The Lost Relic bh-6 Page 7

  As the first heavy kick pounded the door, Ben leaped across the room and out through the French windows onto the balcony. It was too high to jump down to the concrete below without risking injury. He craned his neck upwards and saw that there was another balcony window directly above. The old house was built from solid stone, and the masonry had been expertly pointed, with recesses between the blocks that looked just about deep enough to climb.

  As more kicks thudded violently against the bathroom door, he jumped up onto the balcony rail, turned to face the wall and dug his fingers into the cracks in the stonework to the left of the window. He swung his legs off the balcony. For a few painful seconds, his fingertips took his weight as he brought up his knees and scrabbled against the wall with the toecaps of his shoes until he found a crack. He was clear of the window now, clinging to the sheer wall like a spider. He reached up with his right arm, groped for another hand-hold and found it. Then the left foot, feeling around for a good purchase, then pulling himself up so he could grab another hold with his left hand. The second floor window was still tantalisingly far above him. He climbed faster.

  Down below, the bathroom door burst open with a crash and the two gunmen rushed in, weapons at the hip, knees bent to brace themselves against the recoil. A storm of automatic fire shattered tiles and blasted apart the sink, riddling the walls with holes. Before the men even realised the room was empty, it was destroyed. One of them motioned to the French windows. They ran over to them and burst out onto the balcony.

  Ben was clambering over the rail of the balcony above when he looked down and saw the masked gunmen below him, craning their necks down at the ground. They hadn’t spotted him. For a moment he was tempted to jump down and try to take them both – but some kinds of heroics could get you killed in a hurry.

  By the time they’d looked up from the balcony below, Ben had disappeared out of sight and was going in through the second floor window.

  The two men heard the smash of glass above them and knew what it meant. One grabbed a radio handset from his pocket, hit the press and talk button and said in Italian, ‘This is Scagnetti. I’m with Bellomo. We have a runner.’

  The reply that came over the radio was ‘Find him. Kill him.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  It didn’t take Anatoly long to find the piece of artwork his father had sent him all the way to Italy to obtain. The framed Goya sketch looked pretty much the way it had in the photo he’d seen in the old man’s study. Just a plain and, to him, frankly pretty fucking boring picture of some scraggy dude crouched down on his knees. The poor bastard was barefoot and had a desperate expression on his thin face. He was wearing a shapeless robe that could have been a bit of old sacking material, and his hands were clasped together in supplication as he prayed fervently to God for something or other. Salvation, Anatoly supposed. Or maybe just a decent suit of clothes.

  Anatoly looked at the picture for a long time and the same two questions kept coming back to him. Why would anybody bother drawing such a dull and depressing picture? And why the fuck would anybody want to own it? You’d have thought the old man would have picked something better.

  There was a small plaque on the wall next to the display cabinet that housed the picture. It said Francisco Goya, 1746 – 1824. Underneath was a blurb about how it had recently been rediscovered after being thought to have been lost for years, blah, blah, blah. Anatoly gave it only a cursory glance. Shaking his head, he moved away and spent a few moments gazing pensively at the other paintings around the walls of the gallery. Big, bold, rich-looking oils and ornate gilt frames.

  Now this was more like it. He didn’t much rate this kind of stuff but he’d heard of fancy names like Da Vinci. Who hadn’t? And you didn’t have to be an art snob to know there was a bloody fortune hanging on these walls, right here for the taking. Just a single one of these others would surely fetch him the cost of a new Lamborghini, even after deducting the fence’s cut. It made him wonder all the more why he’d been sent to steal a poxy colourless drawing of a skinny bloke saying his prayers. It didn’t even have a nice frame, just a plain black wood surround.

  But what the hell. Anatoly sighed and turned back to the Goya. Raising his Steyr, he was about to whack the protective glass casing when he remembered what that prick Maisky had said about the impregnable security shutters that would come slamming down to seal off the whole place if anyone messed with the artwork. Before it could be taken off the wall they had to enter the three codes to disable the secondary alarm system. Right. Some parts of his father’s plan did make sense.

