The Lost Relic

said, ‘Each of you has a separate passcode to disable the secondary alarm system. You have five seconds to enter it.’ He grabbed the back of the chair and wheeled the fat man brusquely over to the worktop. The computer was on standby mode and the screen popped up into life as Rocco nudged its wireless mouse. He tapped a few keys and an empty box opened up, a blinking cursor at its far left inviting someone to enter the code.

‘I won’t do it,’ Corsini mumbled.

‘What did the fucker say?’ Anatoly asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘He says he won’t do it,’ Rocco said.

‘Thought so. We’ll see about that.’ Anatoly walked purposefully past the seated men and out of the office. There was a commotion from next door. Moments later, Anatoly came back into the room, dragging a kicking, screaming woman by the wrist – the girlfriend of the bearded guy whose nose Gourko had broken. Anatoly kicked the office door shut, let the struggling woman slump to the floor and knocked her half senseless with a backhand blow to the jaw. Standing over her, he racked the bolt of his Steyr. Pressed the muzzle to her head.

Corsini had turned from purple to white. Silvestri and De Crescenzo both stared at him.

‘Luigi,’ De Crescenzo said in a trembling hoarse whisper. ‘For the love of God, do as he asks.’

Corsini looked from his colleagues to the woman, from the woman to Anatoly. His face twisted with the agony of responsibility. A nervous tic made his left eye flutter wildly.

‘The code,’ Rocco Massi said.

Chapter Sixteen

Every second that ticked by was a torment as Ben explored his new surroundings on the second floor. The room he was in might have been a plush bedroom at one time during the building’s history, with ornately carved ceiling beams and a magnificent double doorway. In its more recent past, the owners of the art academy had converted it into a classroom. A large oak table at the side of the room bore a slide projector and a portable TV hooked up to a VCR. Bookshelves were stacked high with books and old video cassettes with titles like Art of the Renaissance and Grand Masters of Florence. Rows of chairs faced the teacher’s desk, on which lay assorted pens and writing pads, a heavy paper punch, a roll of tape.

Ben glanced out into the corridor, thinking hard and fast because he knew the gunmen were combing the building every moment he hesitated. He could almost hear their running steps closing in on him. He snatched the paper punch from the desk, weighing it in his hand and imagining its best use as a weapon.

He desperately needed to gain some kind of advantage. Escape was an option – it was only a few minutes’ sprint back to the village he’d passed through earlier. If he could get to a phone, he could alert the Carabinieri; but he couldn’t stop thinking about what could happen to those people down there during the precious minutes he’d be gone.

A few metres down the corridor, an antiquated fire hose on a big red metal reel the size of a tractor wheel was fixed to the wall. It looked as though it had been sitting there unused since the war. Next to it, held by steel clips behind a panel of dusty glass, was an old fire axe. Ben ran over to it, used the paper punch to break the glass and tore the axe away from the wall. The hickory shaft felt thick and solid in his hands.

Now he really could hear footsteps. They were some way off, resonating through the empty building, but approaching fast.

He propped the axe handle against the wall and tore a strip of cloth from the hem of his T-shirt. Sorry, Brooke. Snatching a long, pointed shard of broken glass from the floor, he wrapped the cloth around its base to create an improvised knife. With a hard spin of the reel, metres of pipe spilled like entrails over the floor. He used his makeshift blade to slash four lengths of the thick rubber, then spun the reel back the other way to wind up the trailing hose. Grabbing the axe again, he sprinted back towards the classroom.

‘Luigi,’ Count Pietro De Crescenzo repeated urgently. ‘Do what he says.’ Corsini seemed paralysed with indecision. His eyes bulged as he glanced back and forth between his colleagues, the gently stirring woman on the office floor and the submachine gun that Anatoly had pressed hard up against the back of her skull.

‘Too slow,’ Anatoly said. He touched off the trigger of the Steyr. De Crescenzo’s cry of protest was drowned out by the ripping blast of the three-shot burst.

Corsini’s jaw gaped. Silvestri rocked back and forth in his chair, jamming his fist in his mouth to keep from screaming in horror. De Crescenzo stared in numb despair as the last twitches of the woman’s central nervous system made her limbs jerk and the smell of death and cordite filled the small room. Vomit erupted in his throat like hot lava and he threw up.

Rocco Massi said calmly to Corsini, ‘We can keep doing this all day until you give us the code.’

The fat man had had enough. There were tears in his eyes as he grabbed the remote computer keyboard and tapped in a series of numbers, swallowed hard, and hit the enter key.

Anatoly nodded in satisfaction as the screen flashed up a ‘CODE VALID’ message. He pointed at Silvestri. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

Chapter Seventeen

Scagnetti and Bellomo tore through the second floor of the house, kicking open every door as they went. Bellomo was a couple of metres ahead when he held up a clenched fist and jerked his head towards the end of the corridor as if to say, ‘Wait. I hear something.’

Up ahead in the shady corridor was a carved double doorway. The doors were open inwards a few inches, sunlight streaming into the room from the window beyond. The men listened. Behind the doors, a man’s voice was talking. He spoke in rapid Italian, something about Botticelli. The voice sounded tinny and reedy, and they realised it was coming from a TV speaker.

‘That just came on now,’ Scagnetti whispered. Bellomo nodded. As they listened, the sound stopped abruptly, as if whoever had turned it on by mistake was turning it off again in a hurry.

The two gunmen kicked open the doors and raced into the room.

Straight into a massive impact that knocked them sprawling backwards and their weapons spinning out of their hands.

Ben rode the heavy oak table as it came swinging violently down from its perch over the double doors. The lengths of rubber hose he’d tied from two of its legs to the classroom’s ceiling beams brought it down in a perfect arc so that the thick tabletop rammed into the men’s bodies as they entered the room and laid them flat. It was as if they’d been hit by a train. He leaped off, landed nimbly on his feet, and stepped out of the way as the table swung back towards him.

One of the men was out cold; the other was groaning and struggling to raise himself up off the floor. His face was bloodied. Ben remembered him as the one who’d murdered Marcello Peruzzi as calmly as stepping on a beetle. He picked up the fire axe from inside the door and placed its blunt nose against the man’s throat, pressing him back down.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked softly.

‘Go fuck yourself.’

Ben put some more weight behind the axe blade, and the guy’s face turned a mottled purple. Blood dribbled downwards from the corners of his mouth where the table had smashed his lips against his teeth.

‘What’s your name?’ Ben said again.