Library of Gold (23 page)

Judd’s nose burned. “The Cloaca can’t be far ahead.”

“We cannot go into the Cloaca,” Roberto said nervously. “Let us turn back.”

“Not just yet—”

But before he could finish his sentence, the professor screamed. His arms lashed up over his head, and his feet flew out from under him. He twisted, his hands scrambling against the rough dirt wall, seeking purchase as his feet dropped into the water. If the stream were fast and deep enough, it would carry him into the big sewer.

Before Judd could jump in to help, Eva grabbed the professor’s arm. “I’ve got you.”

The current caught the professor’s legs. He was being pulled away.

“Face the bank, Yitzhak,” Judd ordered. He leaned out to peer around Bash and Roberto. “See if your knees can find a slope.”

“You can do it!” Eva’s hands were white from tension. Her jaw muscles bunched as she held on to him.

Sweat coated Yitzhak’s bald head as he turned slowly away from the current until he faced Eva. His free hand grabbed her arm, and he curved his back and hunched his hips.

“Come on. Come on.” She was bent nearly double, her profile strained, as she held on to him with both hands.

Yitzhak grunted and lifted one knee out of the water, then the other. As less water dragged at him, she helped him inch upward. Finally he was out. With a shudder, he planted his feet on the narrow shelf, standing between Eva and Roberto.

“You are in one piece, Yitzhak?” Roberto asked, patting his shoulder and back.

He peered down at his trousers, now laminated to his legs. Water streamed out of his shoes.

“Right as rain.” He gave a sober smile. “Thank you, Eva.”

“What made you slip, Yitzhak?” Judd said. “Check around your feet. What do you see?”

There was a pause. “You’re right. Here’s the top of a skull. I didn’t see it before. It must’ve been hidden under the mud.”

“Are there more skulls?” Eva slid her foot along the ledge, moving the muck away.

“I’ve found another one,” the professor announced.

“So have I,” Eva said.

The professor shone his flashlight along the cave wall above them, then ran the beam back and forth, lower and lower until he reached the wall’s intersection with the bank.

“Here’s a small opening.” He crouched and aimed his flashlight into it.

“What’s in there?” Eva squatted beside him.

“I can’t tell. Help me dig, Eva.”

“We’ll do it,” Judd told them. “Come on, Bash.”

The others moved ahead, and Bash sat on his heels in front of the hole. He plowed the nose of his skateboard into the wet dirt, scooping piles of it back onto the ledge, where Judd slid the dirt into the stream. They continued a half hour, taking turns until the hole was three feet in diameter and formed a tunnel two feet deep. A scent of musty age wafted toward them.

Judd beamed his flashlight into the small passageway and crawled through. Standing erect, he inhaled sharply as he shot his light around. He had entered a gray world of the dead. Age-bleached skulls pinioned one on top of another blanketed the walls from the floor to the vault ceiling.

He moved into the center of the large crypt and turned, continuing to shoot his flashlight over the eerie scene. It was like a macabre carnival. Skulls arched around nooks, framing stone walls on which faded crosses and religious symbols had been painted. Full skeletons dressed in tattered brown monk robes reclined on stone benches as if awaiting the call to prayer.

“My God.” Eva took a deep breath as she walked up to him. “The only time I’ve seen an ossuary like this was in a history magazine.”

“It’s impossible to know what Rome’s underground has in store.” The professor joined them, supporting Roberto. “Buried passageways, latrines, aqueducts, catacombs, fire-houses, access tunnels—and that’s just the beginning. It looks to me as if this crypt belonged to the Capuchin order. That means some of the bones could date back five centuries.”

“There’s got to be thousands of them,” Bash decided. “But how in hell do we get out of here?” Beneath his shorts, his bare knees were coated in mud—but then, all of them were muddy now.

“I’m hoping that way.” Judd aimed his flashlight at the end of the room, where a tall arch of skulls wreathed worn stone steps leading upward. “Roberto, do you want Bash to carry you up?”

Roberto pushed himself away from Yitzhak. “I will do it myself.”

Judd nodded, and he led them past mounds of bones and up a stone stairwell, where more crosses and religious symbols were painted. As they turned the corner of a landing, the wall above their heads displayed pelvic bones arranged like angel’s wings.

He stopped, listening to Roberto’s panting breath behind. He turned. “Carry him, Bash.”

