The Babylon Idol

Chapter 24

He kept a tight grip on her hand as they hurried away through the ruins of Olympia. For the moment, he ignored the questions she kept firing at him: ‘What’s happening? What did those men want with me? Why are you here? What are we going to do about Mr Kambasis?’ He had plenty of questions of his own to ask her, but talking could wait.

As Ben had anticipated, Usberti’s crew had left the keys in the white panel van’s ignition for a fast getaway. Its doors were still open and the engine was still warm. It had Greek plates. Probably stolen, or paid for in cash under a false name, like his Opel.

The van had fared better in the firefight than its former occupants, but it hadn’t survived Casini’s random shooting spree completely unscathed. There was a bullet hole punched through the skin of the front passenger door and another in the flimsy steel of the wing panel, where part of the headlamp was blown away and dangling from its mount like a popped eyeball. Neat, round black holes on white bodywork were a little more conspicuous than Ben would have liked, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, and he didn’t plan on using the van for long.

Inspecting the back, he found that the cargo bay contained a dirty single mattress and had been hastily, not very neatly, lined with thick building-grade plywood to deaden the screams and thumps of an unwilling passenger. The classic kidnap setup Ben had seen a hundred times.

Up front, there was food and bottled water in a plastic bag, ready for a long drive to wherever they’d been planning on taking her. The interior cab light shone on a small zipper pouch that lay on the dashboard. Inside it, Ben found a hypodermic and a small glass vial. The syringe was loaded with a colourless liquid. Ben pressed the plunger until out a single drop trembled on the end of the needle. He waved it under his nose to get a whiff. No mistaking what it was. Once upon a time, kidnappers used chloroform. Nowadays they’d moved on to more sophisticated stuff.

Anna almost fainted when she saw the needle. ‘Dio mio. They were going to drug me?’ Up close, even pale and in shock, she looked radiant. The picture on her website couldn’t do justice. The photographer hadn’t needed to use Photoshop to iron out the old scar on her cheek. It was already invisible.

‘Only for as long as it took to deliver you to their boss,’ Ben said, helping her into the cab. He shut her in, then ran around to the driver’s side, stashed his bag behind the seat and got behind the wheel.

She said, ‘Why would they do that? I don’t understand.’

‘Nor do I,’ Ben replied. ‘But I soon will.’

‘We have to call the police.’

‘They’ll be here soon enough, if anyone heard all the noise back there,’ he said, firing up the van’s engine with a dieselly rasp. ‘And they’ll want to know all about the Italian lady history professor who travelled to their country to pay a visit to Theo Kambasis and was with him when he got shot to bits. You want to spend the next forty-eight hours in an interrogation room with a bunch of suspicious cops hungry for a murder conviction, not to mention all those angry culture officials who want to know why their best tourist attraction just got blown up?’

‘I have nothing to hide. I’m innocent.’

‘So was Kambasis. Didn’t do him much good.’

Ben bumped the van up onto the road and drove fast through the darkening night, the heater blasting, sticking to the back roads, aiming to put as much distance between themselves and Olympia as possible in the short time they could afford to stay with this vehicle. He couldn’t risk returning to the museum to retrieve his car.

‘I rented a house,’ Anna said. ‘Not far from here.’

‘Sorry,’ Ben replied. ‘You can’t go back there. Too dangerous.’

‘But my travel bag is there,’ she protested. ‘My laptop, my clothes, my things…’ She shook her tiny handbag. ‘All that’s in here is my purse, my passport, some tickets and a hairbrush.’

‘It can’t be helped, Anna. I’m certain that the person who sent these men after you also would have found out where you were staying locally. That wouldn’t be difficult. More of them could be watching the place.’

‘How can you be so sure of that?’

‘Because it’s what I would have done.’

She sighed, then gave a resigned sort of shrug. ‘It’s only stuff, as they say. Losing my laptop is the worst thing, but its contents are encrypted and all backed up online, so I can retrieve everything easily. Where are we going?’

‘Not the Ritz-Carlton. But somewhere safe, where these people can’t get to you.’

‘Is there really no other choice?’

‘None,’ he replied.

‘Then it’s not a dream. This is really happening to me. I’m frightened, Ben. I don’t understand. Why are you here?’

‘Let’s find a place to stop. Then we’ll talk.’

She shook her head. ‘I always knew I would see you again. Just not like this.’

‘That’s me all over,’ he replied. ‘Always full of surprises.’

Twenty kilometres further south-east, on a deserted, bleak and icy mountain road near the small town of Andritsaina, Ben finally decided to pull up. He turned off the lights and checked in the mirrors.

They were alone. Leaving the engine running to give them warmth, he turned to her and said, ‘All right, let’s talk. You want to know why I’m here? I tracked you from Florence because your name is on a list of targets, Anna. So is mine.’

‘List?’ she gasped. ‘Why?’

‘Because someone from our past, someone we thought we’d never hear from again, is back and he means to do us harm.’

‘Usberti? The archbishop?’

‘Former archbishop. Thanks to us.’

‘I was barely involved.’

‘He’s not the most forgiving type of person.’

‘But what does he want with us?’

