“I arrived at the plane, which was still afloat and not badly damaged, and removed Greer, the documents, and the satchel. Greer was unconscious and bleeding profusely. He never would have made it to Greenland, much less Washington, D.C.
“As I got him onto the ship, he revived long enough to tell me about the Medici Dagger and pass me the page of Leonardo’s notes. My mission was, of course, secret. I couldn’t let those notes surface; I certainly couldn’t mail them to your father in an unmarked envelope. There was too much at risk. At that time a magic dagger and an eccentric munitions manufacturer didn’t seem like much of a threat. So I sank the plane and the notes went into a vault, along with the satchel of money, to be buried forever beside a thousand other extraordinary artifacts.”
I shook my throbbing head. “Buried forever . . .”
“Well, not forever,” Beckett said. “Until two weeks ago. When the second page of Leonardo’s notes surfaced in Italy, it brought back the memory of the incident with Greer, the satchel in the vault, and the page of notes. I knew the money would be an asset. I didn’t know of what use the page would be, so I researched the Medici Dagger. Of course your father’s file came up, along with the family photo that had run in the newspaper at the time of the fire. Without knowing why, really, I looked into what had become of you. When I found out you were a stuntman, well, that’s when my plan gelled.”
“I know the rest,” I murmured to the window.
“You were the perfect appendage, Reb. My God, how powerful a force vengeance is,” Beckett said to himself.
My hands were shaking again, not from the heights, but from pent-up rage, at the tragedy of greed and malice, the dominoes of death. Was it raw circumstance or preordained that my parents would die, that I would become Leonardo’s mighty traveler, that I would be sitting now, at this moment, across from the man who’d rescuedLeonardo’s first page of the Circles of Truth from being lost at sea only to imprison it in a steel vault until it was time to set it—and me—free?
I looked up to see Beckett staring at me with the same dispassionate-grin he’d had on his face when I’d left him dying in his hospice bed.
He seemed to read my thoughts. “Survival of the fittest,” he said. “I needed to survive and you were—”
“Fit,” I finished.
“Yes. I couldn’t conceive at the time just how extraordinarily fit you were. You actually found the Medici Dagger.”
“And Tecci and Krell and Heath have it.”
“For the moment.”
“And they have the woman I love.”
Silence over the whine of jet engines, wind over wings. I couldn’t believe I’d said those words. The woman I
“If anything has happened to her . . .” I managed. “If she’s in any way . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I faced him again. “There will be a reckoning. Do you hear me? If I’m not dead, there will be a reckoning.”
Beckett looked at me solemnly. “If we don’t catch them, Reb, it will be the Prince of Darkness himself who will reckon with me. So,” he said, plugging his laptop into a modem. “Let’s focus on the problem at hand.”
Beckett dialed into the Internet and connected with the Ferrovie Dello Stato, Italy’s national rail company. In short order, he had a printout of every train leaving Italy for Zurich that afternoon. He made an anonymous call to the FS office and confirmed that the IC382 was pulling a private car and that it was departing from Milan in an hour and fifteen minutes.
He told me it would take us at least an hour to get to Linate Airport, which was six kilometers from the Central Station, a dicey six kilometers; by car it could take a full half hour to reach the station once we touched down.
I asked if he could pull any strings to delay the train.
He said he couldn’t, and that even if he could, a move like that would only alert them and cause them to flee. “Where would we be then?” he added.
He was right. I had to get my brain clear. The only way to get on the train was to catch up with it. To do that, I’d need speed. Jungle speed. I saw myself streaking for the IC382. Beckett wasn’t in the picture. I felt the familiar sensation of resolve. One way or another, I was going alone.
I asked Beckett to print out a map of the roads that followed the train route. Inside a minute I was poring over them.
The train stopped in Lugano, about eighty kilometers north of Milan. After that, it was a straight shot to Zurich.
“Does Dracco have firepower?” I asked.
Beckett got up from his seat and opened a closet. “He’s fairly well stocked, actually,” he said. “Automatics, sniper rifle, an assortment of knives—”
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a large futuristic black plastic weapon.
“This,” he said, handing it to me, “is a Pancor Jackhammer. Hmm . . . loaded. It’s a gas-operated automatic shotgun that’ll turn anyone it’s pointed at into a cave painting. Useful, but a little difficult to conceal. I can’t see an application for it in this mission.”
“Hand it over.”
I leaned forward and stashed it down the back of my jacket, tucking the barrel into my pants. It fit. “How about transportation in Milan?”
“I’ll check with Dracco,” Beckett said, stepping toward the cockpit.
I closed my eyes, felt the muscles in my face tighten, the grit in my gut. Krell, Tecci, Heath—Old-Spiced and
