The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 6



It was ten past two in the morning in the Cloister of the Dead. The full moon, briefly emerging from behind a bank of heavy cloud, cast a silvery light across the deserted Piazza Santa Croce and the pale face of the Basilica which dominated the south-east end of it. But almost as soon as it had appeared another cloud began to obscure it, which suited the two men very well.

They were wearing black. Black jeans, black trainers, black jumpers and black knitted caps, and all their exposed skin had also been blackened with camouflage make-up sticks. There was nothing in their pockets to identify them, and all of the tools they had in their padded black holdall were old and well used. They were each carrying a loaded revolver, each weapon a cheap nickel-plated .38 with the serial number filed off, and which they could abandon, along with the tools, without a single qualm, because none of them could be traced back to either man. It was, to coin an expression used by the intelligence community, of which they were not a part, a totally deniable operation. Their employer had insisted on that.

They needed to work as quickly as possible, but more importantly as quietly as possible. That meant they couldn’t take the quick route and use a petrol-powered jackhammer, which would have done the job in a just a few minutes. They had to use hammers and cold chisels, and muffle them as best they could. The clang of steel on steel was a quite unmistakable sound, one which would certainly have attracted unwelcome attention to what they were doing in that location, especially at that hour of the morning. So they were using heavy cloth pads, taped to the ends of the chisels, and that reduced the noise of each hammer blow to a dull thud, but still drove the point of the tool deep into the masonry.

The piazza had been deserted when they’d arrived, just after midnight, and quite probably still was, but they still paused in their endeavours at frequent intervals to just listen for any sound that could suggest anyone was in their vicinity. And they had to listen because they couldn’t look. The Cloister of the Dead lay within the complex of buildings surrounding the basilica – in fact, it ran down the long southerly side of the building – and from where they were working, the two men couldn’t see outside the garden that lay between the cloister and the museum, and which was bounded at the north-western end by the Pazzi Chapel.

As they were within the complex they couldn’t see out, but by the same token nobody outside could see in. The only way they could be detected was by being heard.

They’d come over the wall near the tennis court which lay at the junction of Via Tripoli and Via Delle Casine, and had worked their way as quickly as they could to their objective. The previous day they’d bought tickets for the basilica and walked through the grounds, taking careful note of the location of every surveillance camera. There weren’t that many cameras – it was only a garden, after all – and they’d been able to avoid most of them that night, just by choosing their route carefully, but there were still a couple that they’d had to sort out. Cutting the feed cables would have done the job, but might also have produced a technician with a bag of tools to investigate.

The solution they’d come up with was simple and elegant: they’d simply sprayed the lens of the camera with a plumber’s spray, using for freezing pipes where the water couldn’t be turned off. The spray instantly covered the front of the lens with a thin layer of ice as the moisture from the warm air condensed on the suddenly cold surface. That allowed ample time for the two men to get past the cameras, but within just a few minutes they knew the lens would clear again, so even if the cameras were being monitored, the brief loss of the picture probably wouldn’t be noticed, and certainly not logged as a fault.

There were no cameras covering the Cloister of the Dead, because there was nothing there: it was just an elevated corridor, the wall of the basilica on one side and a wall a little over a metre in height, studded with pillars and overlooking the garden, on the other. There was nothing actually in the Cloister of the Dead, but there was plenty under it, the old bones which had generated the nickname it enjoyed. The cloister ran directly above a line of tombs, starting with the bones of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti, arguably the most influential and important figure of the Renaissance, and ending with the remains of Niccolo Machiavelli, two names which resounded through history, albeit for different reasons.

But it was not the bones of any of these long-dead men which were the objective of the two men, because there was something else lying under the elevated corridor of the Cloister of the Dead.

Before they’d started work, the two men had spent five minutes checking, re-checking and carefully measuring a specific distance from the south-eastern end of the cloister, a measurement which they’d both independently calculated the previous day. They’d known they had just one chance to get it right. If they dug in the wrong place, there would be no time to carry out another excavation that night, and as soon as the hole was discovered the Florentine authorities would mount cameras and quite possibly station an overnight guard there to prevent any further attempts to breach the sanctity of the hidden space under the cloister.

So they had to get it right the first time.

It was tough going, made more difficult by the way they were having to work, but after about two hours, a final blow from the chisel on the end of a stone rocked it, and another two blows drove it tumbling out of sight, to land with a dull thud somewhere in the void below them.

‘We’re in,’ Bruno whispered.

‘Yeah. Let’s hope we’re in the right place, after all this.’

With the opening created, widening it didn’t take too long, the stones proving comparatively easy to lever out of place, and within another twenty minutes the hole in the floor of the cloister was easily wide enough for them to descend into the space underneath. The second man – his name was Arrigo – pulled a thin but high tensile strength climbing rope out of the tool bag and expertly looped one end of it around the base of the nearest stone pillar, tugging on it several times to confirm that the knot would hold. Then he dropped the other end of the rope into the void, and positioned a folded piece of cloth over the jagged edge of the opening to protect it from chafing. He took a final look round to ensure they were still unobserved, then nodded to his companion, pulled on a pair of heavy gloves, seized the rope and dropped out of sight. Moments later, after checking up and down the cloister and what he could see of the garden and surrounding buildings, the other man followed.

