Secrets of the Dead

XV

Rome – Present Day

‘IF YOU STRUGGLE, we will kill you.’

The man forced her into the car and pushed her down on the back seat. A cloth went over her head: a smell attacked her, and she wondered if it was chloroform. She tried to hold her breath, but her heart was beating too fast.

It was only aftershave, she realised, sickly sweet and drenching the blindfold with the smell of lilies. The car started to move. A hand on the back of her head kept her face pressed against the leather seat.

This is how it happens, she thought numbly. They come in the night and take you. Maybe they kill you, maybe they’re satisfied just to rummage around and break a few bits. But you’re never the same. She’d heard the story a thousand times in the field: brown eyes, blue eyes, always the same dead tears.

The car drove. All Abby could do was focus on the sounds around her: the rattle of a loose seatbelt; the revolutions of the engine; the occasional tick of the indicator. If she’d been a spy in a film, she might have counted off seconds and turns to work out their route. But she was frightened and far from help: it was all she could do to keep the panic from overwhelming her.

She heard a siren in the distance. Hope gripped her. Had someone seen her? Called the police? Arranged a rescue? The siren grew louder until it must have been right behind them. She felt their car slow down, then drift towards the kerb. She wanted to rip off the blindfold, leap up in her seat and shout for help. The hand on her head pushed down harder.

And then it passed. The Doppler wail stretched into the distance and faded away. She was alone again.

She vomited on the leather seat.

The car stopped in darkness. The hand pulled Abby up and dragged her out. She was still blindfolded, but she knew they must have turned a light on when she heard them swearing about the mess she’d made of their seat.

I can understand what they’re saying, she thought. It took her another moment to realise they were speaking Serbo-Croat. She closed her eyes, though under the blindfold it made no difference.

They led her up a flight of stairs, handling her carelessly, knocking her shins and stubbing her toes on obstacles she couldn’t see. Then the floor levelled off. She heard the sweep and thump of doors opening and closing. At last she stopped. The hand pulled the blindfold off her head.

She thought they must have brought her to a museum. She was standing in the middle of a black, windowless room. Silver spotlights in the ceiling picked out exhibits on the walls: slabs of white stone carved into friezes of gods and beasts, tendrilled plants or simply stern inscriptions. Most had rough edges, as if they’d been hastily chiselled away from some larger structure. A desk stood in the middle of the room, steel legs and a black marble top with nothing on it. Behind it, in a leather chair that dwarfed him, sat a slight man with greying hair. He was wearing a black suit and a white, open-necked shirt. He looked as if he was getting ready to go out for the evening. In his lap, he cradled a chrome-handled pistol.

He pointed the gun at her, smiling as he saw her flinch away.

‘Abigail Cormac. Have you ever wondered why you’re not dead?’

She just stared at him. ‘Who are you?’

He waved the gun towards the pieces on the walls. ‘A collector. A dealer. I buy and sell.’

She looked at his face: the sharp cheekbones and angular jaw, the eyes sunk so deep no light reached them. It was infinitely more real than the snatched, blurry photograph she’d seen in the British Library; also some years older. The skin had toughened, the hair retreated. He’d grown a small beard that had flecked grey. But there remained some quality, the same ferocious intensity, that even the camera couldn’t blur.

‘You’re Zoltán Dragović.’

The eyes narrowed. His bloodless lips stretched tight. He trained the gun back at her and flipped a catch on the side. She heard the guard behind her take a step sideways.

‘Are you going to shoot me?’ Get on with it! she wanted to scream. End this now! ‘Why did you bring me here?’

‘To answer my questions,’ he snapped. The gun didn’t move. The chrome barrel threw starbursts of reflected light on the walls. ‘Like, for example, why you aren’t dead already?’

‘I don’t –’

‘You should have died in Kotor Bay. I sent a man – his name was Sloba. I want to know why didn’t he kill you?’

‘I don’t remember.’ It came out as a croak. She was desperate for water, desperate to sit down before she fainted. ‘He shot me.’

‘He never came back.’

‘I don’t know what happened to him.’

‘No one does. You will say, perhaps he ran away.’ He held up the gun, as if he were addressing it and not her. ‘Impossibility. My men do not run away. If they try, I always find them. And him I cannot find.’

Abby rubbed her eyes, hoping she’d wake up and find this was all a nightmare. ‘He killed Michael. I saw him.’

‘If I cannot find Sloba, it means he is dead.’ Dragović swung lazily in his chair, like a boat swaying on its anchor. ‘Let me give you some facts, Miss Cormac. Sloba came to the villa in a car. When the police arrived, this car was still there.’

Look at the man, not at the gun. That’s what they’d taught in her Hostile Environment training, years ago. Looking at the gun makes it more likely he’ll use it. That didn’t make it any easier.

‘You were lying on the floor with Sloba’s bullets in you. In your shoulder, but not in your heart or brain. Why? Sloba was not a careless or a sentimental man. If he let you live, it means he was dead.’

