The Lost Relic

Chapter Thirty-One

Rome

The taxicab Ben took from the airport was a faded yellow Merc that had seen a lot of hard service and looked like it was a second home for the driver, a cheerful, chubby guy with curly hair. Ben read out the address on Tassoni’s business card, and the guy seemed pleased. It was right across the other side of Rome.

Almost 5.20 and the traffic was intense. As they hustled across town the driver played Iron Maiden loudly from rattling speakers, drummed on the wheel and sang along. His English was even less comprehensible than the lyrics the lead singer was belting out.

‘OK if I smoke?’ Ben said over the noise.

The guy made a casual gesture that said sure, do what you like. Not the fussy type. Ben leaned back in the worn seat and took out his Gauloises and Zippo. He offered one to the driver. The guy was happy to accept. Ben smoked and watched the city go by, and thought about Urbano Tassoni.

When the politician had invited him to dinner earlier that day, Ben had made the assumption that he simply wanted to curry public favour by being seen to hobnob with ‘l’eroe della galleria’. Visions of himself walking into a storm of camera flashes, platoons of paparazzi stampeding over one another to get a shot. Having to pose shaking hands with the politician, the whole tedious grip ’n’ grin media ritual that he’d have done anything to avoid.

But Ben realised now that his assumption had been false. Dinner probably would most likely have been a very private affair after all. Just the two of them, over good food and good wine, exactly as Tassoni had promised. A pleasant, quiet couple of hours during which the politician would have used all his well-practised smooth-talking guile to pump Ben for just how much he knew, or might have figured out, about the gallery robbery. Whoever had set up the operation, they hadn’t figured on their plan being interrupted by someone like him; and whatever Tassoni’s involvement, it made sense that he would want to assess the level of threat Ben represented now, in the aftermath.

This surprise visit was going to be interesting. Even a politician could be made to tell the truth. All it took was a little pressure of the right kind. By the time their discussion was over, Tassoni was going to feel all squeezed out.

It was after quarter past six by the time the taxi pulled up in the quiet street where the politician lived. Judging by the average value of the cars parked along the kerb, Tassoni had picked himself one of the most prestigious neighbourhoods in the Roman suburbs. The houses were widely spaced apart, and stood well back from the road at the end of long paved or gravelled driveways. The late afternoon air smelled of flowers and freshly-mown lawns. Tassoni’s place was bounded by a high wall. The house was a graceful white villa, its facade elegantly half-hidden behind drooping willows. Outside the front entrance, a sparkling white Porsche Cayman was parked up next to a burgundy Cadillac SUV. If Tassoni was a patriot, it didn’t show in his automotive tastes.

Cameras peered down from the tall gateposts. Ben wasn’t going in there to kill anyone. Not yet. So it wasn’t nervousness about being caught on a security recording that made him stop and peer back up at the little black lenses that were watching him from above. He was thinking again about inconsistencies. An untrained eye would have missed them, but Ben was already picking out details that seemed to jar.

The politician clearly valued his security; yet the tall wrought-iron gates were wide open. Not just open, but wedged with wooden chocks so that their automatic closing mechanism was blocked. Not the most secure perimeter Ben had ever had to cross.

He walked through the open gates and up the driveway. The lawns were prim, the flower beds neat. Fancy gravel, not just rough quarry chippings but the expensive ornamental stuff. Ben only noticed it because of the tyre grooves cut so deep into the surface that in places it was down to the black synthetic membrane underneath. As though someone had driven away from the place in a real hurry. More inconsistency. Tassoni’s place looked well-tended enough to be pretty well staffed. The kind of place you’d expect two little guys to come out from behind the bushes to rake the gravel up after you. The urgent skidmarks struck the wrong note. A subtle sense of emptiness, a certain desolation that Ben couldn’t put his finger on.

He walked on towards the house. At its end the driveway forked into two and swept across the front of the villa in a U-shape. He climbed the steps to the entrance and his eyes searched for a bell push. Before he found one, he saw the inch-wide gap between door and frame. He nudged with his foot, and the door swung open silently.

The hallway was large and elegantly furnished, with huge polished stone floor tiles that probably each cost the price of a small car. It made Ben think of the old part of the Academia Giordani building, on a showier scale. The broad double staircase was carpeted in red and the banisters gleamed with fresh wax. A perfect backdrop for a photo session for Grazia or Paris Match.

Not today, though. Not without some major cleaning up first.

Ten metres away from the entrance, two men in dark suits were lying sprawled on their backs on the gleaming floor. Tassoni’s bodyguards. They hadn’t been there very long, because the blood pools around them hadn’t fully glazed yet. Ben put it at about twenty minutes. Both men had been shot.

