Written in the Blood (34 page)

She scowled at the two men edging towards her and opened her arms in invitation.

As Leah ran back along the first-floor hall to the map room where she’d left Soraya, she heard the bell in Villa del Osservatore’s watchtower begin to toll. Someone else, at least, had realised they were under attack.

She burst into the room.

Soraya twisted towards her, face pale. Through the window Leah saw that the
hosszú életek
alighting from the two vessels at the dock had grown in number. An advance party was climbing the stone staircase to the lower terrace.

On the lawn outside the music room, the children dropped their bats and balls. They fled towards the house.

‘It’s a coup, isn’t it?’ Soraya asked. ‘They’ve found out about us.’

Leah only nodded.

They ran into the hall, skidding and sliding along the marble floor until they reached a staircase. No time to check what lay at the bottom. Together they flew down it.

Perhaps they wouldn’t kill everyone, she thought. Apart from Soraya, none of the mothers in the building was
kirekesztett
. But her friend’s life, should she be captured, would almost certainly be forfeit. And what about the children?

Don’t think. Act.

Down the last few stairs. Into a foyer with four huge doors, three of them closed. She saw Soraya hurrying to keep up, hands cradling her belly. Heard voices, growing closer.

Leah threw open the music-room door, waiting until Soraya rushed across the threshold before slamming it shut and locking it.

One of the mothers in the room, Ara Schulteisz, had shepherded the last of the children inside. Now she began to lock each of the six doors that opened onto the loggia.

It wouldn’t help them. They were mostly constructed from glass.

Outside, Leah saw eight grim-faced
hosszú életek
crossing the lawn. She cast her eyes around the room. The children old enough to know that death approached stared at her, faces hollow. Even those too young to understand had sensed the growing panic. Two of them began to cry.

She took in their faces: the brothers, Emánuel and Levi; twins Carina and Philipp; Pia and her younger brother Alex; Dávid, Lícia and Tünde; cradled to Flóra’s breast, tiny Elias.

Ten young lives. Not, by any stretch, all of the children from Calw. Catharina had set up a second residence on the shore of Lake Maggiore. Others, too. Leah did not want to think about what might be happening there. The possibility that the
tanács
remained ignorant of their existence was slight.

Along with herself and Soraya, she counted four other adults, mothers all: Kata Lendvai, Ara Schulteisz, Lidia Montigny and Flóra Glaus.

‘What do we do?’ Flóra asked. ‘We can’t stop them.’

‘But we might be able to get the children out. Close the drapes. They know we’re surrounded. I don’t think they’ll hurry.’

Leah went to a door behind one of the concert grands and yanked it open, revealing a servant’s corridor, narrow and dark. From that lightless avenue, most of the villa’s ground-floor rooms were served. To the children, she said, ‘We’re going to play a game. Who wants to do that? Yes? Then all of you, in here.’

The four mothers helped her coax the children through. ‘That’s it,’ one of them called, her voice hitching. ‘Quickly now. Do as Leah asks.’

In the far wall, the handle of the locked interior door began to turn. Leah heard voices behind it.

Six of the children had filed into the passage. Two stood on the threshold.

‘We can’t all go,’ Flóra said. ‘And I’ll slow you down.’ She held out her son to Soraya. ‘Please. Take Elias for me.’

Soraya’s face crumpled. She gathered the boy into her arms. Elias struggled away from her, reaching for his mother.

Flóra kissed his head. ‘Go,
kicsikém
. Soraya will keep you safe.’

The handles on the loggia doors began to rattle.

Leah pushed the last two children into the passage. She picked up Tünde, one of the youngest, and turned to the mothers. ‘Come on. Before it’s too late.’

But they were shaking their heads. ‘You’ve a better chance alone,’ Kata Lendvai said. She smiled, tears on her cheeks. ‘And I’m not leaving Flóra.’

‘You can’t just—’

‘
Go
, Leah. Now.’

Heart aching at their bravery, she stepped into the passage and flicked on a wall switch. Four dim bulbs winked on along the ceiling. The door slammed shut behind her. From the other side, she heard glass breaking.