Look at the man. ‘I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you want to know.’

‘Who else was there?’

‘No one. Just Michael and me.’

But was that true? She thought back to something they’d said in hospital. Somebody rang the police. Her memories were so scrambled it was hard to be sure of anything, but she didn’t think it had been her. It rang false.

So who else was there?

Dragović rolled back on his chair and stood. He sauntered over to the wall and examined one of the stone plaques. This one was painted, not carved, the colours washed out but still clear. A mummified man, wrapped in bandages, stretched out a hand from a stone sarcophagus, while a bearded Christ reached to stand him up. A dog played at his feet.

‘Here is another fact. Sloba died and Lascaris died. But I have seen the police reports. They found only one body.’

He spun around and fixed his gaze on Abby. She took a half-step backwards, though immediately a hand pressed against her back to stop her getting any ideas.

‘Did your man have an accomplice?’

‘Sloba worked alone.’ Dragović moved on to a marble statue, a female nude with upturned breasts and no arms. He stroked a finger across her throat. ‘Two deaths, one body. How do you explain this?’

‘I don’t know.’

And suddenly Dragović was right in front of her, crossing the room so fast she barely saw him move. The guard behind her pinned her arms and almost lifted her off the floor. Cold metal pressed on her jaw as Dragović jammed the pistol against her face. The dead smell of lilies stifled her.

‘Understand this, Miss Cormac. You are already dead. If I decide someone will die, they die. If I keep you living a little longer, it is only because I need you to tell me some things. But I can kill you now and throw you in the Tiber, and no one will care. They will not even recognise you, when I am finished.’

His face was so close to hers his bristles scraped her cheek. Tears ran down her face and soaked into his beard. The intimacy felt like a violation.

‘I don’t know,’ she pleaded. She heard herself repeating it again and again, caught in a stuttering loop she couldn’t escape. Dragović stepped away in disgust. The guard behind her loosened his grip, so she sagged limply into him. She felt him move against her, rubbing himself on her like a dog.

‘Enough.’ Dragović snapped his fingers; the guard let go. Abby fell forward on the floor, crouched on all fours.

‘Your lover Lascaris was meant to give me something. That is why he came to my house.’

‘A briefcase,’ Abby mumbled – too clumsy for them to understand. The guard stepped forward, grabbed her hair and pulled her head back so she was looking up at Dragović. The mouth of the gun yawned open above her, and this time there was nothing she could do but look at it.

‘Michael had a briefcase. I saw it.’

‘It was not there when the police arrived. What happened to it?’

‘I don’t know.’

Another yank on her hair pulled her to her feet. The guard dragged her after Dragović, across the room to a spotlit stone on the wall. There were no carvings or paintings, just two lines of text in sharp capital letters, and a monogram above. Abby stared.

Dragović waved the gun at it. ‘You recognise this?’

There was no point lying. He’d read it in her face. ‘I’ve seen the symbol before. At the villa – there was a gold necklace.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘The police gave it to me. I took it back to London. My Government found out and confiscated it.’

Dragović pointed back to the stone tablet. ‘And the text? You recognise that?’

‘I don’t know Latin.’

Her jaw went numb as the butt of his pistol smashed into it. She spun away, but the guard held her hair tight and dragged her back. She dropped to her knees. Dragović stood over her, his breath fast and excited.

‘You went to the Forum Museum this afternoon. You looked where this tablet came from. Why?’

She spat out a gob of blood on the floor. He doesn’t know about the scroll, about Trier and Gruber, she thought. With horror, she realised she still had Gruber’s translation in her jeans pocket.

She stared at the tablet, the sign like the cross above the words she couldn’t read, and prayed to the God she didn’t really believe in to help her.

‘The symbol,’ she mumbled. She flapped an arm towards the plaque. ‘The tablet had the same symbol as the necklace. I wanted to see it.’

‘Is that why you have come to Rome?’

Now her surprise was genuine. ‘The message.’

‘What message? Who told you to come here?’

She looked at him blankly. Blood dribbled down her chin – she didn’t know if it came from inside her mouth or out. ‘Didn’t you?’

He almost hit her again. She saw his arm tense, felt the grip on her head tighten in anticipation. She saw the fury in his face, and knew that if he hit her again, he’d keep going until there was nothing of her left to hurt.

The blow didn’t come. ‘Tell me why you came to Rome,’ he repeated, his voice tight with the strain of self-control.

‘The text message. I don’t know who sent it. He quoted the inscription on Constantine’s arch. He said he could help.’

Dragović said something over her head. The hand let go; she slumped on to the floor again. Footsteps went and came back. When she opened her eyes, Dragović was rifling through her handbag. They must have got it from the car. He pulled out her phone and read off the screen. He looked surprised, Abby thought.

‘You see?’ she mumbled. ‘Wasn’t that you?’

The guard lifted her up and a cloth went over her head. The last thing she remembered was the choking smell of lilies closing in around her.