When the Dead Awaken (37 page)

‘I want to, but I don't think you understand just how dangerous she is. Have you seen her? And, by the way, where were you an hour ago?'

He looked straight ahead.

‘We were here. In the wrong place. We presumed that you and Forlani would leave the hospital by the main entrance.'

‘So we were bait? That's why you didn't answer your phone. You wanted it to look natural.'

At least he had the decency to blush a little. One hand opened in a kind of gesture, the other wiggled his wristwatch free from the sleeve of his jacket.

‘We don't have very much time, Sabrina. I'm sorry.'

‘So am I.'

Three hours and ten minutes to dawn, and she was totally in the dark. She didn't know where they were, who the other people in the helicopter were, what they were doing or what – if anything – was expected of her. She had now spent five hours sitting still, trapped inside this metal cocoon, and she hated it. The matt black transport helicopter had picked her and Primo Alba up from the landing pad on the roof of the hospital. Alba had closed the sliding door after them and the helicopter had taken off immediately. The few instrument lights in the cockpit had struggled fruitlessly against the darkness inside the body of the helicopter. At the first lurch, Sabrina had fallen into a canvas seat she thought was vacant and which triggered an outburst and a hard smack to her backside that sent her deeper into the cabin to an empty seat. A hand had passed her a padded headset that she had put on, but still the engine noise was indescribable. It was like sitting inside a metal barrel while a group of keen blacksmiths worked on it with pneumatic drills. All the bones in her
skull vibrated out of sync and her teeth refused to stop clattering. She knew that this type of helicopter would sometimes fly for hours without stopping, during troop transports and rescue missions, and she couldn't imagine how people coped. After five minutes she was on the verge of a breakdown. Surely the pilots must be lobotomized before beginning active duty.

When her eyes had acclimatized to the darkness, she could make out half a dozen shapeless figures on the rough canvas seats. They didn't look particularly bothered by the infernal noise, even though Sabrina couldn't see much of their faces. They all wore black helmets and ski masks. Even the area around their eyes had been painted dark grey with camouflage sticks. They stared right ahead, unmoving. They were experts at waiting.

There really wasn't much to look at and, apart from a few brief exchanges between the pilots and an occasional update from a military flight leader, none of those on board had spoken a word for the first couple of hours.

Then the miracle happened: she fell asleep.

She woke up when the helicopter landed at Camp Darby outside Vicenza. Primo Alba pulled her to her feet and helped her across the dark apron to a low, anonymous building.

In a drab changing room he watched while she put on the regulation black fighter suit, helmet, yellow shooting
goggles, throat microphone, a Motorola communications unit and earpiece, a bulletproof vest and boots one size too big. He strapped a plastic holster that contained a Beretta 9-mm pistol with laser sights to her right side.

‘Do you know how to use this?' he asked, and she checked the magazine and nodded.

‘How about you?'

Primo Alba was dressed in civilian clothing: a dark grey tweed jacket, a dark blue shirt, jeans and black running shoes.

‘This is fine,' he said.

‘Shouldn't you at least be wearing a bulletproof vest?'

‘The Lord preserveth the simple,' he said. ‘Besides, I'm the leader of this operation and my apparent contempt for death inspires my team … and they can see who I am.'

He winked merrily at her with one bright grey eye.

‘Now you look ready and very dangerous,' he declared.

Around five thirty in the morning the helicopter landed in an anonymous field outside Cremona, the engines were switched off and everyone straightened out and stretched their limbs as far as the seat belts and extensive equipment allowed.

Someone eventually opened the loading bay, and Sabrina savoured the fresh air. After a few minutes of silence the first brave cicadas resumed their night-time concert. Sabrina looked up at the cockpit. A tall figure momentarily
blocked the instrument lights before kneeling down and starting a hushed conversation with the pilots. Primo Alba, no doubt. The figure rose and resumed his seat at the front of the cabin.

She recognized the voice in her earpiece.

‘Status update, ladies and gentlemen. Those of you who wish to are free to remove your helmets and masks.'