Before Roberto could object, Bash handed his skateboard to Eva and swept the small man up into his arms. “Combat victims get special treatment. Hey, it’s a free ride.”

Roberto looked up into the muscular young face. “This is not an unpleasant fate. Thank you.”

Finally they reached the top, where an ornate iron door blocked their path. Judd peered through the grillwork—there was another stairwell on the far side, this time of modern cement.

“I hear traffic,” Eva said, excited.

Judd tried the door. “Locked, of course.” They were silent, and he could feel their exhaustion. “I seem to be shooting out a lot of locks these days.”

Telling them to stand back, he screwed his sound suppressor onto his Beretta and fired. Metal dust spewed into the still air. The popping noise bounced off the stone walls.

He pushed open the door and gazed up. “Blue sky.”

“Hallelujah,” Eva said.

They resumed climbing, Judd still leading. As he neared the top, he stopped and rose up to see. They had emerged into a ruins of toppled columns, slabs of travertine, and chunks of granite scattered among dirt and weeds between two ancient buildings. Behind the area was another old building. A commercial chain-link fence blocked the ruins from the sidewalk and street.

He turned back. Their expressions were expectant as they stood beneath him in the stairwell. “I don’t know exactly where we are. At least it’s an open area. All of us are dirty, but it’s the blood that’ll draw the kind of attention we don’t want. That means you—Eva and Roberto.”

In seconds, Eva was out of her jacket. Her green shirt was clean. As she turned the jacket inside out and tied the arms around her waist, Bash lowered Roberto onto his feet. Judd studied him. He was standing erect, but his skin color was slightly pink, perhaps feverish. The handkerchief was gone from his shoulder, lost somewhere along the way. Blood coated his white shirt. Gingerly he unbuttoned it.

“Bash, give Roberto your T-shirt,” Judd decided.

Bash took off his jacket and peeled the black T-shirt up over his head.

Judd checked Roberto’s gunshot wound, a ragged slash through the top of his shoulder.

“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “Probably hurts like hell, though.”

“The pain is a small matter. We are free.” Roberto stood motionless as Yitzhak tugged the T-shirt down over his head.

“Take the professor and Roberto,” Judd told Bash. “Eva and I’ll wait until you’re gone. You’ll have to break through a chain-link gate to get out of here.”

Bash grinned. “After this . . . a piece of cake.”

“So now we leave you.” The professor smiled at Eva. He was wet and bedraggled, but his optimistic disposition shone through. “Be well, and even though I don’t understand anything that’s happened, my heartfelt thanks.” He hugged her, then shook hands with Judd. “We’ve had an adventure. Next time we meet, I hope it’ll be boring.”

Roberto kissed Eva on both cheeks. “You must stay in touch.”

“I will,” she promised.

Finally Judd and Bash faced each other. “There’s no way the Charboniers should’ve known we were going to Yitzhak’s house,” Judd told him, choosing his words carefully. “I’ll call our mutual friend and fill him in. We have a leak somewhere.”

The young spy nodded soberly, and they shook hands. Then he led Roberto and Yitzhak up the steps into the ruins.

Eva joined Judd, and they climbed so they could watch the trio approach the fence. Bash looked around. When there was no one on the sidewalk, he used his skateboard to smash open the padlock. Soon they were out the gate and walking away, the tall young man and his two older charges.

“We have to assume the Library of Gold people have figured out who you are now, too,” she told him. “So we can’t use your credit cards, and obviously we can’t use mine. It’s a long hitchhike to Istanbul.”

“I have an extra set of ID on me. I’ll buy the tickets. What’s worrying me is whether they’ll follow us to Istanbul.”

33

As vehicles sped past, tail lights streaming red, Preston waited impatiently outside the terminal of Ciampino International Airport, Rome’s second-largest. He had chosen it because it was closer to the city’s heart and therefore more efficient. Efficiency mattered particularly now—the report from his man in Rome had been bad. Angelo and Odile Charbonier had been shot to death, while Judd Ryder, Eva Blake, Yitzhak Law, and Roberto Cavaletti had vanished. In a foul mood, he checked his watch—eight
P.M.

When a long black van pulled up, he slid open the side door and stepped inside. The car entered the airport traffic, and he crouched in the rear beside the corpses. He lifted the blanket: Angelo Charbonier’s face was angry in death. Odile’s head was coated with dried blood and splintered bone.

