Drummer In the Dark (20 page)

He sat across from this woman whom he had never understood, the rock of his early years. He wondered if it would have been possible to have grown up more like her, had he been older when they came, or known his parents longer. The threat that he might have failed to meet her standards left him so hollow the night breeze off the balcony wafted straight through him. “I don’t remember any of that.”

“No.” She rose to her feet, scarcely looking his way as she crossed the room. As though she finally recognized just how little there was to her brother. “We leave for Wadi Natrum at dawn.”

28

Thursday

T
HREE COBBLESTONE LANES descended away from the Hassler and the Spanish Steps, and at the juncture of two stood Jackie’s café. Thursday morning it was full of light and old men enjoying the springtime freshness. They murmured greetings as she entered, and eyed her appreciatively. The young waiter was already busy preparing her cappuccino. He remained standing there, polishing the bar’s gleaming surface, calling the day
bella
. Finally she opened her
Herald Tribune
in defense, and the waiter retreated.

There were no other English speakers in the café at that hour, so when the voice came from behind it was more startling than the hand on her arm. “Don’t turn around, Ms. Havilland.”

She watched a second hand slip about her other side and set a file upon the counter. Instantly she flattened down her paper, covering the folder. “Who—”

“You wanted information.” The voice whispered an uncertain tenor. “Now you have it. Good-bye.”

All Jackie saw of him was the back of a brilliantined head, a jacket, then nothing. She reached beneath her newspaper and drew out an old-fashioned cardboard folder of forest green. She unwound the string catch and flipped through the documents. She felt another hand then, this one imagined but still capable of gripping her throat and squeezing fiercely.

She glanced around. The café was now filled with Roman statues, men well trained in the art of seeing nothing untoward. Even if she had spoken their tongue, she knew they would not have told her a thing. Jackie scanned the pages again, struggling to fit the answers around the tumult of questions and mysteries.

She flung down a bill, bundled up the folder and paper both, and hurried back into the hotel. Back in her room, she first tried to call Cairo. But what telephone lines there might have been did not open for her. She checked her watch. Three o’clock in the morning, Washington time. Even so, she had to wake Esther Hutchings. But the phone rang and rang.

Jackie booted up her computer, waited impatiently for the internet connection, went straight to the Trastevere site. This time the screen was not blank. As soon as she came on-line, the message shone
Incoming direct coded signal. Will you accept? Go/NoGo
.

Go.

A message drifted out of the white nothingness.
Did your requested data arrive?

She hammered the keys instead of screaming out loud.
WHO ARE YOU?

She watched the message fade, wondering how long she would have to sit and wait this time. Days, she decided, if need be. But the response was as swift as it was strange. No words. Just a cartoon figure of a gondolier paddling a boat.

Jackie watched as over and over the clumsy stick figure came to the brink of falling overboard. And whispered, “Boatman.”

She typed back,
I need more. Can you help?

Every time we connect, it puts us both at risk.

I was told this site was safe.

Lesson one: Nothing is totally secure. Witness this conversation. I tapped into the detective’s request for funds. Others might have done the same. Contact me only in dire emergency.

Like now, she wanted to write, but could not.

When she did not respond, another message appeared.
Have you come across the code name Tsunami?

Negative,
she replied.

Then you are looking in the wrong place
. A momentary fade-out, then the final words bloomed like a poisonous monochrome rose.

Welcome to the war zone.

W
HEN THE CAIRO phone lines remained blocked, Jackie wrote a fax to Wynn, left it at the front desk, then exited the hotel. Across from the Monti church rose a waist-high concrete balustrade carved in Roman arches and curves. She leaned over the barrier and stared down at all the carefree people thronging the Spanish Steps and the Via Condotti. She was utterly alone among lovers exchanging wet kisses and musical endearments. Jackie wished their ardor did not mock her so, or speak of a man she did not know well enough to miss as she did. She felt separated by a lifetime’s distance from all the easy laughter. She raised her face to the sky and whispered the single word “Hayek.”