There was a murmur of approval and everyone removed their helmets and balaclavas. Sabrina could smell a feminine shampoo close by. The person to her left ran a hand through short hair and Sabrina could see that the profile was definitely a woman's. She also had a couple of rings in one nostril. The woman half turned in her seat and offered Sabrina a piece of chewing gum. Then smiled with very white teeth in her camouflage painted face.

Alba resumed his briefing.

‘Exactly five minutes ago our friend Agent X in Naples released a couple of ferrets in Signor M's pigeon loft and within a few seconds the animals bit the necks off practically all of Signor M's prize-winning homing pigeons, with the exception of a few that Agent X had earlier evacuated from the central loft, the one which we believe houses the pigeons that consider L'Artista's den their actual home. They've been fitted with tiny GPS transmitters and will be released in a moment. We hope …'

Primo Alba held a rhetorical pause.

‘Correction: we
very much
hope that the pigeons will lead
us to L'Artista, and not some hapless pigeon fancier who just happens to share Signor M's passion for breeding pigeons. In which case this innocent bystander will get the shock of his life and we, ladies and gentlemen, will have a hell of a lot of explaining to do. A well-fed homing pigeon in good shape can cover between ninety and a hundred and twenty kilometres in an hour. At least. There is an AWACS aircraft in the air above Naples. It will follow the pigeon and give us its coordinates. We have every reason to believe that L'Artista's pigeon loft is equipped with some sort of alarm that will alert her to the arrival of a new pigeon. This means we have a very short time span from the arrival of the pigeon to the raid. We have a window, but only a very narrow one, before she disappears or arms herself. Besides, we don't know if she lives in a penthouse flat in Turin or on a houseboat on the River Po. We've a lot of work to do, and everything … everything will be improvised.'

Primo Alba fell silent without warning. He didn't ask if anyone had any questions, she noticed. Either it wasn't the done thing – a breach of professional etiquette – or the others had only heard the word ‘improvised', and that rendered everything else irrelevant.

Brescia

The young woman turned over in bed and found her wristwatch on the bedside table: 6.30 a.m. Not even dawn yet. She drank a mouthful of water from the glass next to the bedside lamp and wondered whether to ignore the alarm from the pigeon loft. She still ached all over from the collision with Di Luca's Bentley. Her left knee was swollen and discoloured; she would have to have it checked out later today. She always went to the same private clinic.

No bird had ever arrived this early before, and nor had she ever been given assignments in such quick succession. She swung her feet out on to the stone floor, got up and found her dressing gown behind the door. She looked at her husband's dark, curly head on the pillow and smiled. Unlike her, he had been blessed with the gift of deep sleep.

She hobbled down the long passage that separated the bedrooms from the utility room, kitchen and bathrooms. The first room on her right belonged to her daughter,
Abrielle. The old stone walls retained so much of the daytime heat that the nights were always too hot. Their daughter had kicked off her duvet and was lying in her dark blue pyjamas with stars, planets and moons on them. The woman pulled the duvet over the girl. Without waking, she turned over, found a cool corner of the duvet and put it under her cheek.

The window was open and Hector the cat was outside.

She stood for a moment with her arms folded across her chest and looked out of the window. The bedroom was east facing and she could see the start of the pale grey dawn behind the spruces. She checked the time again. Two roebucks would usually forage at the bottom of a fallow field around this time.

But the field was deserted. And the animals had taken all sounds with them.

There were no birds singing, no cicadas. There were no headlights from passing cars or trucks on Viale Sant Eufemia a couple of hundred metres from the cider house. The first shift workers should be on their way to work now, the first trucks should be arriving with deliveries for the supermarkets.

Signora Malvestre, who lived in a small stone cottage a hundred metres to the south behind a row of old apple trees, would usually be up by now, light visible in her kitchen windows. She was the matron at a nursing home in Brescia and rode her bicycle there every morning. Her
house was dark – and the heart in the young woman's chest started to pound.

No noises, no light or animals. Nothing. As if the world around them were holding its breath.