  Anatoly walked back to the side room, swinging his gun as he went. Passing the food table he scooped a handful of stuffed olives from one of the plates he hadn’t blown apart earlier on. He popped it through the mouth hole of his balaclava and chewed noisily as he approached the clustered hostages. Gourko and Rykov were standing over them with their weapons trained menacingly. Turchin was over by the window, refilling a magazine from loose rounds in his pocket. Rocco Massi and one of his guys were slumped in a couple of canvas chairs, holding their guns loosely across their laps. The two Italians Rocco had sent upstairs hadn’t returned yet.

  Anatoly popped another olive and surveyed the crowd of frightened faces, feeling supremely in control. His gaze stopped at the young girl who was in the arms of her mother. Her face was hidden by a mass of blond curls, but running his eye down the curve of her body he liked what he saw. The strap of her pretty little dress was just off the shoulder, showing the flimsy bra strap underneath. She couldn’t be more than fifteen, he thought, and wondered if she was still a virgin. A budding little flower, just waiting to be plucked by ol’ Anatoly. Nice. Very nice.

  A couple of the hostages gasped in fear as he stepped forward and reached down abruptly to grab the girl’s bare arm. She let out a whimper as she felt his fingers close tightly on her skin. He hauled her away from her mother, yanking her body round so he could see her face. So adorable. He stroked her cheek lightly. It was sticky with half-dried tears, and that really turned him on. He cocked his head a little to the side, looked into those sweet, moist blue eyes and gave her a crooked smile. ‘Later, babe, later,’ he muttered in Russian.

  First, though, he had more pressing matters to take care of. He dumped the girl back down on the floor. Scanning the rest of the hostages he quickly picked out the faces of the three men whose photos his father had shown him. ‘You, you and you,’ he said, pointing with his Steyr.

  Rocco Massi stood and jerked his thumb at the three men. ‘Get up,’ he barked in Italian. De Crescenzo, Corsini and Silvestri nervously got to their feet, stiff and rumpled from crouching on the floor. The count was deathly pale. Silvestri dusted off his suit and tried to look dignified. Corsini’s chubby face flushed with indignation; he opened his mouth to say something, but it never came out, because Gourko slapped him hard across the face and then grabbed a fistful of his collar and shoved him brutally towards the door. Corsini stumbled, and Anatoly aimed the toe of his boot at those fat buttocks, sending him sprawling on his face through the doorway.

  ‘There is no need whatsoever for this violence,’ De Crescenzo stammered. ‘Whatever it is you want, we’re more than happy to comply.’

  ‘Oh, we know that,’ Rocco Massi said. De Crescenzo and Silvestri were prodded through the door at gunpoint as Corsini picked himself up with a moan.

  Anatoly pointed at the closed door a few metres along the end wall. ‘Ask them what’s in there,’ he said to Rocco. The big Italian translated. De Crescenzo cleared his throat and replied, ‘That is the office from which we control the security system.’

  ‘Open it.’

  The count fumbled in his pocket, took out a key ring and unlocked the office door. Anatoly shoved it open and led the way inside. The room was small and quite bare, except for a couple of steel filing cabinets, a worktop with a bank of computer equipment and some office chairs.

  The three gallery owners were made to sit. Anatoly leaned against a fi
ling cabinet, twirling his weapon. Rocco stepped up to Corsini’s chair, bent down so that his nose was just inches from the man’s sweaty face, and said, ‘Each of you has a separate passcode to disable the secondary alarm system. You have five seconds to enter it.’ He grabbed the back of the chair and wheeled the fat man brusquely over to the worktop. The computer was on standby mode and the screen popped up into life as Rocco nudged its wireless mouse. He tapped a few keys and an empty box opened up, a blinking cursor at its far left inviting someone to enter the code.

  ‘I won’t do it,’ Corsini mumbled.

  ‘What did the fucker say?’ Anatoly asked, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘He says he won’t do it,’ Rocco said.

