The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 30



Instantly, Lombardi stood up, his right arm a blur as he threw his switchblade knife directly towards where the closest of the two men – Marco – was standing. Then he dived to one side, towards their discarded Berettas.

Perini reacted at the same moment, launching himself across the floor towards the pistols he and Lombardi had been forced to surrender. But even as he did so, the other two men fired, the flat cracks of their suppressed weapons sounding deceptively harmless in the echoing gallery.

Perini’s clutching fingers found one of the pistols. He clicked off the safety catch and fired two shots, a double tap, aiming at the faint illumination he’d seen when the other men fired.

The bark of the unsilenced Beretta was a double assault on the eardrums, and he was rewarded by a single cry of pain or maybe shock.

Perini rolled sideways further, and his knee hit a sharp angular object. He reached down, seized the second pistol and slid it back across the tiled floor towards Lombardi, a dim shape he’d seen in the muzzle flashes.

‘Your weapon, Cesare,’ he called out, then fired twice more, the brief muzzle flashes again providing him with a glimpse of the opposition, and hopefully allowing Lombardi to see the second pistol.

About three metres behind Perini, Lombardi groped for the weapon, found it and immediately aimed it down the gallery. He fired once, blind, using the split second flare of light to locate the opposition, then fired twice more, aimed shots at one of the men, now crouching down beside an exhibit to present a smaller target.

Another two rounds were fired from one of the silenced weapons, and both detectives fired shots in reply. There was the sound of breaking glass, a heavy thud, and then there was silence.

Perini had a small torch in his pocket – he always carried one, just in case he ever needed a personal source of light at a crime scene – and he held it at arm’s length with his left hand and switched it on. Then he immediately turned it off again and dodged to his right, firing his Beretta twice as he did so.

Lombardi fired at almost the same moment, the four shots sounding almost like three, because in the torchlight both detectives had seen one man still standing, his weapon aimed towards them.

Silence again.

Once more, Perini risked using the torch, and this time he left it on, because it looked like it was all over. He played the beam over the men who’d surprised them in the gallery, all three of whom were now lying on the floor.

‘Can you get some lights on, Rudolf?’ he asked. ‘Over-ride the automatic timer?’

He swung the beam of his torch round to where the director lay flat on his stomach, behind the wooden chest, his arms around his head.

Slowly and cautiously Massimo climbed to his feet, and nodded.

‘Shine the light over here,’ he instructed, walking slowly towards the far end of the gallery, where a flat grey panel was set into one wall. He pulled it open, and a moment later the main lights in the gallery came back to life.

The man who they believed was named Marco lay flat on his back where he’d fallen, a surprised look on his face and with Lombardi’s switchblade sticking out of his chest. The tip of the blade had obviously ruptured his heart.

‘You told me you were a good shot, Cesare,’ Perini said, ‘but I didn’t realize you could throw a knife as well.’

‘A misspent youth,’ Lombardi replied.

The second gunman had been hit by a number of bullets and was clearly dead, his pistol lying beside him, but Stefan was still alive, just. One slug had hit his left thigh, bringing him down, beside a glass display case which had shattered as another bullet hit it, and he’d taken another round in his shoulder. He’d dropped his pistol, a small Walther, and the trail of blood on the tiled floor showed that he’d been trying to crawl over to retrieve it.

Perini kicked the weapon out of reach and looked down at the wounded man.

‘You admit those two men were responsible for killing Professor Bertorelli?’ he asked, his voice calm and measured.

Stefan nodded.

‘And for the other man, the one unfortunate enough to have purchased the house in Florence once owned by Dante Alighieri?’

Again Stefan nodded.

‘Now get me to a hospital,’ he snarled, his teeth clenching in pain.

‘Then I think we can call those two cases closed, Cesare?’ Perini suggested.

Lombardi nodded.

‘And no loose ends,’ the sergeant said, took a couple of steps back and fired a single round through Stefan’s chest, ending the man’s suffering forever. Then he slid the man’s Walther back towards him, using the toe of his shoe to position it close to his right hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Massimo demanded. ‘Shouldn’t we be calling the police?’

‘We are the police,’ Perini replied, ‘and this place will be swarming soon enough. Somebody is bound to have heard those shots. So what we need to do is get our stories straight.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ Massimo asked.

‘Just tell the truth, or nearly the truth,’ Perini instructed him, ‘but don’t mention the manuscript when you’re questioned. We’re going to say that we believed that a gang of thieves might be targeting the Palazzo Pitti and we visited you to explain our fears. The people on the entrance will be able to confirm that. While we were here in this gallery, these three men burst in, guns waving. There was a fire-fight, but we managed to overpower them when the automatic timer switched off the lights. And that, by the way, was quick thinking on your part. Knowing that the place was suddenly going to be plunged into darkness was the only weapon we had right then. Just don’t say that Cesare here executed the ringleader, because that obviously wouldn’t look good on the police report. As far as we’re concerned, he was reaching for his pistol and we killed him in self-defence.’

‘And just think how much money we’ve saved Florence by not having a trial,’ Lombardi said. ‘Now, let’s take a look at what was in the false bottom of that chest.’