She spun around and ran down the passage and into the living room. She had forgotten her injured knee and her wrist. When she was a circus artist she would invariably have some sort of injury, but would perform nevertheless. She had learned to ignore pain. She found the key on top of the gun cabinet, dropped it and nearly screamed in frustration while she wasted precious seconds looking for it. She opened the cabinet and found a small Taurus 7.65-mm automatic pistol, put it in the pocket of her dressing gown and snatched a Remington pump-action shotgun from its brackets. She broke a nail when she ripped open a box of shotgun cartridges, tore the rest of the paper off the box with her teeth and pumped cartridges into the chamber of the shotgun.

The weight of the Remington instilled some calm and she got her breathing under control. She glided through the low, dark room with the shotgun ready at her shoulder. She waited ten endless seconds at the back door, before she went outside on the wet flagstones between the house and her husband's studio. It was just at the time when the dew fell and she felt moisture on her face. The sky was growing lighter with incredible speed and revealed trees, fields and fences, while she wanted only to turn back the
clock to the darkness and the night so that she could get Abrielle and her husband to a place of safety. Far away from here.

She knelt down by the first corner and let the barrel of the shotgun swing in a wide arc around the corner before she followed. Hector was standing a few metres away with a mouse. He sat down on his hind legs, let the mouse escape into the tall grass and pricked his ears as he watched her.

From the pigeon loft she could hear a sleepy cooing, as always when a new pigeon had arrived. She assumed it must be a kind of greeting. There were small piles of food and wood shavings in the tall grass and they felt spongy against her bare feet. She rested the shotgun against the wooden wall of the pigeon loft and checked the little photocell in front of the landing board where a homing pigeon would break the light beam.

She had fed the pigeons before she went to bed. There had been three, but now she could make out four silhouettes behind the netting. She lifted the catch, opened the mesh door, and extended her hands into the pigeon loft. She made reassuring noises as the birds cooed anxiously, pressing themselves against the perch. She had always been good with animals. She let her fingertips glide over the neck of each bird and when she got to the second one, she found a small metal cylinder attached to its left leg.

Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
The cylinder was too long, it felt different from the usual metal containers that Signor Marchese tied to the legs of the pigeons – and he always attached them to the right leg. Always. Signor Marchese was methodical in everything he did for Don Francesco Terrasino. And there was something else in the darkness of the pigeon loft that didn't belong: a small LED light casting regular green flashes across the claws of the pigeon.

She closed the hatch, turned to the fields and spotted the first one.

Between the old apple trees. Very slowly, one of the trunks changed shape and became two outlines. The man emerging from the shadow of the tree ran through the long wet grass, in between the trees, and up towards the house.

And out of range of her guns.

She heard Radu cry out from inside the house. Her beloved roared like an animal. The scream was cut short by a noise like an axe hitting a watermelon and the young woman ran silently around the corner, in through the back door and onwards through the living room, though she knew full well they were making Radu scream so that she would come running. She raised the shotgun to her shoulder, rounded the corner to the long passage and shot at the shapeless forms that filled it. There were three of them, but she wasn't sure that she had hit anyone as they vanished like ghosts.

‘Radu!'

His bloody lion's head and upper body lay in the passage. He was naked. He must have dragged himself out of the bed and across the floor when they came. She dropped to her knees a short distance from his face and rested her left shoulder against the whitewashed wall. Her beloved stared at her and his mouth tried to shape a word … a warning. Someone dragged him quickly back into the bedroom by his feet. His hand grabbed the doorframe, but the intruders were too strong and his fingers straightened out and released. He was so far away, so very far. She hit one of the shadows with her next shot. The figure buckled in mid-stride and collapsed at the far end of the passage. She reloaded and fired two quick shots into the dark to keep others out of the passage. She got to her feet and was less than two metres from the bedroom when her husband – fully upright, which he hadn't been for eight years – slowly staggered into her field of view with a red cloud on his temple. Someone had hauled him to his feet and shot him through the head.