The detective’s evidence was utterly clear. Valerie Lawry had departed the previous morning at seven-twelve local time from Aeroporto Roma-Fiumicino, a half hour after Wynn’s Cairo flight. She had traveled via private jet leased to Bank Royale, Liechtenstein. The file contained a photocopy of the flight plan. Nonstop trans-Atlantic, destination Orlando. There Lawry had checked into the airport Hyatt. She had placed one call. A copy of the hotel bill showed the call had been to the Hayek Group’s organization.

The data on Hayek himself had been interesting, informative, and old hat. Preston had regaled her with these details and many more. Everyone who had ever worked for the group knew the stories. The prince, the King. The menace.

Jackie raised her eyes to the rooftops. There was no longer any choice. With weary resignation she accepted the inevitable. She would contact the man she had vowed never to see again.

She traced her way back along the cobblestones with a deliberate tread. Spacing out her steps in time to her plotting. It made the future more endurable. First she would see if the hotel operator had managed to connect with Cairo. Then she would book her flight home. Then try Esther Hutchings again. Then check the internet site to ensure that the notoriously fickle federal prison system still held Shane. Wishing there were some way around the move, knowing she had no alternative.

In the moment of dread and indecision, they struck.

Two faceless moped drivers. They appeared in noisy comedy, the most innocuous of Roman sights. Their vehicles were a parody of transport, with narrow wheels and motors that produced more smoke and noise than power. Jackie noticed them only because they came at her together, one from each of streets fronting her café.

She stopped in midstride. Part of her brain realized they were aimed straight for her. Yet she was unable to move. Making the perfect target.

A blow sliced her left shoulder, then a third moped raced by from behind. She spotted the batons held by the other two just as she felt the pain. The third moped driver’s baton came up red and dripping over his head. She knew it was her own blood, knew also in an instant of impacted time that razors were imbedded in the wood. She heard a scream just as she fell to the stones, and heard the whizzing swoop of blows aimed too high, and the roar of motors passing to either side. Jackie could not tell if the scream was her own. But the noise unlocked her fully. That and the pain.

By the time the mopeds slowed and turned, Jackie was up and moving. She took one step toward the hotel, then halted. The plaza seemed freeze-framed as one moped spun around to block the hotel entrance. The driver swiped the air with his baton, the threat enough to throw every person in the plaza up against the closest wall, or into the nearest doorway. All but Jackie.

She raced for the café. Two old men with gaping eyes and toothless mouths bounded like adolescents for the doorway. Her hyperactive senses formed an auditory radar, warning her of another attack racing up from behind. She took a flying leap for the doorway.

The blow meant for her head caught her calf instead, and sent her spinning into the outside tables. Which was not altogether bad, because she slammed one of the metal-topped tables around in front of her, shielding herself from the other moped’s oncoming assault. The baton whanged and the razor zinged across the table’s battered surface. Jackie crouched tightly behind the metal barrier and took a breath. Another. Breathing in not air but fury.

When she heard the mopeds whine through a tight circle, she leaped to her feet and offered them a scream of her own. Knowing it was her voice, yet hearing the cry of some more primitive woman. She hefted the nearest metal chair and took a hard two-fisted aim.

The nearest moped was already committed and racing toward her. The driver was much burlier than the normal teenage moped driver, which granted her a larger, more solid target. Jackie met the baton head on, heard it snap before her chair connected with a padded elbow. It was not her best strike, but she intended to improve on the second go.

Still shrieking one continuous note, she ignored the second baton entirely. She took furious aim straight for the man’s helmet and struck with a crack heard on all seven of Rome’s hills, or so it seemed at the time. Jackie felt the clout in the soles of her feet. The man went careening off the back of the bike. A solid triple. Jackie wheeled about, searching for the third man, wanting to try for a home run.

The square was empty save for two red-soaked batons, one groaning man, an idling moped, and a host of gaping onlookers. Then she heard the racing engine. Not a moped. A car. And knew it was not over yet.

As usual, the hotel limo was parked just around the bend, between the hotel entrance and the church. The same young man who had driven her and Wynn gawked from behind the wheel. Only when Jackie raced across the piazza did she feel the slice in her leg. It slowed her down, but not overmuch. She flung open the back door and vaulted inside. “Drive!”