Leah squeezed past Soraya and the children until she was at the front. ‘Everyone stay close. Keep your eyes on me. Let’s go.’

When the boats had arrived at the dock, the
Főnök
had been in the villa’s library, in council with members of her
Belső
Ő
r
. The
hosszú életek
leader might still be there.

The door that served the library was up ahead. Leah led the children towards it. Pressing a finger to her lips, she urged them to be as quiet as they could. She placed her ear to the wood, straining to hear anything from the room beyond.

Commotion behind them. The music-room door crashed open, filling the passage with light.

A man shouted.

Knowing they had no time left, Leah burst into the library. leading the children after her. As soon as everyone was through, she slammed the door and used a key to secure it.

‘Lock the entrance!’ she shouted to Soraya. She gazed around the room for something to brace the door from which they’d emerged, which was when she saw the carnage.

At the far end of the library, a table and three chairs had been overturned. On the floor nearby lay a man’s corpse. His throat had been cut. Chips of crushed ice were melting into the blood pooled around him. A few yards away, Catharina Maria-Magdalena Szöllösi lay on her back. Her eyes were open.

In death, the woman wore an expression of savagery such that Leah had never seen. She was wreathed in blood, her body pierced and slashed. Another man lay dead beside her. Against the fireplace slumped one of her
Belső
Ő
r
, his hands twitching as he tried to close the wounds puncturing his chest.

Catharina’s adviser, Ányos Szilágyi, sat on the floor by the window, back resting against the drapes. His breath whistled in his mouth, around a
déjnin
blade buried up to its hilt.

Leah felt her scalp shrinking. So much death. She turned to the children, hopeful they had not seen what waited for them, but they stood in a circle, mouths hanging open. ‘Eyes on the ceiling, all of you,’ she ordered. Then, when they didn’t respond, ‘
Do as I say!
’

To her left stood a mahogany coffer covered with antique navigation instruments. Sweeping them to the floor, she dragged the chest across the locked servants’ entrance.

Soraya lowered Elias to the floor. The woman rushed to the library’s main door, a thick slab of centuries-old hardwood, and twisted the key.

At the room’s far end the two wounded men stared, and Leah saw, in their eyes, that they had been the cause, rather than the intended victims, of this slaughter.

Soraya seemed to see it, too.

‘Don’t let the children watch,’ she said, bearing down on the
Belső
Ő
r
guard by the fireplace. He kicked his legs, trying to worm away from her.

‘Everyone’s eyes back to the ceiling,’ Leah urged. ‘Now!’

Soraya reached the man and knocked him onto his side. Teeth bared, she grabbed his head and wrenched it around, snapping his neck. Turning, she stalked towards Ányos Szilágyi. His eyes widened as she approached, reaching up blood-soaked hands to fend her off.

Something slammed against the door to the servants’ passage, rattling it in its frame. Leah heard voices outside the main library entrance. Its handle jinked back and forth.

By the curtains, Ányos Szilágyi crabbed backwards. Soraya planted a foot against his chest and pushed him onto his back. His head smacked down on the floorboards and he coughed, a dark mist of blood.

Bending, Soraya gripped the handle of the
déjnin
knife protruding from his mouth. Leah turned away, but she heard the sound that followed, and nearly gagged.

The library door shuddered as something heavy hit it from the other side. In the far wall, the door to the servants’ passage began to reverberate. The children backed into a tight group.

Soraya wiped her forehead, leaving a streak of blood. Her eyes, when she found Leah’s, were flat. ‘We’re trapped,’ she said. ‘It’s over.’

C
HAPTER
36

Villa del Osservatore, Italy

A
s his Range Rover accelerated up the hill towards Villa del Osservatore, Ivan Tóth drummed his fingers on the rear seat’s armrest. Beside him, Joó was shouting into his phone. Tóth could only hear one side of the conversation, but it didn’t sound good.

Behind them a convoy of cars, containing the remaining five members of his
tanács
, followed them up the slope.

