The Lost Relic (35 page)

The grins dropped away radically when the guy who’d said it suddenly dived forward in his seat and cracked the table in half with his head. Drink flew. Glasses smashed on the floor.

Ben had hardly felt himself move. He realised he was up on his feet. Tangled in the fingers of his right hand was the big hank of dark hair that had come away from the back of the guy’s head. The guy was face down on the floor, groaning and clutching his bloody face.

There was an instant’s stunned silence; then the whole group were leaping up from their seats and the place erupted in fury. Ben saw a punch coming his way and blocked it instinctively. He moved his arm and saw another guy go flying backwards into the wall. Someone else grabbed a cue from the nearby pool table and came at him swinging it like a bat. Ben ducked backwards and felt the wind of it whoosh a couple of inches past his face. Moving around the side of the pool table he scooped up a ball and as the guy came in for a second swing he dashed it in his face at close range. There was a short scream. The cue clattered to the floor, together with some small white-red objects that Ben realised were teeth.

Nobody else tried to attack him after that. The crowd parted as Ben staggered away and tried to make it as far as the door. Then the bar-room floor came rushing up to meet him, and someone turned out the lights.

When Ben woke up, his first thought was that somebody had decided to pull his brain out through his temple with a blunt corkscrew – until he realised it was just the cruellest, most punishing headache he’d ever known. He groaned, and blinked his eyes to clear away the blurriness in his vision.

He was sitting on some kind of hard bench. He could feel vibrations coming up through his feet and against his spine, where his back was pressed to a hard wall. When he tried to move, he found that his ankles and wrists were secured tight.

That realisation cleared his senses and he opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the unsmiling face of the Portuguese cop sitting opposite him in the back of the police van. The second thing he saw was the short-barrelled shotgun cradled over the cop’s chubby thigh, its muzzle pointed accurately enough at him to blow him in two if he tried anything. Not that he could – he could see now that his wrists and ankles were chained tight to the tubular frame of his bench.

‘Fine,’ he mumbled. ‘Be like that.’ And passed out again.

The Ferris residence

Kensington, London

It was Brewster Blackmore’s voice on the line again, and from his tone it sounded as if he hadn’t called in the middle of the night for nothing.

‘Wait,’ Mason Ferris said. He swung his long, thin legs out of bed, stepped into his slippers and carried the phone out of the master bedroom, out of earshot of Mrs Ferris.

‘Who is it, Mason?’ she murmured sleepily as he left the room. He ignored her, stepped out into the long, broad landing and snicked the bedroom door quietly shut behind him. Moonlight shone in through the house’s high windows. He stood and looked out at the view across London, without really seeing it.

‘It’s after two, Blackmore,’ he said into the phone. ‘Tell me something I want to hear.’

‘Ben Hope’s just been arrested in a village in northeastern Portugal,’ Blackmore said, and Ferris was suddenly much more alert. ‘Local police recognised him after being called out to a bar brawl. He’s being flown back to Rome as we speak, to be treated at Sandro Pertini Hospital before being transferred to Regina Coeli prison.’

‘Hospital?’

‘Gunshot wound to the arm. He managed to get the bullet out and clean himself up. No secondary infections, but he’d lost a lot of blood and there was enough alcohol and codeine in him to kill a horse. We’re lucky we still have him. They want to keep him in for observation for a day or two. That should give us enough time.’

Ferris pondered this latest development for a moment. His plan was back on track. A thin smile traced itself across his lips, then disappeared as his pleasure gave way to darker thoughts.

‘Kane?’ he said.

‘Negative so far,’ Blackmore said. ‘We’ve lost track of her.’

‘Not good enough,’ Ferris said softly.

‘You told me to deal with the Lister situation,’ Blackmore protested. ‘I dealt with it, and I’ll deal with this. I’m doing all I can. For all we know, she’s dead and her body will wash up somewhere down the Seine.’

‘Get it done,’ Ferris told him. He shut off the phone and turned back towards the bedroom.

