Mandino watched for a few moments as his men started work, then walked toward the door, motioning to Pierro to follow him. “We’ll check the rest of the house, just in case they were helpful enough to write down what they found.”
“If they did that to the stone,” the professor replied, “I doubt very much if you’ll find anything.”
“I know, but we’ll look anyway.”
In the study, Mandino immediately spotted the computer and a digital camera. “We’ll take these,” he said.
“We could look at the computer here,” Pierro suggested.
“We could,” Mandino agreed, “but I know specialists who can recover data even from formatted hard disks, and I’d rather they checked it. And if these men photographed the stone before they obliterated the inscription, the images might still be in the camera.”
Mandino yanked the power cable and connecting leads out of the back of the desktop computer’s system unit and picked it up. “Bring the camera,” he ordered, and led the way to the hall, where he carefully placed the unit beside the front door.
They walked back into the dining room, where Rogan and the bodyguard were just lifting the stone clear of the wall. When they’d lowered it to the floor, Mandino examined the surface again, but all he could see were chisel marks. Despite Pierro’s optimism, he didn’t think there was even the remotest chance of recovering the inscription from the pathetic collection of chips and the surface of the stone itself.
The best option they had was to talk to the men themselves.
Funerals in Italy are normally grand family affairs, with posters pasted around the town announcing the death, an open casket and lines of weeping and wailing mourners. The Hamptons knew few people in the town—they’d only been there, off and on, for a matter of months, and had spent most of that time working on the house rather than getting to know their neighbors.
Bronson had arranged for a simple service in the anticipation that there’d be only three people there—himself, Mark and the priest. In fact, there were about two dozen mourners, all members of Maria Palomo’s extended family. But it was, by Italian standards, a very restrained, and comparatively brief, ceremony. Within thirty minutes the two men were back in the Alfa, and heading out of the town.
Neither of them had noticed the single man in a nondescript dark-colored Fiat who had followed them into Ponticelli. When they’d parked near the church, he’d driven past but within moments of Bronson pulling away from the curb, the car was behind them again.
Inside the vehicle, the driver pulled a cell phone from his pocket and pressed a speed-dial number. “They’re on the way,” he said.
* * *
Mark had barely said a word since they’d left Ponticelli, and Bronson hadn’t felt like talking, the two men united in their grief for the death of a woman they’d both loved, albeit from different perspectives. Mark was trying to come to terms with the final, irrevocable chapter of his short marriage, while Bronson’s aching loss was tempered by guilt, by the knowledge that for the last five years or so he’d been living a lie, in love with his best friend’s wife.
The funeral had been Mark’s last farewell to Jackie and, now it was over, he was going to have to make decisions about his life. Bronson guessed that the house—the property the Hamptons had intended to retire to—would go on the market. The memories of their time together in the old place would probably be too painful for Mark to relive for very long.
As he neared the house, Bronson noticed a Fiat sedan coming up fast behind them.
“Bloody Italian drivers,” he muttered, as the car showed no signs of overtaking, just maintained position about ten yards behind the Alfa.
He braked gently as he approached the gateway, turned on his blinker and turned in. But the other car did the same, stopping actually in the gateway and completely blocking it. In that instant, as Bronson glanced toward the old house, he realized they were trapped, and just how high the stakes really were.
Outside the house, a Lancia sedan was parked, and beside the front door—which looked as if it was slightly ajar—was an oblong gray box and a cubical sandy-colored object. Behind the car, two men were standing, staring at the approaching Alfa, one with the unmistakable shape of a pistol in his right hand.
“Who the hell . . . ?” Mark shouted.
“Hang on,” Bronson yelled. He swung the wheel to the left and accelerated hard, powering the car off the gravel drive and across the lawn, aiming straight for the hedge that formed a boundary between the garden and the road.
“Where was it?” Bronson shouted.
Strapped into the passenger seat, Mark immediately guessed what Bronson was asking. When they’d bought the house, the driveway was U-shaped, with two gates, but they’d extended the hedge and lawn across the second entrance. And that was now their only way out. He pointed through the windshield. “A little farther to the right,” he said, braced himself in the seat and closed his eyes.
Bronson twitched the wheel slightly as the Alfa rocketed forward. He heard the cracks of two shots behind them, but he didn’t think either hit the vehicle. Then the nose of the car tore into the hedge, the bushes planted barely a year earlier. Beyond the windshield, their view turned into an impenetrable maelstrom of green and brown as the Alfa smashed the plants under its chassis, branches whipping past the side windows. The front wheels lifted off the ground for a moment when the car hit the low bank that formed the base of the hedge, then crashed down again.
And then they were through. Bronson lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal and hit the brakes for an instant as the car lurched across the grass verge, checking the road in both directions. It was just as well he did.
A truck was lumbering up the hill directly toward them, just a few yards away, a black cloud of diesel belching from its exhaust. The driver’s face wore an almost comical look of shock, having just seen the bright red car materialize from a hedge right in front of him.
Bronson slammed the accelerator pedal down again, and the Alfa shot straight across the road, missing the back of the truck by perhaps three feet. He hit the brakes, swung the wheel hard left and, the moment the car was aiming down the hill, accelerated again. The Alfa fishtailed as he fed in the power, but in moments it was screaming down the road at well more than sixty miles an hour.
“What the hell’s going on?” Mark demanded, turning around in his seat to look back toward his house. “Who were those people?”
“I don’t know
who
they were,” Bronson said, “but I know
what
they were. That cubical object was the stone from your dining-room wall, and the gray box was the system unit from your computer. They were the people who broke in to read the first inscription, and who’ve been trying to get back inside ever since to find the second one.”
