The hall was filling with hospital staff. Marcus shouted at them to get back and call the police.
Blond man kept dragging his hostage backwards at a fast clip until he was at the elevator. He pressed the down button with the bloody tip of his knife.
Marcus followed along the corridor and kept the man’s head in the pistol sights, but even an expert marksman wouldn’t have contemplated the shot. The elevator doors slid open and blond man backed himself and the nurse inside.
Staff reappeared from inside the rooms where they had fled.
“Go help the girls!” Marcus shouted. “Did anyone call the police?”
No one had. He ran for the stairwell and clicked the Beretta’s safety in case he tripped up on the way down.
The elevator stopped on the first floor where blond man roughly ejected the nurse, sending her to her knees.
When the doors opened again in the lobby, the white lab coat and mask were on the ground, the knife was in the breast pocket of his scrubs, and blond man slowly exited with a benign smile on his face, after pressing a button and sending the elevator back up.
The Carabinieri must have gotten the alert, because as blond man casually sauntered across the lobby, two officers passed him running toward the elevators. One of the descending elevators reached the lobby and the policemen scrambled in, punching in the girls’ floor.
By the time Marcus exited the stairway at the lobby level, he was feeling the pain from his stabbing. He pressed forward. There was no sign of unusual activity in the lobby, so he ran out the sliding doors into the hospital forecourt where an ambulance was speeding away. As it turned right out of the gate, he saw a shock of blond hair in the passenger seat.
A man had just dropped off a passenger at the front doors when Marcus approached him, waving the Beretta.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling the driver’s side door open. “I’m taking your car.”
One look at a bleeding man with a gun convinced him to abandon his Hyundai and flee into the hospital. Marcus put the car into gear and took off after the ambulance.
The Passeggiata del Gianicolo that hugged the hospital grounds was a tight, winding road lined by ancient stone walls. Marcus redlined the small engine uphill and just when he thought the chase was going to be futile, he entered a stretch of extreme hairpin turns, requiring heavy braking to stay on the pavement. He glanced to his left in the direction of the Tiber and saw the white ambulance with its orange side-stripe. The switchback was so extreme that it almost seemed he could have thrown the Hyundai owner’s can of soda out the window and hit the ambulance. He honked his horn aggressively to let the ambulance know that it was being pursued and that’s when he saw blond man gesticulating to the driver and pointing straight at him.
“That’s right, asshole,” Marcus said in a rant powered by adrenaline. He lowered his window and raised the gun as a symbol of his rage. “That’s right. I’m coming for you.”
He accelerated and then immediately had to brake when he entered the chicane. The ambulance did the same, but when it came to the next chicane, its high center of gravity defeated the driver’s best efforts and it skidded hard into the side of a parked car.
Marcus saw the accident ahead and aggressively accelerated until he was alongside, then slammed on his brakes, pinning the ambulance against the caved-in Volkswagen.
He leapt out of the Hyundai, swearing and shouting and tried getting the Beretta into a proper two-handed firing position, but his left arm was too painful.
The driver had no such problem. He flung open his door and did a barrel roll onto the road, expertly landing belly-down, and with both hands he aimed a semi-automatic pistol at Marcus at a distance of under half a car length.
Marcus started squeezing rounds off with his unbraced right hand. He made up for lack of accuracy by rapidly emptying the Beretta’s clip. His second or third round caught the driver on the top of his head, eliminating the threat before a single shot came his way.
In the fog of the moment, Marcus forgot about blond man.
He didn’t know he had exited the ambulance from the rear doors.
He didn’t see him come up behind him holding an oxygen cylinder.
He didn’t process the heavy blow he took to the back of his head or hear the other drivers shouting at blond man who calmly got into the Hyundai and drove off.
He wasn’t aware of the drivers and pedestrians yelling at each other to call the police.
And he didn’t hear a couple of dog-walkers standing over him and asking, “Is he alive?”
Marcus’s Story
17
Washington DC, twelve years earlier
“You came,” Alice said.
His wife was in a bed on the thoracic surgery floor of the George Washington University Hospital. Marcus put his bag down. He was clutching a small bouquet from the hospital florist. He had thought the larger ones would give the impression he was trying too hard.
“I wasn’t sure I’d make it before you were discharged,” he said. That’s when he noticed a tube running into a collection bag hanging off one of the bed rails. “What’s that?”
“That’s why I’m still here. It’s a chest tube. They had to put it in to keep my lung inflated.”
He thought she looked wilted and drained of color, like an unwatered house plant kept too long in the shade. He, on the other hand, was the strongest and fittest he had been in years. He’d been on a healthy eating kick and had joined a gym in Paris, near the Embassy.
He put the flowers on her bed tray. “Does that mean there was a complication?”
She used the bed controls to raise the head higher. “I was told it might be something they had to do. It’s not good; it’s not bad.”
He
