The Babylon Idol

Chapter 20

By morning the news channels and the city of Florence were ablaze with last night’s dramatic events, which the media had managed to circumbobulate into yet another terrorist atrocity with the Italian police emerging as the heroes of the hour. City authorities wept over the damage to the Ponte alla Carraia while tributes were paid to the fallen officers and hundreds more of their incensed and heavily armed comrades scoured Florence for the presumed Muslim extremists responsible, still at large, with photos of bearded, olive-skinned, villainous-looking likely suspects plastered online.

Cops were swarming all over the airport as Ben sat waiting to embark on the next leg of his journey, which was giving him headaches on top of a sleepless night in his stolen camper van. If the epicentre of ancient Greek culture was one of Europe’s most frequented visitor destinations in the peak of the high season, during wintertime it seemed by contrast almost as though they were actively trying to keep people out. Kalamata Airport near Olympia was essentially closed up during the colder months, forcing Ben to opt for a flight to the more distant Athens with the plan to double back on himself by road, a drive of over 300 kilometres.

He twiddled his thumbs for hours, wolfed down some breakfast, gulped a pint of espresso, smoked and paced outside in the cold, checked his email, called Tuesday, called Sandrine Lacombe, learned nothing new.

The delays meant that he didn’t land in Athens until midday, there to face the complications of getting hold of a car. He’d wrecked so many hire vehicles and been blacklisted by so many rental companies in his time that it was becoming a problem. The agent at Auto Europe proved so intransigent that Ben eventually walked out of his office in disgust, grabbed a taxi into the city and found a backstreet car dealer who sold him a ten-year-old Opel for under a thousand euros, no papers, no questions asked.

Finally, still seething at the loss of precious time, he was on his way. He took the motorway route via Patras that hugged the coastline, to avoid meeting snow and ice on the more direct roads further inland that cut through the forests and mountains of the Peloponnese mainland. The Opel was basic and rusty and battered, and the scrapheap was in its near future, but it didn’t seem at imminent risk of blowing its engine, and after a few kilometres he felt relaxed about caning it mercilessly.

That freed his mind to agonise instead over how he was going to find Anna, if indeed she would still be in Olympia when he got there, or if the bad guys hadn’t reached her first. While waiting for his flight to Athens Ben had searched online for Theo Kambasis, the man Anna had gone there to meet, but found nothing. How much information had Gianni’s torturer pressed out of his victim? Ben couldn’t afford to assume the enemy’s intel wasn’t a step ahead of his own, any more than he could afford to assume that the two thugs who’d tried to kill him last night hadn’t escaped Florence sooner than he had. Even if the police had caught them, it was safe to bet that whoever was behind this could easily deploy more manpower wherever needed.

Whoever was behind this. The big question. Of all that was bad about the situation, what Ben liked least of all was still not knowing who the enemy actually was. Was Massimiliano Usberti dead, or alive? It was like chasing a ghost.

With no answers, all he could do was press on as fast as he could, pushing the Opel to its limits through landscapes that were stunning even in winter, but which he barely noticed as he focused completely on his objective. Four hours after leaving Athens, he was rolling into the sacred valley of the gods where, according to mythology, Zeus had inaugurated the very first Olympic Games in celebration of having defeated his Titan father, Kronos, in a wrestling match.

Ben didn’t know it yet, but the ancient site was about to become the scene of a new, deadlier conflict.

The modern town of Olympia was small, making the job of finding one person out of only a thousand or so inhabitants somewhat easier. Its single main street was dotted with souvenir shops, bars and cafés, most of which seemed mainly to exist for the coachloads of tourists who descended upon the place en masse in summer, and were now either running on a single cylinder or closed up altogether. According to Ben’s web search there were at least thirty-seven hotels and guesthouses in the immediate vicinity. He’d already narrowed the list to sixteen, eliminating the places that shut in winter and focusing, at least initially, on the more upmarket ones where an affluent woman of taste like Anna Manzini would be more likely to be found.

But sixteen hotels was still sixteen hotels, and he was going to have to do it the hard way, hoofing it to each in turn in the hope that he might get lucky. Moreover, and more troublingly, he was well aware of Anna’s liking for expensive private rentals. There must be hundreds of villas available for rent locally in the dead season, and she could be in any of them.

The day was growing darker by the time he’d drawn a blank at the first four hotels he tried. Feeling suddenly weak with hunger, Ben grabbed a sandwich of spicy lamb in pita bread and a foaming Greek coffee in the bar of the fifth and sat down in a corner to eat it. The bar was almost empty, apart from a few locals and a pair of oversized Cockney tourists weighing down a table in the middle of the room, whose blaring conversation it was impossible to avoid listening in on. ‘I told you it would be freezing here in bloody December, Alf,’ the woman was scolding her husband in a voice to wake the dead. ‘Nothing’s bleeding open, is it? Some bloody holiday idea this was. Should have gone back to Lanzarote like I kept telling you.’

‘Been there, done that,’ Alf said glumly.

‘Well we’re not coming to this dump again. I’m bored to death, my feet are killing me after traipsing about that bleeding museum, and all you can bang on about is some bloody actress you think you saw.’

‘I’m sure it was her,’ Alf protested. ‘I’d know her anywhere.’

‘Bet you would, and all,’ his wife sneered at him. ‘You spend enough time drooling over her pictures. If you think a dolly bird like that would even look twice at a bald old git like you, you need to take a butcher’s in the mirror.’ She gave a derisory snort.

‘Should have got her autograph,’ Alf said with a wistful shake of his head. ‘Wonder what she was doing there. Maybe she lives here. Just think, Deb. Valentina Del Cuore, in the flesh.’

‘Flesh, flesh, that’s all you bloody think about, innit? Honest to God, I don’t know what’s the matter with you.’

They both looked up, startled by the tousled-looking stranger who had suddenly appeared at their table.

‘Did you say Valentina Del Cuore?’ Ben asked.