Raiders

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

With Zara’s hands clamped firmly around his waist, Mason watched as Caleb and Ben skidded away to the northeast and then took off to the south. Rounding a sharp corner, he tracked the Vatican City walls until they hit some traffic on the Via di Porta Angelica. Checking the mirror, he saw police bikes and cars, as well as a van, on their tail and gaining fast.

Looking ahead into the traffic he saw a clear way through. He floored the throttle on the Ducati and it surged ahead, splitting the lane and scorching past the mostly stationary cars either side of them. They made a junction and he braked hard.

“Where did the police van go?” he asked.

Zara stood up and put her hands on his shoulders as she scanned the busy city in search of the police van.

“Got it,” she said. “Three o’clock, turning into that side street.”

“I see it. We’ll go the other way.”

Mason twisted on the accelerator again and steered the handlebars to the left. The Panigale reacted instantly as he cut across the other lane of cars and drew closer to their planned escape route. The powerful engine growled hard as he swerved into the side street and accelerated away from the police van.

“We lost him, Jed!”

“We’re not free yet!”

The needle on the speedometer swept around the dial in a second, indicating in the clearest terms that the Ducati Panigale was not a machine to be messed with. Mason loved speed, but he had to admit he had never gone from nought to sixty miles per hour in 2.6 seconds before. It felt electric, and as the monstrous, liquid-cooled 1.2 litre l-twin engine roared beneath him, for one terrifying second he had visions of himself simply flying off the thing and coming to a bone-crunching end on the hot asphalt.

“You know how to control this thing, right?” Zara called out. “I don’t think I ever saw you ride a bike before.”

Mason acted cool. “Oh yeah,” he lied. “No problem.”

They raced away from the Apostolic Palace along the narrow, cobblestone road to the east, Mason furiously blowing the horn to clear the way of tourists gently ambling along with ice creams and cameras. They burst out on the Via de Mascherino, a broad two-lane road lined with shops and parked cars.

Mason had understeered the powerful bike and they mounted the kerb on the east side of the street and plowed their way along the sidewalk. He hit the brakes and slowed the Ducati from fifty miles per hour down to thirty, steering back onto the road and then increasing power. Soon they were speeding up to one hundred once again, and he felt a surge of adrenalin as he weaved the bike at high-speed through the Roman traffic.

The Vatican City was behind them now, but a Vatican Gendarmerie BMW i3 was sticking to their tail for all their life was worth. He watched them in the mirror as they powered up behind them. The bike was faster, but in the traffic there was a limit to how fast he could push things if he wanted to avoid spending the next three months in traction in a Rome hospital.

“Holy crap!” Zara screamed. “Tram! Tram!”

Mason looked up from the mirror to see one of the famous city trams rattling around the corner to his left and about to cross his path. He swerved the bike to the right and hit the brakes again to avoid smashing into the hood of a Nissan emerging from the traffic on Via Crescenzio.

Clear now, he hit the power and the bike surged forward out of the chaos behind them. “Holy shit, Jed!” Zara cried out. “You nearly killed us!”

Mason said nothing. He felt the same fear but time was running out and Nichetti was closing in. He could see in the mirror that the commissario was on the radio, no doubt calling back up six ways from Sunday and soon they would have nowhere left to run.

“So what do we do now?” Zara said.

“Just as we planned. We get back to the plane and get this codex the hell out of here!”

It was the only plan he had, even though the Citation was still miles way. They could get there if they were lucky and drove like the devil, but they would be cutting things fine, and there was nothing to say that the plane and the rest of the team hadn’t already been shut down by the Italian carabinieri.

The road curved around to the right and he powered up again, racing up a long, straight road called the Via Cola di Rienzo. The road was clear and he decided to open the Ducati up and rag the hell out of it for a few seconds.

“Hold on, Z!”

It was a hair-raising experience.

With the throttle fully open, the superbike easily screeched past one hundred miles per hour, then one-twenty, one-fifty and was soon approaching its maximum speed of a little over one hundred and seventy miles per hour. It had taken a few short seconds and they were going faster than a jet plane at takeoff speed. As a result, they hit the end of the road before they knew it, and Mason saw a bridge fast approaching them.

It was the Ponte Regina Margherita, stretching over the River Tiber in the center of the ancient city. He hit the brakes and slowed to swerve around a line of cars and then revved up to roar across the bridge. Nichetti was still behind them in the BMW i3, but thanks to racing along the last road at nearly two hundred miles per hour, he was further back now and Mason had bought them some much-needed time.

East of the Tiber now, they were heading into the very oldest part of Rome, weaving the Ducati in and out of thousands of years of history. “Over there!” Mason said, looking ahead to a narrow side street. “He’s not getting the Beamer down there.”

He slowed down to walking speed and manoeuvred the bike around a tight corner and into a public walkway no wider than a meter and half. Checking the mirror, he saw Nichetti screech to a halt at the mouth of the walkway, curse, and then zoom away.

“He knows where this is going,” Mason said.

“You think he’s going to try and head us off?”

“He’s not going for gelato, that’s for damned sure.”

“I was just asking a question!”

“Sorry…”

They reached the end of the walkway and burst out onto a small public square filled with tourists. Opposite them were the world-famous Spanish Steps near where Lord Byron had lived, but Mason’s mind was firmly on the BMW i3 that Commissario Nichetti was racing furiously toward him on their left.

“Hold on!” he yelled. “He’s found us already!”

“You’re not going to… you have to be kidding!”

Mason didn’t kid on missions, and now he revved the Ducati and aimed it toward the Spanish Steps. Tourists screamed and ran for cover as he hit the first step, and then increased power as he ziz-zagged his way up the famous landmark in a hail of tire squeals and burning rubber.