Sandro Pertini Hospital, Rome

Two days later

It was almost a relief for Ben when the doctors came into his tiny private room early that morning and told him he was going to be moved to the prison pending his first hearing. Two days spent lying in a narrow steel-framed bed hooked up to a drip, with nothing to count the hours go by except for the changing of the guard outside his door, had felt like twenty. Other than the grim-faced police officials who’d come to formally arrest him and read him a long list of charges and rights, two doctors and four different nurses had been his only visitors. The youngest of the nurses, a waiflike thing from the deep south of Italy, seemed mortally terrified of him; while one of the older ones, a steel-haired matron with the heft of a Cape buffalo, gave him looks of such intense hatred that he was worried about being left alone with her in case she tried to inject him with some lethal drug.

So far, he’d managed to stay alive, despite the tasteless boiled vegetables they were feeding him, and some kind of pulpy grey matter that passed for meat. It was like being in the army again.

The whole time, they’d kept him strictly as far away from newspapers and TV as a person could be. He could only imagine the fun the media were having with the arrest of Urbano Tassoni’s murderer. His favourite Italian reporter, Silvana Lucenzi, would be right in the thick of it, playing to the gallery and watching her ratings climb.

‘How are you feeling?’ the doctor asked.

‘Like an innocent man about to go to jail,’ Ben said. ‘How are you?’

The murderous-looking nurse came into the room carrying a bulky paper bag, which she laid on a chair before stomping over to Ben’s bedside and unhooking him from his drip with all the delicacy of a person ripping tail feathers out of a dead turkey. Ben gave her his sweetest smile as she left, then climbed out of bed and picked up the paper bag. Inside were his clothes, cleaned and pressed, and his shoes with the laces removed.

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Foiled again. I was planning to use those laces to throttle everyone on the ward and then escape out of the window.’

The doctor just stared blankly. Ben walked through to his little bathroom, changed out of the hospital gown and dressed. His arm was still a little stiff, but healing up fine now. When he came out again, four armed Carabinieri guards were waiting for him with handcuffs. Ben put out his wrists for the bracelets, and was escorted from the room. More police were outside in the corridor with shotguns. Among their faces was one Ben recognised. Roberto Lario avoided his eye, looked pensive and said nothing.

The guards ushered Ben out of the ward and down a short corridor to a lift. The door whooshed open, and they all piled inside. Ben faced the door, conscious of the loaded and cocked weapons just inches away. His knees were trembling with the thought of what was happening to him, but he was damned if he’d let them see him nervous. As the lift descended towards the ground floor, he turned to the silent Lario.

‘I have to say, I’m disappointed,’ he said. ‘I’d expected Darcey Kane to make an appearance. To thank me in person for letting myself get caught. That’s gratitude.’

Lario looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ he replied softly, as if even that was saying too much. Ben wanted to ask him what he meant; but then the lift bell pinged and the doors slid open. The guards shoved him forwards, and moments later he was being walked out into the pale morning sunlight.

A group of plainclothes police agents and armed Carabinieri were waiting by a pair of police Alfa Romeos and a bulky white prison van staffed by uniformed security staff. The van’s rear doors were open, revealing a stark interior that consisted of two facing steel benches, sheet metal walls and ceiling. No seatbelts. Ben guessed the Italian prison service were concerned about inmates strangling themselves, or each other, in transit. Or maybe they just didn’t care about them getting pulped in an accident. The windows were barred with high-tensile mesh on the inside, black-smoked glass on the outside.

As Ben was marched towards the back of the van he saw there was another cuffed prisoner waiting to be loaded on board with him. It seemed he wasn’t the only bad boy being transported from the hospital. The second prisoner was a stocky, dark-haired guy of about thirty. He didn’t have the look of a hard-boiled criminal. Ben wondered what the guy must have done to deserve being locked up in the back of a mobile cell with a notorious psychopathic killer.

Ben’s travel companion remained sullen and silent as the two prisoners were steered into the back of the van and the doors slammed behind them. It was dark in the back. The steel shell resonated with the growl of the diesel starting up, and then the van pulled away with a lurch. After a moment’s pause at the gates, they drove out into the streets of Rome.

