“We want to resurrect Whiplash,” he said. “Only this time, it’ll be even better.”
3
Nuri’s heart dropped a beat as he stared at the solid stone wall cutting off his escape. He threw himself to his right, pressing against the wall as a bullet flew next to him. Stone flicked from the wall, hitting him in the forehead. Unhurt, he threw himself down out of desperation, crying out as if he’d been hit by the bullet itself.
“There! There!” people were yelling above.
“Look out!”
“Watch!”
“There’s been a murder!”
“That man has a gun!”
Nuri heard footsteps running toward him. He collapsed facedown on the ground, pretending he was dead.
The shooter hopped over the wall and saw him. She pushed him over to his back, extending her arm toward his heart and firing twice. Then she raised her aim for his forehead and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. The pistol, smuggled past the metal detectors by an accomplice she’d never met, was empty.
Nuri looked dead. Ordinarily, the woman wouldn’t have taken a chance on looks alone, but she had no choice. She was out of bullets, alarms were sounding, people were watching. She dropped the gun on his prostrate body and fled.
The bullets that hit Nuri in the chest had bruised his chest and trachea, but he was otherwise okay, thanks to the thin-layer protective vest he wore under his shirt. The Teflon and carbon polymer vest had diverted most of the energy from the small caliber bullets, saving him from death, though not pain.
He rolled over, trying to get back his breath. With great effort he forced away the black shroud around the edges.
Nuri pushed up to his knees, his whole body trembling. He couldn’t hear anything — there was sound around him, echoes of noise, but nothing his brain could process.
He got up and stumbled into the next passage, saw someone’s legs moving ahead to the left. He leaned forward, using gravity to help him move. Disparate sounds began to emerge from the incoherent cacophony. People screamed and shouted in panic as they tried to funnel through the Coliseum’s narrow outer passages.
He reached into his pocket for the vial of marker liquid and held it. A wave of pain hit him as he reached the hall where he’d entered the arena area. Feeling faint and nauseous, he put his free hand against the wall, steadying himself while waiting for the pain to pass. It didn’t, though, and finally he lurched off the wall, heading toward the steps.
There were so many other alarms and sirens sounding that if the alarm went off when he pushed through the door to the main level, no one noticed. He walked into the main hall, then took a step back as a flood of panicked tourists rushed by, running toward the exit despite the pleas of one of the guards for them to stop.
“Which way?” he asked.
“The subject is below,” replied the Voice. “He has ceased to move.”
“The shooter?”
“No data.”
Of course not; the system had no information to use to follow her. Nuri pushed out into the corridor, weaving left and right as people fled. He went to the archway, looking out on the stone path below. But he didn’t see her.
It was too late now to go back to Luo. His best bet would be to get outside, take a wild shot at finding the shooter or maybe someone supporting her. If that didn’t work — and it almost certainly wouldn’t — he would find someplace to catch his breath, then start figuring out what had happened.
People were still running toward the exit. Nuri took a few steps with them, his chest heaving but his legs sturdier now. He felt a sting in the top of his thighs and pushed harder.
The woman had been wearing khaki green pants, with black running shoes. The detail crystallized in his mind as he reached the exit. He tried working his memory toward her shirt. It was some sort of print T-shirt, over another T-shirt.
Italian, maybe. A soccer team?
No, some sort of slogan. Not in Italian. French, he thought.
Maybe one of the cameras had seen it.
Her face?
Nuri pressed his memory but it wouldn’t yield an image. He turned in the direction of Piazza del Colosseo, the street at the end of Via dei Fori Imperiali. There was a truck there, selling water and other drinks. The alarms were still sounding in the Coliseum, but the people milling around didn’t know what was going on. Most thought there was some sort of fire, or a false alarm.
Nuri quickened his pace, his stomach queasy but the rest of him feeling stronger. Adrenaline buzzed through his body, making his ears ring. He saw a woman with green pants eyeing him in front of the truck. He glanced at her shoes and saw that they were black. But she was wearing a red silk blouse, and her hair was long. The shooter’s had been short.
A wig.
He stared at her face. The woman turned abruptly, walking up the hill. Nuri glanced around, making sure there were no other likely suspects, then started to follow. But as he did, a girl nearby began to yell.
“There he is! There he is!” she said in English, pointing and screaming. “There! There!”
The girl had seen him in the ruins and thought that he had been the one shooting. Everyone nearby turned, and one of the men near Nuri reached to grab him. He pushed the man away, then saw a pair of policemen running toward him from the Coliseum.
The last thing he wanted to do was end up in police custody. Nuri spun and ran across the street, dodging past a tourist bus to run into the Metro stop. Leaping over the turnstile, he ran toward the down escalator, pushing people aside and then squeezing past a pair of old women. His stomach felt as if it was going to explode.
A train was just arriving. Nuri ran through the doors and found a seat, then closed his eyes as he waited for it to move again. The doors shut. The train lurched forward, then stopped. Nuri pushed his eyes closed further, worrying that it wouldn’t start, afraid he’d been caught. But then the train began to move again.
He leaned his head back against the window and contemplated his next move.
Two stops later he got off at Termini, hoping it would be easier to blend into a crowd there if anyone was looking for him or following him. He decided he would find a hotel where he could see to his wounds and perhaps monitor the news. He walked up and around the piazza, down the block, then back, and finally across to Nationale. He chose one of the hotels a few blocks from the station that he had passed earlier.
The desk clerk squinted at the disheveled man who stood before him. Most of their clientele, especially at this time of year, were Italians in Rome on business. The man before him looked too disheveled to pay the bill.
Nuri gave him an American Express card for the reservation. The clerk made sure to check his signature on the register against the blurry script on the back. It matched, but that didn’t satisfy his doubts.
“I need your
It was a standard request in Italy, where technically visitors were required to be registered with the local police. Nuri hesitated, unsure whether to hand over his “regular” passport or the diplomatic one. He decided the diplomatic passport might raise too many questions, and gave the man the normal one.
The clerk saw the hesitation as one more bad sign, and might have called his supervisor or even decided to claim they were full had not a large family come through the doors. Just in from Modena for a visit with an ailing
