The Lost Relic

Chapter Twenty-Eight

There was a somewhat cryptic message from Roberto Lario waiting for Ben at the hotel reception desk. Ben hesitated, reached for his phone and then remembered it was broken. When he asked if he could use the hotel phone, his new fan club were only too happy to fuss him into their cluttered little office behind the reception area and pester him with offers of coffee and cake. It took several minutes to beat them politely away.

‘I have received an unusual call this morning,’ Lario said. ‘You might wish to know about it. It was from a woman desiring most eagerly to speak with L’eroe della galleria after seeing you on the television news.’

Ben groaned inwardly. ‘I’m not feeling like much of a hero, Roberto. What did she want?’

‘She would not say. But it sounded very urgent. An Italian woman, living in Monaco. Her name is Mimi Renzi.’

‘What did you tell her? You didn’t tell her where I was staying, did you?’

‘Just that I would try to pass the message on. Nothing more.’

‘Good. It’s obviously just another bloody reporter.’

‘She sounded old,’ Lario said. ‘Very old. I do not think she is a reporter.’

‘I don’t really care, Roberto. I’m leaving soon, and I’m not interested in old women in Monaco, whoever they might be.’

Back upstairs, Ben took his time packing his few things together. He was still aching from the tumble down the fire escape, and his cut shoulder hurt. He dozed a while, catching up on lost sleep and happy to give his mind a rest.

It didn’t quite work out for him that way. Fitful dreams full of noise and pain woke him sometime before two. The room was stifling. He took another shower, then dressed stiffly and grabbed his bag and went down to the desk to settle his bill. The owners wouldn’t take any money, and he had to fight to persuade them. Eventually managing to tear himself away, he hacked across Rome and made the 30-kilometre drive southwest to Fiumicino airport. He handed over the Shogun at the car rental office, and checked in only to find that some technical problem had delayed the flight by an hour. Take-off wouldn’t be until almost five o’clock.

He found a payphone and used it to call Jeff Dekker at Le Val. When he got no answer, he left a message to say he was at the airport waiting for a delayed flight and would be back home from London in a couple of days or so. The truth was, he had no idea what awaited him in London and he didn’t really want to think about it until he got there.

After leaving the message, he chose a quiet spot at the edge of the departure lounge and watched the people go by. Time passed. He watched parents with their kids. The tender and romantic couple in one corner who couldn’t get enough of each other, the sour-looking couple in the other corner who’d had way too much of each other. The businessman going through his papers with worry written all over his face. The captive audience of bored shoppers lured into the departure lounge’s various boutiques and stores by duty-free goods made to look glitzy and tempting under the lights. An electronics boutique window display was filled with an array of screens of different sizes, some of them showing an explosive movie while others displayed a news programme. Ben kept expecting to see himself appear, splashed across the window for all to see. The next thing, people would be recognising him, pointing at him, and there’d be nowhere to hide.

To his relief, that didn’t happen. Instead, the news focused on the arrest of one Tito Palazzo, an environmental protester charged with throwing a lump of coal at Presidential candidate Urbano Tassoni a few days earlier, as a protest against the politician’s election promise to build more coal-fired power stations in Italy.

That accounted for the damage to Tassoni’s face, Ben thought with a smile.

Footage showed police officers dragging Palazzo out of an apartment building and stuffing him into the back of a car. The environmentalist was yelling, ‘Yes, I threw it at the stronzo; and I’d do it again!’

Some people were watching the TV screens. ‘Good for him,’ a man laughed. ‘I wish he’d shot the bastard.’

Onscreen, the stony-faced talking head paused for effect, then said that police were investigating Palazzo’s possible connections to the radical environmentalist terror organisation known as the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, who had claimed responsibility for acts ranging from spiking trees marked for deforestation to blowing up mobile phone masts. Then the screens cut to footage of the assault itself: Tassoni looking unflappably self-possessed as he strode towards a waiting limo, flanked by his bodyguards in dark suits and sunglasses. They were all large, heavyset men; one in particu lar looked as if he must have his suits specially tailored to contain his muscular bulk. The press were all over Tassoni, cameras flashing and the air full of questions and jeering while the police struggled to hold back the crowd. As Tassoni was about to climb into his limo, the environmentalist Tito Palazzo was clearly to be seen forcing his way through the police line and hurling a black fist-sized object at Tassoni’s face from just three metres away.

Tassoni staggered from the blow. The crowd went wild, the police barely able to contain them. The video cameraman shooting the film zoomed in close to catch the shot of the bleeding politician being helped into the limo. The big bodyguard rushed over to shove the camera away. A protester pushed him, knocking off his sunglasses. A scuffle ensued, and the picture froze with an extreme close-up of the body-guard’s angry face looming into the lens.

It was only onscreen for a second, but Ben could see the image clearly in his mind’s eye even after the newsreader had moved on to the next item.

He was so stunned that he didn’t even realise he’d spilt his coffee.

He didn’t give a damn about Urbano Tassoni’s election manifesto, or how popular or otherwise it was with Italian voters. It wasn’t that.

It was what he’d just seen.

A big, muscular man. With one dark brown eye.

And one hazel eye.

Ben was still staring at the television screens when he dimly heard his flight being called. He looked at his watch. 4.51 p.m. Moving as if dazed, he picked up his bag and followed the line of people filtering out of the departure lounge.

As he walked, the sounds and sights around him seemed to blur out and become an indistinct jumble. He slowed his pace, staring down at the floor. Someone lugging a heavy suitcase bumped into him from behind and tutted irritably, but he was only vaguely aware that he was in everyone’s way.

The men outside Fabio Strada’s door at the hospital. The way Tassoni had ordered them away after seeing Ben inside the room. It made sense now – and there was only one possible reason why the politician would have sent his bodyguards away like that. It was because there was a witness present who might have recognised the big guy from the robbery.

And that meant Tassoni was in on it.

Ben was still a hundred metres from the plane when he stopped dead in his tracks. Passengers streamed past either side of him like a fast-flowing river current divided by a rock.

No, he thought. And said it out loud. ‘No.’

And turned round and started walking back the other way. His step became a purposeful stride as he headed back towards the arrivals lounge. Stopping at a row of lockers, he removed enough cash from his wallet to be getting on with, put the wallet in his bag and stuffed the bag into locker 187. Better to travel light, for what he had in mind. Then he went outside into the sunshine and looked for the taxi rank.