White Heat (35 page)

Emily moved past him and started down the stairs, the others behind her. The Bataan Death March. Their footsteps echoed in the quiet as they descended into the crypts beneath the Basilica, single file.

To keep her mind off how thirsty she was, and oh, yes, how freaking terrified she was, Emily tried to remember what she knew about the Necropolis, other than that the complex of mausoleums under the foundation of the church had been built in the early part of AD 160.That was it. And she hadn’t remembered that. She’d seen a small plaque with the information near the entrance.

The air was close and humid and smelled of damp earth. The lighting was dim, but bright enough to see where she was going. Emily didn’t like
where
they were they going, but at least she could
see
it, she thought a little hysterically. Thirty or forty feet under the floor of St. Peter’s.

She’d been here years ago with a school group, but she didn’t remember her way around the labyrinth of old streets and dead ends. And she’d forgotten this glass door that required a handprint scan on the pad to enter. Very James Bond.

Very T-FLAC.

God. Where was Max? Was he at this very moment in Denver searching for Norcroft? She took some consolation that if psycho Norcroft was here with
her,
Max was somewhere safe. Cold comfort. She’d rather they were both safe, and together somewhere.

They couldn’t go any farther, she thought with relief.

Behind her Georgiou rustled some plastic, and Emily flattened her body against the side wall and closed her eyes. Because she knew he was fishing another damned body part out of his pocket to hold up to the scanner. The thought made her stomach roll as she waited.

It was warm down there. Warm and just a little bit claustrophobic. Sweat prickled around Emily’s hairline as she leaned against the gritty wall, her eyes closed so she didn’t have to see what was being used to open the damn door. She wiped her damp palms down the borrowed black cotton pants she wore.

The security system accepted whatever it was Georgiou held up, and the door swung open with a soft
whoosh.

The air inside the Roman Necropolis, the City of the Dead, was a little more musty smelling, and smoky, with the dust from previous centuries hanging in the still air. The hillside city of the dead had been built to look like a city in miniature, where wealthy pagan families entombed their dead in houses so they could continue their new lives. Eventually, hundreds of years later, a church had been built on the site, and hundreds of years after that St. Peter’s had been constructed, and the tombs had been forgotten.

It was the last place anyone would look for her. If anyone was looking at all She’d never felt more alone in her life.

“Keep walking. Then take the stairs,” Norcroft instructed from directly behind her, jabbing her in the back with his gun.

“You don’t have to press that damn thing into my spine so hard,” Emily informed him. “I’m not
going
anywhere.” There was nowhere
to
go. She was going to die here with the pagans and Christians who’d been entombed in this cemetery for centuries.

She should have forced Max to stay for five more minutes yesterday morning. Forced him to stand still long enough for her to tell him that she loved him. That she wanted more time to build a real relationship with him. That whatever his problem was with commitment, she’d stick by him and they could work it out. Together.

Tears stung behind her lids, and it wasn’t because Norcroft kept the muzzle of his damn gun pressed against her middle vertebra.

Despite everything that had happened to her in the past few weeks, she’d never really believed on a visceral level that she would die.

Now she did.

She’d wanted a lifetime with Max.

Now it was too late.

Two abreast, they walked through the winding streets lined with tombs. Red Lips and Greek guy walked a few steps behind Emily and Norcroft, who moved the gun to jab at a rib instead of her spine. Hardly an improvement.

The rough brick walls of the tombs rose to the ceiling. Niches cut into the stone held tombs and sarcophagi with pagan inscriptions and ancient Christian graffito carved side by side into the worn marble. It was as if the Christians had taken over, and just added to the existing decoration. A tiny sarcophagus had a mournful relief carving of a man and his wife holding their infant son. Emily tried to interpret some of the ancient carvings as she passed them.

Loss. Loss. And more loss. But also love. The tombs abounded with flowery declarations of love of every kind. Mothers for their children, husbands for their wives, a child for a well-loved pet. The carved pictures painted relatable scenes of human lives hundreds of years before.

Side streets branched off and held bigger mausoleums, where the wealthy were buried with their servants to wait on them even in death.

