“Morretti wasn’t strong. He would have died the first day. So Titus said that the Bible was his. That afternoon, in front of the whole population, they gave him the choice. Acknowledge Allah as the one God and Mohammed as his prophet – or be crucified. He refused. They began to beat him, on his knees in the dust like an animal, five or six of them with long staves. He refused again so they nailed him up. They thought it a great joke, give a Christian a real Christian death.” He sipped at his wine and ran the glass round his forehead, cooling his brow. “The pictures you see of Christ on the cross? They cannot convey the pain or the despair that crucifixion brings. When your knees are bent up, your chest hanging down over, you cannot breathe. For hour after hour, you can only take short shallow breaths, each one a stabbing pain because the lungs are collapsing. And, all the time, your entire weight is hanging on the nails through your hands. The pain is excruciating, enough to make strong men beg for death. Christ was young and strong and they hurried him along on the third day with a spear thrust. It is a long lingering death.
“Titus became a symbol for us. Every day he lived up there, every day he spat back at them, every time he managed a curse of his parched tongue, we rejoiced in his spirit. A dignitary was to arrive on his fourth day, so at nightfall we were allowed to cut him down. Men came from all over the prison, Muslim men, Hindu, Christian, even a few Buddhists. They gave their hoarded food and bits of medicines they had stolen and secreted around the place. More than that, they gave their prayers. He was no longer just a man. He was everything we wanted to be. He was strong, he was proud, his dignity and his spirit were intact – and his will to live was astonishing. We nursed him back to health as best we could. Eventually, he was back breaking rocks with the others, but the guards gave him a wide berth from then on. They believed he was something unnatural.
“Well, one day he told me he was going over the wall. I begged him to take me. He agreed. We broke out that night. Even weak, after two years of eating shit, he was formidable. He killed two guards with his bare hands. We took a truck, rolled it down the slope towards the main road, starting the engine a mile from the prison. From there we headed east towards Cairo, out into the desert. He saved my life more than once along the way. When we were found, we had actually crossed into Egypt, and someone contacted my Embassy. In all that time, we never knew his job. I suspected, of course. But he was bitter at being left behind. That much was plain.”
He sipped his wine again and smiled at Holly across the table top.
“So fear not for his safety. Fear more for his soul. He has seen too much for one man. Now he needs peace and laughter and family around him.” He paused. “And fear for those he hunts. If I were they, knowing him as I do, I would just kill myself and be done with it.” He laughed again – and then the old Marco was back. “Come, you have yet to taste my expresso!”
The car took the bend fast and Cockburn put his hand up to steady himself. The traffic was light, considering the proximity to London, and the driver was giving no quarter.
“Slow down!” Cockburn said. “Whatever it is can wait.”
The man eased off the speed and studiously ignored his look in the mirror, a funny half-smile on his face. Eventually, the car drew to a halt outside a small mews house in Belgravia.
“I thought you were taking me to Century House,” Cockburn said. He was tired and all the cloak and dagger nonsense was beginning to bore him.
“Orders,” the driver said. “I’ll wait here for you.”
“You do that,” Cockburn replied dryly, stepping from the car.
As he did so, the door to the house opened, and a well-groomed woman in her fifties smiled welcomingly. “Mr Cockburn?” she said. “Do come in.”
Further up the mews, a black London taxi stood in the darkness.
Quayle pulled himself up the last few feet of the down pipe and swung himself across onto the window sill of Gabriella Kreski’s living room. He peered in, not expecting to see much at two in the morning, but more to confirm that the room was empty before he did the job on the door. Then he climbed down, hand over hand, until he felt the ground beneath his feet. Moving back round the front, he picked the lock on the street door and moved up the stairs three at a time, barely pausing at the top to pick the old Chubb like a professional thief.
He slipped into the room and swore softly. Inside it had the unmistakable air of a house not lived in. Quickly, he checked the bathroom and bedroom. All of the toiletries were gone, as were two suitcases, the dust silhouette on the shelf proof of their recent occupation.
He was already too late.
Letting himself out, he drove back onto the main Brighton to Horsham road, then cut north to Godalming, taking the back roads. When he arrived just before dawn, he broke into the offices of a local solicitor, bypassing the basic Telecom alarm system, and crawled into the attic storage area. There he carefully moved boxes until he found the one he was after. It sat above a box of old crampons, harness, ice axes and other assorted mountaineering paraphernalia. The paraphernalia of his climbing days. Carefully sliding the masking tape off one of the boxes, he began to work through the
