“Where the hell is it? Where’s the inscription?” Mandino’s voice was harsh and angry.
Rogan looked like he’d seen a ghost. “It was here,” he shouted, staring at the wall. “It was right here on this stone.”
“Look at the floor,” Pierro said, pointing at the base of the wall. He knelt down and picked up a handful of stone chips. “Somebody’s chiseled off the inscribed layer of that stone. Some of these flakes still have letters—or at least parts of letters—on them.”
“Can you do anything with them?” Mandino demanded.
“It’ll be like a three-dimensional jigsaw,” Pierro said, “but I should be able to reconstruct some of it. I’ll need the stone to be pulled out of the wall. Without that, there’s no way I can work out which piece goes where. There’s also a possibility that we could try surface analysis, or even chemical treatment or an X-ray technique, to try to recover the inscription.”
“Really?”
“It’s worth a try. It’s not my field, but it’s surprising what can be achieved with modern recovery methods.”
That was good enough for Mandino. He pointed at his bodyguard. “Go and find something soft to put the stone chips in—towels, bed linen, something like that—and collect every single shard you can find.” He turned to Rogan. “When he’s done that, get the stepladder and start chipping out the cement from around that stone. But don’t,” he warned, “do any more damage to the stone itself. We’ll help you lift it down when you’ve loosened it.”
Mandino watched for a few moments as his men started work, then walked toward the door, motioning to Pierro to follow him. “We’ll check the rest of the house, just in case they were helpful enough to write down what they found.”
“If they did that to the stone,” the professor replied, “I doubt very much if you’ll find anything.”
“I know, but we’ll look anyway.”
In the study, Mandino immediately spotted the computer and a digital camera. “We’ll take these,” he said.
“We could look at the computer here,” Pierro suggested.
“We could,” Mandino agreed, “but I know specialists who can recover data even from formatted hard disks, and I’d rather they checked it. And if these men photographed the stone before they obliterated the inscription, the images might still be in the camera.”
Mandino yanked the power cable and connecting leads out of the back of the desktop computer’s system unit and picked it up. “Bring the camera,” he ordered, and led the way to the hall, where he carefully placed the unit beside the front door.
They walked back into the dining room, where Rogan and the bodyguard were just lifting the stone clear of the wall. When they’d lowered it to the floor, Mandino examined the surface again, but all he could see were chisel marks. Despite Pierro’s optimism, he didn’t think there was even the remotest chance of recovering the inscription from the pathetic collection of chips and the surface of the stone itself.
The best option they had was to talk to the men themselves.
Funerals in Italy are normally grand family affairs, with posters pasted around the town announcing the death, an open casket and lines of weeping and wailing mourners. The Hamptons knew few people in the town—they’d only been there, off and on, for a matter of months, and had spent most of that time working on the house rather than getting to know their neighbors.
Bronson had arranged for a simple service in the anticipation that there’d be only three people there—himself, Mark and the priest. In fact, there were about two dozen mourners, all members of Maria Palomo’s extended family. But it was, by Italian standards, a very restrained, and comparatively brief, ceremony. Within thirty minutes the two men were back in the Alfa, and heading out of the town.
Neither of them had noticed the single man in a nondescript dark-colored Fiat who had followed them into Ponticelli. When they’d parked near the church, he’d driven past but within moments of Bronson pulling away from the curb, the car was behind them again.
Inside the vehicle, the driver pulled a cell phone from his pocket and pressed a speed-dial number. “They’re on the way,” he said.
*
Mark had barely said a word since they’d left Ponticelli, and Bronson hadn’t felt like talking, the two men united in their grief for the death of a woman they’d both loved, albeit from different perspectives. Mark was trying to come to terms with the final, irrevocable chapter of his short marriage, while Bronson’s aching loss was tempered by guilt, by the knowledge that for the last five years or so he’d been living a lie, in love with his best friend’s wife.
The funeral had been Mark’s last farewell to Jackie and, now it was over, he was going to have to make decisions about his life. Bronson guessed that the house—the property the Hamptons had intended to retire to—would go on the market. The memories of their time together in the old place would probably be too painful for Mark to relive for very long.
As he neared the house, Bronson noticed a Fiat sedan coming up fast behind them.
“Bloody Italian drivers,” he muttered, as the car showed no signs of overtaking, just maintained position about ten yards behind the Alfa.
He braked gently as he approached the gateway, turned on his blinker and turned in. But the other car did the same, stopping actually in the gateway and completely blocking it. In that instant, as Bronson glanced toward the old house, he realized they were trapped, and just how high the stakes really were.
Outside the house, a Lancia sedan was parked, and beside the front door—which looked as if it was slightly ajar—was an oblong gray box and a cubical sandy-colored object. Behind the car, two men were standing, staring at the approaching Alfa, one with the unmistakable shape of a pistol in his right hand.
“Who the hell . . . ?” Mark shouted.
“Hang on,” Bronson yelled. He swung the wheel to the left and accelerated hard, powering the car off the gravel drive and across the lawn, aiming straight for the hedge that formed a boundary between the garden and the road.
“Where was it?” Bronson shouted.
Strapped into the passenger seat, Mark immediately guessed what Bronson was asking. When they’d bought the house, the driveway was U-shaped, with two gates, but they’d extended the hedge and lawn across the second entrance. And that was now their only way out. He pointed through the windshield. “A little farther to the right,” he said, braced himself in the seat and closed his eyes.
Bronson twitched the wheel slightly as the Alfa rocketed forward. He heard the cracks of two shots behind them, but he didn’t think either hit the vehicle. Then the nose of the car tore into the hedge, the bushes planted barely a year earlier. Beyond the windshield, their view turned into an impenetrable maelstrom of green and brown as the Alfa smashed the plants under its chassis, branches whipping past the side windows. The front wheels lifted off the ground for a moment when the car hit the low bank that formed the base of the hedge, then crashed down again.
And then they were through. Bronson lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal and hit the brakes for an instant as the car lurched across the grass verge, checking the road in both directions. It was just as well he did.
A truck was lumbering up the hill directly toward them, just a few yards away, a black cloud of diesel belching from its exhaust. The driver’s face wore an almost comical look of shock, having just seen the bright red car materialize from a hedge right in front of him.
Bronson slammed the accelerator pedal down again, and the Alfa shot straight across the road, missing the back of the truck by perhaps three feet. He hit the brakes, swung the wheel hard left and, the moment the car was aiming down the hill, accelerated again. The Alfa fishtailed as he fed in the power, but in moments it was screaming down the road at well more than sixty miles an hour.