“Where does it stop in Italy?” I moved the drill a quarter inch closer.
“Milan, I think,” he muttered, leaning as far away as he could from the bit.
“Is Krell on the train?”
“Of course.”
“Is Antonia?”
“Who?”
I clamped my fingers on Lon’s thick jaw and snapped it toward me. “Miss Venice,” I hissed. “Is she on the train?”
He nodded.
“Where are my goddamn guns, Mobright?” I demanded.
“On Krell’s plane, the one we took here. In the cabinet to the right of the sink.”
Police sirens wailed outside. “Tim . . .” Beckett said to Mobright.
“I’m all right, Inspector,” the injured man replied, aiming his weapon at Lon. “You two best be going. I’ll look after our friend.”
Beckett said to me, “Well, then, let’s go get your guns.”
“What about the pilot?”
“Don’t worry about Halliday,” he said, withdrawing a small spray bottle from his coat pocket.
“Then who’ll fly the plane?” I asked.
“We’re taking Dracco’s.”
“Dracco? You mean that was you in Milan? You gave the card to Ginny?”
“Mm-hmm. I nailed those two by the bus for you, passed the business card to her. Let’s move. Dracco’s at the airport. We’ve got to get to Krell’s train.”
There was no time to ponder. I slipped into the hall behind Beckett and followed him to Pendelton’s Benz, which he pointed out was closer than his own car.
The big-shouldered man was slumped over behind the wheel— dead. “He spotted me,” Beckett explained.
We pulled him out and rolled him behind some bushes. Beckett took the wheel and we blasted for the airport.
Heath’s pilot was in the hangar. He was surprised to see me and even more surprised to see Beckett. Two minutes after incapacitating him, I had the mini strapped to my arm and the two Sigs hanging under my jacket.
We found Dracco shaving in the bathroom in his hangar, his Gulfstream ready for travel.
“Hey, Beckett,” he chuckled. “You hooked up with Hollywood Reb. How about that?”
“We’ll be needing your services right now,” Beckett told him. “Full fare. Milan. Linate Airport is closest to the Stazione Centrale.”
“Linate it is,” Dracco answered, toweling off his rugged face. “Let’s boogie.”
Once airborne, Beckett and I stared uneasily at each other from our leather seats. Thoughts and feelings swooped down on me like Hitchcock’s birds. Four days ago I’d sat on Emily’s carpet dents, crying homeless tears to my picture of Ginevra de’ Benci. Since then I’d punched and shot and burned and bled and kissed and felt. I’d soared with Leonardo da Vinci, held his Dagger for my father, and all as the unwitting actor in Beckett’s little drama.
My hands shook; I willed them to stop, grabbing the ends of my arm-rests. Beckett turned to me, but I spoke first, my eyes burning into his.
“You played me, you prick. I told you at the hospice nobody plays me.”
He didn’t have to answer.
“The night you called me with that raspy put-on voice, you said you knew my father. You didn’t know him at all, did you?”
“I had a complete file on him.”
“Why would you have a file on my father?”
“Because of what we found on Greer’s plane.”
“What?”
“The story I told you about Greer and Tecci on the train was true, except Greer didn’t ditch his plane and his legs weren’t broken in the fall. He did try to sell Leonardo’s page and Tecci double-crossed him— slashed his arm badly and was going to throw him off the train at the St. Roddard Pass.
“Greer jumped early with the money and the notes, made his way back to his plane, and took off for America. He didn’t get far; apparently he went unconscious from loss of blood and ditched. I picked him up in no time because I was tracking him.”
“Why were you tracking Greer?”
“Because in addition to transporting Leonardo’s precious page, Greer was carrying secret documents to a contact in Greenland. You see, he was a courier for hire. He worked for everyone from theNational Gallery to the KGB. My job was to make sure those documents never reached Greenland.
