drugs, had streamed out of an alleyway directly in front of them, looking for trouble, and ideally searching for a soft target.
Bronson had stepped forward to face them, but with a courteous bow the old Japanese man had motioned him back, taken two paces forward and just stood waiting. His harmless appearance and placid stance had seemed to enrage the youths, and they’d spent ten seconds shouting abuse before launching themselves at him.
What happened then had had all the appearance to Bronson of magic. It was as if each youth encountered something akin to a catapult: the faster they slammed into the old man, the faster they were tossed aside. In a little under twenty seconds the six youths were lying broken and bleeding on the ground, and throughout the entire time the old man barely seemed to have moved, and when he stepped over the legs of the nearest youth to rejoin Bronson, he hadn’t even been breathing hard.
‘Now do you believe me, Mr Bronson?’ he had asked, and all Bronson had been able to do was nod.
And now that training was going to save his life. Bronson swayed backwards, and the blackjack whistled viciously through the air a bare inch in front of his face. Then he stepped towards his attacker, turning as he did so, and seized the man’s right arm. He pulled him forward so that he was off balance, and continued to turn his body so that his back was towards his assailant. Then he bent forward, still pulling on the man’s right arm, and his attacker flew over his back to land – hard – on the ground directly in front of him.
Bronson hadn’t practised Aikido for some time but, much like riding a bike, his brain still retained the moves and his body responded with the actions he’d practised so many times in the past. The throw he’d just completed was one of the first and most basic of the moves he’d learned, and he finished it off in exactly the way he’d been taught, by tugging on the man’s arm at the instant before he landed, dislocating his shoulder.
The man screamed in pain as the bone was wrenched from its socket, the blackjack tumbling from his hand on to the ground. He was hurt, but Bronson knew he wasn’t immobilized, not yet, and this was something he needed to attend to. He snatched up the blackjack, and swung it as hard as he could against the man’s skull. His attacker flinched and raised his left arm in a futile defence, but there was no way he could avoid the blow. The impact jarred Bronson’s arm, but had the desired effect on his target. The man slumped backwards, instantly knocked unconscious.
Bronson was certain he’d recognized his assailant – and this meant that the two men by the tomb, only some twenty yards away, were surely part of the same gang.
Standing up, he turned towards the tomb of the twin angels and took a couple of steps forward. Then he dropped down, because one of the men had just swung round to face him, and was brandishing a semi-automatic pistol in his hand.
The sound of the shot was shockingly loud amid the tranquillity of the ancient cemetery, echoing off the walls of the church and the tombs all around him. The bullet just missed Bronson as he dived for cover, smashing into a tall stone cross behind him and sending stone chips flying in all directions.
The pistol added a whole new dimension to the situation. Bronson would have had no qualms about tackling the two men. As he’d just demonstrated, he was proficient in unarmed combat, and his whole body burned with fury against the men who’d snatched Angela. Taking on two Italian thugs and beating them to a pulp might well have helped him find her, but no level of anger or competence in hand-to-hand combat would help against a man carrying a gun. This radically altered the dynamics of the situation.
For perhaps a second, he remained crouched down behind another of the tombs, weighing his options and figuring the angles. He couldn’t run, not even if he’d dodged and weaved from side to side, because nobody can out run a bullet. And he couldn’t hide, either, because the other men knew where he was.
He had exactly one chance, and it all depended on the unconscious man lying on the ground a few feet behind him. Keeping as low as he could, he scuttled over to the unmoving figure, and crouched down beside him. He pulled open the man’s jacket, searching desperately for a shoulder holster and a weapon he could use to save his life. But there was nothing, no sign of a pistol under either arm.
Bronson looked over to the tomb of the twin angels. The two men seemed to have separated: one had ducked back behind the tomb, and was keeping low, but Bronson couldn’t see the second man, the one who’d fired the pistol.
Then another shot cracked out, the bullet again missing Bronson, but only barely. The second man had moved around to the east, to get a better shot at him, and was standing only about fifteen yards away in the classic target-shooting stance: feet apart, the pistol held in his right hand, and his left hand supporting his right wrist.
The next shot, Bronson knew, would probably be the last thing he would know in this world, because from that range the man couldn’t possibly miss him.
39
Almost despite herself, Angela was finding the task she’d been given quite fascinating. The dictionary was very comprehensive, and she had no difficulty in rendering the Latin expressions and sentences into modern English, albeit sometimes lengthy and rather convoluted modern English.
She knew that the grave on the Isola di San Michele dated from the early nineteenth century, and she still believed that the diary had been written by the woman who was buried there, and that the book had been interred with her by her family as a mark of respect. Indeed, the sections of the diary that she’d already translated back in the hotel room showed the unmistakable cadences of the kind of Latin she would expect to have been written by a well-educated person – male or female – of that period.
But the section at the back of the book, the text she was now being forced to translate, was very different. Although Angela was fairly sure that it had been written by the same person who had authored the diary sections – the handwriting was quite distinctive – apart from the first few sentences, which seemed to act as a kind of introduction, the remainder of the text shared none of the characteristics of the earlier pages.
The more she read and worked on, the more sure she was that this Latin had been copied from a much older source, which would confirm what Marco had told her – most of it was a copy of a far more ancient document, interspersed with comments and additional material presumably supplied by Carmelita. Some of the language was mediaeval, she thought, maybe even older than that. She could find no explanation anywhere in the text to suggest what exactly the source book had been, but there was something faintly familiar to her about some of the phrases and expressions the unknown author had used, and Angela began to wonder if what she was looking at was a passage taken from a mediaeval grimoire. That might actually tie up with Marco’s apparent belief that the source document dated from the twelfth century.
Whatever the source, the Latin text made for grim but fascinating reading. The passage began with a long paragraph, almost messianic in its fervour, which baldly asserted that vampires were a reality, and that they had existed since the dawn of time. These creatures were older than the rocks and the stones that formed the continents. They had, the text claimed, been known to all the great writers of antiquity; and it even listed the names of a handful of ancient Greek philosophers who had explicitly mentioned them.
Angela had snorted under her breath when she translated that particular section. She was reasonably familiar with the works of two of the philosophers named in the book, and couldn’t recall either of them ever mentioning anything quite as bizarre as vampires. And, she noticed, the author of the text had conspicuously failed to mention where these explicit references might be found, which was a sure sign that the references were simply a product of the writer’s imagination.
Having established, to the author’s satisfaction at least, that vampires existed, the text continued with the unsurprising claim that these creatures were not human in the usual sense of the word. They looked human, the writer stated, and were extremely difficult to identify, but they were actually superhuman because of their immortality, great physical beauty, and the enormous depth of knowledge gleaned over the ages that they had walked the earth.
Angela could see that, if this belief had become accepted by the general population in the days when it had been written, almost any reasonably attractive and well-educated man or woman could have been suspected of being a vampire. And, at the height of the various anti-vampire crazes that had swept Europe at intervals during the late Middle Ages, it was likely that many people would have suffered the consequences.
In the final section of what Angela was mentally calling ‘the introduction’, the writer set out the ultimate
