Plague Ship (32 page)

The bus pulled out onto a four-lane road, picking up speed as it approached the Colosseum. Cars zipped by, horns blared, and the occasional rude gesture was thrown out the window by their drivers. The Ducati rode in its wake like a manta ray following a whale.

Eddie flexed his fingers to work some blood back into them as he thought of a way out of this mess. He’d left his cell phone in the suite because Max had been carrying his. A crazy idea popped into his head and, if he hadn’t felt he was running out of time, he would have dismissed it entirely, but he was getting desperate.

A set of spiral stairs at the rear of the bus led Eddie down to the first level. He was relieved that there weren’t many tourists taking this part of the trip. There had been only fifteen people upstairs and just a handful were downstairs. No one paid him any attention as he strode down the aisle. Eddie kept in a crouch as he approached the driver. There was a translator sitting in the front seat, working on her nails with an emery board between her canned speeches from the tour script. Seeing Eddie approach, she set aside her file and smiled brightly. Judging by his appearance, she assumed he was part of her group and asked him something in Japanese.

He ignored her entirely. The driver wore a white shirt, black tie, and a cap more befitting an airline pilot. Eddie was just thankful he had a slender build. In one motion, Eddie grabbed the driver’s right arm and heaved him out of his seat. Seng ducked, as the man rolled across his shoulder, and then straightened quickly, hurling the driver down the couple of steps near the bus’s main door. He hit the door upside down and collapsed in an untidy heap.

The big diesel barely slowed before Eddie was in the driver’s seat, his foot on the gas pedal. The tour guide was screaming, and passengers farther back began to look frightened. Watching the big wing mirrors, Eddie hit the brakes.

Horns immediately erupted all around, and the Ducati shot from around the back of the bus, narrowly avoiding the car that rear-ended the double-decker. The guide wailed at the impact. The bike was hugging the center line, riding the gap between traffic, and Eddie let him travel halfway down the bus’s length before hitting the gas again and swerving left. The bike had nowhere to go. The other lane was bumper-to-bumper. Had he hung back near the rear of the bus, he might have been able to tuck back behind it again, but he had committed himself to the gap. He dropped a gear and wrenched the throttle. The front wheel leapt off the tarmac, as the 1000cc engine shrieked, the rider bending low over the handlebars to reduce air friction and give him a fraction more speed.

He never stood a chance. The bus clipped him ten feet shy of where Eddie was sitting. The Ducati careened into a car in the left lane. The rider was launched over the front of his bike. Limbs flailing, he smashed headfirst into the rear window of the next car in the line of traffic. The safety glass turned into a glittering explosion of diamond chips. Eddie could only hope the helmet saved his life. The collision started a chain reaction of minor accidents behind him that quickly engulfed all four lanes.

Eddie stopped the bus and hit the controls that opened the door. It swung only partially inward, blocked by the unconscious form of the driver. As the adrenaline surge that had sustained Eddie over the past frightening minutes began to ebb, he thought of the Chairman and how he always made some sort of joke at a time like this. It wasn’t Seng’s style.

“Sorry,” he said to the tour guide, and pushed his way out the door.

He looked back at the accident. The road was blocked from curb to curb with damaged cars. Drivers were out of their vehicles now, shouting and gesturing as only Italians can. He was about to turn on to a side street when a sedan smashed through the wreckage like a charging battle tank. Two men dove out of the way as their cars were crushed up against other vehicles. The sedan barely slowed, its front end mangled and its driver and passenger invisible for a moment behind their inflated air bags.

Eddie knew they were coming for him.

He ran back onto the bus, clipping the slowly rising driver behind the ear to keep him down. The pretty tour guide screamed when she saw him jump into the driver’s seat again, jabbering at him in Italian so fast that the words blended into one long, continuous sound.

He slammed the automatic transmission into gear. The bus took off with a lurch that sent the few passengers who’d gotten out of their seats sprawling.

Cranking the wheel one-handed, to keep the bus on the road ringing the Colosseum, Eddie grabbed the PA system microphone dangling over his right shoulder. He shouted, “Everybody! Upstairs! Now!”

