“What the hell’s going on?” Mark demanded, turning around in his seat to look back toward his house. “Who were those people?”
“I don’t know who they were,” Bronson said, “but I know what they were. That cubical object was the stone from your dining-room wall, and the gray box was the system unit from your computer. They were the people who broke in to read the first inscription, and who’ve been trying to get back inside ever since to find the second one.”
Bronson glanced in his mirror as he accelerated hard down the hill. About two hundred yards behind them he saw two cars emerge from the gateway one after the other and start chasing them. The first was the Fiat that had blocked the drive behind them, and the second was the Lancia.
“I don’t—” Mark began.
Bronson interrupted. “We’re not clear yet. Both cars are chasing us.”
His eyes were scanning the instruments, checking for any abnormal readings that might have been caused by the harsh treatment he’d given the car, but everything seemed OK. And he hadn’t detected any problems with the handling, though there appeared to be various bits of greenery attached to the front of the car.
“What do they want?”
“The inscription, obviously. They know we erased it, so now we’re their only lead, simply because we saw it. Whatever it means, it must be a hell of a lot more important than I thought.”
Bronson was pushing the Alfa as hard as he dared, but the roads were fairly narrow, twisting and not that well surfaced and, though he couldn’t see the other cars behind him, he knew they had to be close. He was a very competent police-trained driver, but he wasn’t familiar with the car or the area, and he was driving on the “wrong” side of the road, so the odds were stacked against him.
“You’ll have to help me, Mark. We’ve got to get the hell away from here, as quickly as possible.” He pointed ahead to a road sign indicating a crossroads. “Which way?”
Mark stared through the windshield, but for a moment he didn’t respond.
“I need to know,” Bronson said urgently. “Which way?”
Mark seemed to rouse himself. “Left,” he said. “Go left. That’s the quickest route to the autostrada.”
But as Bronson paused in the center of the road, waiting for a group of three cars coming in the opposite direction to pass, the Fiat appeared in his rearview mirror about a hundred yards behind.
“Shit,” Bronson muttered, and accelerated as quickly as he could the instant the road was clear.
“A quick check, Mark,” he said. “My laptop and camera are in the car, and my passport’s in my pocket. Is there anything you have to collect from the house?”
Mark felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet and passport. “Only my clothes and stuff,” he said. “I hadn’t finished packing.”
“You have now,” Bronson said grimly, alternating his gaze between the road in front and his mirrors.
“We need to take the next road on the right,” Mark instructed. “Then the autostrada’s only a couple of miles away.”
“Got it.”
But though Bronson slowed as the Alfa neared the junction, he didn’t take the turn.
“Chris, I said turn right.”
“I know, but we need to lose this guy first. Hang on.”
The Fiat had closed to less than fifty yards behind the Alfa when Bronson acted. He slammed on the brakes, waited until the car’s speed had dropped to about twenty miles an hour, then released the brakes, spun the wheel to the left and simultaneously pulled on the handbrake. The car lurched sideways, tires screaming in protest as it slid across to the other side of the road. The moment it was facing the opposite way, Bronson dropped the handbrake and pressed on the accelerator. The Alfa shot past the Fiat, whose driver was still braking hard, and moments later they passed the Lancia as well, which had just caught up.
“What the hell was that?” Mark asked.
“Technically it’s called a J-turn, because that’s the shape of the skid mark the tires leave on the road. It’s amazing what you can learn in the police force. The important thing is that it should have given us a couple of minutes’ breathing space.”
Bronson was checking his mirrors constantly and when they reached the turning for the autostrada there was still no sign of either the Fiat or the Lancia behind them. For a second or two he debated ignoring the junction and taking a side road up into the hills, where they might be able to find somewhere to hide for a few minutes. But he decided that speed was more important, and hauled the Alfa across the road, barely slowing, and within three minutes they were taking a ticket at the barrier.
“Where are we going?” Mark asked.
“We’re heading for the Italian border. I’m going to put as much distance as possible between us and them, and the sooner we’re in another country the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
Mark shook his head. “I still don’t really understand what’s going on. Stealing the computer makes sense, I suppose—it’s possible we could have stored the pictures of the verses on that—but the stone? You completely destroyed the inscription, so why would they bother taking it?”
“They probably think they can recover it by using some kind of high-tech process. You can use X-rays to read the number of a car engine after it’s been ground off the block, so maybe there’s a similar technique that can be applied to stone. I really don’t know. But to go to the trouble of hacking that stone block out of the wall—not to mention shooting at us—that means they’re really serious about finding that inscription.”
12
I
Gregori Mandino was furious. He’d ordered the stone and computer unit to be taken out to the Lancia, and he’d planned to have Pierro drive the vehicle away from the house, leaving the three of them in the property to await the return of Hampton and his companion. But the call from his bodyguard, telling him the two Englishmen were already heading back to the house, had changed all that.
The maneuver by his bodyguard had worked perfectly, completely blocking the entrance to the driveway, but the way the car had escaped had been totally unexpected. That, and the way the Alfa had evaded them minutes later, had convinced Mandino that the driver was either desperate or an expert.
They’d turned to give chase as quickly as possible, but by the time they’d reached the first junction, the Alfa Romeo was nowhere in sight, and there were three possible routes the driver could have taken. Mandino had guessed Hampton and the other man would head for the autostrada, and he’d ordered the Lancia driver to take that route, but they’d seen no sign of their quarry before they reached the tollbooths and, without knowing which way the Alfa had gone, any further attempt at pursuit was pointless.
Mandino hated making mistakes. He’d assumed that the two Englishmen wouldn’t be returning to the house for at least two hours, and assumption, as an American colleague had been fond of saying, was the mother of all screwups. But it was too late now.
“Search the house,” he ordered. “Look for any documents that identify the second man, and anything that might help us find the two of them.”
As his men dispersed to do his bidding, Pierro walked over to Mandino. “What would you like me to do?”
“Take another look around the place, just in case my men miss anything.”
“Where do you think the Englishmen have gone?”
“If they’ve got any sense,” Mandino replied, “they’ll be heading for England. They’ll have picked up the autostrada and headed north, out of Italy.”
“Can’t you stop them? Get the Carabinieri to intercept them?”
Mandino shook his head. “I have some influence with them, but this whole matter is supposed to be handled as discreetly as possible. We’ll have to find these two using our own resources.”
II
Mandino was right—Bronson had taken the autostrada and turned north, heading for the Italian border.