With the doors shut, the inside of the prison van quickly turned into an airless sweatbox under the Rome sun. It was a jarring, jolting ride, and Ben steadied himself as best he could against the bare metal wall, trying to keep his mind blank of thoughts of where they were taking him and the fate that awaited him.

Nobody had even mentioned a lawyer yet. No phone calls, no contact with the outside world. Jeff Dekker at Le Val must be tearing the world apart trying to find out what was going on.

And Brooke . . . she’d know, too. She’d know that Ben had been caught just a few kilometres from her place in Portugal. Would she guess that he knew her secret? That he’d seen her there with . . . with whoever this guy was?

What am I going to do
, Ben asked himself. If he ever got out of this mess, could he even bear to see her again? Did he want to hear what she had to tell him? Should he just try to forget that the last few months had ever happened? He had no answers. He felt lost, and so very alone.

The prison van must have been on the road for some twenty minutes when a sudden violent swerve sent Ben and his travelling companion sprawling across the bare metal seats. Ben was about to say something when he heard the sound of gunfire outside – a ragged string of single shots cracking off somewhere behind the van, followed by a long sustained burst. The two of them dived for the floor as a flurry of percussive impacts clanged against the flank of the vehicle. But Ben quickly sensed that the prison van wasn’t the principal target of whoever was doing the shooting.

The van was suddenly rocked in the shockwave of a huge explosion that was deafening even from inside. Something other than bullets cannoned off its side: flying pieces of whatever it was that had just been blown apart nearby. The van went into a skid, its tyres shrieking as the wheels locked, then hit something solid. With nothing to hold on to, Ben and his companion were hurled forwards, hit the sheet metal partition separating them from the cab, and sprawled to the floor.

A second explosion boomed out. Ben smelled the acrid stink of burning fuel and plastic. They heard the front doors of the van opening, the sounds of men yelling. Then more shots, and yells turned into screams.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the shooting stopped. Ben turned towards the van’s rear doors as he heard running footsteps and more voices. They weren’t Italian.

He hadn’t heard the sound of the Russian language since that day in the art gallery.

The voices were drowned out by a final blast of gunfire from right behind the van, a ripping flurry of bullets chewing through the locks. The doors flew open. Sunlight flooded into the back of the van.

Two men stood framed in the open door, holding stubby black submachine guns. From the cold efficiency in the guy’s eyes, Ben could tell that the one on the left had done this kind of thing before. Ex-military, a gun for hire.

The one on the right, with the buzz-cut hair, who looked as if he’d had his face torn off and stitched back together with a nail and string – he was different. This wasn’t just a job for him. If a shark could smile, it would have contemplated its next meal the way the guy was looking at Ben right now. He jerked the barrel of his
SMG
. ‘Get out,’ he said in guttural English.

Ben guessed it was meant for him. Big surprise. He stood up, keeping his head ducked low, stepped towards the back door and jumped out.

The guy with the scar shouldered his weapon, and before Ben could react, he fired a single shot into the back of the van. The second prisoner’s head exploded in a red mist and he slumped to the metal floor. The scarred guy’s companion unholstered a pistol and aimed it at Ben’s heart. There wasn’t much Ben could do but stare at the scene around him.

What must have been a normal street on the edge of Rome just moments earlier now resembled a scene from Kosovo at the height of the Bosnian war. The two police Alfas that had been escorting the prison van were burning wrecks. One car was lying roofless and twisted on its side, flames pouring out. A charred arm sticking out of the driver’s window was all that remained of the cops inside. The other car was buried under the front of the van, crumpled and blackened like a Coke can tossed in a fire. The bodies of the van driver and prison guards were littered bloodily across the road.

They weren’t alone. Through the smoke, Ben could see at least half a dozen dead passers-by strewn about the pavements, cut down as they went about their business. A taxi was stopped in the road, its horn stuck and blaring. The inside of its shattered windscreen was smeared with blood.

One of the Carabinieri had obviously managed to leap clear of his car before it exploded. Not clear enough. He was crawling pitifully away from the burning wreckage, dragging himself with bloody fingers. His legs were ablaze.