David felt as if time had stopped. All he could hear was the pounding of his own heart, booming like a bass drum. His breath burned in his throat. His gory prize—mouth open, eyes agog—dangled by its hair from his hand. Gradually, he came back to himself, like a man emerging from a trance. The sword clattered to the floor. And then the head dropped, too.
Stooping, he retrieved from the expanding pool of blood the thing he had come so far to find. Looping the Medusa around his neck, he stood up again, like Perseus astride the slaughtered Gorgon, and went to rescue his companion—and tell him it was indeed finished.
Chapter 40
Once she was sure that the car had been swallowed up for good, Olivia had stumbled, soaking wet and missing one shoe, up the muddy bank. But she knew that if she didn’t find some dry clothes or some cover fast, she’d freeze to death while waiting for David and Ascanio to come back.
She didn’t even allow herself to think that they might not return.
She made her way across the cold, hard ground to the cement dock, then back to the spot where the Maserati had been parked. Unless her attacker had followed them on foot, he must have left a car hidden somewhere nearby. But the woods were dark, and it was slow going over the rough, uneven terrain. Her blouse and pants were still dripping, and her one shoe kept her off-kilter. She followed the trail as well as she could, taking advantage of every spot of moonlight to plot her course, and eventually she spotted the back bumper of a car hidden among the trees close to the road. She started to run toward it before realizing that there might be an accomplice inside.
Wiping the wet hair back from her eyes, she inched forward, keeping among the foliage, until she was close enough to see that it was a little, beige Peugeot, with no one in it. It was pointed out toward the road, just as she had done with the Maserati. Everybody, she surmised, had been preparing for a quick getaway.
Now if only it was unlocked.
And it was, with the key still sitting in the ignition. She turned it on and started the heat going at full blast. Then she surveyed the interior, which looked as if somebody had been living in it. Cigarette butts crammed the ashtrays, cardboard coffee cups littered the floor, and clothes were spilling out of an open duffel bag on the backseat. She quickly rummaged around in it and found a heavy fisherman’s knit sweater. Peeling off her wet blouse, she pulled it on over her head, then a pair of woolly white socks that came halfway up her shins. The heat was going strong and she had stopped her shivering altogether.
But her curiosity was greater than ever. Who was this man who had been so relentlessly tracking them? She popped open the glove compartment for the car registration papers and found instead a brochure from the rental agency, with his completed application inside.
“Escher,” she read, “Ernst Escher.” The name meant nothing to her, and though he’d paid with a credit card from a Swiss bank, he listed his address as a post-office box in the States. Chicago, in fact—where David, of course, was from.
Had he been following David’s trail all the way from America? On his own? Or at someone else’s behest?
On the passenger seat, there was another rucksack, which she quickly unbuckled. This one looked like a doctor’s bag inside, stuffed with prescription pills and bottles, along with a BlackBerry and a burgundy Austrian passport, with its distinctive gold coat of arms.
She flipped the dog-eared passport open. The pages bore dozens of stamps, for every place from Liechtenstein to Dubai, but the picture in front was of a weaselly-looking little man named Julius Jantzen. The same man who had drugged their drinks. He was thirty-eight years old, five-foot-six, unmarried, and although his current address was Florence, Italy, his birthplace was listed as Linz, Austria.
Hitler’s hometown, she thought.
She wondered if this Jantzen character wasn’t still out there in the woods somewhere. She tossed the passport back into the bag, steering the Peugeot out of the trees and back toward the dock. She parked it out of sight again, with the motor off and the lights out.
And was surprised to find that her hands and feet were becoming numb. Inside her, despite the warm interior of the car, she felt a cold and hollow spot growing. She was going into shock, she dimly recognized. While she’d been fighting for her life and struggling to find safety, she had been operating on sheer survival instinct and adrenaline. But now, now that she was temporarily—and provisionally—safe, now that she was warm and dry and no gun was grazing her cheek, her heart was still racing, her breath was coming in short, shallow bursts, and her mind was grappling with the trauma she had just undergone.
She had escaped dying by the skin of her teeth.
And she had killed a man in the process. Not a good man, not some innocent, but a man, nonetheless.