“Okay, we’re still okay,” he whispered.
Twenty feet passed, then thirty. Then more notches.
“Turn the light down the channel.”
Elena did. The rocky cavern went straight for as far as they could see.
“Put it out.”
Immediately Elena snapped the flashlight off, then turned forward and peered into the dark in front of them, praying to see a dot of light that would mean the end of the canal and the way out to the lake. But she saw only blackness. Felt only the same cool damp of the air. Heard the light sound of the oars as Harry moved them forward.
Absently, she crossed herself. This was more of God’s testing. But this time it wasn’t about men or lust but about her own courage, her ability to persist under the most unbearable of situations while at the same time remaining strong and true to the patient in her charge.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” she said under her breath. “I will fear no—”
“Sister Elena—“Salvatore’s voice suddenly echoed out of nowhere.
Elena started. Harry froze where he was, oars out of the water, the skiff drifting forward.
“Salvatore,” Elena whispered.
“Sister Elena—” Salvatore’s voice came again. “It’s all right,” he called in Italian. “I have the boat. Whoever was here is gone.”
The white of Elena’s eyes flashed in the dark as she turned toward Harry, translating what Salvatore had said.
“Sister Elena, where are you?”
Instantly Harry pulled in the oars, then grabbed at the passing wall of rock, slowing the skiff by hand. Stopping it. Then they heard the distant whine and rumble of motors. The boat and whoever was in it was coming up the channel toward them.
84
THOMAS KIND HELD THE EDGE OF THE RAZOR against Salvatore’s throat as the motorboat moved slowly forward, the sound of the outboards echoing off the cavern walls. Behind them, Marta lay on the deck between the cockpit and the motors, blood still oozing from a tiny hole between her eyes.
Salvatore turned slightly to look at Thomas Kind. The right side of the blond man’s face was raked with blood and torn skin where Marta had clawed him when he’d caught them, just as they’d reached the elevator cage. The fight had been short and quick. But she had done damage, and for that alone Salvatore Belsito was extraordinarily proud.
Yet Salvatore was not like his wife. Did not have her bravery or rage. It had been difficult enough for him to do what he had in lying to the police when they had twice invaded Villa Lorenzi. Difficult enough just to come to the grotto to care for the fugitive priest while the nun went in search of his brother. Salvatore Belsito was Villa Lorenzi’s chief gardener, a gentle man who loved his wife and only cared about making things grow. Eros Barbu had given them both a home and jobs for as long as they cared to have them. For that he owed him a great deal. But not his life.
“Once more,” Thomas Kind urged.
Salvatore hesitated, then again called out Elena’s name.
THE STAB OF SALVATORE’S CALL resounded off the granite walls like a sound effect in a suspense movie. It was much louder, and much closer than before. Abruptly it was overridden by the throaty rumble of the outboards as the motorboat picked up speed.
“Go right!” Elena said behind Harry, the slim beam of her light following the marks on the stone walls as they reached an abrupt angle where the tunnel veered sharply right, nearly turning back on itself.
Harry pulled hard on the right oar, cutting the corner tightly. As he did, the left oar caught on the cavern wall and was nearly jerked out of his hand. Cursing under his breath, he recovered, felt the left oar touch water, and they were around.
Putting his back to it, he dug in with everything he had. The skin was raw on his hands, and the sweat ran down his forehead, stinging his eyes. He wished he could stop even for a moment to tear off the clerical collar. Throw it away so he could breathe.
“Sister Elena!!!!!!!”
Salvatore’s cry came again in a rolling echo that followed them down the channel like a pursuing wave.
Suddenly a blinding light illuminated the entire waterway where they had just been like day. Harry could see the shadow of wall they had just come around and guessed they had ten seconds at most before the motorboat came around it too and entered the channel where they were.
Looking around wildly, he saw a canal in front of them that ran straight for almost twenty yards before cutting smartly to the left. There was little or no chance they would make it before the motorboat was around the corner and on top of them. Nor, despite some rugged outcropping of rock that fed into the channel, was there a place to hide.
