lair?
The bodyguard looked back behind him for a moment, apparently listening to something being whispered to him, nodded, and then turned back to his post.
Randi smiled thinly. Wulf Renke was there, crouching patiently in the darkness, waiting for his chance to slip away and disappear again, as he had so many times before. That was the answer she had been hoping for. She put her binoculars away and crawled down the slope, staying low and angling away from the street where Renke and the other man were concealed.
She dropped quietly into the little lane that marked the northern boundary of the necropolis and crossed it quickly, slipping into the shelter of one of the small square mounded tombs. Then she slid her Beretta back into the holster on her hip, snapped the flap shut, and used both hands to haul herself up onto the grass-covered roof of the burial chamber.
From there, Randi made her way from rooftop to rooftop, jumping lightly across the narrow gaps between buildings until she reached the flat-roofed tomb just north of Renke’s hiding place. She drew the 9mm pistol, crawled to the corner, and looked down over the edge.
There, just a few meters away, lay the low open door where she had seen the scientist’s lookout. She took aim with the Beretta, waiting while her eyes adjusted. Gradually, the blackness took on different shapes and shades, again revealing the head and shoulders of the sentry crouching there with his submachine gun. Her finger tightened on the trigger and then eased off slightly.
She decided to give this guy the chance to be smart.
“Drop the weapon!” Randi called softly.
Taken completely by surprise, the guard reacted instinctively. His head jerked up and he spun desperately, bringing his Uzi up to fire.
She shot him in the head.
Before the Beretta’s sharp, ringing report stopped echoing back from the stone walls around her, she was in motion. She rolled off the roof, landed in a crouch on the street, and brought her pistol back up, aiming straight at the opening to the crypt.
There was no noise. No sign of movement from inside.
“Wulf Renke!” Randi said quietly in perfect German, pitching her voice just loud enough to be heard inside the tomb. “It’s over. You’ve got nowhere left to run. Come out now, with your hands up, and you’ll live. Otherwise, I will kill you.”
For a moment, she thought he would stay silent, refusing to talk. But then the scientist replied. “So those are my two choices?” he said calmly. “I either meekly surrender to you and face prison? Or else I die at your hands?”
“Correct.”
Renke snorted. “You are wrong,” he said bleakly. “You forget, there is always a third option. And that is the path I choose.”
Suddenly Randi heard a faint crunch from inside the tomb, followed by a startled gasp and then a long, drawn-out sigh that ended in absolute silence.
“Oh, hell,” she murmured, already moving toward the entrance.
She was too late.
Wulf Renke sat slumped over on one of the stone benches used by the Etruscans for their dead. His eyes stared back at her, rigid and unblinking. Foam had dripped out of his slack mouth and into his neat, white beard. The fragments of a broken glass ampule lay on the ground at his feet, next to an insulated carrying case. The air inside the burial chamber smelled faintly of almonds.
The fugitive biological weapons scientist had committed suicide, probably with cyanide, Randi thought grimly. She bent down and entered the tomb.
When a quick search of Renke’s pockets produced nothing of value, she took the case and backed out again, into the narrow moonlit street.
Inside the container, she found a row of glass vials packed in dry ice. And when she read the labels on each vial, her eyes widened in absolute astonishment and horror. At a guess, Randi decided that she was looking at lethal disease variants keyed to the precise genetic makeup of Viktor Dudarev, his senior ministers, and many of Russia’s highest-ranking military commanders.
Quickly, she slammed the lid back down, grabbed the case, and then raced away through the cramped streets of the city of the dead.
Chapter Fifty
Smith slid quietly through the shadows thrown by a row of tall pine trees. He came out on the edge of a small public park dominated by the foundations of an Etruscan temple?not much more than a few stone steps, a raised, grass-covered platform, and the circular bases of what must have once been towering columns. The main road up had turned sharply as it climbed and entered Orvieto and now he was facing south.
He dropped to one knee, signaling Kirov and Fiona to come ahead. They ghosted through the trees and joined him.
The bulk of the medieval city loomed on their right, a maze of little, twisting streets and low, irregularly shaped stone houses that were mostly between eight and nine hundred years old. Arches crossed the streets in many places, linking the ancient houses, and turning the narrow lanes into alternating pools of wan silver moonlight and Stygian darkness.
The eastern end of the plateau fell away on their left, plunging steeply toward the lights of Orvieto Scalo, the lower town. A wide terrace ran along this edge, all the way to the tall, round, open-topped bastions and massive outer stone walls of the Fortezza dell’Albornoz, a papal fortress built in the four-teenth and fifteenth centuries.
“Which way would Brandt and Malkovic go?” Jon murmured. “West into the old city?”
“Not into the old city,” Fiona said flatly. “That’s a dead end for them. The only real way out from there leads straight back toward the Center compound, and that road will be swarming with Italian police and emergency crews.”
“Ahead,” Kirov said firmly. He pointed to a small sign with an arrow, pointing the wav south along a tree- lined avenue to the Piazza Cahen and the Stazione Funicalore?the station for the funicular railway connecting Orvieto with the lower town. “Their only realistic hope of escape is to beg, buy, or steal another car, and the only place to do that safely is down below, near the main train station. That funicular railway is probably closed for the night, but there must be other roads or tracks down from this side of the city.”
Smith nodded tightly. “Sounds reasonable.” He stood up. “Okay, I’ll take the left flank. Oleg, you take the right.”
“And I’ll tag along like a good little girl, safe in the middle,” Fiona said, smiling slightly to take the sting out of her words.
Spread apart in a skirmish line, the three of them crossed the little park, skirting the raised platform of the ruined temple, and kept moving south, sticking close to the left edge of the wide road leading into the open square called the Piazza Cahen.
“But where is Professor Renke?” Konstantin Malkovic forced out between panting gasps, still clutching his briefcase to his heaving chest. He was sitting propped up with his back against the locked doors of the funicular station.
Sweat matted his thick mane of white hair and ran in rivulets down his terrified face.
“Either dead or a prisoner,” Brandt snapped. “He should have kept up with us.”
Coldly furious with himself and with his panic-stricken employer, Brandt contemplated his options. They were increasingly limited. With Renke gone and the HYDRA lab destroyed, his usefulness to the Russians would last only so long as the Americans were kept in the dark about the invasion plans for Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics. The gray-eyed man glanced sidelong at Malkovic’s briefcase. It contained information that must not be allowed to fall into American hands. And the financier himself was rapidly becoming a liability.