In the near-impenetrable blackness of the open space under the cloister, the end of the rope had come to rest coiled on a small pile of rubble formed from the stones, mortar and concrete they’d knocked out of the roof of the void. The second man stumbled slightly as he landed on it.

‘Careful,’ Arrigo murmured.

‘Got the torch?’

In answer, Arrigo took a small torch from his pocket and turned it on, aiming the beam downwards and being careful not to shine it directly up at the opening they had created.

‘Where do we look?’ Bruno asked, his voice a barely audible whisper.

‘Buggered if I know,’ Arrigo replied, equally quietly. ‘It might not even be here at all. Just look for anything that seems out of place. And especially look for anything that’s big enough to conceal something the size of a large book. That’s all the man told me.’

The problem they had, and which became obvious to both of them almost immediately, was that they were standing in what amounted to an empty stone box. There was remarkably little inside it, and apart from the floor and the walls which seemed unlikely hiding places for all sorts of reasons, almost nowhere that anything could be concealed.

‘It’s not here, is it?’ Bruno asked, a few minutes later.

‘I think you’re right. We have to be in the right place, but the object isn’t here.’

‘I’ve never been inside a cenotaph before,’ Bruno replied. ‘I expected there to be more inside it.’

‘Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? This is a bit of an odd place, because it’s like a mausoleum but without a corpse, or even a coffin. Just a space waiting for the body. I suppose that if they’d managed to recover his bones then they’d have spruced up the inside a bit, given the old boy a more comfortable place to spend eternity. Anyway, as far as I can see, it’s not here and there’s nowhere in this place that could be used as a hiding place, not unless it was built into the walls, floor or even a part of the roof. And if it was, there’s no way we’re going to find it unless we demolish the whole place. So let’s go. I’ll call the Russian and tell him we had no luck. Forget about the tools. We can just walk away from them.’

‘No problem. I’m out of here.’

Just over eight minutes later, when they’d almost reached the south-eastern end of the basilica complex, a security light flared into life, accompanied by the banshee wail of an alarm: somehow they’d triggered a motion detector they’d missed on the way in.

Speed immediately became far more important than stealth, and they ran for the fence bordering the Via Delle Casine, triggering a second security light as they did so. They grabbed the fence, hauled themselves up it and dropped down onto the pavement. Outside the complex they started running, crossing the street at the junction with the Via Malcontenti and continuing north-east. Their objective was a patch of waste ground on the outskirts of Florence where they’d left the car, the key hidden under a broken paving slab about fifty yards away from the vehicle.

But at almost the same instant, a Carabinieri Alfa Romeo patrol car, headlights on main beam and lights flashing on the roof bar, swept around the corner from the Via Ghibellina with a squeal of protesting rubber and headed straight towards them. The police had reacted a lot faster than either man had expected.

Arrigo didn’t hesitate.

‘Separate,’ he ordered, and they ran back towards the crossroads, where Bruno went right and Arrigo left. The police driver couldn’t follow both, and picked Bruno, which was probably a mistake, because Arrigo only ran a few yards before he stopped, pulled out his revolver and adopted a classic target-shooting stance, holding the weapon in his right hand and supporting his wrist with his left hand.

As the police car came into view, he sighted down the barrel and fired twice, the double report shockingly loud in the quiet of the early morning. The first shot missed, the copper-jacketed bullet ricocheting off the road surface and into the wall of the building beyond the vehicle. But the second one hit the left-hand side rear wheel, instantly blowing a hole in the tyre, the explosion a further assault on the silence of the morning.

The car lurched to the left, the rear sliding and then hopping as the steel rim bit into the tarmac, a sudden eruption of sparks from underneath it, and slammed sideways into a small Fiat parked on the left-hand side of the road. Neither car would be going anywhere except to a garage for quite a while.

Arrigo turned and ran as hard as he could along the Via De Malcontenti, trying to put some distance between himself and the police officers in the crashed Alfa Romeo. They would have been shaken by the accident, as well as by being shot at, but he knew they’d get out of the car within a matter of seconds, and he didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when they did so, because then he’d be outnumbered and outgunned.

He reached the piazza at the end of the road and looked back, panting from the run, expecting to both see and hear one or more of the officers in pursuit, but the passenger door of the police Alfa was only just opening. He had ample time to lose himself in the tangle of streets on the east side of the Viale Giovanni Amendola, and he’d probably bought Bruno enough time to get clean away.

Half an hour later Arrigo walked across the waste ground towards the old Lancia they’d parked there, and as he did so Bruno emerged from the scrubland a few metres beyond the parked car, the key in his hand.

‘No problem?’ Arrigo asked.

‘Not once you’d shot out their tyre, no,’ Bruno replied.

‘Good. Let’s get out of here.’