“Mr. Addison! Look there!” Elena whispered. She was suddenly leaning forward, pointing off.
Ahead, to their left and a dozen yards away, Harry saw what she was pointing at. A dark shadow that might be the entrance to a cave or inlet. Three or four feet high at best, and not much wider. Just big enough—maybe—for the skiff to get through.
Behind them, the growl of the outboards suddenly rose. Harry looked back. The light was getting brighter. Whoever was at the controls was picking up the speed. Throwing his full body weight behind the oars, Harry drove toward the cave.
“We’re going in!” Harry said over his shoulder at Elena. “Climb past me. Make sure his head doesn’t hit.”
Harry stopped rowing for the briefest second, feeling the brush of Elena’s habit as she scrambled over him. Then he dug in again. As he did, the right oar twisted in his hands and came out of the water. The skiff swung sharply left. There was a metallic scrape as it hit the wall, then glanced off and back into the channel. Recovering, he pulled back toward the cave opening.
At the same time, he saw Elena look up to see the sleek prow of the motorboat slide past the outcrop of rock and turn into the channel where they were. Instantly, the powerful beam of the searchlight came around, sweeping mercilessly toward them as the boat turned fully into the waterway.
Harry glanced over his shoulder. They were right at the cave.
“Get down!” he said.
Crouching over, Harry jerked the oars inboard and the prow of the skiff slid into the opening, ceiling and sides clearing by only inches. Then he saw Elena duck, her hand on Danny’s head. The stern slid through and they were inside.
Instantly, Harry was on his back. Grabbing the rock ceiling above them, pulling the skiff forward, hand over hand. Deeper into the cave. A heartbeat later the harsh beam of the searchlight swept past.
Abruptly the outboards throttled down. A half second later he saw the motorboat glide by. A blond man with a stark profile stood in silhouette to the far wall, one hand on the wheel, the other up tight under the throat of Salvatore Belsito. Then they were gone, the light trailing off with them, the boat’s wake washing into the cave.
Immediately Harry put his hands out to the walls on either side to keep the skiff from banging off them. His heart pounding, he raised himself up and listened. One second. Then two. Then he heard the outboards stop. A moment later the wash subsided and everything was silent.
85
THOMAS KIND LET THE BOAT SWING IN A slow arc, bringing it around, letting it come to a stop facing the way they had come, his eyes searching the cavern in front of him—the glistening walls with their jagged outcroppings, the deep green-black water reflecting the illumination from the searchlight in a thousand different directions.
“Sit down…” Slowly he eased the razor from Salvatore’s throat and nodded toward the bench along the gunwale behind him. The look in his captor’s eyes was all the warning the Italian needed, and he did what he was told. Then he crossed his arms and tilted his head toward the irregular ceiling of the cave, letting his gaze fix there, fix anywhere but at the body of his wife at his feet, the body he had put there after Kind had made him carry it from where he had killed her, at the entrance to the elevator.
Thomas Kind glanced back at Salvatore, then reach
ed into his jacket. From it he took a slender, black nylon pouch. Opening it, he took out a small electronic headset. Putting it on, adjusting the earpieces, he clipped a tiny microphone to his jacket collar and plugged the lead wire into a packet at his waist. There was the faintest click, and a tiny red glow rose from the monitor light beneath his fingers. His thumb ran over the volume control, and the sound came up immediately. Everything was amplified. The echo of the tunnel, the crisp lap of water against its walls. Listening intently, he swung the microphone slowly and deliberately across the canal. Wall left to wall right.
He heard nothing.
He panned back. Wall right to wall left.
Still nothing.
Leaning forward, he turned off the searchlight, and the cavern went dark. Then he waited. Twenty seconds. Thirty. A minute.
Again, he swung the microphone. Left to right. And then back. And then back again.
“…wait…
He froze at the sound of Harry Addison’s voice, a whisper. He waited for more.
Nothing.
