on, Fox. Move!
I undid my seatbelt and scrambled across the broken glass littering the passenger seat. As I crawled out through draping foliage onto the banking, three shots cracked out in rapid succession. Someone else returned fire—a different calibre weapon firing a different load. I couldn’t get a bearing on either. When I shook my head to clear it, I found myself on my knees.
There was a wetness in my hair that irritated. I lifted a hand to it and realised I was bleeding, but didn’t remember hitting my head. It was high behind my right ear—the opposite side from the door frame and screen pillar. Was that how Orosco had got away from me? I wouldn’t put it past him.
Right now, I couldn’t work out who was shooting at who, but without a weapon of my own it was not a game I wanted to join in. I started heading downhill at an angle, away from the fight, hanging onto branches for balance.
I had no idea who the men from the Renault were. I couldn’t rule out that they were part of the crew from the villa in Montisi, however unlikely that seemed. They’d let us walk out of there without argument, after all. And it wasn’t as if I’d left behind the real Darius Orosco tied and gagged in a cupboard in his underwear.
Still, there was nothing to say they hadn’t had a change of heart about letting us go. Maybe Hamzeh had returned and not taken our departure well. Or maybe these were men connected to Ugoccione, out for revenge for the attack on Isola Minore and intent on enacting that revenge on the first people to set foot outside the villains’ lair.
Probably best not to find that out.
Behind me, I heard crashing through the undergrowth, running footsteps with little regard to stealth. Someone shouted, “Down there!”
I tried to pick up the pace, but my pursuers had not just rolled down a hill inside a tin can. It was almost a foregone conclusion that they were going to catch up with me.
What took me by surprise, though, was what happened when they did.
40
“Hold it! Stop running!”
I gritted my teeth and stumbled on.
“For God’s sake, Charlie, will you just stop?”
Finally, I recognised the voice. I managed to slow my descent by aiming for a tree trunk and putting my hands out as a buffer. Even so, I nearly overshot, had to hang onto a branch. It spun me round to face the man chasing after me.
“Parker? But…what the hell are you doing here?”
Parker Armstrong hurried the last few strides and caught up with me. He was dressed like a tourist but carrying a Glock. He must have seen the way my eyes rested on the gun because he tucked it away in the small of his back before approaching.
“What do you think?” he demanded quietly. His gaze skimmed over me, made an instant assessment and plucked me off my feet with one arm under my knees and another around my back.
I went rigid in his arms. “Put me down.”
It was more effective than struggling and shouting would have been but he didn’t comply. He turned his head, stared at me.
“Just for once, Charlie, will you let me help you?”
But I couldn’t quash the memory of his words at the apartment, or his actions since.
“Don’t make me hurt you, Parker,” I said tiredly. “Put. Me. Down.”
He paused a beat, then let my legs slide out of his grasp, tilting me upright again, but kept a steadying arm around my shoulders. I didn’t try to fight him on that. I wasn’t sure I could do it without falling over, in any case.
We turned uphill and for a second I regretted not letting him carry me up there. Someone crashed through the undergrowth above us. We both tensed.
A man came half-running, half-bounding sideways down the slope. I recognised him as one of the new guys Parker had taken on over the winter. There had been quite a few personnel changes, even before the whole mess over Sean in the Middle East, the uncertainty over the Armstrong-Meyer agency itself.
“Boss,” the man called, when he was near enough not to shout. “We lost him. Held up a passing car, threw the guy into the road, and took off.”
“You didn’t follow?”
“Front suspension’s totalled,” the man said with a shrug. “Damn French cars.”
“OK, thanks.”
“Great. That’s just great,” I said sourly. “I had him. You lost him.”
Parker glanced at me. “From where we were sitting, it l
ooked a lot more like he had you.”
“Really?” I muttered, shrugging away from him.
We climbed in silence. It was only as we neared the top of the slope, where the Fiat had gouged ruts through the grass into the dark flesh of the earth beneath, that Parker asked, almost diffidently, “So, who was he?”
“Darius Orosco.”
“Darius Oros—?” Parker broke off, eyes narrowing. “What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Charlie?”
“Nothing I wasn’t only too aware of getting into, and perfectly capable of getting myself out of,” I threw back.
We pushed through the forlorn curtain of snapped-off branches and stepped out onto the road. One of Parker’s guys was trying to calm a middle-aged Italian man, dressed like a farmer, who was gesturing wildly and protesting at increasing volume about his hijacked car.
Another of Parker’s men was inspecting the front end of the Renault. The passenger side wheel was twisted at an unlikely angle and jammed hard into the bodywork. Clearly, the driver was used to Yank SUVs that might have been constructed with offensive manoeuvres specifically in mind. Any normal vehicle would seem flimsy by comparison. He straightened when he caught sight of his boss.
“Alternate transport ETA twenty minutes, sir.”
Parker nodded to him and turned to me. He gestured to the passenger side front seat. “Why don’t you sit down while we wait?”
I’d had enough of being bundled into strange vehicles today, even ones that weren’t going anywhere. “Thanks, but I’m fine standing.”
He sighed. “Just pull that goddamned stick out of your ass and sit down before you fall down.”
He sounded so exasperated, I eyed him warily. His expression softened, almost rueful. “You don’t have to fight me on every single damn thing, Charlie.”
“Really?” I murmured. “Only, nothing you’ve done recently smacks of having my best interests at heart.”
He flinched. Infinitesimal, but there all the same.
“At least let me take a look at that wound.”
I put up an experimental hand to my head. My fingers came away wet, sticky, and tinged with red.