Ben walked up to them. He wasn’t interested in the smaller, blonder of the two guys. It was the big one who caught his attention, and held it. Standing up, he would have towered over Ben by maybe four inches. The cut of his suit couldn’t hide the weight-room bulk of his chest, shoulders and arms. But no amount of muscle could stop a bullet. One had punched through his left pec, straight through to the heart. That one probably hadn’t killed him outright, though. The fatal shot had split his dark glasses in half before blowing out the back of his head. Everything above the eyebrows was pretty much mulch. Below the eyebrows, the face was mostly intact. The dark glasses had fallen away to reveal the guy’s eyes, which were open and staring.

One brown. One hazel.

The big man had been going for his weapon when he’d died. The chunky .45 Ruger automatic was cupped loosely in his outflung hand. Ben scooped it up. It was loaded. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. First lesson Boonzie McCulloch had ever taught him, a long time back, and it had stuck.

He glanced around him, and that was when he noticed the foot poking through the banister rails. The shoe was shiny. Expensive Italian leather. He trod up the stairs to see more, but he already knew whose foot he was seeing.

Which was just as well, because Tassoni’s whole face was missing. The generous blood spatter and the bullet hole in the staircase wall told Ben that the politician had taken one shot to the head while still on his feet, then a second after he’d gone down.

Not the messiest headshot Ben had ever seen, but not too far from it.

It ain’t a lump of coal, he thought.

That first shot had gone right through Tassoni’s head and into the wall. Ben stepped carefully over the body and examined the hole in the plaster. It was neat and clean, about the right size to have been drilled by a .38 or .357 handgun bullet. He could see through it into the next room. There were no shell casings lying about, which meant either the shooter had picked them up, or he’d used a revolver. Three targets, two shots each, added up to six. A revolver made sense. It also tallied ballistic-wise. The most penetrative handgun calibre Ben had used in an automatic pistol had been the .357 SIG cartridge, back in his army days. It had been conceived by a military mind with the purpose of providing a little more power than the standard 9mm auto rounds. But not even the .357 SIG could punch through a man’s skull and out the other side, removing most of his head before going straight through the wall behind him.

Whereas a revolver round like the .357 Magnum was a whole different concept. That hadn’t been developed by a soldier, but by a big-game hunter called Elmer Keith, back in 1934. Keith had been more concerned with taking down elk at three hundred metres than a man at room distance. Forty-four thousand pounds per square inch of pressure, enough to drive the bullet through an engine block. Which was precisely why no soldier would use one for close-quarter work. Too penetrative. Not even the SAS could see through walls and tell who might be standing in the next room, waiting to catch a stray round. A comrade. An innocent civilian. A hostage. A kid. And the calibre’s sheer power was also the reason why no professional assassin would choose it, especially not for close-up indoor kills in a residential area. A .357 Magnum revolver was impossible to silence. Not just difficult. Impossible. And ear-splittingly loud, a brutal high-pitched bark combined with a supersonic crack, that added up to just a few decibels short of standing next to a jumbo jet on take-off. A sound that could carry for miles.

So in the three seconds Ben spent assessing the situation, he knew he was seeing more inconsistencies. A professional kill, executed in a decidedly unprofessional manner. More odd notes struck in his mind.

But now wasn’t the time to try to figure it out. He trotted back down the stairs to the hallway and began checking rooms. The first was a dining room with a long table and a grand piano. The next was some kind of scullery. The third door he tried led to a small room with a row of security monitors on the wall and a table covered in electronic equipment. The stack of four DVD recorders on a professional rack-mounting system looked state of the art. The spaghetti of wires running from the backs of the machines trailed across to a splitter box that it wasn’t hard to guess was wired up to the CCTV system. All four disc ports on the machines were open. The discs had been removed, and with them the cameras’ testimony to the events of the day. The security system was a blind witness to everything that had happened since.

Ben would have liked more time to spend going through Tassoni’s home. He was short on clues as to what the hell this was all about. But the sound of police sirens outside, still some way off and getting steadily closer, told him that his time was running short. He ran back out into the hall and through a door to the right of the stairs that led into a plush living room. Beyond that was a sprawling conservatory and sliding glass doors that led out to back garden. Skirting the L-shaped pool, he made his way across the patio to the long stretch of lawn that led all the way to the far garden wall. Quickly climbing over it, he dropped down into the neighbouring garden. Kiddies’ swings, a tennis court, a patch of woods. He slipped into the trees and was gone before the first in the wailing convoy of police cars made it to Tassoni’s front gates.