‘Is it secure?’ Joó snapped, fingers tight around his phone. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’ He paused. ‘Well,
find
them. Yes, we’re almost here. He’s beside me.’

When Joó hung up, Tóth said, ‘Tell me.’

‘Catharina’s dead. Ányos, too.’

‘Ányos? How the hell—’

‘I don’t know! Something went wrong. I told you I should have been there.’

‘You had to stay away. Politically—’

‘
Politically?
How do you think
this
is going to play out, politically?’

Tóth bit down on the retort he’d been about to deliver. Never before had Joó addressed him so abruptly. More disturbingly, he’d never seen his
tanács
colleague agitated like this.

‘It’s a disaster,’ Joó muttered. ‘That’s what it is.’

The Range Rover pulled onto Villa del Osservatore’s private drive, swept through the gatehouse and past two
Belső
Ő
r.
The guardsmen’s faces were grim, eyes dark. Even from inside the car’s muted cabin, Tóth could hear the villa’s watchtower bell pealing out its warning. ‘What else?’

‘Leah Wilde hasn’t been found. Nor the children.’

‘But they were
there
. They—’

‘I know! But with Ányos dead, there’s no one to lead.’

Their car slid to a stop in a rain of gravel. Tóth recognised Victor Makovecz, one of Ányos’s lieutenants, waiting for them outside the villa.

Throwing open his door, he jumped out. ‘I hear you lost them,’ he said, striding towards the entrance.

Makovecz stiffened. ‘I’m not sure you should go in there while—’

‘You try and stop me,’ Tóth hissed.

Inside the library, shocked by the two swift executions her friend had performed, Leah turned to Soraya and shook her head. ‘No, there’s a way. If we hurry.’ She strode across the room. ‘Children, I need you all to stand back.’

As her charges retreated, Leah crouched down in front of the blood-sodden rug covering the floor. She began to roll it up, grimacing at the fluids that oozed from its fibres. Quickly, she revealed a trapdoor cut into the polished floorboards. A recessed iron ring lay at its centre.

Catherina’s mother had shown Leah the hidden exit years earlier, during a tour of the grounds. ‘One of the benefits of inheriting a home from the papacy,’ the old
F
ő
nök
had told her. ‘Historically, they’ve been quite adept at covering their backs.’

Leah grabbed the iron ring, braced her feet and pulled. The trapdoor yielded unwillingly, dragging with it a frayed matt of cobwebs as it swung upwards. Beneath, a flight of steps descended into darkness. The air smelled damp. Cold.

‘I’ll go first,’ she told the children. ‘Hold hands and follow me. Mind your feet. It gets slippery.’ To Soraya, she added. ‘Pull it closed behind you. There’s a bolt on the underside.’

It would, she thought, grant them perhaps a minute’s reprieve.

Leah activated her phone’s tiny torch, took a breath and led them down the steps to the cave network beneath Villa del Osservatore.

Behind her she heard the boom of the trapdoor falling back into place, and a rattle as Soraya shot the bolt home.

From the other side, a crack like a pistol shot as the library door broke apart.

Tóth strode through the library’s shattered entrance, and what he saw appalled him. The floor was a montage of bloody footprints. At its centre, an opening revealed a flight of steps descending into darkness. The splintered remains of a trapdoor lay to one side. Three
Bels
ő
Ő
r
stood beside it.

Behind them lay the blood-slicked corpse of Catharina Maria-Magdalena Szöllösi. Completing the grisly tableau, four more bodies, including that of Ányos Szilágyi.

Furious, Tóth marched up to the guards hovering beside the library’s secret exit. Pointing to Catharina’s corpse with one hand, he slapped the nearest man’s head with the other. ‘You’re going to leave her lying there like that? Your own
F
ő
nök
? Get a blanket, wrap her up, and get her out of here.
Now
. And show her some respect while you’re doing it.’ To Makovecz, the senior
Bels
ő
Ő
r
he’d met outside, he said, ‘I’m putting you in charge. No one is to speak a word of this until I talk to them first.’

‘Of course.’

‘Do we have any more dead?’