  ‘Thought so. We’ll see about that.’ Anatoly walked purposefully past the seated men and out of the office. There was a commotion from next door. Moments later, Anatoly came back into the room, dragging a kicking, screaming woman by the wrist – the girlfriend of the bearded guy whose nose Gourko had broken. Anatoly kicked the office door shut, let the struggling woman slump to the floor and knocked her half senseless with a backhand blow to the jaw. Standing over her, he racked the bolt of his Steyr. Pressed the muzzle to her head.

  Corsini had turned from purple to white. Silvestri and De Crescenzo both stared at him.

  ‘Luigi,’ De Crescenzo said in a trembling hoarse whisper. ‘For the love of God, do as he asks.’

  Corsini looked from his colleagues to the woman, from the woman to Anatoly. His face twisted with the agony of responsibility. A nervous tic made his left eye flutter wildly.

  ‘The code,’ Rocco Massi said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Every second that ticked by was a torment as Ben explored his new surroundings on the second floor. The room he was in might have been a plush bedroom at one time during the building’s history, with ornately carved ceiling beams and a magnificent double doorway. In its more recent past, the owners of the art academy had converted it into a classroom. A large oak table at the side of the room bore a slide projector and a portable TV hooked up to a VCR. Bookshelves were stacked high with books and old video cassettes with titles like Art of the Renaissance and Grand Masters of Florence. Rows of chairs faced the teacher’s desk, on which lay assorted pens and writing pads, a heavy paper punch, a roll of tape.

  Ben glanced out into the corridor, thinking hard and fast because he knew the gunmen were combing the building every moment he hesitated. He could almost hear their running steps closing in on him. He snatched the paper punch from the desk, weighing it in his hand and imagining its best use as a weapon.

  He desperately needed to gain some kind of advantage. Escape was an option – it was only a few minutes’ sprint back to the village he’d passed through earlier. If he could get to a phone, he could alert the Carabinieri; but he couldn’t stop thinking about what could happen to those people down there during the precious minutes he’d be gone.

  A few metres down the corridor, an antiquated fire hose on a big red metal reel the size of a tractor wheel was fixed to the wall. It looked as though it had been sitting there unused since the war. Next to it, held by steel clips behind a panel of dusty glass, was an old fire axe. Ben ran over to it, used the paper punch to break the glass and tore the axe away from the wall. The hickory shaft felt thick and solid in his hands.

  Now he really could hear footsteps. They were some way off, resonating through the empty building, but approaching fast.

  He propped the axe handle against the wall and tore a strip of cloth from the hem of his T-shirt. Sorry, Brooke. Snatching a long, pointed shard of broken glass from the floor, he wrapped the cloth around its base to create an improvised knife. With a hard spin of the reel, metres of pipe spilled like entrails over the floor. He used his makeshift blade to slash four lengths of the thick rubber, then spun the reel back the other way to wind up the trailing hose. Grabbing the axe again, he sprinted back towards the classroom.

  ‘Luigi,’ Count Pietro De Crescenzo repeated urgently. ‘Do what he says.’ Corsini seemed paralysed with indecision. His eyes bulged as he glanced back and forth between his colleagues, the gently stirring woman on the office floor and the submachine gun that Anatoly had pressed hard up against the back of her skull.

  ‘Too slow,’ Anatoly said. He touched off the trigger of the Steyr. De Crescenzo’s cry of protest was drowned out by the ripping blast of the three-shot burst.

  Corsini’s jaw gaped. Silvestri rocked back and forth in his chair, jamming his fist in his mouth to keep from screaming in horror. De Crescenzo stared in numb despair as the last twitches of the woman’s central nervous system made her limbs jerk and the smell of death and cordite filled the small room. Vomit erupted in his throat like hot lava and he threw up.

  Rocco Massi said calmly to Corsini, ‘We can keep doing this all day until you give us the code.’

  The fat man had had enough. There were tears in his eyes as he grabbed the remote computer keyboard and tapped in a series of numbers, swallowed hard, and hit the enter key.

  Anatoly nodded in satisfaction as the screen flashed up a ‘CODE VALID’ message. He pointed at Silvestri. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Scagnetti and Bellomo tore through the second floor of the house, kicking open every door as they went. Bellomo was a couple of metres ahead when he held up a clenched fist and jerked his head towards the end of the corridor as if to say, ‘Wait. I hear something.’