“Signora, your leg, the blood—”

Through the open door Jackie heard the squeal of rubber and the roar of a hyperstressed engine. “They’re coming!
Drive!
”

Now the young man heard it as well. He put the car into gear and gingerly pulled away. Habit kept him in gentle tourist mode.

That lasted only until the car entered the cobblestone square. It slowed long enough to fling open a door and gather up the moped driver, who was already shouting and pointing toward Jackie and the car.

She reached over, slammed her door shut, and screamed, “
DRIVE!
”

The limo driver floored it just as the approaching car took aim. Jackie flung herself against the opposite side as they were hammered by a silver-gray blur.

The limo driver fishtailed about and took off down the nearest lane. The attackers followed so close Jackie could make out their mustaches bouncing around inside.

Perhaps the young driver had always lived for this moment. Or perhaps it was a latent Italian gene, waiting for the chance to break loose. Whatever the reason, the polite chauffeur was gone. In his place sat Mario Andretti. “
Dové?
”

Jackie bounced around the back seat like a lone pea in a tightly padded can. Leaving bloody stains wherever she hit. “What?”

“
Dové!
Where?”

Only one place came to mind. “Sant’Egidio!”

Having a destination only added fuel to the flame. The driver met an oncoming split in the road by feinting left then flying right. He took the corner too tightly and met the stone angle with an abrasive whine and a shouted curse. He oversteered and whacked the opposing wall. He then avoided by a hair a car that appeared from an invisible intersection. He dove down the increasingly steep incline with a shout of his own.

People shrieked on all sides, jumping with lightning reflexes into doorways and windowsills. Shopping bags flashed across the windshield. Horns blared. Sidewalk tables and chairs leaped into the air at their passage. Barrages of fruit from an overturned stand spilled across the windshield. Sirens. Searing flashes of sheer terror.

They entered the Via Tritoni in a four-wheel skid, slipped under the nose of an incoming bus and threaded through a red light, following a narrow track that was not there. Jackie risked a backward glance. “They’re gone.”

Instantly the driver slowed, pulled into a sudden alcove, and drove sedately around a cobblestone bend. There he halted behind a tinkling fountain, lowered his window, and listened. Nodding once, he rose from the car, and searched in all directions. Nodding a second time, he walked to the fountain and dipped his handkerchief in the water. He returned to the car and handed it over the seat to Jackie. Only then did she realize the backseat was smeared with her blood. As were both side windows, floorboards, roof, door handles, and the rear shelf. Jackie touched her shoulder with one hand, her calf with the other. Suddenly both burned with sticky fire.

“The hospital, miss?”

“Sant’Egidio,” she weakly repeated. “Hurry.”

T
HE GYPSY SELLING roses in the church doorway would not give up her position, not even when Jackie left a bloody handprint where she leaned against the wall. But the Gypsy’s cries brought Anna from within. The young woman’s every movement showed that Jackie was not the first to arrive wounded. She led Jackie around to the side entrance to avoid tracking blood inside the sanctuary, then settled soiled towels about Jackie’s chair and called to others for hot water, hand rags, scissors, and a bottle.

“Here, drink this.”

“What is it?”

“Grappa. So you don’t faint.”

Anna watched as Jackie tasted the fiery liquid and coughed, then winced at how the cough pulled at her wound. “Don’t sip. Drink like medicine. Big swallow. Good.”

“That’s strong.”

“Yes. But now you are not so pale like the linen. Can you move up your arms, up like this, over your head?”

“I don’t think so.”

“No matter. We will cut off your T-shirt. Lean forward.” Anna helped Jackie do so. As she snipped she asked, “Who did this?”

Before Jackie could respond, the hall rang with other voices. Two other women rushed in, one carrying a black bag. There was a swift torrent of Italian, then Anna asked, “Was it a gang?”

“I don’t . . . Ow!” The doctor’s probing fingers retreated. She held a bloody finger up in front of Jackie’s face. The message was clear. Don’t move. Jackie gasped as the fingers resumed their probing of her shoulder, and said, “Three men on mopeds.”

This was also translated. Anna said, “They used clubs with knives, yes?”

“Or razors. Something sharp.”

“Yes, this is the gang’s favorite new toy. Every night the hospitals greet their victims.”