Ever so slowly, he swung back.
“…without an IV… ,” nursing sister Elena Voso said, her voice low and hushed like the American’s.
They were there. Somewhere in the dark ahead of him.
Villa Lorenzi. Same time.
Roscani squinted in the bright sunlight of Edward Mooi’s bedroom. The tech crew was still working the bathroom. Traces of blood had been found in the sink, the vague outline of a bare foot on the floor.
No one had seen the poet since he had returned to his apartment following Roscani’s early-morning search. None of the staff, none of the dozen carabinieri on posted guard. No one. Mooi, like Eros Barbu’s motorboat, had simply vanished.
Through the window, Roscani could see two of the police boats on the lake. Castelletti was in one, coordinating the search on the water. Scala, a former army commando, had gone ashore with ten mountain-trained carabinieri, and they were walking the shoreline, south from the villa. It was assumed Mooi had not gone north, because that would have led him directly into Bellagio, where he was well known and where there were large numbers of uniformed police. So Scala had chosen the southern course, where coves and dense overgrowth provided cover where a boat could be hidden from view from both the lake and the air.
Turning from the window, Roscani left the room and went out into the hallway just as an aide arrived. Saluting, he handed Roscani a thick envelope, then turned and left. Opening it, Roscani quickly scanned its contents. The cover sheet bore the heading INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL POLICE ORGANIZATION, with the familiar INTERPOL crest directly beneath, while the word URGENTISSIMO had been hand stamped on every page.
The pages were the INTERPOL reply to his request for information on the suspected whereabouts of known terrorists and, separately, the personality profiles of killers still at large and thought to be in Europe.
Pages still in hand, Roscani looked back into the room. Seeing Edward Mooi’s bathrobe where it had been tossed on the bed, seeing the tech people still at work through the open door to the bathroom, he suddenly had the sense they were already too late. His ice picker had already been there.
86
HARRY HEARD THE SCRAPE OF THE HULL against rock in the dark and knew the blond man was working the boat back down the channel by hand, coming toward them. How did he know they were there? How could he be that close in all the miles of underground waterways? From the single glimpse Harry had as the boat passed going upchannel, Salvatore had seemed to be the man’s prisoner, but even if he weren’t, if he were there of his own free will, it would still be next to impossible for him to know where they were. Yet somehow he did. And he was only yards, maybe even feet, from the entrance to their hiding place.
The only thing to their advantage, if they had an advantage at all, was that the outcroppings of rock into the channel made the cave entrance difficult to see. Elena had seen it only because of the angle of the motorboat’s searchlight as it turned into the channel. Without that, it would have appeared as nothing more than a shadow from an outcropping, a darkening above the waterline.
The sound came again. Closer than before. Wood or fiberglass scraping rock. Then again, closer still. Then it stopped, and Harry was certain the boat was directly in front of the entrance, so near that Elena, in the skiff’s stern, could reach out a hand in the pitch black and touch it.
Harry held his breath, his senses electric, every nerve alive, waiting for what would happen next. And he knew Elena was the same, helpless, terrified, praying the boat and the men in it would move on.
THOMAS KIND STOOD SILENT, one hand holding the boat against the granite wall, the other pressing the headset to his ear as he listened. His upper body turned slowly, left to right, and then back, listening, but there was nothing.
Maybe they weren’t here after all. Maybe he had been wrong in staying in this channel. Both the microphone and listening device were extremely sensitive. And the jagged rock walls and flat surface of the water were hard surfaces that acted like huge, multidirectional speakers that bounced sound everywhere. The voices could as easily have come from somewhere else. From the channel he had just left, or the one behind, which he had not yet ventured into.
THERE WAS A SOFT CREAK in the darkness just beyond her, and then Elena felt fresh air waft in from the channel. The motorboat was moving away from the entrance of the cave. The blond man was leaving. She crossed herself in relief, then whispered in the dark.
“He’s gone…”
“Give him a few min—“
Suddenly, a loud, sharp wail echoed from the blackness inches away.