  Up ahead in the shady corridor was a carved double doorway. The doors were open inwards a few inches, sunlight streaming into the room from the window beyond. The men listened. Behind the doors, a man’s voice was talking. He spoke in rapid Italian, something about Botticelli. The voice sounded tinny and reedy, and they realised it was coming from a TV speaker.

  ‘That just came on now,’ Scagnetti whispered. Bellomo nodded. As they listened, the sound stopped abruptly, as if whoever had turned it on by mistake was turning it off again in a hurry.

  The two gunmen kicked open the doors and raced into the room.

  Straight into a massive impact that knocked them sprawling backwards and their weapons spinning out of their hands.

  Ben rode the heavy oak table as it came swinging violently down from its perch over the double doors. The lengths of rubber hose he’d tied from two of its legs to the classroom’s ceiling beams brought it down in a perfect arc so that the thick tabletop rammed into the men’s bodies as they entered the room and laid them flat. It was as if they’d been hit by a train. He leaped off, landed nimbly on his feet, and stepped out of the way as the table swung back towards him.

  One of the men was out cold; the other was groaning and struggling to raise himself up off the floor. His face was bloodied. Ben remembered him as the one who’d murdered Marcello Peruzzi as calmly as stepping on a beetle. He picked up the fire axe from inside the door and placed its blunt nose against the man’s throat, pressing him back down.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Go fuck yourself.’

  Ben put some more weight behind the axe blade, and the guy’s face turned a mottled purple. Blood dribbled downwards from the corners of his mouth where the table had smashed his lips against his teeth.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Ben said again.

  ‘Scagnetti.’

  ‘You’re in the wrong place, Scagnetti. You have a first name?’

  ‘Antonio.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Bruno Bellomo.’ It came out as a groan as Ben leaned a little harder on the axe.

  ‘Who are you working for?’

  Scagnetti spat blood at him and snorted. Ben lifted the axe away from his throat. He took a grip on the smooth hickory handle and swung it down with a loud crash of steel on floorboards. Wood splintered. Blood flew, and with it the four severed fingers of Scagnetti’s left hand.

  ‘That’ll save you money on guitar lessons,’ Ben said.

  Scagnetti’s screams echoed
down the corridor as he writhed and rolled in agony, his bleeding hand clamped hard under his right armpit.

  ‘I think you were just telling me who you work for,’ Ben said, crouching beside him with the axe handle against his shoulder.

  ‘The Russian,’ Scagnetti whimpered. ‘I don’t know his name. I swear.’

  Ben knew the look on the man’s face. It was the look of a guy who’d just realised exactly what he was dealing with: an enemy perfectly willing to take him apart, calmly, piece by piece. That was one scary moment, even for a cold killer like Antonio Scagnetti. In Ben’s experience, someone in that seriously rattled state of mind was willing to say anything to make the horror go away. The first thing out of their mouths was generally the truth.

  Ben stood up. ‘OK, Antonio, I believe you. You can save the rest for the cops. Time for a nap now.’ He swung the axe at Scagnetti’s head, side on so that the flat face of the blade whacked into his skull with a meaty thud. Certainly not hard enough to kill him, unlikely to cause permanent damage, but he’d have something to help take his mind off his sore hand for a while.

  Ben stepped over the unconscious body to the other guy, who was beginning to come to. Sweet dreams, Bruno. Crack.

  Putting aside the axe, Ben frisked the men and found two identical radio handsets. He tossed one aside and examined the other. It was a wide-band VHF Motorola, a complex pro-level device covered with knobs and switches. Ben made a mental note of the channel it was set to, then used its scanning facility to skip through multiple frequencies in search of a police channel. The Carabinieri, officially part of the Italian military, used encrypted frequencies that couldn’t be unscrambled on a civilian radio set, but after a minute or so of scanning through white noise and static, he hit on a channel that sounded like a Polizia Municipale control room. The Italian municipal cops were mainly a civilian force, limited to directing traffic, enforcing minor local laws, getting stuck kittens out of trees – but that was good enough right now.