He lifted up the leather-wrapped parcel from the floor where he’d dropped it minutes – and three lifetimes – earlier and placed it on a nearby shelf.

‘Allow me, please,’ Massimo said, pulling on the pair of gloves and stepping forward.

Carefully, he unwrapped the leather and all three bent forward to take a closer look at what had been hidden in the chest for over half a millennium.

It didn’t look very impressive. A piece of parchment with the single word Commedia written in large letters in the centre, the ink faded and darkened with age, and below that a somewhat flowery signature that they could just about make out: Durante degli Alighieri.

‘That was Dante’s full name,’ Massimo explained, then lifted off the parchment.

Below were sheets of paper, unbound, with the word Inferno in large letters at the top of the first page. Below that were a number of lines of text, written in Italian. The first two groups of three lines read, in what looked like the same handwriting as they’d already seen on the cover:



Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

miritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la diritta via era smarrita.



Ahiquanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

estaselva selvaggia e aspra e forte

chenel pensier rinova la paura!



‘That’s it,’ Massimo said softly. ‘That’s the start of the first canto of the Divina Commedia, where Dante finds himself in the dark wood of error. I think I know how he felt.’

He was trembling slightly, like a man who suddenly discovers that he’s won the lottery, which in a way he had.

Outside, they clearly heard the first of the approaching sirens, and Perini knew they had one final matter to clear up.

He took out his mobile phone, selected the camera and took three quick shots of Massimo looking down at the manuscript, making sure that both the man’s face and the first page of the text was clearly visible in all three pictures.

‘What are you doing?’ Massimo asked.

‘Taking out a final insurance policy,’ Perini said. ‘We have your signed agreement, Rudolf, and I’m quite sure that you’ll do what we’ve agreed, but those pictures show you clearly with the relic, just in case you decide to change your mind. Now, we’ll replace what we’ve found where we found it, in the chest, and in a week or so we’ll come back here and tell you that in our own time we’ve followed the trail suggested by the verses and that we believe Dante’s original manuscript is hidden here, and then the three of us, and maybe some other member of the staff here, will come down, examine the chest and find it.’

Lombardi folded the leather around the manuscript again, and slid it back into the false bottom, replacing the panel which had concealed it. Moments later, he’d also replaced ‘Gaetani’s bane’ in the lid of the chest.

‘All done,’ he said.

‘And when we come back, it will be in the chest, won’t it, Rudolf?’ Perini said coldly. ‘We have the agreement and now we have the pictures of you with it. I’d hate to think you might try a little freelance operation here, because wherever you go, I promise we can find you.’

The director shook his head.

‘You have my word,’ he said, ‘and I have only one suggestion. When you come back, I’ll redraft the agreement to give you fifteen per cent of the relic’s worth, not ten per cent, but on one condition.’

‘That we give you one third of the finder’s fee?’ Perini asked.

‘Exactly.’

‘Excellent news,’ Lombardi said. ‘I’m glad we’re all on the same page, here, Rudolf. This will make us all very rich men.’

‘It’s been a pleasure doing business with you,’ Perini agreed, and stepped over Stefan’s bloody corpse as he led the way out of the gallery.





If you enjoyed reading The Dante Conspiracy you might like Trade Off by Tom Kasey, also published by Endeavour Press.





Extract from Trade Off by Tom Kasey





Prologue





Friday



When Kathy Morrell woke up, she was eight days short of her twenty-seventh birthday and had exactly seventeen minutes of life remaining.

At first she thought it was the glare that had awoken her, but she was wrong. Her first waking sensation had been the lights, banks of them located high above her recumbent body, so brilliant that looking up at them quite literally hurt her eyes. But although the lights were all she could see and all she was aware of for the first few seconds after consciousness returned, they weren’t what had interrupted her sleep.

Her return to wakefulness was due simply to chemistry, to a change in the relative concentrations of the gases she was breathing, and had been breathing continuously for just over four days. The oxygen and nitrous oxide mixture had been carefully regulated by the automatic monitoring systems to keep her deeply unconscious during her transportation to this, her final destination. Around thirty minutes earlier, the system had begun to reduce the concentration of nitrous oxide, with a corresponding increase in the proportion of nitrogen, and her drugged brain had slowly returned to life.

For several minutes Kathy just lay still, tentatively exploring her memory and wondering why on earth she felt so ravenously hungry. The nitrous oxide had left her with a blinding headache which showed no immediate signs of abating, and she guessed that if she tried to sit up or stand the pain would probably knock her back down again. So she lay still, collected her thoughts and tried to work out the answer to a single, very simple, but very important question – just where the hell was she?

She dug back through her memories. She remembered dining alone in the hotel restaurant, and the dark-haired man, also unaccompanied, sitting at the adjoining table. She remembered his polite request, and her casual acceptance of his company for coffee and liqueurs. They had talked, exploring each other’s lives as her eyes studied his face, and the coffee cups and the liqueur glasses were filled and refilled, and the restaurant emptied around them.