He crawled forward to the half-seat behind the driver. “Took you long enough to get here.”

Nico Bustamante, still dressed in his gray sweat suit, was behind the wheel. A big barrel of a man, he swore in Italian, then spoke in English. “What did you expect? I told you we had a rotten mess to clean up.”

In the seat next to him, Vittorio nodded. Slender, with a wiry build, he had changed out of his tricolor jogging clothes into jeans and a denim shirt.

“Tell me again exactly what you found,” Preston ordered.

“Signore and Signora Charbonier, both murdered in the kitchen,” Nico said. “We searched the house. No one was there, and we did not find any hidden exits. The targets did not leave through the front door. I know this because I posted men at both ends of the street. And they did not leave through the rear—we were there.”

“It was as if they evaporated into the world of souls.” Vittorio crossed himself.

As they stopped at a traffic light, Preston said, “What about when you cleaned up the kitchen?”

“There was just the usual junk in the trash—I say this because I know you will ask. The only piece that was strange was blood splatters too far away from the
signore
and
signora
to be theirs.”

“So someone else was injured. Tell your people to check the neighbors, the hospitals, and the police.”

Taking out his cell phone, Nico drove the van onto the congested Via Appia Nuova.

As Nico made the call, Preston said to Vittorio, “What about the Charboniers?”

“It is all arranged. A yacht rented in their name is waiting at Ostia Antica.”

Ostia Antica was Rome’s ancient seaport, where the Tiber River flowed into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Today the town was little more than a bookshop, a café, a tiny museum, and mosaic-filled ruins, but it was appropriate for the Charboniers: Ovid’s play
Medea
had premiered in its amphitheater some two thousand years ago and was now lost—except to the Library of Gold.

“And then?” Preston prompted.

“We will put the
signore
and
signora
onto the yacht, sail it far out into the Mediterranean, steal everything—and abandon it. It will seem as if pirates attacked and robbed them.”

“You have their suitcases?”

“Of course. We got them from the hotel, and paid the bill, too.”

Preston nodded, satisfied. Now he had a larger problem: Where had Blake, Ryder, Law, and Cavaletti gone?

As the van headed toward Ostia Antica, he considered everything he knew. It seemed as if at least one of the four was wounded, but not so badly he or she could not escape. He needed the Rome operatives to find all of them. He thought about Charles’s tattoo—the security staff had torn apart his and Robin Miller’s offices and the cottage they shared, but had found nothing about it or any records of the library’s location. The tattoo reminded him of the director—by now he was on the jet with Robin Miller. If the director learned anything from her, he would phone.

As he thought that, his cell rang. “Yes?”

It was his NSA contact. “Your person of interest has turned on her cell and made three calls from Rome.”

“From where exactly?” Preston felt a burst of hope. It was Eva Blake’s cell phone—he had found the number on Peggy Doty’s cell after he had wiped her in London.

“Fiumicino airport.”

He cursed. It was the other airport, and too far away to reach quickly. “Whom was she calling?”

“Adem Abdullah, Direnc Pastor, and Andrew Yakimovich. I can give you the phone numbers she dialed. All were to Istanbul. Two have accompanying addresses.”

“Did you listen to the conversations?”

“You know better than that, Preston. That far I can’t go—even for you.”

“Whom did she dial first?”

“Yakimovich. It was short, less than a minute—a disconnected number. The two other calls were five and eight minutes.”

“What are their numbers and addresses?” He wrote the information in the small pocket notebook he always carried. When he no longer needed a note, he tore it out and destroyed it. There were few pages left. “Thanks, Irene. She’ll have to turn off her cell phone while she’s in the air. When she activates it again, whether she phones out or not, tell me. I need to know exactly where she is.” NSA could pinpoint locations within inches, depending on which satellite was in orbit. He ended the connection and looked at Nico. “Turn the van around. Take me back to Ciampino.” He would charter another jet and beat them to Istanbul.

34

Washington, D.C.

It was late afternoon, the shadows long across Capitol Hill, as Tucker Andersen stood at the front door to Catapult headquarters and gazed out longingly. He was tired of being cooped up. A young officer from OTS at Langley was standing on the porch, holding a small package wrapped in brown paper. His expression was one of being properly impressed at meeting the storied spymaster.