‘Revenge, pure and simple. We hurt him, now he wants to hurt us back. And he’s doing a fine job of it so far. You remember Father Pascal, the old priest from Saint-Jean in the Languedoc who helped us?’

‘I never met him. I spoke to him only on the phone, just one time.’

‘You won’t be speaking to him again. They beat him to death inside his own church.’

‘My God.’

‘How about Luc Simon, the Parisian police detective in charge of the Gladius Domini case? Promoted to a desk at the INTERPOL HQ in Lyon afterwards. I’ve been in contact with him now and then over the years. Not any more. He was stabbed to death in his home the same day they murdered Pascal. Not long after someone took a shot at me at my place in Normandy and put my best friend in a coma from which he might never wake up. It’s an orchestrated hit, one after another, all over France and Italy. Yesterday they attacked your villa outside Florence, and pressed it out of your assistant Gianni that you’d travelled to Greece to meet Kambasis. I was just a step behind them.’

‘Gianni! Is he—?’

‘He’s in hospital. And lucky to be alive. I’m afraid that your agent, Carlo, wasn’t as fortunate. I found him in his office, with his throat cut.’

‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Ben reached into the plastic bag, opened one of the bottles of water left for them by the would-be kidnappers, twisted off the cap and passed it to her. She took a long gulp, passed it back to him with a nod of thanks and then leaned back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed for a moment as she fought her nausea.

‘Feeling better?’ he asked after a few moments.

‘Not really. Not at all. Because what you say means that poor man Theo Kambasis died because of me. I barely knew him, but he seemed so nice. He didn’t deserve to die.’

‘Nice people don’t last very long when Usberti’s around.’

‘If I hadn’t come to meet him — if I hadn’t told Gianni I was coming here — but Ben, how could I have known?’

‘None of us could have known,’ Ben told her. ‘I wouldn’t have had any idea what was happening if Usberti’s former assistant, a man called Fabrizio Severini, hadn’t written me a letter from jail to warn me that his old boss was back and on the warpath. And until tonight I still had no idea of what was really happening. Because I thought Usberti was planning to kill you, too. But I was wrong. There’s something else going on here, Anna. Something about you breaks the pattern. He might have started out with the intention of taking you out just like the rest of us, but he changed that plan. Now he wants you alive. Not out of compassion, or softness, or because you’re a woman. I know this man. He doesn’t do compassion, and he enjoys the hurt that’s inflicted on women almost as much as the sadists he hires to do it for him, like your dear departed pal Franco Bozza. If he’s decided he wants you taken alive, it’s because now he thinks you’re worth more to him that way.’

Anna instinctively put her fingers to her cheek, where Franco Bozza’s knife had cut her. Scars could heal, but some memories lingered forever. ‘What could he want from me? Money?’

‘I wondered about that,’ Ben said. ‘You’re successful, you’re wealthy. A lot wealthier than someone on an INTERPOL commissioner’s salary, let alone a rural priest. But I don’t think this is about money.’

‘Then what? Who am I? I’m just a writer.’

‘You’re a little more than just a writer,’ Ben said. ‘You’re a highly regarded scholar with a knack for digging up bits of history that nobody knew before you came along.’

‘All the same, why would that make a difference?’

‘You tell me,’ Ben said. ‘Gianni couldn’t say much when I spoke to him, because he was all banged up and pumped full of drugs. But I think that when Usberti’s goon, that big bruiser back there, turned up at the villa and put the squeeze on him, he told them a lot more. Which you can be certain reached Usberti’s ears absolutely verbatim, because the guy was recording every word of it.’

‘Poor Gianni. I have to call him, tell him how terrible I feel about what’s happened.’

‘Not advisable. He’d probably ask where you are, assuming he’s well enough to talk at all. And that’s not something we want our friends to know, in case they go back to chat with him again.’

She blanched. ‘Please tell me you don’t really think that. You’re just being careful.’

‘Being careful is what keeps me breathing air. Chances are they won’t, because Usberti’s goons already found out all they wanted. Whatever he let slip to them that was so important, it’s the only thing that prevented you from becoming just another dead body in Usberti’s revenge campaign. I wouldn’t have been able to save you, Anna.’

‘But you did. And it’s not the first time.’

‘I’d like it to be the last,’ he said. ‘That’s why I need to understand what’s going on here.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘I think you do,’ Ben said. ‘You just don’t see the connection. It can only be about one thing. Your research.’

‘My research?’

‘Something big. Really important. That’s what Gianni told me you were working on. You didn’t just visit Kambasis to talk about Phidias’ workshop, did you?’

‘Just as well,’ she muttered unhappily. ‘There’s not much left of it to talk about.’

‘Then there’s more to this.’

‘Oh yes,’ Anna replied. ‘There’s much more to it. Just that I can’t understand why—’ She broke off mid-sentence and her face fell as the realisation hit her. ‘Or maybe I do understand.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘It’s complicated,’ she said. ‘To help you understand what I’ve been researching, I’d have to go right back to the beginning and fill in a lot of detail.’

‘Then I suggest we find ourselves a place to hole up in for the night,’ Ben said. ‘Then, you can explain this entire thing to me.’