wooden box.
The last thing she remembered was Faulks, wildeyed, raising his umbrella above her like an executioner’s axe and then…darkness. Darkness, the smell of straw, a dog barking, something hard and uneven underneath her, her head throbbing where he’d struck her. And in the background a low, incessant drone, a rushing whistle of air, a bass shudder.
A plane. She was on a plane. Lying in a wooden box in the hold of a plane.
She nervously patted her inner thigh, and then sighed with relief. The location transmitter was still there- taped to her skin at the top of her leg where they only would have found it if they had stripped her down.
She’d taken a big risk, she knew. A risk that Tom would never have agreed to. But as soon as it had become clear that there was nothing in either Faulks’s papers or the safe that was going to give them even the slightest hint as to where the League was meeting that night, she’d known what she had to do. Grab the transmitter and some tape out of the bag. Hold back amid the confusion of their hurried retreat as Faulks pounded along the corridors towards them. And then try to talk or shock him into delivering her to the League himself. It was that or give up on getting to the painting before Santos could hand it over to the Serbs. It was that, or admit that they couldn’t stop him.
‘Stop’ was a euphemism, she knew, for what the Serbs would do to him if he failed to deliver the Caravaggio. The strange thing was that, after the horrors she’d witnessed and endured over the past few days, she felt remarkably sanguine about his likely fate. Especially when the alternative was that, armed with his diplomatic immunity and the proceeds of the Caravaggio’s sale, Santos would escape any more conventional form of justice.
Tom had said that the radius of the transmitter was three miles. No use at thirty thousand feet, but if he’d realised what she was doing when she hadn’t come back down, and then followed her signal to the airport, he should have been able to work out where she was heading and take another flight to the same destination where he would hopefully be able to pick up her signal again when she landed. At least, that was had been her rough, ill-conceived plan.
For now, all she had was darkness and the sound of her own breathing. Its dull echo, in fact, that seemed to be getting louder and louder as the box’s walls closed in, pressed down on her chest, her lungs fighting for air.
Suddenly she was back in the tomb. The entrance blocked, the earth cold and clammy underneath. She called out, her fists pounding against the sides, her feet drumming against the end, twisting her body so that she could lever her back up against the lid.
There. Above her head. Two small, perfectly round holes in the wood that she hadn’t been able to see before. She inched forward on her stomach, pressed her face to them, drinking in the narrow rivulets of air and light with relief, her heart rate slowing.
She looked down, struck by a sensation of being watched.
In the dim light, a pair of lifeless eyes stared back up at her, cold lips parted in a hard smile, nose sliced off.
She was lying on top of a statue. A marble statue. But to Allegra the statue might as well have been a corpse, and the box a coffin, and the rumble of the engines the echo of loose earth being shovelled back into her grave.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Cimitero Acattolico, Rome
20th March-10.22 p.m.
‘I’ve lost her,’ Tom barked.
‘What do you mean, you’ve lost her?’ Archie grabbed the receiver from him and shook it. ‘She was just there.’
‘Well, she isn’t now,’ Tom shot back, his anger betraying his concern.
Until now, Allegra had proved surprisingly easy to track, her signal leading them from the Freeport to the cargo terminal at Geneva airport, where they had observed Faulks’s driver overseeing several large crates being loaded on to a plane bound for Rome. It hadn’t taken much imagination to deduce that she had been placed inside one of them. They had therefore immediately booked themselves on to an earlier flight to ensure that they would already be in position to pick up the signal again by the time her plane landed.
Watching through his binoculars from the airport perimeter fence, Tom had been able to tell that this was a well-established smuggling route for Faulks, the Customs officers welcoming him off the plane on to a remote part of the airfield with a broad smile as a black briefcase had swapped hands.
The cargo had then been split, some heading for the warm glow of the main terminal, the rest to a dark maintenance hangar into which Faulks had driven, the doors quickly rolling shut behind him. Then for two, maybe three hours nothing. Nothing but the steady pulse of her location transmitter on the small screen cradled in his lap. A pulse that had served as a taunting reminder of the fading beat of Jennifer’s heart-rate monitor in the helicopter over the desert. A pulse which they had carefully followed here, only to see it flatline.
Sheltered by regimented lines of mourning cypresses and Mediterranean pines, the Cimitero Acattolico nestled on the slope of the Aventine Hill, in the time-worn shadow of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius and the adjacent Aurelian walls. Even by moonlight, Tom had been able to see that it was populated by an eclectic tangle of stone monuments, graves and family vaults, separated by long grass woven with wild flowers. These elaborate constructions were in stark contrast to the trees’ dark symmetry: pale urns, broken columns, ornate scrollwork and devotional statuary bursting in pale flashes through the gaps in their evenly spaced trunks, as if deliberately planted there in an attempt to prove the superiority of human creativity over natural design.
If so, it was increasingly obvious to Tom that this was an argument that nature was winning, decades of neglect having left monuments eroded by pollution and tombs cracked open by weeds and the cruel ebb and flow of the seasons. In one place, a pine tree had shed a branch, the diseased limb collapsing on to a grave and smashing its delicately engraved headstone into pieces. In another, the ground had risen up, snapping the spine of the vault that had dared to surmount it. And now it seemed to have swallowed Allegra’s signal too.
‘Where was the last reading from?’ Dominique asked, ever practical.
‘Over there-’ Tom immediately broke into a loping run, vaulting the smaller graves and navigating his way around the larger tombs. Then, just as he was about to emerge into one of the wide avenues that cut across the cemetery, he felt Archie’s hand grab his shoulder and force him to the ground.
‘Get down,’ he hissed.
Three men had emerged from the trees ahead of them, their machine guns glinting black in the moonlight, torch beams slicing the darkness. Moving quickly, they glided over to a large family vault, their boots lost in the long grass so that they almost appeared to be floating over the ground. As Tom watched, they ghosted up its steps and vanished inside.
‘She must be in there,’ Tom guessed, standing up.
The vault was a small rectangular building designed to echo a Roman temple, a few shallow steps leading up to the entrance, a Doric frieze carved under the portico, white Travertine walls decorated with columns that gave the illusion of supporting the tiled roof. The entrance was secured by a handsome bronze door that the elements had varnished a mottled green. A single name had been carved over it:
‘What?’ Dominique whispered.
‘Merisi was Caravaggio’s real name.’
They paused, straining to hear a voice or a sound from inside. But nothing came apart from the silent echo of darkness.
With a determined nod at the others, Tom carefully eased the door open with one hand, his gun in the other. This and three other ‘clean’ weapons had been sourced by Archie from Johnny Li while they had been watching the hangar at Rome airport. The price had been steep-the money he claimed Tom still owed him, plus another ten for his trouble. Archie had only just stopped cursing about it, although Johnny had at least held his half of their earlier