After walking along a fairly level surface, they came to a second narrow staircase and climbed down. There was another James Bond-like door that the Greek activated, allowing them to pass through. Emily vaguely remembered that the doors were to keep the humidity down. A prosaic reason, but it was a suitably creepy touch to this surreal expedition, and a chilling indication that, for her, this was a one-way trip.

The stone street veered off to the left, then opened into a small,
very
small, courtyard. It was crowded with the four of them.

And the chair.

A banged up, metal kitchen chair, with a cracked red plastic seat and a snake pit of ominous leather straps attached to it sat in the middle of the cramped space.

Norcroft grabbed her by the arm, and shoved her toward the only seat in the house. “Sit.”

She resisted the downward pressure of his hand on her arm. “I don’t think so.” She had nothing to lose. She was going to die here, right beside the small hole in the wall covered with Plexiglas behind which lay St. Peter himself.

She’d rather be shot, get the execution over with, than continue to be played with. “Go to hell.” She backed away from them, but Georgiou grabbed her other arm. She wasn’t going anywhere, it had been stupid to even try

Norcroft shot a glance at Red Lips. “Just a light cocktail for her please, Greta.”

TWENTY

INSIDE ST.
PETER’S BASILICA
14:50:04

“NOTHING.”

“Nada.”

“Zip.”

“Keep looking.” The order was unnecessary T-FLAC wouldn’t
stop
looking for the bomb until A: They found and deactivated it, or B: The shit hit the fan. The escape clause, of course, was the billion- dollar booby prize Black Lily was demanding. Time was ticking away. Max, Savin, and Dare had agreed that if the incendiary device was not found, they would hold off on the money transfer until 15:59:55. Five seconds before detonation.

An hour and change to find the damn bomb.

Max’s HMDG—single lens Head Mounted Display Glasses— blinked the countdown into his left eye. 14:50:04. The glasses gave him lateral head freedom and look-around ability in a sleek, wraparound design. They could create the illusion of a seventy-inch image appearing thirteen feet in front of him if that’s what he needed. For now, a discreet clock was all he required.

He tapped his earpiece twice for Darius.

“Patch me through to Emily,” he said quietly. He wasn’t a fatalist, but he wasn’t leaving the building until Black Lily’s bomb was found. Wherever it was hidden. Like a ship’s captain, Max was prepared to go down with his ship. He never asked his men to do anything he wasn’t prepared to do himself. But he had a very important loose thread to tie up before his destiny came up and hit him in the face. “Dare?”

3:25 P.M
THE CITY OF THE DEAD

Norcroft held up his hand as Red Lips approached with a syringe between her long, dusky fingers. “I’ve changed my mind. Let Miss Greene enjoy all the nuances of the next hour.”

Emily almost fell to her knees in gratitude, although a drug- induced sleep might be better than what was coming. Still, if she had to face her own death she’d rather do it head-on, not as a drooling, unconscious victim.

He indicated the chair. “Please sit down.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“Sit. Down.”

“I have no idea, or interest in, what your agenda is,” she told Norcroft as she plonked her butt on the chair. Behind him the Greek guy was emptying out the duffel bag onto the stone floor. It was like watching clowns climb out of a clown car as he placed one item after the other around him in a semicircle out of the seemly bottomless bag. Emily returned her attention to the most dangerous member of the party.

“But I can assure you,
nobody
will care that I’m missing, in fact I doubt anyone even knows that I’m missing. So kidnapping me—bringing me back to Italy—is a total waste of your time. My death is to no one’s disadvantage other than my own. Let me go, I promise I won’t mention you to anyone. I just want to have my life back.”

“Did you share your coup with the Bozzato family, my dear Emily?”

She used her bound hands to wipe perspiration off her temple. “What coup?”

“The Tillman commission.”

“But I’d been doing that for years—Oh, Lord,” she said appalled. “You killed
an entire family
based on the assumption that I’d told them I was copying paintings for Richard Tillman?”

“Oh, I’ve killed people for a lot less, I can assure you.”