Elena froze where she was. A hand thrown to her mouth in horror.
The wail came again. Longer and louder than before.
“Jesus Christ!” Harry whispered.
Danny was waking.
87
A SHRILL WHINE ECHOED ACROSS THE CAVERN as Thomas Kind touched the starter. The twin two-hundred-and-fifty horsepower Yamahas thundered to life, and the searchlight came on full, swinging in a wide arc across the channel as Kind brought the motorboat’s bow around sharply and roared back the way he had come. As quickly he cut the motors and let the boat drift, playing the light across the cavern walls.
HARRY DUG IN with his hands, grabbing at the rock overhead, pulling the skiff deeper into the recess. Beyond him, over his chest he could see the searchlight swing toward the mouth of the cave. In between, Elena was huddled against Danny on the flattened gurney that lay just below the top of the stern. Whatever sound Danny had made had stopped. He was still and breathing silently as before.
The light swung past the opening and moved on. In that brief second Harry saw more of the cave. It went straight back for another ten or fifteen feet before its height suddenly dropped and it narrowed sharply. There was no way to tell where it went from there. But it was all they had. That was, if the skiff would fit through it.
Thomas Kind swung the light back across the rock outcroppings. All he saw were the shadows where one ended and another began. But he’d heard the cry or whatever it had been. And this time there was no doubt where it had come from, somewhere here, along the wall in this section of the channel.
Now he swung the light back, his eyes intent, the deep scratches Marta had made on his face glistening in its spill.
Behind him, Salvatore sat in a kind of fascinated terror and watched, a spectator at a game. It was who Salvatore was, the most he could be.
There!
Thomas Kind saw it. The low ledge, the dark opening beneath it. Gratification tugged in a cruel smile as he turned the boat toward it.
THERE WAS A LOUD SCRAPE and then a dull bang as the skiff suddenly stopped.
“The flashlight. Quickly,” Harry whispered.
The dull rumble of the outboards grew louder, and the light became appreciably brighter as it danced off the granite walls, moving toward them.
“Here!” Elena leaned toward Harry with the flashlight. Their eyes met
for an instant, and then Harry took it, turning, playing it into the cave behind them.
The skiff had caught up against the passage entrance. With a little maneuvering, it would fit inside it. But after that, who knew? The blond man knew where they were and would stay there, waiting for them to come out. And if they went on, trying to find an exit at the far end…. If there was one…. If not, what then?
Suddenly the beam of the searchlight was full on them.
“GET OVER THE SIDE! NOW!”
Harry threw himself forward and sideways at the same time, felt his hand fill with material from Elena’s habit, pulling her over the gunwale into the water in a hail of automatic-weapon fire.
Shoving her under the surface toward the passageway on the far side of the skiff, he looked back to see the skiff surrounded by the bright yellow-green of water roiling with gunfire. Bullets chewed up the cavern walls around him, whining shrilly off the heavy stern. It was only a matter of moments before they would cut through the thick aluminum and reach Danny.
Ducking under the water, Harry shoved the skiff hard from beneath, trying to turn it, get Danny out of the murderous line of fire.
Lungs bursting, using the underwater wall for leverage, he maneuvered the skiff around, fighting it backward and into the passage. Suddenly it caught against something, throwing Harry backward. He swam back, digging in against the underwater wall, trying to free it.
He couldn’t. His chest was on fire. He had to have air. Pushing off, he came up. Broke the surface full in the beam of the searchlight. For an instant he saw the muzzle flashes. Thought he saw the face of the man behind them. Calm. Unemotional. Firing in short bursts.
Bullets tore past his head, shredding the thin aluminum bow. Half a breath. No more. Harry dove again.
Once more he used the rock for purchase, this time driving against the hull with his shoulder. Still nothing happened. He tried again. Then again. Once more, then he had to have air. This time he felt something give. Lungs exploding, he hit it again. The skiff broke free and jumped forward. He went after it, kept it moving. Then he had to come up.