The Italian Mission (7 page)

“Not sure. Shotgun maybe. The Tuscans are crazy for hunting, but the season doesn’t start until next month. Probably target practice. You notice you don’t hear many birds? They shoot anything in the woods that moves.”

“That’s comforting.”

They walked for a while in silence before Conti spoke again, almost to himself. “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

“Who said that?”

“My ancient relative.”

“President Adams?”

“The second one. John Quincy. When he was my age, he’d already authored the Monroe Doctrine. What have
I
done? Crept around Afghanistan and Iraq spying on radical Imams. In service of a failed policy. Not much to be proud of.”

“You compare yourself to those two? Bound to be a bit disappointing.”

“It’s not that I compare myself to them. But I do want to live up to their memory.” Conti rubbed an ancient signet ring on his right hand, the worn initials JQA barely discernable. “They held to their principles in a flawed world, and the country was better for it. I don’t see how I can expect any less of myself.”

At the end of the vineyard the road petered out into a single track through an oak thicket.

“Thank God,” Jill said. “Not that this conversation isn’t fascinating, but I’ve really got to pee. Wait here. I’m going to find some bushes. Let me know if anyone comes by.”

“O.K., but there are snakes in these hills — vipers.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Not kidding. Did special ops throw in a handgun when they were equipping you for battle?”

“Yeah.” Jill rummaged in her pack and pulled out a Glock 19, a pistol not much bigger than her hand. “They even showed me how to load it.” She reached in deeper, pulled out the loader and began pushing rounds into the magazine.

“Impressive,” Conti said.

“Unfortunately, they didn’t have time to teach me to shoot it.”

“Well, even if you don’t hit the snake, the noise will drive him away.”

“Great.”

As Jill walked away from the path looking for cover, Conti sat on a rock and opened his guide to the
Via Francigena
. Suddenly, a piercing scream echoed through the trees behind him, followed by several gunshots.

10.

The Via Francigena, Siena, Italy,
Tuesday Afternoon

Conti crashed through the underbrush in the general direction Jill had gone, dodging around small stands of oaks, then stopped abruptly. A dead body lay on its stomach in a clearing. Not wearing spandex and camouflage. Not Jill. He almost collapsed in relief.

He knelt down and turned the body over. Chinese. Still grasping a pistol in his dead hand. He barely had time to register these facts before he heard another shot. Conti propped the corpse on its side and hunched down behind it. A second bullet thumped into the body. He lay there for a moment, then leapt up and took cover behind a nearby tree. Two men were running fifty yards down the hill. As they crossed an open field, he got a better view. One of them carried an inert mass over his shoulder. Jill’s red hair hanging straight down, her body limp. Every few steps, the last man turned and took a wild shot back in his direction. Conti watched for a moment, then ran back to the trail. He needed to retrieve whatever other weapons special ops had given her. He found and shouldered her backpack, then rushed back to the clearing.

Although he hadn’t gotten a clear view of their faces, he was reasonably sure they were the same South Africans he’d seen at the Vatican and again on the train. Jill must have stumbled on the aftermath of a confrontation between them and the Chinese. Now that Conti had a few moments to examine the dead man’s pockets, he found a map, binoculars, and a walkie-talkie. The clearing where he’d found the body commanded a good view of the trail as it wound its way north through the hills. The Chinese agent must have been monitoring the trail, on the lookout for the monks. Somehow the South Africans had caught him unawares. But why did they kill him? Who were they working for? He took off down the hill, moving as fast as he could through the brush with the bulky pack slung over his shoulder.

After a hundred yards, he broke out onto a sunlit hillside. Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he scanned the valley in front of him. Golden fields — wheat, he guessed — sloped down on both sides of a dirt road. The trampled path the South Africans had taken led straight to the road, then disappeared. It took only a few minutes for Conti to stumble down the slope where he again picked up their trail, footprints in the dusty track. He loosened the straps of the backpack enough to get both his arms through, pulled them tight again, and set off running in the same direction.

The heat of the midday sun and the heavy pack slowed him to a gasping jog. As he rounded a bend, he saw a panel truck parked a quarter mile ahead. Stepping into the tall wheat stalks, he watched the two men open the back. They rolled Jill’s body in, latched the door, then moved around either side of the truck. The front doors opened and slammed shut again.

He shrugged off the pack and dumped the contents on the ground, quickly finding what he wanted — the miniature sniper’s rifle that special ops had been foresighted enough to include. It came in three pieces. He quickly attached the stock, screwed on the barrel, slid the scope into the groove and shoved a clip into the magazine. Taking careful aim at the rear tire, he held his breath and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. Dabbing the sweat from his eyes, he examined the magazine. Jammed. As he struggled to pull the clip out, the truck spun its wheels and sped away.

11.