The handful of terrified tourists rushed to the rear of the bus, jamming the stairs in their effort to follow his order. Eddie kept his eye on the rearview mirror as the red sedan, a Fiat Bravo, he thought, bulled its way through the congestion in pursuit. It roared up alongside the bus. Eddie could see three men inside. The front passenger’s hands were below the doorsill, but he spotted a weapon cradled in the arms of the man in the rear seat.

The man in back thrust the barrel of an assault rifle through the window and sprayed the side of the bus. Glass exploded as the rounds found their mark, and seat stuffing was blown into the air like confetti. Eddie swerved into the car, forcing it back once again, while the shrieks of the passengers upstairs grew to a fevered pitch.

Turning even tighter to avoid a stalled lane of traffic, Eddie felt the bus go light on its inside wheels as centrifugal force made the vehicle want to roll over. He edged the steering wheel slightly, and the heavy bus mashed back down on its suspension, rocking precariously. The road straightened out as they completed their sweep around the Colosseum and headed northeast. On either side of the road, the new blended with the ancient, as they raced past office blocks, churches, and ruined temples. The Fiat tried to pass the bus again, and Eddie swerved, feeling the satisfying crunch of metal.

Accelerating past fifty miles per hour, Eddie thought that he had damaged the sedan more than he’d thought, because they didn’t try to pass him again. That’s when he heard the hammering crack of an automatic rifle. Despite the bus’s size, he could feel the weight of shots through the chassis. They were firing at the engine in the rear, hoping to disable the vehicle and gun Eddie down at their leisure.

Ahead, Eddie could see what he could only describe as a giant wedding cake. The building was massive, constructed entirely of marble, and seemed to loom over the area. He dimly recalled from somewhere that this was the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the ruler who united all the Italian states into the modern nation it was today. The pomposity of the architecture was made worse by the sheer size of the building, its columns and steps making it look more like an enormous set of dentures than a memorial to a great leader.

The road swept around to the left, revealing a huge bronze statue of Victor on horseback. With the sun beginning to set, tourists and backpackers still lounged on the marble steps, sipping drinks sold by vendors from carts.

Another barrage pummeled the back of the bus, and the tourists outside started to scatter like startled birds.

Eddie knew it was only a matter of time before they hit something critical or that he’d run into a police roadblock. The distant sound of sirens blaring was drawing closer by the second. A sign said he was on the VIA DEI FORI IMPERIALI, not that it meant anything to him. The road was broad, by Roman standards, and too open for Eddie’s tastes. It divided ahead, next to an open parking area filled with buses much like the one he’d commandeered.

He veered left down a street hemmed in by four- and five-story brick buildings. The storefronts offered everything from leather goods to electronics to exotic pets. But it was still too wide for what Eddie had in mind. Brake lights suddenly flared in front of the bus as traffic came to a crawl. Eddie pounded on the horn, and he steered the bus onto the curb. The sidewalk wasn’t nearly wide enough for the large vehicle. As he made his way down the cobbled walkway, the bus mowed down parking meters like wheat before a combine and shouldered aside automobiles amid a cacophony of car alarms and shouts.

The bus plowed through the outside displays of a tourist shop, sending up a blizzard of brightly colored postcards and what Eddie thought, for one terrifying moment, was the body of a woman, but it turned out to be a mannequin displaying a T-shirt. The right-side mirror was ripped off when the bus scraped against a building.

He burst out onto an intersection. Cars screeched all around him, as Eddie guided the bus toward a narrow lane that was more of a trench cut between buildings than a road. There were cars going into the alley but not emerging from it.

Kovac’s men fired at the bus again, having replaced spent magazines. The gas pedal suddenly felt mushy under Eddie’s foot, and in the undamaged left-side mirror he could see smoke erupting from the back of the bus.

“Come on, baby, fifty more yards.”

The engine coughed and caught again and again, sputtering and surging in its death throes. Eddie reached for the microphone, as the gap between the buildings grew closer but not larger.