Kathy remembered Richard’s tentative, almost shy, offer to walk her up to her suite on the tenth floor, and the lingering embrace at the door which had led them, with an inevitability which they had obviously both recognized, through the doorway and straight into the bedroom, shedding clothes and inhibitions on the way.

Richard had been good, very good, and she felt herself moistening with the recollection. But that, she realized with a puzzled frown, was the last thing she could recall. She had no memory of him leaving her suite, and no memory of what she had done after they had lain close together in the afterglow, no memory of anything after that.

Well, that wasn’t precisely correct, she realized. She remembered snuggling up to him, remembered him stroking her long blonde hair, remembered the cigarette he had offered her, and which she had taken.

She was going to give up, she’d told him, but there were times – and without question that moment on that evening qualified as one of them – when smoking a cigarette was simply the only possible thing to do.

The cigarette. Kathy remembered that Richard hadn’t joined her, hadn’t taken one for himself, which had struck her as odd. Yes, she realized. The absolute last thing she had any recollection of was lying back in her bed, smoking the stranger’s cigarette.

At that moment, Kathy Morrell had a little over eight minutes left to live.

She glanced carefully around her, moving her eyes only and taking care to keep her head as immobile as possible. The one place she wasn’t, she was absolutely certain, was in the queen-sized bed in her tenth-floor hotel suite.

She was lying in what appeared to be a casket or box, almost coffin-shaped. The inside was padded, the cover had a large glass faceplate through which the lights above her still blazed, and she was lying on a thin mattress or pad.

She noted without any real surprise that she was quite naked. She had no recollection of dressing after her love-making with the dark-haired stranger, so her nakedness was probably what she would have expected. But where on earth was she?

She wondered if she had been taken ill, and was in a hospital or clinic somewhere but, she rationalized, if that were the case her surroundings would be quite different. She would have been on a gurney or in a bed, surrounded by nurses and doctors and other medical staff. And, she added to herself, she would be wearing something – a gown or nightdress or some other garment – or maybe just covered with a sheet for modesty. She certainly wouldn’t have been left lying naked in some kind of a box.

For the first time Kathy felt unease, and began the slow process of sitting upright. But she discovered immediately that she couldn’t, because of restraints – padded fabric bands or straps – positioned around her wrists and forehead. A few seconds of exploration revealed other bands around her hips and ankles. She was locked in the box, pinned to the base.

The box jerked suddenly and Kathy sensed movement. She also became aware, almost subliminally, of a faint but definite vibration through the floor of the casket. And then she relaxed, because she knew she must be in a hospital. She’d seen patients being fed into CAT scanners and other equipment before, on TV, and she was suddenly sure that she was undergoing some form of test. She couldn’t imagine what for – she was almost never ill – and as soon as they’d finished the examination she’d get the whole situation straightened out.

A couple of minutes later the box jerked again, and she felt the vibration increase in intensity. Obviously they were getting ready to position her in the scanner, or whatever the hell the machine was. Then she noticed that the lid of the casket was lifting off, hoisted into the air by a type of mechanical arm.

‘Hello,’ she called out. ‘Anyone there?’

There had to be someone in the room. Someone had to be operating the machinery that she could hear.

‘Hey! Anybody there?’ Kathy called again.

The sounds she could hear were much louder. A piercing, howling, almost-human scream suddenly cut through the air, and her body tensed involuntarily, then relaxed slightly. A piece of machinery, she thought, and in need of a good dose of lubrication.

She began to discern other sounds, and tried to fit them all into a scenario that made sense. The hissing of something like a hydraulic system was clear enough, and a strange grinding vibration that she felt through the base of the casket almost more than she heard it. And loudest of all were the screams from what she guessed were inadequately lubricated wheels.

‘Hey!’ she shouted again, but without any real conviction. If there had been anyone there, they would have heard her the first time and responded.

The casket jerked again and moved about six feet forward. Kathy felt the fabric straps tighten about her body, and then the casket tilted upwards, pivoting from the foot until it stopped at an angle of about forty-five degrees to the horizontal. For the first time she had an unobstructed view of the whole of the room in front of her.

Nothing that she saw made sense, not at first. The room was about two storeys high, and as far as she could see lined entirely with steel. Ranged on the ceiling were banks of lights, shining down. About five feet in front of her was another casket, lying horizontal and empty, and beyond that was something else.

Knowing is prerequisite to seeing. The human brain takes a considerable time to identify any object which is totally unfamiliar, and adult humans never expect to see anything that they haven’t seen before. That was why Kathy just lay there staring and squinting into the glare for almost ten seconds before she started to scream.

It looked like a machining table in a carpenter’s shop. A flat bed of steel, about eight feet long and three feet wide, with equipment she didn’t and couldn’t recognize positioned along one side of it. Directly behind the equipment was what looked to Kathy like a booth, pretty much like a cashier’s booth on the turnpike, with small glass windows.

But it wasn’t the table, the equipment or the booth that provoked her scream. It wasn’t even the viscous red splashes and smears that covered most of the machinery and a good section of the floor around the table. It was the pinkish-white object on the table, and what was happening to it. It was the realization of what that object was, and of what was about to happen to her.

That was why she screamed.