She stared at him, unable to believe he was sitting there, speaking so casually about an event that would be indelibly engraved on her brain until the day she died. And oh, yeah. Today might be that day, she thought with gallows humor. “Who did you send to k-kill them? These two?”

“Oh, I like to do my own wet work. Of course, I allowed Greta and another gentleman acquaintance to assist me. Great fun. Too bad—what was his name, dear Greta?”

“Bragonier.”

“Ah, yes.
Bragonier.
Had to be left behind with the spoils of war.”

She forced herself to breathe, because her lungs didn’t want to cooperate. “How did you get out of the U.S.? The heliport! You flew somewhere else, then switched planes.”

He made a voilà gesture, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. “Quite.” He rubbed his chin on his hand. “You copied thirty-four paintings at Daniel’s behest,” Norcroft mused, watching her like a hungry cat watched a fat mouse. He silently indicated the Greek could do—whatever. “And were hired to do another twenty- five on your own. Fifty-nine works of art. Perfect in every way— Please raise your arms, my dear. Each one practically undetectable from the original. Daniel’s little protégée churning out weapons of mass destruction, and proud of it.”

“I wasn’t
churning out
anything:’ Emily snapped, resisting as Nor- croft’s two goons tried to force her to raise her arms. “Will you danm well stop that?! I was commissioned,” she said roughly, “I
believed,
by Richard Tifiman to
copy
his collection for his own private galler—”

He cut her off with a blow to the face that left her face numb, and her senses reeling. “Do not talk back. Every bomb that has gone off, in every church, synagogue, temple, and mosque, for the past three months was secreted in the frame of one of Richard’s paintings. One of
my
paintings.”

He hit her again, a stunning, openhanded blow that knocked her head back and caused her to bite her tongue. Blood bloomed in her mouth. “A brilliant, and carefully choreographed plan,” he told her conversationally, not missing a beat.

The entire situation was surreal. Anyone listening to Norcroft would think he was chatting easily to a friend over a cocktail, not beating the crap out of a restrained woman. Even his demeanor, face, and body language didn’t reflect the violence in the slaps. And they’d been more than slaps; the sick son of a bitch had put his whole body behind them.

Red Lips and the Greek were strapping her to the chair, but Emily couldn’t take her eyes off Norcroft and hardly noticed. Her cheeks were on fire, her eyes watering from the consecutive blows. She had never been struck by anyone in her life, and the fact that he could do it so casually, so without fanfare stunned her.

“Why?” she asked, exploring the reopened cut inside her lip with her tongue. “Why do you hate Catholics? Or Jews? Or Buddhists? Because you hate religions?”

“What a simplistic young woman you are. No, my dear. The bombings are my calling card. I’ve worked for this recognition for the past seven years. Refining my plans, putting each component carefully into place.”

The straps were too tight, she could barely breathe, and her head swam sickeningly because she was scared out of her mind. “And Daniel Aries was a component?”

“Hiding the bombs in the picture frames was
his
idea. Brilliant. Truly inspired. I took it from there.”

If there was a way,
any
way, to communicate with T-FLAC and/or Max, maybe she could help them. Even if—”That was pretty damn clever of you.” She tried to sound admiring. It wasn’t easy. “Using the copies of the originals to hide your bombs. Which painting did you use?
Madonna dell Granduca? Adoration of the Magi?”
Two of the nine paintings still unaccounted for. Two of the paintings
she’d
done.

“Hmm. Both good choices, but no. The work of art I’ve chosen has more value, and is considerably more beautiful than any copy of an old master.”

Emily started to chew her lower lip, then winced because it hurt. Did Max have a list by now of where the other painting might be? What was more valuable than a Raphael or a daVinci? She tried to think of some of the other artists on the list of missing paintings. Was it the Lorenzitti? Filippo Lippi’s
Madonna and Child with Angels?
There’d been two Michelangelos on the list as well. More valuable? More beautiful? Than what?

Keep him talking. The more he talks, the more he brags, the better the chances I have of someone coming down here. GodohGodohGod. No one
was going to come down here,
she
knew it, and
he
knew it. She couldn’t fathom why he’d brought her halfway across the world to tie her to a chair in an empty tomb.