Bronson glanced in his mirror as he accelerated hard down the hill. About two hundred yards behind them he saw two cars emerge from the gateway one after the other and start chasing them. The first was the Fiat that had blocked the drive behind them, and the second was the Lancia.
“I don’t—” Mark began.
Bronson interrupted. “We’re not clear yet. Both cars are chasing us.”
His eyes were scanning the instruments, checking for any abnormal readings that might have been caused by the harsh treatment he’d given the car, but everything seemed OK. And he hadn’t detected any problems with the handling, though there appeared to be various bits of greenery attached to the front of the car.
“What do they want?”
“The inscription, obviously. They know we erased it, so now we’re their only lead, simply because we saw it. Whatever it means, it must be a hell of a lot more important than I thought.”
Bronson was pushing the Alfa as hard as he dared, but the roads were fairly narrow, twisting and not that well surfaced and, though he couldn’t see the other cars behind him, he knew they had to be close. He was a very competent police-trained driver, but he wasn’t familiar with the car or the area, and he was driving on the “wrong” side of the road, so the odds were stacked against him.
“You’ll have to help me, Mark. We’ve got to get the hell away from here, as quickly as possible.” He pointed ahead to a road sign indicating a crossroads. “Which way?”
Mark stared through the windshield, but for a moment he didn’t respond.
“I need to know,” Bronson said urgently. “Which way?”
Mark seemed to rouse himself. “Left,” he said. “Go left. That’s the quickest route to the autostrada.”
But as Bronson paused in the center of the road, waiting for a group of three cars coming in the opposite direction to pass, the Fiat appeared in his rearview mirror about a hundred yards behind.
“Shit,” Bronson muttered, and accelerated as quickly as he could the instant the road was clear.
“A quick check, Mark,” he said. “My laptop and camera are in the car, and my passport’s in my pocket. Is there anything you have to collect from the house?”
Mark felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet and passport. “Only my clothes and stuff,” he said. “I hadn’t finished packing.”
“You have now,” Bronson said grimly, alternating his gaze between the road in front and his mirrors.
“We need to take the next road on the right,” Mark instructed. “Then the autostrada’s only a couple of miles away.”
“Got it.”
But though Bronson slowed as the Alfa neared the junction, he didn’t take the turn.
“Chris, I said turn right.”
“I know, but we need to lose this guy first. Hang on.”
The Fiat had closed to less than fifty yards behind the Alfa when Bronson acted. He slammed on the brakes, waited until the car’s speed had dropped to about twenty miles an hour, then released the brakes, spun the wheel to the left and simultaneously pulled on the handbrake. The car lurched sideways, tires screaming in protest as it slid across to the other side of the road. The moment it was facing the opposite way, Bronson dropped the handbrake and pressed on the accelerator. The Alfa shot past the Fiat, whose driver was still braking hard, and moments later they passed the Lancia as well, which had just caught up.
“What the hell was that?” Mark asked.
“Technically it’s called a J-turn, because that’s the shape of the skid mark the tires leave on the road. It’s amazing what you can learn in the police force. The important thing is that it should have given us a couple of minutes’ breathing space.”
Bronson was checking his mirrors constantly and when they reached the turning for the autostrada there was still no sign of either the Fiat or the Lancia behind them. For a second or two he debated ignoring the junction and taking a side road up into the hills, where they might be able to find somewhere to hide for a few minutes. But he decided that speed was more important, and hauled the Alfa across the road, barely slowing, and within three minutes they were taking a ticket at the barrier.
“Where are we going?” Mark asked.
“We’re heading for the Italian border. I’m going to put as much distance as possible between us and them, and the sooner we’re in another country the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
Mark shook his head. “I still don’t really understand what’s going on. Stealing the computer makes sense, I suppose—it’s possible we could have stored the pictures of the verses on that—but the stone? You completely destroyed the inscription, so why would they bother taking it?”
“They probably think they can recover it by using some kind of high-tech process. You can use X-rays to read the number of a car engine after it’s been ground off the block, so maybe there’s a similar technique that can be applied to stone. I really don’t know. But to go to the trouble of hacking that stone block out of the wall—not to mention shooting at us—that means they’re
really
serious about finding that inscription.”
12
I
Gregori Mandino was furious. He’d ordered the stone and computer unit to be taken out to the Lancia, and he’d planned to have Pierro drive the vehicle away from the house, leaving the three of them in the property to await the return of Hampton and his companion. But the call from his bodyguard, telling him the two Englishmen were already heading back to the house, had changed all that.
The maneuver by his bodyguard had worked perfectly, completely blocking the entrance to the driveway, but the way the car had escaped had been totally unexpected. That, and the way the Alfa had evaded them minutes later, had convinced Mandino that the driver was either desperate or an expert.
They’d turned to give chase as quickly as possible, but by the time they’d reached the first junction, the Alfa Romeo was nowhere in sight, and there were three possible routes the driver could have taken. Mandino had guessed Hampton and the other man would head for the autostrada, and he’d ordered the Lancia driver to take that route, but they’d seen no sign of their quarry before they reached the tollbooths and, without knowing which way the Alfa had gone, any further attempt at pursuit was pointless.
Mandino hated making mistakes. He’d
assumed
that the two Englishmen wouldn’t be returning to the house for at least two hours, and
assumption,
as an American colleague had been fond of saying, was the mother of all screwups. But it was too late now.
“Search the house,” he ordered. “Look for any documents that identify the second man, and anything that might help us find the two of them.”
As his men dispersed to do his bidding, Pierro walked over to Mandino. “What would you like me to do?”
“Take another look around the place, just in case my men miss anything.”
“Where do you think the Englishmen have gone?”
“If they’ve got any sense,” Mandino replied, “they’ll be heading for England. They’ll have picked up the autostrada and headed north, out of Italy.”