Conti slumped against the backpack, exhausted, sweaty and still sucking wind. A faint noise came from somewhere inside the pack. A metallic beeping. He dug through the contents. Several more clips for the rifle, a waterproof parka, two flares, what looked like a burglar’s tool kit, and half a dozen military ration packs. Below that were packages of spare socks and underwear. No wonder she’d labored climbing the steep Tuscan hills. The thing must have weighed fifty pounds. Finally, he got to the bottom and the source of the noise — a small, brushed steel box. Opening the latch, he found a computer screen inside that showed a map of the area. As he watched, a small icon moved across the map. The truck. Thank God for the tech nerds at headquarters. And thank God Jill had brought all this with her. He’d never mock her again.

He stood up, stuffed everything back into the pack and began jogging again down the dirt road. Checking the tracker, he saw that the truck was moving on the outskirts of Siena toward what looked like a small rural settlement, perhaps a farm with several outbuildings. The read-out at the bottom of the screen said that it was 2.8 kilometers away. He could get there in half an hour if he hurried. The South Africans had killed a Chinese agent in cold blood. God knows what they might do to Jill, especially if they found out she was CIA. Hopefully, someone back in Langley had warned her not to carry her government I.D. Still, the South Africans would have ways of finding out her true identity. All they needed was a little time. He picked up the pace, kicking up dust clouds on the deeply rutted road.

Five minutes of this and a sharp pain in his side stopped him cold. Bending over, he waited for the knife to stop twisting in his ribs. Running on a rubber track in nylon shorts was one thing; running through two inches of dust in hiking boots with a fifty-pound pack another. As his panting slowed, he heard the staccato coughing of an engine coming near. A small, three-wheeled truck chugged up the rise behind him. Without Conti having to so much as wave, the old farmer stopped, swung the door open and gestured for him to climb in. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he began to speak in Italian.

“
Gratie, gratie
, I am in a big hurry.”

The old man looked at him and laughed. “Who isn’t these days? I will take you as fast this old machine will go.” He patted the dash affectionately. “My uncle bought it in 1958. Still runs like a top.” Conti saw the vehicle’s insignia on the dash, a
Poggia Ape
. “Yes, the farmer continued, “this will keep going when I am in the ground. I will give it my grandson. My son is a lawyer — useless — but my grandson, he works. Only eighteen and his trees produced four truckloads of peaches this year.”

Conti was half listening as he opened the tracker and checked the position of the South Africans’ truck. It hadn’t moved in the last ten minutes.

“Can you take me to” — he squinted at the small screen — “
Via Santa Caterina
? If it’s out of your way, I can pay. A friend of mine is in trouble, and I need to get there right away.”

The man reached into his breast pocket, took out a half-smoked cigar and, steering with one elbow, lit it. “You are American? Only Americans speak such fancy Italian. Of course I’ll help you. I was in the resistance in World War II, only a young boy but I carried a radio all over the mountains. Sixty kilos. The Americans came just as the Germans were about to pick us up. Otherwise, I’d be dead now.” He laughed, then puffed on the cigar and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. The small engine whined at a higher pitch, but Conti could detect no significant increase in speed.

The farmer dropped him off a quarter mile from where the icon hovered on the GPS display. He walked quickly over a little rise, keeping in the shadows cast by the tall trees lining the road, until he came to a drive that climbed through lush vineyards. The computer screen indicated the truck was less than a hundred yards up the hill, but he couldn’t see it or the farm buildings from where he stood. He avoided the drive, ducking instead under several rows of vines and clambering over the ploughed soil between them, staying low.

The buildings sat among tall plane trees at the top of the hill. The largest building was an ancient farmhouse, its various layers of brick, wooden beams and broken plaster fused together into a unified whole by centuries of sun and wind. Ten yards from the house a Quonset hut squatted, surrounded by a muddy field where half a dozen goats calmly munched on stacks of hay. The panel truck was parked on the other side of the hut. Muffled voices came from inside.

Conti took the sniper’s rifle out of the pack, removed the clip and reinserted it properly. He propped the pack against the backside of a tree and crawled on his belly through the broken slats of a picket fence and behind the row of hay bales toward the hut. The goats watched his progress, chewing their dinner contentedly. When he reached the hut, he pulled himself up on its concrete block foundation until he found a narrow gap between the corrugated steel panels that allowed him to see the interior of the room.

Jill sat strapped in a battered metal chair, eyes closed, head lolling to the side. Her ripped shirt hung around her waist, revealing a sports bra and several ugly red welts on her chest and shoulders. They’d wasted no time in trying to break her. The two South Africans stood nearby, one a short, heavily muscled man and the other thin and gangly with a shaved head. The stocky man flexed his massive arms and approached Jill.

“You better tell us right now who you are and what you were doing in that clearing. Otherwise …,” he grabbed her hair and jerked her head upright. Jill opened her eyes but said nothing. He unleashed a backhanded slap, as vicious as it was unexpected. She still didn’t make a sound, just glared at him, hatred burning in her eyes, crimson blood oozing from her lip.

As Conti searched the wall of the hut for an opening large enough to squeeze through, a car pulled up on the other side of the building. A minute later, a third man with an overgrown Fu Manchu mustache barged through the door. He surveyed the room, then strode over to the two men standing near Jill.