‘Four who remained loyal to her. We had no choice. And you’d already sanctioned it.’

‘I didn’t sanction this mess,’ Tóth hissed. He took a breath, exhaled it explosively. ‘It’s not your fault. Get the rest of these bodies out of here. All of them. And somebody stop that goddamned bell from ringing.’

‘I’ll see to it myself.’

‘Not you!’ he shouted. ‘It’s a bell! Delegate it!’ He took another breath, calmed himself. ‘The rest of the household: where are they?’

‘We’re holding them in another part of the building. Do you want to see them?’

‘Yes. But not yet. First let’s—’

He broke off as he heard a commotion behind him, and saw the remaining five members of his
tanács
enter the room.

They stopped dead as they took in the scene.

‘My God,’ one of them whispered. ‘What have we done?’

Tóth was glad the man had said
we
. He wondered how much time he had left before they started saying
you
.

In the darkness deep beneath Villa del Osservatore, Leah reached the bottom of the flight of steps. When she raised her phone, the bluish light of its torch beam revealed the entrance to a tunnel chiselled out of the surrounding rock. Its sides were lumpen and damp, the ceiling only a few inches above her head. Murmuring encouragement to the children behind her, Leah stepped into it. She glanced over her shoulder, counting the heads of those who followed. Dimly she saw Soraya’s silhouette, bringing up the rear.

Ahead, the tunnel took an abrupt turn. They emerged into a natural cave. The walls opened out and a draught brushed her cheek. The rock ceiling dripped with moisture. Another few yards, and the torchlight reflected off water.

Leah heard a fluttering around her. Smelled the ammonia stink of guano. Lifting the phone higher, she saw hundreds of tiny eyes.

Bats.

They clustered together on the roof of the cave, a rippling skin of black wings and furred bodies. Behind her, one of the children cried out.

‘It’s OK, they won’t harm you. You’re safe, I promise.’

The torch picked out the dim grey shape of an open-topped boat bobbing on the water, moored by a single rope attached to a bolt in the cave wall.

Leah pulled on the rope until the vessel nudged up against a rock jutting out into the water. ‘Quickly now,’ she whispered. ‘Into the boat, and watch your step.’ One by one, she helped the children aboard. The moment Soraya took her seat, Leah cast off the rope. She leaped into the stern, using her momentum to launch the boat forward.

Wanting to avoid starting the engine until the last possible moment, she reached out and used the walls of the cave to manoeuvre the boat along its course. They eased around a shallow bend. Ahead, she saw a glow of reflected daylight illuminating the last turn before the cave’s mouth.

Behind her she heard voices. The tramp of boots on the steps. Above, the bats chittered, restless.

The boat bumped against the rock wall, and Leah shoved away from it, steering them around its curve. The cave mouth opened into daylight, and she narrowed her eyes against its brightness. Mist rolled and coiled on Lake Como’s surface, so thick that they might have been emerging into the twilight domain of Hades.

A shout from behind. She glanced back, but the tunnel’s curve now hid them from the secret dock. Her pursuers wouldn’t be able to use their phones down here, wouldn’t be able to notify the
Belső
Ő
r
guarding the villa’s main landing stage on the far side of the peninsula. Even so, she would have to be quick.

Bracing her foot on the back of the boat, she grabbed the outboard motor’s ripcord and yanked as hard as she could. The engine fired into life on the first pull. Calling to the children to hold on, she dropped into her seat and twisted the throttle. The boat surged out of the cave and into the mist-wreathed waters of the lake.

One hand still on the tiller, Leah dialled a number on her phone.

Until now, her rush of adrenalin had caged her fear. But as the boat thumped along beneath her, as she saw the frightened faces of the children in front, as she considered what might be happening in Calw, in Lake Maggiore and elsewhere, it broke free to assault her, and she gritted her teeth against its power.

Please
, she thought.
Please answer.

And then she heard Hannah’s voice.

For a moment her relief was so intense she nearly lost her grip on the throttle. ‘Listen carefully,’ she shouted. ‘You don’t have much time.’