“Everybody, brace yourselves.”

Eddie sensed the engine about to let go, so he slipped the transmission into neutral and coasted the last thirty feet. Behind him, he heard the motor seize, in a tearing of metal that would have lanced Max’s engineer heart.

The bus entered the dim alley with barely five inches of clearance on either side. The remaining left mirror was sheared off. Eddie saw that the road constricted even further just ahead, because one apartment building was slightly larger than its neighbors. He hit the brakes an instant before the bus struck the building, bounced back, and smeared against the opposite apartments, before becoming completely jammed. The impact caused a fresh wave of frightened screams from above, but Eddie could tell by how quickly the sound faded that no one had been hurt.

A large red fire extinguisher was clipped just below his legs. He popped it free and smashed it into the windshield. The glass starred but didn’t break. He hit the windshield again and again until he’d opened a man-size hole. He jumped though it, setting a hand on the warm asphalt when he landed to steady himself before taking off at a run. When he looked back, he could see dense smoke boiling from behind the bus. Kovac’s men couldn’t climb over the vehicle, so they would have to backtrack around the apartment block, provided they weren’t boxed in by other cars who’d followed them into the alley.

He rounded the corner and slowed to a normal pedestrian gait, blending in with the flow of people headed home from their offices or out to dinner with their families. A minute later, he heard car tires screeching as he ducked into a taxi. The cab pulled away as the Fiat Bravo braked in front of the alley. He’d lost them.

A few minutes later, he threw some Euros at the driver and jumped out of the vehicle while it was stalled in traffic. He bought a prepaid disposable cell phone from a tobacco stand. Eddie walked into a crowded bar, ordered a beer from the girl behind the counter, and dialed the hotel. The staff was still buzzing about the man who’d climbed down the balconies, so it took him a few minutes to explain that gunmen had broken into his room. The reception-desk staffer promised to call the
polizia
. Eddie gave him his cell number.

Fifteen minutes later, Eddie’s beer gone, his phone chirped.

“Mr. Kwan?” That was the alias they’d used to book the suite.

“Yes.”

“Our desk manager entered your room with the police. There was a man in your suite named Jenner with a cut to the head,” the clerk said apologetically. “They would like you to return here to get your information, a statement, I think you call it. They have many questions about what took place and about an incident that happened nearby.”

“Of course, I’ll be happy to cooperate with the authorities. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kwan.”

“Thank you.” Eddie dialed another number. When it was answered, he said, without preamble, “Tiny, file a flight plan out of the country. I’ll be there as quickly as I can.”

He didn’t wait for the pilot’s reply before cutting the connection and dialing again. As he listened to the ringing over the line, he knew that there was no way Kovac would remain in the city—or in Italy, for that matter—so there was no reason for him to wait around for the police to pick him up.

“Hello.”

“Chairman, it’s Eddie. Kovac has kidnapped Max.”

A heartbeat passed before Juan responded. “What about his son, Kyle?”

“I think the little punk was in on it.”

CHAPTER 20

“HOLD ON ONE SECOND,” CABRILLO SAID, GETTING his mind around the situation.

He was alone in his cabin. His desk was strewn with paperwork that had gone ignored too long. He hit the intercom button for the communications station in the Op Center.

“Yes, Chairman,” the night-duty supervisor answered at once.

“What’s the status of Max Hanley’s radio ID chip?”

Each member of the Corporation had a locator microchip surgically embedded in the leg that beamed a faint signal to the constellation of communications satellites circling the globe. Powered by the nervous system, with an occasional transdermal boost of electricity like with a pacemaker, the devices allowed Juan to know where any member of his team was at all times.

“I’m not getting a signal. Hold on. Here we go. The computer says his transponder stopped working eleven minutes ago, about two miles from the hotel where he was staying with his son. Eddie’s is working fine. I show him in central Rome, about a quarter mile from the Colosseum.”

“Thank you.” Juan released the intercom and spoke into his desk telephone, a modern instrument disguised to look like a Bakelite phone from the 1930s. “Max’s transponder’s out.”